Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  For better or worse, I’m a product of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign. Drugs make me fearful in a way that booze never does, probably because public service announcements have worked their magic on me: The U.S. government still spends twenty-five times as much on campaigns to fight drugs as it does on campaigns to prevent underage drinking.

  Even in the moments when I’m so smashed I’m scared, when I’m lying on the bathroom tiles I can’t hoist myself up from, throwing up so tirelessly that I start to cry, I can still rest assured; it’s comforting to know my brain is not on drugs. I assure myself that this, too, will pass. After all, it’s just rum.

  ONE NIGHT, Jody gets drunk enough to talk about the girl that people say he sexually assaulted. We are sitting at his coffee table mixing Salty Dogs when he gets up and starts burrowing through an antique oak chest, tossing out weathered scripts and old Playbills as he goes, until he comes up with a sheet of notebook paper. It’s a letter, he says, that she wrote him during the semester that he was studying in France, which irrevocably proves he is not guilty.

  I read it over twice between sips, but I’m saturated with grapefruit juice and vodka and I can’t absorb anything else. The letter is penned in big, bubbly letters, and the ink is blue, and the words meld on the page. I fold it back up where it’s creased, and decide it’s impossible to know what actually happens when a man and a woman are alone together, particularly when they’re both drunk, and when they dated both before the incident and for months after. I ignore the fact that only guilty people think to hoard evidence; I decide that Jody is harmless.

  It is an opinion that I stick by through the late-night phone calls and parties at his place where a dozen people dump Baggies onto a mirrored coffee table, and I drink too much apricot brandy to care, and Hannah leaves crying because she walked in on someone snorting lines off a toilet seat.

  And I keep on thinking it until the night when Jody and I are stretched out on the floor of my bedroom, and Tess is away at a sorority party. The night is muggy and motionless. On TV, women are doing leg lifts. Jody is buffing his gums with his fingertips, and I am drinking more and more merlot, feeling the lumpish, leaden drunk that comes with wine. I am drifting to sleep with my head on Jody’s stomach when I hear the crack of two hard surfaces making contact. I come around a few seconds later, when I realize the smacking sound was my head hitting the nightstand when Jody pushed me.

  When my eyes adjust, I can see that he is bent over me with blue eyes as wide and dull as the designs printed on the ends of wine corks. He’s got one hand pressed hard on the top of my head, and the other curled tight around my neck, so I feel like the gray slab of clay he’s compressing on a potter’s wheel.

  He kneels down to say, “Don’t you dare tell my girlfriend.”

  I’m amazed, not by the force of his request, but by my senses’ dullness. I can’t believe I could barely feel such a crash. All I do is pitch my head back to croak, “I didn’t know you had one.”

  AFTER EVERYTHING with Jody and Chris and the man at the formal, I develop trouble sleeping. When I close my eyes, I see men as big as monsters. They are hairless and bare-chested; their arms bulge and twitch like snakes digesting mice.

  In my dreams, I always run from men. I sprint through dark suburban streets, always looking over my shoulder, while my heart rate clangs and hammers. But it is never fast enough; the men always sack me from behind, and I hit the concrete under their oppressive weight. I am flattened. The wind is always knocked out of me when I wake up.

  The only nights I sleep soundly are when I am excessively drunk. When I’m wasted, exhaustion drops from clear out of nowhere, like the steel combination safes that flatten people in cartoons. I can be going about my business, doing my thing, playing cards or debating partial-birth abortion or executing a handstand, blind to the shadow of drowsiness that hangs over me—that is, until it falls with the bam of its total molecular weight and I have to lie down wherever I am, in a restaurant booth, on a friend’s couch, or on the sidewalk.

  I love that kind of drunken sleep. I love that for a few brief hours after it strikes, every thought is knocked clear out of my head. That is, before sunlight drains through the window blinds and I have to peel my steamrolled body off the bedsheets and pop my brain, with its misgivings, back into 3-D.

  In the quest for self-erasure, sleeping picks up where drinking leaves off. On the nights when, drunk as a drum, I still can’t calm myself enough to fall asleep, if alcohol amplifies my emotion instead of silencing it, I swallow a few of the sleeping pills that Elle carries like dimes in her change purse. Those nights, permitting I make it home to my bed and don’t pass out on Elle’s floor, I fall asleep without setting the alarm, giving no thought to what I might need to get done in the morning or to anything that goes bump in the night.

  BEER TEARS

  IN THE FALL of my sophomore year, I am still a virgin. For someone who has been drunk enough to lose as many jackets and wallets and bits of sterling silver jewelry as I have, it’s hard to believe that I haven’t lost this, too. After all, one study reports that 60 percent of girls have had sex by their high school graduation, and the majority of those who haven’t will have their first sex in college. Plus, a study by the Institute of Alcohol Studies in the UK that polled a thousand women found that a third of them had had unprotected sex after drinking too much, and almost half had a one-night stand they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

  Still, through all the weekend parties where I’ve sipped vodka straight up and gone wobbling through strange bedrooms, whacking into door frames, and bumming cigarettes from boys, I know I’ve stayed as chaste as an unscooped sugar bowl. That certainty lasts until two days before winter finals, when I open one eye after the soundest sleep of my life.

  THROUGH THE sting of consciousness, there is too much information to process. The time of day, for instance, is wholly indeterminable. The room is like a casino in its clocklessness. Hot, white light is spewing through the bay window, but it means nothing without a directional gauge. If the room faces east, it might be seven in the morning. If it points west, it might be midday.

  I know I am on the second floor of a master suite in a fraternity house that I usually wouldn’t be caught dead in. It is the Greek organization that at S.U. harbors painfully preppy boys. I am lying in the fetal position on a full-sized futon, under a patchwork quilt that looks like someone’s mother might have made. The bed is on a lofted platform, atop a wrought-iron ladder that I vaguely remember being nudged up.

  Beside me is a boy I recognize as a senior, a political science major named Skip. I met Skip briefly at a party two weeks ago. The introduction is dwarfed in my memory because it was the same night that Chris stopped me in the stairwell to hold my hands and make a beer-teary apology. I’d followed Chris home that night and slept in the bow of his arm, feeling violently happy until the morning, when I felt the same old deadlock: His closeness made me tremble, and I crept out the door while he slept.

  I barely know Skip, but I know I don’t like him. He is smug in a distinctly male way. He has calculated facial stubble and the type of ego that is hatched from early admission to law school and a family yacht named Never Again II, tied up in Newport.

  The one time we spoke, he made it clear that the feeling is mutual. He hates girls like me, the ones who have difficult names and thrift clothing. He hates those of us who are pale where we should be tan, dark where we should be blond, sullen where we should be smiley, and mute when we should be fawning.

  I decide he even looks like he’s swaggering when he’s sleeping. He is facing me, with his eyes pinched closed and his lips pulled into a pout. I’m not happy that I’ve passed out here, but I’m not alarmed by it—not until I move my hands under the quilt to quietly roll myself away from him, and realize that I am as naked as the day I was born.

  THE SITUATION is almost sci-fi. I feel like I’ve been reborn into a whole different reality, and whoever transported me has rubbed out my m
emory. My body is as sapped of energy as any screen heroine’s after she has swapped realms or bodies, and I am experiencing the same wooziness. My lower back cramps. My limbs shirk orders when I tell them to move.

  I try to retrace last night’s steps:

  The night began at a campus bar, where I didn’t drink much. I had, what? two, maybe three, shallow glasses of white wine before the party filtered out. It tasted cool and thin, and it hadn’t affected me at all.

  Next, Elle wanted to go to a party in the basement of this fraternity house. I owed her a favor, so I came even though I call this place the Inferno because its every party is a pilgrimage into hell.

  The basement is a stony cavern lit by red lightbulbs. There were fights. Boys leapfrogged onto each other’s backs and started throwing punches, and one girl caught an elbow in the teeth. The air was hot as an oven, and the cigarette smoke had nowhere to filter off to. Everywhere, people were kissing like they were trying to devour each other.

  I remember brooding in that lower hell, holding a beer bottle, and talking to Skip. I’d had a few beers, enough to make me feel sunny and lithe, and I was nowhere near being brutally drunk.

  Then come the gaps. There is an interlude between the memory of the basement and the one where I am here, on the ground floor of this suite, sitting on the couch and being kissed by Skip.

  And there is another hole, between that and a few blurred moments that I remember sitting on a toilet seat, leaning forward with my chin between my knees. The instant dissolves around the edges. The bathroom is just a small patch of floor and a toilet. My feet are bare. Under them is a pattern that seems like no real pattern at first, as though a contractor tossed tiles into the air and glued them down wherever they landed. Some are square. Some are rectangular. Some are black. Some are white. Then the floor starts to blur, and it looks like a crossword puzzle that no one bothered to fill in. I remember that I couldn’t hold my torso upright without its flopping back down like a sheet of cheap poster board.

  And sometime after that I remember standing in the hallway in my underwear, staring at a succession of doors, the way a winner on The Price Is Right tries to decide which grand-prize display to crack open. I knew that behind one of them was the million-dollar spectacular: my clothes. I vaguely recall that a boy came along like Bob Barker and told me which one to open.

  IF THIS was a movie, this would be the point where I would lean over and ask Skip what happened. He would say, “We just passed out is all.” And then we would both hide our heads under our pillows, and cringe at the close call that nearly spoiled our friendship.

  Only this is real life. Skip is not my friend. He is snide and combative, and he makes me feel small. I will not ask him what happened because I do not want to know.

  Instead, I collect my clothes as quietly as I can, while Skip sleeps, or pretends to. My socks, pants, and shirt are strewn across the couch like bread crumbs, but they don’t lead me any further out of my blackout. I have never felt so lost. I will never find a way to MapQuest myself to this futon. I’ll never know how I got here. I’ll never know what intersections I crossed along the way.

  I decide to hold my shoes in my hands until I make it to the hall, until I’m far enough away to risk the clomping of my cowboy boots. I can’t find my bra, so I opt to leave it behind. I hate to think I might be leaving a trophy that Skip can hold up as proof of the conquest, but it is the limb I am willing to bite off to escape the steel-jawed trap.

  Outside the bedroom door, it can only be early morning because the whole house is as quiet as a tomb. I confront the same conundrum I must have faced last night: Every stone hallway seems to lead me back to where I started. My legs are shuddering, and I try every possible direction. I go right instead of left. I go up and down different sets of stairs. Yet all routes are circular; they all lead back to Skip’s door.

  Were I in my right mind, this house with its mural towers, Canterbury windows, and spiral vaults would make me mad as hell. And it will later, when I think about the way these swaggering shitheads live here, insulated as shining knights in a stronghold. But right now, I feel like a drugged rat in a maze during a clinical trial. I’m so desperate to leave that I am willing to wake Skip just so he’ll show me the way.

  Later, I won’t remember how I roused him from sleep. I won’t know whether I climbed the stairs to the loft, or if I called out his name and stayed very far away. I know that I must have averted my eyes because I can’t conjure a clear picture of his getting up from the bed. I have no idea what he was wearing, if he had on anything at all. Only the sight of his forcing his feet into unlaced sneakers will stay with me. The laces make little tapping noises as we move across the floor of the pantry, which is the one avenue I didn’t try.

  When we make it to the garden-side entrance, Skip swings back the door and bleached light courses over him. He is so blond that sunlight mirrors off him, the same way light gets reflected off the three-foot-high mounds of snow on the sides of the street. He wears blue cotton shorts and a white polo shirt. I can’t help but wonder what he plans to do after I leave, if he’ll go back to bed or sit down with jellied toast and the newspaper’s sports section. I can’t imagine that any other news could possibly matter.

  He stuffs one hand in his shorts’ pocket and says, “See you around.”

  Outside, nature is indifferent. Birds are actually chirping the way they do in Disney movies. I only make it a few steps toward home before I have to double over to rest. I crouch on the curb, where I can hear Skip close and bolt the storm door behind me.

  THERE’S ONLY one thing to do when you’re not sure what happened during a blackout, and that’s to keep on not being sure. G.I. Joe had it ass-backwards in those public service announcements from the 1980s when, in between commercials for Combos and Robo Strux, he taught us to put reflectors on our bikes and test doorknobs during a fire because “Knowing is half the battle.” In terms of denial, it’s the opposite: Not knowing is half the battle.

  Doctors at Duke University say blackouts happen when alcohol totally shuts down the hippocampus, the chunk of the brain’s temporal lobe that churns out new memories—the same one that is damaged by Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Experts used to think blackouts were an early sign of alcoholism, but today they are finding that mind erasures are common among nonalcoholics, too. Plus, girls needed far fewer Long Island Iced Teas to blow the fuse. On average, girls black out after five drinks. It takes guys nine.

  The only upshot of a blackout is that you’re spared the emotional effort it takes to repress whatever happened in the midst of it. The night in question forever exists like the train scene in a silent movie, the one where the screen goes dark the instant the train charges the tunnel, and when it emerges a few seconds later with two long whoops of its whistle, the audience never really knows what happened in the tunnel’s obscurity. Who made love in the first-class compartment? Who stabbed the man in the club car? You can guess, but you’ll never know for sure.

  After a blackout, all you have to do is keep on not knowing. If you can’t remember, you hope you never remember. You indulge your selective amnesia. You operate under the philosophy I don’t think, therefore I am.

  A FEW THINGS happen before I release the memory of Skip like a captive dove.

  For one, I scrutinize my body. This is hard, considering I’ve never been the kind of girl to bend backward over a handheld mirror. I have always been too shy, even alone, to give myself the monthly breast exams my doctor always explains with pamphlets. But before I shuffle down the hall to the dorm bathroom to take the symbolic morning-after shower that I’ve seen in too many movies, I force myself to do a thorough once-over. I pull my hair up off my face. I smell my skin. I check my inner thighs for bruises. Since I’ve never had sex before, I don’t know what signs I am looking for.

  The only thing I know with any degree of certainty is that I feel violently ill. My digestive system feels more off-kilter than ever, like organs are writhing and back
firing inside me, and I feel a squeezing stomach pain like someone is standing on my abdomen. I don’t know whether it’s nerves, or a hangover, or withdrawal from some date-rape drug that makes my heart flutter, but I am so unsteady on my feet that I have to sit on the floor of the bathtub under the shower spray. Between shampoo and conditioner, I bend over the drain to vomit. It’s stomach fluids, the acidic yellow froth you spit up when there’s nothing else in you.

  Next, I avoid my mother, who has been calling as though she’s psychic. She has been worried, she says, when she gets me to pick up the phone three days later. No doubt it’s because I haven’t returned her calls, but in the throes of my remaining paranoia, I’m convinced it’s because she knows something that I don’t. I think she must have had a premonition about Skip in a dream. Hot tears stream down my face halfway through our talk, and I have to put my hand over the receiver so she won’t hear my voice tremble. I pick a fight that makes her hang up before we say our good-byes.

  Last, I talk to Elle and get what I can of the details.

  I do it while Elle and I sit at a picnic table outside of the university’s food court. It’s our favorite spot for heart-to-hearts and last-minute cramming, where the wind flips the pages of our notebooks and we ingest the eight-inch-tall cups of well-sugared coffee that we count on to fuel us through our hangovers.

  Elle is wearing fingerless gloves and a puffy down vest that looks like a life jacket. She is straddling the picnic bench, hunched over notes on something difficult. Elle negates the myth that smart people don’t binge drink—she’s one of a handful of female physics majors, and the sharpest person I know. Her mind teems with a hundred mathematical theorems that she calls on to explain just about everything.

  I am absently staring at the same notes on Ideological State Apparatus that I’ve had open all day, when I look up and ask her what happened.