Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget Read Online Free PDF Page A

redbrick homes and children selling lemonade on the corner. My brother and I rode our bikes to the shopping center a mile away to buy gummy worms and magic tricks, and we made As on our report cards, and we were safe. In fact, the only thief I ever knew was me.
    I was a small-time crook. In middle school, I slipped lipstick and powder compacts into my pocket at the Woolworth’s and smiled at the clerk as I passed. Every kid pushes boundaries, butsomething else was going on: Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club that involved changing the spelling of my name each time I joined. But the first thing I remember stealing was beer.
    I was seven when I started sneaking sips of Pearl Light from half-empty cans left in the refrigerator. I would tiptoe into the kitchen in my cotton nightgown, and I would take two long pulls when no one was looking, and I would spin around the living room, giggling and knocking into furniture. A carnival ride of my very own.
    Later, I would hear stories of girls this age discovering their bodies. A showerhead positioned between the thighs. The humping of a pillow after lights off. “You didn’t do that?” people would ask, surprised and maybe a little bit sad for me.
    I chased the pounding of my heart to other places. A bottle of cooking sherry under the sink. A bottle of Cointreau, screw top crusty with lack of use. But nothing was as good as beer. The fizz. The left hook of it. That wicked ka-pow.
    In high school, girls would complain about beer—how gross and sour it was, how they could barely force themselves to drink it—and I was confused, as though they were bad-mouthing chocolate or summer vacation. The taste for beer was embroidered on my DNA.

    T HE MOVE TO Dallas was hard on everyone, but it might have been toughest on my mom. She was catatonic for a week after our arrival. This was a woman who had traveled alone in Europe and was voted “most optimistic” in her high school class, but inthe first days of our new life, she sat on the couch, unable to retrieve even a lampshade from the garage.
    She was too overwhelmed. She’d never been so far from her big, noisy Irish brood, and though some part of her longed for distance, did she really want this much? My mother was also not what you’d call a Dallas type. She wore no makeup. She sewed her own empire-waist wedding dress, inspired by characters in Jane Austen books. And here she was at 33, with two kids, stranded in the land of rump-shaking cheerleaders and Mary Kay Cosmetics.
    I was happy in those early years. At least, that’s the story I’m told. I shimmied in the living room to show tunes. I waved to strangers. At bedtime, my mother would lean down close and tell me, “They said I could pick any girl baby I wanted, and I chose you.” Her glossy chestnut hair, which she wore in a bun during the day, hung loose and swished like a horse’s tail. I can still feel the cool slick of her hair through my fingers. The drape on my face.
    I clung to her as long as I could. On the first day of kindergarten, I gripped her skirt and sobbed, but no amount of begging could stop the inevitable. Eden was over. And I was exiled to a table of loud, strange creatures with Play-Doh gumming their fingertips.
    The first day of kindergarten was also a rocky transition for me, because it was the last day I breast-fed. Yes, I was one of those kids who stayed at the boob well past the “normal” age, a fact that caused me great embarrassment as I grew older. My cousins dangled the tale over my head like a wriggly worm, and I longed to scrub the whole episode from my record. (A bit of blackout wished for but never granted.)
    The way my mother tells it, she tried to wean me earlier, but I threw tantrums and lashed out at other children in frustration. And I asked very