But skit night proves that my drinking has become its own tarnish. Drinking to quash the past won’t work anymore because the past has welled back up. Every awful feeling bobbed back up under the alcohol and burst open. Now I feel doubly bad, on account of the things that have been bothering me and the emotion that I’ve neglected to control.
After lunch, Hannah comes to sit on the side of my bed. She says, “Don’t worry. It was just beer tears. The sisters understand. At one point or another, we’ve all gotten drunk and sobbed senselessly.”
I draw my knees toward me and watch the tent they make in the sheets. I nod. I tell Hannah, “I know.” But deep down, I sense that the tears were not meaningless. I think that crying was an honest reflex, an involuntary reaction to some inner pressure point. They might have been my body’s way of telling me that something is wrong inside, that six years of drinking is catching up with me. It is contorting me into some different girl, a new person who I can sometimes see in pictures, behind my glassed eyes and in the down-turned corners of my mouth. This new girl is sad and secretive and volatile. She is me, and I am in trouble.
SECOND SEMESTER of junior year is a drop in the bucket. Two-thirds of my friends and acquaintances leave to study in Europe. Their postcards arrive weekly and get pinned up in the sorority mailroom. There are pictures of plazas and palazzos, the sun setting on London Bridge, the sun rising on Notre Dame, the brown-and-white–trimmed canal houses in Amsterdam that look like short stacks. The cursive in the back boxes is minuscule, in an attempt to squeeze in descriptions of every pub, hash restaurant, live sex show, and weekend Eurail ride to Ibiza. Every girl has a favorite corner café, bridge, pub, discotheque, and strong brand of cigarettes. Everyone has a new understanding of culture.
I, too, had put in an application to study in London, and even made arrangements to temp at my favorite British women’s magazine. But at the last minute, I defected. I decided to stay in Syracuse because I didn’t want to fall behind on my course load; the prospect of spending an extra year making up graphics classes was just too horrifying. Instead, I interview for a job at Syracuse’s weekly newspaper, where I slump at the intern’s desk, typing out human-interest stories of low quality.
Suddenly, I am among the oldest girls living in Zeta. Once the girls my age take British Air flights to new flats in Camden, a crop of nineteen-year-olds moves in to take their place. April stays put with me. But Selene takes her records, her bong, and her yoga mat to Paris, leaving a vintage map tacked above her desk for us to remember her by. In her space, a bubbly eighteen-year-old named Eva unpacks teddy bears, Ralph Lauren sweaters, and a clear vase filled with Christmas lights that serves as a night-light.
Eva surprises me. I would have guessed she was too prim and prissy to slug Jim Beam. Every bit of clothing that hangs in her lopsided armoire is pastel colored. She has more powder-blue sundresses, pink sweaters, and T-shirts in shades of rubber-duck yellow than there are in the infant section of any department store. She speaks with a baby voice, too, which is high and whiny in its Long Island accent. But sure enough, within the first week of living with us, Eva wakes up with a boy in her bed and can’t remember ripping open the condom wrapper on the nightstand; she bounds downstairs to eat French toast, telling me “Sex is really no big deal.” Another night, she staggers home soaked in beer, after a girl she got into a fight with poured a cup over her head.
The new girls make me uneasy in their wildness, particularly my “little sister,” Hailey, who acts as though she’s demonized by the same sadness and rage that held me captive last semester and the summer before it. For a month Hailey chews shyly at dinner, while the girls around her shout, gossip, and smack the table hard enough to bounce the silver. That is until Smirnoff transforms her overnight into the house’s constant source of theatrics. Come three A.M., she is always in the phone booth making prank calls, or in the kitchen filling water balloons. Sometimes she is hanging out the second-story window, flinging beer bottles at her ex-boyfriend’s window in the fraternity next door.
Hailey upsets me the way my real little sister does when I see her doing something moronic that I sense she learned by observation. Three years from now, I’ll be able to see an icky younger version of me in my sister when she comes home from her freshman year at college. There, even in the heat of her southern university, she’ll wear my old five-inch-high shit-kickers and concert T-shirts (now twice dilapidated), and stay out in bars past four A.M., fermenting herself. After a time, it will be hard to be around either of them. They remind me of the me I am trying hard not to be.
These girls, in no small part, are the reason I try to pull myself out of the trench of my alcohol abuse in the winter of 2001. Once I am alone in the house, living with girls who are two and three years younger than I am, it occurs to me to start acting older. I realize winter is sliding into spring, which will slide into summer. Junior year will fall off into senior year. And beyond senior year, real life looms as ghastly and gargantuan as a nuclear mushroom cloud. I think that after three years of college, I should try to grow up, and outgrow the life-stage behavior of binge drinking.
ONE NIGHT in the library stacks, I run into a boy I haven’t seen since he gave me a piggyback ride home from a party freshman year, and resolve to start dating him.
Years later, I will think it must have been more organic than that. I must have felt some romantic spark worth nurturing. But in retrospect, it escapes me. I can only see him for what he eventually becomes: a long distraction from the inevitable.
My boyfriend fills the blank box of time until May. He is kind, if grating. He likes what I let him see in me, which is not much. And as a result, he treats me like Any Girl. It is the way he thinks a girlfriend should be treated: He buys me jewelry based on my birthstone and brings me bunched carnations that make the sisters say, “Awww.” I say “me, too” when he tells me he loves me. I give up my virtual virginity, not because I feel desire, but because I don’t think I’ll ever feel grown-up until I do.
We take trips together that enable me to get away from the house, and from the girls who reel home dished from a night at a frat party. We take his station wagon up Route 5 to Skaneateles and sit under the gazebo, holding coffee in foam cups and staring at the ice on the lake. We coast down I-81 to Ithaca, and then over to Cornell, where he rings the bell at their chapter of Zeta, even though I scream at him not to. We take the New York Turnpike home to my house one weekend, where my dad snaps a picture of us on the porch swing, and my mom attributes “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and a good man” to the bright change she sees in me.
After three months of abstinence, I feel so changed that I go to a party as a test to myself. It is a “paint party” at Chris’s fraternity, where everyone pours big vats of water-based paint over each other’s heads, as though the theme were abuse itself. I think I will only have a couple glasses of the punch the boys call jungle juice, but it tastes rich and syrupy, and I get obliterated without any effort. The paint that splashes over my shoulders and down my arms feels cool, and I don’t even care that it’s stained me everywhere. I twirl around under the blue spray of a squirt gun, and the room keeps spinning after I stop. I am lax enough to let some boy pick me up and toss me into a crowd of people on the second-floor landing, where I slip through everyone’s paint-slick hands and hit my back against the floor with a crack.
When I weave through the third-floor hallway, dragging one Crayola-red hand along the wall, Chris is there to grab me by the shirtwaist. I have no sober sensibility to stop me from kissing him. I forget that I have a boyfriend. I forget that I am trying to be a grown-up, and dependable, that I am trying to stop abusing other people with my drunken whims.
There is nothing to stop me from standing on my toes to whisper in Chris’s ear. I tell him he’s the only one I’ve ever wanted. He just looks at me. I notice he has a blue streak across one cheek from where I held his face with my hand, and there is something like a flicker in his eyes. It’s a loo
k I don’t know how to interpret; behind it might be anything from affection to resentment to drunkenness. My relationship with Chris is just as fitful as my current relationship with drinking. I plunge into it, I feel frightened, and then I try to pull myself out. I feel passionate about him, and yet I am terrified by that passion. I am afraid my need runs too deep.
Before Chris can say anything, a sister comes over to say that my boyfriend is waiting in the foyer to drive me home. I leave Chris standing in the hallway, and it is the last time I will see him before he graduates. I go back and smear my paint-stained self over the pillowcases of my boyfriend’s bed.
IN MARCH, I go to Cancún for spring break. I committed to it last semester, when Elle convinced me to go with her and Brianne, plus six people I know in passing from the campus bars. Though Elle pulled out at the last minute, after our fight, I go because our all-inclusive package—which includes airfare, lodging, and a big packet of all-you-can-drink tickets—is dependent on a group of eight, and we have already called our travel agent with too many substitutions.
I immediately regret my decision to go. Our charter flight out of John F. Kennedy Airport is delayed for more than twenty-four hours due to technical problems, and the terminal is awash with three hundred jocks getting drunk on duty-free liquor. There is an air of anarchy. People are hooting and running around barefoot, emulating some spring-break insanity they’ve seen on MTV. One of the girls I barely know gets drunk at the airport bar and has sex with a man in the public bathroom before we even board the plane. I take a sip of Brianne’s cup, filled with Gatorade and vodka, and fall asleep with my face in my knapsack.
Spring break doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t work with me in it. During the flight, the smell of the Bloody Marys coming off the seatbacks all around me turns my stomach, and I feel offended for the pretty flight attendant when a thunder-mouthed frat boy puts his hand on her ass. We land at midnight, and I am too cranky to rejoice at the novelty of buying Coronas on the airport shuttle. But I crack open a bottle anyway, while a tour leader blathers into the bus’s P.A., and try to sip it between bumps in the road.
I don’t know what I expected, but even in the prime of my excess, the amount of drinking that goes on during spring break would be too much for me. The heat is insufferable the first day I try to endure it hungover; when I unroll my hotel towel on a poolside chair, my head pounds, and my chin beads up with perspiration. All around the perimeter of the pool, girls are tied into bikinis by strings that reveal no tan lines. They sit on the tiled stools of the hotel wet bar, smoking Camels and ordering bottles of Bud, unaffected by heat or hangovers. I, however, am morose, sallow, and turning more lobster red by the day. Every glass of beer saps me of energy. I can feel myself dehydrating like a sundried berry.
As the week goes on, I realize that no matter how many all-inclusive Creamsicle-flavored cocktails I down, I can’t get drunk. The bars must have realized that packing the drinks with handfuls of ice, to displace the real liquor, forces us to order twice as many. Our drink levels plunge dramatically after we pick out the ice cubes and toss them into the sand, afraid that the dissolving water will give us Montezuma’s revenge.
While the girls I came with still manage to get afflicted, I just get a headache. I keep thinking that if I were drunk, perhaps I wouldn’t feel as insulted by the lewd promotions going on at every beach and in every bar: people flashing their private parts and tonguing shots off one another’s necks; men nibbling cupcakes off girls’ laps to win bottles of liquor; girls sucking suggestively on frozen bananas for the sake of free T-shirts. A booze cruise drops us at an island for three hours of watching simulated sex contests, in which the winners actually fornicate onstage. Sober, everything I see makes me livid.
The girls I share a room with don’t share my objections to spring-break culture. On the stretch of beach outside the Oasis Hotel, they get blighted on Alabama Slammers and enter the hotel’s infamous wet T-shirt contest, which sounds misleading because the girls don’t wear T-shirts at all. They dance bare chested under the spray of a garden hose, while men pack in by the hundreds to watch their breasts bounce in circles like blown pinwheels. One of the girls I came with wins a Bacardi key chain as her prize for third place. We all assure her that she would have won first had she not slipped on the wet floorboards and tumbled bare-ass-over-elbows off the stage.
Together, the girls meet men from state universities and reality-TV shows, with whom they exchange cell-phone numbers so they can meet them later at La Boom and Señor Frogs and share margaritas from yard-tall plastic tubes. At five A.M. every day, I am vaguely aware of the door handle clicking as someone struggles with the key. I hear the low whispers of a man as he knocks into the bureau, followed by my roommate’s inebriated giggling. Then comes the dragging sound of someone’s pulling back the sliding glass door to the balcony, where the next day, she’ll say they had sex on our wet beach towels.
After a few days I stop hanging out with them altogether. I go to the beach alone, while everyone sleeps off the night before, and float facedown in the impossibly blue water to see just how far down the beach the tide will carry me.
The night before we fly home, I finally drink my fill of tequila at an open-air bar, where I meet perhaps the only art-school boy in all of Mexico. He is so pale and rail thin that one of the boys who came with us will, in an ongoing joke, call him Powder, after the bald albino boy in that Victor Salva movie. Powder and I share a pitcher of sangria and yammer at each other the way drunkards do. He is not really listening to my talk about poetry, and I am not really listening to his talk about photography or sculpture. Yet my hand is on his shoulder, and his hand is on my thigh. And I feel lit up like a punched-tin lantern. That morning, while the sky is lighting up to a sherbet-colored orange, we walk to the beach. Someone steals my handbag while we’re stretched out in the sand kissing.
I make it back to New York because I had the foresight to store my passport in the hotel safe. But in the process, I got into a brutal screaming match with Brianne, who insisted on being in charge of the safe’s key on the day we checked in, when we stuffed it with drink tickets and traveler’s checks. When I burst through the door that morning, she was keg legged, too, lying in bed with the quarterback from a Midwest university, and she was not pleased about being interrupted. She shoved the alarm clock off the nightstand and said she didn’t see how my lost purse was her problem.
While I’m figuring out how to get back to school without a ride from Brianne, and in the absence of cash or credit cards, I ring up eight hundred dollars’ worth of collect calls to my parents. They call my cousin, who lives in Manhattan and offers to help. She sends a car service to pick me up when I land at JFK. I spend two baffled hours at the terminal’s curb, trying to figure out which of the numbered black town cars is intended for me, before I give up and take a cab to the studio apartment she shares with her fiancé. It’s two A.M. when I coil up on their spare futon for a few fitful hours of sleep.
The next day, my dad lands me a ticket on a commuter flight to Syracuse. It puts them out another few hundred dollars that they don’t have to spare, and makes me wonder if I wouldn’t have done less financial damage if I’d just gone to Europe. It occurs to me that my abuse has continued right where it left off—I am still mistreating everyone in the throes of my drinking.
The light coming through the plane window is too bright. I can see the ovular splotch of it even with my eyes closed, and it sets off some delayed hangover, a sickness that’s been waiting until we were someplace over the Catskills to strike like a gong. The woman next to me looks alarmed when I extract the paper barf bag from the seat pocket, to hold on my lap, just in case. I decide to ascend, again, from drinking as the plane descends on Hancock International Airport.
LIQUID HEART
SINCE MY ALCOHOL abuse has always been social, it only makes sense that I become antisocial in my self-reform. I associate abusive drinking with parties and bars, with spring break and the s
orority house, which are the types of places where people convene for the sole purpose of getting shitfaced. I think I’ll be good as new once I escape mobs and mob mentality. If I can stay away from other students until I graduate, holing up in my new, off-campus apartment like it’s the Fortress of Solitude, I can stay clear of confusion and emptiness, and thus alcohol.
During the summer before my senior year of college, I turn twenty-one, and my boyfriend drives to Massachusetts to celebrate with me, even though I tell him not to. My parents take us to dinner at the restaurant where we used to spend every Christmas Eve when I was young. It is the place where my sister and I would barrel down the corridors in our patent-leather shoes and matching taffeta dresses, throwing pecan rolls at the geese on the patio, and playing “Joy to the World” on the restaurant’s piano.
But on the night of my long-anticipated twenty-first birthday, I am not festive. I am still trying to abstain from alcohol as a result of my disastrous spring break. But at the same time, I feel conflicted about the fact that I am not sticking to prototype. Another girl would be off taking twenty-one shots right now and forging from bar to bar in a T-shirt reading BARELY LEGAL.
My mother prods me to order a glass of white wine because she wants me to experience the ritual of being carded, but I clench my jaw and refuse. There is no way to tell her that the ceremony holds no thrill. I have been carded for years. I have passed off dozens of fake IDs to waitresses and bouncers, and the fact that the transaction is now legitimate doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.
I gloom through the soup, the salad, and the fish course, ignoring the wine menu that my mother has set in front of me like a place card. Just when I think I’ve escaped the pressure to drink, a waitress sneaks up behind me and delivers a slice of Chocolate-Merlot cake topped with a candle. My boyfriend starts to hum “Happy Birthday to You.” I close my eyes and wish for a new life.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 25
