AN INTERVAL
Both House Director Pat Montesian and Don Gately’s A.A. sponsor like to remind him how the new Ennet House resident Geoffrey Day could be an invaluable teacher for him, Gately, as Staff.
“So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by clichés” is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was at 0825. “To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, needlepointing primly beside him on the old vinyl couch that just came from Goodwill, purses her lips. “You need to ask for some gratitude.”
“Oh no but the point is that I’ve already been fortunate enough to receive gratitude.” Day crosses one leg over the other in a way that inclines his whole little soft body toward her. “For which, believe you me, I’m grateful. I cultivate gratitude. That’s part of the system of clichés I’m here to live by. An attitude of gratitude. A grateful drunk will never drink. I know the actual cliché is ‘A grateful heart will never drink,’ but since organs can’t properly be said to imbibe and I’m still afflicted with just enough self-will to decline to live by utter non sequiturs, as opposed to just good old clichés, I’m taking the doubtless hazardous liberty of light amendment. Albeit grateful amendment, of course.”
Charlotte Treat looks over to Gately for some sort of help or Staff enforcement of dogma. The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still. Gately reminds himself that he too is probably still mostly clueless, even after all these hundreds of days. “I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know” is another of these slogans that look so shallow for a while and then all of a sudden drop off and deepen like the lobster waters off the North Shore. As Gately fidgets his way through daily a.m. meditation he always tries to remind himself daily that this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.
“I cultivate it assiduously. I do special gratitude exercises at night up there in the room. Gratitude-ups, you could call them. Ask Randy over there if I don’t do them like clockwork. Diligently. Sedulously.”
“Well it’s true is all,” Treat sniffs. “About gratitude.”
Everybody else except Gately, who is lying on the old other couch opposite them, is ignoring this exchange, watching an old movie whose tracking is a little messed up so that staticky stripes eat at the picture’s bottom and top. The Ennet House Director, Pat M., encourages new Staff to think of residents they’d like to bludgeon to death as teachers of patience, tolerance, self-discipline, and restraint. She can always tell when Gately’s exercising tolerant restraint, because of the slight facial tic that betrays his effort of will, and makes it a point to praise his willingness to grow and change when the cheek starts to spasm.

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Day isn’t done. “One of these exercises is being grateful that life is so much easier now. I used sometimes to think. I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest orSaturday Evening Post. Easy Does It. Remember to Remember. But for the Grace of God. Turn It Over. Terse, hard-boiled. Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliché pool? No inflection necessary? Too many syllables, probably.”
Poor old Charlotte Treat, all of nine weeks clean, is looking primmer and primmer. She glances again over at Gately, lying on his back, taking up the living room’s whole other sofa, one sneaker up on the sofa’s square worn-fabric arm, his eyes almost closed. Only House Staff get to lie on the couches.
“Denial,” Charlotte finally says, “is not a river in Egypt.”
“Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,” says Emil Minty.
Geoffrey (not Geoff, Geoffrey) Day has been at Ennet House eight days. He came in from Roxbury’s infamous Dimock Detox, where he was the only white person, which Gately bets must have been broadening for him. Day has a squished blank smeared flat face, one requiring great effort to like, and eyes that are just starting to lose the nictitated glaze of early sobriety. Gately tries to remind himself that Day is a newcomer and still very raw. A red-wine-and-Quaalude man who finally nodded out in late October and put his Saab through the window of a Malden sporting-goods store and then got out and proceeded to browse until Boston’s finest came and got him. He’d taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some Jr. college up the Expressway in Medford and came in saying in his Intake interview that he also manned the helm of a scholarly quarterly. Word for word, the House Manager had said: “manned the helm” and “scholarly quarterly.” His Intake indicated that Day’d been in and out of a blackout for most of the last several years, and his wiring is still as they say pretty frayed. His detox at Dimock, where they barely have the resources to slip you a Librium if you start to D.T., must have been real grim, because Geoffrey D. now alleges it never happened: his story is he just strolled into Ennet House on a lark one day from his home five-plus miles away in Malden and found the place too hilariously egregious to want to leave.