Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas Read Free Book Online

parents are up-stairs sleeping, and I am downstairs in the living room, mixing a mug of Kahlúa and milk and sipping it in front of Nick at Nite. The drink tastes good and sweet. I nuke it in the microwave until it steams like hot cocoa, and it warms my whole chest as I

    30 INITIATION | First Waste
    drink it, like VapoRub. I sit in my father’s favorite armchair, holding the glass in both hands so it scalds my palms. On TV, sitcom characters are drinking in a Boston bar, and I drink along while I listen for flipped light switches or feet on the stairs, sig-nals that someone is coming. Bear, the golden retriever, watches me with his ears back like he knows what I’m doing.
    I have little time. I am expecting some rapid change.
    I have the idea that Kahlúa will make me either dizzy or giddy, but neither sensation comes. I wait for them. I wait for the TV dialogue to make me giggle, but it just rolls on in a series of one-liners and laugh-track hums. I wait for the carpet to wobble under me, but it stays beige and still. The only change I can feel is in my face. My cheeks feel as though they might be warm to the touch, but there is no one to put their hands on them to confirm it.
    I don’t drain the mug halfway before I get bored and dump the rest down the sink. I decide there’s no point in getting drunk without having a friend like Natalie along to encourage me to drink more and faster in order to get drunk. There’s no rivalry when you’re drinking alone; it’s like playing Battleship without an opponent.
    As I’m climbing the stairs to go to bed, my mother hears me and groggily calls my name through the darkened door of my parents’ bedroom.
    She says, “Koren, is that you? Are you okay?”
    I roll my eyes and pretend I don’t hear her. I keep padding down the hallway.

    Most days , I wish Anne Sexton were my mother. We study her in school, and because it’s public school they don’t mention that she was a sexually abusive mother.
    I read “Mother and Daughter” in my ninth-grade English book and realize my own mom will never understand girlhood with the same level of clarity. I wish she had Anne’s insom-nia, panic attacks, addictions, her own shit to deal with, old-Hollywood looks. I wish she would call me “string bean” and stand back during my high school years like “somebody else, an old tree in the background.”
    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.

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    “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