Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (9 page)

in a word,
sick.
But there on the X-ray, I’m faced with proof that, deep down, I’m sturdy; even full-grown. Dr. Fix-It says so. It is the notion of health, not injury, that makes me ill. It forces me to lean over and put my head between my knees.

I spend the rest of the school year hobbling up stairs and out of cars, never certain when my knee will submit and give out under me. Without my intricate agenda of after-school activities, I give in to self-imposed quarantine. I spend afternoons

56
INITIATION
|
First Offense

paging through stolen library books in the backyard’s canvas lawn chair. Evenings, I keep vigil in the living room in front of infomercials.

In an effort to cheer me up, my mother proposes a vacation. I propose Ocean City. We spent three consecutive summers there, when I was five, six, and seven, and I’ve retained every second of each of them. I can remember burrowing for sand crabs in the wet sand down by the surf, letting them squirm to their deaths in a pebble-filled tank because I loved them too much to liberate them. I remember the boardwalk, where my mother bought me a T-shirt with a beaded hem that jingled when I walked. I remember the length of beach where I played catch with my fa-ther, way past my usual bedtime, and the way my hands looked when they slow-motion-grasped for the glow-in-the-dark ball. I remember the name of every resort on the strip—The Golden Sands, The Palm, The Prism—and the mirrored windows that made each one look as sunny as the sky. I remember mornings that I sat on a condo carpet, eating Cabbage Patch Kids cereal, which was the type of sugary snack that was forbidden at home, and savoring each candy-coated puff on my tongue like a gem-stone far too precious to swallow.

To other people, Ocean City may be a tumbledown summer town with a name that ought to be implied. But to me, it’s al-ways represented hedonism.

I imagine my parents associate Ocean City with unity, with the years before I hit adolescence and became too mean and moody to take, because they agree to my destination quickly and resolutely. My mother even suggests I bring Natalie, who is home for two months on summer break, because the condo she’s rented is big enough for us to have our own room. It feels like her final attempt to coax a smile out of me.

• • •

The bedroom
Natalie and I share turns out to be more like our own little apartment. It has its own bathroom, a queen-sized bed under a tufted comforter, and a sitting area where yellowed paper-backs are stacked beside a transistor TV. We fold our swimsuits into the room’s white dresser and spread our arsenal of curling irons across the paint-chipped surface of the nightstand. Natalie parts the window’s lace curtains, and we stand for a few minutes in front of it, awed by the condominiums that shoot up thirty stories high over the Coastal Highway. My parents’ room faces the beach, and ours faces the street, and we prefer it that way.

We wait three nights to push out the screen and boost ourselves out of the window.

We started
sneaking out of Natalie’s house a month ago. We’d spend whole days drafting our escape plans, testing to see which hinges whined, which floorboards creaked, and gathering de-vices we might use to prop, resist, and muffle them. At night, we’d wait for the TV to fall silent in Natalie’s parents’ bedroom, and we’d silently stuff Natalie’s bed and my sleeping bag with stuffed animals and sweaters. Then we’d tiptoe down the stair-case, roll open the garage door, and sprint to where the driveway meets the street.

Most nights, the joy of the prison break was enough. We didn’t need any plans, aside from walking the culs-de-sac like two ghosts, taunting the neighbors’ tied-up Labradors, kicking bits of gravel and sharing cigarettes.

We’d learned to stay in the neighborhood after the night we hitchhiked to a party near Natalie’s boarding school, where we drank Heineken and listened to a band, and nearly got stuck

58
INITIATION
|
First Offense

there without anyone to drive us home. At three
a.m.
, we’d finally agreed to pay an older boy fifteen dollars in exchange for a ride. He had a summer job as an ice-cream man, and he drove us home in his singing white truck.

Years later, when my parents ask if I used to drink and sneak out because I wanted to test their boundaries, I’ll say yes, even though that was never my aim. I won’t know how to tell them it was a suicidal impulse that drove me out windows. I had a curious
It’s a Wonderful Life
–like compulsion to explore what my house, or my life, would look like without me in it.

Natalie and
I find a stand in our condo closet. It’s a fold-out deal with metal legs and canvas rungs, and whoever put it there probably intended it for supporting suitcases or drying beach tow-els. But we see its full potential. Natalie unfolds it beneath the bedroom window and steps back to whisper, “After you.” I position one foot on each of the metal legs and stand there, spread-eagle, for a moment of breath catching before I grab both sides of the window frame and hoist myself out, one inch at a time.

We don’t speak a word until we hit the pavement in the condo’s parking lot. That is the divide, the predetermined finish line, and once we cross it we’re free. There, we slip our feet back into our sandals and let out our pent-up laughter. All around us, the strip is illuminated with neon signs and headlights. People are everywhere, in cars, leaning out of hotel windows, roaming the sidewalks as they drink from foam-sheathed beer cans.

I feel like I did when I was younger, when my sister and I would linger on the stairs in our nightgowns during my parents’ adults-only dinner parties, listening to the muffled laughter and the chiming sound of my father hitting his wineglass with a

spoon. Tonight, the Coastal Highway confirms that old suspicion: There is a whole world that takes shape during the hours I’m asleep.

Across the street from the condo, Natalie and I wait for the trolley car, trying to decide if the ten dollars wadded up in our pockets is enough to feed the fare machine for two round-trip tickets. It is. When the trolley pulls up, we choose seats in the far back, which we know to be the most desirable spots on a school bus. We ride for thirty minutes, and fifty blocks.

Earlier in the day we met a guy behind the counter of the Pizza Palace who directed us to the part of town where the college kids hang out. They are waiters and lifeguards, he said, who rent entire houses on their own. Listening to him, I couldn’t help but envision the staff kids in
Dirty Dancing,
the way they embraced booze, sex, and rock music like life, love, and the hunt for happiness. I sit in the trolley’s grooved plastic seat, imagining I’m Baby—only I won’t have to carry a water-melon the way she did to get into a party; I sense that being a girl is its own free pass inside.

Natalie and
I aren’t sure where to go once we step off the trolley. It’s my idea to take off our sandals and wander down the beach, past all the darkened resorts that have beach chairs stacked in the sand. We aren’t walking anywhere in particular, but Natalie keeps urging me to move faster because it’s her na-ture. I trail behind her, watching the red tip of her cigarette move to and from her mouth, and the way the wet sand erases her foot-prints as soon as she makes them.

Down the beach, we see a campfire. In the dark, we can spot its orange spark, like a meteor, from a long way off. As we tread closer, we can see the empty beer bottles in the sand and the keg

60
INITIATION
|
First Offense

on ice in a trash can, a web of people settled around it. It looks like any cigarette or beer ad: a tight-knit circle of strangers made friends by atmosphere alone. Girls huddle on driftwood while boys drop kelp down their blouses. Flames brighten their faces. Steely waves crash at their backs.

It feels good to give myself over to that formula. It is like the type of extra credit where you get points for just showing up. The kids on the beach don’t care that they don’t know Natalie and me. A boy stands to offer us his space on a blanket. Someone else brings us beer in clear plastic cups. They welcome us into their circle, no questions asked, and we don’t have to work for any of it.

The funny thing about that unconditional stamp of approval is that it makes me act less like myself. For all intents and pur-poses, it should make me more comfortable being regular old Koren—idiosyncratic, a bit phobic in groups, but a decent girl if you get to know her. But instead, I, too, conform to a beer-ad version of myself. I kick off my shoes and pirouette in the sand. I agree to drink beer from a funnel, even though I know the boy channeling it through will pour too fast, and I will end up wearing the thick tar of beer and wet sand. When Natalie and the other girls strip down to their underwear, I do, too. I ride a boo-gie board in my undershirt and white cotton panties, and don’t care when the salt water makes my skin show through.

At the time, I write off these behaviors as a need to adapt. I don’t want to stand out as a high-school girl, the type of baby who can’t keep up with buxom sorority girls from Southern universities. I want to prove that I can funnel as much beer as they can, that I can unflinchingly take the same lascivious looks in the dark.

Later, I’ll be able to see that this is how it all starts. I concede

to shifting my personality, just a hair, to observe the standards I think the situation calls for. From now on, every time I drink, I’ll enhance various aspects of myself, willing myself into a state where I am a little bit brighter, funnier, more outgoing, or vi-brant. The process will be so incremental that I’ll have no gauge of how much it will change me. I will wake up one day in my twenties like a skewed TV screen on which the hues are all wrong. My subtleties will be exaggerated and my overtones will be subdued. My entire personality will be off-color.

Natalie and
I cut and run again the next night. It’s the same es-cape route: over the stand, out the window, and down the strip on the trolley. This time, we head for a party in a large, stilted cottage a few blocks west of the beach. At the campfire the night before, a boy wrote the address in ballpoint pen on Natalie’s fore-arm.

When we swing open the house’s screen door, there isn’t a party inside. There are college guys in T-shirts and swim shorts, just loafing around. They conjure up images of half a dozen frat-boy movies. The house is a labyrinth of rooms, empty, but for a few neon beer signs, pizza boxes, and TVs paused on video games. In the den, a few girls watch boys shoot pool from a sag-ging couch. Some fluff their hair so it falls over their shoulders. A few eye us distrustfully.

I make wide-open eyes at Natalie that say
This is a tragedy.

But she just screws up her face and turns a corner toward the kitchen because she knows full well I’ll follow her.

There, a boy introduces himself as Greg and offers us beer. Right off the bat, Natalie says Greg looks like a criminal, on ac-count of his T-shirt’s black-and-white prison stripes, which he wears with a plastic belt and jeans so tight I can make out the

62
INITIATION
|
First Offense

square of cue chalk in his pocket. He is small, nearly my size, with blue eyes that stand out behind blond bangs so long they clear the bridge of his nose. He says he studies painting at a Maryland art institute where classes like “interactive media,” “experimental animation,” and other things I’ve never heard of are required. He’s spending the summer painting his senior the-sis project between shifts at a local surf shop. When I ask what he paints, he says, “Come on up and see.” As I turn to follow him upstairs to his studio, Natalie says she’ll stay behind. She is busy sharing cigarettes with a University of Maryland boy named Wally.

Greg’s canvases are scattered across the floor of the studio, and more are propped up against easels and walls. I can’t find a common motif. There are paintings of cracked eggs, hands holding apples, the shriveled breasts of a woman he says is a portrait model. What catches my attention, what holds me trans-fixed the way a nail holds a mirror, is an oversized American flag on the ceiling. It is riddled with holes and faded from the sun, and the effect makes it look exactly like a flag (was it the original American flag?) that I’d seen hanging in a museum in Washington, D.C. I take it as a symbol of independence. I would die to be twenty, to spend summers away from my parents, painting still lifes and gluing up surfboard gashes.

I tell Greg lies, heaps of them. Actually, they aren’t lies so much as they are little shifts in facts that, I think, make me ap-pear worldly in his eyes. I tell him I am eighteen, spending a month in Ocean City with my aunt before returning home to Boston for my senior year of high school. I weave all my stories around these small substitutions: eighteen as opposed to fifteen, relatives as opposed to parents, big city as opposed to small town. The persona I create isn’t terribly far from the truth, but

it makes me feel safer around him, more anonymous and less exposed.

We kiss for a while amid the toxic smell of art supplies, and Greg is gentle with me. When my hair falls into his mouth, he brushes each wet thread away. When I say something he can’t quite hear, he says, “I’m sorry, sweetheart?” And the word
sweetheart
sounds so tender it soothes some raw part of me, and I find myself whispering so I can hear it again.

I imagine that Greg understands me, that he has a psychic sense for how far I am from the place where I started. I think compassion drives him to hold me closer. When I speak, he concentrates like someone listening to a seashell, and I think he can hear the ocean that is pitching itself around inside me.

That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really there inside that moment, with its neighborly warmth and conversation, it’s hard to tell what’s responsible for producing emotion. What’s responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you’re drunk, or because you’re connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? To an outsider, the distinction is an easy one to make. But when you’re fifteen and fe-male, when you experience these feelings first and later only when you are drinking, it becomes a question of which came first, the liquor or the Greg?