I don’t drink to forget, or to reminisce, for that matter, though sometimes the right amount of alcohol will trigger a momentary fugue state and I’ll find myself suddenly among memories I haven’t visited in years, stretched out on either side of me like a hall of mirrors.  Sometimes these scenes are as spectacularly crisp as when I first lived through them: I’ll see La Avenida Revolución at night, an apartment in La Jolla, smoky taverns in Portland, my old dorm room.

The other common side effect of indulging in the drink is that so many of the functional shortcuts you can take as a sober person become abruptly unavailable as parts of your brain drop off the grid, and if you want to function at all you have to learn new and interesting ways of processing while inebriated.  I come up with entirely different algorithms for remembering names, for e-nun-ci-a-ting so that I don’t speak in one long continuous slur of words, for handling knives when I slice up new limes.  At a recent party we’d gathered in the living room to play Trivial Pursuit, the question came up “What is the sum of the first 100 integers?” and  I blurted, “Oh, I know this,” because I knew the method to derive the answer, but discovered I wasn’t able to perform the mental multiplication to spit the answer out.  “Hold on,” I said, and held one hand up, palm out, while I sketched in the air with my other hand, because apparently I hadn’t lost the ability to hold an invisible piece of paper down against an imaginary wall and write on it with the tip of my finger, looking to all the world like nothing more than an especially manic mime.  “Wait…carry the five…ah…five thousand fifty.”  And this earned me a few open-mouthed stares, so I shrugged and picked up my glass and wandered back into the kitchen for a refill.

Later at the same party I found myself sitting in a kitchen chair, enjoying the warm glow of my last cocktail, looking at a girl standing over by the counter.  She’s pretty, I thought, and then noted a ring on her hand.  She might also be married.  Is that the right finger for a wedding ring?  Ugh. Unable to remember what hand the wedding ring went on, I started working out the steps, first mentally mapping her hand around a hundred and eighty degrees to my own.  Left hand.  Okay. I looked down at my left hand, fingers splayed lightly across my thigh, and imagined a silver band around my ring finger.  Well, that looks right.  Check it against something else.  Does it feel right?

The body has its own way of storing memories, its own way of remembering.

“Why do we even have to get married?” she’s asking me.  “Because our families say we have to?  Because society says we have to?”

“We don’t have to,” I find myself saying, surprising myself.  “They don’t matter to me, not anymore.  We don’t have to get married.”

“Isn’t it enough,” she’s saying, and she takes the ring she gave me off of my right hand, “isn’t it enough,” and she’s putting it on the ring finger of my left, “to just do this,” and she kisses my hand, “and say ‘now and forever’?”

I look at her, thinking about it, then take the matching ring from her right hand, move it to her left.  I bring her hand up and kiss her fingers, and say “Now and forever.”

We stand there looking at each other, savoring the feelings, the moment, the joy and relief.  Joined, then, in that little studio with wood floors, and nobody knows it but us.  It doesn’t seem like there’s anything that needs to be said for a while, but finally, smiling, I-

“Hey.”

Blinking.  Focus.  Hand.  Wide focus.  Kitchen.  Party.  Hostess is talking. Acknowledge.   “Hey.”

“You doing okay?”

I was still looking down at my hand.  I flexed the fingers closed.  Opened them.  Closed again.  Yes, I guess that is the hand the ring goes on. “Yeah.”  I remembered that I had a party smile in my bag of tricks, and clicked it smartly in place as I looked up.  “Yeah, totally!  Do we still have vodka?”

She smiled.  “Plenty.”

I got up and walked around the counter to cut some more limes for the cocktails while my friends poured various bottles into the shaker.  I handled the knife carefully around the edges of my buzz, and when I finished I found that I was staring at the bare fingers of my left hand.  And nobody knew it but me.

Share on Tumblr