Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (18 page)

glass coffee table.

In fact, the only person who hasn’t yet been humbled by alcohol is Wendi. That’s not to say that she won’t be, though. Before the school year ends, she will get dead drunk on Goldschlager and keck in her sheets. I won’t say a word while she’s stripping her bed the next day, but I’ll feel like I’ve won.

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• • •

I go home
for Christmas break feeling totally unencumbered. The commuter flight into Boston is crowded with students drinking Bloody Marys and comparing plans for New Year’s Eve. By the time the plane touches down on the Logan runway, everyone’s face is as red as a poinsettia, and a few rowdy frat boys have repeatedly cornered the flight attendant with a sprig of mistletoe. Behind the fake-frosted glass at the arrival gate, my dad is waiting. He gives me a bear hug and says I look great.

My parents have always considered themselves European in the fact that they think the legal drinking age ought to be eighteen, and that drinking is fine for teenagers as long as it’s done at home. Therefore, Christmas dinner finds me with a glass of white wine instead of my usual goblet of skim milk. I do my best to sip naturally between helpings of squash and turkey and the goopy Jell-O salad my mom calls “blueberry gunk,” even though I still haven’t acquired a taste for wine. We drink little of it at school, unless you count the strawberry wine coolers that come in bottles with screw-off tops.

Relatives ask me about Syracuse: “How are the parties?” Followed by, “How are classes?” And I gesture majestically with my glass, which, as the night coasts on, feels more and more like a tulip-shaped extension of my hand. The air smells like cinna-mon sticks and chimney smoke. My grandma tells off-color jokes. My uncles get plastered and pound out “Werewolves of London” on the player piano.

As a Christmas present to ourselves, my family and I spend the week following New Year’s in Grand Cayman, where (as a Christmas present to me) the legal drinking age is eighteen. The days are hot and stale. Time stretches out like the blue line of the ocean, and I spend it faceup on a hotel towel, watching prop

planes pull ads for drink specials at a club called Next Level. My sister and I snap pictures of sea turtles in algae-crusted tanks. We snorkel with stingrays and shriek when their slippery whips brush our legs. One afternoon, I bump into a boy from my dorm on a bleached stretch of beach (in the coming years, there will never be a city remote enough to escape people I knew at S.U.). We spend a night at a sports bar called Bobo’s Iguana, drinking Red Stripes and flirting shamelessly.

On our last day in the Caymans my dad rents a Jeep, and we drive it up the curved road to the botanical park, only to find that it is closed due to bad weather. The sky growls and threat-ens rain. We take pictures on a burned-out tree trunk: my sister sitting high on top, me at mid-level, my mom at the base. Together we look like a succession of Russian stacking dolls, span-ning the continuum of womanhood.

When the temperature slips below seventy degrees, we buy sweatshirts at the gift shop and sit wearing them in a nearby canteen. My dad orders frozen mudslides, blended with Tor-tuga rum and topped with whipped cream. There is a glass for everyone but my thirteen-year-old sister. When my mom lets her have a sip she purses her lips and says it tastes too much like coffee.

I drink two, fast enough to get a brain freeze, and then suck on my parents’ straws when they get up to go to the bathroom. On the ride back to the hotel, I fall to rum-humming sleep in the backseat.

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Back at school,
January is gelid. The roads around campus are two inches deep in slush left behind from a New Year’s Day snowstorm. Even in hiking boots, the walk to and from class requires hoofing it, with your wool gloves cradling your note-books, your turtleneck pulled over your chin, and your feet skidding this way and that. “Ice luges” start turning up at off-campus parties. Boys tip bottles over the crests of four-foot blocks of ice that they’ve chiseled chutes into, and we kneel at the bot-tom with our hot mouths on the finish line, as vodka toboggans down the fronts of our shirts.

There hasn’t been a memorable party since house parties be-came the usual way to pass weekends. Nothing remarkable has

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ensued since a routine was established: the standard procedure for Saturday nights, whereby Hannah and I toddle through the snow to the address that an upperclassman has scrawled on our doors’ Dry Erase boards, while the windchill stiffens our fingers and older boys zip down Euclid Avenue toward the campus bars, leaning their heads out of car windows and roaring
“Freeesh-men,”
which is the verbal equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Since then, I’ve realized that house parties, which I first thought were enormously grown-up, are actually adolescent. They are a way for senior boys to make a swift eight hundred bucks, by supplying beer to freshmen who have no other way of getting it. When I look closer, I notice the way each boy has his own chore, collecting money or carrying kegs, and each one per-forms it with the mope of begrudged obligation. When I’m a dollar short of the admission fee, the fuzzy-haired boy at the door has to check with his superior before letting me in. When I’m in another boy’s way when he comes lugging a keg through the door, he grumbles “For-christ’s-sake-move.” I realize parties are these boys’ part-time jobs. Two a month is all it takes for freshmen like me to pay their monthly rent.

By second semester, the parties are like a hologram that looks the same from every angle. There is nothing unexpected about them; there are only lines at discreet rear entrances, cups of sour beer, floors peppered with cigarette butts, bathrooms without toilet paper, and the same familiar faces that drift from room to room. After a while, those faces are not even worth nodding at because nothing can come from that small gesture except the same old small talk and dumb silences. After a while, these parties’ only variable is the street address.

I don’t change, either. I still go to these parties. I still stay at

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them, determined to get my five bucks’ worth by filling and re-filling my oversized party cup with beer.

In the future, I will always be the girl who stays too long or too late. I will be the girl who holds out for aye, as though it were a contest. I will be as determined to keep drinking as people on reality shows are determined to stay standing one-footed on a log, for six hours at a time. I will be the last girl to leave the dinner party, the one who stays after all the other girls have given their good-bye air kisses, the one who promises to catch a ride, a cab, a bus, and yes, “Call when I get home.” If I’m a guest at your party, I’ll be the girl who falls asleep on the bed with the coats, sleeps until nine, and accepts a cup of French roast from your mother before I go. If I’m your love interest, you, too, won’t be rid of me until morning, until you find me my shirt and my socks, until you offer me a palm filled with aspirin, and walk me out the door.

Drunk, I’ll never know how to go home until I’m told to. I’ll stay out until two
a.m.
in the suburbs, four
a.m.
in the city, until I get a cue, like the bar’s lights coming on and a bouncer saying,

“I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here.” And even then, I’ll invite you to my place for an after-party, or I’ll invite myself to your place if my freezer is fresh out of vodka, and we’ll both keep drinking until I hit the floor. I’ll keep taking until I’m long saturated, and even after that. I’ll be parasitic that way. I’ll suck blissfully on a straw for hours, like the tick that sucks until it’s big as a dime, until it bursts in a bloody streak on your arm.

During the
time that I am a student at S.U.,
The Princeton Re-view
will repeatedly count it among the top twenty campuses in the United States with “more to do.” And the label will always

confuse me because I’m not sure whether it means S.U. has more to do than other schools, or more to do aside from drinking, which seems to be the undercurrent that runs through all campus-related references. In
2001
, S.U. will actually rate as the university that has “the most to do,” and it will make me think chancellors ought to start addressing sympathy cards to the nation’s
12
million other undergraduates, who must be bored to tears.

I know because I’m bored to tears. Just five months into college, I am jaded. I am sated with watching student films, and sledding the steep incline in front of Crouse College on green plastic lunch trays, and buying student tickets to student pro-ductions like
Leading Men Don’t Dance.
If there really is “more to do” on campus aside from holing up among the dirty-clothes piles in somebody’s dorm room, smoking, swigging flavored vodka, and playing PlayStation, I can’t find it. The new year finds my friends and me in a state of hog-drunk hibernation. In the cold and sleet, even average outings require a cocktail. We drink screwdrivers before we ride the shuttle to the movie the-ater; we stir amaretto liqueur into our cups of hot cocoa at hockey games.

It’s a strange moment when I realize that drinking, which used to be the single interlude that could break up high school’s tedium, is becoming just as dreary as most things in college are. That is not to say that beer has become
as
dull as dining-hall food, though it will be by the time I graduate. It’s just that the sensation that comes with the third or fourth bottle of it, which used to be a sudden awareness as jolting as a blow to the head, has become so familiar that I don’t have to pay much attention to it. Falling into a buzz is like falling into something staunch and comfortable, like a favorite armchair. I sink into the feeling; I could drift to sleep there.

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• • •

By the
beginning of February, quarter-page ads for rush appear in
The Daily Orange,
saying “Tri Delt has a rush on you” or “The sisters of Alpha Phi wish you good luck with recruitment.” A Greek Expo kicks off in the student center. It’s just like the con-sumer electronics shows I used to go to with my father, but in-stead of demonstrations of the latest robotic arm there are booths of girls wearing sweatshirts stitched with alien letters, exhibiting “sisterhood.” A slide show flips frames on a life-size screen. Girls are everywhere, hugging one another too tightly. Their cheeks are flushed. Their mouths are spewing laughter. Everyone wears name tags that read,
hi my name is
, and everyone’s name is
kaitlyn
.

Someone passes out a guidebook that contains black-and- white photos of all fourteen houses and sorority symbols: their chosen flowers, philanthropies, and color schemes. The differ-entiation is as befuddling to me as the splitting of the atom. For the past semester, I’ve thought all sororities were one unit. I had no idea that there were points of distinction. I didn’t know there were so many different Alpha, Beta, and Gamma girls in orbit. Back in the dorm, I scrawl a note on my Dry Erase board that reads,
fools rush in.
But just before the rush deadline, Hannah asks me to sign up with her, and I cave. I resolve to rush but ab-solutely not pledge, a choice that will later invoke the old AA id-iom, “If you hang out in a barber shop, sooner or later, you’re bound to get a haircut.” I figure the registration fee costs little more than two house parties, and a week of waxing sap to

Greek freaks will, at the very least, give me something to do.

I am immediately disappointed to discover that “rush parties” aren’t really parties at all. Whereas boys rushing fraternities lounge on black leather couches, watching televised sports

and chugging beer with the brothers, girls rushing sororities are subject to much stricter rules. For starters, we are not allowed to drink at all during rush: not in the bars, not in our dorms, and certainly not in the sorority houses. Forget about accepting a cold drink; we are not allowed to accept even the most trivial items from sisters. The Panhellenic Council interprets a tissue or a spare tampon—any exchange at all—as a bribe.

Our parties are like job interviews. I have a “rush group,” a herd of thirty girls with whom I shuttle from house to house, as we are required to spend thirty minutes at each of the fourteen sororities. I tour each house’s succession of bedrooms, the neat little beds lined up like those of Snow White’s dwarves, and du-tifully whisper “Wow.” I am introduced to sisters dressed in cashmere sweater sets who peek at the label of my coat when they help me out of it. I sit with them on taupe-colored section-als, and have odd little staring matches like the ones I used to have with my sister to see who could last the longest without blinking. They grill me about my major, my hometown, and my

G.P.A. One girl has the gall to ask me what my father does for a living, and I wish I had the conviction to tell her to fuck off, but I don’t, so I shyly tell her about his business.

The funny thing is, rush is one of the most legitimate experiences I’ll have in college, in spite of its out-and-out bogusness. For a lot of college girls, it is our most honest—not to mention our most sober—attempt at self-definition. Rush is predicated upon classification. At every house, girls line up on a staircase, clapping out harebrained rhymes, totally confident, totally con-vinced that

They’re the Alpha Phis, they’re the best in the land, And we’ll see them wherever we go.

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From the Golden Gate to the Empire State, they’ll be wearing silver and bordeaux.

These are girls who are, at least in one respect, pretty damn sure of their place in the world.

College is all about compartmentalization. The university it-self is divided into graduate and undergraduate, subdivided by liberal arts and science, and then split into professional schools and divvied up by departments. As a student, you lose track of how many times people ask you, “What’s your major?” or “What are your career goals?” Not just academic advisers, but other students, even some friends. Everyone wants to know
what
you
are,
followed by
what
you want to
be.
You learn to re-fer to yourself by taxonomy, by major and minor:
communica-tions journalism.