Free Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas Page A

Margaret’s confidence. What exactly has she entrusted me with? Just who does she trust me to be? What possible obligation has she charged me with here in Massachusetts, more than four hundred miles away from her? Her tone reminds me of a sitcom I saw once, in which a mom found her daughter hungover after a night of drinking “tornadoes” and told her that maybe, just maybe, after good behavior and a number of years, she might trust her to stay home alone again. Only Margaret isn’t my mother, she is my equal. And she’s sup-posed to be my friend.
    I throw Margaret’s poem away because it outrages me most of all. Initially, I decide it’s the type of touchy-feely literature that S.A.D.D. airdrops over high-school proms by the thousand. Later, it occurs to me that she’s written it herself.
    The writing is good, certainly better than anything I’ve sent her, and it has just the right amount of hidden meaning. At first read, the poem seems to be about the importance of spelling and punctuation. But when I read it again, I understand the full meaning. Margaret is trying to tell me it isn’t important what I say with my life. The story, the full manuscript, is ancillary. What matters, she says, is the syntax. She says it’s the rules that govern a life that make that life important.
    Even though I’m no wild child, I can’t imagine a goody-goody world in which how closely a person adheres to rules is a measure for how well she lives.
    As my final correspondence with Margaret, I send her e. e. cummings’s poem “since feeling is first,” without a letter of ex-planation:
    since feeling is first who pays attention
    to the syntax of things
    will never wholly kiss you: wholly to be a fool
    while Spring is in the world.

    It is my only attempt at rebuttal, my way of telling her that I am ignoring the things she respects, namely risks and rules. Just as e. e. cummings disregarded syntax, I am ignoring the mini-mum legal drinking age in the name of beauty, fun, and an art-ful existence. Of course, I don’t yet know about cummings’s critics, the folks who say that ignoring the rules is just as restric-tive as following them. And if I did, I doubt I’d care. It is spring-time in my life, even though it happens to be fall. I feel fully kissed, by Mac and by liquor.
    To make this point clear, I cut off the poem’s last lines when I copy it to send: “for life’s not a paragraph / and death I think is no parenthesis.” As far as my drinking is concerned, death doesn’t even warrant an afterthought.

    54 INITIATION | First Waste

FIRST OFFENSE ‌

    The first time my parents catch me drinking is during the summer of 1995 , in Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City is the per-fect place to get caught red-handed, what with its miles of boardwalk and green, plastic, mini-golf turf, its snack bars smelling of crab cakes, and the saltwater breeze carrying the screams of children as they plunge down waterslides. The setting means everyone involved can write the whole mess off as situational. It makes my drinking look like the exception as opposed to the norm, a seasonal recreation only slightly more hazardous than body surf-ing or searing in the noon sun without Coppertone.
    There are two motivations for our trip: my father’s promo-tion and my injury. Sometime in May, my father receives a raise

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    at the technological corporation where he works. Around the same time, I topple down the basement stairs and tear a ligament in my knee. The sequence of the two events seems signifi-cant to me. The whole world is rising, while I fall.
    After my accident, I visit two doctors and three specialists. The last of them is an orthopedic surgeon at Emerson Hospital, a man I later dub Dr. Fix-It, who schedules me for reconstructive surgery in August.
    I pass out on the examining table the day I receive the prog-nosis. I am shifting my weight on the parchment while Dr. Fix-It is describing his plans to harvest a portion of my hamstring and