Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

Raising the Glass

59 catherine conant ฀ t Raising the Glass my earliest recollection of drinking was as I ate supper at my grandmother’s kitchen table and watched my grandfather cut Italian bread by sawing through the loaf he held against his chest. Stopping just a millimeter shy of cutting his shirt, he would stab the tip of his knife into the new slice and drop it on a plate. Fine dining it wasn’t, but it was great theater. Having come from a country where even the cows couldn’t be trusted, my mother’s parents did not believe there was such a thing as “good” milk. They were also certain that if we ate milk and tomato sauce together, when they met in the stomach, they would “curdle” and cause no end of trouble. When their grandchildren reached the age of three, they started serving them meals with tiny juice glasses painted with oranges, filled with water and a tablespoon of wine. (Also, because our father came from a different village in Italy, they were sure we children were cursed with “weak blood” and thought it prudent to give us wine soon after we had been toilet trained.) Perched on a telephone book, a dish towel tied around my neck, I would lift my glass of pale pink liquid and on cue shout “Salute!” Then I’d dig into a plate of homemade pasta and sauce, washing it down with water that became progressively darker as I got older. Life was ordered and sharply defined, with good and bad spelled out on separate sides of the ledger. Drinking wine with meals was just another example of how things should be done. As I grew, my girlhood dreams were to be—in no particular order—a jockey; a water-skiing showgirl in Cypress Gardens, 60 t c a t h e r i n e c o n a n t Florida; Audrey Hepburn; and a bride. The pitiful reality was that I was a nice Italian Catholic girl on an extremely short leash who was continually warned against “occasions of sin,” which I assumed meant events that took place after it got dark. My universe was school, church, and an occasional shopping expedition to Newark, New Jersey. Meanwhile everybody else in the world was having much more fun and eating meat on Fridays. I was forbidden to go the movies unless it was to see the fake virgin Jennifer Jones look saintly in The Song of Bernadette. Patent leather shoes were too reflective, and wearing pants implied the presence of a crotch. The ultimate danger was riding in a car so crowded that you would be obliged to sit on a boy’s lap. If a phone book wasn’t available as a protective shield, it was best to ask to be strapped to the roof. Since I was being groomed to be a wife and mother, just about anything interesting was forbidden—except liquor. When it came to booze, I could have pulled open the fridge in any house in the family and knocked back as much Gallo Brothers Chianti as I wanted, stopped only if there was a danger of not leaving enough for my grandfather. My father kept his liquor cabinet stocked and ready to serve his cronies without a thought of checking levels or counting bottles. There might as well have been a neon sign blinking “Open” above the door. The prevailing attitude about liquor was the same as for flour and Jell-O, with the assumption being that if you took it, you needed it for something. It might seem inevitable that as soon as I realized there was the opportunity to drink at will, I would have run amok, but alas, there were no role models for such behavior. The women of my family were fabulous at demonstrating guilt, passive aggression, speculation, gossip, and scorekeeping, but not social drinking. For them alcohol was primarily wine, and they drank when eating a meal. Okay, maybe some anisette on holidays, but I swear that was it. They never—no, not ever—drank just for sport. The notion of a woman knocking back a martini was as disturb- Raising the Glass t 61 ing as the idea of not being married before you were old enough to vote. This made my high-school years somewhat socially backward. On Fridays when kids organized field trips to the...