I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl Read Online Free

in one of the motels near the topless bars on the highway. My friend Sophie had spotted him at the bar, recognized him as the singer in a band. She liked the drummer, asked me to go over, find out if he was still around too. He wasn’t.
    “Damn, I was hoping,” she said. It’s really the bartender, Bill,whom I want. But he’s not there. When I tell Sophie I’m giving the singer a ride, she gets mad. “Then you’ll get home at six in the morning, and your parents will be bitching for days. Let him find his own ride.”
    “I’m taking him.” The next morning, when I talk to Sophie on the phone, tell her I spent the night with the singer, she said I was becoming an alcoholic.
    “You don’t care about yourself anymore,” she says. I don’t know what she means. Why going home with this guy crossed some boundary between heavy drinking and alcoholism. I’m hurt, and Sophie says she’s sorry.
    I’d controlled my drinking while I was pregnant—no more than two glasses of wine a night. A magazine article said wine was good for you. In the last six months of my pregnancy, I dated a British architect who had a serious, live-in relationship with a woman in California. Temporarily working in Orlando, he’d met me in the train car restaurant where I worked when I was three months pregnant. Victoria Station. It must have reminded him of home. Pregnant, my drinking stabilized—I couldn’t hurt the baby. After work, the British man and I go to dinner some nights, or out for drinks. At his house, we watch old TV shows I’ve never seen, like Get Smart. Once, I sat in his lap, not looking at his face, while he asked why we didn’t have to use birth control. I told him I was already pregnant. It seems weird to say how loyal he was to me, this guy who was cheating on his girlfriend. But he’d held me tighter when I said I was pregnant, and he stayed with me even after I began to show. Strangers in bars congratulated him on the baby. The first time, he’d looked surprised, but then he just went with it. Smiling, saying thank you. It was the most normal relationship I’d ever had. That was a year ago.
    Since I gave birth, I can’t drink enough fast enough. I drink twelve to fourteen shots a night. Beer is too slow. Every night I’mjust trying to get somewhere, and the only thing that stops me is passing out or throwing up. There’s no reason to stop.
    I like the singer’s solitariness, the quiet tones of his voice. In the future, when I’m in a recovery meeting, trying not to drink, a girl will say, “Sleeping with someone seemed like a good way of getting to know them.” It made sense to me. I’m also attracted to him because he can sing. I’ve watched him from the floor. But mostly, I’m drunk, and drunk I can’t stand to be alone. If he’d been less kind, less welcoming, I’d probably still have gone with him for the distraction and comfort. The company.
    I don’t know what’s happening to my son, especially since he got so sick. No one tells me anything directly. My aunt and uncle tell my parents that Tommy has leukemia, that he’s being treated. My parents discuss it. I feel as though I don’t have the right to ask questions. As if I’m an embarrassment. A ghost mother. There’s no way I can call my aunt and uncle. I’d like to ask, “What is happening? How is he feeling?” He can’t be dying. There are so many basic things I don’t know. Is he in pain? I offer Kentucky Man a ride home.
    In the room, he asks if I want to get high. “All right,” I said. We sit on the end of the bed and watch a small black-and-white TV. It crackles. Pot is too calm a drug for me, dull, but it seems unfriendly to turn him down. A gigantic, fake-looking, prehistoric animal chases thousands of tiny Japanese people through the streets of Tokyo. Black-and-white movies make me feel tired and a little bereft, the time before color. As a kid, I’d been sick with asthma a lot, stuck home, watching old movies on