Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  Someone says plainly, “Get her out of here.”

  Greg tells me to kneel down beside Natalie and wrap one arm under her shoulder and around her waist. He does the same thing on the other side, and when he says, “Ready, set, stand,” we do, and my knees buckle for a brief moment under Natalie’s dead weight. Together, we move emphatically for the door, like we are storming out of a movie that has deeply offended us.

  “ARE YOU okay to stand up? If I set you down, you’re not going to fall, right?”

  Greg tries to lower Natalie to the sidewalk beside the trolley stop. His questions are more or less rhetorical, as Natalie has been reduced to gurgling whenever we speak to her. Her limbs look too heavy for her to move. When she tries to lift her hands, they only come up an inch or two before they fall back down and roll away from her. Greg says she looks like a rag doll; I think she looks like one of my dog’s dilapidated chew toys.

  The second Greg lets Natalie’s feet touch the concrete, her entire body folds under her. She assumes the position of a chalk outline on NYPD Blue: arms outstretched, with her legs wrenched one way and her neck twisted the other. We let her rest like that while we wait. All around her on the sidewalk, ants are building knolls that look like ginger.

  “How did she get like this?” I cover my hand with my mouth as I speak because Natalie is emitting a sour smell that makes me think I might throw up, too. “Honestly? She wasn’t drunk at your house. How do you think she got this way? Do you think she took pills or something?” Natalie has told me about kids at her school who steal prescriptions. They mostly sell downers, she says, the kind of painkillers that make you feel as weightless as an astronaut somersaulting through a spacecraft.

  Greg shakes his head. I’m not sure if he means to say no, or if he is trying to clear his bangs from his face. He says, “Naw, she just had too much to drink. Once you get her home she can sleep it off.”

  I should believe him because his eyes are calm, in a way that suggests he has been through this scenario a million times before. But I don’t. I don’t see any way that this is going to be okay. In my mind, I have a very distinct picture of what is going to happen next: I will get Natalie back to the room, tuck her into bed, and sometime during the night she will choke on her own vomit and die. That was the one unmistakable thing I learned from our alcohol unit in health class—sometimes, if people get drunk enough, they can drown in their own puke, like Jimi Hendrix. There is even a parody of “Purple Haze” that goes “excuse me while I choke and die.” I think I’m going to have to resuscitate Natalie while my parents sleep, unsuspecting, in the room next door. I don’t even remember how to do mouth-to-mouth. I don’t know how far you’re supposed to tip the head back, or how many seconds you’re supposed to wait between giving breaths.

  At any minute, I imagine my parents will hit the bar on their alarm clock. My mom will go to the bathroom and start the shower spray; my ten-year-old sister will turn on cartoons; my dad will go out to buy bagels. There is no way I can stuff Natalie through the window in her condition, and if we use the front door, my parents will instantly know about the beach, the boys, and the booze.

  I am stuck in this situation, and the feeling that follows that realization is the same dread and shortness of breath I felt the time I got wedged behind a basement bookshelf I wasn’t strong enough to move. I am trapped and there is no way out; I can’t keep that knowledge to myself any longer.

  I unleash a string of confessions on Greg. I tell him that I am not eighteen or seventeen, but fifteen, and that I am actually staying with my parents and not an aunt. These are small distinctions, but to me they feel indispensable, like pronouns, without which he has no hope of understanding my language.

  He says, “Don’t worry about your parents. They’ll be mad at first, but so what? The worst they can do is ground you. It’s not the end of the world.”

  The sun is creeping up the sky like a bug on a wall, and all around us people are climbing into their cars to go to work. I look at Greg, and notice for the first time that he is practically crawling out of his skin, anxious to go home and, presumably, sleep before his shift at the surf shop. He, too, looks younger in the sunlight, less collegiate, more like a boy I barely know.

  The trolley pulls up and I thrust Natalie onto it.

  THE RIDE back to the condo is unbearable. Natalie vomits twice, and each time I struggle to hide her from the bus driver, who is watching us knowingly in his rearview mirror. I lean over and pretend to tie my shoelaces while I cover the puddles with stray newspapers. Whole families get on, carting canvas bags filled with black beach towels and sunblock. Businessmen drink coffee from foam cups and peruse USA Today. Construction workers clutch their scuffed hard hats in their laps. Some of them look at us with disgust, and others offer commentary, like “Friend had a rough night, eh?”

  No one offers to help. No one pulls the emergency brake and shouts for a doctor. To them, we are no crisis; we’re a joke. Their smirks reflect my most grisly apprehensions. We are ingrates, prime examples of godless, suburban white girls, defects in the knit of society.

  When we get back, Natalie is still too drunk to climb through the window. I am forced to do the unthinkable. I cringe, and carry her in through the condo’s front door.

  When I lead her to bed she seems to wake up a bit, as though she has amnesia and the bed is the only thing she recognizes. She barely responds when I call her by name, but somehow the sight of the lace pillowcases flips a switch in her brain that says, Sleep, sleep here, sleep now. I let her crawl in between the covers without even bothering to remove the heaps of towels we had skillfully sculpted only hours earlier. I change quietly into a nightgown and curl beside her. I put my head on her shoulder so I can monitor her breathing. As far as I can tell, the rising and falling of her chest seems regular.

  I don’t have a chance to doze off before my mother materializes in the bedroom doorway.

  “Koren,” she whispers. I can see she has already changed into a beach cover-up and a wide straw hat. “We’re going down to the pool. Please come down after you’ve rested; we’d like to talk to you.”

  “Shit,” I shout, after I hear the front door close behind her.

  HOURS PASS, and I am filled with the same sense of doom I felt in seventh grade, when Mrs. Kent sent me to the principal’s office when I refused to read aloud. Fuck Greg for telling me this isn’t the end of the world. It is the end of my world, the one in which I am an admittedly mopey teenager, but still the firstborn daughter, a decent student but for math and science, and the apple of my daddy’s eye.

  Rest? Who was my mother kidding? My eyes burn with exhaustion, but I can’t sleep. I keep imagining my head on a chopping block, instead of a too-thin hotel pillow. I try to evaluate the incriminating evidence. Until I decide how much my parents actually know, I can’t draft a speech in my defense. My mind spins. When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m nose-diving into a spiral descent. I’m not hungover, but I run to the bathroom and throw up.

  Natalie joins me a few minutes later, and we take turns holding each other’s hair and heaving into the bowl. We flush, and she tries her best to tell me what happened. Alcohol has muddled the details, so she fills in the blanks as best she can. Wally brought her to his room, bolted the door, and tried to put his hands down her pants. She escaped his grasp narrowly and unharmed, but she didn’t feel like waiting on the porch, and she didn’t want to mount the stairs to the studio and disrupt my time alone with Greg. So she went for a walk. She walked along the beach where we had been the night before, and when a group of guys called out to her, she joined them on their deck. She chugged what she thought was a jumbo-sized plastic cup of beer, but when she was halfway finished, it occurred to her that it might have been liquor. She also smoked what she thought was a joint, but the contents were whiter, she said, and it occurred to her that it might have been angel dust.

  My stomach does another revolution, and I think I might throw up again. The scenario Natalie has
described is even worse than the one I imagined. In my heart of hearts, I had thought we’d both only had a few beers. I thought she had just been “a two-beer queer,” which was a term she always used to describe me when I got drunk off very little. But the truth is laced with liquor, boys, and drugs. There is no way I can relay it to my parents, who, I imagine, wait impatiently by the pool, already burning in the one o’clock sun.

  I ask Natalie if she’s okay, and it’s a leading question. I am trying to make her agree so I can stop my own nauseous feeling, the one that tells me this is my fault. I say, “Natalie, nobody did anything to you, did they?”

  “I don’t think so,” she says, and her forehead crinkles up, as though she’s considering the possibility for the first time. “But, then, I don’t remember everything.”

  It will be years before I know the horror and shame that make Natalie cringe. I will have to experience it myself before I can understand that there are two parts of the mind that constrain memory after nights like this: one that wants to dig it up, and another that wants to push it deeper down. In college, I will learn about boys and blackouts firsthand, about the way the things you can’t remember can terrorize you.

  I lean my head over the toilet bowl and passionately ralph.

  AROUND TWO o’clock I trudge in the direction of the hotel pool, like a dead girl walking, thinking I can’t possibly put it off any longer. I resolve to accept my punishment. I hope my parents’ backlash will be quick and painless, a kind of lethal injection, my social life ended abruptly at the hands of the state.

  I spot them sitting at a flimsy poolside patio table. The morning’s clouds have blown off, and behind them the day is flawlessly blue. In the pool, children buoy to the surface on red foam boards. Teenage girls, who look exactly like me, stretch out, catlike, on lawn chairs, reading fashion magazines, and applying oil to the skin beneath their bikini strings. Waiters are everywhere, carrying piña coladas in sweaty glasses. It is an unlikely location for my first lecture about drinking.

  When I get to the table, I look down and see a glass of beer resting in front of chair number three.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” my father says. “We went ahead and ordered for you.”

  I DECIDE TO tell a fraction of the truth. It will become something I will tell my parents for years in times of distress. I like to think of it as the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth’s second cousin; they may not share all the same physical characteristics, but there is no denying they’re related.

  Years later, it’s hard to remember the precise story that I tell them. But it is exactly that—a story. I shift various facts around like squares on a Rubik’s Cube, in the hope of aligning the details. They only get more jumbled when my parents ask me to repeat them.

  The night sounds like a fairy tale by the time I am through reconstructing it. Natalie and I left the house at midnight because we couldn’t fall asleep. We walked along the beach to tire ourselves, enjoying the mist and the moon and the damp sand under our feet. We found a party somewhere along the breaking waves, and it was not unlike the Mad Hatter’s tea party: Everyone was gathered around a campfire, singing songs, raising their glasses, and switching seats. Someone offered us something from a keg, which we drank to gauge the mystical effects it would have on us.

  The narrative is straight out of Alice in Wonderland, right down to the bottle marked DRINK ME. My father is repressing a look that says, Off with her head.

  He asks how many beers I drank.

  “Two, only two.” Saying things twice always seems to substantiate them.

  He asks if I’ve ever had a drink before.

  “No,” I lie. “Never.”

  My mother asks what Natalie drank.

  Since I’ll never know, I guess and say, “Four beers.”

  Her look is dubious.

  “Koren, she smells like hard alcohol.” My mother is a bloodhound. She could make a living sniffing out contraband in luggage at customs.

  I shrug and say she might have had hard alcohol. I add, “It’s not like I was watching her every second.”

  My mother gasps.

  She says, “Listen, little girl.” It is the first time in the conversation that she has raised her voice, and whenever she calls me “little girl” I know she means business. “Natalie is your friend. You two are supposed to look out for each other. Particularly if you’re going to be drinking.” She doesn’t need to add that I shouldn’t have been drinking. We both know, at this point, that it is extraneous to the conversation.

  What she says makes sense, and ultimately, it is the one real lesson I take away from that lecture by the pool: During times of booze, girls are responsible for nurturing one another. When she says it, an image flashes through my mind of Jodie Foster in Foxes, pouring coffee and cornflakes for her girlfriends after a night of too much Scotch and too many quaaludes. If drinking is like playing grown-up or playing house, somebody has to be the mother. And the fact that my own mother says this makes the knowledge feel all the more sacred, like a bond passed down by women through the ages. I add it to my list of drinking commandments, alongside Thou shalt select a designated driver.

  “There weren’t any boys involved, were there?” I know she is really asking if there was any sex involved.

  If girls need to defend each other while they drink, sex is the threat we need to protect one another from. The thing I am discovering about girldom is, in the end, nobody cares if you are a drunk, an anorexic, a runaway, a dropout, a dope fiend, or a psychotic. These things aren’t regaled, but they are allowed. With the right amount of therapy or religion or pharmaceuticals, they can be remedied and passed off as life stages. That is, as long as you are still a virgin. To be a whore is to be unsalvageable.

  “No. God, no,” I half-mouth the words in a way that suggests the scenario is so far-fetched it doesn’t merit sound. But secretly, I am wondering if something other than vomit impelled Natalie out of her clothes and into those gym shorts.

  It wasn’t too long ago that Natalie and I rented the movie Kids, and I haven’t been able to forget the look on Chloë Sevigny’s face when her character is raped while she is passed out on a sofa, drunk and high. The camera captures the whole horrifying scene, and it gave me nightmares for months after I saw it. I could not stop thinking of how each thrust sent the pleather couch squeaking. The boy had bent her legs so far back over her head, they looked as though they’d snap off at her hips.

  MY PARENTS never say the words “get-out-of-jail-free card,” but that’s what this is. As a first-time offender, I escape any real punishment. They make it clear that I will be severely sorry if they catch me drinking again. They establish what addiction counselors call a “No-Use” rule. I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to drink alcohol outside of their company before I graduate from high school. They say, “If you’re curious about alcohol, that’s fine, but you’ll drink it with us.” I am more than welcome to have half a glass of wine with dinner.

  My parents seem almost relieved to get the discussion out of the way. I get the sense that they’ve been waiting to catch me drinking, the same way they’ve been waiting to catch me kissing some boy in the den. To them, it is just another version of the birds and the bees, a conversation they’ve been waiting for years to spring on me, holding off until I was developed enough to pass for old enough. For the most part, this lesson about alcohol strikes me as more discourse to file away with panty liners and antiperspirant. It is the type of embarrassing lecture that makes all of us uncomfortable.

  They are generous with my punishment. I am grounded for a week, which means little in the grand scheme of things. I routinely get more jail time for failing a math test or harassing my sister.

  Their real charity, though, is in terms of Natalie. I’d just assumed this would be one of those situations where my mother called Natalie’s mother, the way she used to when we were younger and she caught us watching R-rated movies. Up until this point, it seemed to be the preferre
d parental way of dealing with things—everyone rehashing the events and comparing notes out of obligation, outrage, or guilt. Instead, they decide to let Natalie tell her parents herself. I think they do it because we are old enough to be trusted as active participants in our retribution. It will take me years to see it for what it is: embarrassment and the desire to pretend the whole thing never happened.

  That will be the thing about my parents. From the outside, they will come off as suspicious as hell. They will dutifully set and enforce curfews. They will ask where I’m going, and with whom. They’ll keep asking who’ll be there, how long I’ll be gone, and how I’m getting back. My father will hug me when I come home at night, as if to check my breath for alcohol. My mother will linger in my room too long when she is putting away laundry; she’ll slide her fingers along the bottoms of my drawers as if she’s checking for drug-filled plastic Baggies. But when it comes down to the hard evidence, the material proof sitting right in front of them in sunglasses and sweatpants, the very portrait of hungover, they will choose optimism. They’ll believe in the best in me. And years later, they’ll believe in the best in my sister.

  Every parent would rather believe that their child abstains—from sex, drugs, booze, and violence, all the cultish impulses.

  NATALIE AND I spend the afternoon on the boardwalk. I take her there because I can’t have the conversation I want to have with her in the condo without wrecking the half-truths I told my parents, and because she feels too weak to lie on a beach towel in the radiant heat. In spite of the boardwalk’s hundred-foot Ferris wheel and toy-sized tram, the funnel cakes and beef-pit barbecue, the men selling bags of cotton candy that look like attic insulation, it is the most depressing three-mile stretch of wood in the world.

  Beside a bike-rental shop, we find a sad, green awning that advertises SAND ART and looks private. I can tell by the way Natalie lets me take out my wallet to pay for the glass bottles that she thinks I’m indebted to her.