Blackout

by Sarah Hepola

  PART ONE

  ONE

  THE BEER THIEF

  I grew up in Dallas, Texas, wondering why. In the novels and buttery teen magazines I read, people of consequence lived in California and the East Coast, the glittering cities where a Jay Gatsby or a John Stamos might thrive. When I became obsessed with Stephen King books, I nursed fantasies of moving to Maine. Things happened in Maine, I told myself, never understanding things happened in Maine because Stephen King made them happen.

  My father was an engineer for DuPont Chemical in 1970, but a crisis of conscience changed our family’s entire trajectory. The environmental movement was getting started, and my dad wanted to be on the right side of history—cleaning up the planet, not pumping more toxins into it. He took a job with the burgeoning Environmental Protection Agency, which was opening up branches across the country, and in 1977, when I was three years old, we moved from a quaint Philadelphia suburb to the wilds of Dallas, a city so far removed from what we knew it might as well have been Egypt.

  I’ve often wondered how much of my life would be different if we’d stayed where we sprouted. What part of my later troubles, my sense of estrangement could be traced back to this one simple set change—swapping the leafy and sun-dappled streets surrounding our apartment in Pennsylvania for the hot cement and swiveling highways of Big D?

  My parents rented a small house on a busy street in the neighborhood with the best public school system in Dallas. The district was notorious for other things, too, though it took us a while to catch on: $300 Louis Vuitton purses on the shoulders of sixth graders, ski trips to second homes in Aspen or Vail, a line of BMWs and Mercedes snaking around the school entrance. Meanwhile, we drove a dented station wagon with a ceiling liner held up by staples and duct tape. We didn’t have a chance.

  Parents often try to correct the mistakes of their own past, but they end up introducing new errors. My father grew up in a public housing project in Detroit. My mother wondered what she might have achieved if she hadn’t downshifted her intelligence through school. They wanted better opportunities for their two children. And so they moved into an area where all the kids went to college, an area so cloistered from the dangers of the big city it was known as the Bubble.

  The neighborhood was a real slice of old-fashioned Americana: two-story redbrick homes and children selling lemonade on the corner. My brother and I rode our bikes to the shopping center a mile away to buy gummy worms and magic tricks, and we made As on our report cards, and we were safe. In fact, the only thief I ever knew was me.

  I was a small-time crook. In middle school, I slipped lipstick and powder compacts into my pocket at the Woolworth’s and smiled at the clerk as I passed. Every kid pushes boundaries, but something else was going on: Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club that involved changing the spelling of my name each time I joined. But the first thing I remember stealing was beer.

  I was seven when I started sneaking sips of Pearl Light from half-empty cans left in the refrigerator. I would tiptoe into the kitchen in my cotton nightgown, and I would take two long pulls when no one was looking, and I would spin around the living room, giggling and knocking into furniture. A carnival ride of my very own.

  Later, I would hear stories of girls this age discovering their bodies. A showerhead positioned between the thighs. The humping of a pillow after lights off. “You didn’t do that?” people would ask, surprised and maybe a little bit sad for me.

  I chased the pounding of my heart to other places. A bottle of cooking sherry under the sink. A bottle of Cointreau, screw top crusty with lack of use. But nothing was as good as beer. The fizz. The left hook of it. That wicked ka-pow.

  In high school, girls would complain about beer—how gross and sour it was, how they could barely force themselves to drink it—and I was confused, as though they were bad-mouthing chocolate or summer vacation. The taste for beer was embroidered on my DNA.

  THE MOVE TO Dallas was hard on everyone, but it might have been toughest on my mom. She was catatonic for a week after our arrival. This was a woman who had traveled alone in Europe and was voted “most optimistic” in her high school class, but in the first days of our new life, she sat on the couch, unable to retrieve even a lampshade from the garage.

  She was too overwhelmed. She’d never been so far from her big, noisy Irish brood, and though some part of her longed for distance, did she really want this much? My mother was also not what you’d call a Dallas type. She wore no makeup. She sewed her own empire-waist wedding dress, inspired by characters in Jane Austen books. And here she was at 33, with two kids, stranded in the land of rump-shaking cheerleaders and Mary Kay Cosmetics.

  I was happy in those early years. At least, that’s the story I’m told. I shimmied in the living room to show tunes. I waved to strangers. At bedtime, my mother would lean down close and tell me, “They said I could pick any girl baby I wanted, and I chose you.” Her glossy chestnut hair, which she wore in a bun during the day, hung loose and swished like a horse’s tail. I can still feel the cool slick of her hair through my fingers. The drape on my face.

  I clung to her as long as I could. On the first day of kindergarten, I gripped her skirt and sobbed, but no amount of begging could stop the inevitable. Eden was over. And I was exiled to a table of loud, strange creatures with Play-Doh gumming their fingertips.

  The first day of kindergarten was also a rocky transition for me, because it was the last day I breast-fed. Yes, I was one of those kids who stayed at the boob well past the “normal” age, a fact that caused me great embarrassment as I grew older. My cousins dangled the tale over my head like a wriggly worm, and I longed to scrub the whole episode from my record. (A bit of blackout wished for but never granted.)

  The way my mother tells it, she tried to wean me earlier, but I threw tantrums and lashed out at other children in frustration. And I asked very nicely. Just once more, Mommy. Just one more time. So she let me crawl back up to the safest spot on earth, and she didn’t mind. My mother believed kids develop on their own timelines, and a child like me simply needed a few bonus rounds. She wanted to be a softer mother than the one she had. The kind who could intuit her children’s needs, although I can’t help wondering if I was intuiting hers.

  These were the hardest years of my parents’ marriage. Nothing was turning out the way my mother expected—not her husband, not her life. But she and I continued in our near-umbilical connection, as diapers turned to big-girl pants and long-term memories formed on my developing mind. Was she wrong to let me cling like this? Did she set up unrealistic expectations that the world would bend to my demands? Was this a lesson in love—or codependence? I don’t know what role, if any, my protracted breast-feeding plays in my drinking story. But I know that whatever I got from my mother in the perfect little cocoon of ours was something I kept chasing for a long, long time.

  I was in first grade when my mom went back to school, and much of the following years are defined by her absence. She disappeared in phases, oxygen slowly leaking from the room, until one day I looked around to find my closest companion had been relegated to cameo appearances on nights and weekends.

  She became a therapist, the go-to profession for wounded hearts. She wanted to work with children—abused children, neglected children, which had the unintended consequence of pulling her away from her own. She cut her long brown hair into a no-nonsense ’80s do. She stored her ponytail in a hatbox on a high shelf in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would pull it down, just to run my fingers over it again.

  EVEN THOUGH I was seven when I first stole beer, I was six when I first tasted it. My father took care of me and my brother in the evenings, and he spent most of the hours in a squishy chair in the living room, watching news reports of weather and death. I often saw him with his eyes closed, but he swore he wasn’t
napping, which made me curious where he had gone, which alternate reality was better than ours.

  He nursed one beer each night. Sometimes two. He poured the beer into a glass, and I could smell the hops dancing in the air as I passed. Few scents crackle my nerve endings like beer. As gorgeous as campfire, as unmistakable as gasoline.

  I sidled up to him. Can I have a sip?

  Just one. I placed my nose in the glass, and I could feel stardust on my face.

  I don’t know if parents still let their kids taste beer, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time. The bitterness was supposed to turn us off the stuff, but that one sip lit a fuse in me that burned for decades.

  My parents weren’t big drinkers back then, but thirst ran in our bloodlines. My mother’s Irish heritage requires no explanation. My father’s background is Finnish, a nationality fabled for its shyness and its love of booze (two qualities that are not unrelated). To be both Irish and Finnish is to be bred for drinking—doomed to burst into song and worry later what everyone thought about it.

  My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears, which he thought stood out funny, and the vitiligo that looked like spilled bleach across his arms and shins. He was a handsome man, with a beaming smile, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t want to be noticed. He wore a lot of beige.

  My father’s EPA office was in the flashy downtown skyscraper where J. R. Ewing swindled his fortunes on the TV show Dallas. But the two men couldn’t have been further apart. My father was a diligent government worker who scanned our bills at Steak and Ale to flag any item accidentally left off the tab. He took me to a movie every Saturday, and he let me choose the film (a luxury no second child forgets), but he was so anxious about arriving on time we often showed up before the previous movie had ended. We’d linger in the lobby for 20 minutes, the two of us sitting on carpeted stair steps, not talking.

  As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there. He had an introversion common to Finns, and to engineers. He avoided eye contact. If he was growing up today, I’m curious what a psychiatrist would make of him. He had a boyhood habit of stimming, rocking back and forth to soothe himself. In his 20s, he had a compulsive blinking tic. In his middle age, he kept a notebook listing every winning Dallas lotto number, recorded in his careful, geometrically precise block lettering. A futile attempt at charting randomness.

  Perhaps these were coping mechanisms of a childhood harsher than mine. His father was sent to a mental institution when my dad was 15—a breakdown brought on by mental illness, drinking, or both. But most of my dad’s past, like my dad himself, was a mystery to me. All I knew was that my father was not like those loud, wisecracking fathers on sitcoms who tousled your hair and tickled you till you snorted. He communicated in his own rhythms. If I said, “I love you, Daddy,” he would sometimes pat my head and say, “OK. Thanks.” So I learned that fathers were very loyal and dependable people who existed behind glass.

  My mother was full of passion and conversation. I sometimes marveled these two people ever came together, but I was charmed by tales of their courtship. In lieu of an engagement ring, my father gave her money to study in Germany, an act of gentle nonconformity and global discovery that shaped my worldview. But at night, in our cramped house, their fights curled like smoke underneath their bedroom door. And as tender as my mother could be, an Irish fire lurked in her, too. I could hear her voice each night, bitten by frustration. The tone that always made the veins on the side of her neck stand up like cords. Why can’t you do this right, John? Why can’t you listen, John?

  For a while, my brother and I were allies on this battleground. Josh was my hero, a swashbuckling little boy who could find excitement in any dusty corner. He turned blankets into royal capes and wicker chairs into spaceships from a galaxy far, far away. He was four and a half years older than me, with a precocious mind forever solving the Rubik’s Cube of how the world worked. Of course, he solved his actual Rubik’s Cube. I gave up, and changed the stickers.

  I didn’t realize it, but Josh had a rough entry to school, too. A Yankee boy dropped into a part of the world where kids were still fighting the Civil War. The brainiac skills that wowed his younger sister were useless on the football field, where Texas boys proved their mettle. And by the time he entered middle school, our shared excursions had turned into his solo journeys: onto the clunky personal computer he won in a radio contest, into the J. R. R. Tolkien books crinkled and dog-eared with devotion. I wanted to follow him into those exotic boylands, but he started closing doors in my face. Get out. Go away.

  I got my own room. Pink walls, red carpet, a Strawberry Shortcake explosion. And in this private universe, where no one could criticize me, I was the star of every show. My fantasy worlds were dominated by girls like me, discovering their own power. I was Sandy, in the last scene of Grease, strutting in hot pants and causing a bulge in every man’s heart. I was plucky Orphan Annie, rescued by a billionaire she saved right back. I was Coco, fan-kicking her way through the cafeteria in Fame.

  Fame. I wanted it more than anything. If you were famous, nothing hurt. If you were famous, everyone loved you. In fifth grade, I would start plastering my walls with teen pinups—Prince Charming in the form of a soft boy with a popped collar—and I became fixated on celebrity and glamour, those twin instruments of escape.

  But before that, there was the beer.

  OUR PEARL LIGHT lived in 12-packs resting on the floor to the right of our cream-colored Kenmore fridge. Reaching inside that cardboard box gave me a bad thrill, like sinking my hands into a vat of warm wax. All that carbonated joy rumbling around my fingertips.

  My mother often stored a half-empty can in the fridge to drink over the course of an evening. She would stuff a rubber stopper that looked like a lime wedge in the mouth.

  This was 1981, and we were always dreaming up new ways to keep our carbonated beverages from going flat. My mother’s older sister informed us if you crunched the big plastic soda bottle before you tightened the cap, you could preserve the carbonation. Our soda bottles looked like they’d taken a flight on an airplane: sunken bellies, cratered at each side. The rubber stoppers were part of this scheme to prolong shelf life, though they never worked. The fizz leaked out anyway. You would come back to your can the next day and find it flat and syrupy. Eventually those lime wedges ended up in a kitchen drawer alongside twisties and dead batteries, another failed experiment in fighting the way of the world.

  But when I began stealing sips of my mother’s beer, we still had faith in the lime wedges. I would pop that sucker out and take a few glugs—not enough to be obvious but enough to get melty inside—and I would put the can back exactly where I found it. On the door side, next to the raspberry jam. On the top shelf, beside the cantaloupe, logo facing the back.

  I didn’t do this every day. I didn’t even do this every month. It was a special-occasion indulgence. A splurge. But I did it for many years, as the 12-pack grew into the economy 18-pack from Sam’s Wholesale and cotton nightgowns turned into striped pajama bottoms and Duran Duran T-shirts.

  Sometimes I went too far, because the beer was like a wave I wanted to keep crashing into. I would misjudge a few swigs and realize the can was nearly empty. I couldn’t put my mother’s Pearl Light back in the fridge with nothing but backwash in it.

  So I had to drain that can and pop open a new one, drinking it down to the original level, which made me woozy with rainbows. I would take the empty back to my bedroom and shove it behind the foldout chair in the corner until I could slip out to the alley and dump it in someone else’s trash.

  It’s odd I was never caught. Sometimes my mother noticed her beer lower than when she left it, but she wrote it off to a fluke of memory. And my father kept his eyes on my brother—who was, literally, a Boy Scout. Any con man depends on people looking in the wrong direction, but perhaps nothing worked more to my advantage than gender bias. Nobody thought a little girl would steal beer.r />
  I WAS IN fourth grade when I began to realize my family might be out of our league in the neighborhood. One afternoon, a friend’s father was driving me home when he asked, “Does your dad rent that house?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Innnnteresting,” he said, in a way that told me it was not interesting but shameful.

  There are moments you can taste your difference, like copper on your tongue. I began lying after that. Little lies, lies no one could catch. Yes, I’ve been to Aspen. No, that’s not our car. Absolutely I’ve been accepted to the School of Performing Arts in New York. When people asked where my father worked, I named the building but not the profession. “He’s a banker?” And I said, “I guess so.” Banking was a power career. Banking meant money.

  Our home was on a major artery through the neighborhood, where cars zipped past all day long, forcing us to keep the blinds drawn at all times. I started using the back door to come and go. I didn’t want strangers to see me and know the dinky rental house was ours.

  My mother had become embarrassing to me as well. She listened exclusively to classical music and hummed conspicuously in public. She had a therapeutic chattiness that felt like a doctor’s probe. “How do you feel about that, Sarah? Tell me more.” God forbid we pass a mother with a baby in the grocery store. She had to download the entire backstory. How cute, and how special, and blah to the blah. And my mother didn’t assemble herself like those kicky mothers of the PTA, with their frosted hair and ropy gold necklaces. She wasn’t bad-looking. But didn’t she realize how much prettier she’d look with some eye shadow?