Read Online I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom - Free Book Online

barback from the train car bar. Blue-eyed, sweet. He was my height, which made him seem like someone from high school, someone still growing. Most of our talk was voiceless, but actual words felt as though they went through walkie-talkies. A pause where the button would be pressed in to listen, speak. He was from somewhere with more humidity, Mississippi slowing his movements. I’d started drinking at the lower bar, downstairs. Shots that made little fires inside. The four long stairs I’d climbed like planks to the upper bar, a boat. No exit from here. Just a wall of glass, fronted by bottles. Steve is behind the bar, standing on the black rubber mat honeycombed with holes. He’s washing glasses, smiling. There is probably a list of stages of psychological trauma that I need to pass through. The nun probably knew them. I propel my smile, accept Steve’s invitation to his apartment. I lift my glass to my mouth, over and over.
    I have to wait until last call, until the lights blink, and then turn on full-strength. I’m allowed to wait at the bar while Steve and thetwo bartenders and the manager close, bleach molecules in the air, my lungs, cleaning everything. My hair in a thousand curls, maybe more, looks alive.
    I abandon my car, the safe thing to do. Steve drives past the grassy lake to Maltese Circle, the Regency. He parks between the white lines. White stones circle an oval of water made turquoise by paint. A fake lake with five flags announcing a period of time, a country ruled by another during the absence of its monarch. His hand touches my hip where I had so recently felt like ash, like a mattress left in a house that burned. That someone saw through an open window in a town where no one lived. Now, under his hand, my hip is only dark.
    Drunk on his waterbed, of course I feel sick. The drug still in my body. Hot, my head throbbing, I’m nauseous. The bed is like the ocean, waves high. My stomach feels as if it’s biting itself. But so what. I’m in my own body, I’m saying come in. I’m not long gone. Not a bloody thing in a Dumpster, in the muck of construction, ground into the ground of a housing development, a suburb. I’m not under a sidewalk, bikes overhead. Covered with the shadow of it.
    Naked, dirt flecks off my teeth. My bones feel crooked, but the beaten places lean into him, stop panicking. The vein on the back of one of his hands is a place to go. We won’t be together long. In a few days, when I’ll pretend he’s a real boyfriend, we’ll fight, break apart. He’ll date a short, happy-looking girl. But at the Regency, my mouth saved from the grave kisses his. Lips pink again, the gift of it, a bow that twirls, unties. Wraps around. I can’t really see him anymore in this liquid state that I remember, that lets me reappear.

Night Train
    I miss drinking sometimes, the train car bar. It’s January 1984. I’m twenty-two years old, nearly six months sober. Living at home with my parents again. Mrs. Collins transferred me to the quiet branch of the health food store, in the Orlando mall downtown. I’ve never had this much time without a drink before. At Dry Dock, the brown mustache counselor said he loved me. I was forty-four days sober when he said that, not wanting anything. A light around my body. It helps that Sophie’s been out of town. I get nervous when the tiny princess girl calls me—anyone I used to drink with makes me nervous. I’m afraid they’ll want to go out. I’m enthralled by the accumulation of sober days, counting them. It seems miraculous, the way they add up when for so long I had to drink every other day.
    On the days I don’t go to school, I work in the store from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. or 12 to 9 p.m., forty-five hours a week. If I have the earlier shift, after work I drive a few minutes down the highway, to the eight-o’clock recovery meeting on Broadway. If I’m scheduled to close the store, I still go to Broadway. Sometimes the meetings run late, and I can get a