Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  Back in the dorm, I scrawl a note on my Dry Erase board that reads, FOOLS RUSH IN. But just before the rush deadline, Hannah asks me to sign up with her, and I cave. I resolve to rush but absolutely not pledge, a choice that will later invoke the old AA idiom, “If you hang out in a barber shop, sooner or later, you’re bound to get a haircut.” I figure the registration fee costs little more than two house parties, and a week of waxing sap to Greek freaks will, at the very least, give me something to do.

  I am immediately disappointed to discover that “rush parties” aren’t really parties at all. Whereas boys rushing fraternities lounge on black leather couches, watching televised sports and chugging beer with the brothers, girls rushing sororities are subject to much stricter rules. For starters, we are not allowed to drink at all during rush: not in the bars, not in our dorms, and certainly not in the sorority houses. Forget about accepting a cold drink; we are not allowed to accept even the most trivial items from sisters. The Panhellenic Council interprets a tissue or a spare tampon—any exchange at all—as a bribe.

  Our parties are like job interviews. I have a “rush group,” a herd of thirty girls with whom I shuttle from house to house, as we are required to spend thirty minutes at each of the fourteen sororities. I tour each house’s succession of bedrooms, the neat little beds lined up like those of Snow White’s dwarves, and dutifully whisper “Wow.” I am introduced to sisters dressed in cashmere sweater sets who peek at the label of my coat when they help me out of it. I sit with them on taupe-colored sectionals, and have odd little staring matches like the ones I used to have with my sister to see who could last the longest without blinking. They grill me about my major, my hometown, and my G.P.A. One girl has the gall to ask me what my father does for a living, and I wish I had the conviction to tell her to fuck off, but I don’t, so I shyly tell her about his business.

  The funny thing is, rush is one of the most legitimate experiences I’ll have in college, in spite of its out-and-out bogusness. For a lot of college girls, it is our most honest—not to mention our most sober—attempt at self-definition. Rush is predicated upon classification. At every house, girls line up on a staircase, clapping out harebrained rhymes, totally confident, totally convinced that

  They’re the Alpha Phis, they’re the best in the land,

  And we’ll see them wherever we go.

  From the Golden Gate to the Empire State,

  they’ll be wearing silver and bordeaux.

  These are girls who are, at least in one respect, pretty damn sure of their place in the world.

  College is all about compartmentalization. The university itself is divided into graduate and undergraduate, subdivided by liberal arts and science, and then split into professional schools and divvied up by departments. As a student, you lose track of how many times people ask you, “What’s your major?” or “What are your career goals?” Not just academic advisers, but other students, even some friends. Everyone wants to know what you are, followed by what you want to be. You learn to refer to yourself by taxonomy, by major and minor: communications journalism.

  Almost spontaneously, we group ourselves socially, too. At nineteen, knowing who our friends are is the closest many of us can come to knowing who and what we are. Even if we haven’t yet committed to a major, to a hair color, or to eating three square meals a day, we know the group of people that can best tolerate us. Our posse is a label that we wear proudly: The student government knots Brooks Brothers ties; the Outing Club anchors snowboards to the roofs of their cars; and the staff members at The Daily Orange use hollow lingo like “off-lead” and “hammerhead.” They are markers that everyone knows how to spot and read.

  The Greek system is itself a signifier. And within it there are subsignifiers. They are the letters mounted on gold brooches, embroidered on sweatshirts, and nailed to the exteriors of every house. During rush, every sorority rolls out trays of cupcakes with their codification spelled out in icing.

  During rush, it is all too easy to line yourself up against a score of female stereotypes and try to figure out which one you fit. All day long girls debate—before class, in the library, on the stationary bikes in the school’s gym. Do they belong in the house of funny girls or the house of prim and propers? Can they imagine themselves in the stone farmhouse or the California rambler? Do they belong with the girls who look like Courteney Cox or the ones akin to Anna Kournikova? Choices, choices. Girls everywhere remind me of the orphaned duckling in my favorite children’s book, the one that runs the streets, asking stranger after stranger, “Are you my mommy?” Every girl is looking for her sisters, total strangers with whom she expects to share some strand of genetic code.

  I am not above it.

  I visit Zeta Alpha Sigma just before the sky darkens on a snow-spitting Wednesday afternoon. I’ve heard ahead of time that they are not your average sorority girls. In a pantheon where every house has a denomination—Kappa Kappa Glamour, A Chi Ho, etc.—they are called the Zeta Alcoholics, the fun-loving, fast-living, antisorority girls. Whereas most of the sororities on Comstock Avenue have ivory shutters, Bombay furniture, and a fine-tuned baby grand, Zeta is as squat as a frat house, an ivy-covered stucco with crumbling walkways, a secret smoking room, and discarded cups in the potted geraniums. It is rumored that their house chef bakes pot brownies and serves them alongside chicken à la king.

  Given their reputation, I imagine the Zetas will be brawny tomboys who open bottles with their teeth. For now, I buy the myth that female binge drinkers are overweight brutes with disheveled hair and sweat stains. It is the allegory I’ll later call the “Drunk Girl” myth, after the Saturday Night Live skit. It is a convenient misconception that gives those of us habitual drunks, the ones who don’t look like Jeff Richards in a crooked wig, the license to keep discounting ourselves among girls who have alcohol-abuse problems.

  In reality, the Zetas are hugely feminine. The arch-top door swings open on natural beauties, waifs, lip-gloss-and-mascara girls. They wear their lettered sweatshirts over tattered jeans, vintage slips, and paint-splattered Pumas. Tiny diamonds twinkle in their pierced noses. Tattoos peek over the waistbands of their jeans. They are the hipsters, the hippies, the rock-and-roll girls, and the renegades. They come from families of sons.

  Moreover, the Zeta house has the dim, haunted feeling of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Floors croak. Pipes clang. A framed portrait of a dead housemother eyes you with too much interest. The sisters float through the tour without any overblown pep, gently joking about the sloped kitchen floor and mismatched furniture. Even clean, their bedrooms are a hash of negatives, paint tubes, and scraps of fabric. Paint-smeared photo collages hang slightly crooked in the stairwells, alongside composite photos of old members, some of them dating back to the fifties, all those women with furry cardigans and sturdy-looking hairdos.

  The house immediately appeals to me as a historical landmark. It is the type of place that retains the air of its past residents: the outrageous, the artistic, the self-destructive, the wounded, the anything-goes. When I move into the house one year later, I’ll find out the second floor really does show signs of the macabre. The girls who live there hear wailing at night. Some see shower curtains blowing sideways, even though the windows are closed. Many report having the same dream, in which a young blonde drowns in a bathtub.

  All mentions of alcohol are strictly forbidden during rush, but when I take a seat on a slanted window bench, opposite a sister named Maya, all of our talk drifts back to drinking. She tells me she’s a sophomore photography major who hangs out at a jazz bar downtown. I tell her about drinking with Tess, and then drinking with Hannah, and the string of off-campus parties that are fast becoming déjà vu. Together, we talk like sentimental fools, like girls who can’t quit gushing about our boyfriends. We don’t see it, but we are just as bad as the sorority girls who define themselves by family money and designer jeans. Booze is the axis ou
r dialogue revolves around. It is our centrifugal force.

  “Look,” Maya says, leaning in to grip my upper arm like a railing, and making me feel for the first time like I’m built for feminine support. “During rush, a lot of sororities try to deny the fact that they drink. Talking about it can get them in big shit with the Greek council. Sororities have a lot of bad stereotypes, you know? But I’m going to tell you, here we believe in the philosophy of ‘work hard, party hard.’ The girls in this house are really real, and they really go for it. But we have our fun, too.”

  The Zeta girls consider themselves what addiction counselors call “terminally unique,” which in their case is actually more like “terminally cool.” I’ll learn soon enough that their triumphs are pinned up like taxidermy. And their failures are felt like a cerebral hemorrhage that no one without a poet’s intensity, an artist’s receptivity, or a radical’s planetary foresight has any hope to understand. For the next four years, they will again and again tout themselves as “real,” and I will be too naive to know that anyone who uses that designation is disguising a representation of immense falsity.

  Four years later, I’ll meet an old sorority sister at a Manhattan restaurant, and between sips of her third artificially colored, artificially flavored sour-apple martini, she will unironically tell me, as though she is still wired to the same audio loop, about her postcollege quest for “something real.”

  It will take me years to decipher the code of the chemically dependent, to learn that “fine” implies hammered, “relaxed” translates to stoned, “normal” means totally fucked. Reality just is. It is the light that permeates the thin bedroom curtains on the morning of a fierce hangover, after all the nocturnal beer tears and boozy sentiments, and the self-annihilation disguised as fine art.

  Anything that needs to be represented with a concept-word (e.g., sisterhood ) is almost always a crock of shit.

  Zeta is one of eight sororities that invite me back for the second round of rush. The second round is the skit round, and I am subjected to far too many tearful renditions of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

  Zeta’s skit is a musical review that spans the ages and includes lyrics like, “If you’re smart, you’ll be here, and you’ll be drinking lots of beer” and “Going to M Street, Zeta’s there, everyone in the bars beware!” The sisters in the audience, the ones standing on their chairs and throwing their hands up at any mention of alcohol, make my young, drunk’s heart glad.

  When we hear the ringing of a dinner bell, an indication that it’s time to go, Maya finds me in the crowd. She is wearing a deep-blue, polyester lounge dress that is probably a costume, but in this house, one can never be sure. Her pale face is freckled with glitter. As we walk to the door, she bends in to say, “As far as I can see, you’re a Zeta through and through.”

  Outside, snowflakes fall like confetti. I am utterly abuzz on approval.

  When it comes time to place “bids” (our three favorite sororities, ranked in order of how much we want to join them), I write down only Zeta. This is what our rush leaders call “suiciding,” namely because it’s Russian roulette; if you pick only one sorority and that sorority doesn’t invite you to join it, it’s a shot to the head. But I can’t see myself anyplace else. The Zetas and I have common interests. In any other sorority, I’d be a fish out of firewater.

  MAYA CALLS me the day I receive my invitation to pledge Zeta, to say congratulations and ask, “Aren’t you excited?” And even though I am excited, even though my pride swells with the idea that a group of women likes me enough to solicit me in this way, I can’t get over a pledge I was forced to sign when I vowed my intention to become a sister of Zeta: It made me promise I would abstain from alcohol for the next three months.

  I tell Maya how ironic it is that one of the meanings of the word pledge is to drink a toast to, considering our pledge leader says we can’t drink as pledges. She explains that underage drinking has been the cause of a few chapters’ suspension at S.U., and a few of the nearby universities have closed down their houses altogether. There’s been a lot of bad press. The local news networks make Greek organizations look like one big bender. To read it in the papers, you’d think sororities drink mimosas for breakfast and draft beer for lunch, that they turn water into wine. You’d think they toss empty bottles in the driveway and make pledges run barefoot through the shards.

  “A lot of freshmen—not you, but a lot of others—just don’t know their limits,” Maya says. “A pledge could be drinking in her room, or out at a party that has nothing to do with the sorority, and if she goes too far—if she gets taken to the emergency room or something—there’s nothing to keep the administration from shutting down the house. Everyone assumes she was hazed. Everyone always assumes the worst.”

  Sure as hell, Maya is right. The following spring, campus security will find six girls, all pledges of Alpha Omicron Pi, drunk as badgers in their dorm rooms. Two of them will be brought to the hospital for acute intoxication, after which the administration will order the sorority’s S.U. chapter to close for good.

  Statistically, freshman sorority girls are a liability. Whereas freshman frat boys begin college with more boozing experience than non-frat freshman, freshman sorority members are just as green as non-Greek girls are. When freshman girls drink, we are like people learning how to drive a stick shift: We either let go of the clutch too fast or too slow. We take too many shots, or not enough. When we’re trying to get drunk we stall short. When we’re not trying to get drunk, we mistakenly lurch into it anyway. Either way, driving the drink is never a smooth ride.

  “Hang in there,” Maya says. “We’ll have a party sometime soon.”

  IT IS the occasional tantalizing reminders that bait you. They are the sorority’s way of keeping you on the line long enough to reel you in, along with your semesterly dues. Big-sister week is the wriggling worm on the hook. It takes place just a week before hell week, apparently so we’ll have a confidante for when the shit hits the fan, a Virgil to shepherd us through so much ridiculous chaos.

  Big-sister week is five days of anonymous gifts: bouquets of flowers and buckets of candy, not to mention shot glasses and cigarette lighters bearing Zeta’s letters. Every day, our names are lettered on envelopes lined up on the mantel. Inside them are cryptic clues that say too much without saying anything at all:

  So here, Koren, is clue number three

  Soon you’ll know who your big sister will be.

  I’m from a small town, not far away from a city

  I have two dogs, a bird, and a kitty.

  When it comes to smoking cigarettes,

  I pass, though occasionally I get drunk off my ass.

  For music, I’m into The Cars and The Ramones,

  As well as Dylan, Costello, The Who, and The Stones.

  Guess who?

  Your Big Sister

  The mystery is to be revealed Saturday night, when the big sisters organize a scavenger hunt on and off campus. Their identities will be unveiled at the finish line, like a whopping grand prize.

  On Saturday, I show up at Zeta at 8:30 P.M. as instructed by my final clue, wearing the plastic, party-store lei that came with it. I’ve spent the week pretending I don’t know my big sister is Maya because I don’t want to spoil her fun.

  There are four other pledges waiting in the foyer, variously outfitted for the occasion: One girl is wearing a pointed party hat; another is wearing striped leg warmers; and one unfortunate girl wears her bra outside of her shirt. There is the usual rumbling that happens when girls get together, the kind that I always shrink from. Girls are comparing costumes and spitting up laughter, and the volume escalates until Zeta’s president comes downstairs and tells everyone to shut up.

  She gives us a math problem to solve, something like 49,832 times 0.615, minus 30,000.68, plus 20, minus 42. The final answer reveals the address that we’re supposed to go to, 624 Ackerman Avenu
e. In the driveway, two cars wait to drive us there.

  NONE OF us recognizes the drivers, which is enough to send us into a fury of nervous whispering. At the house, we’ve been having weekly quizzes in which the sisters file into the rec room one at a time, singling a pledge out and asking her, “What’s my name? You want to be a member of my sorority and you don’t even know my fucking name?” Some of the high-strung pledges have fainted under interrogation.

  My heart thrashes in my chest like a drowning man, until someone figures out that the drivers are alumnae. They are Zetas who graduated two and three years ago. The apartment they take us to belongs to two more former Zetas, both grad students. It is much more grown-up than the off-campus apartments where we go to house parties, which are usually a mess of neon beer signs, cigarette butts in the sink, and bookshelves constructed from police barricades and raw lumber. Even in the dark, the whole room is a rainy green. There are kiwi-colored walls and pesto-colored futons. Jute rugs line the hardwood floors. The only light comes from the stairway, where there is a lit candle on every step. We sit where we’re told to, around a coffee table, on velvet floor cushions the verdant shade of aloe vera.

  A girl in a black ski cap carries out a tray of two dozen beer bottles and explains the rules. They are going to turn on the stereo, and every time we hear The Police sing “Roxanne” we are going to drink. One pledge cries, “Are you kidding? They repeat it a bajillion times!” In reality, I think it works out to about twenty-five gulps in two minutes.

  The music kicks in like a thunderclap. I don’t have time to acknowledge the gyre of nerves in my stomach before it’s Roxanne over the bottles clinking on and off the table, Roxanne over the slow giggles of the alumnae who are reclining on the futons and playing along even though no one’s forcing them. Roxanne. Roxanne. Roxanne. I usually consider myself pretty good at this, but I find myself “putting on the red light,” and missing a few refrains until an alumna warns me to pick it up. Every gulp makes my stomach flop like a sunfish.