I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (3 page)

I’d had my first taste of alcohol the year before, and I’d been
drunk, but had never lost my memory. There’s a party, and I arrive late. Sharee and Kathy already there. “You need to catch up,” Kathy said. She opens a cabinet under the kitchen sink, reaches into a cache of bottles, sets several on the counter. In a tall juice glass, she pours me a drink from seven bottles.

I love the burning, how the drink is nearly undrinkable—a potion that changes me, makes me unafraid. The glow that spreads through my body like the moon on the ocean. Before I black out, I kiss my best friend’s boyfriend. A girl runs down the street screaming. Hours later, I come to on my doorstep. It’s nearly 2 a.m. Still hot out, humid. A friend of Sharee’s has walked me home. Tall, he’s something to lean on. His face shines in the heat. The porch light comes on over our heads. My dad opens the front door. Furious.

He’s never seen me drunk, but he comes from a family of alcoholics. His mother, some of his siblings, other relatives I don’t know at all. A father who beat him. He’d been epileptic as a child, and I had a feeling it was from being hit. The epilepsy vanished when he was older (and the hitting stopped). Another relative had been blind as a child, but gained his sight when he was older. Could blindness and epilepsy be side effects of violence? How the body copes? Alcoholism and abuse seemed tied in my father’s family. Many years later, I learn that my dad’s father isn’t his real father, that there’s no blood relation. It’s some of my dad’s siblings who have the Groom blood—his half brother stabbed to death in a bar fight, half sister disabled by a life of hard drinking—who seemed to have stood little chance of survival. My dad moved us away from his hometown, and we have little contact with almost all of his relatives. We keep our distance. My dad has a nice family, a studious, quiet daughter. That night, when he opens the door and sees me drunk and propped up by a sweaty, disheveled boy, it’s as if I’ve risen up from his city, those people he’s fled.

My dad’s face so dark, I know I only have a few moments. Deserting the boy on the porch, I run past my mother in her long, high-necked nightgown. She’s a tiny, still figure from another century, Victorian, aghast. I hurry down the narrow, unlit hall, hoping to make it to my room before my dad catches me. My brother’s bedroom is at the end of the hall, just past mine. His door opens. I shut mine, lock it just before my dad’s fist hits it. The impact so loud, I jump as if he’d actually hit me. Breathe out. No matter what, I know not to unlock the door. My brother’s voice soft in the background. Sleepy at first, rising in concern. My brother’s panicky voice muffled under the sound of my father pounding my door. My father yells, “Let me in. Let me in.” I don’t. I know he isn’t himself. There’s a big window in my room. If he makes it in, I’m going out into the night. But after an hour, it’s quiet. I lie down. Sleep.

Four years later, when I’m nineteen and pregnant, I’ll worry that some gene, some violent tendency has been passed on to me. My dad had somehow been spared both alcoholism and abusiveness. But what if I’m like those people he came from, the alcoholics who never recovered, who hurt their children?

As my pregnancy goes along, my fear lessens that I’ve inherited some kind of abusive gene. By the time my son is in my arms, I feel like those people who can lift cars off the injured, superhuman. I feel the opposite of harm. I hadn’t known what it would feel like. I hadn’t known that I would run you down if you tried to harm him, that I would lift a spear, an ax, use the strength of my body, my teeth, nails, to save him. But by then, I’d already decided to give him away.

A truck blares when I swerve into the opposite lane. I grin at my passenger, a man from Kentucky. “Sorry.”

“Sure. You know we’re on the wrong side of the road?”

“What? Right.” I change lanes. He raises his eyebrows and shuffles his feet in the newspapers and bottles on the floor. He watches me out of the corner of his eye. His band had left Orlando last week to go home to Kentucky. For some reason, he’s still in town. With no transportation. I’d moved back to Orlando when I turned eighteen, after being placed on academic probation my first semester of college in Massachusetts. My grades had picked up the next semester, but my parents still thought I should come back to Florida and try community college instead. Live at home. Their new house is in the same development I’d lived in as a kid, near Tangerine Avenue. I’ll graduate from community college the next month, in April 1982.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?”

“Of course, I’m fine.” He’s staying in one of the motels near the topless bars on the highway. My friend Sophie had spotted him at the bar, recognized him as the singer in a band. She liked the drummer, asked me to go over, find out if he was still around too. He wasn’t.

“Damn, I was hoping,” she said. It’s really the bartender, Bill,
whom I want. But he’s not there. When I tell Sophie I’m giving the singer a ride, she gets mad. “Then you’ll get home at six in the morning, and your parents will be bitching for days. Let him find his own ride.”

“I’m taking him.” The next morning, when I talk to Sophie on the phone, tell her I spent the night with the singer, she said I was becoming an alcoholic.

“You don’t care about yourself anymore,” she says. I don’t know what she means. Why going home with this guy crossed some boundary between heavy drinking and alcoholism. I’m hurt, and Sophie says she’s sorry.

I’d controlled my drinking while I was pregnant—no more than two glasses of wine a night. A magazine article said wine was good for you. In the last six months of my pregnancy, I dated a British architect who had a serious, live-in relationship with a woman in California. Temporarily working in Orlando, he’d met me in the train car restaurant where I worked when I was three months pregnant. Victoria Station. It must have reminded him of home. Pregnant, my drinking stabilized—I couldn’t hurt the baby. After work, the British man and I go to dinner some nights, or out for drinks. At his house, we watch old TV shows I’ve never seen, like
Get Smart.
Once, I sat in his lap, not looking at his face, while he asked why we didn’t have to use birth control. I told him I was already pregnant. It seems weird to say how loyal he was to me, this guy who was cheating on his girlfriend. But he’d held me tighter when I said I was pregnant, and he stayed with me even after I began to show. Strangers in bars congratulated him on the baby. The first time, he’d looked surprised, but then he just went with it. Smiling, saying thank you. It was the most normal relationship I’d ever had. That was a year ago.

Since I gave birth, I can’t drink enough fast enough. I drink twelve to fourteen shots a night. Beer is too slow. Every night I’m
just trying to get somewhere, and the only thing that stops me is passing out or throwing up. There’s no reason to stop.

I like the singer’s solitariness, the quiet tones of his voice. In the future, when I’m in a recovery meeting, trying not to drink, a girl will say, “Sleeping with someone seemed like a good way of getting to know them.” It made sense to me. I’m also attracted to him because he can sing. I’ve watched him from the floor. But mostly, I’m drunk, and drunk I can’t stand to be alone. If he’d been less kind, less welcoming, I’d probably still have gone with him for the distraction and comfort. The company.

I don’t know what’s happening to my son, especially since he got so sick. No one tells me anything directly. My aunt and uncle tell my parents that Tommy has leukemia, that he’s being treated. My parents discuss it. I feel as though I don’t have the right to ask questions. As if I’m an embarrassment. A ghost mother. There’s no way I can call my aunt and uncle. I’d like to ask, “What is happening? How is he feeling?” He can’t be dying. There are so many basic things I don’t know. Is he in pain? I offer Kentucky Man a ride home.

In the room, he asks if I want to get high. “All right,” I said. We sit on the end of the bed and watch a small black-and-white TV. It crackles. Pot is too calm a drug for me, dull, but it seems unfriendly to turn him down. A gigantic, fake-looking, prehistoric animal chases thousands of tiny Japanese people through the streets of Tokyo. Black-and-white movies make me feel tired and a little bereft, the time before color. As a kid, I’d been sick with asthma a lot, stuck home, watching old movies on television. In front of them, I am convalescent again. He clicks on the table lamp. Some light hits the curtains from a street lamp in the parking lot. The TV’s a light too, with snow.

I like that he has very long hair, as if he’s arrived from the past. We could be in the past. Before I gave Tommy away. Before he
got sick. But we aren’t—it’s March 1982. I try to stand up, but my muscles don’t feel strong enough to lift me an inch, never mind out the door. I’ve never had pot affect me like this—maybe there’s something else in it. I don’t ask. It’s after two in the morning. I scoot slowly backward across the thin bedspread until I feel my head rest on a pillow. Lift a lukewarm beer from the nightstand. I don’t know where it came from. Did I bring it? Take a sip, close my eyes. I’m glad the man is relaxed, glad we’re high. Godzilla stomps about—he was scary when they made this movie. It had been just a few years after the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a magazine I’ve seen a woman giving a victim a bath in a round wooden tub. The victim missing limbs from the nuclear air. It might have been birth defects from the blast, the aftereffects. But all I can see is the woman who holds the injured one with tenderness, even the light is tender, yellow on her skin and wood and water. She looks like she’s singing, like her song is a bath.

Godzilla’s a monster who slept through history, until a bomb was tested in the Pacific Ocean. He woke up, killing tens of thousands. Like a walking atom bomb. Something the people can see. Something the scientist can defeat with his Oxygen Destroyer.

I open my eyes in the dark room. The front door has plastic slats open to the outside. The street light slips in. It can only reach so far. My heart is beating very fast, panicking. The TV sound is down. The picture’s too static-y to decipher.

A lot of people think Godzilla breathes fire, like a dragon. It’s not fire. He has deadly atomic breath. He breathes radiation. When he does this, his dorsal fins light up. Kentucky Man gets up to put the air conditioner on. We listen to it, clacking. Racketyclack like cards in the spokes of a bike. I think of my son being old enough for a bike. Remember the tricycle comes first. “Wait,” I said, “don’t boys get wagons before that?”

I keep having this problem at the train car restaurant where I work too, not knowing at what age things happen. I was a cocktail waitress until I delivered my son, nine months pregnant, and customers would give me extra tips, say things like, “Have a boy for me.” My back would hurt. After his birth, when I went back to work, I tried to be a regular waiter. It was more money. But I had to train for it, bussing tables. And the gray dish tubs were so heavy. I’d bleed lifting them. I wasn’t myself yet. I’d come back to work after a couple of weeks, too soon. The regulars keep asking me questions. Asking for pictures. I don’t even know at what age a baby starts to walk. To eat solid food. To talk. In line at the grocery store, a man behind me watched me open my wallet, saw the one photo I had of my son. He asked, “Is that your little helper?” There was no way to tell the customers, the extra tippers, the man in line behind me, that I’d given my son away to relatives, that he was very, very sick, and that I was not there for him. So, I tried to answer, and my answers weren’t right. I remember the confusion on one customer’s face.

In the motel room, Kentucky Man looks confused too. “What? Wagons?”

“Yeah, what did you have first?” His eyebrows up again. I’m looking for clues, information about my son.

“When?”

“When you were little.” He rubs his index finger along his temple. Brushes his hand across my cheek. He’s patient with me.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?”

In the brighter morning, the sun comes all the way in, striping the carpet. The carpet is gray, dinge on the sun. Kentucky Man’s eyes are closed, and I think he’s asleep. I’m in trouble. I hadn’t called home. At twenty, still living with my parents, I have to be home by 2 a.m. Or I have to call them with a decent lie fairly early in the evening. I find my keys in the tangle of blanket and bed
spread on the floor. Sit next to him on the bed’s edge, lean over quietly. Kiss him. “Be careful,” he said. I spring back. “No, no.” He laughs, pulls me onto his chest. “Not careful of me. I meant be careful driving home.”

“Oh. Right. Sure.”

Years later, my brother will ask, “Remember when you used to be a groupie?” I’ll be in the passenger seat of his minivan, his kids in the backseat. He’ll say it like, “Who are you? How do I talk to you?” I could say that I had been a picture of a sister, cut from black paper. That the imprint of skin on my skin means I’m still here. When the man from Kentucky touched me I materialized. I felt alive. How could Sophie expect me to give that up? It was the only thing that connected me to the earth.

That spring in 1982, when my son is fighting leukemia, people close to my family ask me how we’re doing. I respond, but it’s like reaching into an empty room. As if I’ll have to cross that long room first before I can reach my hand out, touch the answer. I say things like, “We’re hopeful.” All the news I have about him travels to me long-distance: by phone from my aunt and uncle in Massachusetts, filtered through my parents, and then to me. My hair looks like weeds, knotted, as if I spend a lot of time underwater.

The scientist had to kill himself when he killed Godzilla. He did it in a matter of seconds. Godzilla, whose radiation could change who you are just by touch, change your DNA. I don’t know much about leukemia yet, but I know it comes from something in the environment that can change your DNA. I know radiation can hurt your DNA. I wonder what changed Tommy’s cells to make him sick? What hurt his chromosomes? I think of every X-ray I’ve had taken for broken bones, lung trouble. I hope it’s not my touch that poisoned him. In March 1982, all I can do is poison myself.