Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

Our home was on a major artery through the neighborhood, where cars zipped past all day long,
forcing us to keep the blinds drawn at all times. I started using the back door to come and go. I didn’t
want strangers to see me and know the dinky rental house was ours.
My mother had become embarrassing to me as well. She listened exclusively to classical music
and hummed conspicuously in public. She had a therapeutic chattiness that felt like a doctor’s probe.
“How do you feel about that, Sarah? Tell me more.” God forbid we pass a mother with a baby in the
grocery store. She had to download the entire backstory. How cute, and how special, and blah to the
blah. And my mother didn’t assemble herself like those kicky mothers of the PTA, with their frosted
hair and ropy gold necklaces. She wasn’t bad-looking. But didn’t she realize how much prettier she’d
look with some eye shadow?
Even my brother was a frustration. “You’re Josh’s sister?” the teachers would say on the first day
of class, eyebrows arched with delight. But no matter what high score I made, his had been higher.
Don’t even try, kid. Someone already won this race.
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.