Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 13

  THE EXPERTS say that jocks are susceptible to “group think,” a decision-making model that includes collective rationalization (i.e., “There is no I in TEAM”) and the illusion that shit can’t happen. I, however, am a freethinker. On my teammate’s birthday, I do shots of Devil Springs, a 160-proof vodka that burns my throat like acid and makes me cry out in awe. Afterward, I collide with the coffee table while having a cake fight with the birthday boy, in which we are nailing one another in the face with fistfuls of devil’s food cake. The next morning I go to Spanish class with a black welt on my knee and chocolate frosting in my hair.

  By Thanksgiving, I start to realize that the drills we do in practice—the nonstop crunches, reverse triceps dips, and suicides—are diminishing my tolerance for cocktails. Lighter, I’m noticing, I have a greater margin for error.

  One night, I do a few shots of Bacardi with Hannah and Joe, nothing that would have done me in when I weighed 113, but at 105 I am caught by surprise when the floor totters under me, and Hannah tells me I’m slurring my words. The next thing I know, I’m throwing up in the trash can while Joe holds my head, his giant hand pinching the back of my neck like he’s lifting a kitten from a crate. When I start passing out, he carries me to my room in a trust fall.

  One year later, when Joe dies in a car crash, stone sober, I won’t be able to stop thinking of the boozy wrecks that he pulled me from like the jaws of life. I’ll unearth an old photo of us drinking Rheingold and get gooseflesh. I’ll be forced to flip it over.

  ALSO BY November, I have profound misgivings about Wendi, an ill will that tears through my abdomen like an ulcer. I feel the first stabs of injury on the night I wake up and hear her clattering into the phone about me, telling her boyfriend she hates my clothes and my friends, not to mention the way I sleep, eat, answer the phone, and employ the word rad. My bile swells the day she short-sheets my bed. By the time she tries to solicit me to write her women’s studies paper for fifteen dollars, odium is choking me. The sentiment cuts off all other basic functioning.

  All the college-prep books that my mother ordered obsessively before I left home warned me about this. Tensions are bound to arise, the authors wrote, when you’re sharing a room the size of a bus-stop shelter. They said get out of there. It’s easier to keep the peace when you’re both busy. Heeding that advice, I try to distance myself from the room and from the dorm itself, where Wendi, as if she senses the loner tendencies with which I constantly struggle, has used them to rally the fourth-floor girls against me.

  One night, the hallway carries the sound of a conversation she is having a few rooms away. From my bed, the acoustics are good. I can hear the high whine of Wendi’s voice, telling Cara P. and Julie L. that I stay away from the girls on our floor because I think I am better than they are, and that’s why I go out and drink with my teammates. I feel as though Wendi has stuck a voodoo pin through my heart because that’s where the ache is. She has gone right for my weakness and twisted it into misunderstanding.

  For a moment, I consider running down the hall in my nightshirt and telling them the truth. I want to say, I don’t avoid you because I think I’m superior, I do it because I think I’m inferior. I do it because I think you don’t want me, and that lowliness is the reason that I drink, too. But I know I couldn’t deliver that message without crying, which would only substantiate the weirdness and weakness that I think they suspect of me. So instead, I roll over to face the wall, and when Wendi comes in, I pretend to sleep.

  I retreat even further from the dorm. I study in a fifth-floor cubicle at Bird Library, among poetry volumes that haven’t been checked out since the early eighties. I eat sodden pizza with Hannah in the student center. I learn to lie in bed wearing headphones, relying on the lyrics to fold me into sleep. I handle Wendi with kid gloves until light beer hinders my diplomacy.

  One night, after power hour with Hannah, my dormant resentment bursts and impels a tsunami. I am staggering down the hallway to my room, dragging my hands along the walls on either side of me, when Wendi cuts me off in the doorway, hands on her hips, carping about a phone message that I wrote on a Post-it and forgot to stick to her mirror. Under any other circumstances, I would bow my head and make an apology. But on this night, I feel as shimmering and fluid as a jellyfish drifting on a wave. The words in my head are rhythmic and pulsating, and there is nothing to stop me from saying them. I tell Wendi to leave me alone because I can’t handle her bullshit.

  It only gets easier from there. From there, I will come home more nights, feeling as lucent as the vodka I drank, half hoping Wendi will start a fight with me. All week, I will save up my rage for her. I’ll stockpile it like ammo, so it will be there on the weekend, when I’m drunk enough—and therefore brave enough—to retaliate. The night she makes a reference to my dirty-clothes pile, I’ll throw the telephone against the wall, splitting it open to reveal a tangle of rainbow-colored wires. The night she takes me on over a cable bill, I’ll slam the door in her face so hard that the force of it blows her hair back. One night, I’ll come home and rip her Mariah Carey calendar off the bulletin board for no reason other than I’ve decided that somebody needs to do it.

  I’m uncomfortable with my new capacity for drunken belligerence. I have a feeling it’s the type of thing that people can use against me, the way prosecutors on TV crime shows call character witnesses to prove that the defendant is capable of committing an unspeakable crime. But I console myself with the Claude Bernard quote “Hatred is the most clear-sighted, next to genius.” I praise myself for expressing malice plainly, like a man, for howling and swearing and knocking over what-ever is handy, instead of employing rumors and nasty looks, the subterfuge of women.

  Wendi is not so progressive. By chance, I find out that she’s telephoned my parents to discuss me, to tell them that I’ve lost some weight and she thinks I might have an eating disorder. As an afterthought, she tells them I am drinking a lot.

  My mom tells me about it on a Sunday afternoon, a few weeks after Wendi reached out and touched her. When I ask her how she responded, she says, “Please! I told her you were working out with the team four hours a day. On top of that, you eat totally normally.”

  When I ask her what she thinks about the drinking, she says, “I’m not delusional; I know people drink in college. Just be responsible.”

  My mom is right about people drinking in college. The girls on my floor scatter to a party at least once a weekend, like seeds being blown by the wind. When Saturday nights find me stuck in my dorm room, typing a paper, I am guaranteed to have at least five hours of soundlessness in which to listen to the clicking of my own computer keys. The girls wander home again in the early morning hours, when I can hear thumping, or vague hollering, or doors fluttering open and closed, despite the tube socks we’ve all duct-taped to our doorframes to muffle the slamming.

  If I wanted to, I could go room by room down the hallway and list each tenant’s drunken acts of delinquency: There is Emma M., who, after a house party, crawled buck-naked to the bathroom on her hands and knees, as though she’d regressed to the state of infancy. There is Kylie T., who, after too many gin and tonics, mistook Anna B.’s room for her own and scrambled into bed with her. And there is Danielle P., whose cast we all signed in felt-tipped pen after she got drunk and fell through a glass coffee table.

  In fact, the only person who hasn’t yet been humbled by alcohol is Wendi. That’s not to say that she won’t be, though. Before the school year ends, she will get dead drunk on Goldschlager and keck in her sheets. I won’t say a word while she’s stripping her bed the next day, but I’ll feel like I’ve won.

  I GO HOME for Christmas break feeling totally unencumbered. The commuter flight into Boston is crowded with students drinking Bloody Marys and comparing plans for New Year’s Eve. By the time the plane touches down on the Logan runway, everyone’s face is as red as a poinsettia, and a few rowdy frat boys have repeatedly cornered the flight attendant with a sprig of mistletoe. Behind th
e fake-frosted glass at the arrival gate, my dad is waiting. He gives me a bear hug and says I look great.

  My parents have always considered themselves European in the fact that they think the legal drinking age ought to be eighteen, and that drinking is fine for teenagers as long as it’s done at home. Therefore, Christmas dinner finds me with a glass of white wine instead of my usual goblet of skim milk. I do my best to sip naturally between helpings of squash and turkey and the goopy Jell-O salad my mom calls “blueberry gunk,” even though I still haven’t acquired a taste for wine. We drink little of it at school, unless you count the strawberry wine coolers that come in bottles with screw-off tops.

  Relatives ask me about Syracuse: “How are the parties?” Followed by, “How are classes?” And I gesture majestically with my glass, which, as the night coasts on, feels more and more like a tulip-shaped extension of my hand. The air smells like cinnamon sticks and chimney smoke. My grandma tells off-color jokes. My uncles get plastered and pound out “Werewolves of London” on the player piano.

  As a Christmas present to ourselves, my family and I spend the week following New Year’s in Grand Cayman, where (as a Christmas present to me) the legal drinking age is eighteen. The days are hot and stale. Time stretches out like the blue line of the ocean, and I spend it faceup on a hotel towel, watching prop planes pull ads for drink specials at a club called Next Level. My sister and I snap pictures of sea turtles in algae-crusted tanks. We snorkel with stingrays and shriek when their slippery whips brush our legs. One afternoon, I bump into a boy from my dorm on a bleached stretch of beach (in the coming years, there will never be a city remote enough to escape people I knew at S.U.). We spend a night at a sports bar called Bobo’s Iguana, drinking Red Stripes and flirting shamelessly.

  On our last day in the Caymans my dad rents a Jeep, and we drive it up the curved road to the botanical park, only to find that it is closed due to bad weather. The sky growls and threatens rain. We take pictures on a burned-out tree trunk: my sister sitting high on top, me at mid-level, my mom at the base. Together we look like a succession of Russian stacking dolls, spanning the continuum of womanhood.

  When the temperature slips below seventy degrees, we buy sweatshirts at the gift shop and sit wearing them in a nearby canteen. My dad orders frozen mudslides, blended with Tortuga rum and topped with whipped cream. There is a glass for everyone but my thirteen-year-old sister. When my mom lets her have a sip she purses her lips and says it tastes too much like coffee.

  I drink two, fast enough to get a brain freeze, and then suck on my parents’ straws when they get up to go to the bathroom. On the ride back to the hotel, I fall to rum-humming sleep in the backseat.

  GREEK MYTHOLOGY

  BACK AT SCHOOL, January is gelid. The roads around campus are two inches deep in slush left behind from a New Year’s Day snowstorm. Even in hiking boots, the walk to and from class requires hoofing it, with your wool gloves cradling your notebooks, your turtleneck pulled over your chin, and your feet skidding this way and that. “Ice luges” start turning up at off-campus parties. Boys tip bottles over the crests of four-foot blocks of ice that they’ve chiseled chutes into, and we kneel at the bottom with our hot mouths on the finish line, as vodka toboggans down the fronts of our shirts.

  There hasn’t been a memorable party since house parties became the usual way to pass weekends. Nothing remarkable has ensued since a routine was established: the standard procedure for Saturday nights, whereby Hannah and I toddle through the snow to the address that an upperclassman has scrawled on our doors’ Dry Erase boards, while the windchill stiffens our fingers and older boys zip down Euclid Avenue toward the campus bars, leaning their heads out of car windows and roaring “ Freeesh-men,” which is the verbal equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

  Since then, I’ve realized that house parties, which I first thought were enormously grown-up, are actually adolescent. They are a way for senior boys to make a swift eight hundred bucks, by supplying beer to freshmen who have no other way of getting it. When I look closer, I notice the way each boy has his own chore, collecting money or carrying kegs, and each one performs it with the mope of begrudged obligation. When I’m a dollar short of the admission fee, the fuzzy-haired boy at the door has to check with his superior before letting me in. When I’m in another boy’s way when he comes lugging a keg through the door, he grumbles “For-christ’s-sake-move.” I realize parties are these boys’ part-time jobs. Two a month is all it takes for freshmen like me to pay their monthly rent.

  By second semester, the parties are like a hologram that looks the same from every angle. There is nothing unexpected about them; there are only lines at discreet rear entrances, cups of sour beer, floors peppered with cigarette butts, bathrooms without toilet paper, and the same familiar faces that drift from room to room. After a while, those faces are not even worth nodding at because nothing can come from that small gesture except the same old small talk and dumb silences. After a while, these parties’ only variable is the street address.

  I don’t change, either. I still go to these parties. I still stay at them, determined to get my five bucks’ worth by filling and refilling my oversized party cup with beer.

  In the future, I will always be the girl who stays too long or too late. I will be the girl who holds out for aye, as though it were a contest. I will be as determined to keep drinking as people on reality shows are determined to stay standing one-footed on a log, for six hours at a time. I will be the last girl to leave the dinner party, the one who stays after all the other girls have given their good-bye air kisses, the one who promises to catch a ride, a cab, a bus, and yes, “Call when I get home.” If I’m a guest at your party, I’ll be the girl who falls asleep on the bed with the coats, sleeps until nine, and accepts a cup of French roast from your mother before I go. If I’m your love interest, you, too, won’t be rid of me until morning, until you find me my shirt and my socks, until you offer me a palm filled with aspirin, and walk me out the door.

  Drunk, I’ll never know how to go home until I’m told to. I’ll stay out until two A.M. in the suburbs, four A.M. in the city, until I get a cue, like the bar’s lights coming on and a bouncer saying, “I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here.” And even then, I’ll invite you to my place for an after-party, or I’ll invite myself to your place if my freezer is fresh out of vodka, and we’ll both keep drinking until I hit the floor. I’ll keep taking until I’m long saturated, and even after that. I’ll be parasitic that way. I’ll suck blissfully on a straw for hours, like the tick that sucks until it’s big as a dime, until it bursts in a bloody streak on your arm.

  DURING THE time that I am a student at S.U., The Princeton Review will repeatedly count it among the top twenty campuses in the United States with “more to do.” And the label will always confuse me because I’m not sure whether it means S.U. has more to do than other schools, or more to do aside from drinking, which seems to be the undercurrent that runs through all campus-related references. In 2001, S.U. will actually rate as the university that has “the most to do,” and it will make me think chancellors ought to start addressing sympathy cards to the nation’s 12 million other undergraduates, who must be bored to tears.

  I know because I’m bored to tears. Just five months into college, I am jaded. I am sated with watching student films, and sledding the steep incline in front of Crouse College on green plastic lunch trays, and buying student tickets to student productions like Leading Men Don’t Dance. If there really is “more to do” on campus aside from holing up among the dirty-clothes piles in somebody’s dorm room, smoking, swigging flavored vodka, and playing PlayStation, I can’t find it. The new year finds my friends and me in a state of hog-drunk hibernation. In the cold and sleet, even average outings require a cocktail. We drink screwdrivers before we ride the shuttle to the movie theater; we stir amaretto liqueur into our cups of hot cocoa at hockey games.

  It’s a strange
moment when I realize that drinking, which used to be the single interlude that could break up high school’s tedium, is becoming just as dreary as most things in college are. That is not to say that beer has become as dull as dining-hall food, though it will be by the time I graduate. It’s just that the sensation that comes with the third or fourth bottle of it, which used to be a sudden awareness as jolting as a blow to the head, has become so familiar that I don’t have to pay much attention to it. Falling into a buzz is like falling into something staunch and comfortable, like a favorite armchair. I sink into the feeling; I could drift to sleep there.

  BY THE beginning of February, quarter-page ads for rush appear in The Daily Orange, saying “Tri Delt has a rush on you” or “The sisters of Alpha Phi wish you good luck with recruitment.” A Greek Expo kicks off in the student center. It’s just like the consumer electronics shows I used to go to with my father, but instead of demonstrations of the latest robotic arm there are booths of girls wearing sweatshirts stitched with alien letters, exhibiting “sisterhood.” A slide show flips frames on a life-size screen. Girls are everywhere, hugging one another too tightly. Their cheeks are flushed. Their mouths are spewing laughter. Everyone wears name tags that read, HI MY NAME IS, and everyone’s name is KAITLYN.

  Someone passes out a guidebook that contains black-and-white photos of all fourteen houses and sorority symbols: their chosen flowers, philanthropies, and color schemes. The differentiation is as befuddling to me as the splitting of the atom. For the past semester, I’ve thought all sororities were one unit. I had no idea that there were points of distinction. I didn’t know there were so many different Alpha, Beta, and Gamma girls in orbit.