Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (36 page)

When he crosses the room to hug me, the moment is crush-ingly brief. After he steps back from the embrace, he is gone to his friends, who are sardined in a booth pouring beer pitchers and igniting napkins with cigarette lighters. I fall back into the same routine of waiting. I hole up on a bar stool, drinking rum and watching the bartender knot a cherry stem in his mouth, us-ing only his tongue.

So much time passes while I’m waiting for Chris that my drunkenness burns off. By the time we make it back to the couch in my apartment, I am experiencing the same old hesita-tion. I sit a good foot away from him, with my hands crossed in my lap, until he grabs me by one elbow and pulls me next to him. When we kiss, it is not as easy as I remembered it. Instead, our mouths are timid and halting.

In the black space of my bedroom, Chris asks, “What do you want to do?”

When I say “Everything,” the space between his eyebrows

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seams, as though he doesn’t understand where the word is com-ing from. He wants to know why—after two years of passing out in his arms or recoiling from the closeness—I have the sud-den desire to do everything. And in the moment, it is too hard to explain that my expectations for sex, which I waited and waited for, have been lessened by the boyfriend whom I did not love and by not knowing what happened with Skip. I can’t tell him that sometime during the past two years, the idea lost its glitter and became a drill, a procedure to get through.

Everything
is fumbling and uncomfortable. But in a back-

ward way, I like the awkwardness. There is a shy tenderness to it that is different from the other nights I’ve spent with Chris, when alcohol made our bodies too eager and unfeeling for doubt. It occurs to me that he isn’t drunk, either, and the few moments before I nod off to sleep feel like a breakthrough.

I don’t know he’ll be gone in the morning. I don’t know it will be six months before he writes to me again.

I am still
mourning Chris’s disappearance on New Year’s Eve. Vanessa and I forgo invites to the Harvard Club to stay in our re-spective hometowns and go to parties with people we knew in high school. I am at a party that’s being thrown by a girl who was my best friend for six months in fifth grade, when we would play dress up in clip-on earrings and Lycra miniskirts and apply mas-cara to our eyelashes in goopy coats.

Words can’t describe how heinous the scene is. All the snot-nosed ex–student council members have put on their best grown-up faces. They are clustered in the living room, in front of card tables stacked high with saucers of coconut-crab dip and plates of mini-quiche. Our gracious hostess asked everyone to bring
two
bottles of wine and
two
trays of hors d’oeuvres, and the resulting

bounty looks like the Last Supper. The boys are discussing what-ever postgraduation jobs they’ve lined up at American Express or General Electric, and the girls are yapping about their secrets for getting their anchovy puffs perfectly puffy.

I am in the kitchen, slumped against the counter with the stoners, who still strike me as having more conviction than I do. I come to find out the boy I had a crush on in high school has been hopping freight trains for a year, stopping only long enough to find work harvesting avocados or alfalfa in order to finance a trip to someplace else. A girl I passed out next to on a coat bed last year tells me she’s moved from Chardonnay to cocaine as ca-sually as if she were telling me she’d transferred colleges.

Through all this, I am standing at the kitchen table mixing my hundredth glass of cranberry juice and Malibu rum. I brought the bottle, which is an opaque white color, so I can’t chart how much of it I’ve poured.

It was a Christmas gift from my parents. My dad had asked me if I wanted anything before his holiday liquor-store run, which was when he bought enough wine to keep the relatives too paddled to bicker during Christmas dinner. I’d told him “Malibu,” which I loved for its artificial coconut flavoring. I’d opened it on Christmas morning; it was wrapped up among the usual boxes of winter sweaters (to keep warm) and books (to keep smart). My parents gave it to me because I was newly twenty-one. My dad had joked with me about the bottle’s utter girliness. It looked like a bottle of sunscreen, he said, with its picture of twin palm trees in front of a half-set Caribbean sun. I am drinking Malibu as hard as I did that night in high school when I had my stomach pumped. I’ve had five years of boozing experience since then, so I ought to know better. By now, I should know that you have to give each viscous glass a

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few minutes to absorb before you pour yourself another, that you can’t expect to immediately feel all mops and brooms. But I do. I am deeply frustrated by the fact that all the Malibu I am sipping isn’t having any effect on me. I feel like I’m trying to evoke a genie; I’m rubbing the bottle ’til my palms start to burn, but I can’t stir up the sensation of drunken comfort. That hot flush of confidence stays plugged up inside me.

Later, I’ll wonder if my childhood friends have always awak-ened my wholehearted desire to be comatose. I can feel the Yalies in the living room eyeing me as they molest bowls of bean dip. A girl whose name I can’t remember studies my haltered pantsuit and describes it in two mouthed syllables that I can make out from clear across the room:
Uh-gly.
An ex–English teacher’s daughter tumbles over to give me a hug, and to apolo—

gize for that time in high school when she wrote
koren is a ho-

bag slut
on the wall of the locker room. I feel that if I were wasted immediately, it still wouldn’t be soon enough.

Drunkenness doesn’t creep up on me softly; it comes up be-hind me and shoves. When I look up from my glass, it’s midnight already. The TV is all snow, and our countdown lacks any de-gree of precision;
2002
begins when some tin-hatted jock howls “Happy New Year.” I have funhouse-mirror vision, in which people look like squiggly lines. Their features bulge outward or cave inward, depending on the angle from which I look at them. Party hats are hitting the ceiling. Boys are lifting girls up by their waists. People are making moves to hug me.

He appears behind me when someone switches on the stereo. He is the hostess’s brother: older by a few years and handsome, if you like that type. I suspect he is very drunk, too, but I am at the vanishing point where I can’t gauge how far gone anyone else is. In ten years, he has never breathed a word to me, unless

you count a ski trip I took with his family when I was ten, when he leaned over during dinner to tell me that my sweater, which was stitched with yarn-haired horses, was
gay.
I’m confused by the fact that he has now pulled me into him. I have no clue why he is trying to dance with me with both hands cupped tight around the contours of my ass.

I don’t want to dance, for two reasons. First off, I feel woozy. Odds are my head is wobbling around on my neck, the way Vanessa always tells me it does when I am a real wreck—
bobble-headed,
she calls it, after the sports figurines with spring necks that make their heads wiggle and nod. Second, every time this boy tries to pull me close to shimmy and shake, the Yalies shit themselves laughing. Even half shot, I am aware of people judg-ing me. I won’t be humiliated.

And so it goes like this: I start to break away, and he grabs me by one hand and snaps me back into him like a yo-yo. In my head, it looks choreographed that way, like salsa dancing, like the moment the woman turns away from her partner and then spins, toplike, into his chest. But I know, fucked up as I am, it can’t possibly look that civil or smooth.

Later, friends will tell me that I wobbled up to them repeat-edly to say, “Please rescue me” or “Please make him leave me alone.” But they also say that the moment he scuttled up behind me and caught me around the waist, I collapsed in his arms and seemed more than content to let him kiss me. I never had a chance. Even my girlfriends, God love them, thought like date rapists. They thought I said no and meant yes.

The next
thing I know, I am lying on his daybed. In retrospect, I’ll know it’s almost morning because the room has a weird light

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about it. Sun must be coming in through the pores of the red curtains, and as a result, everything looks dark and orange, the way I imagine things must look in the womb. The light makes me think of the album art on Nirvana’s
In Utero,
the anatomic illus-tration of a winged woman, looking wide open with arms out-stretched.

I’m naked, even though I don’t want to be. I let my halter suit slide off the bed because he promises that I won’t have to do anything. Without clothes on, my body feels cold and snaillike. It always feels this way when I’m drunk. The sensation of bare-ness usually sobers me right up. Usually, it’s like a cold shower that sets me turning over bedspreads to find my underthings. Tonight, though, I can’t feel nakedness anywhere near that intensely. In fact, as time passes, I can’t really feel anything at all. It’s like my body just dissolves below my neck. My body parts seem to exist independent of each other, like there’s nothing stringing them together. I, as a person, don’t seem to exist any—

more. I feel like a car that’s been scrapped for parts.

They are parts I am only aware of when the boy taps at them, first with his fingers, like a metal pointer, and later with the half-slack slug of his dick. I’m just lying there, thinking about that sketch on the Nirvana cover. I know I’m saying, “No, I really don’t want to,” and trying to say, “You said we didn’t have to,” though it only comes out “You said, you said,” the way a kid reminds you that you said she could have an ice-cream sundae after some boring errand, like a trip to the furniture store.

But for everything I say, I can’t physically unload him from his space on top of me. Tonight, my drunkenness is heavy. I feel as though I am lying under the lead apron the dental hygienist pulls over me every time she photographs my wisdom teeth. All

I can do is implore him to dig a condom out of the nightstand drawer, and then lie quietly for a few more minutes before getting up to put on my clothes.

Standing up is not an improvement. All those syrupy glasses of Malibu have transformed the approaching hangover into something like an insulin crash. It’s not the usual headache I feel, which is a low, aching pain behind my forehead. No, this is a sharp, light-headed pain, like the one you would get after hanging your head between your knees for twenty minutes, and then suddenly sitting up. I almost can’t make it down the two flights of stairs to my car, which has taken it upon itself to change location during the night. My knees give out and my ears buzz, and I’d probably sit down to take a rest were the boy not walking with me.

When I sink into the driver’s seat, he says the words that will stick with me. It’s an apology that will be there every time I wonder if I really was wronged, if maybe I was too dazed to remember things accurately. Before I turn the key in the ignition, he leans down to kiss me on the cheek. And to say, “Sorry about the whole sex thing.”

At home, I lie in bed, facedown, and my skin feels prickly. I can’t let myself feel abused. He was drunk, which makes him less blameworthy; and I was drunk, which makes me more so. I don’t need anyone to explain this equation to me. I just know it, the same way that people just know how to grieve. My stomach bucks. My head thwacks. In its hangover, my body reminds me that I am at fault.

Back at school,
it is a particularly brutal winter. The snow is so continual that we can’t help but feel like the sky is pushing in on us. Sometimes it flutters down so hard that the clouds buckle

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and split open with lightning. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the snowbanks from the slush-colored sky.

There are reminders everywhere that the end is near. On TV, car commercials are set to the tune of “Pomp and Circum-stance.” The campus bulletin boards are all pinned with flyers auctioning off extra tickets for commencement. And instead of making my great escape feel more imminent, it only makes my jaw lock up in a panic attack.

I can’t believe I am about to graduate, and that isn’t yearbook rhetoric. I don’t mean it in the wistful
where-has-the-time-gone
sort of way. I literally mean that I don’t think I am going to ful-fill the requirements that are compulsory to earn my bachelor’s degree. Even on the day a woman draws a tape measure around the crown of my head to fit my mortarboard cap (broadcasting an impossible girth of twenty-three and a half inches), I have to go home and reexamine the registrar’s letter that I’ve taped to my refrigerator. It is the semesterly memo we have all come to live by, which keeps an ongoing countdown of requirements: one more foreign-language class, one intensive writing, two more natural science and mathematics. Only this time, on the line for remaining credits, the office staff had drawn a flat, blank-faced “zero.” That zero has the gravitational field of a black hole; in a matter of weeks it will be the plug pulled out of my cosmic bath-tub drain; it will suck down life-as-I-know-it.

In the months after New Year’s, I have been blinking drunk almost every night. I no longer know whether I’m drinking to generate new stories or to forget old ones. And in a way, it doesn’t even matter; the quality of my drinking is that dreary. It has all the daily excitement of cooking spaghetti or washing my face.

If ever the slogan “I drink, therefore I am” was applicable, it is to describe me now. I drink because I always drink. I drink to feel

the liquor vapor clear out my sinuses, or to hear the smoothed-over sound of my own voice. These have become the sensations that convince me I’m still here. I drink now for the dullness of it. There’s no passion or exhilaration left. Taking a shot of vodka is like kissing a lover I’ve touched lips with for seven straight years.