Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  Under any other circumstances, I would be afraid. Mac is four years older, and he is probably a bum the way my dad says “All boys are bums.” He has a pierced eyebrow and a Chevy Camaro, and Billie says he sells pot. He may or may not have had sex before. He may or may not want to have sex with me right now.

  At this moment I am not one bit chicken. I like the anonymity, the fact that I don’t know who I’m kissing beneath his skeleton suit. Mac isn’t kissing me, either. He’s kissing my shit face, which makes me feel less vulnerable. I imagine it’s the way Elijah Wood felt, wearing that Nixon mask, while Christina Ricci had sex with him in The Ice Storm. Mac is pressed smack into me. He is closer than any boy has been before, but I feel like there is a protective layer between us, a type of atmospheric safe sex.

  His tongue parts my lips. His breath is potent, the way I imagine mine must be, and his cold, wet lips remind me of a bowl of eyeballs (they were really skinned grapes) I stuck my hand into once, when I was blindfolded at a Halloween party. I kiss him back because out of the corner of my eye I see that Billie is kissing Phil, and that seems like as good a reason as any.

  Mac’s hands are on me, too, latching on to me in places I myself don’t dare touch. One curled hand is wrapped around the bantam bulge of my bra, the other kneading my upper, upper 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 disoriented 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. 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 Mitsubishi 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 hungov-er 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 almost 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 mailbox. I love seeing my name lettered with curlicues on an envelope 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 Natalie. 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 storefront.” 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 euphemism 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 be
cause 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 crying as I write this because I can’t believe that someone with all your gifts could be so selfish and susceptible to peer pressure. 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 letter 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 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 supposed 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 explanation:

  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 minimum legal drinking age in the name of beauty, fun, and an artful existence. Of course, I don’t yet know about cummings’s critics, the folks who say that ignoring the rules is just as restrictive as following them. And if I did, I doubt I’d care. It is springtime 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.

  FIRST OFFENSE

  THE FIRST TIME my parents catch me drinking is during the summer of 1995, in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City is the perfect 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 surfing or searing in the noon sun without Coppertone.

  There are two motivations for our trip: my father’s promotion 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 significant 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 prognosis. 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 popularity nor academic contests, that I am unsure and insufficient—in a word, sick. But there on the X-ray, I’m faced with proof that, deep down, I’m sturdy; even full-grown. Dr. Fix-It says so. It is the notion of health, not injury, that makes me ill. It forces me to lean over and put my head between my knees.

  I spend the rest of the school year hobbling up stairs and out of cars, never certain when my knee will submit and give out under me. Without my intricate agenda of after-school activities, I give in to self-imposed quarantine. I spend afternoons paging through stolen library books in the backyard’s canvas lawn chair. Evenings, I keep vigil in the living room in front of infomercials.

  In an effort to cheer me up, my mother proposes a vacation. I propose Ocean City. We spent three consecutive summers there, when I was five, six, and seven, and I’ve retained every second of each of them. I can remember burrowing for sand crabs in the wet sand down by the surf, letting them squirm to their deaths in a pebble-filled tank because I loved them too much to liberate them. I remember the boardwalk, where my mother bought me a T-shirt with a beaded hem that jingled when I walked. I remember the length of beach where I played catch with my father, way past my usual bedtime, and the way my hands looked when they slow-motion-grasped for the glow-in-the-dark ball. I remember the name of every resort on the strip—The Golden Sands, The Palm, The Prism—and the mirrored windows that made each one look as sunny as the sky. I remember mornings that I sat on a condo carpet, eating Cabbage Patch Kids cereal, which was the type of sugary snack that was forbidden at home, and savoring each candy-coated puff on my tongue like a gemstone far too precious to swallow.

  To other people, Ocean City may be a tumbledown summer town with a name that ought to be implied. But to me, it’s always represented hed
onism.

  I imagine my parents associate Ocean City with unity, with the years before I hit adolescence and became too mean and moody to take, because they agree to my destination quickly and resolutely. My mother even suggests I bring Natalie, who is home for two months on summer break, because the condo she’s rented is big enough for us to have our own room. It feels like her final attempt to coax a smile out of me.

  THE BEDROOM Natalie and I share turns out to be more like our own little apartment. It has its own bathroom, a queen-sized bed under a tufted comforter, and a sitting area where yellowed paperbacks are stacked beside a transistor TV. We fold our swimsuits into the room’s white dresser and spread our arsenal of curling irons across the paint-chipped surface of the nightstand. Natalie parts the window’s lace curtains, and we stand for a few minutes in front of it, awed by the condominiums that shoot up thirty stories high over the Coastal Highway. My parents’ room faces the beach, and ours faces the street, and we prefer it that way.

  We wait three nights to push out the screen and boost ourselves out of the window.

  WE STARTED sneaking out of Natalie’s house a month ago. We’d spend whole days drafting our escape plans, testing to see which hinges whined, which floorboards creaked, and gathering devices we might use to prop, resist, and muffle them. At night, we’d wait for the TV to fall silent in Natalie’s parents’ bedroom, and we’d silently stuff Natalie’s bed and my sleeping bag with stuffed animals and sweaters. Then we’d tiptoe down the staircase, roll open the garage door, and sprint to where the driveway meets the street.

  Most nights, the joy of the prison break was enough. We didn’t need any plans, aside from walking the culs-de-sac like two ghosts, taunting the neighbors’ tied-up Labradors, kicking bits of gravel and sharing cigarettes.

  We’d learned to stay in the neighborhood after the night we hitchhiked to a party near Natalie’s boarding school, where we drank Heineken and listened to a band, and nearly got stuck there without anyone to drive us home. At three A.M., we’d finally agreed to pay an older boy fifteen dollars in exchange for a ride. He had a summer job as an ice-cream man, and he drove us home in his singing white truck.