”No, that`s it.”
The statement is firm but not unfriendly as Kitty Dukakis makes her wishes known: that this interview and photo session must be brief.
It`s not just that Dukakis is tired after a draining day at Wayside House, a residential treatment and rehabilitation center, where she is working with two dozen women fighting her familiar battle with the bottle.
It`s also that Dukakis is learning that she has to stop accommodating everyone else except herself, to say ”No” when she needs to say ”No,”
whether it`s to the press, to her family, to her friends or to a drink.
”The most important thing in my life right now is my sobriety,” she says. ”Not my husband, not my children, not my father, not my sister. My sobriety.”
April will mark two years of her being sober, says Dukaki, wife of the former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate. Behind her is a 26-year addiction to diet pills she kicked after rehab in 1982. Behind her are three sessions in three alcohol rehab centers where she went for treatment after publicly acknowledging her alcoholism in 1989. Behind her is her book, ”Now You Know,” which details her downward spiral from vodka to nail-polish remover to rubbing alcohol.
Ahead could be a career as a substance-abuse counselor, though Dukakis makes no pronouncements. Instead, she speaks with the caution of a recovering alcoholic, which she is.
”I don`t know what`s going to happen,” she says. ”I take it one day at a time.”
On this particular day, at this particular time, Dukakis, 55, is looking tanned and attractive in a minidress that`s a cheerful explosion of primary colors.
She is trying to compress the past and present into a 20-minute interview and seems most at ease when talking about herself and her husband, maybe because so much has been written that the territory is familiar. All those stories about how he`s controlled and she`s volatile. He`s frugal. She`s extravagant. He`s stoic. She`s supersensitive. He`s beige. She`s magenta.
In truth, in back-to-back interviews with each of them, the contrast is striking. Michael Dukakis appears relaxed; Kitty Dukakis is tightly wound. Yet while he is clearly more comfortable talking politics, she doesn`t blanch at getting personal.
Tell her, for instance, that her husband is careful not to speak on her behalf or give his opinions as her own, and she flashes a smile.
”That`s new,” she says, ”and that`s beautiful. He knows he can do a lot of things and that he can run politics but that he can`t always make people do what he would like them to.
Before her addiction became public, she says, her husband wanted to be in charge and when he saw her in deep trouble, he wanted to make it better, but
”for once, he couldn`t do it. He couldn`t fix his wife, and that was incredibly hard for him.”
Though Michael Dukakis, who is a visiting professor at Florida-Atlantic University in Boca Raton, can claim expertise on everything from national health care plans to welfare reform, it`s addiction that his wife knows. Her mother was addicted to diet pills; her sister`s husband is a recovering alcoholic. She credits that brother-in-law with getting a message across to her husband that she couldn`t: that alcoholism is a family disease-that is that it affects the entire family.
”He wasn`t a happy camper when he heard that,” she says. ”All along it had been, `My wife has the disease and she`s sick.”`
When Kitty Dukakis left public life for private counseling, a Pandora`s box of problems flew open. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, more commonly known as manic-depression. For that, she takes lithium. She fights seasonal affective disorder by using therapeutic lights or heading to sunny climes during winter. Last year, Hawaii. This year, southern Florida.
She also is a student at the University of Massachusetts, working on her certification as a substance-abuse counselor. Her 10 weeks of work at Wayside House, in a homelike setting tucked behind high hedges, is part of her course work. So for 2 1/2 days each week, she is back in the fire, sitting in on group therapy sessions, leading low-impact aerobics classes and, maybe most helpful, talking about her behavior as an alcoholic.
”A lot of clients and staff were concerned when they heard she was going to be with us,” says Phyllis Michelfelder, director of the center, and like everyone else on the staff, a recovering alcoholic.
”They were afraid she`d bring in Secret Service people with her and things like that, which, of course, she didn`t. She`s so down to earth. After the first 20 minutes, she won their hearts.”
In fact, it is her sensitivity and willingness to listen that will make her so adept in her new field, says Wilma Greenfield, a childhood friend of Kitty`s and a professor of social work.
”What I appreciate about Kitty is her loyalty,” she says. ”She never neglects her old friends, and over the years she`s been selfless.”
But Dukakis, known to press for perfection, known to push herself hard, is more judicious in her words. And they`re not about the women she`s working with, they`re all about her.
”I know,” she says, speaking of her rehabilitation, ”that I`ve got a long way to go.”
