If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (3 page)

Sea Isle looks like an abandoned circus; electric signs pulse into the fog like lighthouses. Old men huddle outside brick bars in twos and threes while cigarette smoke drifts out of open doorways into the morning. A spitting rain coats the
sidewalk. I notice a storefront that reads We Sell Beer and Gold. Several blocks west, a cop slowly crosses the intersection on a black horse, the beast’s tail whipping at low clouds as they turn down another alleyway and amble out of view. I’m sure I am losing my mind.

According to the local news, this is the first of many days of rain. Gutters churn. A pair of seagulls pick at the trash that is tossed out of curbside streams. We could drown in fog so thick. When I find Eric he is huddled behind an empty shake shack trying to light a joint with a pack of matches. He is hunched over and haggard-looking, like a bit of flotsam cast out from an errant tide. I don’t ask about his missing shoe.

“Where’s Mom?” he says, picking a loose pot leaf from his tongue.

He is crouched very low to the ground and in this position he resembles an old man. He is a pale kid, skinny and tall. Lately, the flush of adolescence has drained from his cheeks. Instead, gray pools of exhaustion settle beneath his eyes. His hair is always messy now, even when he tries to gel the bangs straight up into the air—as if he’s in the habit of running into walls.

“I don’t know. Probably trying to flirt her way on to MTV.”

We are angry at her these days, though neither of us could say exactly why. Probably it is easier to beat up the parent who is close enough to field the blows. Last week she came home drunk at five o’clock in the afternoon and ordered us both to bed. It was the first time we’d ever seen her drunk, and we are hell-bent on never letting her forget it. There is only room for one addict in this family, and that position was filled years ago.

“I lost my shoe,” Eric says.

“I see that.”

“Hit?” He holds out the joint, a sloppy job that smokes too much on one side.

Eventually, a day will come when I realize with horror that I was the one to introduce my little brother to drugs—handing him his first joint at twelve, sneaking out with him in the midnight hours to take hits from a pipe made from an apple, heaving barrels of change to the local Coinstar to finance the evening’s entertainment. But now, that day is still very far away. Now, we are still a team. He hasn’t yet lost control and we can still distract ourselves with games of hide-and-seek, run-and-return, here-I-am-now-I’m-not.

“Nah,” I say. “But can I have your other shoe since you don’t really need it now?”

I’ve been thinking about his shoes a lot lately, real dark leather and long as platters, the shoelaces missing. I’ve considered adding them to my collection of planters made from old shoes, which are clustered on my windowsill. I felt the shoe pots added a real sense of irony to the space, and Mom agreed, until I planted yellow geraniums in her only red pumps. I’d been reading
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and the shoe pots became my homage to the central metaphor, and also to Francie, who I imagined as my spirit sister.
Our daddies even have the same name!
I thought.
Our daddies don’t have jobs!

“A Geranium Grows in Funk,” I wrote on an index card and taped it to the wall next to the window.

I once glued pieces of a broken mirror to the wall above my
bed, the shards of glass positioned to look like an exploding heart. For weeks, I shuddered through dreams, tiny cuts forming down my abdomen, and woke up with pieces of glass in my hair. Eventually, I gave up and took it down. I inserted the shards into some of the dark earth in my shoe pots. In the winter light they look like melting glaciers.

MY BROTHER AND
I walk down Ocean Avenue toward the boardwalk, Eric shoeless, both of us tiptoeing around broken bottles, paper bags, and chicken bones. I make him hold my hand, not because I am particularly fond of him, but because it looks to all the world like I have a boyfriend. And there is nothing I want more than to look like I have a boyfriend. A girl with backup. I have no idea how to relate to boys other than my brother, so a real boyfriend is out of the question. It would just be nice to
look
involved, like Carrie Kid and Chris Caruthers, who stumble down school hallways as if they’re in a three-legged race. I am in love with both of them on different days.

We pass a man sitting inside a wooden hutch at the entrance to an empty parking lot. He doesn’t lift his head as we shuffle by. He is reading a paperback that is swollen with moisture, the pages buckled like waves. He doesn’t seem to notice the shutters banging in the wind, the warm rain sliding down the back of his neck.

Eric takes off his T-shirt and ties it in a knot around his waist. I press on the round fist of bone at the top of his spine.
What a curious boy
, I think. He has a hang-dog neck like a
marionette. He bats my hand away as we enter the arcade on the boardwalk. The kid behind the counter watches us as we walk down the aisles, poking buttons and fingering plastic guns. We look like vagabonds, road-weary immigrants suddenly deported to this dank and derelict tourist town, this aqueous vortex with caramel corn.

Just let me rest my head inside this race car
, I think.
I’d like to take this spaceship for a ride
.

On the fifth morning Mom is up especially early.

“Rise and shine!” she says, ripping at our blankets.

I heard her get up to use the bathroom so I am prepared, wrapping the cheap polyester blanket around me like a tortilla. Eric isn’t so lucky and he thrashes at the air and moans while our mother bunches up his covers and draws back the heavy curtains, asking which one of us would like to go get her coffee. We know this isn’t really a question, so we stage a silent protest.

“All right,” she chirps, “then I guess I’m going fishing alone,” which is enough, she knows, to at least get us to open our eyes.

We don’t ask when we’re going home because, we figure, anything is better than being in school. Plus, we love fishing.

She leaves us to shower and get dressed while she drives to a neighboring shore town to see about a boat. Right after she leaves I notice the money missing from my wallet, and I turn on Eric with alarming ferocity. Stealing is a new habit of his, but my occasional violence toward him is not novel. I have a very early memory of choking my brother until he turned
blue. He couldn’t have been more than two years old. Choking was one of my favorite methods of assault, my scrawny brother writhing as I held him on the ground, my knees pressed deep into his stomach. I wasn’t satisfied until he cried, and I never worried about rebuttal. His counterattacks were fruitless, and if he ever got particularly aggressive, I would simply roll onto my back and fend him off with a barrage of kicks, like a lizard spreading her wattle to ward off predators.

“Really, Jess? Ten bucks? You’re going apeshit over ten bucks?” His voice gets louder; he squints as if he can’t quite make me out.

My mother warned me this day would come; I just didn’t expect it so soon. “One day,” she’d said, “he’s gonna be bigger than you. You’ll try to beat him up and he’ll kick your ass from here to next Tuesday.”

I realize I’m in trouble when he doesn’t start to cry. Eric has always been a big crier. He is sensitive to his surroundings; a slight change in air pressure can set him off. He sidles into the bathroom and I follow him. I really want that $10 back. I really want an apology and everlasting repentance, some acknowledgment of my moral superiority at least. I want this scraggly, petty thief to bow down in his too-small undershirt and pledge undying supplication. In the absence of all of these concessions, I see no other choice but to attack.

I catch myself in the mirror, a feral child, hair wild and teeth bared, a line of spittle down my chin. There is a scuffle. I hear the crack of his spine as he lands backward in the tub. His skull bounces off the green linoleum wall. He does not immediately
react, but he appears completely composed, breathing deeply and staring right through me. I’m screwed and I know it.

A few weeks before our father was arrested and the three of us took off into exile, my brother and I went to see an art exhibit in the city. It is the sort of experience that wasn’t immediately appealing, but in contrast to school, well, it gave us something to do. We jumped on the train during school hours and planned to be back before Mom noticed we were gone. It was only $5 from Norristown to the Thirtieth Street Station, round trip. The exhibit was in Fairmount Park, inside a makeshift shack set up beside the river, the interior walls painted black. A woman had outfitted several ballet dancers with microphones and asked them to dance. The recording of their breathing played, amplifying the tiny space with all those guttural huffs and sighs. We even heard joints cracking. We heard the thrusts of their bodies beating against air and space, minds catching muscle, saying
move
, saying
more
. There were no corresponding images; there was no music.

Eric left and waited for me outside, thinking the noises were too sexual. He didn’t want to listen to that shit next to his sister.

“
Nasty
,” he said in his faux-gangster drawl.

Truly, this was the stuff of birth, of original sin, of blood and atoms and energy. There were many narratives in this dark room, alongside the river, me in my city sweat. I was fascinated by the paradox of visual grace and apparent effortlessness with the grunts and groans of physical strain, an exertion I had previously associated with sex, or wrestling, or the delivery room
in the hospital—but not ballet. It was maybe the first time I realized how two opposing truths could exist at the same time. Beauty and pain. Light and dark. Love and hate. That our father passed out on the floor was just a body on the floor. The battle was before.

So what of this other soundtrack, as two siblings rage inside a wan and forlorn motel room? What is going on inside their heads, beneath the shitty dialogue (“Fuck you, assface!”), the smack of mere matter? Where is
that
soundtrack? I’d like to layer it over a white background, poke around it like an insect. Is our grief written into our rage? Made smaller by the ferocity of baser emotions? If I could somehow transcribe the rhythm, turn it into language, maybe. Could I finger the phonetics? Sever the syllable that will drive us, finally, so far apart?

But it doesn’t live here on the page. Our anger won’t translate. So we will move in circles for years, colliding like meteors captured in the same orbit, both eventually sent off course.

One punch to the jaw.
Bam!
Even as I crumble to the ground, the pain searing up my jaw and settling sharply near my temples, I know there is justice here. And I mourn this moment like the final act in a play.

We won’t fight this way again. That’s what I finally understood in that second before he decked me in the face.

We don’t know it yet, but the roles have been pre-prescribed, written into our DNA. What will become of Eric is barreling toward us, unstoppable. What we are more likely to understand now is that this cycle will not end with some apartment in the sky and thrice-weekly TV dinners. The second coming isn’t
coming. Our father is still in jail, our mother still earnest and struggling, the old escapes pointless. Our fighting costs energy we don’t have the luxury of spending on such simple hurts.

Soon, I will start to worry about how often my brother gets high. I’ll follow him around like a scorned lover, digging through drawers and reading private journals, handing out lectures even as I begin to snort Ritalin, at age sixteen, during my drive to school. I am bad at playing mother, and Eric will resent me for it. After so many vacations sleeping in the same room, we’ll begin to lock our bedroom doors, each afraid of the other, still too close for our own good. Mom will begin to drink in earnest and develop her own pot habit. I will enter college and begin to drink compulsively, too, never satisfied. We’ll spend years running away only to be yanked back in, as if attached to giant rubber bands fused to the home, soldered to our grief.

But now my brother and I are still sweaty and intimate, each of us gasping and dissecting the other’s stricken face—studying the familiar bone structure, the close-set eyes, the swollen lips—when there is an authoritative knock on the motel room door. My brother rushes to me, uses the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe away the trickle of blood on my lip. We swing open the door and stand side by side. Our posture looks improbably rehearsed, the back of Eric’s neck already blooming with blue whorls, my chin still sticky and pink. The cop is young, twenty-five or twenty-six, blond and stocky in her pressed, navy blue uniform, her bun beginning to unravel. Behind her the police car is idling. She doesn’t plan to stay long.

I lean on Eric’s shoulder casually.
Nothing happening here, Miss. Just getting the day started. Me and my bro
.

“Where are your parents?” she wants to know.

She wants to know where we belong, what we’re doing here. We should know there were some noise complaints, some unhappy customers.
Why aren’t we in school?
she wonders aloud. There is an expression on her face, pursed lips and disapproval, and I think I can read her mind.

She will leave. It is for the best. These kids still have their limbs, no? It’s just noise, meaningless sound. Shit happens all the time, in places like this.

When Mom comes back to the motel room she is smiling,
buoyant
, a boat lined up and already paid for—“Half off ’cause I’m so cute!” We are already bundled up in oversized sweatshirts. I wear a scarf to disguise my purple jaw because
she needs our shit like a hole in the head
. The rain has not stopped, only slowed to a light drizzle, cold and clean. We will sit on this boat for hours, silent but for our breathing, hot gray puffs of steam like Morse code. We will be, for the moment, mollified by our own rhythms—bait, cast, reel, bait, cast, reel—our mother dangling a cigarette between her lips and fumbling with her line, occasionally calling out softly, “Here, fishy fishy, here, fishy.”