Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (33 page)

Three
a.m.
rolls around. Elle still hasn’t come back, so I climb

the stairs to go look for her. My heart sputters as I turn down hallways and peer into bedrooms because this reminds me of the way I lost Natalie in Ocean City. Five years later, experience has taught me that any time a girlfriend disappears at a party, it

means something bad has happened. Eventually, a boy who is zigzagging down the hallway, holding a blue bottle of vodka, tells me Elle left for Zeta an hour ago.

It doesn’t make sense that Elle would just cut me loose in the party’s living room and duck out the side door without me. But for the time being, there is no time to figure it out. I am late. The other sisters are already shimmying into their hooded black robes. Pledges are lining up outside the house’s secret entrance. I am running through the park toward the house. My boots are breaking through the frost on the ground, and I can see my breath’s fog. At least I know where Elle is.

Elle is
the first person I see when I tramp into the room where the other sisters are already beginning to line up to start the cer-emony. She is balled up on the floor of the chapter room, weep-ing, and the black polyester of her robe is spread out around her. She looks like a puddle, and the sisters are snickering.

Zeta’s president pulls me into the kitchen to say, “We don’t know what’s wrong with her. She won’t put her arms through the holes of her robes. Someone saw bandages on her wrists, and started telling people that she cut them.”

When I go back into the chapter room to kneel down next to Elle, she won’t turn to face me. She sinks deeper into the carpet. Her shoulders convulse. Every time I try to put an arm around her, she swats it off.

The initiation lasts five hours, and I spend the whole time watching Elle cry through her teeth, and running the night over and over in my head, trying to figure out what I did wrong.

She agrees
to meet me the next night, on the concrete steps outside of Bird Library. She takes pulls off an extra-long cigarette,

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and starts by saying, “it was melodramatic and silly and I never would have done it if I weren’t drunk.”

Then she goes on to tell me things that I’ve already sensed. I’ve already felt them in my blood. I already know that she left the party to put notches in both her wrists. I learn that she did it first with a razor blade, but the business of cutting was harder than it looks in movies. The edge of the blade wasn’t sharp enough, and it wouldn’t slice deep enough, so she traded it for a steel chef ’s knife. Sometime later, her roommate walked in and saw the knife, the blade, and the bloody kitchen rags on the counter. Together, they bound her wrists with strips of gauze and packing tape.

Snow is drifting from the sky, in a way that is calm and airy. It is collecting in the long, black fibers of Elle’s hair in a way that makes it look like she’s wearing a pearl headdress. It is early evening. The breeze is gentle, and the moon is muted behind a thin drift of clouds. As usual, I hate the universe and its irony. The world looks too pretty for this moment. It doesn’t fit this talk, which is too sad, and biting, and ugly.

My whole face is damp with tears. I keep saying, “Show me, I want to see,” but Elle shakes her head
no.
I lurch forward any-way, and she doesn’t fight me off. When I roll back one of her sweater sleeves, she sits very still, and her face stays expression-less. She is wearing a black-leather bracelet that has two silver snaps I have to pop open. Under it, there is thick cotton gauze rolled halfway up her forearm.

She tells me it was my fault that she did it, because I was talking to the boy that she works with. She says she’s liked him for months, and I
knew
that, and yet I let him put his arm around my waist, anyway. It doesn’t matter when I tell her I was just glad to have someone to talk to while I waited for her to come

back for me. The scars will stay with her and, in her mind, they will always be my fault.

Elle says, “I don’t want to be around you anymore.”

I can’t think of a thing to say. I mop my nose on my jacket sleeve. I bend forward and cradle my own wrists in my lap, as though they were hers. I am not used to pleading my case. In the past, Elle has been the one to speak for me; she has always ar-gued on my behalf when I have felt this indefensible. I look up at the flat face of the library. My mind is blank. I don’t have a shred of certainty.

I tell Elle, “I’m sorry.” And I mean it.

For years I will mean it. I will add her injuries to my running list of ruination, right alongside whatever happened to Natalie in Ocean City, and whatever happened to me with Skip, and all the other destruction I hold myself liable for. In the future, even after addiction counselors translate the term
alcohol abuse
for me, even after they say “It is improper use of alcohol, like drinking to medicate your moods,” the word
abuse
will always make me think of these kinds of maltreatment. It will make me think of the ways we emotionally battered each other while we were wasted.

I almost wish Elle had pummeled me instead. A black eye would heal far quicker than this emotional wound. It will take me years to absolve myself of the blame she has assigned to me. It will take me years to see that Elle blamed me because it was eas-ier than blaming alcohol, and alcohol-induced depression. We were best friends, but her relationship with alcohol went deeper; she had been allied with it for far longer.

After my
friendship with Elle dissolves, I stay on the periphery of house activities because I don’t want to see her. I hide in the

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third-floor phone booth when everyone filters downstairs for chapter meetings. I spend a long time studying rows of numbered spines in the library and dropping hurried notes of apology in the president’s mailbox.

I show up for rush because I have to; it is a requirement. Shirking it means removing myself from Zeta for good and putting my name on a waitlist for a spare cot in an underclassmen dorm. I drink with April the night before rush, and I am hungover for its duration. My hair is unwashed, my clothes smell of cigarettes, and my thighs pimple with itchy hives I can’t shake. Still, sisters steer their rush crushes to me. They are the quick-witted girls, with clean skin and mod glasses, who everyone wants to join Zeta. The fact that I’m charged with convincing them is a compliment; it means the girls I live with think I have retained some semblance of stature and intrigue. I do my best to woo the recruits, the same way that the sisters baited me, by clat-tering on to them about our parties, our drinking, and our drugs. I sense the girls are looking for some other source of enthusiasm, but I don’t know what it is or how to give it to them. In the end,

we lose every last one of them to other sororities.

One Tuesday night in November, I get bullied into taking a role in a house skit. It is part of a fraternity’s week-long philan-thropy, and I join the troupe the night before the competition because I’m not stealthy enough to avoid their committee meeting on the second-floor landing. They assure me I can hit the open bar before I have to go onstage.

The night of the competition, we rehearse in the dining room of the boys’ fraternity while they mix cocktails to take the edge off our stage fright. I down a glass filled two inches high with vodka and topped off with cranberry juice. It is all I need to go runny.

My beer tears begin while we are walking to the bar. They persist while I’m showing my ID to the doorman, while pledges whose names I don’t know ask me what’s wrong, and while someone’s boyfriend keeps bringing me shots, which only make me sob harder. I am the kind of dead drunk where I can hear my voice vibrating in my throat, and my breath is bumping in and out of me hard and fast, but I can’t hear what I’m saying. I don’t know who or what I am mourning; it might be Elle, or Skip, or Chris. These days, there are too many sore spots that trigger tears. I can’t name just one.

When it’s time to take our place onstage, I stand inert in front of some three hundred people, forget that I’m supposed to deliver lines, and instead just totter and weep openly for the full four minutes. It is as though the alcohol I am funneling into my body is leaking back out the ducts of my eyes. If someone licked my face, I’m sure my tears would taste like Barton vodka.

I stay in bed the whole next day because I don’t want to face the Zetas downstairs. Were I to untwist myself from my com-forter and slog down the hall to the bathroom, I would have to face girls who know me too intimately. They would look up from blow-drying their hair or brushing their teeth with looks that are too knowing. They’ve seen me cry, and they know I have private afflictions. I think if I’d stripped my shirt off on stage, I still wouldn’t feel this exposed.

This kind
of self-loathing used to be the reason that I drank in the first place.

I swilled vodka to fl over humiliating experiences, like someone who turns stained couch cushions to avoid looking at smudges. I drank to forget the spots in time when someone snickered when I stood up to speak, when a boy ignored me, when a

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woman eyed me from top to bottom and stopped curtly at my boots. I drank to forget fi with my parents, the nights when they had the misfortune of calling during one of my hopeless moods, when I cut their questions short and later felt guilty, when I fell asleep convinced that my mother must hate me. I drank to turn these memories over because I couldn’t bear to look at them. But skit night proves that my drinking has become its own tarnish. Drinking to quash the past won’t work anymore because the past has welled back up. Every awful feeling bobbed back up under the alcohol and burst open. Now I feel doubly bad, on account of the things that have been bothering me and

the emotion that I’ve neglected to control.

After lunch, Hannah comes to sit on the side of my bed. She says, “Don’t worry. It was just beer tears. The sisters understand. At one point or another, we’ve all gotten drunk and sobbed senselessly.”

I draw my knees toward me and watch the tent they make in the sheets. I nod. I tell Hannah, “I know.” But deep down, I sense that the tears were not meaningless. I think that crying was an honest reflex, an involuntary reaction to some inner pressure point. They might have been my body’s way of telling me that something is wrong inside, that six years of drinking is catching up with me. It is contorting me into some different girl, a new person who I can sometimes see in pictures, behind my glassed eyes and in the down-turned corners of my mouth. This new girl is sad and secretive and volatile. She is me, and I am in trouble.

Second semester
of junior year is a drop in the bucket. Two-thirds of my friends and acquaintances leave to study in Europe. Their postcards arrive weekly and get pinned up in the sorority mailroom. There are pictures of plazas and palazzos, the sun

setting on London Bridge, the sun rising on Notre Dame, the brown-and-white–trimmed canal houses in Amsterdam that look like short stacks. The cursive in the back boxes is minuscule, in an attempt to squeeze in descriptions of every pub, hash restau-rant, live sex show, and weekend Eurail ride to Ibiza. Every girl has a favorite corner café, bridge, pub, discotheque, and strong brand of cigarettes. Everyone has a new understanding of culture. I, too, had put in an application to study in London, and even made arrangements to temp at my favorite British women’s magazine. But at the last minute, I defected. I decided to stay in Syracuse because I didn’t want to fall behind on my course load; the prospect of spending an extra year making up graphics classes was just too horrifying. Instead, I interview for a job at Syracuse’s weekly newspaper, where I slump at the intern’s

desk, typing out human-interest stories of low quality.

Suddenly, I am among the oldest girls living in Zeta. Once the girls my age take British Air flights to new flats in Camden, a crop of nineteen-year-olds moves in to take their place. April stays put with me. But Selene takes her records, her bong, and her yoga mat to Paris, leaving a vintage map tacked above her desk for us to remember her by. In her space, a bubbly eighteen-year-old named Eva unpacks teddy bears, Ralph Lauren sweaters, and a clear vase filled with Christmas lights that serves as a night-light.

Eva surprises me. I would have guessed she was too prim and prissy to slug Jim Beam. Every bit of clothing that hangs in her lopsided armoire is pastel colored. She has more powder-blue sundresses, pink sweaters, and T-shirts in shades of rubber-duck yellow than there are in the infant section of any department store. She speaks with a baby voice, too, which is high and whiny in its Long Island accent. But sure enough, within the fi week of liv-

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ing with us, Eva wakes up with a boy in her bed and can’t remember ripping open the condom wrapper on the nightstand; she bounds downstairs to eat French toast, telling me “Sex is really no big deal.” Another night, she staggers home soaked in beer, after a girl she got into a fi with poured a cup over her head.

The new girls make me uneasy in their wildness, particularly my “little sister,” Hailey, who acts as though she’s demonized by the same sadness and rage that held me captive last semester and the summer before it. For a month Hailey chews shyly at dinner, while the girls around her shout, gossip, and smack the table hard enough to bounce the silver. That is until Smirnoff trans—

forms her overnight into the house’s constant source of theatrics. Come three
a.m.
, she is always in the phone booth making prank calls, or in the kitchen filling water balloons. Sometimes she is

hanging out the second-story window, flinging beer bottles at her ex-boyfriend’s window in the fraternity next door.