The night I discovered raspberry schnapps, you and I shared the whole mickey1 on someone’s parents’ bed. Maybe that was the night that solidified our high school friendship, made me have picnics in the park with you when I came back summers from college, made us contact each other on Facebook 20 years later. Sweet, sticky, prickly. It went down so easily, passing the glass-necked bottle back and forth.
House parties in rural Ontario—all anyone needed was parents out of town and word of mouth. We’d show up with our mickeys and two-fours2, someone would DJ the stereo with AC/DC, Joan Jett, MC Hammer. We’d smoke outside and come back in to drink and talk and dance.
That raspberry-schnapps night may have been our first party. You didn’t drink much after that, but somehow, I found my groove, the alcohol warming me, allowing me to say and dance and be who I wouldn’t be during the week. I graduated to peach schnapps, lemon gin, vodka and orange juice, anything with fruit in it. Tequila with a lemon wedge, Malibu rum with the aftertaste of coconut suntan lotion.
One time, we weren’t drunk—it was a school function—we went up to the minister in the dark parking lot, laughing and asking if he’d marry us. We wanted to preserve that moment of closeness. Marriage, even a pretend marriage, was the only way we knew how. Now we are both conventionally married to men, three children each, a border apart, and I still like a margarita, the tart lime puckering my cheeks, swallowing down memories of what I thought was freedom. This could have been a cautionary tale, but my liver is fine, they tell me. Kidneys, too. No, this is a story of friendship, of how the world can wind two young women so tightly with expectations that they’ll drain any glass bottle looking for the genie to send them somewhere, they aren’t sure where because they don’t have words or concepts or a lexicon to figure any of it out. All they know is, they—we—need something else from what we’ve been shown.
**
Notes
- In Canada, a mickey is a 750 mL bottle of liquor, glass, with a slight curve to it so as to be easily grasped by the human hand, as is a flask.
- A two-four is a case of beer, twenty-four cans.
Wendy BooydeGraaff is the author of Salad Pie, a children’s picture book published by Chicago Review Press/Ripple Grove Press. Her fiction, poems, and essays have been included in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, NOON, The Dillydoun Review, Popshot Quarterly, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan.
Carolie Parker is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and world literature. She was recently a MacDowell Fellow and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. In the past few years, her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, NOW culture, Sixth Finch and The Yale Review. What Books Press published a collection of her poetry, Mirage Industry, in 2016. She exhibits her visual work widely in Los Angeles, most recently at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, LAVA Projects and 515 at the Bendix Building. She holds a BFA in studio art from UC Irvine and an MA in comparative literature from UCLA (Latin American, US and French poetry).