Burial of the Dead

SEASONAL COLDS - Manny

MANNY

Manny’s changed her hair to its natural color, declarative-red, and calls herself Emmanuella. She hopes the changes will herald a change of fortunes. She’s never thought of herself as being superstitious, especially given the way she was raised with a mother who deemed practicality the realpolitik of hard lives lived in a material world. And yet, like many practical people, good with numbers, inventive with plots, Manny’s mother – the original red head with extraordinary legs – from time to time, did toy with the Tarot deck or the Quiji board, a name that defeated her any time she tried to spell it. So Manny inherited the practicality, the inventiveness and a hint of superstition that surfaced when fortunes were low, when luck ran down, when she’d take up the bottle in a cycle of entreaty, disappointment and blame.

She sits at a back table in the corner bar where she used to meet LaPorta. Clive the bartender waits on her with Brit politeness, and Manny tips him better than he deserves. She spends the extra dollar because it’s nearing the holiday season and she’s in one of her almost biblical modes, primarily New Testament, RSV, repeating scriptures to herself, believing in the giving-to-receive axiom as adjunct to the ill-defined spiritualism of tertiary alcoholism.

Manny’s struggle with addiction might be uniquely personal, but it continues to trace the template of most alcoholic lives: Self-medication worked until it didn’t work; she took from it what she could for as long as she could; she suffered from it when it offered nothing but pain and the compulsion to keep doing it.

She hit her first bottom when she was a secretary for a tool and die maker in Waterbury. Her boss was no stranger to similar troubles and he’d been kind enough to get her into rehab where it took a week before she realized she’d have to stop if she wanted to live. Her liver was swollen and almost cirrhotic.

Manny’s mother was living outside of Bridgeport then. She hadn’t aged well; she hadn’t mellowed at all. The mean streets and fast life lived among men who couldn’t care less evinced themselves in lines hardened as much by age as by the unkind indictment of one who’d played a game and lost, suffering the defeat of an inner self that bankrupts the starlet before the hair goes white and the body sags.

She wouldn’t visit Manny in rehab. She figured the girl was making too much of nothing. People drank – that was the way it was: People drank and did crazy things, and then they woke up and went on about their lives; and none of it, not one headache, hangover, shiver in rough sheets in dull morning light required doctors or hospitals or all those nosey communist social workers who had nothing better to do than to press themselves into places they didn’t belong.

Manny cleared up some during the second week in rehab. She felt good enough to check herself out, but didn’t do it after she made friends with a truck driver from Seymour who convinced her to stay. They spent their afternoons together and talked about everything, and one day he told her the new wing at the far end of the hospital complex had been named after some guy named Kost whose granddaughter gave away more money in a month than most people in Fairfield county made in a year.

“Kost,” Manny said, and the guy said the lady’s name was “Kost-O’Something-or-other,” because she’d married some Irish mortician in Hartford. It wasn’t all the information Manny would need, but it was a beginning and more than enough to get her started.

She checked out of rehab after thirty days and moved to Simsbury and rented a room in a doctor’s house. The house was huge and the doctor was old, semi-retired and lonely having lost his wife of forty years to throat cancer. He was a skinny guy with sun brown skin. His name was Walker and he was generous and believed in AA and told Manny he’d forgive the rent, month to month, if she went to meetings and helped out around the place.