Years later, when my parents ask if I used to drink and sneak out because I wanted to test their boundaries, I’ll say yes, even though that was never my aim. I won’t know how to tell them it was a suicidal impulse that drove me out windows. I had a curious It’s a Wonderful Life–like compulsion to explore what my house, or my life, would look like without me in it.
NATALIE AND I find a stand in our condo closet. It’s a fold-out deal with metal legs and canvas rungs, and whoever put it there probably intended it for supporting suitcases or drying beach towels. But we see its full potential. Natalie unfolds it beneath the bedroom window and steps back to whisper, “After you.” I position one foot on each of the metal legs and stand there, spread-eagle, for a moment of breath catching before I grab both sides of the window frame and hoist myself out, one inch at a time.
We don’t speak a word until we hit the pavement in the condo’s parking lot. That is the divide, the predetermined finish line, and once we cross it we’re free. There, we slip our feet back into our sandals and let out our pent-up laughter. All around us, the strip is illuminated with neon signs and headlights. People are everywhere, in cars, leaning out of hotel windows, roaming the sidewalks as they drink from foam-sheathed beer cans.
I feel like I did when I was younger, when my sister and I would linger on the stairs in our nightgowns during my parents’ adults-only dinner parties, listening to the muffled laughter and the chiming sound of my father hitting his wineglass with a spoon. Tonight, the Coastal Highway confirms that old suspicion: There is a whole world that takes shape during the hours I’m asleep.
Across the street from the condo, Natalie and I wait for the trolley car, trying to decide if the ten dollars wadded up in our pockets is enough to feed the fare machine for two round-trip tickets. It is. When the trolley pulls up, we choose seats in the far back, which we know to be the most desirable spots on a school bus. We ride for thirty minutes, and fifty blocks.
Earlier in the day we met a guy behind the counter of the Pizza Palace who directed us to the part of town where the college kids hang out. They are waiters and lifeguards, he said, who rent entire houses on their own. Listening to him, I couldn’t help but envision the staff kids in Dirty Dancing, the way they embraced booze, sex, and rock music like life, love, and the hunt for happiness. I sit in the trolley’s grooved plastic seat, imagining I’m Baby—only I won’t have to carry a watermelon the way she did to get into a party; I sense that being a girl is its own free pass inside.
NATALIE AND I aren’t sure where to go once we step off the trolley. It’s my idea to take off our sandals and wander down the beach, past all the darkened resorts that have beach chairs stacked in the sand. We aren’t walking anywhere in particular, but Natalie keeps urging me to move faster because it’s her nature. I trail behind her, watching the red tip of her cigarette move to and from her mouth, and the way the wet sand erases her footprints as soon as she makes them.
Down the beach, we see a campfire. In the dark, we can spot its orange spark, like a meteor, from a long way off. As we tread closer, we can see the empty beer bottles in the sand and the keg on ice in a trash can, a web of people settled around it. It looks like any cigarette or beer ad: a tight-knit circle of strangers made friends by atmosphere alone. Girls huddle on driftwood while boys drop kelp down their blouses. Flames brighten their faces. Steely waves crash at their backs.
It feels good to give myself over to that formula. It is like the type of extra credit where you get points for just showing up. The kids on the beach don’t care that they don’t know Natalie and me. A boy stands to offer us his space on a blanket. Someone else brings us beer in clear plastic cups. They welcome us into their circle, no questions asked, and we don’t have to work for any of it.
The funny thing about that unconditional stamp of approval is that it makes me act less like myself. For all intents and purposes, it should make me more comfortable being regular old Koren—idiosyncratic, a bit phobic in groups, but a decent girl if you get to know her. But instead, I, too, conform to a beer-ad version of myself. I kick off my shoes and pirouette in the sand. I agree to drink beer from a funnel, even though I know the boy channeling it through will pour too fast, and I will end up wearing the thick tar of beer and wet sand. When Natalie and the other girls strip down to their underwear, I do, too. I ride a boogie board in my undershirt and white cotton panties, and don’t care when the salt water makes my skin show through.
At the time, I write off these behaviors as a need to adapt. I don’t want to stand out as a high-school girl, the type of baby who can’t keep up with buxom sorority girls from Southern universities. I want to prove that I can funnel as much beer as they can, that I can unflinchingly take the same lascivious looks in the dark.
Later, I’ll be able to see that this is how it all starts. I concede to shifting my personality, just a hair, to observe the standards I think the situation calls for. From now on, every time I drink, I’ll enhance various aspects of myself, willing myself into a state where I am a little bit brighter, funnier, more outgoing, or vibrant. The process will be so incremental that I’ll have no gauge of how much it will change me. I will wake up one day in my twenties like a skewed TV screen on which the hues are all wrong. My subtleties will be exaggerated and my overtones will be subdued. My entire personality will be off-color.
NATALIE AND I cut and run again the next night. It’s the same escape route: over the stand, out the window, and down the strip on the trolley. This time, we head for a party in a large, stilted cottage a few blocks west of the beach. At the campfire the night before, a boy wrote the address in ballpoint pen on Natalie’s forearm.
When we swing open the house’s screen door, there isn’t a party inside. There are college guys in T-shirts and swim shorts, just loafing around. They conjure up images of half a dozen frat-boy movies. The house is a labyrinth of rooms, empty, but for a few neon beer signs, pizza boxes, and TVs paused on video games. In the den, a few girls watch boys shoot pool from a sagging couch. Some fluff their hair so it falls over their shoulders. A few eye us distrustfully.
I make wide-open eyes at Natalie that say This is a tragedy. But she just screws up her face and turns a corner toward the kitchen because she knows full well I’ll follow her.
There, a boy introduces himself as Greg and offers us beer. Right off the bat, Natalie says Greg looks like a criminal, on account of his T-shirt’s black-and-white prison stripes, which he wears with a plastic belt and jeans so tight I can make out the square of cue chalk in his pocket. He is small, nearly my size, with blue eyes that stand out behind blond bangs so long they clear the bridge of his nose. He says he studies painting at a Maryland art institute where classes like “interactive media,” “experimental animation,” and other things I’ve never heard of are required. He’s spending the summer painting his senior thesis project between shifts at a local surf shop. When I ask what he paints, he says, “Come on up and see.” As I turn to follow him upstairs to his studio, Natalie says she’ll stay behind. She is busy sharing cigarettes with a University of Maryland boy named Wally.
Greg’s canvases are scattered across the floor of the studio, and more are propped up against easels and walls. I can’t find a common motif. There are paintings of cracked eggs, hands holding apples, the shriveled breasts of a woman he says is a portrait model. What catches my attention, what holds me transfixed the way a nail holds a mirror, is an oversized American flag on the ceiling. It is riddled with holes and faded from the sun, and the effect makes it look exactly like a flag (was it the original American flag?) that I’d seen hanging in a museum in Washington, D.C. I take it as a symbol of independence. I would die to be twenty, to spend summers away from my parents, painting still lifes and gluing up surfboard gashes.
I tell Greg lies, heaps of them. Actually, they aren’t lies so much as they are little shifts in facts that, I think, make me appear worldly in his eyes. I tell him I am eighteen, spending a month in Ocean City wit
h my aunt before returning home to Boston for my senior year of high school. I weave all my stories around these small substitutions: eighteen as opposed to fifteen, relatives as opposed to parents, big city as opposed to small town. The persona I create isn’t terribly far from the truth, but it makes me feel safer around him, more anonymous and less exposed.
We kiss for a while amid the toxic smell of art supplies, and Greg is gentle with me. When my hair falls into his mouth, he brushes each wet thread away. When I say something he can’t quite hear, he says, “I’m sorry, sweetheart?” And the word sweetheart sounds so tender it soothes some raw part of me, and I find myself whispering so I can hear it again.
I imagine that Greg understands me, that he has a psychic sense for how far I am from the place where I started. I think compassion drives him to hold me closer. When I speak, he concentrates like someone listening to a seashell, and I think he can hear the ocean that is pitching itself around inside me.
That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really there inside that moment, with its neighborly warmth and conversation, it’s hard to tell what’s responsible for producing emotion. What’s responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you’re drunk, or because you’re connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? To an outsider, the distinction is an easy one to make. But when you’re fifteen and female, when you experience these feelings first and later only when you are drinking, it becomes a question of which came first, the liquor or the Greg?
THREE BEERS and twelve watercolors later, I go downstairs to find Natalie. It isn’t that I have forgotten about her; she has always been there in my mind, like a telephone ringing in the background. I feel guilty for neglecting her. I imagine she’s downstairs on the porch, smoking a Marlboro and delivering a sermon on Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories, which is her version of small talk. Hopefully, she’s done some kissing, too, with Wally, in which case she won’t be fed up with waiting for me. Either way, I’m obliged to go downstairs and pick her up.
But Natalie isn’t on the porch. She isn’t in the TV room, the game room, or the kitchen, either. I know because I am gripping Greg’s hand and tugging him from one room to the next. I can’t imagine where Natalie is, or why she would leave me. That’s the big thing: I don’t understand how she could abandon me in a house full of strangers, with dawn about to break. I imagine my parents getting up in a few hours, making breakfast and going about the business of preparing for the beach; sooner or later they will discover our empty room and the towels we have stuffed between our sheets.
Greg decides we should check Wally’s room, and relief washes over me. It occurs to me that the night has already been going in the direction of a double date: The boys have paired off with us, to steal whatever couple time they can.
SURE ENOUGH, there is a girl in Wally’s room, but she isn’t Natalie.
“Your friend left,” Wally says through the crack of the door. Through it, I can see one of the blondes from the couch downstairs. She is wearing only turquoise-colored underwear and using the corner of a blanket to shield her bare chest. In the yellow lamplight she looks less intimidating, and much more freckled and angular. It occurs to me that she’s probably my age.
“What do you mean she left? Did she say she was going back to the condo?” Panic is moving in to displace my buzz, and the feeling is intoxicating in a different way. My throat tightens enough to cut off my breath. I can feel my pulse in my head.
Wally gives a puny shrug, as if to say, Not my problem, before he closes the door. I hear the click of it locking, and before I know what I’m doing, I am bringing my foot back over and over, pounding the rubber toe of my sneaker against the door. The wood feels flimsy, like it might be particleboard, and the door rattles in its frame. As hard as I kick, Wally won’t come back to open it.
Greg puts his hand on my shoulder to stop me.
I start screaming. At first, there are no words. I am little more than a trumpet screaming out notes. Beer has given my voice a new wind, and it makes each squeal breathe through me brassy and clear. “What did he do with Natalie? Where the fuck is Natalie?”
I can feel tears welling up in my eyes, and they are dangerously close to spilling out onto the folds of my cheeks. The song of my screaming is reverberating off the walls. It blows open bedroom doors and makes boys poke their heads out.
Greg is looking at me as though I am a deranged animal he is not sure how to restrain. Something in his look implies I am being irrational. It’s the look I get from my mother when she remembers midway through a fight that I’m a teenage girl and therefore have no perspective. It occurs to me that he cannot empathize; he has never empathized. He has no idea why I am upset.
“Do you mean Wally? He wouldn’t do anything to her. I’m sure your friend is fine. She just decided to go to another party, that’s all.”
I don’t know how to tell him that Natalie and I don’t know about any other parties. This was the only address Natalie had printed on her arm.
The only place I can think to look for her is down on the beach, near the burned-out shell of the campfire left over from the night before.
GREG COMES with me to look for her, but I am beginning to feel uneasy around him. I feel myself shifting into confessional mode, like I might slip up and tell him everything. Each moment that I fail to find Natalie, I am more hysterical and I care less about maintaining the details of my cock-and-bull story.
The sun is starting to come up. The waves rolling over my feet look like frothy green tea, and the sand is the color of burned sugar. The world is turning seaside colors again, and it reminds me that there is little time left. I have to find Natalie and get her back through the condo window.
I decide to tell Greg I lied to him, that I am seventeen and not eighteen. It still isn’t the truth, but it feels like a small admission of guilt, like I am admitting in a critical moment how inexperienced I am.
We scuffle along the sand, and this time I am the one to walk fast, and I turn around every few feet to make Greg hurry up. When we get to the site, the same fire is burning. The same keg is being pumped from the same trash can by the same people wearing alcohol-induced grins. In the light of dawn, they seem so much more loathsome than they did the night before. Everyone is too stupid or drunk or self-absorbed to help me find Natalie.
The beach is whipping up a strong wind that straightens out wind socks and sets porch chimes clanging, and it feels like a slap in the face. I lean against Greg, trying to brace myself from it, while he stops to question people on the beach.
The conversation goes like this:
“Have you seen an eighteen-year-old girl with green eyes and freckles?”
“Seventeen,” I correct him, and wonder if he’s been listening to me at all.
“What was she wearing?”
“What was she wearing, again?” Greg asks me.
“A green polo shirt.”
“A polo shirt. Green.”
Finally, someone points to a lopsided condo on the corner. I break free from Greg and take the steps to the door two at a time.
INSIDE, I find Natalie in an armchair, looking wilted. She is conscious, but barely. Her head is bowed forward and her eyes, rolled way back, divulge only the whites. It is a look she once perfected at a rock club, when she pretended to pass out in the pit so we could watch the band from a better vantage point backstage. I can’t help hoping she is faking again.
Around her are guys and a few girls, jumbled around a coffee table and on a paisley sofa, playing cards and sipping beer. A joint, the first I have ever seen, burns in a scalloped clay ashtray. I don’t need anyone to tell me it isn’t a cigarette. Somehow the smoke just smells green.
I go to Natalie’s armchair and
grab one of her legs with both hands, rattling it loosely, the way I might rouse someone from an afternoon nap. With the white flesh of her thigh in my hand, I realize she is wearing someone else’s clothes. Her jeans and polo shirt have been replaced with blue mesh shorts and a white undershirt.
I don’t even bother asking Natalie where her clothes are because it’s clear that she can’t speak. Instead, I stand up and spin around to face the people on the sofa; I ask them where the fuck her clothes are.
“She threw up on them,” a girl with a throaty voice says. She holds the joint between the nails of her thumb and her index finger and examines it like a tiny bug she is thinking of squashing.
“Natalie?” I lean over and shake her by the shoulders, too hard now, but I can’t help it. I am desperate to wake her in the way people are desperate to revive their dead lovers in made-for-TV movies. I don’t care if I look melodramatic. This is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing a corpse.
“Natalie?” When I call her name in my trumpet scream, the green half-moons of her eyes roll in my direction.
“You fuc-king bitch,” she says and leans over as if to spit on me, but drool just rolls down one side of her chin in a glistening tear.
A guy says, “This might be a good time to get her out of here.”
Greg hauls Natalie out of the armchair and onto her feet. He has to hold her by the waist to keep her upright, while I hunt for her shoes. She stands there like a ski jumper, leaning her head into his chest with her legs locked too far out behind her. She lets out another string of profanities when I lean down to put on her flip-flops.
“Fuc-king bitch-ass dirty slut.”
She drops to her hands and knees on the floor, and her shoulders start to tremble like she is going to be sick.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 7
