This drink could be hazardous to your relationship.

This post was inspired by the lemon drops my dad's wife made for us the week before last.

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It seems like it was a lifetime ago, but it’s really been just a few years since my fiancé and I broke up. When I say fiancé, I mean the guy I knew I could never marry even though we were engaged, for too long, on both sides of the calendar of an erstwhile wedding date. (I also mean the laughing boyfriend from this post.) Gilles was never that to me; he was never my fiancé; we were never engaged during any of the six months after we’d officially announced to friends and family that we officially planned to marry and before the official wedding actually took place. Although there is that date on the calendar, our wedding date, it feels like our relationship just progressed organically each day, day after day, without any official divisions or labels or roles to play. It feels like we were married before we were married. 

Anyway. It was him – the fiancé – who taught me to drink. I was twenty-five and fresh out of graduate school when we met, and I’d had neither the funds nor the inclination to focus too much on consuming alcohol. He was older and had both the funds and the inclination.

He liked a glass of wine upon returning home from work, a glass before dinner, a glass with, a glass after, and another to finish whatever was left in the bottle. He liked old-aged single-malt Scotch on the rocks, and he’d empty the snifter before the ice could melt and then fill it up again. He liked four-olive martinis. There were a lot of other drinks he liked, too. And I learned that I liked to join him in enjoying them.

We had so much fun together. We said that to each other all the time. So much joyous, carefree, wild, exhilarating, exuberant fun that would burn itself out into all-night screaming matches with threats of breakup and abandonment, which were often carried through, for a day or two at least, before one or the other would come crawling back home, ready for more fun. None of this was helped much by the constant presence of alcohol.

After that ended, once and for all, when the threats had become the reality, I spent some time putting myself back together and then found a generally lovely young fellow, much more childlike than his years should have allowed him to be, to spend some time with. He never drank. Ever. Which I had known before our first date from tracking down his from-forever-ago Friendster page. He hadn’t changed his mind about it in the intervening years and told me himself on our first date that he never drank but didn’t have a problem with people who did.

This was not true.

When we flew home for my birthday weekend, my dad’s wife made me a celebratory lemon drop with the fruit from her carefully tended-to potted Meyer lemon tree, kept safe in the living room out of the northern chill. Afterwards he wouldn’t talk to me and turned away from my kiss. “Your breath makes me sick,” he said rudely.

When we visited my friends in San Francisco and went to a leisurely dinner in a new restaurant, they began with pre-dinner martinis and then split a bottle of wine. I wanted to join them but held myself to a glass with dinner. He requested water and was cold to me from the moment I ordered and for hours thereafter, until we retreated to their spare bedroom, ostensibly to sleep, where he spoke fervently to me about his concern for my health and well-being given how much I drank, as evidenced that evening, until I fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up to find, tucked carefully under my pillow, pages of his handwriting going over these points again. He hadn’t slept.

The first time he met one of my best friends, in a too-hip pizza restaurant in Echo Park, the waiter laughed at him when he ordered a glass of milk. “You’re in the wrong place, kid.” Having already learned my lesson, I asked for an orange soda. At least that was on the menu. At least nobody sulked at me later that night.

He wanted to marry, to have a family. He thought I was the right person to do it with. But, he told me, he was afraid I’d give a child fetal alcohol syndrome.

I wouldn’t have. Of course I wouldn't have. But anybody who would think, and dare to say, that he feared I would is not somebody who will ever have the chance to find out how wrong he is.

borrowed ethically from source