Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (4 page)

I didn’t realize it, but Josh had a rough entry to school, too. A Yankee boy dropped into a part of the world where kids were still fighting the Civil War. The brainiac skills that wowed his younger sister were useless on the football field, where Texas boys proved their mettle. And by the time he entered middle school, our shared excursions had turned into his solo journeys: onto the clunky personal computer he won in a radio contest, into the J. R. R. Tolkien books crinkled and dog-eared with
devotion. I wanted to follow him into those exotic boylands, but he started closing doors in my face.
Get out. Go away.

I got my own room. Pink walls, red carpet, a Strawberry Shortcake explosion. And in this private universe, where no one could criticize me, I was the star of every show. My fantasy worlds were dominated by girls like me, discovering their own power. I was Sandy, in the last scene of
Grease
, strutting in hot pants and causing a bulge in every man’s heart. I was plucky Orphan Annie, rescued by a billionaire she saved right back. I was Coco, fan-kicking her way through the cafeteria in
Fame
.

Fame.
I wanted it more than anything. If you were famous, nothing hurt. If you were famous, everyone loved you. In fifth grade, I would start plastering my walls with teen pinups—Prince Charming in the form of a soft boy with a popped collar—and I became fixated on celebrity and glamour, those twin instruments of escape.

But before that, there was the beer.

O
UR
P
EARL
L
IGHT
lived in 12-packs resting on the floor to the right of our cream-colored Kenmore fridge. Reaching inside that cardboard box gave me a bad thrill, like sinking my hands into a vat of warm wax. All that carbonated joy rumbling around my fingertips.

My mother often stored a half-empty can in the fridge to drink over the course of an evening. She would stuff a rubber stopper that looked like a lime wedge in the mouth.

This was 1981, and we were always dreaming up new ways to keep our carbonated beverages from going flat. My mother’s older sister informed us if you crunched the big plastic soda
bottle before you tightened the cap, you could preserve the carbonation. Our soda bottles looked like they’d taken a flight on an airplane: sunken bellies, cratered at each side. The rubber stoppers were part of this scheme to prolong shelf life, though they never worked. The fizz leaked out anyway. You would come back to your can the next day and find it flat and syrupy. Eventually those lime wedges ended up in a kitchen drawer alongside twisties and dead batteries, another failed experiment in fighting the way of the world.

But when I began stealing sips of my mother’s beer, we still had faith in the lime wedges. I would pop that sucker out and take a few glugs—not enough to be obvious but enough to get melty inside—and I would put the can back exactly where I found it. On the door side, next to the raspberry jam. On the top shelf, beside the cantaloupe, logo facing the back.

I didn’t do this every day. I didn’t even do this every month. It was a special-occasion indulgence. A splurge. But I did it for many years, as the 12-pack grew into the economy 18-pack from Sam’s Wholesale and cotton nightgowns turned into striped pajama bottoms and Duran Duran T-shirts.

Sometimes I went too far, because the beer was like a wave I wanted to keep crashing into. I would misjudge a few swigs and realize the can was nearly empty. I couldn’t put my mother’s Pearl Light back in the fridge with nothing but backwash in it.

So I had to drain that can and pop open a new one, drinking it down to the original level, which made me woozy with rainbows. I would take the empty back to my bedroom and shove it behind the foldout chair in the corner until I could slip out to the alley and dump it in someone else’s trash.

It’s odd I was never caught. Sometimes my mother noticed her
beer lower than when she left it, but she wrote it off to a fluke of memory. And my father kept his eyes on my brother—who was, literally, a Boy Scout. Any con man depends on people looking in the wrong direction, but perhaps nothing worked more to my advantage than gender bias. Nobody thought a little girl would steal beer.

I
WAS IN
fourth grade when I began to realize my family might be out of our league in the neighborhood. One afternoon, a friend’s father was driving me home when he asked, “Does your dad
rent
that house?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Innnnteresting,” he said, in a way that told me it was not interesting but shameful.

There are moments you can taste your difference, like copper on your tongue. I began lying after that. Little lies, lies no one could catch.
Yes, I’ve been to Aspen. No, that’s not our car. Absolutely I’ve been accepted to the School of Performing Arts in New York.
When people asked where my father worked, I named the building but not the profession. “He’s a banker?” And I said, “I guess so.” Banking was a power career. Banking meant money.

Our home was on a major artery through the neighborhood, where cars zipped past all day long, forcing us to keep the blinds drawn at all times. I started using the back door to come and go. I didn’t want strangers to see me and know the dinky rental house was ours.

My mother had become embarrassing to me as well. She listened exclusively to classical music and hummed conspicuously in public. She had a therapeutic chattiness that felt like
a doctor’s probe. “How do you feel about that, Sarah? Tell me more.” God forbid we pass a mother with a baby in the grocery store. She had to download the entire backstory. How cute, and how special, and blah to the blah. And my mother didn’t assemble herself like those kicky mothers of the PTA, with their frosted hair and ropy gold necklaces. She wasn’t bad-looking. But didn’t she realize how much prettier she’d look with some eye shadow?

Even my brother was a frustration. “You’re Josh’s sister?” the teachers would say on the first day of class, eyebrows arched with delight. But no matter what high score I made, his had been higher. Don’t even try, kid. Someone already won this race.

I got a crazy idea I’d be rescued from this unspecial life. Surely I was meant for more. In the customer service area of JC Penney, while waiting for my mom to complete some transaction, I watched women file in, hoping each new one in a smart dress suit was a fairy godmother carrying my new fate. I’d catch her glance as she passed, hoping she’d see the star pattern in my eyes.
Oh, it’s you. I found you.
Does every child have this fantasy—or just the sad ones?

I was very torn about my mother. She never abandoned me, but I felt abandoned in some hyperbolic childhood way, the same way I deemed it a mortal sin I never got a Barbie Dream House. A thing known but never discussed:
Your mother needs some time to herself.
I learned to tread lightly during the hectic workweek. If you tapped her shoulder at the wrong time, she could snap. She was spending more and more time at the piano, the instrument she yearned to play as a girl, but her mother never allowed it, and now I had to pay the price. I wanted to
push the plunky contraption in the nearest lake. I despised having her so near and far away at once. But on the weekends, I would curl up in her big king-size bed and let her read me stories, and I would mold my body alongside hers till we were two interlocking puzzle pieces.

My mother wanted badly to make me an active reader, a lover of literature like her, but I remained weirdly stubborn on this count.
Little Women
wasn’t doing it for me. I gravitated toward stories of troubled kids. Judy Blume.
The Outsiders.
But I never fully sparked to imaginary worlds until I found Stephen King.

Everyone knew Stephen King wasn’t for children. But that was perfect, because I no longer wanted to be a child. My older cousins had introduced me to his books, which were like a basement I wasn’t supposed to enter, but I creaked open the door anyway. Whatever you do,
do not go inside
. So I tiptoed forward, heart like a kick drum. Not much else could grab my attention after I’d felt breath that close to my face. Not the stuffy novels assigned in English class. Not the lions and the witches and the wardrobes the other kids read in their free time. I didn’t need those talking woodland creatures or those magic carpet rides.

Because the magic carpet arrived when I plucked the lime wedge out of the Pearl Light and poured the golden liquid down my throat. That’s when the living room rug levitated, and the world tilted upside down, and I began to convulse with laughter. Why was I laughing anyway? What was so funny? But there is ecstasy in the room you are not supposed to enter, the room no one knows about. Ecstasy when everyone is gone and still you are held.

I
T WAS MY
aunt Barbara’s idea for Josh and me to spend summers with her family in Kalamazoo. I was eight when she offered to take us while my mom completed her schoolwork, an older sister’s act of generosity and superiority: Part “Let me help you while you’re struggling,” part “Let me show you how it’s done.”

My aunt and uncle Joe lived on a peaceful cul-de-sac with a big sloping hill out front. They had a waterbed. A big puffy couch with footrests that lifted when you turned the wooden crank. A giant console TV that doubled as floor furniture. Their home was like walking into a time capsule branded “1982.”

My mother had strict limits on our television and sugar intake. Debates in the cereal aisle were like trying to get a bill through Congress. But my aunt pooh-poohed that hippie nonsense. At her place, we lived on Cap’n Crunch and Little Debbie snack cakes. I lay around in my nightgown till noon, watching game shows and soap operas. At night, we gathered around the big TV to watch prime-time dramas and R-rated movies.

Josh and I had three cousins—Joey, Kimberley, and Scotty—and I was the youngest in our group. To be the littlest in that gang was a mixed blessing. It was to be hoisted on the shoulders of new adventure at the same time I was blamed for someone else’s farts. We filmed our own version of
Star Wars
, directed and produced by my brother, and I was dying to be Princess Leia. Instead, he cast me as R2D2. I didn’t even get the dignity of lines to memorize. Just a series of random bleeps and bloops.

The part of Princess Leia went to Kimberley, a cute tomboy with feathered bangs, though production broke down when
she failed to show on set. Kimberley wasn’t obedient like me. Her response to boys who thought they ruled the world was a sarcastic eye roll. She was Josh’s age, but she actually preferred my company, which probably felt like having a little sister and a disciple at once. She let me tag along to Crossroads Mall and taught me things about sex never mentioned in my mother’s “when two people love each other” lectures.

She tried to make me tougher. The universe had made me soft, too quick to sniffle, and she saw it as her duty to make me better prepared. We used to play this game.

“I’m going to plant a garden,” she would say, running her fingers along the tender skin of my inner arm. Her nails were like a caress at first, a tickle of sorts, but as the game progressed, the friction intensified. “I’m going to rake my garden,” she would say, digging into my skin and scraping, leaving pink trails. “I’m going to plant seeds in the garden,” she would say, twisting up a corkscrew of flesh between thumb and forefinger. What a strange game, a femmy version of “uncle.” Girls can be so sideways with their aggression. Why not just punch each other and get it over with? Instead, we inch into the bizarre eroticism of inflicting and accepting each other’s pain. I could never beat Kimberley—but I gnashed my teeth, gulped down my tears, and tried.