WESTLAND, Mass. Marcie Everts found the experience of “Dry January” difficult at first, but a revelation by the end of the month. “I looked in the mirror and my double chin was gone for the first time since I turned 21!” she says with enthusiasm. “Of course I had to celebrate.”
The suburban housewife and charity volunteer accordingly went back to her former routine on February 1st. “A first glass of wine when I turn on the evening news, then wine with dinner, and another after I’d washed the dishes,” she says, her smile of a few moments before now gone. And that was it? this reporter asks delicately. “Well, I did find a glass in my bathroom when I woke up yesterday morning,” she replies sheepishly, “so that’s a no.”
Marcie consulted with her son Todd, home on break from Parnassus College in western Massachusetts. A former drug user and “dealer” to his fellow students, he went “cold turkey” after being introduced to the “straight edge” lifestyle many of his friends adopted when they tired of the excesses of hardcore punk subculture.
“You have to get rid of everything,” her son told her, “not just the booze, you have to dump the people who encouraged you and throw out all the stuff that goes with it.”
“I wasn’t about to give up my friends,” Marci confides, “but I did take Todd’s advice to get rid of all my chardonnay ‘paraphernalia’.”
“I could really go for an oaky chardonnay right about now.”
So this Saturday morning finds Marcie and two of her friends, Ginger Knox and Tori MacKay, packing up a Mercedes SUV for a trip to Boston’s South End, a neighborhood where hopeless and desperate men have historically gravitated when their drinking problems get the better of them.
“What if they don’t want our things?” Knox asks, drawing an incredulous stare from McKay.
“Are you kidding? I bought this at Pottery Barn,” she says, holding up a 6-bottle wine rack.
“Well, you can’t be certain,” Knox replies. “There’s no accounting for tastes when you’re talking about people who like to live under bridges.”
“I’m not sure they like it,” Everts says as she scans the sidewalks along Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, an intersection known as “Mass & Cass” that is notorious for open-air drug dealing.
“Then why do they do it?” Knox asks.
“I suppose it’s preferable to sleeping out in the rain.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time the sherpa on our honeymoon to Nepal,” MacKay begins, but Everts cuts her off.
“Yes, Tori–he asked why you Americans travel half-way around the world to live in discomfort when you showed him a picture of your home.”
“I guess I am repeating myself a bit lately.”
“There’s a likely candidate!” Everts says when she spies a grizzled man talking to himself after taking a long drink from a bottle of high-alcohol “bum wine.”
“Excuse me,” she says, after rolling down her window.
The man looks up at the car full of women on a mission of mercy, but he doesn’t speak at first.
“Would you like some nice cocktail accessories?” Everts says, hoping to break down the man’s apparent resistance with a smile she has perfected before many fundraising gala photographers.
The man is skeptical but, after seeing Everts license plate showing her support for the Boston Red Sox favorite charity, decides her heart must be in the right place.
“Whadda ya got?” he asks warily.
“These nice napkins from Cherchez,” she says as she holds out a handful of gaily-colored paper goods.
“The cute little shop in Wellesley Center?” the man asks.
“Yes–have you shopped there before?”
“Not since my wife threw me out of the house in”–the man looks off into the distance in an effort to recall the year–“I guess it was 1998.”
“They’ve really expanded!” MacKay says with enthusiasm. “Pottery, throw pillows, lamps.”
“Cool,” the man says before ultimately accepting the proffered gift. “Well, if you really don’t need them . . .”
Cute!
“I did ‘Dry January’ but kinda overdid it last month, which turned into ‘Fat February,'” Everts says. “So now I’m on to ‘Moderation March.'”
“Okay,” the man says. “These will come in handy when I have friends over to my place,” he says, nodding at a jury-rigged dwelling made of discarded appliance boxes.
“Could you use a carafe?” Knox asks. “It can turn a humdrum drink with a girlfriend into a festive occasion!”
She holds out the sleek glass decanter for his inspection, and his native wariness returns.
“You know, that kind of expensive home furnishing really sticks out as ‘conspicuous consumption’ in this neighborhood.”
“Oh, pish!” Knox says with mock derision. “It didn’t cost me a thing, I got it with my American Express Rewards points!”
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Blurbs From the Burbs.”