TheBanyanTree: Walking to the 7-11 - a WIP

[Gail Richards]

How can something so sad leave me wishing there was more to read?? 
Wonderful, Monique!!

-----Original Message----- 
From: Monique Colver
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 11:00 PM
To: Banyan Tree
Subject: TheBanyanTree: Walking to the 7-11 - a WIP

At night sometimes I’d walk to the 7-11, maybe a mile, maybe a two, down
the dark highway. I had to walk. We only had one car, and if he wasn’t
home, which was common, I had to walk, or stay home alone. It was hot,
usually, for usually I only walked to the 7-11 in the summer, mostly just
for something to do, mostly so I wouldn’t just be home alone. It was also
humid, the night air like a moist blanket. This was summer in Louisiana,
and so I walked to the 7-11 in shorts and a tank top, just for something to
do. I remember walking to the 7-11 once in the winter, in jeans and boots
and a sweater, and it was so cold I waited, and then called him to pick me
up so I wouldn’t have to walk home in the cold.


It was late at night when I’d walk to the 7-11, or so I remember it, for
the night was pitch black, and that could only happen late at night. I
don’t know why the 7-11, maybe because it was just the closest thing to
somewhere to go, other than the bar just down the street from our little
tar paper house, but I wouldn’t go there alone.

It was so humid in Louisiana that after I’d shower in the morning I’d put
my hair in a bun, and at the end of the day I’d take it down, and the hair
would still be wet, more than damp, really wet, and it wouldn’t dry until
late at night, and then just barely. My hair was long then, and wet most of
the summer.


He spent a lot of time at the bar at the end of our street. It wasn’t near
as far as 7-11, which was good, because in his condition he shouldn’t be
driving far. His condition was usually drunk.


I’d sit at home and wait for him.


“Be back in an hour,” I’d say, “Dinner will be ready.”


He promised to be back in an hour, and an hour later dinner would be ready,
or something resembling dinner, and I’d wait.


And wait. I would wait for a very long time, usually. A couple of times I
called the bar, asking for him, and he’d get on the phone and say he’d be
back shortly. It was a five minute walk, or an even shorter drive if he had
the car. And I’d wait.


I waited a lot.


Usually by the time he did get home he was in no condition to eat anything.
He was usually in a condition to fall down drunk, or to grab at me
ineffectively if I complained.

My condition wasn’t usually drunk, but often drunk. I was in that stage
between being an irresponsible teenager and an irresponsible adult, able to
buy and drink all the alcohol I wanted, and it made living in a tar paper
shack with an alcoholic easier.


Our rented house, as we affectionately referred to it, was four rooms.
Bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom, which also housed the washing
machine, an elderly appliance prone to flooding. In the summer I’d hang out
the clothes to dry on the clothesline in the back, fending off swarms off
flying insects to do so. I thought I was in hell.


The shack came pre-furnished with the sort of furnishings one might find at
the county landfill, if one were so lucky, and I had covered the couch and
chair with corduroy bedspreads. I wouldn’t sit on them otherwise. The
kitchen was infested with roaches, and at night, when it was dark, they
would scurry about the kitchen. If I came home after dark and came in the
kitchen door, which we always did, I would open the door and reach inside
without actually going in, and I’d switch on the light switch, and I’d
wait. The roaches would disperse after a few minutes, and then I would go
in, and if I were lucky, they’d all be hidden again.


Out back and to the left of the clothesline was a little tar paper garage.


We rented this amazing little piece of shit from an elderly woman who lived
in the big white house around the corner. She invited us over, once, to sit
on her screened porch with her and her sister and her sister’s daughter,
and we drank weak tea and chatted about the weather.


If it was summer, the weather was hot and humid, hell from sunup to
sundown, and I hated it.


If it was winter, we used a space heater in our tar paper shack rather than
freeze to death, and one time I lit it and it blew up at me, and it took me
a month to grow back my eyebrows and the hair on my arms.


We loved that tar paper shack like we would love an abusive parent. It
wasn’t much, and it caused us pain, and it made me miserable, but it was
all we had. That, and each other.


I don’t know if he was miserable. I suppose I didn’t know him well at all,
though I’d married him. I excuse myself by saying I was drunk a lot, then,
and didn’t realize what I was doing, but that’s no kind of excuse, is it? I
was young and stupid and thought it was the best I could do, a perpetually
drunk airman without ambition, other than finding his next drink. I think
he was numb.


While we lived in the tar paper shack my alcohol obsession waned, and then
went away. Turned out I wasn’t an alcoholic after all, despite earlier
predictions. I would still drink, but I could take it or leave it. By the
time I was 21 the drunkenness as a way to get through life was over, and
though I thought his might lessen too, it only got worse.


And sometimes I walked to the 7-11 late at night because it was preferable
to waiting at home alone in my tar paper shack while he was out drinking.


M