I left Maine, closed that chapter of my life. I cordoned off both the hope and the hopelessness, left them up there in the cold and went down south. I read. I partied. I pretended the reading had nothing to do with a deeply buried impulse to write, and I pretended the partying was no different from any other college kid’s. I sat in dorm rooms on dusty futons, gossiping and laughing, and danced in frat houses hazy with sweat, pushed up against khaki-clad young men I had no intention of bringing home. I could drink half a bottle of vodka in a night, taking bloated shots straight off the bottle’s narrow lip. I felt pain only in that upturned second, when I looked at the convex glass bottom and thought about draining the burning liquid down to it, tipping it all into my throat and seeing what would happen. I imagined the relief I would feel at the end, the sweet, collapsing surrender. I had gained weight but was still small-framed like my mother, would not have survived drinking an entire glassy fifth. I’d stumble home in the gunmetal early morning, the nightmare corpses of cicadas crunching under my heels.
I spent many nights throwing up, my body fighting my impulse to poison, lying on cool linoleum between sessions over the toilet and feeling my heart flutter erratically in my chest. At the end of the night, alone again at three, four, later, I could not give up; I always struggled against the slow suicide I’d begun. Sometimes I got it together enough to run cool water over a washcloth and lay it across my forehead, as my mother had done when I was little. I fought to keep my eyes open, whispering encouragement to my heart, that small, sick animal within me. It’s okay, I thought. Just keep going. One misstep and I would fall, I knew that much, and in the end I did not want to fall.
Eventually my heartbeat would even out, and the nausea would let go a little, and I’d climb off the floor and shuffle to bed. As gray light edged into my room, I’d close my eyes, hoping that I’d wake up again, that I’d learn to stop doing this.
On some of those blurry nights, I’d think of Tom, or of Howard. I’d think about how alcoholism can travel through the family tree like poison up from the roots. But I was okay; I drank only on weekends. Until I drank on Wednesdays. Until I drank most days, could polish off an entire case of beer if I started in the morning. But I was fine; I felt fine. Couldn’t feel a thing.
I didn’t have a lot in common with most of the girls and boys I drank with. The girls wore neatly pressed shirts and tiny pastel shorts, and their legs were always perfectly shaved. The boys wore polos and khakis and exuded the sort of self-possessed assurance I associated with middle-aged businessmen. Their bodies and faces were capable and unmarred, their smiles too easy; they were already too used to getting what they wanted. When the fringe student newspaper ran an editorial describing an epidemic of unreported sexual assault on campus, the only thing that surprised me was how surprised other people were to read it.
For a time, I joined a women’s social club, wore pearls to our weekly meetings, cultivated a well-behaved, sexless prettiness. But I could never get the details right. My nails were dirty or my bra straps showed or my Army surplus jacket covered up my whole outfit anyway. I didn’t have the energy for all the powdering and lotioning required to erase the traces of my body, the smell of uncontrolled emotion. When I got drunk, I could be angry and mean, sharp remarks shooting from my mouth before I thought to restrain them. It was rare for the other girls to show anger, drunk or sober.
I loved that Army jacket, and wore it constantly; it had been given to me by a family friend who could find no one else small enough to wear it. But when a lacrosse player, a friend of a friend, sneered at me for wearing it all the time, telling me I should take it off and show my body more, I was overcome with embarrassment. As though the harmlessly pretty girls around me were the real women and I was just some tomboy kid. I charged around in boots while everyone else wore the boat shoes that my mother had deformed her hands to make.
* * *
My feeling of alienation at Davidson actually made it pretty easy to make friends with others who felt the same way, once I gave up on entering the wealthy mainstream of the place. My close friends were mostly broke northerners, queer kids, international students, and, paradoxically, nerdy students who didn’t drink much. We stood out to one another, and clung together.
Two of my closest friends were Christina, the sort of cheery, easygoing athlete who is friends with all sorts of people, and Brent, who was gay but not yet fully out. One night we went to see In the Bedroom, a movie that I hadn’t realized was set in Maine. As the lights fell, I was transported to a town that could have been a neighbor of Bridgton and Naples and Casco. There was the white Congregational church steeple, the turning drawbridge, the steep hill lined with clapboard buildings. Marisa Tomei played a young, beautiful single mother, around thirty years old, who dates a much younger man. As I watched the first half hour of the movie, I knew something terrible was coming; I knew it was a crime drama. But I was so happy watching her. She had a beautiful, spontaneous smile, and she loved with an easy, optimistic freedom. She was devoted to her two sons, and although she wasn’t highly educated, she was smart and perceptive. She endured the judgment of her boyfriend’s mother, and of others, with composure and grace. I’d always loved Marisa Tomei, who had been one of Mom’s and my favorites ever since we’d watched her in My Cousin Vinny.
But in this movie, Marisa is plagued by a violent ex-husband who, halfway through, shoots and kills her young boyfriend. The ex gets out of jail for a while, on bail, and she and the boyfriend’s parents have to suffer seeing him around town. I sat in the darkness of that theater, watching this killer buy coffee at the convenience store and drive slowly down Main Street, and I imagined Mom’s killer doing the same in Bridgton. Except he would be blending right in; no one would know what twisted his face into a smug grin.
By the end of the movie, the boyfriend’s mother convinces her husband, a pliable Macbeth, to kill the killer and bury him deep in the woods. I was thrilled, watching this unfold, but also terrified. I had long fantasized about killing Mom’s murderer, or sending someone else to. But would I, if given the chance? Sitting in that theater, immersed in the deep woods on-screen, I felt that I was capable, but that I would ultimately choose not to. It was too ugly, ugliness on ugliness. I had long known this, but now could see it up close.
Realizing that I would never kill, even in the most forgivable of circumstances, should have made me feel good, secure in my humanity. But instead I felt bleak. Because what I realized was that there would be no recompense, there would be no satisfaction. I wanted Mom’s killer off the streets, sure. I didn’t want him walking around town as though nothing had happened, a violent man who could threaten the safety of others. But I knew then that jail wouldn’t be enough, and death would be too much. There was no hope of a satisfying ending. I would have to find my own peace, without one.
When the lights came up, I felt exposed, like a mask had been pulled from my face. As we walked across the dark parking lot, I looked down at the pavement, away from my friends. We were all quiet at first. Then Brent started laughing. “Oh my God!” he said. “She was soo white trash! Marisa Tomei is the best!?” I felt a rush in my chest, like hot water poured across my heart. I didn’t say a thing.
* * *