the moon and the damp sand under our feet. We found a party somewhere along the break-ing waves, and it was not unlike the Mad Hatter’s tea party: Everyone was gathered around a campfire, singing songs, rais-ing their glasses, and switching seats. Someone offered us something from a keg, which we drank to gauge the mystical effects it would have on us.
The narrative is straight out of Alice in Wonderland, right down to the bottle marked drink me . My father is repressing a
look that says, Off with her head.
He asks how many beers I drank.
“Two, only two.” Saying things twice always seems to sub-stantiate them.
He asks if I’ve ever had a drink before. “No,” I lie. “Never.”
My mother asks what Natalie drank.
Since I’ll never know, I guess and say, “Four beers.” Her look is dubious.
“Koren, she smells like hard alcohol. ” My mother is a blood—
hound. She could make a living sniffing out contraband in lug-gage at customs.
I shrug and say she might have had hard alcohol. I add, “It’s not like I was watching her every second.”
76 INITIATION | First Offense
My mother gasps.
She says, “Listen, little girl. ” It is the first time in the conversation that she has raised her voice, and whenever she calls me “little girl” I know she means business. “Natalie is your friend. You two are supposed to look out for each other. Particularly if you’re going to be drinking.” She doesn’t need to add that I shouldn’t have been drinking. We both know, at this point, that it is extraneous to the conversation.
What she says makes sense, and ultimately, it is the one real lesson I take away from that lecture by the pool: During times of booze, girls are responsible for nurturing one another. When she says it, an image flashes through my mind of Jodie Foster in Foxes, pouring coffee and cornflakes for her girlfriends after a night of too much Scotch and too many quaaludes. If drinking is like playing grown-up or playing house, somebody has to be the mother. And the fact that my own mother says this makes the knowledge feel all the more sacred, like a bond passed down by women through the ages. I add it to my list of drinking com-mandments, alongside Thou shalt select a designated driver.
“There weren’t any boys involved, were there?” I know she is really asking if there was any sex involved.
If girls need to defend each other while they drink, sex is the threat we need to protect one another from. The thing I am discovering about girldom is, in the end, nobody cares if you are a drunk, an anorexic, a runaway, a dropout, a dope fiend, or a psy-chotic. These things aren’t regaled, but they are allowed. With the right amount of therapy or religion or pharmaceuticals, they can be remedied and passed off as life stages. That is, as long as you are still a virgin. To be a whore is to be unsalvageable.
“No. God, no,” I half-mouth the words in a way that suggests the scenario is so far-fetched it doesn’t merit sound. But secretly,
I am wondering if something other than vomit impelled Natalie out of her clothes and into those gym shorts.
It wasn’t too long ago that Natalie and I rented the movie Kids, and I haven’t been able to forget the look on Chloë Sevigny’s face when her character is raped while she is passed out on a sofa, drunk and high. The camera captures the whole horrifying scene, and it gave me nightmares for months after I saw it. I could not stop thinking of how each thrust sent the pleather couch squeaking. The boy had bent her legs so far back over her head, they looked as though they’d snap off at her hips.
My parents never say the words “get-out-of-jail-free card,” but that’s what this is. As a first-time offender, I escape any real punishment. They make it clear that I will be severely sorry if they catch me drinking again. They establish what addiction coun-selors call a “No-Use” rule. I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to drink
The narrative is straight out of Alice in Wonderland, right down to the bottle marked drink me . My father is repressing a
look that says, Off with her head.
He asks how many beers I drank.
“Two, only two.” Saying things twice always seems to sub-stantiate them.
He asks if I’ve ever had a drink before. “No,” I lie. “Never.”
My mother asks what Natalie drank.
Since I’ll never know, I guess and say, “Four beers.” Her look is dubious.
“Koren, she smells like hard alcohol. ” My mother is a blood—
hound. She could make a living sniffing out contraband in lug-gage at customs.
I shrug and say she might have had hard alcohol. I add, “It’s not like I was watching her every second.”
76 INITIATION | First Offense
My mother gasps.
She says, “Listen, little girl. ” It is the first time in the conversation that she has raised her voice, and whenever she calls me “little girl” I know she means business. “Natalie is your friend. You two are supposed to look out for each other. Particularly if you’re going to be drinking.” She doesn’t need to add that I shouldn’t have been drinking. We both know, at this point, that it is extraneous to the conversation.
What she says makes sense, and ultimately, it is the one real lesson I take away from that lecture by the pool: During times of booze, girls are responsible for nurturing one another. When she says it, an image flashes through my mind of Jodie Foster in Foxes, pouring coffee and cornflakes for her girlfriends after a night of too much Scotch and too many quaaludes. If drinking is like playing grown-up or playing house, somebody has to be the mother. And the fact that my own mother says this makes the knowledge feel all the more sacred, like a bond passed down by women through the ages. I add it to my list of drinking com-mandments, alongside Thou shalt select a designated driver.
“There weren’t any boys involved, were there?” I know she is really asking if there was any sex involved.
If girls need to defend each other while they drink, sex is the threat we need to protect one another from. The thing I am discovering about girldom is, in the end, nobody cares if you are a drunk, an anorexic, a runaway, a dropout, a dope fiend, or a psy-chotic. These things aren’t regaled, but they are allowed. With the right amount of therapy or religion or pharmaceuticals, they can be remedied and passed off as life stages. That is, as long as you are still a virgin. To be a whore is to be unsalvageable.
“No. God, no,” I half-mouth the words in a way that suggests the scenario is so far-fetched it doesn’t merit sound. But secretly,
I am wondering if something other than vomit impelled Natalie out of her clothes and into those gym shorts.
It wasn’t too long ago that Natalie and I rented the movie Kids, and I haven’t been able to forget the look on Chloë Sevigny’s face when her character is raped while she is passed out on a sofa, drunk and high. The camera captures the whole horrifying scene, and it gave me nightmares for months after I saw it. I could not stop thinking of how each thrust sent the pleather couch squeaking. The boy had bent her legs so far back over her head, they looked as though they’d snap off at her hips.
My parents never say the words “get-out-of-jail-free card,” but that’s what this is. As a first-time offender, I escape any real punishment. They make it clear that I will be severely sorry if they catch me drinking again. They establish what addiction coun-selors call a “No-Use” rule. I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to drink
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