Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

I got a crazy idea I’d be rescued from this unspecial life. Surely I was meant for more. In the customer service area of JC Penney, while waiting for my mom to complete some transaction, I watched women file in, hoping each new one in a smart dress suit was a fairy godmother carrying my new fate. I’d catch her glance as she passed, hoping she’d see the star pattern in my eyes. Oh, it’s you. I found you. Does every child have this fantasy—or just the sad ones?

 

I was very torn about my mother. She never abandoned me, but I felt abandoned in some hyperbolic childhood way, the same way I deemed it a mortal sin I never got a Barbie Dream House. A thing known but never discussed: Your mother needs some time to herself. I learned to tread lightly during the hectic workweek. If you tapped her shoulder at the wrong time, she could snap. She was spending more and more time at the piano, the instrument she yearned to play as a girl, but her mother never allowed it, and now I had to pay the price. I wanted to push the plunky contraption in the nearest lake. I despised having her so near and far away at once. But on the weekends, I would curl up in her big king-size bed and let her read me stories, and I would mold my body alongside hers till we were two interlocking puzzle pieces.

 

My mother wanted badly to make me an active reader, a lover of literature like her, but I remained weirdly stubborn on this count. Little Women wasn’t doing it for me. I gravitated toward stories of troubled kids. Judy Blume. The Outsiders. But I never fully sparked to imaginary worlds until I found Stephen King.

 

Everyone knew Stephen King wasn’t for children. But that was perfect, because I no longer wanted to be a child. My older cousins had introduced me to his books, which were like a basement I wasn’t supposed to enter, but I creaked open the door anyway. Whatever you do, do not go inside. So I tiptoed forward, heart like a kick drum. Not much else could grab my attention after I’d felt breath that close to my face. Not the stuffy novels assigned in English class. Not the lions and the witches and the wardrobes the other kids read in their free time. I didn’t need those talking woodland creatures or those magic carpet rides.

 

Because the magic carpet arrived when I plucked the lime wedge out of the Pearl Light and poured the golden liquid down my throat. That’s when the living room rug levitated, and the world tilted upside down, and I began to convulse with laughter. Why was I laughing anyway? What was so funny? But there is ecstasy in the room you are not supposed to enter, the room no one knows about. Ecstasy when everyone is gone and still you are held.

 

 

 

IT WAS MY aunt Barbara’s idea for Josh and me to spend summers with her family in Kalamazoo. I was eight when she offered to take us while my mom completed her schoolwork, an older sister’s act of generosity and superiority: Part “Let me help you while you’re struggling,” part “Let me show you how it’s done.”

 

My aunt and uncle Joe lived on a peaceful cul-de-sac with a big sloping hill out front. They had a waterbed. A big puffy couch with footrests that lifted when you turned the wooden crank. A giant console TV that doubled as floor furniture. Their home was like walking into a time capsule branded “1982.”

 

My mother had strict limits on our television and sugar intake. Debates in the cereal aisle were like trying to get a bill through Congress. But my aunt pooh-poohed that hippie nonsense. At her place, we lived on Cap’n Crunch and Little Debbie snack cakes. I lay around in my nightgown till noon, watching game shows and soap operas. At night, we gathered around the big TV to watch prime-time dramas and R-rated movies.

 

Josh and I had three cousins—Joey, Kimberley, and Scotty—and I was the youngest in our group. To be the littlest in that gang was a mixed blessing. It was to be hoisted on the shoulders of new adventure at the same time I was blamed for someone else’s farts. We filmed our own version of Star Wars, directed and produced by my brother, and I was dying to be Princess Leia. Instead, he cast me as R2D2. I didn’t even get the dignity of lines to memorize. Just a series of random bleeps and bloops.

 

The part of Princess Leia went to Kimberley, a cute tomboy with feathered bangs, though production broke down when she failed to show on set. Kimberley wasn’t obedient like me. Her response to boys who thought they ruled the world was a sarcastic eye roll. She was Josh’s age, but she actually preferred my company, which probably felt like having a little sister and a disciple at once. She let me tag along to Crossroads Mall and taught me things about sex never mentioned in my mother’s “when two people love each other” lectures.

 

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