When Natalie twists off the black plastic cap and hands the bottle to me, I take it as part of an implicit equation about how drinking dovetails people. The Burkes’ parties have taught me how alcohol steadies strained social conditions. Summers before, in this house, a few rocks in lowball glasses seemed to balance impossible elements, people with disparate ideas and temperaments: A personal injury lawyer would pitch horseshoes with a soccer mom; the newspaper editor would scrape hot dogs off the grill and trade stock tips with a recent college grad; a substitute teacher would dance with the police chief, shimmying her colossal hips and letting him spin her in close.
I think this bottle might level the differences between Natalie and me, too. As junior high slides into high school, I can see us becoming less compatible best friends. She laughs more, and I’ve become quieter and more reluctant to speak. As her emotions become more transparent, mine become more opaque. When Natalie’s aunt photographs our auras, the pictures reveal Natalie’s persona as a swollen, orange puff and mine as a patch of brown haze.
Our time together is starting to feel precariously off-kilter, like a scale tipped in her favor. I’m hoping this bottle can make us flush for a while, the way my science teacher once used a vacuum to make a feather and a quarter fall three feet in the same amount of time.
I’m glad for Natalie’s choice of bottle. I like the color—like iced tea—and the name, Southern Comfort, which makes me think of warm apple pie. It sounds like something you’d find folded in a red and white napkin and set out to cool on a windowsill.
I have reservations about the label. The very top of it is printed with the words ESTABLISHED 1874. The year makes it pretty darn elderly, and makes me feel extra guilty for touching 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 intended 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 southern plantation as grand as the one in Gone With the Wind. I’ve always 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 grandfather would drink.
It smells sweet and spicy, like the hot apple cider my mother sometimes serves at Christmas, and I drink deeply before I realize 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 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 resent her, and she knew a few shots could chip away at my disloyalty.
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 dimpled 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 simply leaves us alone. It’s summer, after all. We have a Ping-Pong table, Sega Genesis, Slip N’ Slides, a basketball hoop, MTV, a giant 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 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 i
s 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 characteristically weak, I envy the fact that boyhood’s rules are consistent. 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. We are passing the bottle at the same time and for the same reason 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 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 expressionless. 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 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 forthcoming 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 began to withdraw? My CD changer plays only songs about dejection, “Creep” and “Loser” and “Losing My Religion.” Even my outfits look confused: fishnet 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 sexuality, 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 finally over. I didn’t find it in my monthly period, which has often 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.
It only makes sense for the sacra to be the bottle. Natalie awarded it to me, and I awarded it to Laurel, and it marks our new status as drinkers.
AFTER WE finish both bottles, I rinse them out in the guest bathroom because the birthday girl doesn’t want the garbage to smell like booze.
The girls who are tipsy go outside to topple down the Slip N’ Slide. The ones who aren’t walk home to raid their refrigerators for beer. Natalie plays video games because she’s decided not to speak to me; I’m not sure what that means for my plans to sleep over later.
I pull open the sliding glass door and step out into the backyard.
I’m alone outside. The sky is dark, the steely dark of e
arly summer, not the blind dark of winter. Through it, I can see gnats rising and falling in the porch lights. Crickets sing. Far off, a few girls are chasing each other through the spiny stretch of orchard that spreads off the backyard.
For once, I don’t mind being all alone in public. Usually, I’d be frightened of what solitude might say about me. I’d worry that someone would trot up the walkway, see me sitting in the crabgrass, and assume that no one likes me enough to want to sit with me. Tonight, though, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I watch the road for girls coming back with cans of beer. When no one comes, I lie on my back and stare at the slab of gray sky.
I don’t know what being drunk feels like, but I don’t think I am. I can walk straight. I can see straight. And for the first time in a long time, I can think straight. I am not exerting mental energy, trying to decide whether my mother is lying when she tells me I’m pretty. I am not thinking about a conversation I had two days ago, and rolling my eyes because I said something stupid.
I am not thinking about anything. My knees are bent in such a way that I can make out patterns of freckles on my thighs. My hair is fanned out under me. The air has the smell that fabric softener companies are always trying to capture—the breeze smells like fruit trees.
The word finally occurs to me: I am comfortable.
I close my eyes.
When I open them, Eric Ostrau is tickling my ear with a stray oak leaf.
Eric’s father runs a snow-removal company that clears our driveway during heavy snowstorms. During blizzards, I meditate by my bedroom window, waiting for the groan of the plow against the asphalt and a glimpse of Eric’s red baseball cap in its passenger seat.
Eric always wears a red baseball cap, although once in a celestial moment, he’ll take it off by the brim and pet his own head as though its blond bristles are the softest things he’s ever felt. There’s no overestimating how badly I want to touch them myself and confirm it.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 3
