Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2 page)

ities that people call
feminine.

Girls don’t drink in the name of women’s liberation, for the sake of proving we can go drink for drink with the boys. We don’t drink to affirm we are “sassy” or “self-confident,” which newsweeklies have lately suggested. Nor is our drinking a manifestation of “girl power” or “gender freedom” or any of the other phrases so many sociologists interchange with happiness. On the contrary, most every girl I’ve known drank as an expression of her
unhappiness.
I too drank in no small part because I felt shamed, self-conscious, and small.

To me, it is no surprise that underage drinking has spiked, given the fact that so much of it is dismissed as experimentation or life-stage behavior. Parents tend to brand alcohol abuse as the lesser evil, as a phase that is far less actionable than drug abuse. As a drinking girl, especially a college-aged girl, I assigned happy hours and the subsequent hangovers to behavior that was expected of those my age. I believed the people who romanti-cized those years, the ones who told me to embrace irresponsi-bility before I was slapped with the burdens of corporate adulthood.

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For many girls, alcohol abuse may be a stage that tapers off after the quarter-life mark. Many will be spared arrests, acci-dents, alcoholism, overdoses, and sexual assaults. A whole lot of them will have close calls, incidents they will recount with self-mocking at dinner parties some fifteen years later. Some of them will have darker stories, memories or half memories or full-out blackouts, that they will store in the farthest corners of their mental histories and never disclose to their families or lovers. But I fear that women, even those women who escape the physical consequences of drinking, won’t escape the emotional ones. I fear some sliver of panic, sadness, or self-loathing will always stay with us.

I have
always loved Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Grown-Up,” which speaks of a girl who stands bravely before the world’s fear and grace. We’re assured she “endured it all: bore up un-der
the swift-as-fl the fl the far-gone,
the inconceiv-ably vast, the still-to-learn, / serenely as a woman carrying water moves with a full jug.” I could recite that poem in my sleep, and yet I recognize that I have never been that girl. Instead of shoul-dering adulthood with all my young courage and strength, I dropped it after the first impossible hoist, when it all felt too un-manageable. I wrote life off as heavy cargo, and accepted it could only be mastered by masterful men. I was a coward. I grasped on to alcohol, which was the first available escape.

Nine years after I took my first drink, it occurs to me that I haven’t grown up. I am missing so much of the equipment that adults should have, like the ability to sustain eye contact without flinching or letting my gaze roll slantwise to the floor. At this point in time, I should be able to hear my own unwavering voice rise in public without feeling my heart flutter like it’s trying to

take flight. I should be able to locate a point of conversation with the people I deeply long to know as my friends, like my mem-oirist neighbor or the woman in my reading group who carries the same tattered paperbacks that I do and wears the same foot-less tights. I should be able to stop self-censoring and smile when I feel like it. I should recognize happiness when I feel it expand in my gut.

Some of the most interesting research findings in substance abuse involve women who began drinking regularly in their preteens. Clinicians report some of these women, who seek treatment for alcoholism in their mid-to late twenties, not only look younger, but act younger, too. Some turn up at clinics wearing kids’ clothing and cradling teddy bears. Some still play the way children do, by twirling hula hoops and blowing bub-bles. When faced with conflict, they just totter away. It seems some women’s emotional development arrests as a result of alcohol. They stall at the age they were when they had their first drinks.

While this manifestation is extreme, it hits close to home.

As a twenty-three-year-old, I am mistaken daily for nineteen (seventeen if my hair is pulled into a ponytail and fifteen if I’m wearing Converse sneakers). Too many days, people make me aware of my own childishness. I am aware that the clerk behind the counter calls me miss instead of ma’am, telemarketers still ask to speak to my parents, and after years of financial independence, every handyman who turns up at my apartment still makes a snide remark about “Daddy paying my rent.” I am aware that the fourteen-year-old girl I tutor in English is a head taller than I am; and while I craft arguments that burn my cheeks because I never spit them out, she extends her opinions even when they aren’t complete. I am aware that somewhere

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along the line, I’ve subconsciously turned down the pitch of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don’t feel like I am using my full voice.

I might
have waited to quit drinking. I might have kept abus-ing alcohol for at least five more years at the pace I was moving. I might have waited for alcoholism to fall like an ax. Or I might have tried my best to “drink responsibly,” even though setting responsible limits is complicated by my physical smallness; plus the sheer fact that I’m female means the same amount of alcohol affects me differently every time.

In the end, I quit drinking because I didn’t want to waste any more time picking up the pieces. I decided
smashed,
when it’s used as a synonym for drunk, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I stopped drinking, I never experienced the high-on- life sensation that so many people say consumes them like the Holy Spirit in their first months of abstinence. I never felt the buzz that people report feeling once they discover they can thrive without alcohol, once they dust off their sober faculties and realize everything still works. Abstinence did not help me rediscover the world with childlike awe. I never felt inspired by the simplicity of nature, by the dependability of sunup, or spring’s yawning blossoms.

I didn’t feel the ecstasy of returning to a life that was unal-tered by alcohol because no such life ever existed for me. For nearly a decade, alcohol was the mold that shaped me. Once it lifted, I felt the immediate terror of having no framework. Without drinking, there was nothing to structure my weekends, my relationships, or my self-image. I felt my confidence cave in on itself.

For me, abstinence has been nothing but growing pains. It

has meant starting from scratch, reliving my awkward phase, and learning all over again what it means to be adult. It’s meant I will act like less of an asshole, but
feel
much more like one. It’s meant learning that drinking will always be more socially ac-ceptable than abstaining. It’s meant discovering I am more cau-tious and introspective than I ever allowed myself to be, and I will never again dance in public, which is probably preferable. After a decade of alcohol abuse, I find myself going back over the chronology, trying to pinpoint when I might have averted it. Mentally, I go back to my university, to the row of bars that is located just across from the health center and wonder if anything could have led me to the south side of the street, to tell my story to a man with a notepad instead of a man with a bar rag, to switch counselors. I remember the first kiss that tasted like sweet malt and then the subsequent ones, the boys whose breath held the must of wine or the ethanol of whiskey, and I wonder would my story have turned out differently if boys had played no part in it? I go back to the bite of my first drink and wonder, what if I had been sixteen or eighteen instead of fourteen?

Would age have lessened my attachment?

I apply all the questions to my story that the experts employ: I wonder, What if I’d never seen an alcohol ad? What if there were no glistening bottles and bodies to catch my attention between the pages of magazines or on freeway billboards? I wonder what if the legal drinking age was eighteen? I ask myself whether any legislation might have made my drinking moderate.

My story has no real turning point. There is no critical mo-ment that might have changed my whole narrative. My alcohol abuse, like the issue of all underage alcohol abuse, has its roots in more than one factor. Just as drinking pervades our culture, it diffused into my personality. I grew into my abuse, like the oc-

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Preface

casional tree you can find on a nature walk, its roots spilling over both sides of a boulder like outspread fingers, in spite of the rock’s lack of soil, moisture, and stability. To see it only at the height of its maturity is to wonder, Why build on that?

My alcohol abuse was a seed that fell at just the right time, in just the right place, when all the conditions were just right to nurture it. To understand the outgrowth, I have to go back to the first bottle that fell out of the liquor chest and into my ready hands. I have to go back to the beginning.

To this day
, I can’t remember when I had my first kiss. I can’t tell you how old I was, if it was a moment in May, if I closed my eyes or left them open. The memory is long gone. My mind tossed it out with the bathwater of experience, with TV and takeout and chitchat, the brief intervals of time that simply never soaked in. That kiss, though historical, was in no way historic. It was a tree that fell in the forest. And I didn’t make a sound.

I remember other firsts shallowly, like the type of big Broad-way plays where the scenery is more moving than the spectacle. Today, any emotion that was evoked by those rites escapes me. I can only recall in detail the rows of white chiffon on my First Communion dress, or the torn vinyl seats of the school bus on

my first day of school. I can’t remember the trauma of my first period, or the year (was it sixth grade or seventh?), but I know that I told my mother about it in the front yard, where she was watering the hydrangea tree with a green rubber hose. The memory of the first time I drove the family Ford has been re-duced to a vacant parking lot. My first sex has the solid darkness of its windowless room.

But like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.

The exact date is June
17, 1994
. I am fourteen, which is the

norm these days, when the mean age of the first drink for girls is less than thirteen years old.* I am a few days shy of my eighth-grade graduation. Summer vacation looms close, and just be-yond it, regional high school. In the interim is public school mania, a collective chaos brought on by high temperatures and lettered report cards, when even teachers slam closed
The Meta-morphosis
and let classes out ahead of the bell.

It’s Friday and I’m spending the weekend at Natalie Burke’s summer cottage on Lake Pleasant, which in my mind has the exoticism of St. Bart’s. The cottage is small, a single-story, but we move around it as we please because Mr. and Mrs. Burke often work well into prime time. Its rooms bulge with wicker furniture, wind chimes, Bonsai trees in clay pots, framed star-fish on the walls, a thick shag carpet that always smells like sunscreen, and a china cabinet stacked with party napkins and Thai cookbooks, Natalie’s old
Cosmopolitan
s, and her parents’ old
Vanity Fair
s. A string of white lights on the deck, which are left to sway in the wind year-round, are a continual re-

*Devon Jersild,
Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman’s Life,
96
.

4
INITIATION
|
First Taste

minder of the indefinite nature of our holiday. All in all, there is nothing to encourage us that the rules of our ordinary lives apply here.

It is another afternoon of Natalie and me alone, together. We spend it sunbathing on the roof and swimming unsupervised. Natalie’s parents forbid us to do both, but we can’t be bothered with cautionary tales while the sun is still high and motorboats skid viscously past the end of the dock.

It is seven o’clock when we towel off. A few months ago, it would have been twilight. But, since it’s summer, the sky hasn’t darkened past pale pink. Through the sliding glass door, the sun looks defiant. It sits bloated and orange above the lake’s public beach, like another inflatable ball kids forgot in the reeds when they left for the day.

I am standing Speedo-ed in the kitchen, sliding an elastic strap down over one shoulder and examining a faint tan line. The baby oil Natalie made me rub on instead of sunscreen has left my skin feeling buttery and somehow sexy, like it’s a waste that no one will touch it but me. Still, I haven’t browned past the color Natalie calls “Bisque,” after a tin of loose powder in her makeup chest. Bisque is a winter color, she says. I should sun myself until I can wear the same color she does—Toast—which is a warm tan she tops with Raspberry Jam blush. I tell her the oil didn’t work; I’m as Bisque as ever.

I am talking too loud because my ears are stopped up from a violent plunge off the end of the dock. Water is dripping down the tips of my hair and splattering the kitchen tiles where Natalie is crouched over an open cabinet like someone searching for a spare deck of playing cards.

Only she comes up with a bottle.

• • •

The way
the sun is dawdling on the horizon has me feeling ex-posed. Pink light is filtering in through the skylight and screen doors, and the kitchen is lit up like an aquarium we are moving around in, on display.

Across the yard, I can make out Natalie’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. McCree. I wonder if she can see us from where she is tipping a copper watering can into her window boxes. If she spots Natalie rooting around in the liquor chest, she’ll surely tell the Burkes, the same way she did last summer, when she watched us etch our initials into the trunk of a property-line birch tree. I know enough to walk to the windows and pull the green ging-ham curtains closed.

I am waiting for Natalie to say something.