Gin

The Roths had a pool—of course they had a pool, my mother scoffed—and Elise often lay out drinking gin and tanning.  Where she got the gin I was never sure, but she invited me to join her one summer afternoon when I was fifteen and she was eighteen.  She poured me my first taste of liquor from a bottle of Tanqueray wrapped in a beach towel. Iceless, the taste of juniper filled me, saturated me layer by layer and took me on a wet-bodied ascent toward the flagpole across the water.

Elise was studying Science & Health in her pool chair.  Apparently her mother had been raised in Christian Science, and Elise was curious about the religion.  We sat on the pool’s edge skin-to-skin along our thighs, and she told me she suspected her mother had never actually given up the practice.  She’d dropped it for Mr. Roth, who found the religion wacky and cultish, but she still never took aspirin or drank coffee or poured herself a glass of wine, and she was panicky around doctors.  While I experimented with another glug of Tanqueray, Elise sipped her own helping and told me about her grandfather’s refusal to see a doctor when he coughed up blood in a New York taxi.

“When the driver asked if he was okay, he said he had indigestion,” she told me, leaning back on her elbows.  “Indigestion!”

She described the scene with such detail it was all I could do to banish the image of blood dribbling from lips when she later took me into her bedroom and asked me to remove my swimsuit.  The bottle of gin made a ring on her desk, I noticed. I was giddy with the idea of being seen naked for the first time but also disarmed by the way Elise had spoken throughout the day—like an adult, somebody my parents might enjoy talking to.  She was imaginative and quick, so unlike the rest of her family. And later that night, after I’d spent hours trying to stifle my wretches with my head against the toilet tank at home, I wished I was a different person. The type who had interesting things to say about religion and who could captivate Elise Roth with an anecdote.

I was in those days slight and ribbed, inconceivable even to myself, which is perhaps why I went downstairs long past midnight and—still in my bathing suit and without a shirt—snuck over to Elise’s driveway and lay on it so that the pavement transferred the day’s heat to my spine.  I was sick in the stomach. An inflamed fist in my sinuses clenched and released in perpetuity. Nothing truly monumental had happened in Elise’s bedroom that day. She’d asked me to slip off my suit, and I was happy to. I was stark naked with an erection in broad daylight, wondering when her parents would be home with her three brothers.  She walked over and kissed me, ever so slightly taller and standing a little to the side to avoid me, and I was endlessly grateful when she lowered her hand and ventured a back-and-forth motion before leaning away and delivering the most indecipherable sentence I’d heard in my life: “We probably shouldn’t.”

Which, funny enough, was more or less what I was thinking as I lay on her driveway later that night, head still whirling from the gin.  I probably shouldn’t, I thought. Be there, that is. It was strange of me. But I was stupid with the idea. To think that Elise could look down and see me against the blacktop, skin glowing—that was what I wanted, and I waited until it was almost light again before getting up and slipping back to my own house.

So began my summer on the pavement.  I was too young to have a drinking problem.  That’s what I thought, at least. Or I didn’t really think about it at all, actually.  Drinking was something I enjoyed and something that connected me to Elise, who was an avid gin guzzler with her towel-wrapped bottles and a paring knife she kept poolside to slice limes.  During the day I drank casually with her, passing the time and getting sunburned. At night, though, I spirited away a bottle from my parents’ liquor cabinet and drank it with a different kind of pleasure.  In my bedroom I hissed back shots and read books until the lights went out in the Roth household, at which point I snuck over and splayed myself out on their driveway. Most thrilling was when Elise’s bedroom light remained on, and I could imagine she saw me waiting for her out there, making myself available if she wanted, though she never mentioned it in the mornings and I wasn’t reckless enough to glance at her window to know if she actually saw me.

It’s funny I was so surprised when, years later, my father told me he and my mother were separating.  I must have been preoccupied with Elise and the gin. The most important people in my life were astute and almost therapeutic in their ability to read people.  But those powers had eluded me, I guess, since during my gin summer I failed to observe my parents’ new patterns. For instance, they never woke at the same time anymore.  My mother rose early and was already on her way to the university when my father entered the kitchen in his blush-green pajamas.

But the changes at home were good for me, all in all, insofar as they obscured the transformations I myself was undergoing.

Elise was strong on one point: we would not have sex.  She took pains to make sure I understood that this wasn’t because she didn’t want to, per se—this is what she said, It’s not because I don’t to, per se—but because it struck her as inappropriate.  Which was confusing because the difference between sex-sex and hand- or mouth-sex had come to seem merely semantic to me.  In fact, we had to get so creative under this constraint that I thought we were probably crossing intimacy boundaries we wouldn’t otherwise have breached.  We reached for each other under towels by the pool when her parents were in earshot inside the house. I gave her oral sex for the first time in the Roths’ garage while she held her bathing suit to the side and accidentally opened the bay door by tipping her head against the button.  We even kissed for forty-five minutes straight one time while standing in our soaked bathing suits on the tight-knit wall-to-wall carpet of her parents’ bedroom.

Our relationship was clandestine and bold, and in many ways I hated it.  When I toweled off and made for home, I felt transparent and ugly under Mr. Roth’s gaze.  He liked to corner me and ask questions, which seemed designed to inspire fantastic amounts of self-loathing.

“Going out for a sport this year?” he asked, clapping my bare back.

“Don’t think so.”

“No?  Can you run?”

“A little.”

“Can you skate?”

“Not well.”

“Nonsense.  Ricky’ll give you pointers before hockey season.”

By this time, Ricky—Elise’s eleven-year-old brother—already had a line of hair crawling out of his bellybutton.  He’d once suggested we should wrestle while I was sitting with his sister on the edge of the pool, and before I could say no thanks he had me in a headlock with his armpit hair warm and soft against the nape of my neck.  He smelled like Old Spice and sunscreen. Because I was drunk (unbeknownst to him), I lost my balance while thrashing, skinned my elbow on the ledge, fell into the water, and bled into the chlorine, feeling weightless with my head-buzz and the desire to reach up and pull Elise under with me.

Luckily Ricky wasn’t normally around, since the family—except for Elise—busied themselves with summer-league football, driving to neighboring towns and, I imagined, screaming themselves hoarse from the bleachers.

One such day, Elise was absorbed in a book called Pulpit and Press.  

“Pass the gin,” I said.  I’d already had several cups, but I couldn’t feel anything.  She reached for the bottle without looking up.

“Wait,” she said after handing it to me.  “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“I feel fine.”

She folded a page corner and faced me.  We were on towels in the grassy area between the pool and the yard’s back fence.  The flag luffed overhead.

“My dad’s brother was an alcoholic,” she said.

“Your uncle?”

“Dad said he went to rehab three times and still couldn’t get sober.”

Her eyebrows rose over the perfect circles of her small sunglasses.  She waited. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.

“He’s dead,” she added.

“That’s awful,” I said, the Tanqueray sweating in my hand.  I had taken the cap off and the smell of liquor whispered from the bottle.  “Are you quitting drinking, then?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said.  “I don’t have a problem.”

“Definitely,” I said.  “No, definitely.”

The windchimes in my backyard bonged out a five-note scale on the other side of the picket fence.  I smiled and tilted the bottle, splashing gin against the soggy limes at the bottom of my cup.

“You know, Charles, you’re pretty young,” she said, and it was the worst thing she’d ever done to me.  “You’re pretty young. I mean, you can’t even drive.”

“Where’s this coming from?” I asked, embarrassed how angry I sounded.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Thinking.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking.”

“What about?”

“How young you are,” she replied.  “I already said that.”

It was true.

“What’s it have to do with anything?” I asked.

“It has to do with a lot, actually.”

“Name something, then.”

“For starters, you probably shouldn’t be drinking.”

“I wouldn’t be if it you didn’t offer,” I said.

“I thought that at first,” she answered, as if she were a scientist disproving a hypothesis.  “I’m not sure anymore, though.”

“You drink,” I said.

“I’m not fifteen.”

“Neither am I,” I retorted.  “Well, not next week, anyway.”

“Sure,” she said.  “But you are fifteen now.  And even sixteen is too young, by the way.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What’s there to get?” she asked, reaching for the Tanqueray.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” I said, tightening my grip on the bottle.

“Well if there’s no problem, it shouldn’t be a big deal if you stop drinking.”

At this I paused.  We were both pulling at the bottle, but I twisted it so that it slipped from her fingers.  Now I held it over my shoulder as if to pass it to somebody standing behind me. What I should have said was that I didn’t depend on the booze in any physical way.  Drinking was only a calibration that let me be with her, because otherwise I was terrified: petrified at the pool, our feet in the water and our relationship amorphous, too energizing, hammer-thuds and indecision, my skin smelling of chlorine and saliva.

Her driveway, too, at night.  Her shampoo. The things I coveted and the things I dreaded, not yet certain where one ended and one began, or maybe not yet cognizant of the overlap between opposing emotions.  Gin was nice because it compressed the spectrum. If grief and joy existed at two ends of a straight line, gin smudged that line into a dot, and I could carry that dot around in my belly and open my mouth and breathe out the entire happy-sad continuum.

The telephone rang inside.  Because we were the only ones home, Elise went to answer it.  She threw me a look from the sliding door as I let more gin trickle into my cup.  I replenished hers, too, so she wouldn’t be high and mighty when she got back. But it was true that strange things had started happening since I’d started drinking liquor every day.  My piss was a deep, fluorite yellow that smelled like fruit peels, and I was angry when I wasn’t by the pool sipping gin with Elise, though I’d assumed this was because I couldn’t stand to be apart from her.

I was distantly worried about what she’d said, but I decided it was too beautiful out to make any lasting decisions.  Maybe I’d stop drinking if it made her happy, but I was sure it wasn’t necessary to do it today.

The gin was warm and piney in my mouth.  Elise was on the other side of the sliding glass door, clawing at the cord and straining her face forward, her brow furrowed and her mouth working fast before abruptly stopping as she listened.  I half rose from my towel, but the sun had made me heavy so I sank to one knee, the ground sort of tilting to meet my hand. I was dried out. Slow. Elise threw open the slider and ran toward me, yelling.  I wasn’t sure what it was all about. Something very bad, I guessed. When I stood I realized I was eight feet tall, then four. We ran like that, my vision banging with my steps like footage from a war broadcast.  She shunted me into the garage, slammed the button for the bay door, and ordered me to get in the passenger’s seat. She needed an extra set of eyes, she said, because she’d been drinking. I thought that was kind of funny, given our conversation.  And given my sudden desire to vomit. But I got in and buckled up, the garage shrinking away in a fantastic act of foreshortening as Elise gunned the car in reverse.

The Roths had been driving home from Mike Jr.’s Pop Warner game when the better part of an elm tree rolled off a lumber truck and barreled toward their car.  Father and sons were just fine, Elise was informed over the phone, but Mrs. Roth was en route to the emergency room.

I absorbed some of these details while sitting shirtless in the passenger seat and wondering what it was about this situation, exactly, that made Elise feel okay driving thirty miles per hour above the speed limit.  Her mother had been in a motor vehicle accident, and now she herself was drunkenly careening down Route 4, passing a minivan on the road’s righthand shoulder and nearly impaling us on the triangulated guardrail jutting out to mark the exit for Chuck-E-Cheese’s.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“I can’t believe they wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong with her,” Elise was saying, hunched over the wheel in her two-piece.  “I can’t believe it.”

“I’m sorry,” I tried.  “I’m here for you. But I might puke.”

“Don’t puke,” she said, immediately returning to her stream-of-consciousness monologue, the details of which I can’t recall because I tucked my head between my knees and recited the alphabet backwards, the damp odor of my swimsuit swelling up at me with a mild funk and making me excruciatingly aware—for reasons unknown—of my tonsils, which seemed to have risen into my mouth.

Being hammered was still new to me, so I was shocked to feel the toy-like sensation of moving through the washed lights of the hospital with Elise, like I was in a game in which everything was at my command but also hovering two inches beyond my reach.  I was aware of the gravity of Mrs. Roth’s situation, but it didn’t touch me in any profound way, except that I wanted to bow down to Elise and inherit her fright. I had spit up a little in the car, but I was still woozy. Shirtless and barefoot, I was asked to stay in the waiting room.  Elise was by my side for what felt like only two or three minutes, though in that time we had a stilted conversation in which she held nothing back: I was fifteen, she was eighteen, the things we’d done together were absurd and honestly kind of icky—her words—and I had to stop drinking. She was sorry she’d introduced it to me.

Of course, this was all packed into two dismissive sentences.  She was preoccupied, as she deserved to be, but I wasn’t so inebriated that I didn’t understand what she meant.  And then she wasn’t sitting next to me anymore but calling over her shoulder that she’d appreciate it if I stayed.  This gave me hope. I would stay for her. We would settle things when she returned. I would buy her a slice of lemon meringue pie from the cafeteria and we would sip coffee and have an adult conversation.  Although, when I thought of it, I realized I didn’t have money to buy coffee or pie. Also, her request that I stay quickly lost its significance, as I remembered I had no way of leaving.

After an hour and a half I got up and actually did find my way to the cafeteria.  My heart thumped between my eyes. I expected more people to stare at me—the unaccompanied teen in a bathing suit—but nobody seemed to mind.  Maybe people in hospitals see more in one day than everybody else sees in a week, or a month, I thought. I sat down at a circular table and fell asleep with my head on my forearms.

I was still drunk, but also hungover.  I wasn’t sure if that was a possible combination, but it’s what I felt.  The hospital air was freezing. It seemed dreamlike, but at one point Elise visited and talked to me as if I were part of her family, telling me her mother had broken five ribs, suffered a severe concussion, and was bleeding internally.  This was all manageable, Elise said as I noticed that her flesh, like mine, had gone to goosebumps. It was all manageable, she explained, but her mother was refusing medication. No painkillers. Mr. Roth was incensed. He yelled at the doctors about the Hippocratic oath, hoping they’d force Mrs. Roth to take something, and then he called his wife’s parents on the phone, but they only praised their daughter’s conviction, insisting she’d make a quick recovery because of her metaphysical strength.  Truth is immortal, they told him, and promised to pray while they drove to the hospital.

I myself started to like the sound of using the mind to overcome physical ailments.  My nausea had acquired new compartments, which opened and opened upon themselves. Elise talked and I did what I could to keep from throwing up.  Somehow she’d transitioned from the topic of her mother to the nature of our relationship. Maybe she wanted to distract herself by declaring her new practical attitude about us.  Whatever her reasons, I was incapable of interacting with the words she spoke. I was so distracted that she was gone before I could register her departure, and fifteen minutes later—after dozing with my face directly on the table, I think—a man was sitting beside me.

He was skinny and his flesh appeared coated in a layer of fine ash, though when I looked closely he seemed clean enough.  His knee fidgeted beneath the table.

“Hi,” he said.

He wore an oversized sweatshirt even though it was summer.

“Hi,” I replied, lifting my head from the table.  Meeting him at eye-level, the world was vertiginous and beyond me, like I’d been transplanted into a new reality where lights were brighter and noises louder.

“Terrible place,” the man said, knee shaking the table.

“What?”

“This place,” he said.  “Terrible. Right? Godawful.  You just have to hate it.”

“It’s fine,” I said, hoping to trick whatever omniscient being had dropped me here, thrown me into this feeling.

“I don’t think so.  It’s gotta be the worst.  Let me ask you, though, why are you here?  You’re alone, you’re young, you’re here. I’d like to know why.  This terrible, terrible place.”

“Waiting,” I said.

“Waiting.  Yes.” He slurped a coffee I hadn’t seen him holding before.  “Me, though? I’m here for Barbara, not that she knows it.”

“That’s nice.”

“The problem is she’s unconscious,” he explained.

I didn’t respond.

“Jake, by the way.”  He held out his hand and I saw his cuticles were the color of old hubcaps.  I told him my name and we shook. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “Yeah, she’s out like a bulb.  Barbara. Funny thing about that, you can’t tell the nurses to let your boyfriend into the room.”  He laughed as if he’d told a joke. “You know what I mean,” he said.

His knee began to hit the table’s underside harder and faster.

“Typical Barbara,” he went on, “making me wait here, godforsaken fucking shithole cafeteria, most depressing place on earth.”

I thought I saw Elise haze by in her bathing suit through the hallway.  Her hair reached almost to her hips—had it always been so long? My stomach rose through my ribs.  I thought of her Christian Scientist grandfather coughing blood.

“Excuse me,” I said to Jake.

“And one time in Fresno,” he was saying, “she had this broken toe and I had a broken index and we both weren’t on healthcare and I hadn’t seen rain in maybe three years but there it was, coming down like I don’t know what.  In Fresno, of all places. So we sat in the waiting room for who knows how long but maybe like fifteen, sixteen hours. My finger hurt wicked fucking bad, but I thought about it so much it just stopped.  That’s what worked, the thinking about it, so when they finally called me in, I said, hey, never mind, don’t need you, sayonara, good riddance, I healed myself. Three weeks later I get this bill for two hundred dollars with a number to call, which obviously I called them right away and said they could have the shaft.  They hadn’t even given Barbara crutches, so she was hobbling around everywhere and continuing to call me a bad fucking influence every chance she got and eating Funyuns right out the bag for weeks straight, nothing else going into her body except the Funyuns and the usual stuff.  And dialing the phone, I tweaked my finger, the bad one. Right on the joint, probably pressing too hard on the dial because I was so fucking jacked up. I mean, how’s that for American healthcare?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.  I was gradually understanding what Elise had said to me, both earlier that day about the gin and here at the table, her words coming back fractally and almost wonderfully, though they plunged me hard into this bleached place.

“Right, that’s exactly it,” Jake said.  “I don’t know either. Barbara doesn’t even know.  She’s unconscious somewhere down that hall, I think.”  He waved toward the corridor where I’d glimpsed Elise, though now it was so white and empty I felt she must have been an apparition.

Jake put his hands flat on the table and rocked forward.  Somehow his fingers went on shaking even with the table’s support.

“Here’s the thing,” he said.  “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

“Mind what?”

“I’m getting to that.”

“Okay.”

“You wouldn’t mind, though?”

“I guess not.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said, smiling.  “Because the thing is, I need you to find out where she’s at.  They won’t let me in. Right down the hall somewhere. Go in that direction and you’ll find her.  Then come back and tell me which room she’s in and if they look worried.”

“Who?”

“Barbara.  Christ. Listen up, kid.”

“No, I mean—if who looks worried?”

“Her doctors.  Nurses. Anybody.”

“How will I know it’s her?”

“Black hair, sunflower tattoo on her left forearm.  Right forearm. I mean left. I don’t know. Black hair—look for that.”

I rose.  I walked out of the cafeteria, Jake’s rasped voice sending his thanks as I went.  Thank you, kid, thank you, goddamn, thank you. The tiles were white but sometimes they were turquoise.  Sometimes mauve. I would miss gin. It reminded me of her. In three weeks she’d be across the country at college.  She’d reminded me of this between phrases about her mother refusing medicine. In three weeks she’d be across the country at college and I would be three weeks older.  But still in high school. Still at home with my parents, who had stopped talking—I was able to see this now. They hadn’t spoken for a month, maybe more. Cordial at the dinner table, but a frigidity to each exchange.  It hadn’t mattered to me before because of Elise, because of my days at the pool. Gin warmth. Swimming. Trying sex, but not sex-sex. I liked things that were almost, I realized.  Things that were almost were hopeful, whereas things that had been done were over.  Elise and I had been almost for the whole summer, and now we were done, though we hadn’t actually done it, but that was okay.  I thought I understood Jake’s situation—it was unclear, but it was almost clear, and I liked that.  His Barbara was somewhere in here, and that was all he needed to know.  I went room by room and saw people laid up in the most extravagant ways, limbs suspended and jointed tubes with moving parts sucking and clicking, respiring for the damned.  The almost dead, almost alive. A redhaired woman sitting up in bed with a plastic receptacle in her lap. A family of four crowded around a sleeping man with spotted skin and a bandage on his face.  A skinny little boy kneeling on his bed playing Gameboy in his hospital gown. And a young woman sleeping in the fourth room on the right with the darkest hair I’d ever seen, a sunflower blossoming on her right forearm, which was turned up and facing me as I stood in her doorway and she regarded me in my bathing suit, observing me with acceptance, as if this was exactly the place I was supposed to be.

That night, I went home and put my back one last time against Elise Roth’s driveway, but it was cold.  The next week, I turned sixteen. She and I never drank gin together again.

________

Taylor Lannamann lives in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House Online, The Literary Review, Joyland, Kenyon Review Online, LitHub, and elsewhere. He has received support from The Corporation of Yaddo and holds an MFA from The New School. “”Gin”” is an excerpt from his novel-in-progress.