Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  After a decade of alcohol abuse, I find myself going back over the chronology, trying to pinpoint when I might have averted it. Mentally, I go back to my university, to the row of bars that is located just across from the health center and wonder if anything could have led me to the south side of the street, to tell my story to a man with a notepad instead of a man with a bar rag, to switch counselors. I remember the first kiss that tasted like sweet malt and then the subsequent ones, the boys whose breath held the must of wine or the ethanol of whiskey, and I wonder would my story have turned out differently if boys had played no part in it? I go back to the bite of my first drink and wonder, what if I had been sixteen or eighteen instead of fourteen? Would age have lessened my attachment?

  I apply all the questions to my story that the experts employ: I wonder, What if I’d never seen an alcohol ad? What if there were no glistening bottles and bodies to catch my attention between the pages of magazines or on freeway billboards? I wonder what if the legal drinking age was eighteen? I ask myself whether any legislation might have made my drinking moderate.

  My story has no real turning point. There is no critical moment that might have changed my whole narrative. My alcohol abuse, like the issue of all underage alcohol abuse, has its roots in more than one factor. Just as drinking pervades our culture, it diffused into my personality. I grew into my abuse, like the occasional tree you can find on a nature walk, its roots spilling over both sides of a boulder like outspread fingers, in spite of the rock’s lack of soil, moisture, and stability. To see it only at the height of its maturity is to wonder, Why build on that?

  My alcohol abuse was a seed that fell at just the right time, in just the right place, when all the conditions were just right to nurture it. To understand the outgrowth, I have to go back to the first bottle that fell out of the liquor chest and into my ready hands. I have to go back to the beginning.

  INITIATION

  FIRST TASTE

  TO THIS DAY, I can’t remember when I had my first kiss. I can’t tell you how old I was, if it was a moment in May, if I closed my eyes or left them open. The memory is long gone. My mind tossed it out with the bathwater of experience, with TV and takeout and chitchat, the brief intervals of time that simply never soaked in. That kiss, though historical, was in no way historic. It was a tree that fell in the forest. And I didn’t make a sound.

  I remember other firsts shallowly, like the type of big Broadway plays where the scenery is more moving than the spectacle. Today, any emotion that was evoked by those rites escapes me. I can only recall in detail the rows of white chiffon on my First Communion dress, or the torn vinyl seats of the school bus on my first day of school. I can’t remember the trauma of my first period, or the year (was it sixth grade or seventh?), but I know that I told my mother about it in the front yard, where she was watering the hydrangea tree with a green rubber hose. The memory of the first time I drove the family Ford has been reduced to a vacant parking lot. My first sex has the solid darkness of its windowless room.

  But like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.

  The exact date is June 17, 1994. I am fourteen, which is the norm these days, when the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen years old.* I am a few days shy of my eighth-grade graduation. Summer vacation looms close, and just beyond it, regional high school. In the interim is public school mania, a collective chaos brought on by high temperatures and lettered report cards, when even teachers slam closed The Metamorphosis and let classes out ahead of the bell.

  It’s Friday and I’m spending the weekend at Natalie Burke’s summer cottage on Lake Pleasant, which in my mind has the exoticism of St. Bart’s. The cottage is small, a single-story, but we move around it as we please because Mr. and Mrs. Burke often work well into prime time. Its rooms bulge with wicker furniture, wind chimes, Bonsai trees in clay pots, framed starfish on the walls, a thick shag carpet that always smells like sunscreen, and a china cabinet stacked with party napkins and Thai cookbooks, Natalie’s old Cosmopolitans, and her parents’ old Vanity Fairs. A string of white lights on the deck, which are left to sway in the wind year-round, are a continual reminder of the indefinite nature of our holiday. All in all, there is nothing to encourage us that the rules of our ordinary lives apply here.

  It is another afternoon of Natalie and me alone, together. We spend it sunbathing on the roof and swimming unsupervised. Natalie’s parents forbid us to do both, but we can’t be bothered with cautionary tales while the sun is still high and motorboats skid viscously past the end of the dock.

  It is seven o’clock when we towel off. A few months ago, it would have been twilight. But, since it’s summer, the sky hasn’t darkened past pale pink. Through the sliding glass door, the sun looks defiant. It sits bloated and orange above the lake’s public beach, like another inflatable ball kids forgot in the reeds when they left for the day.

  I am standing Speedo-ed in the kitchen, sliding an elastic strap down over one shoulder and examining a faint tan line. The baby oil Natalie made me rub on instead of sunscreen has left my skin feeling buttery and somehow sexy, like it’s a waste that no one will touch it but me. Still, I haven’t browned past the color Natalie calls “Bisque,” after a tin of loose powder in her makeup chest. Bisque is a winter color, she says. I should sun myself until I can wear the same color she does—Toast—which is a warm tan she tops with Raspberry Jam blush. I tell her the oil didn’t work; I’m as Bisque as ever.

  I am talking too loud because my ears are stopped up from a violent plunge off the end of the dock. Water is dripping down the tips of my hair and splattering the kitchen tiles where Natalie is crouched over an open cabinet like someone searching for a spare deck of playing cards.

  Only she comes up with a bottle.

  THE WAY the sun is dawdling on the horizon has me feeling exposed. Pink light is filtering in through the skylight and screen doors, and the kitchen is lit up like an aquarium we are moving around in, on display.

  Across the yard, I can make out Natalie’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. McCree. I wonder if she can see us from where she is tipping a copper watering can into her window boxes. If she spots Natalie rooting around in the liquor chest, she’ll surely tell the Burkes, the same way she did last summer, when she watched us etch our initials into the trunk of a property-line birch tree. I know enough to walk to the windows and pull the green gingham curtains closed.

  I am waiting for Natalie to say something.

  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 detour 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 grandmother’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 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 bottle caps because my mom said I could, has helped me understand drinking as much as anatomy drawings in textbooks have helped me underst
and 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 embarrassment. 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 indication 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 characteristic 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 suicidal 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 operate as Natalie’s sidekick. She is the magician, the one who possesses 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 tactics 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.

  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 unhinged 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 Cumberland 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 despicable 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 vulnerable as being naked does. I expect it to strip away my inhibitions, 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, causing 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 inadvertently 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, fumbling 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 security 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 neighborhood 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 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 testament 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 th
e information: 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 remnants 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 neighborhood 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 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, neglecting to answer the buzzing pager at his hip. They always seem so much happier then, less alone. And I wish I could preserve that feeling for them, capture them, too, in a mason jar and bring them home aglow.