Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (8 page)

thigh like he is trying to give me a charley horse. I see where he’s touching me more than I can feel it. My synapses are bootless beneath layers of thermal underwear and the deadening effects of brandy. I could be thumbed and needled and barely feel a thing. I try to will myself to reciprocate, but I can’t find my hands.

Thanks to apple brandy, I can only gauge my general position. I can see the outline of my body as though I were watching myself from far away, the way people who’ve come back from the brink of death claim they watched doctors resuscitate them from high above their own operating tables. My body is there in the dirt, tucking one Herculean hand under the back of his T-shirt (it must be cold because it makes him shiver), while my essence is someplace much higher, far above the cigarette butts and the stone rows and the longest-reaching flashlight beam.

In college, we’ll describe this as dead drunk. It’s the kind of drunk where your eyes roll back in your head and your friends, smiling, say, “She’s gone to a better place.”

The next
morning I feel like a corpse awakened at a funeral, which is an image I definitely read in a poem, but am far too dis-oriented to remember in full. I know I’m lying in my Wayne costume on an alien futon. I can vaguely remember the walk back from the cemetery, when Billie got sick on the side of the road and I lost my balance and skinned my knee.

I feel Billie’s hand on my elbow, shaking me and saying, “Come on, we have to go.”

I drag my revenant ass to the bathroom, where in the light of the vanity mirror, the lemon-colored wallpaper is too bright to look at. When I look at my reflection, my eyes are as bleary as they were the time I had pinkeye. The T-shirt I’m wearing feels damp, as though I had night sweats, so I change into a fresh one.

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I splash cold water on my face and use my fingers to comb the knots out of my hair. I dig two aspirin out of the medicine cabinet because it seems like the right thing to do.

Billie’s stepmom, Dawn, drives us to school in a silver Mit-subishi that has the new-car smell that turns my stomach. I sit in the backseat with my elbow on the sill of the child-safe window and my chin in my hand. My throat is raw and scratchy after smoking half a pack of cigarettes, and my fingers have retained the smell. Billie is in the front seat, pulling the sun visor down and mouthing
I’m so hungover
in its little lit-up mirror.

A few miles from school, Dawn steers the car into the drive-thru at Honey Dew Donuts as though this were some huge act of generosity. She leans her head out the car window to shriek into the talk box, saying, “We want two hot chocolates, two bagels, and donut holes,” even though that couldn’t be further from the truth. Neither Billie nor I can think of consuming a thing. The saccharine smell of donuts emanates from the pickup window, and when Dawn passes a bag back to me, I have to hold it far away from my face, for fear of losing my aspirin.

Billie tosses hers in her knapsack and says, “Thanks, Dawn.

We’ll eat them during homeroom.”

For the
first part of the day, my mouth tastes bad. My stomach heaves. My head is filled with the dead space of a hangover. I feel dehydrated, but every trip to the water fountain makes my stomach fizzle. I can’t stand up without suffering vertigo. For the first three periods of the day, I think these symptoms could kill me, but by fourth period, I almost enjoy them.

Fourth period is earth science, where I decide I like being hungover because it gives me a focal point. The side effects of the night before allow me to focus on life’s details: raising my

hand, saying “Here,” resisting my stomach’s contractions. I am no longer worried about the big picture. I’m not paying attention to a quiz that got passed back to me with a fat red C, or to the girls who whisper when I walk by their lab table. For the time being, I feel far removed from those issues. The bad grade is like deforestation of the Amazon. The catty girls are like global warming.

As the day spins on, I am intently focused on the here and now.
Here,
my head throbs, so I ask the nurse for more aspirin.
Now,
my stomach somersaults, so I compute the number of steps to the nearest bathroom. For the first time in my life, I’m not worried about catastrophes until they arise. The discovery is al-most Confucian. I feel like I’ve found a religion.

Unfortunately
, not everyone is a believer.

Margaret Feeney is my first and last pen pal.

We met at ballet camp the summer before I started high school, and we stayed in touch. She sends me a letter every few weeks. I love spotting Margaret’s stupid pink stationery in the mail-box. I love seeing my name lettered with curlicues on an enve-lope that is dotted with stickers. Inside, Margaret’s letters are short. Mostly, she writes to me when she has updates. She writes to say she got a boy’s phone number or a Dalmatian puppy and “Can you believe it?” Sometimes she includes goofy pictures she thinks I’ll appreciate. In one she wears a sequined tutu and looks

resentful. In another, she kisses a moose head on the cheek.

There is something reassuring about every letter I get from Margaret. She isn’t just a testament to my ability to be liked. Over time, she’s become a real confidante, and I find myself telling her things I don’t even feel comfortable sharing with Na-

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talie. I write to her to say: “I’m afraid I’m ugly,” or “I’m afraid I can’t ever be the person my mother wants me to be,” or “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to bear the sound of my own voice on a message machine or the look of my own face reflected in a store-front.” I even send her a few of the poems I’ve started to write. But I make a mistake when I tell her about Halloween. I write, “I kissed a boy and it was liberating. We were curled up

in the dirt, among dead people. I was completely smashed.”

I take great care when I choose the word
smashed
as a euphe-mism for
drunk.
There are infinite slang terms to choose from:
bombed, blasted, capsized, toppled, clobbered, dismantled, damaged.
But they are the type of violent action verbs the boys I baby-sit use when they play with G.I. Joes. None of them have
smashed
’s fragile femininity.

Smashed
reminds me of the moment Laura Wingfield’s glass unicorn tumbled off a table and broke its horn in
The Glass Menagerie.
For the past few years, I’ve felt as though there’s been a glass shield around my heart, the type of protective barrier that

says
in case of emergency
,
break glass
.
Apple brandy put its

fist through my isolation. I let my reticence break apart. I vowed to no longer be as emotionally delicate as spun crystal.

Five days later Margaret sends a response.

Koren,
[no dear, sans stickers]

I got your letter. By “smashed,” I can only assume you meant you were drunk, which is not only not cool, it is disgusting, as is the fact you thought I’d be interested in hearing about it. Do you have any idea how many people die each year from drunk driving? It’s
18,000
. I know because I’m in Students Against Drunk Driving here at Montgomery High

School. There was a senior here who
died
drunk driving. Did you know that by the time you graduate from high school at least two people in your class will be dead? Do you really want to take the risk that you could be one of them? I’m cry-ing as I write this because I can’t believe that someone with all your gifts could be so selfish and susceptible to peer pres-sure. I think you should really think about what you are doing. In the meantime, I don’t know if I want to keep exchanging letters because I just don’t want to hear about it. Maybe one day I will trust you again.

Margaret

P.S. Enclosed is a poem I think you should read.

I feel like I’ve torn open a chain letter.

My stomach flops and my hands quake. I want to read the let-ter again, to make sure Margaret is really suggesting I might die, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Instead of writing in her usual slanted cursive, Margaret has printed, and the word
died
looks even more menacing as a result. I want to run the letter through my dad’s paper shredder, or burn it, or take it into the woods and stuff it deep into an animal’s hole.

Up until this moment, I’ve been lucky every time I drank, in the fact that there were never any consequences. No police officer or parent happened upon the crime scene. And though I’ve been hungover, I’ve never even thrown up. I feel as though Margaret has jinxed me with this letter. From here on out, my drinking is doomed. I can feel it.

The worst part about it is that her threat is nameless. I don’t know what form the bad luck is going to take. Margaret has only assured me that some inexplicable accident is coming, the

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way chain letters promise heart attacks, or serial murders, or freak storms that blow down houses.

The “trust” part infuriates me, I can’t understand how my drinking is a betrayal of Margaret’s confidence. What exactly has she entrusted me with? Just who does she trust me to be? What possible obligation has she charged me with here in Massachusetts, more than four hundred miles away from her? Her tone reminds me of a sitcom I saw once, in which a mom found her daughter hungover after a night of drinking “tornadoes” and told her that maybe, just maybe, after good behavior and a number of years, she might trust her to stay home alone again. Only Margaret isn’t my mother, she is my equal. And she’s sup-posed to be my friend.

I throw Margaret’s poem away because it outrages me most of all. Initially, I decide it’s the type of touchy-feely literature that S.A.D.D. airdrops over high-school proms by the thousand. Later, it occurs to me that she’s written it herself.

The writing is good, certainly better than anything I’ve sent her, and it has just the right amount of hidden meaning. At first read, the poem seems to be about the importance of spelling and punctuation. But when I read it again, I understand the full meaning. Margaret is trying to tell me it isn’t important what I say with my life. The story, the full manuscript, is ancillary. What matters, she says, is the syntax. She says it’s the rules that govern a life that make that life important.

Even though I’m no wild child, I can’t imagine a goody-goody world in which how closely a person adheres to rules is a measure for how well she lives.

As my final correspondence with Margaret, I send her e. e. cummings’s poem “since feeling is first,” without a letter of ex-planation:

since feeling is first who pays attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you: wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world.

It is my only attempt at rebuttal, my way of telling her that I am ignoring the things she respects, namely risks and rules. Just as e. e. cummings disregarded syntax, I am ignoring the mini-mum legal drinking age in the name of beauty, fun, and an art-ful existence. Of course, I don’t yet know about cummings’s critics, the folks who say that ignoring the rules is just as restric-tive as following them. And if I did, I doubt I’d care. It is spring-time in my life, even though it happens to be fall. I feel fully kissed, by Mac and by liquor.

To make this point clear, I cut off the poem’s last lines when I copy it to send: “for life’s not a paragraph / and death I think is no parenthesis.” As far as my drinking is concerned, death doesn’t even warrant an afterthought.

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The first time
my parents catch me drinking is during the summer of
1995
, in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City is the per-fect place to get caught red-handed, what with its miles of boardwalk and green, plastic, mini-golf turf, its snack bars smelling of crab cakes, and the saltwater breeze carrying the screams of children as they plunge down waterslides. The setting means everyone involved can write the whole mess off as situational. It makes my drinking look like the exception as opposed to the norm, a seasonal recreation only slightly more hazardous than body surf-ing or searing in the noon sun without Coppertone.

There are two motivations for our trip: my father’s promo-tion and my injury. Sometime in May, my father receives a raise

at the technological corporation where he works. Around the same time, I topple down the basement stairs and tear a ligament in my knee. The sequence of the two events seems signifi-cant to me. The whole world is rising, while I fall.

After my accident, I visit two doctors and three specialists. The last of them is an orthopedic surgeon at Emerson Hospital, a man I later dub Dr. Fix-It, who schedules me for reconstructive surgery in August.

I pass out on the examining table the day I receive the prog-nosis. I am shifting my weight on the parchment while Dr. Fix-It is describing his plans to harvest a portion of my hamstring and insert it into my knee. He is pointing out exactly where on the X-ray board, where my bones are lit up like a slide show of his recent trip to Fiji, and yet all I can think is,
There is some mistake, that skeleton can’t possibly be mine.

The bones are just too regular, like a stock photo from
Gray’s

Anatomy.
I’d assumed that inside I’d look as dark and knotty as I feel. I was hoping the X-ray board could show me the injury I feel so deeply, a hurt that justifies the framework I’ve been using for living. For the past year, I’ve told myself that I’m drinking and smoking and otherwise acting delinquent because high school has dealt me a shitty hand, that I am winning neither pop-ularity nor academic contests, that I am unsure and insuffi