The best guess, says the seed package, is that the name for this fabulous lettuce, Drunken Women, derives from her frizzy-headed look—emerald leaves tipped in dark claret red. A look I myself have flirted with. And not only is she virtuously pure and organic, certifiably not genetically modified, she is one of the last to bolt in summer.
But when I show this to my friend Sharon, she says it’s outrageous, awful, that West Coast Seeds should be ashamed of themselves.
I am taken aback. I thought it was hilarious. But when I go back to the seed package for a deeper look, I see this lettuce is described as crisp, tasty. Like all the other tasty dessert girls—the Honeys, the Sugars, the Cupcakes and the Tarts.
So yes, Sharon, of course drunkenness is not amusing. I hear my mother’s voice echo through my mind’s ear: There’s nothing more abhorrent than a drunken woman.
Well, Mum, I can think of a few things more abhorrent.
Still. I think of the long list of those tortured writers who drank to excess to cope with their haunted lives: Zelda, Dorothy, Anne, Marguerite, Elizabeth . . . too many. I think of wild, fierce Jean Rhys, for whom the BBC ran an ad in the 60s to find out if she were still alive. She was. Barely. Still drinking dangerously. Decades after she set sail from her Caribbean island and landed in monochrome, cold-shouldered England, she was discovered washed up in Devon, living in a cottage aptly named Landboat Bungalows. Fending off the neighbours who were convinced she was a witch. Committed briefly to a mental asylum for attacking one of those neighbours with a pair of scissors.
“I feel somewhat tactless at being alive,” Jean said when the BBC caught up with her.
But, amazingly, through all this drinking and poverty and madness and violence, Jean was writing her magnus opus, Wide Sargasso Sea, which gave a new name and a voice to the so-called “madwoman in the attic” from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jean gave this beautiful Jamaican Creole woman a life before she was imprisoned in the cold English manor house attic. This woman whose family’s wealth Rochester’s father so coveted, he leveraged his son into marrying her, without coming clean about her family’s history of mental illness. Most likely, the woman’s inherited fortune was wrested from harvesting sugar—wealth extracted through slave labour. A poisoned sweetness. Which could also be said of alcohol.
Is madness inherited? Is alcoholism? Maybe. Seems to be a bit of a crap shoot. At any rate, Sharon, you are right: let us consider the drunken women more soberly.
Sharon’s stopped drinking alcohol. Stopped caffeinated coffee. Radically cut down on salt. She’s dyed orange streaks in her long hair. She wants to be one of the last to bolt.