Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (28 page)

The only upshot of a blackout is that you’re spared the emotional effort it takes to repress whatever happened in the midst of it. The night in question forever exists like the train scene in a silent movie, the one where the screen goes dark the instant the train charges the tunnel, and when it emerges a few seconds later with two long whoops of its whistle, the audience never really knows what happened in the tunnel’s obscurity. Who made love in the first-class compartment? Who stabbed the man in the club car? You can guess, but you’ll never know for sure.

After a blackout, all you have to do is keep on not knowing. If you can’t remember, you hope you never remember. You in-dulge your selective amnesia. You operate under the philosophy
I don’t think, therefore I am.

A few things
happen before I release the memory of Skip like a captive dove.

For one, I scrutinize my body. This is hard, considering I’ve never been the kind of girl to bend backward over a handheld

mirror. I have always been too shy, even alone, to give myself the monthly breast exams my doctor always explains with pam-phlets. But before I shuffle down the hall to the dorm bathroom to take the symbolic morning-after shower that I’ve seen in too many movies, I force myself to do a thorough once-over. I pull my hair up off my face. I smell my skin. I check my inner thighs for bruises. Since I’ve never had sex before, I don’t know what signs I am looking for.

The only thing I know with any degree of certainty is that I feel violently ill. My digestive system feels more off-kilter than ever, like organs are writhing and backfiring inside me, and I feel a squeezing stomach pain like someone is standing on my abdomen. I don’t know whether it’s nerves, or a hangover, or withdrawal from some date-rape drug that makes my heart flutter, but I am so unsteady on my feet that I have to sit on the floor of the bathtub under the shower spray. Between shampoo and conditioner, I bend over the drain to vomit. It’s stomach flu-ids, the acidic yellow froth you spit up when there’s nothing else in you.

Next, I avoid my mother, who has been calling as though she’s psychic. She has been worried, she says, when she gets me to pick up the phone three days later. No doubt it’s because I haven’t returned her calls, but in the throes of my remaining paranoia, I’m convinced it’s because she knows something that I don’t. I think she must have had a premonition about Skip in a dream. Hot tears stream down my face halfway through our talk, and I have to put my hand over the receiver so she won’t hear my voice tremble. I pick a fight that makes her hang up be-fore we say our good-byes.

Last, I talk to Elle and get what I can of the details.

I do it while Elle and I sit at a picnic table outside of the uni-

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versity’s food court. It’s our favorite spot for heart-to-hearts and last-minute cramming, where the wind flips the pages of our notebooks and we ingest the eight-inch-tall cups of well-sugared coffee that we count on to fuel us through our hangovers.

Elle is wearing fi gloves and a puffy down vest that looks like a life jacket. She is straddling the picnic bench, hunched over notes on something diffi Elle negates the myth that smart people don’t binge drink—she’s one of a handful of female physics majors, and the sharpest person I know. Her mind teems with a hundred mathematical theorems that she calls on to explain just about everything.

I am absently staring at the same notes on Ideological State Apparatus that I’ve had open all day, when I look up and ask her what happened.

I don’t know how she answers because I still can’t concentrate on anything external. Inside, I feel mental interference that is al-most electrical. It is a deep static that is hard to hear over. Still, I hear Elle talk about how she left me at the party, where I was talking to Skip. She didn’t want to go without me, but I was like the donkey that resists the force of the reins with its full weight. I threw a tantrum when she wouldn’t let go of my arm. I told her, “I’m fine. Just leave. Just leave me the fuck alone.” She has no gauge for how drunk I was because she was drunk, too.

Still, when Elle tells me, her face screws up in a look of guilt, and I can tell she’s sorry she left. She is averting her eyes, pulling the cotton strings from the holed-out knees of her jeans, and questioning, I’m sure, if she could have done more. No doubt, she is feeling that female-specific remorse that happens when we think we haven’t adequately mothered one another. It is the same remorse I felt when I lost Natalie in Ocean City. It’s the same remorse my mother will tell me she felt when I was in high school,

the night I was taken to the hospital. I think the world as I know it is a massive web of feminine guilt. We all mourn and make up for not just our own catastrophes, but also everyone else’s.

Men don’t do this. When men drink, they help each other, but they don’t feel personally responsible for one another’s catastrophes. Three years from now, when I’m living in New York, three boys I knew in college will crash at my apartment after a night at a nearby bar. One boy will turn up barefoot, and his face will be smeared with street sludge. The other two will let him sleep the entire night on my bathroom floor, without showing the slightest remorse about it. In the morning, when he’s scrubbing puke off his shirt collar, neither of them will tell him, “I shouldn’t have let you get that drunk.”

Yet my girlfriends and I do this all the time. We play God to one another. We are the omnipresence that won’t let our friend Eve reach for that third apple martini.

I tell Elle, “It’s fine. I think I’m fine.”

It starts to snow, and I don’t even bother to pack up my books. I turn my hands over on the table, so I can catch flakes on my inner forearms. I let them dissolve on my skin because I want to feel icy.

Elle says, “Whatever. If you can’t remember it, it never really happened, anyway.”

Somehow the
word
whatever
has outlasted slacker culture. It is the one artifact that has survived all those movies from the mid-
1990
s, in which high-school dropouts and college graduates em-braced Doc Martens and too much flannel, formed grunge bands with obscene names, went grocery shopping with their parents’ gasoline cards, got drunk, got high, slept with their best friends, and challenged the system that would have them believe that do-

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ing nothing wasn’t something in itself. Over the course of the past fifteen years,
whatever
has become one of those linguistic sneezes that transcends partisans. It is there in almost every facet of American culture, a ready-made column and comic-strip name for every would-be satirist. The word is scrawled under as many pictures in my high school yearbook as
Peace and Love
is in my parents’.

Girls were especially keen on the word from the start. From the moment Alicia Silverstone injected it with a shrill note of sarcasm in
Clueless,
it became immediately obvious that anytime I said something a little off-key, some eighth-grade girl would use her thumbs and index fingers to form a giant
W
to wag in my face, while she rolled her eyes and said “Whatever.”

But Elle is right. Saying “whatever” is the best way I know to change the subject. It’s a ready-made oneliner, a phrase that is devoid of control, responsibility, or ownership, with the capacity to mean anything, or everything, or nothing at all.

I decide that whatever happened with Skip meant nothing at all.

At school
second semester, I assemble a steady team of drinking buddies from the girls I see every night at the campus bars. We are the sorriest girls I know. I am one of the lucky ones— among the girls I slug vodka with on the steps of the school chapel are several victims of rape and abuse and girls who have abusive boyfriends, divorced or dead parents, mothers in rehab and fathers in mental-health facilities. Some have half siblings they’ve never met.

Together, we drink until we’re batty enough to tick off our disappointments, to cry, and to comfort each other the way girls do. It’s like group therapy, only instead of helping me feel less

disturbed, our meetings only push me deeper into depression. They make me more convinced that life as we know it is some kind of purgatory, in which everyone suffers and is punished, and every one of us is licking her wounds. All our talks turn back to suicide—who has tried it and who has thought about trying it. Everyone knows how and under what circumstances she’d pull the trigger: if she had AIDS, if a sister died, if she were too irretrievably crazy.

By January
2000
, I’ve felt sadness creeping into my daily routine. It’s like a dampness, that cold, clammy feeling you get dur-ing a hurricane, when moisture seems to permeate your hair, your towels, and your sheets, even though the windows are closed. Some mornings, I wake up and snap immediately into crying. My whole body hurts like a bad joint that aches when it rains.

By winter, even good news makes me cry because I feel it has a swollen underbelly of human truth. Tears start running down my cheeks during class lectures. My eyes water in the laundry room, on the treadmill, and during student-union screenings of slapstick comedies. One night, Tess finds me sobbing during the health segment of the evening news. Scientists have discovered scarred cells from cardiac arrest fall away over time, and she can’t understand how sadly hopeful that is. To me, it means that the human heart has the capacity to heal itself.

It’s hard to say what is responsible for the change in me. For the most part, I blame Chris, who won’t date me, or the fact that my father was laid off. And once in a blue moon, I’ll fault Skip. It doesn’t occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive be-havior, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder. Experts suggest that drinking when you feel low is like

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taking speed if you’re feeling jumpy: It heightens the ailment instead of remedying it.

There is no reason that that would occur to me. Alcohol is still the one elixir that can remedy my glum moods. And when my blood buzzes on beer or hard liquor, it doesn’t feel like a downer. The times that I am drinking are still the few when I don’t feel anguish. After a few jiggers of vodka, the heaviness in my chest buoys up, and I feel light, and light-headed.

Elle and I start spending every spare moment together, and we are a match made in Bellevue. Afternoons, we sip coffee over our copies of
The Daily Orange,
smoke Marlboros in the car-peted corridors of Watson Hall, or share a joint in the stairwell at the library. We spend nights at a campus bar ordering shots of “Blood and Sand,” or spilling Bombay on her roommate’s bed-spread while we mix nightcaps.

We are together so often that some of the drunken frat boys at the campus bars start to lean in and ask, “Are you dykes?” And even my mother, in a much less explicit way, asks during our weekly phone calls if I have
something to tell her
about my re-lationship with Elle. The rumors only get worse when a visiting beer promoter persuades us to peck on the mouth, and posts the picture on a popular college-party Web site.

But for maybe the first time ever, I don’t care what people think. I admire Elle. Her sadness has a great, booming quality. You can feel it approaching before she does, like the glass of wa-ter that ripples in
Jurassic Park
before the tyrannosaurus roars onto the screen.

Elle refuses to dress up her hurt for other people’s sake. Save for the bars, Elle refuses to get dressed at all. She goes to class with eyes smudged with liner from the night before, wearing

pajama pants and confrontational Tshirts, the type with
hell hath no fury
and
still ill
lettered across the chest. Elle’s moods are as gory as surgery shows on TV. Her every torn heartstring is displayed like payback for the world that inflicted the injury.

Some afternoons, Elle and I drink on the quad in plain view. We share a thermos filled with something gamy she mixed up, and swallow the capsules of St. John’s Wort I’ve begun to carry in my book bag. I’ve been following the directions printed on the side of the bottle, but the six pills I take every day do nothing to cure my feeling of imminent doom.

As we drink, we share headphones. We each have a plastic ear-piece stuffed into one ear; we listen to Elliott Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing to Me,” and The Beatles’ “Yer Blues,” and The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over” on repeat. Sometimes we fall asleep there, with our heads on our balled-up sweatshirts. CD cases are spread out between us, along with the journals we use to store morbid collections of quotes and the suicide letters we call poetry. I wake up in the dark and the grass, head pounding, when the lampposts switch on outside Machinery Hall.

In many ways, a glass in your hand is an outward expression of pain. It will take me a good number of years to realize it, but drinking is a visible sign to the world that you’re hurting, in the same way that starving and cutting are for some girls. In a movie, drinking is one of the best ways for a hero to convey despair without a voice-over. All he really needs to do is walk into a bar, order a shot of tequila, and stare at it resolutely before he slams it back and orders another.

Later, I’ll wonder if I hoped someone would catch me during this period. I’ll think maybe I wanted someone to notice that I

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was always blue, always thirsty for another glass of beer, and ask me who or what broke my heart. I don’t want to use the phrase “cry for help” because I don’t think I wanted to be rescued. Dis-aster was still too moving. It was a challenge of psychological and bodily limits that seems risky but not wholly dangerous, like skydiving or bungee jumping, any extreme stunt you have to sign a waiver for.