Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  Plastic trays that resemble kitty-litter boxes are lined up across a wooden picnic table, and each one is filled with the kind of colored sand that doesn’t exist in nature. There is mint green and lavender sand, sand in lemon yellow and fire-engine red.

  Natalie goes to the cobalt-blue box and starts carefully funneling the sand through the neck of the bottle I bought her. She has changed into a sleeveless black T-shirt, but she still wears the blue mesh gym shorts from the night before, rolled up four times so they fit. For some reason, the fact that she didn’t bury them in her suitcase or toss them into one of the hotel lobby’s wastepaper bins makes me furious.

  Natalie doesn’t speak to me. She concentrates on stratifying her glass bottle in meticulous layers. She pours blue, lavender, orange, and then blue again.

  I ask her to tell me, again, everything she remembers. I want her to lay the facts out for me, layer by layer, the way she handles the sand.

  She says, “I told you everything. I blacked out. It’s happened a few times before, at school, and when it does, there’s nothing you can do to remember. So don’t ask me again.”

  I look back at my own bottle. I haven’t been paying attention while I’ve been pouring sand into it, and the colors are as muddled as whatever happened last night. I try to contain the hot tear I can feel simmering in one corner of my eye.

  I know I can’t bawl because I have no real right to bawl, because Natalie’s blackout belongs to her and not me. If anyone deserves to cry, it’s her. Although I pray to God she doesn’t cry because I won’t have a clue how to comfort her. I pray she’ll keep guiding her every terror into that little glass bottle. Before we leave Ocean City, I want all talk of the incident corked.

  Overnight, the world around us has changed little. The sun is blistering. Seagulls are swooping down to fight over dropped French fries. Whole families are whizzing by on rented bikes. It is Natalie who is changed. She is no longer the proud girl with swaggering shoulders and scheming eyes. I know I can’t rely on her for answers the way that I used to, when I used to trust her wink, when I trusted that she knew everything. That fearlessness has been emptied from her. Now, she’s filled with dread and hesitation that’s even heavier than mine is.

  I watch her scoop up handfuls of hot-pink sand and let it run through her fingers.

  I already know Natalie and I will stop seeing each other once we get home. I already know we will be like lovers who have experienced something horrible together, like a near-fatal accident, or an abortion, or a threesome. We will have too many reasons not to look at each other. There will be too much history in the way.

  From now on, whenever I look at Natalie, the memory of her face last night, sheening with sweat and smeared makeup, will float to mind like a helium balloon. I will be sickened by the thought that I was responsible for losing her because I mounted the stairs to Greg’s studio. The anxiety will only grow when a girl who has been vying for Natalie’s friendship since junior high uses the incident as leverage. She will call me on the telephone to say, “You should be ashamed.”

  More than five years later, long after we’ve lost all contact, Natalie will still appear in my dreams. She’ll come to me again and again when I close my eyes, and together we will move through parades or giant bazaars, where I know a current of people will pull me away, and then it will. Every time, my fingers will slip from Natalie’s hand, and I will be filled with a heart-thumping panic that will pull me from sleep.

  I will feel the dread, too, well into the waking life of my twenties. Some days, I will think I see Natalie’s face in the face of a bank teller or a woman crossing the street. I’ll stop cold for a moment, before I realize I am looking at a different set of green eyes. I will have to blink Natalie away, and go back to endorsing a check or dodging traffic.

  I will never get over feeling like Lady Macbeth. Natalie will be the spot of blood I can’t clean from my memory.

  I GO HOME, and a month later I have knee surgery. Dr. Fix-It opens my leg up and sorts things out. He cuts away the deteriorated ligaments and cartilage and replaces them with other tissues. He secures it all with nuts and bolts that are better equipped for support. I feel like the faulty family VCR, sent away for repair. After surgery, I go back to being my old self, pre-injury and pre–Ocean City. I prove to my parents that I am still good, reliable.

  But before the surgery, I slip up. I am sitting in an examining room with my mother and a nurse, who is taking my medical history. It is the usual stuff:

  “Any family history of diabetes, heart disease, or mental illness?”

  “No.”

  “Any drug allergies?”

  “No.”

  I am doing fine until she asks me the fateful question: “Do you drink?”

  I suddenly and impulsively say, “Sometimes.”

  Right away, I know it is the wrong thing to say. It is a Freudian slip. I had meant to say No, God No, Hell No. What’s worse is, it’s too late to take it back. I feel like the squirrels that so often run in front of our car and then stand paralyzed in the forward crunch of the tires. I’m torn between the compulsion to run and the urge to stand still and hope the danger will pass.

  The nurse is looking back and forth between my mother and me. She is holding her pen upright, as though it’s a knife and her clipboard is a T-bone steak she is thinking about stabbing. She asks, “How often is ‘sometimes’?”

  I can feel my mother glaring at me, snake-like, out of the corners of her eyes.

  “Sometimes,” I roll the word over in my mouth as though I’m trying to determine its flavor. There’s nothing left to say but, “Sometimes, like on the weekends.”

  DURING THE ride home from the office, I get an earful from my mother. Why, she wants to know, had I said such an awful thing? Hadn’t I known that the nurse meant did I drink daily? It’s not like I get off the bus and mix martinis every day after school.

  I tell her I was referring to Ocean City. I say I thought it was a crime I was obliged to disclose, like the box on an employment form that asks, Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

  My mom says, “She didn’t need to know about that.”

  Didn’t need to know. In that moment, I realize what a terrible mistake I’ve made. I was supposed to keep what happened in Ocean City to myself, disclosing it only to God, or, in His absence, to our priest, out of absolute necessity. I should have taken a note from the spring-break coverage on MTV, all those girls wearing whipped-cream bikinis who lean into the camera and clamor, “Remember, whatever happens in Panama City stays in Panama City!”

  What happened in Ocean City should have stayed there. I should have disposed of the memory the way people “take care of” dirty bodies. It is a menacing recollection that deserves no marker, no eulogy. I should have given it a watery grave, the way Tom Petty does in one of his music videos, when he lays his pretty, dead girlfriend down in the Pacific, and afterward only her red lips can be seen beneath the back-and-forth motion of the waves.

  I push any remembrance of that night down the sinkhole. I don’t know I’ll be back in the same hospital one year later, nearly swimming with the fishes, just as dead in the water.

  COMA GIRL

  HENCEFORTH, MY MOTHER will refer to it as the time I almost died. We’ll be sitting in the kitchen, both four and seven years from now. My dad will extend the leaves of the kitchen table to accommodate whatever college boyfriend I’ve brought home for the weekend. And my mom, while spooning out three-bean salad, will turn and ask him, “Has Koren told you about the time she almost died?”

  I’ll never know how much of that assertion accounts for melodrama.

  Sure enough, it feels like death. On November 9, 1996, I wake up between the Tide-stiff sheets of my childhood Banister Bed and one thought occurs to me: I’m not wearing any underwear.

  This is all the information I need to know that something horrendous has happened. At sixteen, I am never naked, save for ten minutes a day under the stream of a morning
shower, and even then, I turn away from the bathroom mirror before I drop my towel to step in. Even alone, I am ashamed of the arcs of my own pale skin, particularly in the whitest part that spans between my hips. Given my tendency to thrash in my sleep and kick down sheets, I would never sleep without underwear.

  My bed looks like it’s been made with me in it. There’s not a wrinkle in the comforter; its patched pastel pattern is pulled smooth and tight, clear up to my neck. When I start to unroll my arms and legs from the folds of the sheets, I feel a sharp pain in my elbow, like I’ve been sleeping on it, and I stop for a moment, trying to decide if that position is physically possible.

  I decide to fold back the comforter from one corner, the way someone might diagonally halve a dinner napkin. I do it slowly. It’s like opening a hand-addressed letter with no return address; I have a feeling I could find just about anything inside.

  What I find under the covers looks like someone else’s nightgown. It is a thin, white, cotton smock, stippled with green, and it cuts off at my knees. I can’t imagine who I borrowed it from, since my friends and I all sleep in nylon shorts and our dads’ XL T-shirts. When I feel around to the breach of cloth above my own pink ass, it dawns on me: I’m wearing a hospital gown.

  I’m immobile in the face of my panic. I’m stunned to the point that I don’t dare breathe or kick my feet in a way that would make even the faintest sliding sound on the starched sheets. I don’t know how many minutes I lay like this, motionless in the small sag that my body makes in the mattress, barely breathing. I can’t get out of bed until I’ve figured out what emergency landed me in this green and white gown. My room is directly above the dining room, and the littlest thump on the carpet can shake the chandelier; I don’t want anyone downstairs to see it swinging and know I’m awake.

  I feel like I’m arriving at the scene of an accident, like my physical self has been creamed in a hit-and-run and my mental self is the first one to find it. All I can do is run through the basic first-aid checkpoints, the first of which is: Can you move?

  I pull my knees into my chest and wrap both arms around them with no problem, aside from the throbbing deep in my elbow. The back of my head is tender against the pillow, and my neck moves in a succession of arthritic-like cracks. But my joints move. I’m not paralyzed.

  There are no clues in the form of a cast or a bandage or stitches. Lying down, I can’t even make out any discernible bruises. Later, I’ll be able to make out the purple impressions of fingers around my biceps, plus a golf ball–sized bruise on one ass cheek, a sort of yellowed half-moon around a raised, blue bump. But for now, the only visible signs that I’m injured are the hospital gown and a pink, plastic wristband that reads ZAILCKAS, KOREN.

  The house is filled with the sounds of Saturday morning in motion. Bear is barking to be let in through the side door. There is the sound of coffee mugs clinking on countertops, and I detect the faint smell of bagels burning in the oven. I might even hear the far-off sound of my mother’s whirring laughter.

  My room appears equal in its sameness. There are dirty socks on the floor and stacks of Seventeen on my desk. On my bureau, there are notebooks on top of snapshots, necklaces on top of notebooks, and dust over just about everything, ever since I barred my mom from my room. Fall light filters through the window blinds and casts sunny stripes across the carpet. I can see my back-to-school sweaters brushing elbows in the closet; the price tags are still stapled to some of them, and I can make out the orange half-off stickers from Filene’s juniors’ department.

  MENTALLY, I retrace my steps from last night to try to find this dropped memory.

  As far as Friday nights go, it was typical. I spent it with my new friend, Kat Caldwell. She is a girl I made friends with a few months ago for no real reason other than we both drink and we’re both sensitive. The first night I’d slept over at Kat’s house, I saw that her sheets were streaked with mascara, and her Laura Ashley pillowcases retained the outline of her whole face: half-moon of foundation, faint ring of lip stain, black strokes from the flurried beating of her dripping eyelashes. She’d opened the drawers of her bureau to show me the old liquor bottles she hid under her childhood ballet costumes, and I’d laughed at dozens of tiny Lycra bodices, net tutus, and loose sequins that smelled of Tanqueray.

  Kat came with a silver cord to more friends, like Abby and Allen, and I’d gone with all of them, plus my childhood friend Claire, to a Friday-night get-together near the lake in the next town over.

  A girl whose parents were away in Vermont for a wine-tasting weekend threw the party. Her parents must have warned her not to have friends over while they were gone because she wouldn’t let any of us inside her house to mix drinks properly, in cups. Instead, about a dozen of us—friends, and friends of friends, and neighborhood kids who’d heard that someone’s parents were out—were in the backyard, slugging rum, tequila, and Kahlúa straight from their bottles. At one point, when I asked the girl if I could go inside to use her bathroom, she suggested that I drop my pants behind the hedges across the street.

  The whole ordeal hadn’t been the least bit thrilling. I’d sat beside Kat on a splintering dock. Our bare feet dangled over the edge of the black, rippling water, where we could occasionally hear fish jump, making plopping sounds like tossed coins. The wind propelled dead leaves across the lake’s surface. The clouds swirled themselves around the moon.

  I started by taking small sips from the communal bottles. I knocked back a few sips of generic rum, which tasted strong and acidic, and bit my throat. I soothed it with candied gulps of Kahlúa.

  I also drank from a thermos filled with vodka that Claire had filched from a bottle in her parents’ liquor cabinet. It was the same gallon-wide jug of Absolut that we always stole from, and then added water to, in an effort to recover the stolen inches. After months of adding and subtracting, the vodka had reached a diluted state that rendered it tasteless. It was as cold and wet as springwater, and we drank it fast.

  The last thing I remember is telling Claire about the poet Frank O’Hara, the way he’d said that after the first glass of vodka you can accept anything about life, even your own mysteriousness. After that, my own mystery opens up.

  THERE ARE only so many calamities that could have warranted this hospital gown. My first thought is that I lost my footing on the path leading up from the dock and cracked my knee in the place where it still wasn’t fully healed from the surgery. One would think I’d remember that kind of fall, but perhaps the pain of it blacked me out.

  For one horrible moment, it also occurs to me that Allen, who had driven, might have had too many sips of straight rum and veered the car off the road on the way home. It was only a month ago that a boy in our class got drunk and drove his car into a lake, where it sank like an old tire, and he had to unroll the window to swim out. For a moment, I think whiplash could be responsible for my lumped head and stiff neck, not to mention the amnesia. But then I decide I’d surely remember something from the moments before we crashed: gasping, blackness spreading across the windshield, the sound of pine branches scraping the flanks of the car.

  I should call one of the girls who’d been with me, to see if she can fill in the gaps. But when I look for the portable phone, someone has removed it from its cradle on my bureau, as if to prevent that from happening.

  I STEP SOFTLY to my full-length mirror, using the ballet-walk where you stand only on the balls of your feet.

  The image reflected back at me makes me cup my mouth with both hands: I look like a woman in a zombie film from the 1950s. My hair looks like it’s been replaced with a Halloween wig; it is teased into a high pile of knots and dusted with dirt and leaves, and something sticky has lacquered the ends together. From this position, I can make out a whole range of fingerprints that wrap around my forearms in shades of brownish-blue and yellow. A cat-scratch is carved into the corner of my eye; aside from that, my face looks slack and pasty, but unmarked.

  I can see now that I’m wearing
hospital booties with my gown. They are blue ankle socks with plastic beads on the soles, presumably so you won’t slip on the linoleum floors while you’re fleeing the ward.

  I add another item to the list of possible accidents: psychiatric emergency.

  My alarm clock says it’s 10:30. That tells me that whatever happened must be serious because no one has bothered to wake me for my poetry workshop. I was scheduled to spend the weekend at a conference for Worcester County’s most promising young writers, and it started more than two hours ago. The workshop is one of those college résumé padders that my mother would send me to in any state short of death. (Just two months ago, she forced me to spend a week at diplomacy camp at Washington, D.C., and just to spite her, I’d skipped the lectures on youth leadership to buy forties of beer and drink them with local delinquents on the hill behind the dorm.)

  I would stay in my room all day, trying to figure out what happened, if I didn’t desperately need a glass of water. My throat is so parched it feels raw, and each swallow is arduous.

  I keep the hospital booties on because the morning has the cold nip of fall, but I trade the gown for a sweatshirt and a pair of flannel pants. I try to brush my hair, and realize with one painful stroke that the task could take all afternoon, so instead I wind the whole snarled mess into a lopsided bun. I look at myself in the mirror and wince before heading downstairs to meet my parents with the premonition that I am fucked.

  IT IS my first blackout.

  I will never again experience one so comprehensive. I get the details first from Claire, who I find pretending to sleep on the couch in the living room. My parents will rehash them with me again later, as will Kat and Allen and Abby when I see them Monday morning at school. The remaining gaps I’ll fill in years later, when I get the courage to ask my father more questions, and when I see my emergency file.

  I passed out on the dock in a puddle of my own vomit. I imagine it was mostly liquor because my dad told the doctor I didn’t eat dinner that night. Before that, I pulled my shirt up over my shoulders to show my bra to someone’s brother because, knowing I was slipping into oblivion, he’d asked me what color it was. I’d also professed a soul-shattering love for an older boy who had taken me for a drunken walk in the woods a few months earlier—a boy who had pushed my back into the cragged banks of a stream and called me a baby when I wouldn’t let him pull off my underwear.