Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (3 page)

Mr. Burke is due home any minute to drive us to a surprise birthday party for a girl with whom we both ride the bus. We have a little more than an hour to eradicate the evidence that we’ve been swimming. We need to shower, blow-dry our hair, and change back into cut-off jeans. This bottle is an evident de-tour from the plans. It blindsides me.

On the one hand, I shouldn’t be as startled as I am. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with bottles. I’ve seen and handled loads of them. Come Christmastime, they are lined up like toy soldiers across the marble-topped bar in the living room: bottles of different heights and shapes. The liquor is in clear or brown bottles. The wine is in green or yellow bottles. I refill my grand-mother’s glass when my father asks me to, and I know what kind to pour by the shape of the goblet. Whites go in the slender glasses, and reds go in the spherical ones. I know wine needs to breathe, so I fill up the glass only halfway.

I’ve seen all these bottles, and yet I’ve never seen one quite like

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this one. The way it is resting in Natalie’s lap in this quiet house and this pale light, I sense it means something else entirely.

The difference might come from the change in context. I’m not sure what to do with the bottle
here,
where there are no parents, no relatives, and no party. All I can do is watch Natalie, and think that all the times I’ve poured bottles in the company of my parents, peeling back the labels and even licking the bot-tle caps because my mom said I could, has helped me understand drinking as much as anatomy drawings in textbooks have helped me understand sex. My eighth-grade education has taught me how liquor works: how it oozes through the walls of the intestines into the bloodstream, circulating and bleeding into body cells, making them drunk. But that’s just physiology. I sense it won’t help me when it comes to methodology, when I have to figure out what to do with this bottle. Its neck looks erected at me.

It’s not unlike my first glimpse of male genitals, which I got while I was waiting at the fifth-grade bus stop, when a man in a brown sedan pulled up and flashed himself out the window. Natalie is holding the bottle in the same way: slanted up, with the butt of it pressed into her stomach, her fingers curled around the neck. In its presence, I feel the same hot flush of embarrass-ment. The same slow tingle spreads itself up the back of my neck. Years from now, I’ll find myself processing the memory in the same way. I’ll want to find foreshadowing in the events of the day. I’ll want a sign that this presence was coming, an indi-cation that I’d been flirting with trouble all along.

But there was no omen. Natalie is like an earthquake, the type of natural disaster that no one can predict. It is the charac-teristic that most draws me to her. My most exciting moments with Natalie come when I least expect them, like love. Her attention span is short, and at any point during our afternoons together, her interest might pass swiftly from one amusement to another. A walk in the woods turns into a walk on the train tracks. A swim turns into a high dive off an old fishing bridge. I invariably find myself standing on a ledge, assessing the risk, while Natalie plunges in headfirst. She will be the blueprint for the kamikaze girlfriends I’ll seek well into my twenties, the sui-cidal personalities who seize the day by letting go of any expectations for a tomorrow.

Inevitably, I perform many feats with Natalie that I have no real interest in doing. I hitchhike. I stuff two Hello Kitty T-shirts into my book bag while a clerk isn’t looking. I let her take an
X-ACTO
blade to my upper arm so we can be blood sisters. I even agree to third-wheel when she goes skinny-dipping with the boy who lives down the lane; I dive down to run my hands along the lake weed, staying clear of their splashing while they do whatever makes Natalie conclude that boys’ thingies float.

I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m a tagalong, I know it. I op-erate as Natalie’s sidekick. She is the magician, the one who pos-sesses the hocus-pocus, and I see myself as her mousy assistant. It is my job to prepare her instruments and trust her magic, to stand paralyzed against the target while she throws knives at my head.

And yet I never consider her influence to be what a decade’s worth of health teachers have called “peer pressure.”
Pressure
doesn’t define Natalie. The word is too heavy to explain the tac-tics of my best friend, a girl who stands under five feet tall, who weighs less than a hundred pounds, who doesn’t even have the persuasive powers to persuade her mother to stop buying gallon jugs of limeade. She is not steadily compressing me under the weight of her deviance, the way the word seems to suggest.

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If anything, Natalie is fragile. Too many afternoons, I walk into her bedroom and find her curled under her desk, which is the most secluded space she can find ever since her parents un-hinged her bedroom door, when they decided she couldn’t be trusted with that most basic privacy. The days I find her sobbing in the same position that schoolchildren assume during bomb drills, I am all too happy to apply a five-finger discount at Cum-berland Farms, or key her brother’s pickup truck, or smoke a pack of cigarettes in her mother’s dress closet with the intention of marring its Givenchy suits with the smell of Kools. My petty crimes are sympathy gifts, like flowers or chocolates or teddy bears. I comply with her ploys to make her laugh after a despi-cable world has made her cry.

I trust Natalie, which seems important. I imagine my first drink the way I imagine my first sex, and I don’t think I could have either with someone I don’t feel wholly comfortable with. I anticipate that being drunk will make me feel just as vul-nerable as being naked does. I expect it to strip away my inhibi-tions, and in my openness, I’m afraid my private confidences will come tumbling out, the way they do when women drink on sitcoms, confessing whom they love or whom they loathe, caus-ing Jerry Seinfeld to declare Elaine’s mental “vault” worthless because too many people know that peach schnapps is the key. I want to know that the person I drink with won’t laugh if I in—

advertently reveal all of me.

That was the reason I passed when Shannon Fife invited me to her house last April, to blend frozen daiquiris while her dad was at an Elk’s Club meeting. We were new friends, and I had never slept over at her house before. I’d never seen her bedroom, or petted her dog, or sat at her kitchen table while her mom flipped pancakes. Drinking was too intimate an act to do for

the first time with Shannon, who knew none of my secrets. I hadn’t trusted her enough to show her my eighth-grade yearbook, revealing which boys’ pictures I’d drawn hearts around in pink ink.

It feels
good to decide my first time will be with Natalie.

By now, she has deflowered me on multiple levels. The biggest milestone was two months ago, when she taught me how to smoke. We were sitting on her screened-in porch, fum-bling with faulty Bic lighters amid the bite of mosquitoes and the blare of Beck, when she pulled out a pack of exquisitely thin cigarettes she’d brought back from a class trip to Rome. She’d shown me how to exhale like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Learning to smoke was like learning how to kiss, she’d said. It was all in the way you threw your head back, in the round
o
that you made with your lips.

For all her moral support, Natalie is a tough coach, too. She’s quick to elbow me in the ribs in the aisles of Rite Aid, where she’s pocketing tubes of lipstick and I’m staring up at the secu-rity mirror, which she says draws attention to us. When we’re smoking cigarettes behind her dad’s toolshed, she’ll critique my technique no matter which floppy-haired boy from the neigh-borhood is there to hear. She’ll scold me for holding the cigarette like a man or for not inhaling deep enough. She’ll toss me the pack and say, “You’re gonna keep lighting them until you smoke one right.”

I know why I accept Natalie’s lessons, but I’m not wholly sure why she offers them to me. I used to think she did it for the sole purpose of testing me. Every new task would find her with the same face a boy makes when he slides his hand up your shirt. It

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was an expectant look, like she was waiting to see if I leaned into the challenge or pushed it away.

It was that face that led me to believe she’d passed afternoons this way before. I thought she’d scouted out the inside of the abandoned barn on Longhorn Road before she boosted me into its hayloft. I thought she’d hitchhiked to the skate shop on

Route
12
before she had me shadowing her on the road’s shoulder, resting my outstretched thumb on my thigh.

Only recently have I begun to wonder if Natalie is faking her know-how. I think her expertise might be another act, a testa-ment to what the vice principal calls Natalie’s compulsive lying, and what I call her love for performance. Experienced drinker, smoker, and crook might be little more than personae she makes up at a moment’s notice, like the time she convinced the ticket seller at the movie theater we were the owner’s daughters and therefore didn’t have to pay to see
Return of the Living Dead III.
The liquor cabinet might be virgin territory for her, too. It might be like the haunted grove we once hiked to through streams, past tire piles, and over ravines. She might be bringing me along for company because she is too frightened to explore it alone. She might be pretending, for my sake, that she knows

the way.

I kneel
down and peer into the hole of the cabinet. It is a voyeuristic impulse, a lot like the urge to root around in someone’s medicine cabinet. I can’t resist. The moment Natalie pulls open its doors, she unearths her parents’ answer to that age-old question, “What’s your poison?” She’s revealed (a) that her parents get loaded, (b) how often they get loaded, and (c) what, specifically, they prefer to get loaded on.

Of course, I am not an experienced liquor clairvoyant, as I will be in college. Now, I don’t know how to interpret the in-formation: the number of bottles (three), the names (Hiram Walker, Southern Comfort, Seagram’s) and the fullness (three-quarters gone or not yet opened). I can’t read them like tea leaves and predict with reasonable accuracy who poured them, when, and under what circumstances.

I sense that these bottles are leftovers. They are probably rem-nants from past parties, the type of midsummer cookouts where the beer and wine goes first. The triple sec evokes margaritas that were never made. The whiskey has probably been there for years, opened but rarely poured, allowed to linger as a last resort. And as for the sealed bottle of vodka, I have no doubt that Mrs. Burke bought it in preparation for a party, overestimating how much people would drink, the way hostesses often do.

Natalie’s parents are big on throwing parties. Their annual Fourth of July bash is an event big enough to be advertised in the local newspaper’s calendar of events. Every girl in town gets a new bathing suit, including me, and the local swim shop makes

a small fortune selling one-piece swimsuits in size youth-
14
.

My parents beam each year when an invitation arrives in the mailbox, a cartoon duck in an inner tube reminding us, “It’s that time again!” The Burkes’ cottage means independence for all of us. My little sister sits on the edge of the dock and baits sunfish with watermelon chunks. Natalie and I help tow the neighbor-hood kids on a raft behind the motorboat. And my parents lounge on the pine deck, amid the bug-repellent candles and smoking hamburger buns, and drink an odd concoction of wine and fruit that I’ll later learn is sangria.

There is something in that wine that lights them up from the inside like the fireflies settling around us at dusk. My mother

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glides from one conversation to the next as though hoisted by a great wind, while my father sags, bemused, in his lawn chair, allowing the lines around his eyes to relax and, for once, ne-glecting to answer the buzzing pager at his hip. They always seem so much happier then, less alone. And I wish I could pre-serve that feeling for them, capture them, too, in a mason jar and bring them home aglow.

When Natalie twists off the black plastic cap and hands the bottle to me, I take it as part of an implicit equation about how drinking dovetails people. The Burkes’ parties have taught me how alcohol steadies strained social conditions. Summers be-fore, in this house, a few rocks in lowball glasses seemed to bal-ance impossible elements, people with disparate ideas and temperaments: A personal injury lawyer would pitch horse-shoes with a soccer mom; the newspaper editor would scrape hot dogs off the grill and trade stock tips with a recent college grad; a substitute teacher would dance with the police chief, shimmying her colossal hips and letting him spin her in close. I think this bottle might level the differences between Natalie and me, too. As junior high slides into high school, I can see us becoming less compatible best friends. She laughs more, and I’ve become quieter and more reluctant to speak. As her emotions become more transparent, mine become more opaque. When Natalie’s aunt photographs our auras, the pictures reveal Natalie’s persona as a swollen, orange puff and mine as a patch of

brown haze.

Our time together is starting to feel precariously off-kilter, like a scale tipped in her favor. I’m hoping this bottle can make us flush for a while, the way my science teacher once used a vac-uum to make a feather and a quarter fall three feet in the same amount of time.

I’m glad for Natalie’s choice of bottle. I like the color—like iced tea—and the name, Southern Comfort, which makes me think of warm apple pie. It sounds like something you’d find folded in a red and white napkin and set out to cool on a win-dowsill.

I have reservations about the label. The very top of it is printed with the words
established 1
874
. The year makes it pretty darn elderly, and makes me feel extra guilty for touching