Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (6 page)

During ninth grade, a mom who will not stand back is a nightmare, particularly if she’s a stay-at-home mom, the type who says things like, “You are my full-time job,” when you’re pretty sure you’re a dead-end vocation. She’ll prepare for ado-lescence like the Y2K. She will scrutinize your grades, your friends, and your appearance, looking for headway, as though womanhood is a twelve-point plan and the big boss expects a progress report.

My mother is that type of mother. By the time I start high school she has not only read
Reviving Ophelia,
she has highlighted it, as though it were a how-to manual for dealing with me. Now, whenever I erupt in tears at the most inappropriate times, she puts on a face of quiet bemusement and I can imagine her thinking:
Ah, Koren exemplifies the process of disowning the true self. With puberty she went from being a whole, authentic per-son to a diminished version of herself.
And I cry harder because my private pains are so unoriginal.

Mary Pipher has fucked up my life good. She’s convinced my mother that she needs to save my “self,” to pull me from the un-dertow of fury and self-doubt that is sucking me down. Now, any hesitation on my part is a sacrifice to the patriarchal system. The patriarchy wins when I don’t run for student council. It wins when I don’t touch palms with a boy in the pew behind us during the hand-shaking portion of church.

32
INITIATION
|
First Waste

“You need to get over this shyness,” my mom will say with a shrill whine that sets me stomping up the stairs to my room. “Do you want to be like this your whole life? Do you? Do you want boys to ignore you? Teachers to skip over you in class? I used to be like you. Until I forced myself. And believe me, you have to
force yourself
because, I’m telling you now, the meek sure as hell don’t inherit the world.”

By now, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m meek. I accept the fact that I’ll never know what to say in a group. In class, I will sit and watch everyone else chatter with great ease. And I’ll think I should say something
now
because each passing second will only make it harder to speak without everyone turning to look at me with great shock, as though a chair, or a stapler, or some other inanimate object had sprung to life.

While that meekness won’t help me make friends or get dates, it is favorable in other ways. Adults seem to think it makes me more feminine and, often, a little more grown-up. Teachers praise me for my cooperation. The “comments” portion of my report card always reads: “courteous,” “attentive,” and “well mannered.” But teachers treat the domineering girls differently. Girls like Natalie, who sit with the boys or speak out of turn, are called “disruptive” or “disrespectful,” sometimes “cocksure,” but even that sounds dirty.

But that’s what my mother wants from me. She wants me to have everything she never had as a girl, which, on top of piano lessons and designer jeans, includes buoyancy. She wants me to rise to the top of the worst situations. She wants to raise a mod-ern woman: someone who is cool and collected, a vixen, a man-eater, hell-on-wheels in heels.

Unlike Anne Sexton, she cannot accept that she has given me her “booty, her spoils, her Mother & Co. and her ailments.” I

have swallowed her immunities and her maladies, and now I can’t help feeling skittishness deep in the coils of my DNA, a ge-netic predisposition like cystic acne, something that will not clear up no matter how many times she warns me to keep my hands off my face.

Years from now, I’ll pick up her copy of
Reviving Ophelia
and

notice a paragraph about parents who, “taught their children that only a small range of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors would be tolerated,” who, “because of their own childhood ex-periences, regarded parts of their children’s personalities as un-acceptable.” This section will not be highlighted.

I think
my mother wants me to be like Billie Jankoff.

Billie is a girl. As far as I can tell, her name isn’t even short for Beverly or Belinda or anything. Later, she will tell me she was named for Billie Holiday, and I’ll insist on calling her Miss Brown.

Billie and I have assigned seats at the same round table in English class. She sits at twelve o’clock and I sit at three, and every time she flips a page in
The Yearling
her scent drifts clockwise. She smells like cigarettes and a woody perfume that reminds me of my mother’s cedar chest. Her key lime–colored cowboy boots tap the table legs with a jumpy energy that shakes my notebook.

I constantly stare at her out of the corners of my eyes.

Billie is ghostly white, the way only chronically ill people and The Cure are, and her skin darkens the rest of her features by comparison. Her blond hair has a fringe of ebony where it parts, where her unprocessed, natural color is growing in. Her blue eyes are so deep-set they look black, and when she outlines them with a charcoal pencil, her irises look bottomless. I’m compelled

34
INITIATION
|
First Waste

to look deeper into them to find her pupils, the way I’d lean over a wishing well to look for its floor.

Billie is the type of girl teachers love to hate. For one thing, she writes with a ballpoint pen shaped like a syringe. It is 1994 and Kurt Cobain is four months dead, and the administration is sensitive to heroin innuendo. She also dresses entirely in black, which teachers interpret as a sign of mutiny. Some days, she wears skirts of layered black chiffon, which wave when she walks. Other days, she wears tight black leggings under an oversized sweater with thumbholes cut into the cuffs. I love the

days that Billie wears T-shirts that say things like
to die for
,

phrases that are provocative but too ambiguous for the dress code to ban outright.

Our English teacher, Mr. Coffee, hates Billie because she’s quick to pick fights with him, and not about late assignments and absences, the inconsequential things. No, Billie’s fights are the kind where she stands up during a discussion of
The Great Gatsby
and says, “This is stupid, Daisy is stupid, all the girls in all the books we read are brain dead,” and then storms down the hall in a flutter of black chiffon. When she’s gone, Mr. Coffee apologizes for the interruption, and I’m left wondering what I am missing. I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me.

One day during English, Billie spots the spine of a fat spell-book poking out of my backpack, and I want to hide my face behind my hands. In the absence of alcohol, I’ve resorted to the power of real magic to transform my life. I’ve been lolling in the library during lunch period, combing the card catalog for
Charms, Spells, and Formulas
and
Practical Candle Burning Ritu-

als.
I’ve been tying ribbons on fence posts for happiness, sticking pins through candlewicks for friendship, and sleeping with a glass of water under my bed for love.

I take a deep breath because I know what is coming. I know Billie is going to say “Spells are stupid, that book is stupid, and you must be brain damaged.”

Instead, she leans in and whispers, “I love that shit.”

I feel a rupture of joy for the first time in months. I can’t stop from widening my eyes.

Billie lives
in the bordering town of Clinton. Though our towns share a school, a wildlife reserve, and a waste-disposal cen-ter, their commonalities end there. Whereas my town is rural and secluded, the type of place where you can live seven years and never catch a glimpse of your neighbors, Clinton is the kind of old mill town that is common in Massachusetts. It is spotted with vinyl-sided duplexes, pool halls, Dairy Queens, and auto-body re-pair shops. The boys from Clinton ride dirt bikes and smoke Marlboros, and if they take you out to look at the stars, they drop the
r,
with the accent that most people attribute to the Bay State—
stahs.
To me, everything about the place sounds like freedom.

Billie lives with her divorced mother, a position that fills me with envy. I know that is stupid, that I should be grateful that my parents are still happily wed, both of them tuned into my every ballet recital or parent-teacher conference like it’s Super Bowl Sunday. And I am. But our nuclear nest also makes divorce look exotic, like the stuff that art is made of. After all, this is shortly after
Newsweek
declared, “Grunge is what happens when children of divorce get their hands on guitars.”* Divorce

*
Newsweek
—April
18, 1994,
“The Poet of Alienation” by Jeff Giles.

36
INITIATION
|
First Waste

seems like a beautiful truth, a stark contrast to my own two-parent household, which at times feels stickier, more deceptive. What’s more, divorce creates the possibility of independence, for which I am desperate. The dissolution means train rides and plane rides alone, en route to Mommy’s house or Daddy’s condo. And keys. I long for house keys; I want to wear them on a satin string around my neck. After school, I want to unlock the door

to a quiet house and, consequently, a quiet mind.

Billie’s house is like an Egyptian tomb, like it ought to be named Valley of the Queens. It is still and soundless when we take the bus there on Friday afternoons. Snapshots hang on the walls: There’s one of Billie and her sister carving a pumpkin, another of Billie and her mom wearing pointed party hats. The medicine cabinets are lined with lipstick. The refrigerator is stocked with Snack Packs and mummified microwave dinners, ample provisions for the afterlife. Everything seems easy—easy to find, easier to make, easiest to clean up.

Mrs. Jankoff works odd hours as an emergency-room nurse and spends most days dressed in rose-colored scrubs and ortho-pedic shoes, her blond hair fastened in a nest of loose curls. But twice a week she undergoes a magical transformation. After her shift ends, she goes out for drinks at Watson’s, a pine-paneled neighborhood bar. She has single friends, loads of them, and at Watson’s they meet men in droves. The following day, she describes to us whatever lawyer, welder, or real-estate agent she met, and in our own vernacular. “Joe was hot,” she’ll say over the kitchen stove, where she is standing in a terrycloth bathrobe and cooking scrambled eggs. “But at some point I realized he was a little messed up in the head.”

When Billie’s mom goes out to Watson’s, she even dresses like one of us. She wears army boots, flannel skirts, and baby-doll

T-shirts with broken hearts ironed on. She refuses to wear a bra because, she says, they’re just another way in which the world keeps women down. So her breasts sway like water balloons when she walks, and I love the way they make my mother wince. As much as I love Mrs. Jankoff, I know Billie spars with her, too. She fights with her mom the same way I fight with my mom, but for opposite reasons. I want to be independent from my mom, and Billie wants to be dependent on hers. Billie loves my mother’s involvement, while I love Mrs. Jankoff ’s detach-ment. We both have the magnetic properties that attract us to each other’s mothers, and repel us from our own. I want to drive my mother away from me by being deceptive; Billie tries to

lure her mother home by proving she’s trustworthy.

The more
time I spend with Billie, the more I realize I have her pegged all wrong. Sure, she smokes. She also wears satin bras and smeared eyeliner, and in school, she is all too happy to scream at Mr. Coffee or skip gym class on the days that we are forced to run a mile. But when it comes to her real assets, the things Natalie would have considered
no doy,
like the fact that she has the house without chaperone for hours on end, complete with access to her mother’s cherry schnapps, she pleads bank-rupt. In her own house, she is quiet and reserved.

Friday nights, while Natalie is in some boy’s dorm room burn-ing incense, listening to way-hip post-rock Brit-pop, and drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, Billie and I do nothing. We stretch out on the kitchen counters, where we can watch headlights stream by on Water Street, and half-think we see someone we know coming or going, then speculate as to where. We eat chocolate chips from the bag and listen to FM radio until “Love Songs After Dark” turns into “Marty in the Morning.”

38
INITIATION
|
First Waste

Some nights we work on our witchcraft, but even that is dull. We want to draw baths filled with rose petals, but we can’t af-ford to buy a dozen roses from the farmer’s market, and Billie won’t let me steal them. We also long to do love spells, but there is no way for us to gather boys’ toenail clippings. There are no stores within walking distance that sell orrisroot.

Instead of making me calm, Billie’s immobility makes me restless.

Afternoons at her house, I feel fidgety. I am incapable of be-ing still. I have an urge to scratch my nails down my cheeks, tear the skillets down from the pot rack, strip off my clothes, and run bare-assed and shrieking through the condo’s parking lot. I want to turn on the stove and press my palms into the burners just so I can test my synapses. I need to know I can still react, still feel terrified, still feel.

At the same time, I am so thankful to have Billie for a friend that I don’t know how to tell her I’m bored. I don’t know how to say I’m not used to a friend like her. I am used to Natalie’s an-tagonism, the rhythm of combat and truce that could easily pass an afternoon. I miss the best friend who mows me over with her moods and her will. I miss being cut down, in the name of being forced to grow.

One night
, Billie is fishing in the kitchen cabinets for something resembling a clear glass goblet to fill with salt water and dip our beaded necklaces into, in order to make them Poseidon protection charms. The closest thing she can find is a German beer stein, which we both agree will work just fine.