Charles Douthat
Carolyn
Not yet of two minds that raw hospital afternoon
when the decade-long charade of my sister’s diabetes
as explanation for everything difficult and strange
happening to her broke down, and the on-call doctor
declared what I’d suspected long before entering
Carolyn’s house that morning and finding in a cupboard
twenty or more empty quart bottles of Jim Beam
bourbon. Your sister’s an alcoholic, the doctor
told me in the hall, then said it to both of us
once we entered her room, putting on
a grave and certain manner, remarking that liquor
was suicide for an insulin-dependent diabetic.
No surprise when Carolyn disagreed.
Propped in bed in a lank hospital gown, her dyed
and bowl-cut brown hair in greasy disarray,
my sister stiffened, insisted otherwise, her manner
briefly charged with authority, as if channeling
the keen-witted lawyer she’d once been.
*
The doctor said she’d happily review the literature
but declined discharge until my sister agreed in writing
to a treatment plan. Carolyn turned on me then.
Why had I flown out to Oakland, interfering as always.
From a shopping bag I’d filled at her house, I stood upright
on the foot of her bed six empty bourbon bottles, the big
red B centered on each label, the brand-name in fancy
script above the words Not Genuine Without the Signature.
As from a great distance Carolyn regarded the bottles.
Fondly she looked, with a childlike pleasure and intimacy,
and argued no further when I supported the doctor,
said I wouldn’t let her die this way, meaning I had another
in mind, a longer way which I imagined better, though
my sister was one who’d already decided, no nursing home
for her, no selling her house to pay for care. No. No. No.
None of that for her. She was smart and stubborn
like other women in our family. Farmers’ wives, teachers,
nurses who often outlived their Arkansas, Montana
or Iowa husbands for decades in righteous judgment,
in futile longings and suppressed Presbyterian fury.
*
I took Carolyn home. I remained for a time, driving her
to AA meetings which she attended willingly so long
as I stayed in Oakland, kept her company. Riding home
from meetings she’d describe those who’d spoken that day.
A few interesting or inspiring. Many neither. Yet all comical
in her accounts during those two weeks before I flew home.
I couldn’t stay. I had my own life. I didn’t want to stay.
Carolyn exhausted me, even in her sobriety. Especially
in her sobriety. Which continued afterward with phone calls
at night and stories from meetings, though the AA tales
dwindled before long. Her night calls rang later and later,
her telephone voice loosened, as did her thinking
and humor. She waxed nostalgic and sentimental, recalling
our childhoods, her first marriage, her second. Soon
I realized she was keeping company with Jim Beam again,
her true and faithful brother, her protector against
what she called the unendurables, arriving like clockwork
each afternoon except when they appeared at breakfast.
*
Nine months later she fell off her back porch one night,
landed face down in a garden path. Which was the end
of that part of Carolyn, who I loved, who I couldn’t stop
loving in the way I couldn’t help trying, misguidedly,
to save her. For what does saving a person mean?
I think of those bottles upright on my sister’s hospital bed,
her fond regard for their labels, the stale remainders
of air, the brown bourbon-crusts circling bottoms.
Charles Douthat
Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist. His first book of poems, Blue for Oceans, won the PEN New England Award. His new book, Again, chosen by Peter Campion for Unbound Edition Press, is forthcoming in 2025. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College.