Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (5 page)

It only makes sense for the
sacra
to be the bottle. Natalie

awarded it to me, and I awarded it to Laurel, and it marks our new status as drinkers.

After we
finish both bottles, I rinse them out in the guest bath-room because the birthday girl doesn’t want the garbage to smell like booze.

The girls who are tipsy go outside to topple down the Slip N’ Slide. The ones who aren’t walk home to raid their refrigerators for beer. Natalie plays video games because she’s decided not to speak to me; I’m not sure what that means for my plans to sleep over later.

I pull open the sliding glass door and step out into the backyard.

I’m alone outside. The sky is dark, the steely dark of early summer, not the blind dark of winter. Through it, I can see gnats rising and falling in the porch lights. Crickets sing. Far off, a few girls are chasing each other through the spiny stretch of orchard that spreads off the backyard.

For once, I don’t mind being all alone in public. Usually, I’d be

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frightened of what solitude might say about me. I’d worry that someone would trot up the walkway, see me sitting in the crabgrass, and assume that no one likes me enough to want to sit with me. Tonight, though, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I watch the road for girls coming back with cans of beer. When no one comes, I lie on my back and stare at the slab of gray sky.

I don’t know what being drunk feels like, but I don’t think I am. I can walk straight. I can see straight. And for the first time in a long time, I can think straight. I am not exerting mental en-ergy, trying to decide whether my mother is lying when she tells me I’m pretty. I am not thinking about a conversation I had two days ago, and rolling my eyes because I said something stupid.

I am not thinking about anything. My knees are bent in such a way that I can make out patterns of freckles on my thighs. My hair is fanned out under me. The air has the smell that fabric softener companies are always trying to capture—the breeze smells like fruit trees.

The word finally occurs to me: I am
comfortable.

I close my eyes.

When I open them, Eric Ostrau is tickling my ear with a stray oak leaf.

Eric’s father runs a snow-removal company that clears our driveway during heavy snowstorms. During blizzards, I medi-tate by my bedroom window, waiting for the groan of the plow against the asphalt and a glimpse of Eric’s red baseball cap in its passenger seat.

Eric always wears a red baseball cap, although once in a ce-lestial moment, he’ll take it off by the brim and pet his own head as though its blond bristles are the softest things he’s ever felt. There’s no overestimating how badly I want to touch them my-self and confirm it.

Normally, with Eric standing over me, I’d pop myself up-right and try to dream up something to say. But tonight, I don’t say anything. The act of drinking—and being seen drinking— has renewed my confidence. I look up at him from where I’m lying.

He asks if I feel all right.

“Why do you ask?” I know why he asks. In addition to mak-ing sure every girl in the basement knew Natalie and I brought liquor, Casey Schiller ran into a game of three-on-three and made sure the boys knew, too.

Eric kneels down next to me in the crabgrass.

“I don’t know. I got drunk at my brother’s wedding in April and I was sick the whole night.”

I prop my weight up on my elbows in a way that doesn’t just
look
natural, it
is
natural, which is a foreign feeling to me. Eric Ostrau is talking to me, and for some odd reason, I’m not hug-ging my own shoulders and curling into myself, like a slug be-ing poked with a stick. I’m not fidgeting or parting the grass. I’m not even stumbling over what I’m trying to say.

I look at him over one shoulder and say, “Maybe you just couldn’t hold your liquor.”

“You really don’t want to puke?” “No.”

“Not at all?” “Not a drop.”

“Well, what if I do
this
?”

In a brief moment he lurches forward and hoists me over one shoulder. He takes off running toward the orchard, stopping every few feet to spin in circles to dizzy me. I’m coughing and he’s laughing, and with every step I can feel his hands on my thighs, clutching tighter, trying to steady me. The blood is fun-

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neling to my head. Blades of grass are brushing past me. And then Eric trips on a root, launching us both into the dirt and fallen apples. My flip-flops sail off my feet.

As payback for the fall, Eric lets me run my hands over every last glorious inch of his head. Sure enough, the soft fleece of his hair is the best thing I’ve ever felt.

When Eric’s ride home shows up, I steal his hat. I fold it in half and tuck it into the waistband of my jean shorts without his noticing. I don’t even feel bad about it. I think Natalie will be proud of me.

The ride
back to the cottage drags. Natalie still isn’t talking to me, and I am trying hard to conceal a smile when Mrs. Burke glances in the rearview mirror and momentarily lets her eyes fall on me.

I’m sure I don’t look any different to her. I’m still wearing Natalie’s T-shirt over the holey cut-off jeans my mother likens to Swiss cheese. The humidity is still coiling the hair around my face. I’m just a girl, not even a high school girl yet. I’m someone who comes over to her house to occupy her daughter by baking cookies and playing checkers and staging cannonball contests off the dock.

She doesn’t know that the thing I found in her liquor cabinet has given me the capacity to be a completely different animal on the inside. Inside, I feel exotic and dangerous. I’m a cobra inside a kitty cat.

I run my hand under my shirt, over Eric’s worn, cotton cap, and know what Columbus must have felt when he washed up on the American shore. Drinking has always been, but it’s a New World to me. It’s been waiting for me to discover it.

I think it’s no
coincidence that a shot is called a shot. You throw back that little jigger of liquor with the same urgency with which a gun fires ammunition into open space. You feel the same ringing in your ears, the same kickback in your arms and chest. The first time you drink, you don’t aim to get drunk. The thrill of pulling the trigger is itself enough. If you like the crack of the rifle, you’ll be back for a second go, which is when you’ll pay attention to the crosshairs and fire enough shots to hit the mark. After my first drink, I don’t have an opportunity for target practice. The summer before high school is a succession of middle-class time killers: ballet camp for a month, horseback-riding camp for a week, piano lessons every other day, CCD

classes every third night. These are the things my mother was never allowed to do in her time, and the things I am never allowed
not
to do in mine.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. In grade school I begged for ballet slippers and jodhpurs. I could have spent whole afternoons at the Gym Nest, turning loops on the uneven bars. But that feels like so long ago. At fourteen, I long for unmitigated free time to spend my summers like normal kids do, watching talk shows and eating Pop-Tarts and complaining that there is nothing to do.

For now, there is too much to do. Before I know it, I’m in high school. Before I know it, I have a new bus driver and a new locker combination, and I am correcting new teachers who are butchering my name (“No,
Zel-kiss
”). And Natalie has convinced her parents to send her to a boarding school for the arts, despite the fact that she doesn’t act or paint or play the cello, despite the fact that she doesn’t do anything that technically qual-ifies as art. And I have no one to drink with, so I don’t.

August turns to September, and I realize I didn’t have a sum-mer love. I didn’t meet a boy while I was gathering shells on Cape Cod, or while I was leaning my elbows over the railing of the ferry en route to Nantucket. My eyes never met someone else’s across a pebbled beach or a crowded room. My breath never cut short with immediate desire. The closest thing I found to a summer fling was alcohol: I was introduced to it. I loved it instantly. Then circumstance separated us.

Tasting alcohol just once is as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy just once. It feels like the time I kissed a boy in the coatroom at a wedding where he was on the bride’s side and I was on the groom’s side, and it was a sweet, singular kiss that dizzied my head and made me want to stay there among the

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trench coats forever. But then the cake got cut and the bouquet got chucked, and the boy’s father put on his jacket and the boy’s mother swung her purse over her shoulder, and my eyes followed him under the balloon arch and out the door, and I never saw him again.

I can’t imagine a way to rendezvous with liquor again.

Once a
week, Natalie calls from her dorm’s pay phone to make me feel envious. She’ll tell me about a party she went to in an abandoned house, where boys strummed acoustic guitars, girls read palms, and everyone drank red wine straight from the bot-tle. She’ll say she was too drunk to walk the two miles home be-fore midnight, when the dorm’s doors get locked. It was better that way, she’ll say, because a boy got locked out, too, and they slept in his car.

I listen for a long time and my cheeks burn. I say nothing.

Natalie promises to get me drunk when she comes home for winter break. But the interval seems unreasonable, and it doesn’t console me. I think,
Even star-crossed Juliet got to marry Romeo and take him to bed in a single day.
Likewise, I’ve been through the ceremony of my first drink. Now I am ready to con-summate it by drinking faster, drinking more.

Nights, before I go to sleep, I try to imagine what being drunk feels like. I’m not sure why, but I decide the sensation must have weight. After the third or fourth drink, the drunken feeling must sneak up and pin you down. It must quiet your mind, like a lover that puts one finger to your lips, saying “Shh, baby.” It must crush you with the force of its embrace. It must bore into you, permeating your whole body, your whole soul.

I imagine all of this and my chest tightens with yearning. I can’t wait until Christmas.

• • •

Everyone
at my new high school drinks.

In the hallway between classes, I hear rumblings about a keg party at an upperclassman’s house, or in the woods near the town quarry. I see girls drawing straws at lunch to choose a designated driver. I see one guy put another in a headlock and say, “Boy, prepare to get drunk tonight.”

I try to get myself invited.

I do it during science class, when my lab partner is turned backward in her chair, telling two girls about the cookout she’s throwing on Saturday. The theme is luau, she says. She’s going to decorate the backyard with wading pools and inflatable palm trees. She’s going to serve vodka watermelon.

I interject to say, “I love that drink.”

In the space under their desks, I see one girl nudge another with her foot. All three of them stare at me for a stunned mo-ment before they exhale small coughs.

That night, I find a recipe for vodka watermelon on the In-ternet. The instructions say to cut a hole in the top of the melon, funnel vodka inside, and let it sit for a day before you cut it into pieces so the fruit will absorb the alcohol. I read it over twice be-fore I realize you eat the watermelon chunks, instead of drinking the juice. When I do, I want to walk outside and lie down in the street.

With no
friends and no chance of getting invited to a party, I try to drink alone one night in September. My parents are up-stairs sleeping, and I am downstairs in the living room, mixing a mug of Kahlúa and milk and sipping it in front of Nick at Nite. The drink tastes good and sweet. I nuke it in the microwave until it steams like hot cocoa, and it warms my whole chest as I

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drink it, like VapoRub. I sit in my father’s favorite armchair, holding the glass in both hands so it scalds my palms. On TV, sitcom characters are drinking in a Boston bar, and I drink along while I listen for flipped light switches or feet on the stairs, sig-nals that someone is coming. Bear, the golden retriever, watches me with his ears back like he knows what I’m doing.

I have little time. I am expecting some rapid change.

I have the idea that Kahlúa will make me either dizzy or giddy, but neither sensation comes. I wait for them. I wait for the TV dialogue to make me giggle, but it just rolls on in a series of one-liners and laugh-track hums. I wait for the carpet to wobble under me, but it stays beige and still. The only change I can feel is in my face. My cheeks feel as though they might be warm to the touch, but there is no one to put their hands on them to confirm it.

I don’t drain the mug halfway before I get bored and dump the rest down the sink. I decide there’s no point in getting drunk without having a friend like Natalie along to encourage me to drink more and faster in order to get drunk. There’s no rivalry when you’re drinking alone; it’s like playing Battleship without an opponent.

As I’m climbing the stairs to go to bed, my mother hears me and groggily calls my name through the darkened door of my parents’ bedroom.

She says, “Koren, is that you? Are you okay?”

I roll my eyes and pretend I don’t hear her. I keep padding down the hallway.

Most days
, I wish Anne Sexton were my mother. We study her in school, and because it’s public school they don’t mention that she was a sexually abusive mother.

I read “Mother and Daughter” in my ninth-grade English book and realize my own mom will never understand girlhood with the same level of clarity. I wish she had Anne’s insom-nia, panic attacks, addictions, her own shit to deal with, old-Hollywood looks. I wish she would call me “string bean” and stand back during my high school years like “somebody else, an old tree in the background.”