I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (5 page)

I’m going to live in a trailer in Jacksonville, he says, while he goes out to sea. I like the idea of a new life, rooms all to myself. But before the wedding, I drink, fall off the wagon. Jason and I are at a hotel. We need a room. I live at home, and he’s in some kind of Navy quarters. On the way to the elevator, we see the sign by the hotel bar: “Free Drinks” it says. “I could get one,” I joke.

“Maybe it would be fun,” he says. I’m surprised he would say this. I’ve been sober for two months—six weeks in treatment plus the two weeks since I got out. I haven’t been going to meetings very
often. When I do go, sometimes I leave early. I tell myself I have to go to the gym and work out. That it’s healthy too. I can’t just sit in those chairs listening to people. It’s hard to be still for the hour of the meeting. I haven’t learned to be there yet, my thoughts racing, taking me out the door. I want to go to the bar, drink myself into another state. This is a pattern my life takes over the next two years. Relapsing whenever I put anything else in front of going to meetings. I need to go to meetings every night. Sometimes I need to go twice a day, even three times. But I don’t know this yet.

Jason hasn’t had a drink since his slip while we were both in rehab. How can he think this is a good idea? The floor feels slanted, walls gray in this drab hotel. I’m not in love. Jason is safe, older—he’ll take care of me. I thought he would anyway, but now he’s suggesting I drink? Maybe he’s feeling confined like me, bored. I don’t know what he wants. It occurs to me I don’t really know who he is.

I find a rum and Coke in a plastic cup in my hand as we ride the elevator. It’s familiar. Jason doesn’t get one. The hotel room feels too small. I don’t like Jason watching me drink. I hide my cup on the toilet tank in the bathroom. Then go back in there to drink it, secretly. I get tired of him, the dreary room—I want to go out. But there’s no way. It’s definitely not fun having a drink. My sobriety so new, I don’t even have a sense yet of what I’ve lost. As if the disease itself is buffering me. My drinking doesn’t feel calamitous, but I’m unmoored.

My mom plans my wedding. She buys me a white dress. We select wedding invitations bumpy with engraving, mail them out. Restaurant booked for the rehearsal dinner. Two weeks before the wedding, Jason takes the bus down from Jacksonville on a Saturday afternoon. My parents are out of town, and we have sex on my canopy bed. But by 8 p.m., he’s asleep, a big man whose body overtakes my single girl bed. So, I leave him a note, say I am taking cookies to a sick friend, and go in search of the man I love:
Bill, Bill, bartender Bill of the beautiful lank hair and many girlfriends. He loves my back, loves when I sit on the kitchen table drinking straight from the bottle. Bill’s not happy that I’m getting married, doesn’t like the idea of coming to visit me when my husband’s at sea. As if he has some moral commitment to marriage, as long as it isn’t to him. Bill’s not stopping me, not getting down on his knees.

And in the bar tonight, Bill’s not even there. I feel the scraped emptiness of the place, cigarette wood, insect chatter, and see his friend, Zappa, named for his Frito Bandito mustache and hair, coffee sad eyes, lazy familiar. There’s nothing in my memory until morning when I see the white of a sheet, and Zappa picks up the cup my contacts float in, tosses it out the window, blue blue. I find only one lens in the grass, and have a difficult time driving. By the time I get home, Jason has woken up and is hiding on the porch. “I don’t trust you,” he says. I cry like a barbarian, an exile. I cry sensationally, a banshee. Jason drives my car to the bus station, and while I am wailing in the passenger seat, a customer from the health food store where I work is in the car beside me. He is so calm in the driver’s seat. It’s a glimpse of sanity. Startling and clear. In my car, I could be underwater. I could be drowning. I have no idea how to live in that sober world. For a few moments, while our cars are parallel, those worlds appear side by side. I want to be safe, housed in a quiet place where I can think. Jason is unmoved. He phones me from Jacksonville. “I talked to my chaplain. He says I should wait to get married. Until I’m not at sea. I’ll be back in six months. We can talk then.” The idea of the marriage dies. My parents blame Jason. They say he walked out on me. My wedding dress is a ghost in a closet of coats.

I go back to the Dry Dock meeting. Sit in a chair. Try to stay for the full hour. My treatment counselor always hugs me at the meetings, an enveloping that feels like protection, as though for
the moments of her holding I’m safe. My sponsor is a large woman with blond hair and with many sponsees who are all drinking. I can go a day or two without a drink. Something still races through me like adrenaline. I can listen to the other staff person, the man with a brown mustache who smiles at me kindly. Jim. I tell him, “I’m afraid to speak, to stand up.” He asks me, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I hadn’t really thought it out. I imagine walking up the aisle to the podium, opening my mouth to tell my story, and then what? My knees buckle. A sharp whiteness explodes, and it’s all I can see. I lose my traction on the floor, tilt, fall into the darkness at their feet. I can hear my treatment counselor say, “Well. Then, we’ll pick you up.”

In the spring of 1983, I’m taking classes at the university, majoring in English. My mom gives me money for my classes and books. My parents surprise me with a gift, a $200 electric typewriter to replace my old manual model. I’m grateful for their help but feel guilty for it too. In my creative writing class, a boy with a cloud of black hair writes a story in which the narrator walks across campus, ignored and lonely for what seems like years, until a girl with curly hair blinks black mascara-ed eyelashes at him. “An angel,” the narrator says. In class, we could turn in a “private” story, one that wouldn’t be workshopped, only seen by the teacher. But the teacher recognized my hair in the boy’s story and showed it to me. I hadn’t realized I wore so much mascara.

In the story, the boy is seen by the girl, recognized in a way that makes him feel he can trust her, love her. I can be trusted, but not when I drink. It reminds me of police emptying meth labs of plastic cones and tubes, paraphernalia, and the men and women pulled out onto the grass with their dark eyes cuffed—like loving someone who just has to tip over one thing, and everything’s on fire.

The boy lives on the water, the opposite coast. School is in the center of the state, so it’s a long drive for him. We’ve been out a few times. I’ve only been drunk once. We’d gone to the Night Train,
when I still worked there. The manager had seen me at the bar. “We’re short tonight,” he said. “We need you.” So I drove the boy back to school, and we had sex in my car in the English Department parking lot. I went to work; he’d gone home.

The boy wants to cook for me, something with curry. I’ve never had a boyfriend who could cook. He lives with his mother and father, sister. There is going to be a big family wedding reception at a hotel. All his family there, all his friends. I can’t remember who is getting married.
I want to take you there and show them how beautiful you are
, he says. The boy stirs at the stove. My vanilla yellow boots are roomy below the knee, as if for some cowboy fabric, the burr and heft of the range.

When pain receptors in your body start to burn from the heat of curry, they release endorphins to comfort you, the one they love most. So some people get addicted, wanting it hotter and hotter. Pain coming from the Latin for
fine, penalty.
There’s pain of the nerves, blood vessels, visceral pain from the body’s organs, phantom pain, pain of the skin cut open, and extreme sadness in the torso. Receptors at the surface bob free, a path for fast pain and slow. With slow pain, there’s a horn to pass, your dorsal, the fish we came from finned inside us, and upward travel. Pain has a gate to get through before your body makes its own opium, endorphins sounding like something that swims.

I don’t like curry, but I eat the meal, lit up sitting with the boy. At the wedding party, in the hall where the reception is held, there are bottles. A bowl of alcohol. I drink glass after glass, until I have to lean against the wall. I slide down to the floor. The boy looks concerned, wonders if I’m ill. Why was I falling as if I’d forgotten what the body is for, how it works?

The singer in the band dances with me, looks surprised when his hat floats away on my head. I tell the boy I’m going to the bathroom. But when I drift out the door unafraid, someone says
there is a party somewhere, and I find it. In the room is a big bed, and the blanket scratches slightly, though who is in the bed, the room—it is all unclear. I only remember the bubble of noise around me, someone touching me so that I’m not alone, someone choosing me. And then the darkness of the door opening—all the doors the boy must have tried to find me, a hotel of doors.

Later, alone with him, I say,
Baby
. He does love me again before the night is out—a few hours of mercy—before he faces his friends, his family, sister who names me The Dancing Girl. We were back at his house, everyone asleep. I was twisting alone on the couch until I couldn’t stand being away from him any longer. Regardless of the noise, the risk of waking his parents, I climb the stairs to his bed. His eyes are open and sharp in a long way, as if even the shape of his eyes has changed. He rises, guides me to the garage, and the darkness of the car. It is the only private place, the only place we can be unheard. Stick shift between us like a planchette for a Ouija board, as if it can answer his questions. He keeps asking,
What were you doing
? I try to tell him about the extreme sadness in my torso. All I can talk about is Tommy. There are men whose hands I can’t remember, the touch of their bodies, no physical memory of sex. But when I tell the boy, whose name is Tom, when I tell him about my son, he weeps. He holds me against his body as if he is inside me. And that holding on stays with me, like the painted works of mercy.

There is a last even of last times.

—
SAMUEL BECKETT

By the summer of 1983, my drinking is so out of control, Sophie refuses to go out with me. At the bar, I’d tried to trick her. Downing shots while she went to bathroom, drinking vodka disguised in juice. But I always got too drunk, and she had to take care of me. She’s had it now. Tired of my blackouts, sweeping up, my sleeping hidden under tables, on the floor, in the parking lot, yard. Drinking, I was safe with Sophie. Without her, anything could happen. No one else knew to protect me. I’m going to meetings off and on. It’s the Fourth of July, and I have six days without a drink. It’s a good stretch for me. Usually I drink every other day. Sometimes I can go as long as four days. But holidays are trouble—I’m off work, free. And now I’m down to acquaintances who don’t know I can’t be left on my own, that I’ll disappear.

I’m home alone, in the apartment my parents have found for me. Six days of cashiering, of laundry and television, humidity, homework, dirty dishes, dust. I look at the phone on the wall. Run my fingers down the names in my address book. Stop at the names of two sisters who always want to go out. One works in
a hair salon and always wears a hat. They’re both sort of distant until they get drinking. I call them. We meet at ten o’clock at a new bar. “I’m just drinking beer tonight,” I said. “I can’t ever drink enough of it to get drunk. I always get too full first.” The hat girl says she wants to get drunk. Everyone is cheerful. The waitress brings me a drink that someone has sent over. It’s not beer. I drink it—tequila, rum, vodka. Someone else buys me another. When the bar closes, one sister goes home, and the hat girl rides with me to an after-hours bottle club.

Inside the club, an older man tries to pick up the hat girl. He gives us a fifth of both Jack Daniel’s and Southern Comfort. They charge for water, so after one glass, I take the square JD bottle and fill my glass halfway, then pour Southern Comfort to the rim. It spills a little. Swallow, take a breath, swallow, breathe, pour it down, pour it down, breathe, pour. I make another drink. I’m going to throw up.

I black out in the toilet stall. Wake up with my face on the dirty tile, other shoes visible in the empty space beneath my stall, at the sinks, the mirrors. It’s hard standing up, as if I am lifting another body, downed and waterlogged. In front of the wall mirror, I see a woman with gum, ask for some. Cinnamon, a tiny rectangle, a slight hot burn on my tongue. Her face in the mirror before I go out the door, black out again. The hat girl never sees me leave the bathroom. The doorman doesn’t see me leave the bar. Nobody else knows me. The hat girl can’t find me in the bar or the parking lot. At five in the morning, she gets a ride home from the older man. Earlier, I’d come to in a house, on the carpet, knees on fire. A blackout is ending. Three strange men stand over me—two dark men who look Middle Eastern and one blond American. I vaguely remember dancing with the blond man.

My knees are red, rug-burned from trying to run when I can’t stand up. I’m crawling fast. Someone laughs, moves leisurely, but
I can feel a nervousness in him, that I’ll get away. He lets me reach the bedroom door, touch the gold knob, and turn until it stops hard at the same spot, clicking
no
over and over in its shut way, until the man drags me back.

We’re in one square room of a suburban home, neighbors asleep next door, the room nearly bare of furniture: dark brown plywood—roach camouflage, corner where the blond man stands, a bed that rattles like a metal bridge. It’s very late, near dawn.

The abduction was easy. When I danced with the blond man, he promised a bottle if I’d go home with him to get it. I don’t know where the two dark-haired men come from, one of whom drags me back when I try to leave. They speak English, but their accents are from another country. The three men could be students, sharing the house, not caring for anything decorative—just walls, a place to sleep, doors.

No one is setting me free. The men don’t like it when I scream. One man says, “I can’t come while she’s crying.” So my mouth is covered, my face, and pressure is applied. They suffocate me until it’s quiet.