BY NARASU REBBAPRAGADA
Copyright is held by the author.
“SURE, WILL we go in for one?” asked Dermot.
Ana stopped walking to focus on the mental gymnastics that every evening of this vacation had brought. She had two glasses of wine yesterday. If she drank one pint now, tomorrow would need to be a dry day. Then, she could still meet her weekly goal of seven drinks a week, two drinks max per day. No whiskey.
“Sure,” said Ana, knowing that going in for one really meant going in for two or three for Dermot.
“Will you try a Beamish? It’s like Guinness but from Cork,” said Dermot.
Ana nodded and smiled at Dermot’s pride in his hometown in Ireland. They turned left into an alley with a long art mural. Caricatured painted faces of musicians and market hawkers watched her approach to the Mutton Lane Inn. Dermot walked to the main bar to order drinks. Ana turned into the snug, a small side room that was a unique feature of the Victorian pubs that are so famous in Ireland.
Ana loved the vibe of Irish pubs. They were gathering places for storytelling and conversation, craic as they called it. Pubs were for writing your novel, waiting out the rain, listening to a trad band of fiddles and banjos. And sure, pubs were for getting drunk. But in Ana’s mind, Irish pubs existed for community first and getting wasted second, unlike the bars at home in San Francisco, which seemed to have the reverse set of priorities.
And right now, Ana teetered between the two, as this would be her first trip to Ireland since she started an alcohol harm reduction program six months ago.
Ana enrolled in the program after two particularly bad nights. One night, she had a few too many whiskeys at the in-house bar at the ad agency where she worked. She thought she was drinking at the same pace as the rest of her team, but she was the only one who overslept, missing the big pitch to the client. They didn’t get the account, and she ended up on a performance-improvement plan. About a week later, she had no idea how she got home. She woke up in bed naked with a scraped-up knee and her clothes in a ball on the floor next to an empty pint of ice cream.
Some of her friends had laughed off the incidents, and Dermot just wanted to quickly move past them. After all, everyone had a bad night or two or three. But none of them knew the depths of her shame, and that lack of control that had been building for years. A day where she swore off drinking ended with an evening at a bar and a morning of self-loathing. And round and round she went until she finally confessed to her doctor, who referred her to the harm reduction program, which counsels people who want to drink less alcohol rather than quit together.
The first two months were the hardest. But with the help of medication, a support group, and a social worker, Ana set goals. Slowly, she started achieving them more weeks than not. She slept better. The daily morning dread began to dissipate. Maybe someday she could be a casual drinker. Not today but someday. All she knew was that she could never go back to the way it was.
Dermot came back to the table with a pint-size Beamish for him and a half-size, called a glass, for her. The pour was perfect. Coffee-coloured stout curved up the glass and rose to a pillow of foam at the top, like the whipped cream on an ice cream sundae.
Ana sipped the ale. She felt her heart simultaneously race and calm down. After a few more sips, the surrounding music and voices cuddled her in a womb of red walls and lamp light. If only life could always be as good as when you were having your first drink of the day, she thought.
Dermot picked up his beer and looked around the room at the vintage posters of Irish festivals and Jameson whiskey ads. He paused at the black-and-white drawings of St. Patrick’s Bridge and Cape Clear Lighthouse. He chatted with others in the pub about how long he was home, and did he know so-and-so who also moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. Ana smiled and waved when she could tell Dermot was introducing her as his girlfriend.
Ana drank as slowly as she could to keep to her quota. She had gotten a glass of water to have two drinks to alternate between, a harm-reduction tactic. She tried to keep her fingers busy and twirled one of the square cardboard coasters, called beer mats in Ireland, that lay on the table. On one side was the familiar green, white, and red of the Heineken logo, but the other side was different. It had a similar shape but was blue, white, and red. It read Heineken 0.0, the company’s zero-alcohol beer product.
A few nights ago, Dermot and Ana had the good fortune of experiencing a lock-in, where the bar manager shut the doors after last call but allowed a select group to stay for a late-night party. A couple of guys with guitars and fiddles were jamming away. Ana was enjoying the music and trying to keep a physical distance from the bar. That way no one would include her in the next round of drinks, not realizing that she was drinking a zero-percent alcohol Guinness. It tasted pretty much like the real thing, but she didn’t want to get into it with the crowd here. She had made the mistake of telling someone earlier in the evening, which inspired a drunken rant about the branding loophole that Big Beverage was exploiting. Beer companies were showing ads for 0% alcohol products in places where they couldn’t normally advertise alcohol, like near schools.
Ana had nodded along but refrained from sharing her truth, which was that zero-alcohol beer was her saviour on this trip. When she arrived in Ireland, she bought her own six pack to carry around to homes where she was staying. She used it to reduce the number of drinks on days that she was drinking. She clutched it like a security blanket on days that she wasn’t.
Lost in thought at the Mutton Lane Inn, Ana kept her hands busy by trying to make a pyramid of beer mats on the table when Dermot returned. He was drinking another full pint. Ana tried not to show disappointment at his going off to order another drink without checking in with her.
“Another round, love?” he asked.
More mental gymnastics, but this time, Ana tumbled into frustration. Maybe some of the people in her support group were right, that abstaining from alcohol would be simpler. Harm reduction was taking a trip that she loved and ruining it. With all the micro-moments of planning, there was no room for spontaneity, for letting go. She envied Dermot, and the rest of Ireland for that matter, for indulging in a pastime that she had turned into a battle. If she could only go back before she ever started drinking heavily. And when was that exactly? In college? In her 30s? It snuck up on her so slowly that she had no idea. But if she could, she would tell her younger self to slow down so that there would be no need for an existential crisis today.
Ana picked up one of the Heineken-branded beer mats to let it determine her fate tonight. With a deep turn of the wrist, she spun it like she was tossing a coin. Green side up, she drank. Blue side up, she didn’t. And after a few quick turns, it landed blue side up. But she already knew that it would. While twirling it earlier, she figured out how to make it land that way.
And then Ana replied, “Thank you. I’m good.”
***
Narasu Rebbapragada began writing fiction a few years ago to explore the roller coasters of her inner and outer worlds. Her literary work has appeared in Forum Magazine and West Trestle Review. She lives in San Francisco, California and regularly travels to Ireland to visit friends and family.