but our refrigerator held only a few cans of Coors and Olympia. Other parents had full bars and hard alcohol, and were far more oblivious than my immigrant mother, who was strict, rude to interlopers, and could smell a cigarette from the next block. No one ever spent the night at my house, crowded with kids and chores. We always stayed at Tari’s. Her parents were from upstate New York. We spent Friday afternoons mixing their gin, vodka, whiskey, brandy, and vermouth with Cherry Kool-Aid in a huge yellow Tupperware bowl. We called it sangria.
I don’t understand how alcoholism works in my family genes, considering how many of my male relatives were alcoholic, but all this liquor had very little effect on me. I was too scared of my mother to be drunk. She required me to be home by exactly 7:00 a.m. Saturdays. My dad had bought an appliance repair shop, which came with a junkyard. Saturdays we cleaned the junkyard office and laundromats. Delana would pass out, Dawn would laugh, and Tari would throw up. I stayed awake until the early hours, holding someone’s head as she vomited, firmer in my resolve not to be a nurse or a mother. At dawn I walked home to face dryer lint collected like fallen thunderclouds, and the bathroom of men who patronized a junkyard.
Finally, in the late spring of 1975, two boys waited for my friends and me at the park where my street dead-ended. I was in charge of liquor that night, and I headed toward the front door, sad that my offering would be completely meager. My mother saw the unnatural way I held my jacket, covering two cans of Olympia. All we had, but I thought someone might like the waterfall logo, which was pretty. My stepfather shouted, “Don’t you realize you could get pregnant from one can of beer?” He must have had some sangria.
Actually not a terrible version of sex education, since in junior high I knew girls who’d gotten pregnant in eighth grade. Lucky he didn’t know who was at the park: two senior guys with a van—yellow, pinstriped, with only the two small windows at the back, like fish eyes. One had given me thirteen marijuana joints in a manila envelope, for my thirteenth birthday. (I was extremely popular for a few weeks, because I smoked one, hated the taste and coughing, and gave the other twelve away.)
I was grounded for three months for two cans of Olympia and the obstinate belief that I could handle my life. My mother didn’t like these things: I had asked for a blow-dryer, I was sewing halter tops and hemming up my shorts, and I wore root-beer-flavored lip gloss as blusher, so sheer I thought she hadn’t noticed.
She gave me the ugly talk.
We sat at the maple dining room table she’d bought when she married, the one where I’d done my homework every night, every spelling test and math problem, the imprints of my own handwriting and calculations in the golden wood. Every week I rubbed those smooth edges with lemon oil. My mother said sternly these things: “You don’t have a lot going for you. You’re not athletic.” (I thought, well, yeah, I did have to learn to walk again after the Country Squire.) “And you’re ugly.” (She insists that she used the word plain.)
I know this part by heart, though. “With your looks, you’ll probably never get married. The only thing you have going for you is your brain. So you’d better not mess it up with drugs. You’d better use it, because it’s all you’ve got.”
I sat there for a moment. Then she got up and went to listen to the Dodgers in the other room. I went into my bedroom, where there were novels, and albums by Chaka Khan, Al Green, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
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