Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  After I tottered and fell sideways onto the planks of the dock, nobody could wake me. Allen, Abby, Claire, and Kat carried me up the hill to the road by my arms and legs, which is why my body bears what look like forty finger-shaped bruises. They dropped me a few times, too, which explains the raised bumps on my butt and the back of my head.

  When they tell me this, I envision a dead body—not my body, but the body of someone in a thriller movie who has just been clubbed with a paperweight and dragged in a bloody streak across the floor by her feet. When I ask them why they didn’t roll me up in a rug, no one finds it funny.

  The girl whose house we were at brought out a pair of pilled sweatpants because I’d retched all over my jeans. I can’t imagine that she would have let me inside, given that I was liable to puke over all manner of Venetian rugs and calico curtains, so I’ll come to imagine that they pulled off my jeans outside on the porch, leaving my underwear fully exposed while they struggled to stick my feet through the sweatpants’ elasticized legs. Then they draped me across the backseat of Allen’s car and drove me to Abby’s house.

  From what I can tell from the medical records, this whole ordeal took at least an hour. It was around 12:30. Abby’s parents were asleep when my friends lugged me in through the front door.

  They tried to give me a shower, to clean off the combination of liquor, vomit, dirt, and leaves that adhered to me. I’ll never know if I was fully naked or if they left my underthings on because I am too embarrassed to ask. Nor will I know if Allen was there while they did it, though I don’t know how they could have held me under the showerhead without his strength. Afterward, they must have put me back into the sweatpants because they are there in the plastic bag that my dad carried home from the hospital, and they are all but crusted with vomit. My mom will wash them and insist that I return them, in a most undignified moment, to the girl at school on Monday morning.

  By the time I was showered, I had already missed my curfew, so Abby called my father to tell him not to worry. She said I’d fallen asleep while we were watching a movie and asked if I could stay the night.

  My father hadn’t believed her. He asked to speak to her parents, and when she said they were sleeping, he asked to talk to me. I was dangling over the edge of her brother’s bunk bed, getting sick again. In a second-long flash of memory, I recall someone shaking my shoulders and telling me to pull it together for two minutes, probably so I could ask my dad if I could stay the night. When they held the receiver to my ear, I slurred, “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes, Daddy.”

  Years later, he will say it was one of those pivotal moments—he sensed that the whole world swung on whether he went back to sleep or drove to me.

  CLAIRE WENT to the hospital with my father. She was an emergency medical trainee and knew how to calculate heart rates and breaths per minute, which she did throughout the thirty-minute drive.

  After everything, it is the thought of Claire answering my dad’s questions that makes me feel most guilty. He is intimidating when he’s not trying to be, and bloodcurdling when he is. If he puts the full boom into his voice, he can make boyfriends tremble and customer-service reps cry. When he asked Claire what happened, she told him nearly the whole truth. She injected fiction only when he asked where we got the vodka—she said older boys from the neighborhood brought it, instead of admitting that we poured it from her parents’ depository of Absolut jugs.

  When the car pulled up in front of the emergency room, my father says, he carried me through the doors the way he used to carry me to bed.

  The doctors tested my urine for drugs. According to the doctor’s notes, it was the only time I showed signs of life. When the nurse was trying to insert a catheter I kept muttering, “Stop, it’s embarrassing,” proving that even semiconscious, I was self-conscious. In my chart, there are ten pages of lab results, including all sorts of decimal numbers and strands of letters that I don’t understand, but really don’t need to. Alcohol alone was responsible for knocking me out, a combination of rum and vodka and coffee liqueur. On one page there is a long list of chemical compounds for which I came up NONDETECT.

  Claire tells me the doctors seemed certain they would find some substance, besides alcohol, sweeping through my system. It is the year that everyone first read about Rohypnol, the brand name for flunitrazepam, the tranquilizer used to treat sleeplessness, anxiety, convulsions, and muscle tension. Four months earlier, two women who had been raped after someone slipped them Rohypnol testified before Congress to urge them to take action against the vast numbers of people who were smuggling the drug into the United States. One of them said of the man who raped her, “This guy could have sawed me in half and I wouldn’t have known the difference.” A classification known as “date-rape drugs” had emerged. And everyone in the ER thought I was on them.

  My dad will say later that the doctors were far less compassionate when my test results revealed I was just another teenaged girl who’d nearly poisoned herself by drinking. I will always wonder, though, if the staff’s lack of sympathy had more to do with another brief flash of a memory, in which I clawed at the tubes tethered to my arm and screamed at the faint impression of a woman, maybe a doctor or nurse, calling her a “dumb-ass bitch.”

  NO ONE could imagine that I’d done this to myself. My dad, particularly, was convinced that someone had held a gun to my head. It was beyond his comprehension that I’d willed myself to this level of past gone. I was an A student in English, psychology, and art. Sure, math and science were touch-and-go, but that just meant I was right-brained. As far as he knew, will was what I reserved for the PSATs and ballet auditions. It was what I used to solicit cash for the mall.

  My charts say my skin was cold and clammy, which is one of the signs of alcohol poisoning, as is the fact that I was only semiconscious. When my tests came back they showed my blood alcohol content to be 0.25. A 0.4 BAC is considered lethal for the average person, but it can take less for young people and first-time drinkers.

  At sixteen, I’m 5'2" and 105 pounds with a ski parka on, which means it would take about one hour of downing eight to ten drinks to kill me. Claire told the doctors I’d been drinking for an hour and a half. I’d had half a thermos of vodka, plus immeasurable sips of rum and Kahlúa, straight from the bottles. As the doctor told my father, a few more drinks and I’d have fallen into a coma or died right there on the dock.

  No matter how many ways I go over the story, I’ll never know if some part of me sought that kind of close call. A good bit of it was inexperience; it was not waiting for all those gulps of liquor to absorb into my system, but just expecting to feel them right away. But I also wonder if that night wasn’t the first glimmer of a budding death drive, what Freud called the instinct we all have to return to the perfect stillness we felt before birth. Other girls my age steered into that urge with starvation diets or razor blades, but I chose alcohol because it seemed far less fanatical. On nights when I felt sad, particularly, I could feel my drinking accelerate.

  I’d been saddened a lot lately, and stressed. Even with new friends like Kat, high school was a nightmarish system of checks and balances. It required observing yourself constantly, making sure you distinguished yourself enough to be accepted, but not to the point where you might garner resentment. Schoolwork required inscribing index cards for hours, all the while maintaining the illusion that you didn’t give a shit about the decimals of your GPA. Getting a date required acting just uninterested enough to make a boy interested in asking you. Every consideration required reconsideration. I’d begun waking up at 4:30 A.M. so I could reappraise my outfit for the school day; the fate of the next two years seemed to weigh on whether I chose suede cowboy boots or Adidas sneakers.

  My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I’m told would last for hours. If I couldn’t triumph, I didn’t wan
t to play. I would pack up my toys and go home. This was perhaps how I felt about being sixteen.

  But I’ll never know if I intended to forfeit. They pumped my stomach, and I sprang back to life that morning in my bedroom. I went directly back to homeroom. I did not pass “Go.” I did not collect $200.

  SATURDAY, at breakfast, my parents seem almost serene. The coffee is still steaming. The Saturday Boston Globe is still spread out beneath us, in sections. My dad is sitting across from me, with his elbows folded on the woven tablecloth my parents bought in Greece early in their marriage. My mom is at the head of the table, with her hands crossed on the paper’s business section. Bear is pacing the floor by our feet, hoping for a dropped cube of cantaloupe. The seating arrangement makes me feel like a fox in an English hunting painting. It feels like everyone is closing in around me, and I feel the terror of being surrounded.

  My mother starts the conversation and I end up turning sideways in my chair to face her. From this position, I can avoid the gaze of my father, which is sterner on account of his being at the hospital. My mom doesn’t try to recap the time line. Instead, she says, “I assume Claire filled you in.”

  It makes me wonder if my parents had had Claire sleep on the living-room couch because it spared them the awkwardness of rehashing the gory details for me. In fact, we’d waited to have this discussion until my dad and I had driven Claire home. Even with the babble of NPR, the car was so silent I could hear the engine purring.

  My mom says the problem is not that I’ve been experimenting with alcohol; she’d made it clear in Ocean City that I am old enough to do that. In fact, she says, it is probably a good idea for me to toy around with drinking now, while I still live at home, instead of waiting until I get to college, where the environment makes inexperience even more risky.

  She says she wouldn’t have cared if I’d been drinking at home last night. I could have drunk myself into a similar stupor, she says, gone upstairs, and passed out in my bed. At home, she would have known I was safe. But anything could have happened to me on that dock. She says, “What if you fell into the water and drowned? What if you had been raped?”

  My dad says hardly anything. He sets his reading glasses down on top of the front page and looks at me with eyes I don’t know how to interpret. I can’t remember the last time he looked at me this unremittingly. The moments we spend together usually revolve around some type of project. Typically, we talk while we cook, spray-paint patio furniture, or make candles out of melted-down crayons. Those times, his eyes are focused on the peppers in the wok, or the jet from the paint can, or the bottle we fill with hot wax. He is the type of dad who expresses concern by constructing things, or cooking, or shopping for gadgets, by making sure I have a full stomach, a computer Zip drive, and Gore-Tex boots come spring thaw. I’ve never seen the expression he is giving me now. It’s not outrage, really, or disappointment. It is the look of crude disbelief.

  The only concern he voices aloud is about my missing the young writers’ conference. He asks (rhetorically, of course), “Do you see how drinking makes you miss out on other fun activities?”

  My mother cries a little, which always makes me cry, too. I’ve always been like a dog in the way that I absorb her moods. I have been listening to my parents speak with a tension like a rock in my throat. As my mother cries, I have to keep swallowing. In the end, I give up and bawl soundlessly. I use the sleeve of my sweatshirt to wipe the wetness from my face.

  At the time, I think my mother cries solely because I’ve frightened her. But years from now, more drunken sons and daughters will surface among her relatives and friends. There will be comatose daughters on respirators, daughters laid up in hospitals with broken cheekbones, car accidents, DUI charges, and sons whose early admissions to Ivy League universities are threatened by alcohol-related suspensions. Years from now, my mother will explain more to me. She’ll say, “When you choose to stay at home to rear your kids, a dead-drunk daughter makes you question an entire decade’s worth of motherhood—you wonder if the career you gave up made the slightest difference in the personalities you’ve been shaping.”

  My sister is eleven. As luck would have it, she is spending the night at a friend’s house, so she misses all the clues that point to this black crime. My mom won’t tell her about it until she’s eighteen, when it’s used as a cautionary tale to warn her off drinking, and by that time the handles of the liquor cabinet will wear a silver luggage lock. My sister will be appalled. But mostly, she’ll mourn the fact that, as the youngest, she’s always the last to know.

  There is not much to say in my defense. There is no point in telling a fraction of the truth because there is no gray area in which to weasel. All the facts of the night are laid out on the table, like plates of fruit and toast.

  While my parents talk, I nod like a dashboard Chihuahua and say, “I know, I know, I know.” I certainly say I am sorry; it’s the only thing I can think to say with the hospital bracelet still sliding up and down my wrist.

  I am hangover-free due to the large bags of saline pumped through my forearm’s thin veins. Still, I climb the stairs back up to my room and sleep for the rest of the day. It’s like slipping back into the hole of the blackout—in sleep, I can forget again.

  Tomorrow, I’ll go for the second day of the young writers’ conference, telling the tweed-jacketed director only that I’ve been sick. In a low-lit corner classroom, I’ll try to write a poem I decide to call “Lush,” but I won’t be able to come up with more than a few first words, scarred by cross-outs.

  I know the whole ordeal needs to be written about. But two days afterward, I am still far too close to the night to see it clearly. I am looking only at the incident, and the result is a lot like the pictures in our biology textbook, taken at microscopic range, the ones that look like billowing clouds until you read the caption and realize you are looking at magnified cotton swabs. Years will pass before I can see the night of my stomach pumping to scale. I will need the perspective of six more years before I understand what I am looking at.

  MY PARENTS ground me for the remainder of November, which is the cruelest season to be in lockdown. There are school-sponsored carnivals. There are semiformal gymnasium dances. There are evening football games, where mist levitates in the stadium lights. And there are remote keg parties afterward.

  There are parties that require a two-mile hike through the thick New England woods, crunching through dead leaves, and dodging the occasional small-town cop on the prowl. There are parties like I’ll never know again. The air in the clearing smells of apple orchards, Bud Light, and pine-dense bonfire smoke. The weather seems always on the verge of snow, and some boy, who is sitting on a log a few feet away, always seems to be on the verge of crossing the fire flicker to put his arm around me.

  Sometime during my punishment, the guilt I feel as a result of the incident melts away. After a few days, my parents stop talking about the reason I am grounded; they reference it only with raised eyebrows when I make some complaint. Likewise, the girls in the cafeteria, who in those first few days after the accident were a flurry of whispering, direct their attention to somebody else. The alarm I felt that morning in my bedroom fades from memory. It is replaced by the agitation that comes with being restricted.

  My parents have never made good wardens, and the Zailckas Home Penitentiary is notoriously low security. Here, a prisoner is free to leaf through fashion magazines, drive to the video store, or surf Internet chat rooms ’til dawn. Phone calls are unlimited. And time off for good behavior will certainly be afforded, if such a thing ever occurs.

  In fact, the only real rule in the house of correction is that I can’t leave it. At least, not after prime time. This means bonfire parties are out. So is the repertoire of fictions that I regularly use to disguise them: dinner at Applebee’s, movies at the General Cinema, fishing in Harvard, canoeing in Concord, hiking Mount Wachusett, throwing spares at the Bowl-A-Way.

  At ten every night, my dad punches
the keypad on the security system in a series of calculated beeps, to which a robotic woman’s voice answers “Al-arm sys-tem is on!” I listen to him ascend the stairs to go to bed, to Bear’s dog tags jingling two or three steps behind him, and know there is no escape. The entire house stirs whenever the system announces “Al-arm sys-tem is off!” It’s enough to wonder whether it’s in place to keep criminals out, or to keep me in.

  These nights, the house must look picture perfect. For a month, my parents never have to answer the question: “It’s ten P.M., do you know where your children are?” My sister and I are sachets stuffed into the pockets of our beds.

  Nights, the floodlights from the perennial garden splash light over our front door, where my mother has hung a grapevine wreath. Even with the blinds closed, the light gets tossed against my bedroom wall, too. It’s bright enough to read by, and well suited for shadow puppets. I’ve long forgotten how to lace my fingers into the shape of a barking dog, and opt instead for my favorite gesture, the flipped bird. I examine the silhouette of my middle finger from every imaginable angle, saying “Fuck you” to no one in particular. I perfect all the various forms—thumb in, thumb out, with a wrist twirl—before I lie down to close my eyes, deciding that I hate just about everyone.

  Our house is close enough to the high school that I can hear the noise from its football stadium. There’s the low echo of my English teacher’s voice, announcing the players’ names; the horns from the marching band; the swell of applause after each touchdown; and the bleacher stomping, which sounds like thunder. Somewhere past the edge of the driveway, the mailbox, the old tire swing, I can hear football season. My friends are sneaking Jack Daniel’s in the school parking lot during halftime. There is a play in motion.