Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (4 page)

it. Growing up, my mom always taught me not to touch other people’s relics on the basis that old things are irreplaceable. The fact that this bottle looks antique reminds me that it is not in-tended to be handled by me.

Southern Comfort is
106
years my senior, and it shows. The

lettering on the bottle looks like it’s straight off an Old West flyer or the gag
wanted
posters they print in the photo booth at the mall. Beneath them is a black and white drawing of a south—

ern plantation as grand as the one in
Gone With the Wind.
I’ve al-ways imagined my first drink would be from the bottle in the liquor ads that picture a man hoisting a giggling blonde onto his shoulders. Southern Comfort looks like something my grandfa-ther would drink.

It smells sweet and spicy, like the hot apple cider my mother sometimes serves at Christmas, and I drink deeply before I real-ize what a terrible first drink it is. On my tongue, the flavor is completely foreign, a revolting combination of black licorice and antiseptic. I swallow it like a carnival freak swallows fire and can feel it glow red in my throat.

Natalie looks glad.

She says, “That wasn’t bad, right?” I lie and say, “Right.”

I’m still shuddering. I can feel the shot not in my stomach, as

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I had imagined, but lodged in my chest like a flickering ember. Its soft heat radiates in waves down my drowsy arms.

Natalie is
tender afterward, the way I imagined she’d be. She lets me choose the radio station while we change for the party in her bedroom, and she doesn’t breathe a word of criticism when I let the dial rest on the golden oldies station.

The liquor has made me feel sleepy, but not drunk.

Natalie falls face-first onto her bed and says she feels the same way.

I can tell the afternoon has been cathartic for her, too. We have bonded in a way that only people who have experienced tension can. I feel a conjunction with her. It’s the same sensation of closeness that I feel with the family dentist after I’ve spent forty minutes in his chair, getting a cavity filled. I feel grateful to her even though she has made me uncomfortable, maybe even
because
she has made me uncomfortable. It’s as though she brought out that bottle because she sensed I was starting to re-sent her, and she knew a few shots could chip away at my dis-loyalty.

Even though I’m grateful, I sense Natalie has also taken away a piece of me, the pure part that used to order Shirley Temples with dinner because my parents’ friends thought that was dim-pled and darling, like tap dancing with “Bojangles” Robinson. Still, the loss is worth it because I have won Natalie’s respect. I can tell she is proud of me for enduring the burn of the liquor and the risk of getting caught. Her esteem is worth every sip. She lets me borrow her favorite Sonic Youth T-shirt. She squirts a bottle of tangerine musk and dances with me through the mist. Before we leave for the party, Natalie pulls two glass bottles from the recycling bin and fills them with So-Co. The bottles

still have labels from the juice company Nantucket Nectars; we carry them into the backseat of her parents’ minivan, imagining the amber fluid looks like apple juice.

Mr. Burke either doesn’t suspect or doesn’t want to suspect what we’re really drinking. Every time he hangs a corner with too much gusto, I envision the worst-case scenario: We’ll be pulled over for speeding and a shrewd cop will convict us on open-container laws. But Natalie looks confident. She even manages a few swigs while we circle the block, on the lookout for a mailbox pegged with helium balloons.

The party
is in a basement. We’re made to hide behind the sofa and yell “
Surprise.
” There is a cake, and a horror movie in the VCR. The birthday girl’s mother periodically comes downstairs with more Pepsi or plastic forks, but for the most part, she sim-ply leaves us alone. It’s summer, after all. We have a Ping-Pong table, Sega Genesis, Slip N’ Slides, a basketball hoop, MTV, a gi-ant trampoline, and the pleasure of each other’s company. If only she knew: It takes so much less to entertain us.

It doesn’t take long for word to get out that I’m holding liquor in my little glass bottle.

I make the mistake of telling Casey Schiller: flat-assed, mammoth-chested, president of the dance committee, first-rate motormouth Casey Schiller. I do it because when she waves hello to me, it’s the only thing I can think of to say. Casey tells Mary. Mary tells Vera. And Vera snatches the bottle from my hand and announces its contents to the girls who are watching an Aerosmith video and trying to pole dance like Liv Tyler around one of the basement’s cast-iron pipes.

Natalie is on the perimeter of it all, hiding her bottle behind her back. It’s clear that I’ve lost her admiration. She’s shaking

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her head in the disapproving way she always does when I’ve acted like a real shit. For the moment, I don’t even care. I put my hands on my hips and shake my head back.

Seventeen ounces of Southern Comfort is all it takes for me to make new friends. It is all I had to offer to the goddesses of my idolatry: the student council president, the captains of the girls’ softball team, the girls voted “most daring” and “most talkative” in the junior-high yearbook. I give it up gladly.

I’d like to think I want to share because it means I have to drink less, but the truth is I like the attention. Now that they know I drink, girls invite me to their houses; they reach for

happy birthday
napkins to write down their phone numbers. In

a matter of minutes, everyone has gathered around me like I am the one about to blow out the birthday candles. Every girl wants a sip. You’d think I’d bottled the cure for menstruation, the way they line up for a swig and close their eyes while they knock it back.

It is a moment that reminds me of an ad for sparkling wine I saw once in a magazine. The ad pictured three women dressed in sleek black sheaths, all laughing and gasping at their own wickedness. Below them was the slogan, “When it’s just you and the girls without all the men, drink it in, drink it in, drink it in.” For the time being, it is always just us girls. We have our own gym class, our own choral group, and our own corner in the cafeteria. The occasional coed functions, mostly birthday parties or school dances, are self-segregated. The boys stake out a space that is separate from the girls’ section. And even as we shoot them smiles and slow glances from the girls’ side, we don’t dare cross the border without a good excuse. In junior high, a wayward Frisbee is fine justification; some girls toss them into the boys’ camp and blame poor depth perception. In high

school, being drunk will be reason enough; girls will pitch themselves onto the boys’ side under the guise of looking for a keg, and when they brush up against the school quarterback, they’ll still blame bad aim.

Tonight, all the boys at the party are outside on the driveway, charging the basketball hoop with the wholehearted thrill of competition, half of them stripped of their shirts, mouths hinged open in concentration. I hate the boys the same way I hate them in algebra class, when they practically crawl out of their skins if they think they know the answer to whatever problem the teacher scrawls on the blackboard. They understand competition and anger in a way that girls don’t. They take pleasure in fouling one another. They get to enjoy the rush of air on their naked chests.

More than that, they seem to understand who they are and who they’re supposed to be. The only commandment that boys seem to live by is “Thou shalt be strong to the point of being cocky.” That means pedaling their bikes toward three-foot-tall ramps without fearing broken ribs. It means taking a sucker punch without squealing. It means knowing how to change tires, drive nails, throw spirals, and unhook girls’ bras without looking.

And while I don’t think I’d be any good at being a boy, given the fact that I am constantly afraid, constantly crying, and char-acteristically weak, I envy the fact that boyhood’s rules are con-sistent. Being male is not a mess of contradictions, the way being female is. It is not trying to resolve how to be both desirable and smart, soft and sturdy, emotional and capable.

It seems boys come off the assembly line finished, and we’re the ones left wanting. We are huddling in the basement’s dank impasse, alternately sipping So-Co and applying berry lip gloss.

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We are passing the bottle at the same time and for the same rea-son that we pass compact mirrors. We are trying to master what our mothers have taught us about looking “put together.”

Each girl
swoops in eagerly when it is her turn, “drinking it in” by locking her pink nails around the bottleneck and jacking it to her lips. I get the impression that most of them have done it before, which is probably an accurate observation, as experts say half of all eighth graders have tried alcohol.* Many times, when the bottle is passed from girl to girl, there are multiple hands on it at once, the way women at weddings claw to catch the bride’s bouquet.

But there are a few girls who hold back, ones who ask what the bottle is filled with and where we got it.

There is one in particular, Laurel. When we were ten, she formed a club to save the Florida manatees, and I passed many Sunday afternoons at her house with the other fourth-grade girls, covering my eyes while we watched videos of blubbery, gray beasts being chopped up by motorboats.

Laurel’s older sister died when we were in the sixth grade. The newspaper said she fell into a ravine near her liberal-arts college, but we all knew she jumped. That was when we stopped writing letters to the Florida Coast Guard. Her house was filled with the white noise of sadness, and the Manatee Club stopped going there because we didn’t know what to say.

Today, she creeps toward the bottle slowly and asks what it tastes like.

After a dozen girls’ gulps the bottle is nearly empty. There is

*The
2003
National Youth and Anti-Drug Media Campaign.

less than one brown inch of liquid left, but I hand it over to her anyway.

“Try it,” I say. “If you want, you can hold your nose.” I pinch my nostrils closed between my thumb and my pointer finger, the way Natalie had showed me earlier. Doing this seems to help stop the sting of the liquor in the walls of my throat. I tell her, “Try to throw it down without even swallowing. Don’t even let it touch your tongue.”

She does. Good little Laurel pinches her nose and swallows a shot like it’s cherry-flavored cough syrup. For a second, her eyes go watery and her cheeks pucker. I’m almost certain it’s her first drink.

“That wasn’t bad, right?” I know I’m mimicking Natalie, but I do it anyway.

Laurel’s shoulders shiver. She says, “Right.”

It occurs to me that in a matter of hours, I’ve gone from pupil to mentor. I feel a twinge of guilt for robbing Laurel of this last bit of innocence. At fourteen, her face already fringes on expres-sionless. Her ice-blue eyes look still and empty, and her jaw has a locked look about it. Like someone who is accustomed to silence, Laurel startles easily. I think I might have been wrong to teach her how to drink, given that she already seems too knowing.

But I look at her again, when she is across the room, pink-cheeked and grinning as she passes the bottle off to Liz Bacon, and change my mind. She looks happy nose-pinching and whiskey-sipping. I think,
It was only a matter of time until she took her first drink.

The girls who are clumped in the basement’s concrete corner are deeply involved in the ways in which the others drink. As one girl sips, the rest urge her to drink more or drink faster. Margo Thomas even holds the bottle while Darla Locke takes a

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pull from it. Margo tips it into her mouth in a way that looks ritualistic, like a priest doling out Communion wine.

We’ve been studying rituals in social studies class because our teacher Mr. Booth thinks it will shed some light on our forth-coming graduation ceremony. Mr. Booth says most initiation ceremonies take place in three parts. First, the initiate withdraws. Usually, she’s sent away from her family and her village, which represent her old life, as a child. Next, she lives a life of solitude and confusion, in which she has to fend for herself. Then, after time passes, she is allowed to go home and rejoin her community as a full adult, where she is presented with what he calls the
sacra,
meaning something sacred that symbolizes her transformation. Mr. Booth says our diplomas, in a way, are our
sacra.
But I’m not so sure.

When I think about what Mr. Booth says about initiations, I think drinking might have begun for me long before Natalie handed me the bottle this afternoon. It might have been a rite I embarked on two years ago, when I first started withdrawing from my family, shutting myself in my bedroom in the hours before dinner, cutting pictures from magazines or doing nothing, lettering signs to tape on the door that read
do not disturb
. Like a girl who lives alone in the woods, haven’t I felt lost since I be—

gan to withdraw? My CD changer plays only songs about dejec-tion, “Creep” and “Loser” and “Losing My Religion.” Even my outfits look confused: fi thigh-highs under baby-doll dresses or shapeless jeans paired with my dad’s flannel shirts, which I amputate at the sleeves. My closet looks like the place where girlhood comes to battle boyhood, virginity comes to battle sex-uality, youth comes to battle womanhood. Mornings that I dress in the mirror, I can’t decide which virtue, or gender, or level of maturity is winning.

In a way, I have been waiting for something sacred to present itself. I’ve been expecting some sign to come like a lightning clap and tell me I can stop hating myself because this awkward period is fi over. I didn’t fi it in my monthly period, which has of-ten been so shameful that I have to wear a thermal shirt tied around my waist. And even though I haven’t had sex yet, I know it can’t be the sacred thing I am waiting for, either. For girls sex is seen as a fall, not a triumph. When word got out that Sara Dohart messed around with Trent Cooper in the athletics closet, he rose to the status of teen heartthrob, and she was called “Sara Blows Hard” so often her parents had to put her in private school.