Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (14 page)

My mother starts the conversation and I end up turning sideways in my chair to face her. From this position, I can avoid the gaze of my father, which is sterner on account of his being at

the hospital. My mom doesn’t try to recap the time line. Instead, she says, “I assume Claire filled you in.”

It makes me wonder if my parents had had Claire sleep on the living-room couch because it spared them the awkwardness of rehashing the gory details for me. In fact, we’d waited to have this discussion until my dad and I had driven Claire home. Even with the babble of NPR, the car was so silent I could hear the en-gine purring.

My mom says the problem is not that I’ve been experiment-ing with alcohol; she’d made it clear in Ocean City that I am old enough to do that. In fact, she says, it is probably a good idea for me to toy around with drinking now, while I still live at home, instead of waiting until I get to college, where the environment makes inexperience even more risky.

She says she wouldn’t have cared if I’d been drinking at home last night. I could have drunk myself into a similar stupor, she says, gone upstairs, and passed out in my bed. At home, she would have known I was safe. But anything could have happened to me on that dock. She says, “What if you fell into the water and drowned? What if you had been raped?”

My dad says hardly anything. He sets his reading glasses down on top of the front page and looks at me with eyes I don’t know how to interpret. I can’t remember the last time he looked at me this unremittingly. The moments we spend together usu-ally revolve around some type of project. Typically, we talk while we cook, spray-paint patio furniture, or make candles out of melted-down crayons. Those times, his eyes are focused on the peppers in the wok, or the jet from the paint can, or the bot-tle we fill with hot wax. He is the type of dad who expresses concern by constructing things, or cooking, or shopping for

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gadgets, by making sure I have a full stomach, a computer Zip drive, and Gore-Tex boots come spring thaw. I’ve never seen the expression he is giving me now. It’s not outrage, really, or disap-pointment. It is the look of crude disbelief.

The only concern he voices aloud is about my missing the young writers’ conference. He asks (rhetorically, of course), “Do you see how drinking makes you miss out on other fun activities?”

My mother cries a little, which always makes me cry, too. I’ve always been like a dog in the way that I absorb her moods. I have been listening to my parents speak with a tension like a rock in my throat. As my mother cries, I have to keep swallow-ing. In the end, I give up and bawl soundlessly. I use the sleeve of my sweatshirt to wipe the wetness from my face.

At the time, I think my mother cries solely because I’ve frightened her. But years from now, more drunken sons and daughters will surface among her relatives and friends. There will be comatose daughters on respirators, daughters laid up in hospitals with broken cheekbones, car accidents, DUI charges, and sons whose early admissions to Ivy League universities are threatened by alcohol-related suspensions. Years from now, my mother will explain more to me. She’ll say, “When you choose to stay at home to rear your kids, a dead-drunk daughter makes you question an entire decade’s worth of motherhood—you wonder if the career you gave up made the slightest difference in the personalities you’ve been shaping.”

My sister is eleven. As luck would have it, she is spending the night at a friend’s house, so she misses all the clues that point to this black crime. My mom won’t tell her about it until she’s eigh-teen, when it’s used as a cautionary tale to warn her off drinking, and by that time the handles of the liquor cabinet will wear a silver luggage lock. My sister will be appalled. But mostly, she’ll mourn the fact that, as the youngest, she’s always the last to know.

There is not much to say in my defense. There is no point in telling a fraction of the truth because there is no gray area in which to weasel. All the facts of the night are laid out on the table, like plates of fruit and toast.

While my parents talk, I nod like a dashboard Chihuahua and say, “I know, I know, I know.” I certainly say I am sorry; it’s the only thing I can think to say with the hospital bracelet still sliding up and down my wrist.

I am hangover-free due to the large bags of saline pumped through my forearm’s thin veins. Still, I climb the stairs back up to my room and sleep for the rest of the day. It’s like slipping back into the hole of the blackout—in sleep, I can forget again. Tomorrow, I’ll go for the second day of the young writers’ conference, telling the tweed-jacketed director only that I’ve been sick. In a low-lit corner classroom, I’ll try to write a poem I decide to call “Lush,” but I won’t be able to come up with more

than a few first words, scarred by cross-outs.

I know the whole ordeal needs to be written about. But two days afterward, I am still far too close to the night to see it clearly. I am looking only at the incident, and the result is a lot like the pictures in our biology textbook, taken at microscopic range, the ones that look like billowing clouds until you read the caption and realize you are looking at magnified cotton swabs. Years will pass before I can see the night of my stomach pumping to scale. I will need the perspective of six more years before I understand what I am looking at.

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• • •

My parents
ground me for the remainder of November, which is the cruelest season to be in lockdown. There are school-sponsored carnivals. There are semiformal gymnasium dances. There are evening football games, where mist levitates in the stadium lights. And there are remote keg parties afterward.

There are parties that require a two-mile hike through the thick New England woods, crunching through dead leaves, and dodging the occasional small-town cop on the prowl. There are parties like I’ll never know again. The air in the clearing smells of apple orchards, Bud Light, and pine-dense bonfire smoke. The weather seems always on the verge of snow, and some boy, who is sitting on a log a few feet away, always seems to be on the verge of crossing the fire flicker to put his arm around me.

Sometime during my punishment, the guilt I feel as a result of the incident melts away. After a few days, my parents stop talking about the reason I am grounded; they reference it only with raised eyebrows when I make some complaint. Likewise, the girls in the cafeteria, who in those first few days after the accident were a flurry of whispering, direct their attention to somebody else. The alarm I felt that morning in my bedroom fades from memory. It is replaced by the agitation that comes with being restricted.

My parents have never made good wardens, and the Zailckas Home Penitentiary is notoriously low security. Here, a prisoner is free to leaf through fashion magazines, drive to the video store, or surf Internet chat rooms ’til dawn. Phone calls are un-limited. And time off for good behavior will certainly be afforded, if such a thing ever occurs.

In fact, the only real rule in the house of correction is that I

can’t leave it. At least, not after prime time. This means bonfire parties are out. So is the repertoire of fictions that I regularly use to disguise them: dinner at Applebee’s, movies at the General Cinema, fishing in Harvard, canoeing in Concord, hiking Mount Wachusett, throwing spares at the Bowl-A-Way.

At ten every night, my dad punches the keypad on the security system in a series of calculated beeps, to which a robotic woman’s voice answers “Al-arm sys-tem is on!” I listen to him ascend the stairs to go to bed, to Bear’s dog tags jingling two or three steps behind him, and know there is no escape. The entire house stirs whenever the system announces “Al-arm sys-tem is off!” It’s enough to wonder whether it’s in place to keep crimi-nals out, or to keep me in.

These nights, the house must look picture perfect. For a month, my parents never have to answer the question: “It’s ten

p.m.
, do you know where your children are?” My sister and I are

sachets stuffed into the pockets of our beds.

Nights, the floodlights from the perennial garden splash light over our front door, where my mother has hung a grapevine wreath. Even with the blinds closed, the light gets tossed against my bedroom wall, too. It’s bright enough to read by, and well suited for shadow puppets. I’ve long forgotten how to lace my fingers into the shape of a barking dog, and opt instead for my favorite gesture, the flipped bird. I examine the silhouette of my middle finger from every imaginable angle, saying “Fuck you” to no one in particular. I perfect all the various forms— thumb in, thumb out, with a wrist twirl—before I lie down to close my eyes, deciding that I hate just about everyone.

Our house is close enough to the high school that I can hear the noise from its football stadium. There’s the low echo of my English teacher’s voice, announcing the players’ names; the

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horns from the marching band; the swell of applause after each touchdown; and the bleacher stomping, which sounds like thun-der. Somewhere past the edge of the driveway, the mailbox, the old tire swing, I can hear football season. My friends are sneak-ing Jack Daniel’s in the school parking lot during halftime. There is a play in motion.

The days scuttle by, and I keep myself occupied. I divide my closet into a stack of sweaters to keep, and dresses to bag up for Goodwill. I play GameBoy, drop balls of cookie dough onto alu-minum sheets, and watch reruns of
The Real World: Miami,
which is the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. I go to my math tutor nightly and try to twig the cosine rule for hyperbolic triangles.

I never find the file in the birthday cake, that secret escape through the doggy door or out the guest-room window. I never slither breathless through my father’s tomato plants, like Tim Robbins in
The Shawshank Redemption,
to emerge at the neighbors’ swing set, rain soaked, jovial, free! I never give my parents the opportunity to search every doghouse, whorehouse, or crack-house. I pay my debt to society because I’m guilty.

I feel confident I could escape if I wanted to; I could shoulder out a bathroom window and walk the two miles it would take to meet so-and-so at such-and-such a party. The most high-tech safeguards are no match for the sixteen-year-old mind.

But in the end, it is my friends themselves who have the authority to keep me at home. My trip to the hospital doesn’t ex-actly cause our falling out; we still meet at one another’s lockers between classes. In study hall, we still paint our fingernails with a black Magic Marker. They still call me on Saturday afternoons to disclose the details of their Friday nights, filling me in on the party that took place in an abandoned barn or someone’s unfin-ished basement. I am always alerted to who threw up, who was

felt up, and how long it took the police chief to show up. But no one is willing to aid and abet my escape. Never comes that call to throw down thy hair.

I don’t blame them. The only A I was ever afforded in biology was in the chapter on evolution. The idea of the able-bodied predator was the only concept that made sense to me. In nature, everyone roots for the marauder. That’s why we’ll glue our-selves to Animal Planet for hours, stoned or straight, to watch a pair of African lions descend on a gazelle as though we aren’t sure how it will end. Everyone would rather be a lion. If we feel sorry for the lesser species it is only because they were sorry enough to get caught.

That night at the dock, I proved I was the weedy one. And because I couldn’t handle my liquor, because that weakness en-dangered everyone else’s drinking with the threat of getting caught, I was temporarily cast aside.

I’d managed to get Abby in trouble. Her parents had stum-bled to the door when my dad turned up at her house. Since she hadn’t been drunk herself, they only grounded her for a weekend, but it was enough to make Allen and Kat temporarily turn on me. They made me apologize to Abby that Monday during lunch period, and I did, because I felt sorry at the time.

But the more I think about Abby during my house arrest, the less apologetic I feel. I can’t be sorry for her or her parents, who ban me from their house afterward on the basis that I’m bad company. I decide her parents are either the world’s heaviest sleepers, or they’ve known the score all along. They’ve slept through infinite Saturday nights where we mixed drinks in their kitchen, or smoked a joint in their backyard, or passed out dead drunk in their basement in a group of twenty, looking like victims of a cult mass suicide. I think they look the other way

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and justify it to themselves by saying that as long as Abby drinks in their house, she is under their control.

A month later, Allen will carry Kat, dead drunk, into Abby’s parents’ New Year’s Eve dinner party. And as much as I’ll be able to empathize, the irony will be almost poetic. After it happens, I’ll think her parents will retract their harsh judgment of me, realizing that this kind of thing can happen to anybody. But it won’t happen that way. In the end, her parents will blame me for Kat’s near overdose, even though I wasn’t there when it happened. They’ll tell the other neighborhood parents, “This kind of thing is contagious,” like teenage pregnancy or suicide. They will refer to me as though I were the carrier drunk that had infected their children.

For all these reasons, a month of being grounded is a blessing. It allows time to pass, and people to forget about me. I imagine myself like the junkie bound for inpatient rehab, or somebody’s pregnant daughter gone to Utah to give up the baby for adop-tion. I can emerge sometime in December in good health. I can come back from “visiting relatives” or that “much-needed break.” One month is enough time for somebody else to replace me as the scapegoat for underage drinking. Surely someone else will do something stupid, and they will be strung up as a reminder to everyone else.