I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (7 page)

I didn’t know a jury would take a drunk girl’s word. The Keaton victim’s mother saying,
It’ll be okay,
and calling the police for her daughter. I could only tell people on the periphery of my life: the restaurant manager. My new roommate, whom my parents had found in the newspaper. They’d moved my things into her apartment, given me the key. My new roommate who works at night shipping packages, backed away from me, my news. The nurses, doctor.

A couple of days after I see my doctor, a religious counselor calls, asks me to come see her. She’s in a room of the hospital, in one chair within a big, empty circle of chairs. I sit next to her. It’s as if we’re surrounded by invisible, quiet people. There are dark, heavy curtains behind us, floor to ceiling, like a stage. Her face is not something I can remember, but she’s a nun. In regular clothes. And because she’s a nun, I feel I shouldn’t talk about the body, use sexual words. My words feel blurry. But I hear her say, “It’s not
your fault. No matter what you did. It’s not your fault.” There is a mark across the sky, I want to say. Look up.

I’m supposed to go back, see the nun again. I don’t. But when I can’t remember what I used to be like, I sit in a car stuck in highway traffic, car lighter on the soft inside of my arm, searing circles that scar white and cratery, perfect little moons, or break a juice glass in the sink, rocks glass on the toilet tank in the stall of a bar’s restroom, cutting shallow lines of blood around the moons—and once, forgetting to unroll my long sleeves, set a drink down in front of a customer who pushes herself back, asks, “What happened to you?” and when I say,
“
Accident,” she squints at me, says, “It looks like you’ve been in a concentration camp.” The customer watching me carefully, angry I don’t break down, confess, her cramped lips letting me know she doesn’t like liars—or, when I find myself in the mirror by surprise, and I don’t know this nice girl, her pretty smile; then, I try to play the nun’s voice in my head, a song. Her words soothe me even if I can’t believe them. It helps to know that someone believes it wasn’t my fault.

After the rape, I want our red rocking chair, the scratchy fabric. When I was a child, my mother, who touched me rarely, would take me in her arms after I’d been punished. Though this didn’t happen often or seem unusual—we still had corporal punishment in school—it was always humiliating and often my mother’s doing, complaining to my father about something I’d done. Afterward, she’d hold me in the red rocking chair, and my body didn’t seem distasteful to her then. As if I had to be broken down, almost hopeless, for her to touch me. Or maybe it was that I was so vulnerable then, like a baby. It seemed more like the beginning, when we were one. The chair’s been reupholstered, a different color, but she’s held me inside. I’d like to show her the lines in my hands, ask if she recognizes me.

I need to be touched in a nonviolent way. As soon as possible.
I’d read in
Time
magazine that it takes a woman seven years to heal from a rape. I’m not letting that be taken away too. The pleasure of being touched. I make my own prescription, a plan to counteract the rape.

I have to find someone to have sex with. But first, I have to get drunk. I’m only three days off Antabuse. I’d started the drug to show I was sorry for drinking, that I’d learned my lesson.
Here, I’ll swallow this pill, and then I can’t drink.
The thing is, Antabuse doesn’t prevent you from drinking. It just makes you sick. And while it’s “nontoxic,” it can also supposedly kill you. If you drink on Antabuse, your body makes more of an acid, a colorless, flammable liquid. A concentration. It was discovered in the 1930s by rubber workers who worked with the substance, and became ill when they went out drinking.

I go off the Antabuse and three nights later, choose Steve, the barback from the train car bar. Blue-eyed, sweet. He was my height, which made him seem like someone from high school, someone still growing. Most of our talk was voiceless, but actual words felt as though they went through walkie-talkies. A pause where the button would be pressed in to listen, speak. He was from somewhere with more humidity, Mississippi slowing his movements. I’d started drinking at the lower bar, downstairs. Shots that made little fires inside. The four long stairs I’d climbed like planks to the upper bar, a boat. No exit from here. Just a wall of glass, fronted by bottles. Steve is behind the bar, standing on the black rubber mat honeycombed with holes. He’s washing glasses, smiling. There is probably a list of stages of psychological trauma that I need to pass through. The nun probably knew them. I propel my smile, accept Steve’s invitation to his apartment. I lift my glass to my mouth, over and over.

I have to wait until last call, until the lights blink, and then turn on full-strength. I’m allowed to wait at the bar while Steve and the
two bartenders and the manager close, bleach molecules in the air, my lungs, cleaning everything. My hair in a thousand curls, maybe more, looks alive.

I abandon my car, the safe thing to do. Steve drives past the grassy lake to Maltese Circle, the Regency. He parks between the white lines. White stones circle an oval of water made turquoise by paint. A fake lake with five flags announcing a period of time, a country ruled by another during the absence of its monarch. His hand touches my hip where I had so recently felt like ash, like a mattress left in a house that burned. That someone saw through an open window in a town where no one lived. Now, under his hand, my hip is only dark.

Drunk on his waterbed, of course I feel sick. The drug still in my body. Hot, my head throbbing, I’m nauseous. The bed is like the ocean, waves high. My stomach feels as if it’s biting itself. But so what. I’m in my own body, I’m saying come in. I’m not long gone. Not a bloody thing in a Dumpster, in the muck of construction, ground into the ground of a housing development, a suburb. I’m not under a sidewalk, bikes overhead.
Covered with the shadow of it.

Naked, dirt flecks off my teeth. My bones feel crooked, but the beaten places lean into him, stop panicking. The vein on the back of one of his hands is a place to go. We won’t be together long. In a few days, when I’ll pretend he’s a real boyfriend, we’ll fight, break apart. He’ll date a short, happy-looking girl. But at the Regency, my mouth saved from the grave kisses his. Lips pink again, the gift of it, a bow that twirls, unties. Wraps around. I can’t really see him anymore in this liquid state that I remember, that lets me reappear.

I miss drinking sometimes, the train car bar. It’s January 1984. I’m twenty-two years old, nearly six months sober. Living at home with my parents again. Mrs. Collins transferred me to the quiet branch of the health food store, in the Orlando mall downtown. I’ve never had this much time without a drink before. At Dry Dock, the brown mustache counselor said he loved me. I was forty-four days sober when he said that, not wanting anything. A light around my body. It helps that Sophie’s been out of town. I get nervous when the tiny princess girl calls me—anyone I used to drink with makes me nervous. I’m afraid they’ll want to go out. I’m enthralled by the accumulation of sober days, counting them. It seems miraculous, the way they add up when for so long I had to drink every other day.

On the days I don’t go to school, I work in the store from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. or 12 to 9 p.m., forty-five hours a week. If I have the earlier shift, after work I drive a few minutes down the highway, to the eight-o’clock recovery meeting on Broadway. If I’m scheduled to close the store, I still go to Broadway. Sometimes the meetings run late, and I can get a few minutes. At the very least, people are still milling around. I can find someone to talk to before I go home. It’s good for me to have one place I can rely on, that feels like home. Sometimes, sitting in a meeting, I don’t really hear
what’s being said. I just read the steps numbered on a laminated poster by the front door. If I’m late, and the room’s crowded, that’s where I sit, squeezed in between people. Safe. It’s best if I can get a seat further in, in the middle of things. Otherwise it’s too easy to be scared at the end of the meeting, and just rush out the door to my car without talking to anyone. But I don’t want to go out drinking again. The release isn’t worth that pain, the risk of having other people control me. The worry that if I drink again, I’ll die.

There’s an inner room where a second meeting is sometimes held. It’s good for me to sit there. I have to pass by a lot of people before I get outside, lots of chances to say hello, hug someone. My favorite part is when I get to hold hands with two people at the end of the meeting. Everyone does it. We say a prayer together. I love it. Sometimes the two people whose hands I hold are the only people I touch all day. Except for handing back change at the store, touching someone’s palm with my fingertips.

One Saturday night, before a meeting, a little girl comes up to me, the daughter of an alcoholic. She’s five. I’m sitting at a round table, talking to a mountainy guy. The little girl and I have crayoned together before, and she’s played hide-and-seek with my purse. But this night, she puts her arms around me and is touching my arm, asking, “How did you get your arms to be so soft?” Before she touched me, I could have been a ghost. I could have floated away.

If it’s a school day, I go into work later, to close. But sometimes I’m free and can go to the 6 p.m. and the 8 p.m. meetings. The recovery house is at the center of my life. For once, I don’t go into bars at all. After meetings, at home, I write until late at night on my new typewriter. I start running again, in the mornings, on the weekend. My mom likes me. She’s calmer, softer. I’ve always loved her, even when she was so hard. At the university, I’m taking a class on the English novel and a writing class.

At 42 days, I did risk drinking. Rachel called. I used to work with her at Dino’s Pizza, my first job in Florida, at eighteen. Going out with her was always trouble because it was never just alcohol. She’d always have drugs too, and the mix made things unpredictable, but I agreed to go to a bar. I didn’t plan to drink. Luckily, when I arrive at her house at 11 p.m., she’s taken Valium with whiskey and is too wasted to do anything. There’s a strange, skinny guy in her kitchen. She wants me to go out with him, but I don’t. I go home. At 64 days, I go out with the sisters I drank with the night of my abduction, rape, almost-murder. I feel so uncomfortable in the bar with them, not drinking. It feels as if I’m in the wrong place.

At 68 days without a drink, Sophie’s back. She calls, suggests we go to Bill’s bar. I say okay. Bill there, all in white from a wedding. He said, “I want to know your every move.” When I’m 74 days sober, Bill says he loves me. He drinks. Sophie drinks. But neither of them wants anything to do with me if I’m drinking. I’m still going to meetings, but now I’m going to the bar too. Pretty often. When I have 76 days, one of the barbacks said, “You’re Bill’s girlfriend.” But it’s never just me. At 80 days, Sophie tells me, “You better just forget him—he left with that Susan girl last night.” It’s not just Susan either. Now, at nearly 180 days, I still see him once in a while, but go out with other men. He’ll never be my boyfriend. At the university, my creative writing teacher tells me that if I don’t drink I can be an assistant at a writers’ convention in Winter Park. I’d like that.

At work, I draw letters on small white bags, fill them with grain. A mountain of lopsided paper cakes. Sometimes, by mistake, I write Bill’s name on the bag, fill it. The front door is bordered by a blood pressure machine. I have to climb onto the plastic seat to turn off the store alarm in the morning, set it at night. I like to wrap the cuff around my arm like a rough hand, tightening.
Uncross my feet. My count so low, I faint if I stand too long in one place. As a child standing in line for the bus, I’d once fallen in the small space between curb and stairs, the feet of other children overhead as if I’d gone underground. This job is a lot of standing—I’ve learned to lean, sit on the counter.

The store is recessed in a side pocket of the mall. The elderly come here for exercise, walking in twos and threes from Ivey’s through Jordan Marsh, a cool chamber. A kind of preparatory tomb. The stores are dying off slowly. Ten years later, I’ll be sitting in a Barnes & Noble café built on the demolished mall, and one of my old customers will appear. “This is where the juice bar used to be,” he’ll say, standing over me in my chair. The juice bar beneath our feet. He comes to my store after playing basketball—I make him a Pep Power in the blender—strawberries, half a banana, wheat germ, protein powder, brewer’s yeast, ice. I don’t know his name, but in 1986, when I was being transferred permanently from the mall store back to the busier store in Winter Park, I told him I was nervous about going. The day I start at the new store, dizzied by the larger space and crowd, he shows up. Stands in the aisle and smiles at me. I’d seen him one other time outside the store. After I’d finished the Navy’s alcohol treatment program, after I’d cheated on Jason. I’d been on the highway, in the passenger seat of my car, Jason driving. I’d been frantic, begging Jason not to call off our wedding. The juice bar guy had been the man who appeared, driving in the car beside me. He was the one who almost embarrassed me into sanity.

Behind the front counter, Pat said, “You could go out with my nephew.” We wear matching smocks—thin cotton coats the color of yolk. Next door is a magazine stand, the piano store. How many pianos could they even sell in a day? It looked like zero a year. A luncheonette across the way. Further down is expensive jewelry, wedding rings. The jewel sellers, like the piano salesman,
appear to be conserving energy, moving little. Leaning against glass. Sometimes I take a walk, make the mistake of eye contact, and the jewelry sellers latch on. I only make $4.25 an hour. What kind of jewel could I buy?

“He’s nice,” Pat said. I’d never seen her nephew. I say I’d like to go out with someone nice. A sign missed. Pat arranges it. Dinner. Pat’s very short. I decide her nephew must be short too. She also works part-time at a costume store on the highway. I can’t imagine it gets much business outside of Halloween. The store is like a warehouse for clowns. Wheels of opaque makeup, little pots of white and black and red. The clothes scratchy and flammable.