If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (2 page)

HE VISITS US
when we are happy and when we are sad.

HE VISITS US
every time you land in the same jail, your twin mug shots forever floating in the same county database, each one more fucked up than the last.

HE VISITS US
when we are broke down and blacked out and beaten up. When we are bringing more dead bodies to the same cemetery. When we are eating pizza with pepperoni. When we are playing cards or fishing or on a boat, anywhere at any time. When Grandma died this past winter and you were newly sober and held my hand the whole time like the big man you were becoming. When we are on the street and it is crowded and there are blond men with mustaches ducking into corner stores to buy cigarettes. When we are chewing spearmint gum or at a shoe store or a Jiffy Lube. When we see men in orange vests picking up trash on the side of a highway. When we are walking through woods or down alleyways. When I hear your voice for the first time in a long time and startle at how much you sound like him. Whenever the Indigo Girls come on the radio. Or Led Zeppelin. Or Genesis. When we pet a black lab and when we eat chicken pot pie. When we see a pickup truck. When I read Steinbeck. When you watch
Mash
.

SO, HERE’S TO
the big-bellied men in flannel, to huge clumsy hands of stillborn blue. To the choked-up, spit-out slide of attrition. To the housebuilders and the homewreckers. To the jokesters and the dream crashers and the old-timey tinkers. To the wrench pullers and car wreckers. To the name givers and the frozen-pie makers. Here’s to the fold, to the snug saltbox houses on dead-end streets that he loved so well. Here’s to oil-packed cans of tuna fish that will pass for a meal and the ghostly women who give them away.

HERE’S TO THIS
night in Vermont and the snow burying the birdseed and the silver pickerel frozen in the lake, tiny half-moons of perfect comedy and perfect tragedy.

HERE’S TO OUR
dead, flickering in and out of focus, like ashes from long extinguished volcanoes that somehow make it across time and oceans to land in our cereal. Something like that.

AND HERE’S TO
you, Pumpkin, wherever you are.

—February 23, 2012

A FEW DAYS
after our father is arrested near our home outside of Philadelphia, I find a Bible in the nightstand drawer. This is our third night in this New Jersey Shore motel room and we are getting restless. We are tired and stoned and our mother sleeps on the other twin bed with her mouth open, snoring loudly. I am fifteen, Eric is thirteen, and we are at home wherever we land, the three of us, together. Here, the window shades are heavy and purple and dust crowds a slip of light. I am sleepless and giddy. Eric opens the Bible. Many of the paragraphs are underlined and with such force that the pages are ripped and stained ink blue. This is a dark and quiet hour and there is flickering from a muted television. Eric whispers passages to me and we laugh like much younger children. We don’t read Bibles, don’t need Bibles, don’t feel anything but the pulse of the weed and a wet wind that blows past the blinds. I touch my brother’s cheek to see if his skin is as hot as it looks, pinprick
red, as if all of his blood is being lured to the surface by the damp heat in this room. My brother’s complexion is darker than mine anyway, kissed by the whisper of Eastern European roots, while I am like my father, fair-haired and pig-belly pink.

This room, it hums with the promise of rain.

“Here,” I say, “feel my head,” and he does, squinting at me and deciding we feel just the same.

I know suddenly we will paint our toenails black and my brother says, “All right then, do mine.”

When we were little kids, our father often hooked a tiny sailboat to the back of his truck and drove two hours to Chesapeake Bay. It was a Sunfish with a bright-yellow hull. He taught us to sail around the peninsula while my mother fished from shore. She waved at us every time we turned around, her cigarette bouncing between her fingers like a rock ’n’ roll song. The Sunfish didn’t last long, rusting away in the backyard like some overgrown lawn ornament, so my father’s old-money parents started chartering boats for the whole family. We sailed all over the Chesapeake Bay for weeks at a time, eating the thick stew that my grandmother would thaw on an electric burner each night. I remember I wore the same white dress every day because I liked the way it blew in the wind when I stood on the bow of the boat. When the warm air whipped through my hair and up my thighs, I felt my first shudders of romance. Often, I would kneel down and wrap my arms tightly around my knees until I felt something like leeches, swollen and slick with blood, slide down my thighs, my crooked little toes. The harder I squeezed, the more powerful I felt. I thought myself
a
renegade
, which is a word I’d read in
Anne of Green Gables
and took to mean something akin to royalty, though I wasn’t sure how. Also, I liked the feel of the letters in my mouth, the rolling consonants and the hard suffix.
Ade, blade, swayed
. I could rhyme for hours, watching the tops of my feet change colors in the sun.

What a stark contrast to our lives back home, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where everything looked like the dirty underside of a couch cushion and evenings were spent in the back room of Skip’s, the bar around the corner. Not that we minded Skip’s much. At least we were allowed bowls of peanuts and oversweet Shirley Temples. Occasionally, Dad would hand Eric and me a fistful of quarters for the pool table, which we didn’t know how to play, but we enjoyed making up our own games anyway. We’d sit cross-legged on top of the green felt and let our knees clack together, a sound like hollowed-out chicken bones. First person to fit a whole pool ball into his or her mouth won. Or we’d pretend the blue chalk was war paint and I’d draw arrows across my brother’s smooth forehead, cartoon skulls on his cheeks. Later, we’d squeeze into the cab of Dad’s pickup truck and wend our way home, six blocks at five miles per hour, reeking of cigarette smoke and spearmint gum and belting “American Pie.” Our mother’s parents paid the rent for the small, two-bedroom ranch house we lived in, all brick and linoleum and brown shag carpets. It was half an hour from Philadelphia and five minutes from them. We lived at the bottom of the street, the least affluent part of the neighborhood, which grew increasingly middle class as you ascended
the hill. Our neighbors were mechanics, grocery store clerks, barbers, construction workers, bartenders. They were mostly white. There was a lot of stuff everywhere; I remember that. Old cars on jacks, broken toys and lawn ornaments, tires and tools and creaky swing sets. I could see the city skyline when it was clear. I would run around barefoot all day.

We ate lots of stew on those sailboats on the bay, and we listened to the tapes that my father liked best. Bonnie Raitt, Led Zeppelin, the Indigo Girls. We crabbed in the marshes, and I remember my mother being dismayed by how much Eric and I enjoyed dropping crabs into boiling water, my brother poking at them with a wooden spoon as they tried to escape, while I screamed and giggled and kicked at the stove like a maniac. In the mornings, my father let us steer the boat while he trimmed the sails, ducking beneath the boom and quickly wrapping the rope around his arm. He moved fluidly, assuredly, manipulating the huge Island Packet as if tuning a violin.

When my father was still young and whip-smart and licking his wounds with alcohol, his parents paid a large sum of money so that he could join a crew from New England that sailed down to the islands of the Bahamas. He’d been a solemn boy, too much in his head, and he’d felt a nameless pain he was too proud to mention. It was grotesque, like something left out to rot, and so he kept this hazy sorrow to himself and used booze to dress it up for a day, a night, a few goddamn hours. This was before the days of AA, of higher powers and twelve steps and endless Styrofoam cups of coffee grinds and cigarette
butts. Before babies and their shit-heavy diapers, wet mouths, and oversized heads. Before talk therapy. Before asbestos removal jobs and wrecked cars. Nights so hot and black they burned like a solar eclipse through his insides. Before little league games and parent-teacher conferences. Before he fucked the three-hundred-pound housewife next door for a couple of Klonopin. Before she killed herself with the rest.

Before all that, I imagine him long-limbed and cherry red in the sun, tossing ropes to shore and tying his Boy Scout knots—a doomed, affable expression beneath curls of Nordic white hair. With his right hand he tosses the anchor into the water, feeling for the weight and dredge of the sand, the faintest vibration, the last job well done. He leans back against the mast and lights a cigarette and surveys this new velvet landscape, colors he hadn’t imagined could be so saturated, and then tosses the pack to a friend.

It’s March and we should be in school but we’re not. This isn’t unusual. Even though our father hasn’t lived with us for years, my mother still thinks it best to take off every time he “falls off the wagon” and gets arrested, as if distance alone could protect us. This time it’s drinking and driving and unpaid fines from previous arrests for drinking and driving. There were a couple of sober years, when Eric and I were in early elementary school. Since then, he’s had at least two DUIs a year, and he cycles from jail to rehab to halfway house and back again. Occasionally, he’ll manage a few sober months in a halfway house, and occasionally he’ll stay with his mother in anticipation of getting his own place. During those months,
there is lots of talk about the future, of our own bedrooms and weekends spent watching movies and skiing at the Pocono Mountains, but it never happens.

“Same old, same old,” Eric sings, “
woo woo woo
.”

The drive from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore takes nearly two hours. We know it well; we do this at least twice a year.

Eric always falls asleep the moment we leave the driveway and wakes up, as if by instinct, the second we cross the bridge into Sea Isle City. Today when we arrive there aren’t many fishermen—it’s still too early in the season—but a few grizzled diehards lean heavily on the bridge’s steel railings, hooking their lines with wet strips of haddock or hunks of clam. Or else they sit on overturned buckets with one hand on the rod, the other holding a sandwich made with white bread, and watch the tide turn. Eric and I always make a game out of who can spot the first catch, the angry curve of the flounder’s belly like a silver scythe in the sun. There is something heroic about fishermen—all that faith in the dark.

The bridge trembles as we speed across it, the men frozen in their various postures; our car shoots into the sky.

We rent putt-putts, as Dad used to call them, every summer when we’re down the Jersey Shore. That’s what we say in Philly: not “at the Shore,” but “down the Shore.” They are tiny, sputtering things with single engines that just manage to get us from the dock on the bay over to the nearby marshes where fish are hiding in the grass roots. A home video features one of these early trips. My mother is doing her first “Voodoo Fisher-woman” routine for the camera—a subtle performance—her
eyes squeezed shut, her lips pursed like a fish. Slowly and meditatively, she calls the fish to her line.

“Here, fishy fishy fishy,” she whispers. “Here, fishy fishy.”

My father laughs convulsively in the background, one hand on the engine, the other holding a can of Budweiser. Eric looks up at him and laughs, clearly more excited by his father’s ebullience than his mother’s performance. I smile girlishly from behind the camera before inexplicably holding up a peace sign in front of the lens, as if anticipating the brevity of these good times.
All here together!
I might be trying to say.

IN THE MOTEL
room, we don’t talk about where our father went or why. Because I don’t know better, I envision the process of entering jail to be like checking into a hotel. I see my father walking up to the desk of his own accord and receiving a key to his room, following an old woman with puffy red hair down a dark hallway, and trailing his old corduroy suitcase behind him. Or maybe it is more like the rehabs we used to visit—large, empty lobbies and television sets that were always on mute. Outside, clusters of unshaven men in blue jeans and flannel shirts sit around picnic tables smoking and playing cards. It was at one of these rehabs that I learned how to play poker, the only card game I still play well.

The next morning we eat sticky buns on the beach and rinse caramel and shredded napkin from our fingers in the frigid water. All along the Jersey Shore it is overcast and chilly, but not yet raining. We watch the sandpipers chase a receding
wave, ecstatically pecking at the sand until the tide turns, a deep breath, the next wave exhaling and tumbling after the birds. They skitter away in unison, legs straight as stilts. The planet’s longest-running game of tag.

“We okay? Everyone okay?” She is checking, again.

We are still okay. Eric wants to go watch girls dance in bikinis. We heard on television that somewhere nearby MTV is taping its Spring Break Special. This is part of the reason we have come to Sea Isle rather than Ocean City, where we usually go. The other part has to do with unfamiliar terrain and liberation, our mother thinking the two identical. Eric is too young to get into the MTV dance party, he tells me later, but he will watch the girls through slats in a fence until a big man with an earpiece chases him away. Mom wants to read her book on a bench near the boardwalk, under the red and white Johnson’s Popcorn awning. I tell her I’m going to the beach to do some homework. I am fifteen now, I argue, and can spend some time
alone for christsake
. She looks at me, tired, and nods. We are all tired. I take off down an alleyway to smoke cigarettes and search for reusable trash. I find an empty inkwell near a chain-link fence and consider it a good day. The bottle’s opening looks like two hungry, porcelain lips and suggests an era I’ve never known but suddenly miss, like a phantom limb or an estranged twin.