Billie lives with her divorced mother, a position that fills me with envy. I know that is stupid, that I should be grateful that my parents are still happily wed, both of them tuned into my every ballet recital or parent-teacher conference like it’s Super Bowl Sunday. And I am. But our nuclear nest also makes divorce look exotic, like the stuff that art is made of. After all, this is shortly after Newsweek declared, “Grunge is what happens when children of divorce get their hands on guitars.”* Divorce seems like a beautiful truth, a stark contrast to my own two-parent household, which at times feels stickier, more deceptive.
What’s more, divorce creates the possibility of independence, for which I am desperate. The dissolution means train rides and plane rides alone, en route to Mommy’s house or Daddy’s condo. And keys. I long for house keys; I want to wear them on a satin string around my neck. After school, I want to unlock the door to a quiet house and, consequently, a quiet mind.
Billie’s house is like an Egyptian tomb, like it ought to be named Valley of the Queens. It is still and soundless when we take the bus there on Friday afternoons. Snapshots hang on the walls: There’s one of Billie and her sister carving a pumpkin, another of Billie and her mom wearing pointed party hats. The medicine cabinets are lined with lipstick. The refrigerator is stocked with Snack Packs and mummified microwave dinners, ample provisions for the afterlife. Everything seems easy—easy to find, easier to make, easiest to clean up.
Mrs. Jankoff works odd hours as an emergency-room nurse and spends most days dressed in rose-colored scrubs and orthopedic shoes, her blond hair fastened in a nest of loose curls. But twice a week she undergoes a magical transformation. After her shift ends, she goes out for drinks at Watson’s, a pine-paneled neighborhood bar. She has single friends, loads of them, and at Watson’s they meet men in droves. The following day, she describes to us whatever lawyer, welder, or real-estate agent she met, and in our own vernacular. “Joe was hot,” she’ll say over the kitchen stove, where she is standing in a terrycloth bathrobe and cooking scrambled eggs. “But at some point I realized he was a little messed up in the head.”
When Billie’s mom goes out to Watson’s, she even dresses like one of us. She wears army boots, flannel skirts, and baby-doll T-shirts with broken hearts ironed on. She refuses to wear a bra because, she says, they’re just another way in which the world keeps women down. So her breasts sway like water balloons when she walks, and I love the way they make my mother wince.
As much as I love Mrs. Jankoff, I know Billie spars with her, too. She fights with her mom the same way I fight with my mom, but for opposite reasons. I want to be independent from my mom, and Billie wants to be dependent on hers. Billie loves my mother’s involvement, while I love Mrs. Jankoff’s detachment. We both have the magnetic properties that attract us to each other’s mothers, and repel us from our own. I want to drive my mother away from me by being deceptive; Billie tries to lure her mother home by proving she’s trustworthy.
THE MORE time I spend with Billie, the more I realize I have her pegged all wrong. Sure, she smokes. She also wears satin bras and smeared eyeliner, and in school, she is all too happy to scream at Mr. Coffee or skip gym class on the days that we are forced to run a mile. But when it comes to her real assets, the things Natalie would have considered no doy, like the fact that she has the house without chaperone for hours on end, complete with access to her mother’s cherry schnapps, she pleads bankrupt. In her own house, she is quiet and reserved.
Friday nights, while Natalie is in some boy’s dorm room burning incense, listening to way-hip post-rock Brit-pop, and drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, Billie and I do nothing. We stretch out on the kitchen counters, where we can watch headlights stream by on Water Street, and half-think we see someone we know coming or going, then speculate as to where. We eat chocolate chips from the bag and listen to FM radio until “Love Songs After Dark” turns into “Marty in the Morning.”
Some nights we work on our witchcraft, but even that is dull. We want to draw baths filled with rose petals, but we can’t afford to buy a dozen roses from the farmer’s market, and Billie won’t let me steal them. We also long to do love spells, but there is no way for us to gather boys’ toenail clippings. There are no stores within walking distance that sell orrisroot.
Instead of making me calm, Billie’s immobility makes me restless.
Afternoons at her house, I feel fidgety. I am incapable of being still. I have an urge to scratch my nails down my cheeks, tear the skillets down from the pot rack, strip off my clothes, and run bare-assed and shrieking through the condo’s parking lot. I want to turn on the stove and press my palms into the burners just so I can test my synapses. I need to know I can still react, still feel terrified, still feel.
At the same time, I am so thankful to have Billie for a friend that I don’t know how to tell her I’m bored. I don’t know how to say I’m not used to a friend like her. I am used to Natalie’s antagonism, the rhythm of combat and truce that could easily pass an afternoon. I miss the best friend who mows me over with her moods and her will. I miss being cut down, in the name of being forced to grow.
ONE NIGHT, Billie is fishing in the kitchen cabinets for something resembling a clear glass goblet to fill with salt water and dip our beaded necklaces into, in order to make them Poseidon protection charms. The closest thing she can find is a German beer stein, which we both agree will work just fine.
She is about to turn the cold knob on the kitchen sink when I say, “Wait a minute.”
I lunge for the refrigerator, where I know a big, round jug of Chardonnay occupies a large portion of the wire shelf. Its green glass feels cold in my hands.
“What do you think?” I ask. “It’s a diversionary spell.”
Billie wears a horrified look, like I just suggested doing one of the black-magic hexes that involve torching chicken bones. It’s a look that says every good quality she’s ascribed to me has been wrong.
I should get used it. I will see this look many times in the years to come. I’ll see it later in high school, when a month after an alcohol overdose, someone sees me taking shots of tequila. I’ll see it in college, when someone sees me drinking beer before noon to alleviate a hangover. I hate this look, but I should get used to it. It’s the look you’d give a pregnant woman who orders a rum and Coke. It is people cocking their heads and wondering if they’re seeing me right.
Billie looks frozen. She is still holding the stein in such a way that it looks like she might burst into an old German drinking song at any moment: swinging the glass back and forth, a frothy stout slopping out. Instead, she slams it down in the sink with a small crash.
I am mortified. I didn’t think alcohol could ruin this moment so completely. I haven’t met a girl yet who hasn’t been interested in drinking. Every time I’ve seen a bottle emerge, girls have followed it the way children follow Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin: with small feet pattering, wooden shoes clattering, little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering.
I slide the green jug back into its spot beside the Chinese food takeout containers and try to figure out how to pass it off as a joke.
I lie and say, “I didn’t really mean it.”
The wall clock ticks once.
Billie says, “Fine.”
I should feel relieved, except she’s making the same face she’d made once in English class, when Mr. Coffee said there was no way that she read A Tale of Two Cities in a single Saturday.
She plucks the stein from the sink, and I fill it a quarter full with Chardonnay. My shaky hand makes the blond stream come out in fits and bursts.
She sips slowly. The cup’s wide rim covers half of her face, and I can’t gauge her reaction. When she brings the stein down to the counter, she says, “It almost tastes like water.” Under any other circumstances this would be an extraordinary lie, but everything in Mrs. Jankoff’s cabinet has only a slightly higher alcoholic content than mouthwash.
We’ll mix dri
nks during our sleepovers from this moment on. We’ll sit on the tiles in front of the refrigerator or the liquor cabinet, shift bottles around, read their labels, and try to figure out what we have to work with. When it comes down to it, we have no idea how to tend bar. We mix gin with Coke and zinfandel with orange juice. Every drink we make tastes too sweet or too bitter, repellent. They are concoctions we can’t bring ourselves to drink, and therefore don’t ever get drunk on.
BILLIE AND I book Halloween as the night we will officially get drunk. It falls on a Monday, and Billie is spending the week with her dad in his four-bedroom town house in downtown Salem. I manage to persuade my mother to let me sleep over even though it’s a school night.
We enlist Billie’s stepbrother Mac to help us. At eighteen, he looks old enough to buy bottles from Market Wine & Spirits, and he can procure harder liquor than Billie’s mom’s schnapps.
While Mac roves the aisles at the liquor store, we wait for him behind a hedgerow in the Salem graveyard. The night is cold as an icebox, with the kind of chill that gets into your skin and sticks there. After a half hour of waiting, I know nothing but a hot bath will be able to restore the feeling to certain body parts. Billie and I are wearing fingerless gloves and smoking Mild Sevens because we don’t yet know how cliché that is. In plots all around us, we can hear whistling bottle rockets, dropped flashlights, someone’s ill attempt at the ghoulish oo-haa-haa. People are tripping over their costumes, and a paranormal tour guide is leading a group toward the haunted jail, urging them to stay close because “People faint all the time.”
It occurs to me that Halloween is the perfect date to get first-time drunk. It is the single day of the year on which you can shield your flaws with a layer of latex, the way Lucy Grealy did in her memoir Autobiography of a Face. She’d survived cancer and an endless bout of surgeries to reconstruct her jaw, and yet the only time she ever felt free was on October 31, when she could hide in a costume and feel confident, knowing no one knew what she looked like inside.
Externally, I’m not perfect, but I’m healthy. In fourteen years, I’ve never once fallen down stairs or caught my hand in a car door. I’ve never had stitches. I’ve never so much as twisted an ankle. It’s my insides that I need to hide. Privately, I feel disfigured. I am ashamed of my gnarled soul, which is something no surgeon can correct. Were my inner workings exposed, I feel certain they would make children stare, and adults avert their eyes. Like Lucy, I, too, want a mask, the type Dylan Thomas talks about: “to shield the glistening brain and the blunt examiners.” I want to get shit-faced, a term itself that connotes camouflage.
Mac shows up at the gravesite with his friend Phil and a bottle of Captain Apple Jack 100-proof brandy. When Billie asks if it will get us drunk, Mac says, “More like Exorcist possessed,” and I secretly hope he doesn’t mean projectile puking.
Now that the boys are with us, I wish I hadn’t worn a costume. It was my idea for Billie and me to come dressed as Wayne and Garth from the movie Wayne’s World. I’m Wayne. Billie got to be Garth because she’s the blonde. Our “costumes” aren’t much different from the flannel button-ups and diaphanous T-shirts we usually wear. Even so, I have to look up at the boys from under the rim of my black Wayne’s World cap, which makes me feel silly.
Mac has a skeleton T-shirt on. Phil is in everyday clothes, but he’s looped nylon rope into a noose around his neck.
We position ourselves in a circle around an old camping lantern and the bottle of brandy. If anyone comes up through the headstones behind us, they’ll probably assume we’re conducting a séance. Billie in particular is staring at the bottle like she is trying to channel its energy.
Billie told Mac that we’ve never been drunk before, so he knows this is serious business. He twists off the brandy’s plastic top and apologizes for not bringing cups. He asks if we’re ready, and looks at us one at a time, waiting for a response.
Billie says, “Yeah.”
Phil says, “Fuck yeah.”
I nod, and pull my leather jacket tighter around me. I’m nervous. My sternum is shivering the way it does when I have to give a class presentation, but I know I am prepared for this. I like the idea of getting drunk in a group of four.
Before, when I drank by myself or with Billie, I think I held back. I didn’t drink as much or as fast as I should have because I was afraid of entering new territory while I was all or mostly alone. As a girl, after all, you are taught to be fearful when you’re alone. In the park or at the drugstore, you’re a target. You can be abducted, scooped up by any number of unforeseen dangers, molested, tortured, left for dead. But in a group, you are taught to feel stronger, like the sum of your parts. Gradually, you forget your anxieties and reservations. You practice the buddy system. You falsely believe that tragedy cannot single you out.
Drinking brandy with Billie and the boys feels like booking a passage on the Titanic. The thought that we are all going down together consoles me.
Somebody comes up with the drinking game Have You Ever, which basically involves the boys shouting out offensive questions like “Have you ever seen one?” and Billie and me sipping brandy if we have. In my case, this game is perversely embarrassing; which is to say, I’m not embarrassed by what I’ve done, but by how little.
Phil asks, “Have you ever smoked pot?”
He and Mac drink.
Billie asks, “Have you ever done it?”
Mac and Phil drink.
Billie says, “Yeah, right, on both accounts.”
Mac asks, “Have you ever given anyone a hickey?”
He and Phil and Billie drink.
Phil asks me, “Have you ever done anything?”
Mac hands me the bottle and says, “Just drink already.”
I avert my eyes when I take it.
All night, I have been afraid to look directly at the boys, and I don’t know why. It’s not because they’re handsome. They have scarred skin and sneering lips, and their eyes are small and squinty. It must be something else that’s intimidating me, something in Phil’s broad shoulders that reminds me of his strength, or in the stubble on Mac’s chin that reminds me of his age. I’m startled by the way they both lean in to light my cigarette, as though the Zippo were too unwieldy for me. When I glance into either boy’s eyes, I feel a jolt like static electricity.
Apple brandy rolls over my tongue and past my tonsils, and doesn’t leave me time to process the taste. After one sip, all I can think about is a movie I saw once, in which a man torched a house that was the site of a murder. I’m imagining the film frame by frame: the striking of the match, its slow-motion drop onto the gasoline-soaked floorboards, the line of fire that creeps up the stairs and down the hall until the house is one big fireball with blown-out windows.
That’s what apple brandy does. One gulp of the plum-colored stuff kindles my tonsils, starting a fire that knocks down my esophagus like a trail of dominoes. The fumes fill my sinuses. I feel flammable. I’ll combust if Phil lights another cigarette.
A new sensation follows this drink. After the brandy’s initial blaze, I feel dead calm, like a shot of novocaine to my chest has set numbness spreading. I feel like it’s in preparation for something, as though a tooth is about to be pulled. I take a few more sips while Mac looks me dead in the eyes. I suddenly don’t care if he’s watching.
The anesthetic is in my brain. All my worries fall over and die like canaries in a mine shaft. I put both hands on my hat to make sure my head is still there.
Five sips later, I start to feel like I’m watching a home movie. The camera is moving too quickly, panning from one person to the next with amateur dexterity and minimal focus. I have to close my eyes every few minutes, when the rapid motion makes me woozy. My life, at this moment, feels like The Blair Witch Project.
Billie is standing on the steps that lead up to somebody’s hulking, granite tomb. She uses her hands to make a megaphone around her lips and screams, “Rest in peace, Salem!”
Phil is wearing
her Garth glasses and crooning the Billie Holiday lyrics, “A kiss that is never tasted forever and ever is wasted.”
And I am accidentally snapping my lit cigarette in half and then trying to smoke the filterless stub, while Mac talks about the band Crash Test Dummies and the plight of the human individual.
Everyone is talking at once, bruiting irrelevant stories, but brandy holds us together with a strange harmony like a doo-wop group, where each voice rises and halts with its own stray ooh waah ooh.
THE VERY next thing I know, I’m lying faceup on the ground with my head propped against a headstone engraved with the name CLYDE BARKER. I imagine Clyde’s corpse directly under me, like we are two parallel lines spaced six feet apart. Overhead, the sky is huge and domed like the screen at the Boston Planetarium, where we went on a recent class trip.
Mac is over me, too, saying “Barker, Barker,” and barking like a deranged poodle. In the lantern light, his pumpkin face looks distorted, as though he’s holding a flashlight under his chin. The wind rattles the trees and leaves tumble everywhere, like it’s snowing foliage.
Mac is heavier than he looks. When he lowers his skinny skater frame on top of me, I feel like I’m being buried alive. I think of Madeline in the “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which we just read in school, and wonder at what point she stopped scratching the lid of the coffin and just fell into death, the way I let Mac fall into me. He is holding my head with both hands, the way I might hold an open book. My hat slides off and falls at the foot of Barker’s tombstone, where someone bereft would place a bouquet.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 5
