Normally, with Eric standing over me, I’d pop myself upright and try to dream up something to say. But tonight, I don’t say anything. The act of drinking—and being seen drinking—has renewed my confidence. I look up at him from where I’m lying.
He asks if I feel all right.
“Why do you ask?” I know why he asks. In addition to making sure every girl in the basement knew Natalie and I brought liquor, Casey Schiller ran into a game of three-on-three and made sure the boys knew, too.
Eric kneels down next to me in the crabgrass.
“I don’t know. I got drunk at my brother’s wedding in April and I was sick the whole night.”
I prop my weight up on my elbows in a way that doesn’t just look natural, it is natural, which is a foreign feeling to me. Eric Ostrau is talking to me, and for some odd reason, I’m not hugging my own shoulders and curling into myself, like a slug being poked with a stick. I’m not fidgeting or parting the grass. I’m not even stumbling over what I’m trying to say.
I look at him over one shoulder and say, “Maybe you just couldn’t hold your liquor.”
“You really don’t want to puke?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Not a drop.”
“Well, what if I do this?”
In a brief moment he lurches forward and hoists me over one shoulder. He takes off running toward the orchard, stopping every few feet to spin in circles to dizzy me. I’m coughing and he’s laughing, and with every step I can feel his hands on my thighs, clutching tighter, trying to steady me. The blood is funneling to my head. Blades of grass are brushing past me. And then Eric trips on a root, launching us both into the dirt and fallen apples. My flip-flops sail off my feet.
As payback for the fall, Eric lets me run my hands over every last glorious inch of his head. Sure enough, the soft fleece of his hair is the best thing I’ve ever felt.
When Eric’s ride home shows up, I steal his hat. I fold it in half and tuck it into the waistband of my jean shorts without his noticing. I don’t even feel bad about it. I think Natalie will be proud of me.
THE RIDE back to the cottage drags. Natalie still isn’t talking to me, and I am trying hard to conceal a smile when Mrs. Burke glances in the rearview mirror and momentarily lets her eyes fall on me.
I’m sure I don’t look any different to her. I’m still wearing Natalie’s T-shirt over the holey cut-off jeans my mother likens to Swiss cheese. The humidity is still coiling the hair around my face. I’m just a girl, not even a high school girl yet. I’m someone who comes over to her house to occupy her daughter by baking cookies and playing checkers and staging cannonball contests off the dock.
She doesn’t know that the thing I found in her liquor cabinet has given me the capacity to be a completely different animal on the inside. Inside, I feel exotic and dangerous. I’m a cobra inside a kitty cat.
I run my hand under my shirt, over Eric’s worn, cotton cap, and know what Columbus must have felt when he washed up on the American shore. Drinking has always been, but it’s a New World to me. It’s been waiting for me to discover it.
FIRST WASTE
I THINK IT’S NO coincidence that a shot is called a shot. You throw back that little jigger of liquor with the same urgency with which a gun fires ammunition into open space. You feel the same ringing in your ears, the same kickback in your arms and chest. The first time you drink, you don’t aim to get drunk. The thrill of pulling the trigger is itself enough. If you like the crack of the rifle, you’ll be back for a second go, which is when you’ll pay attention to the crosshairs and fire enough shots to hit the mark.
After my first drink, I don’t have an opportunity for target practice. The summer before high school is a succession of middle-class time killers: ballet camp for a month, horseback-riding camp for a week, piano lessons every other day, CCD classes every third night. These are the things my mother was never allowed to do in her time, and the things I am never allowed not to do in mine.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. In grade school I begged for ballet slippers and jodhpurs. I could have spent whole afternoons at the Gym Nest, turning loops on the uneven bars. But that feels like so long ago. At fourteen, I long for unmitigated free time to spend my summers like normal kids do, watching talk shows and eating Pop-Tarts and complaining that there is nothing to do.
For now, there is too much to do. Before I know it, I’m in high school. Before I know it, I have a new bus driver and a new locker combination, and I am correcting new teachers who are butchering my name (“No, Zel-kiss”). And Natalie has convinced her parents to send her to a boarding school for the arts, despite the fact that she doesn’t act or paint or play the cello, despite the fact that she doesn’t do anything that technically qualifies as art. And I have no one to drink with, so I don’t.
August turns to September, and I realize I didn’t have a summer love. I didn’t meet a boy while I was gathering shells on Cape Cod, or while I was leaning my elbows over the railing of the ferry en route to Nantucket. My eyes never met someone else’s across a pebbled beach or a crowded room. My breath never cut short with immediate desire. The closest thing I found to a summer fling was alcohol: I was introduced to it. I loved it instantly. Then circumstance separated us.
Tasting alcohol just once is as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy just once. It feels like the time I kissed a boy in the coatroom at a wedding where he was on the bride’s side and I was on the groom’s side, and it was a sweet, singular kiss that dizzied my head and made me want to stay there among the trench coats forever. But then the cake got cut and the bouquet got chucked, and the boy’s father put on his jacket and the boy’s mother swung her purse over her shoulder, and my eyes followed him under the balloon arch and out the door, and I never saw him again.
I can’t imagine a way to rendezvous with liquor again.
ONCE A week, Natalie calls from her dorm’s pay phone to make me feel envious. She’ll tell me about a party she went to in an abandoned house, where boys strummed acoustic guitars, girls read palms, and everyone drank red wine straight from the bottle. She’ll say she was too drunk to walk the two miles home before midnight, when the dorm’s doors get locked. It was better that way, she’ll say, because a boy got locked out, too, and they slept in his car.
I listen for a long time and my cheeks burn. I say nothing.
Natalie promises to get me drunk when she comes home for winter break. But the interval seems unreasonable, and it doesn’t console me. I think, Even star-crossed Juliet got to marry Romeo and take him to bed in a single day. Likewise, I’ve been through the ceremony of my first drink. Now I am ready to consummate it by drinking faster, drinking more.
Nights, before I go to sleep, I try to imagine what being drunk feels like. I’m not sure why, but I decide the sensation must have weight. After the third or fourth drink, the drunken feeling must sneak up and pin you down. It must quiet your mind, like a lover that puts one finger to your lips, saying “Shh, baby.” It must crush you with the force of its embrace. It must bore into you, permeating your whole body, your whole soul.
I imagine all of this and my chest tightens with yearning. I can’t wait until Christmas.
EVERYONE at my new high school drinks.
In the hallway between classes, I hear rumblings about a keg party at an upperclassman’s house, or in the woods near the town quarry. I see girls drawing straws at lunch to choose a designated driver. I see one guy put another in a headlock and say, “Boy, prepare to get drunk tonight.”
I try to get myself invited.
I do it during science class, when my lab partner is turned backward in her chair, telling two girls about the cookout she’s throwing on Saturday. The theme is luau, she says. She’s going to decorate the backyard with wading pools and inflatable palm trees. She’s going to serve vodka watermelon.
I interject to say, “I love that drink.”
In the space under their desks, I
see one girl nudge another with her foot. All three of them stare at me for a stunned moment before they exhale small coughs.
That night, I find a recipe for vodka watermelon on the Internet. The instructions say to cut a hole in the top of the melon, funnel vodka inside, and let it sit for a day before you cut it into pieces so the fruit will absorb the alcohol. I read it over twice before I realize you eat the watermelon chunks, instead of drinking the juice. When I do, I want to walk outside and lie down in the street.
WITH NO friends and no chance of getting invited to a party, I try to drink alone one night in September. My parents are upstairs sleeping, and I am downstairs in the living room, mixing a mug of Kahlúa and milk and sipping it in front of Nick at Nite.
The drink tastes good and sweet. I nuke it in the microwave until it steams like hot cocoa, and it warms my whole chest as I drink it, like VapoRub. I sit in my father’s favorite armchair, holding the glass in both hands so it scalds my palms. On TV, sitcom characters are drinking in a Boston bar, and I drink along while I listen for flipped light switches or feet on the stairs, signals that someone is coming. Bear, the golden retriever, watches me with his ears back like he knows what I’m doing.
I have little time. I am expecting some rapid change.
I have the idea that Kahlúa will make me either dizzy or giddy, but neither sensation comes. I wait for them. I wait for the TV dialogue to make me giggle, but it just rolls on in a series of one-liners and laugh-track hums. I wait for the carpet to wobble under me, but it stays beige and still. The only change I can feel is in my face. My cheeks feel as though they might be warm to the touch, but there is no one to put their hands on them to confirm it.
I don’t drain the mug halfway before I get bored and dump the rest down the sink. I decide there’s no point in getting drunk without having a friend like Natalie along to encourage me to drink more and faster in order to get drunk. There’s no rivalry when you’re drinking alone; it’s like playing Battleship without an opponent.
As I’m climbing the stairs to go to bed, my mother hears me and groggily calls my name through the darkened door of my parents’ bedroom.
She says, “Koren, is that you? Are you okay?”
I roll my eyes and pretend I don’t hear her. I keep padding down the hallway.
MOST DAYS, I wish Anne Sexton were my mother. We study her in school, and because it’s public school they don’t mention that she was a sexually abusive mother.
I read “Mother and Daughter” in my ninth-grade English book and realize my own mom will never understand girlhood with the same level of clarity. I wish she had Anne’s insomnia, panic attacks, addictions, her own shit to deal with, old-Hollywood looks. I wish she would call me “string bean” and stand back during my high school years like “somebody else, an old tree in the background.”
During ninth grade, a mom who will not stand back is a nightmare, particularly if she’s a stay-at-home mom, the type who says things like, “You are my full-time job,” when you’re pretty sure you’re a dead-end vocation. She’ll prepare for adolescence like the Y2K. She will scrutinize your grades, your friends, and your appearance, looking for headway, as though womanhood is a twelve-point plan and the big boss expects a progress report.
My mother is that type of mother. By the time I start high school she has not only read Reviving Ophelia, she has highlighted it, as though it were a how-to manual for dealing with me. Now, whenever I erupt in tears at the most inappropriate times, she puts on a face of quiet bemusement and I can imagine her thinking: Ah, Koren exemplifies the process of disowning the true self. With puberty she went from being a whole, authentic person to a diminished version of herself. And I cry harder because my private pains are so unoriginal.
Mary Pipher has fucked up my life good. She’s convinced my mother that she needs to save my “self,” to pull me from the undertow of fury and self-doubt that is sucking me down. Now, any hesitation on my part is a sacrifice to the patriarchal system. The patriarchy wins when I don’t run for student council. It wins when I don’t touch palms with a boy in the pew behind us during the hand-shaking portion of church.
“You need to get over this shyness,” my mom will say with a shrill whine that sets me stomping up the stairs to my room. “Do you want to be like this your whole life? Do you? Do you want boys to ignore you? Teachers to skip over you in class? I used to be like you. Until I forced myself. And believe me, you have to force yourself because, I’m telling you now, the meek sure as hell don’t inherit the world.”
By now, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m meek. I accept the fact that I’ll never know what to say in a group. In class, I will sit and watch everyone else chatter with great ease. And I’ll think I should say something now because each passing second will only make it harder to speak without everyone turning to look at me with great shock, as though a chair, or a stapler, or some other inanimate object had sprung to life.
While that meekness won’t help me make friends or get dates, it is favorable in other ways. Adults seem to think it makes me more feminine and, often, a little more grown-up. Teachers praise me for my cooperation. The “comments” portion of my report card always reads: “courteous,” “attentive,” and “well mannered.” But teachers treat the domineering girls differently. Girls like Natalie, who sit with the boys or speak out of turn, are called “disruptive” or “disrespectful,” sometimes “cocksure,” but even that sounds dirty.
But that’s what my mother wants from me. She wants me to have everything she never had as a girl, which, on top of piano lessons and designer jeans, includes buoyancy. She wants me to rise to the top of the worst situations. She wants to raise a modern woman: someone who is cool and collected, a vixen, a man-eater, hell-on-wheels in heels.
Unlike Anne Sexton, she cannot accept that she has given me her “booty, her spoils, her Mother & Co. and her ailments.” I have swallowed her immunities and her maladies, and now I can’t help feeling skittishness deep in the coils of my DNA, a genetic predisposition like cystic acne, something that will not clear up no matter how many times she warns me to keep my hands off my face.
Years from now, I’ll pick up her copy of Reviving Ophelia and notice a paragraph about parents who, “taught their children that only a small range of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors would be tolerated,” who, “because of their own childhood experiences, regarded parts of their children’s personalities as unacceptable.” This section will not be highlighted.
I THINK my mother wants me to be like Billie Jankoff.
Billie is a girl. As far as I can tell, her name isn’t even short for Beverly or Belinda or anything. Later, she will tell me she was named for Billie Holiday, and I’ll insist on calling her Miss Brown.
Billie and I have assigned seats at the same round table in English class. She sits at twelve o’clock and I sit at three, and every time she flips a page in The Yearling her scent drifts clockwise. She smells like cigarettes and a woody perfume that reminds me of my mother’s cedar chest. Her key lime–colored cowboy boots tap the table legs with a jumpy energy that shakes my notebook.
I constantly stare at her out of the corners of my eyes.
Billie is ghostly white, the way only chronically ill people and The Cure are, and her skin darkens the rest of her features by comparison. Her blond hair has a fringe of ebony where it parts, where her unprocessed, natural color is growing in. Her blue eyes are so deep-set they look black, and when she outlines them with a charcoal pencil, her irises look bottomless. I’m compelled to look deeper into them to find her pupils, the way I’d lean over a wishing well to look for its floor.
Billie is the type of girl teachers love to hate. For one thing, she writes with a ballpoint pen shaped like a syringe. It is 1994 and Kurt Cobain is four months dead, and the administration is sensitive to heroin innuendo. She also dresses entirely in black, which teachers interpret as a sign of mutiny. Some days, she wears skirts of layered black chiffon, which wave when she walks. O
ther days, she wears tight black leggings under an oversized sweater with thumbholes cut into the cuffs. I love the days that Billie wears T-shirts that say things like TO DIE FOR, phrases that are provocative but too ambiguous for the dress code to ban outright.
Our English teacher, Mr. Coffee, hates Billie because she’s quick to pick fights with him, and not about late assignments and absences, the inconsequential things. No, Billie’s fights are the kind where she stands up during a discussion of The Great Gatsby and says, “This is stupid, Daisy is stupid, all the girls in all the books we read are brain dead,” and then storms down the hall in a flutter of black chiffon. When she’s gone, Mr. Coffee apologizes for the interruption, and I’m left wondering what I am missing. I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me.
One day during English, Billie spots the spine of a fat spellbook poking out of my backpack, and I want to hide my face behind my hands. In the absence of alcohol, I’ve resorted to the power of real magic to transform my life. I’ve been lolling in the library during lunch period, combing the card catalog for Charms, Spells, and Formulas and Practical Candle Burning Rituals. I’ve been tying ribbons on fence posts for happiness, sticking pins through candlewicks for friendship, and sleeping with a glass of water under my bed for love.
I take a deep breath because I know what is coming. I know Billie is going to say “Spells are stupid, that book is stupid, and you must be brain damaged.”
Instead, she leans in and whispers, “I love that shit.”
I feel a rupture of joy for the first time in months. I can’t stop from widening my eyes.
BILLIE LIVES in the bordering town of Clinton. Though our towns share a school, a wildlife reserve, and a waste-disposal center, their commonalities end there. Whereas my town is rural and secluded, the type of place where you can live seven years and never catch a glimpse of your neighbors, Clinton is the kind of old mill town that is common in Massachusetts. It is spotted with vinyl-sided duplexes, pool halls, Dairy Queens, and auto-body repair shops. The boys from Clinton ride dirt bikes and smoke Marlboros, and if they take you out to look at the stars, they drop the r, with the accent that most people attribute to the Bay State—stahs. To me, everything about the place sounds like freedom.
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