Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  She lives in the sorority next door, with whom the Zetas have a long-standing rivalry. From our end, it’s no contest. We are the Zeta Alcoholics, and they are the Alpha Babes. They are all white, all blond, all members of the university dance team. One day after happy hour, it is easy to recruit a few Zetas to join me on the roof, where we have a clear view of the girl and her fellow babes, who are trickling out onto the sidewalk after a chapter meeting. The whole pug-drunk lot of us leans over the edge of the roof and pelts them with eggs. Every scream from the sidewalk quiets me. Each splattering sound makes me feel a little lighter.

  The boy doesn’t deserve my best efforts, but I can’t see that when I’ve been slurping vodka cocktails for six hours, and feeling my rage rat-a-tat through me like seeds trundling around inside a dried gourd. So one night, at a party where a group of us are slurping wine from the bottle, and Elle slips and overturns the whole thing on a cream-colored couch, I find myself sitting opposite him on the carpet, giving him a piece of my mind. I have my finger pointed gunlike at his chest, and I push it into his sternum to accentuate my points. I push it in over and over, like I’m ringing a doorbell that no one runs to answer. Elle will tell me later that I droned in the slow singsong timbre that only drunkards have. I said, “Your photos are for shit, all of them are flat and ill lit, and you are not nearly as handsome as you think you are.”

  I start a relationship with another man. I will call him X because he is a variable that changes constantly and means something different every time.

  Sometimes X has authentic feelings for me, though I can’t ever believe it enough to return his phone calls. He is the rugby player who wants me to come watch his games, or the film major who lets me sleep in his feather-light bed when I am too drunk to go home—the one who kisses me once and then exhales, saying he can’t believe he found the courage to do it.

  More often, X is a boy who pushes me up against the wall at a party while I’m loaded and looking for the bathroom, the one who says nothing before he makes a move to cup my breasts through my shirt. X is the boy who walks me back to his place and doesn’t offer his hand when I slip while stepping over a guardrail and cut a gash in my back. He is someone’s ex-boyfriend, who pulls me down onto the torn couch in the smoking room. He is my date to a semiformal, the boy who hails a cab with the fifteen dollars he borrowed from the bartender while I was throwing up in the bathroom. Occasionally, X is Chris.

  EVEN AS my tolerance for alcohol goes sky high, I am not considered one of the house’s loose cannons. In Zeta, there are girls who drink seven nights a week, whereas I drink five. They can handle four Long Island Iced Teas, whereas I’m tap shackled after two. Plus, there are narcoleptic drunks: One of the sisters passes out behind a Dumpster on East Adams Street and doesn’t wake until the next morning, when she hears the psst psst sounds of a concerned homeless man. There are humpty-dumpty drunks too: One girl tumbles down the fire escape and breaks her front teeth. Another girl runs into a door frame and breaks her nose

  By comparison, my drunken disasters look minimal. When I write to Chris years later, asking him if, during college, it was clear that I had alcohol issues, he’ll say, “No, we all drank as much as you did. Plus, there were people far crazier . . . Don’t you remember your friend Elle?”

  The sisters of Zeta seem to think Elle is a cataclysm. Elle sets people evacuating when she whirls into the den after dinner, shrieking and pulling her hair, with her breath hinting of whiskey. They scramble to pack up their textbooks and coffee mugs and bottles of nail polish, as though she were a class-four hurricane, like the force of her drunkenness has the capacity to blow out the windows.

  In Zeta, the secret to getting piss drunk is to not piss anyone off while you do it. You can down all the Gin-and-Gingers you like as long as you can still manage to keep your blouse on in public and avoid kissing some sister’s boyfriend. You can also drink wildly when everyone else does, and bank on the fact that your blackouts will line up.

  For instance, I wake up wincing one morning when I remember the way I ran around a party the night before, wearing the heavy, ceramic head of a fraternity’s dog-shaped statue. But at breakfast, when I see half a dozen hungover faces, recoiling from the smell of cooked eggs, I realize the squinting faces are trying hard to recall their own acts of embarrassment. No one can possibly remember mine.

  The key is to not humiliate yourself irreversibly. It is okay to be the girl who passes out in the hallway or pukes on the porch; there isn’t a girl among us who hasn’t done that stuff. We make up for it the next morning by cracking jokes over the basket of bagels and eradicating the evidence with the garden hose. Drunk, we allow ourselves the space to cry or hide our heads in our hands. We even permit ourselves the freedom to call one another names like psycho, bitch, or slut. These things are familiar. They are passive aggressive, which is feminine.

  But may the Lord help the girl who gets drunk and belligerent: the one who throws punches and demitasse cups, or puts her fist through the wall of the laundry room. Her drunkenness is scary. It sends us all tripping up the stairs, where we huddle together to watch from the safety of the second-floor landing. We watch her the same way we’d watch a lion tear through steaks behind Plexiglas at the zoo.

  Drinking confirms men’s gender role, whereas it diminishes women’s. We are meant to believe that men who drink heavily are men’s men. Beer ads play strongly to the idea that men drink because they like shooting pool, watching ESPN, and bonding with other men. And they drink because they appreciate women—particularly, big-haired, big-chested broads in ’80s-style bikinis.

  By contrast, a girl’s drinking makes her less feminine. The sisters think of the aggressive drunk as brutish, and as a result her penance is long and difficult. She is nicknamed “Fight Club” or “DUI Hard” or “Hit-and-Rum.” For weeks, she is the punch line at dinner, when someone will lean over the leaves of her salad to say: “Hit-and-Rum walked into a bar . . . Ouch.” A whole month passes before the sisters speak to the sophomore who got butt wasted, belted out Queen, and emptied shampoo bottles on the floor of the bathroom.

  I HAVE never been frightened by Elle’s excess because its breadth has always been just as wide as my own, and beneath it has always been the same woe, the same bitterness, the same pang. I like that Elle doesn’t subscribe to the rules of girlhood. I like that she is rowdy, and spontaneous, and intimidating. I like the way she’ll hiss at the girls who get in her way when she’s grappling with four beer bottles in the campus bar. Sometimes, she’ll lurch forward and bare her teeth like she’s apt to bite them.

  Later, I will be one of these girls. I will look down at my shoes if I stumble into Elle in an empty bar bathroom. My hands will tremble, and I will be afraid that she might bludgeon me among the tampon dispensers and cigarette-stopped sinks, where there is no one around to protect me. But for now, I take a secret pride in the way Elle can ruffle other girls. She turns them entirely to stone, save for their eyelashes, which flutter like they’ve been poked in the eyes. Standing next to Elle, I almost feel cocky; it’s like having an all-state linebacker on the field with me.

  But all of that changes the night that we are set to initiate a new group of pledges into full Zeta sisters.

  THE INITIATION is scheduled for three A.M., and rather than setting our alarm clocks for that ungodly hour, Elle and I decide to go to a party and drink rum, which always keeps us awake and electrified clear into the first streaks of sunup.

  The party is like any other, except as I’ve gotten older, everyone I drink with has begun to look younger. The drinks are too weak, and the music is trite. The crowd of boys and girls who are milking the keg looks babyish. Elle goes upstairs to smoke a joint with someone from her physics classes and leaves me to stand in a doorway, where I bite the rim of my plastic cup and watch the clock.

  I don’t know how long I lean there, with my head against the door frame. I am not drunk, and I feel acutely frustrated as a result of it. There is no use fi
lling my cup. My tolerance is huge, and the watered-down beer doesn’t affect me.

  Everyone else is drunk, and the fact that I’m not makes me feel left out, as though I’ve failed to grab a seat in a game of musical chairs. Girls lope by carrying cups full of foam. A boy who is careening through the crowd singes my arm with his lit cigarette, and it blisters immediately into a perfectly round sore. Eventually, a boy who works with Elle at a campus bar, where he checks IDs and she stamps hands, sees me waiting and talks to me.

  Three A.M. rolls around. Elle still hasn’t come back, so I climb the stairs to go look for her. My heart sputters as I turn down hallways and peer into bedrooms because this reminds me of the way I lost Natalie in Ocean City. Five years later, experience has taught me that any time a girlfriend disappears at a party, it means something bad has happened. Eventually, a boy who is zigzagging down the hallway, holding a blue bottle of vodka, tells me Elle left for Zeta an hour ago.

  It doesn’t make sense that Elle would just cut me loose in the party’s living room and duck out the side door without me. But for the time being, there is no time to figure it out. I am late. The other sisters are already shimmying into their hooded black robes. Pledges are lining up outside the house’s secret entrance. I am running through the park toward the house. My boots are breaking through the frost on the ground, and I can see my breath’s fog. At least I know where Elle is.

  ELLE IS the first person I see when I tramp into the room where the other sisters are already beginning to line up to start the ceremony. She is balled up on the floor of the chapter room, weeping, and the black polyester of her robe is spread out around her. She looks like a puddle, and the sisters are snickering.

  Zeta’s president pulls me into the kitchen to say, “We don’t know what’s wrong with her. She won’t put her arms through the holes of her robes. Someone saw bandages on her wrists, and started telling people that she cut them.”

  When I go back into the chapter room to kneel down next to Elle, she won’t turn to face me. She sinks deeper into the carpet. Her shoulders convulse. Every time I try to put an arm around her, she swats it off.

  The initiation lasts five hours, and I spend the whole time watching Elle cry through her teeth, and running the night over and over in my head, trying to figure out what I did wrong.

  SHE AGREES to meet me the next night, on the concrete steps outside of Bird Library. She takes pulls off an extra-long cigarette, and starts by saying, “it was melodramatic and silly and I never would have done it if I weren’t drunk.”

  Then she goes on to tell me things that I’ve already sensed. I’ve already felt them in my blood. I already know that she left the party to put notches in both her wrists. I learn that she did it first with a razor blade, but the business of cutting was harder than it looks in movies. The edge of the blade wasn’t sharp enough, and it wouldn’t slice deep enough, so she traded it for a steel chef ’s knife. Sometime later, her roommate walked in and saw the knife, the blade, and the bloody kitchen rags on the counter. Together, they bound her wrists with strips of gauze and packing tape.

  Snow is drifting from the sky, in a way that is calm and airy. It is collecting in the long, black fibers of Elle’s hair in a way that makes it look like she’s wearing a pearl headdress. It is early evening. The breeze is gentle, and the moon is muted behind a thin drift of clouds. As usual, I hate the universe and its irony. The world looks too pretty for this moment. It doesn’t fit this talk, which is too sad, and biting, and ugly.

  My whole face is damp with tears. I keep saying, “Show me, I want to see,” but Elle shakes her head no. I lurch forward anyway, and she doesn’t fight me off. When I roll back one of her sweater sleeves, she sits very still, and her face stays expressionless. She is wearing a black-leather bracelet that has two silver snaps I have to pop open. Under it, there is thick cotton gauze rolled halfway up her forearm.

  She tells me it was my fault that she did it, because I was talking to the boy that she works with. She says she’s liked him for months, and I knew that, and yet I let him put his arm around my waist, anyway. It doesn’t matter when I tell her I was just glad to have someone to talk to while I waited for her to come back for me. The scars will stay with her and, in her mind, they will always be my fault.

  Elle says, “I don’t want to be around you anymore.”

  I can’t think of a thing to say. I mop my nose on my jacket sleeve. I bend forward and cradle my own wrists in my lap, as though they were hers. I am not used to pleading my case. In the past, Elle has been the one to speak for me; she has always argued on my behalf when I have felt this indefensible. I look up at the flat face of the library. My mind is blank. I don’t have a shred of certainty.

  I tell Elle, “I’m sorry.” And I mean it.

  For years I will mean it. I will add her injuries to my running list of ruination, right alongside whatever happened to Natalie in Ocean City, and whatever happened to me with Skip, and all the other destruction I hold myself liable for. In the future, even after addiction counselors translate the term alcohol abuse for me, even after they say “It is improper use of alcohol, like drinking to medicate your moods,” the word abuse will always make me think of these kinds of maltreatment. It will make me think of the ways we emotionally battered each other while we were wasted.

  I almost wish Elle had pummeled me instead. A black eye would heal far quicker than this emotional wound. It will take me years to absolve myself of the blame she has assigned to me. It will take me years to see that Elle blamed me because it was easier than blaming alcohol, and alcohol-induced depression. We were best friends, but her relationship with alcohol went deeper; she had been allied with it for far longer.

  AFTER MY friendship with Elle dissolves, I stay on the periphery of house activities because I don’t want to see her. I hide in the third-floor phone booth when everyone filters downstairs for chapter meetings. I spend a long time studying rows of numbered spines in the library and dropping hurried notes of apology in the president’s mailbox.

  I show up for rush because I have to; it is a requirement. Shirking it means removing myself from Zeta for good and putting my name on a waitlist for a spare cot in an underclassmen dorm. I drink with April the night before rush, and I am hungover for its duration. My hair is unwashed, my clothes smell of cigarettes, and my thighs pimple with itchy hives I can’t shake.

  Still, sisters steer their rush crushes to me. They are the quick-witted girls, with clean skin and mod glasses, who everyone wants to join Zeta. The fact that I’m charged with convincing them is a compliment; it means the girls I live with think I have retained some semblance of stature and intrigue. I do my best to woo the recruits, the same way that the sisters baited me, by clattering on to them about our parties, our drinking, and our drugs. I sense the girls are looking for some other source of enthusiasm, but I don’t know what it is or how to give it to them. In the end, we lose every last one of them to other sororities.

  One Tuesday night in November, I get bullied into taking a role in a house skit. It is part of a fraternity’s week-long philanthropy, and I join the troupe the night before the competition because I’m not stealthy enough to avoid their committee meeting on the second-floor landing. They assure me I can hit the open bar before I have to go onstage.

  The night of the competition, we rehearse in the dining room of the boys’ fraternity while they mix cocktails to take the edge off our stage fright. I down a glass filled two inches high with vodka and topped off with cranberry juice. It is all I need to go runny.

  My beer tears begin while we are walking to the bar. They persist while I’m showing my ID to the doorman, while pledges whose names I don’t know ask me what’s wrong, and while someone’s boyfriend keeps bringing me shots, which only make me sob harder. I am the kind of dead drunk where I can hear my voice vibrating in my throat, and my breath is bumping in and out of me hard and fast, but I can’t hear what I’m saying. I don’t know who or what I am mourning; it m
ight be Elle, or Skip, or Chris. These days, there are too many sore spots that trigger tears. I can’t name just one.

  When it’s time to take our place onstage, I stand inert in front of some three hundred people, forget that I’m supposed to deliver lines, and instead just totter and weep openly for the full four minutes. It is as though the alcohol I am funneling into my body is leaking back out the ducts of my eyes. If someone licked my face, I’m sure my tears would taste like Barton vodka.

  I stay in bed the whole next day because I don’t want to face the Zetas downstairs. Were I to untwist myself from my comforter and slog down the hall to the bathroom, I would have to face girls who know me too intimately. They would look up from blow-drying their hair or brushing their teeth with looks that are too knowing. They’ve seen me cry, and they know I have private afflictions. I think if I’d stripped my shirt off on stage, I still wouldn’t feel this exposed.

  THIS KIND of self-loathing used to be the reason that I drank in the first place.

  I swilled vodka to flip over humiliating experiences, like someone who turns stained couch cushions to avoid looking at smudges. I drank to forget the spots in time when someone snickered when I stood up to speak, when a boy ignored me, when a woman eyed me from top to bottom and stopped curtly at my boots. I drank to forget fights with my parents, the nights when they had the misfortune of calling during one of my hopeless moods, when I cut their questions short and later felt guilty, when I fell asleep convinced that my mother must hate me. I drank to turn these memories over because I couldn’t bear to look at them.