Drinking Again: A Short Story

‘Let — go — that — Oh-h-h! Please, now, will you? Don’t start drinking again! Come on — give me the bottle. I told you I’d stay awake givin’ it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way — then what are you going to be like when you go home. Come on — leave it with me — I’ll leave half in the bottle. Pul-lease. You know what Dr Carter says — I’ll stay awake and give it to you, or else fix some of it in the bottle — come on — like I told you, I’m too tired to be fightin’ you all night. . . . All right, drink your fool self to death.’
‘Would you like some beer?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t want any beer. Oh, to think that I have to look at you drunk again. My God!’
‘Then I’ll drink the Coca Cola.’
The girl sat down panting on the bed.
‘Don’t you believe
But she decided finally to clean up the glass first; on her knees, searching a last piece of it, she thought:
— This isn’t what I ought to be doing. And this isn’t what he ought to be doing.
Resentfully she stood up and regarded him. Through the thin delicate profile of his nose came a light snore, sighing, remote, inconsolable. The doctor had shaken his head in a certain way, and she knew that really it was a case that was beyond her. Besides, on her card at the agency was written, on the advice of her elders, ‘No Alcoholics’.
She had done her whole duty, but all she could think of was that when she was struggling about the room with him with that gin bottle there had been a pause when he asked her if she had hurt her elbow against a door and that she had answered: ‘You don’t know how people talk about you, no matter how you think of yourself — ’ when she knew he had a long time ceased to care about such
Really, I think I could help him.’
‘That’s up to you. But if he tried to grab your wrists.’
‘But he couldn’t,’ the nurse said. ‘Look at my wrists: I played basketball at Waynesboro High for two years. I’m quite able to take care of him.’
Mrs Hixson looked at her for a long minute. ‘Well, all right,’ she said. ‘But just remember that nothing they say when they’re drunk is what they mean when they’re sober — I’ve been all through that; arrange with one of the servants that you can call on him, because you never can tell — some alcoholics are pleasant and some of them are not, but all of them can be rotten.’
‘I’ll remember,’ the nurse said.
It was an oddly clear night when she went out, with slanting particles of thin sleet making white of a blue-black sky. The bus was the same that had taken her into town, but there seemed to be more windows broken now and the bus driver was irritated and talked about what terrible things he would do if he caught any kids. She knew he was just talking about the annoyance in general, just as she had been thinking about the annoyance of an alcoholic. When she came up to the suite and found him all helpless and distraught she would despise him and be sorry for