Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (21 page)

bottle of tequila silver. By the end of the night, more than a few Zetas cry, when they realize there is a name for girls who earn money that way.

There are wine-and-cheese parties, beer-and-bowling parties, wake-and-bakes, casino nights, power hours with Midori sours, plus preparties and after-parties, in case one bender isn’t enough.

But the biggest party by far is Zeta’s semesterly formal.

A formal is
like a high school prom, but with an open bar and no chaperones. Most sororities at S.U. have them, and mostly at resorts in Canada, where across the border just four hours away, the legal drinking age is eighteen. Everyone spends the night in a three-star hotel, doing their best impression of Led Zeppelin at the Continental Hyatt by kicking over nightstands, putting cigarette burns in hotel towels, and disrupting things enough to make other guests file formal complaints.

No sister wants to go alone, but asking a date is a big deal because you have to share a hotel room with him.

I end up inviting a boy named Milton who lives on Hannah’s

floor in Sadler Hall. We met a month earlier, in the dorm bathroom, where I was getting sick after a night of downing
7
&
7
s. The room felt as damp as a sea cave, and Milton found me in

one of the stalls, where I was drifting to sleep with my cheek on the toilet seat and hugging the bowl like a life preserver. In memory, he was a giant sea beast that latched on to me, kissing me right there on the tiles without even bothering to help me up from my space among the stray wads of toilet paper. I hadn’t resisted. Unmoored as I was, I was happy for rescue.

I don’t really
like
Milton, but I don’t dislike him, which is the

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standard by which I measure the boys with whom I drink. I fig-ure bringing him will be better than not going at all, or going stag, in which case I’d be sure to end up alone in a corner, taking shots, while everyone else snuggled into slow dances. Since I haven’t ever been to a formal, I don’t know that boys interpret the invite as an open invitation for sex, on account of both the open bar and the hotel room. If I’d known, I never would have asked.

Milton and I hitch a ride up to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with Hannah, who also joined Zeta, and her date, Perry, a platonic friend she went to high school with. It is the slow, awk-ward drive of people who don’t know what to talk about. We wheel up Interstate 81, past the army base in Watertown and through the Thousand Islands. Hannah fiddles with the radio. Perry folds and unfolds the map. Milton says over and over that he should have brought his stash of pot. When we get to the bor-der, a customs officer in a glass booth waves us through, despite the fact that when he asks what country we are citizens of, Perry says “Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

We park the car in front of the first packaged-goods store we spot, and skitter through the aisles like contestants on
Supermarket Sweep,
amassing bottles of rum and tequila, plus a thirty-pack of beer and the stubby Canadian cigarettes called Players. It should be a thrill to be able to buy booze legally, but for some reason, I still feel sheepish, like I’m doing something wrong. I hand a few bills to Milton and let him carry my share to the counter, where a bald man knowingly rings them up.

By the
time we get to the hotel, most of the sisters have already checked in. They are moving the elevator up and down, bursting

in and out of rooms holding beer bottles. There are Zetas smoking a joint in the lounge chairs beside the indoor pool, and more sitting at the hotel bar like birds on a wire, picking through peanut bowls and chatting with the bartender while he pulls back the lever of the beer tap. It’s the first time I’ve ever checked into a hotel without my parents, and I’m unsure what to do at the horseshoe-shaped front desk, where a clerk in a hunter-green blazer hands me my room key card.

Hannah and I have arranged to have adjoining rooms on the ground floor. Mine has two double beds because I don’t feel wholly comfortable bunking with Milton.

The rooms have sliding glass doors that open onto a small bay, and Hannah and I jog outside without our coats on to mar-vel at its half-frozen finish. We sit on the broad wooden railing that divides the lawn from the water, holding bottles of Labatt’s in our laps and sighing in the dippy, satisfied way the situation seems to call for. The air around us is smoky before we even light a cigarette. It’s not dark yet, but we can see the moon, as though by mistake. Hannah says the clouds make its edges look serrated, like a bottle cap.

Back in the hotel room, Hannah and I drink while Perry snaps pictures. We lie under the bed’s stiff paisley comforter with our backs against the headboard, like a married couple watching the eleven o’clock news. Between us are an ashtray, a bottle of Captain Morgan coconut rum, and the tiny juice glasses from the hotel bathroom that we’ve been using to take shots.

After a few deep dips into the bottle, I locate the inner button that can take me off mute mode. I come up with a point of con-versation. I ask everyone, “What was the last ludicrous thing you did when you were drunk?” I find out that Milton passed

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out in his closet. Hannah accidentally penciled in her eyebrows with red lip-liner in a bar’s dark bathroom. Perry peed into his refrigerator’s vegetable drawer during a drunken sleepwalk.

People seem to visit our room in sixes. Girls I pledged with come by to rap on the door, as does Maya, as well as boys in rum-pled dress shirts who turn out to be other sisters’ dates. Everyone is chain-smoking Players and posing for pictures, asking for beer and offering pot, until our standard-sized room starts to feel like a bank with Perry playing the teller. Since he bought most of the booze, he supervises the deposits and withdrawals. The whole time, I stay curled up in the sheets with the rum bottle, feeling too gratified to leave it. Around the room, other sisters are bear-hugging a plastic pink bong or nuzzling drinks, and it occurs to me that this formal is like our honeymoon, like the ravenous periods of early love. In Canada, we can hardly believe we can drink legally, the way newlyweds can hardly grasp that they’re married. We shut ourselves up in our rooms, con-summating our lust. We consume room service, our drinks, and

our dates. Each taste makes our union feel a little more real.

I know I’m starting to get drunk because I can feel my eyes turn to marbles in my head. I love that about alcohol. It has a way of making my whole face relax, the way I imagine a facial must. When I’m this slack, I wonder why I always feel so tense to begin with, why I walk around with my cheeks pulled so tight they look hollow, why my mouth is always drawn tight, into a constipated-looking little
o.

I once heard someone use
copacetic
as a slang term for

“drunk,” and I thought
That’s me.
With a buzz on, I’m first rate. Alcohol is my wood sealant. When I’m painted, nothing can penetrate my essence. My best friend can call me
bitch.
The boy

who is brushing my thigh with the back of his hand can tell me I’m only pretty when he’s drunk. In the moment, these senti-ments just bead up and roll off me.

I don’t even mind when Milton crosses the room to smooth my hair, as though he cared about me.

Some time
later, we run out of booze, and Hannah, Perry, and I go to buy more at what we don’t realize is a gigantic, fine-wine store. The bottles that line the shelves from floor to ceiling are far too good for the likes of us. I tramp through the rows of labels from Portugal, Argentina, and New Zealand—all the regions I’m too uncultivated to know—with the mania of Augustus Gloop in the chocolate room.

It occurs to me that an hour has passed since my last drink, and my buzz has begun soft pedaling. I am still drunk, but I cannot be
just
drunk. Just drunk will not gut my head of its worries. Just drunk will not swat away my misgivings about Milton, anxieties that are whirring around me when I’m alone with him, like so many insects. I need a bottle of something sweet and potent to perk me back up to a state of past gone. Champagne will do the trick. Cheap champagne, which is both romantic and lethal, will hit me like a crime of passion. I think it can help me behead myself.

Hannah is in the back of the store, inspecting the coolers stocked with chilled Korbel, as if she has read my mind. But when I approach her to help select a fat green bottle from the cooler’s shelf, she doubles over with her hands on her knees, and starts dry heaving.

I’m able to grab her under one arm, and get her out of the store before the store owner has to run for a mop. The door chimes, and the cold Canadian air hits us hard and blue. I tug

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Hannah just around the corner of the storefront, where we’re out of the cashier’s view, and I hold her blond curls while she throws up on the sidewalk. I grit my teeth when I hear the splashing sound vomit makes when it hits concrete.

We’re standing on the edge of the town’s main street, and traffic is heavy. Every few minutes, a car whizzes by. The drivers, mostly men, lean against their car horns, and the blares are mocking. Hannah wipes her mouth with the pink sleeve of her sweater and says, “We’re such goddamn Americans.”

When we
make it back to the Crown Princess Hotel, Hannah is still down for the count, so Perry and I haul her to bed and go about the business of changing for the dance.

In what will become a mythic recovery, Hannah will wake up stone sober two hours later, wriggle into her black satin gown, loop her hair into an updo, and come downstairs to re-sume drinking. As college continues, we will all build up this level of stamina, which may be the truest measure of excess. Sorority sisters who are drunk enough to have eyes swiveling around in their heads will learn to tickle their throats with their fingers, hurl, and reel back to the party to pick up drinking where they left off.

In spite of the scene at the liquor store, I still managed to net a bottle of champagne. Perry pops the cork out the sliding glass door, where it cracks like a gunshot. Milton has been lost for hours, and I’m glad because I don’t have to think about him. I can just drink champagne from a bathroom glass with Perry, whom I feel comfortable with on account that he isn’t my love interest, or even Hannah’s.

Each sip of champagne tastes like honey. I love the whisper-ing sound its bubbles make, as though the drink itself is trying

to tell me something. After a few glasses, I am too unsteady on my feet to slip into my new floor-length gold dress without step-ping on the hem and half falling over.

Getting ready is the most challenging part about formal weekend. After five hours of preparties, a mascara brush is just as dangerous to operate as heavy machinery, and when we de-velop the film from our disposable cameras, everyone’s makeup looks like Tammy Faye’s. High on champagne, my biggest chal-lenge is scooping out my suitcase. After twenty minutes of paw-ing through my clothes, I still can’t locate two high heels. When the time comes, I go downstairs to the ballroom wearing Mil-ton’s rubber flip-flops.

The dance itself is the least interesting part of the weekend. For a few hours, there’s an open bar, and we drink screwdrivers garnished with orange wedges through tiny plastic straws. As a sorority, we were too cheap to have the event catered, so the white tablecloths are covered with confetti but no food, and our empty stomachs make us even more drunk. On a banquet table are a few cheese plates, sticky glasses that are half full or half empty of cocktails, and ashtrays smoking with forgotten, un-mashed cigarettes. The deejay we hired was detained at customs, so there’s a Canadian one, spinning the culturally offensive music that’s usually reserved for terrorist interrogations.

Zeta’s president requests Crosby, Stills, and Nash, which is something that someone will do at every formal henceforth. When it comes on, the sisters make a ring on the dance floor, linking arms and slurring the words to “Our House.” I join in, wrapping my arms around the synthetic material of two people’s dress waists, and chirping about how life used to be hard, but now everything is easy because of Zeta. I tilt my head against the sister standing next to me and let my eyes well up.

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The words zing out of me because I don’t yet know what a Greek myth they are.

The rest of the night flickers on like a movie that you watch while you’re nodding off to sleep, and catch only pieces of. The vodka I drank in the ballroom omits some scenes, but I manage to pay attention to the important events in the plot. Milton mate-rializes during a slow song, when he tows me onto the dance floor by my elbow, and I let him twirl me a few times before I flip-flop back to the bar. Perry finds a piano in a hallway and thumps out a labored rendition of something truly campy, maybe “You Are So Beautiful.” Someone snaps a picture of me standing beside him, listening, with one hand on the piano’s lid. In it, my eyes look blank, and my skin is as white as chicken meat.

Sometime after midnight, Hannah and I get the idea to climb onto the slick roof of a ferry that is tied up in the bay. The red

letters painted on the ferry’s side read
sea fox
, though Hannah

keeps calling it
sex fox
. We plunk ourselves down on top of the boat’s bridge, smoking a joint and shouting “All aboard” as loud as we can, to see if the ice will toss our voices back in an echo. Sometime after that, I slide back through the door of my hotel room and pass out alone in the sheets.

The room
is as dark as first darkness, the way only hotel rooms can be. In my sleep I can hear the old-fashioned clock on the nightstand flip its numbers. I know I will not be able to sleep soundly here, knowing Milton still remains at large, and that he might tear through the door at any minute with his plastic key. Beyond that, I can never fully doze off when I am this loaded with hard liquor. Vodka, especially, lulls me into a state of deliri-ous half sleep, in which I talk and laugh out loud.