If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (7 page)

When I returned home for winter break freshman year, I found Jordan and my mother sitting on the couch, smoking and watching the ten o’clock news. Jordan was living in Eric’s room then. He’d spent so many nights there during our senior year of high school and then, one day, he just never left. My brother’s belongings had been stuffed inside a hall closet, the oversized T-shirts, tattered textbooks, dirty socks, and crumpled tinfoil bowls. The gangster posters remained on the walls, though, and the mattress still stank of stale cigarette smoke.

Eric was seventeen and living in a drug rehab for juveniles, a court-mandated placement after a year of truancy and dirty piss tests and then seven disastrous months living in Las Vegas with our uncle, Mom’s only brother. Out of desperation, perhaps, my mother had hoped that Eric would straighten out under the guidance of a “positive male influence.” It didn’t work. When my uncle finally returned home after delivering my brother to the airport for an early-morning flight back to Philadelphia, he discovered his safe wide open and nearly empty. All that remained were his youngest daughter’s birth certificate and a sheaf of old business documents. Exactly how much money my brother and his friends managed to get away with remains a point of contention, but it is generally estimated at around the $10,000 mark.

But Jordan was better company anyway, as attached to me as a new puppy and prone to muttering witticisms from the side of his mouth. There was wine on the table and he was curled up and leaning one cheek on his left palm, his fingers twisting in and out of his newly blackened hair and a cigarette held high in the other hand. He smoked like a coquettish film star from the thirties, taking long drags and then whipping the hand away and holding the burning cigarette above his shoulder, a burdensome thing. There was great flourish to most of his gestures, but he was a terrible hugger, reaching around with one thin arm and patting my shoulder blade with the fiery hand, the blue smoke lapping at my hair. He felt even smaller than before, bird-boned and fragile. I wanted to squeeze him hard and kiss his
keppie
, as my mother would say. Yiddish for “head.”

“You’re kissin’ the wrong keppie, Pean,” he said, laughing.

We hugged and he went back to the couch, plopping down dramatically and sighing, as if exhausted.

“Welcome home, Pean,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said my mother, “welcome home!”

They looked like a couple of loafing teenagers, both of them in raggedy T-shirts and sweat pants I knew were once mine.

“Our prodigal returns,” Jordan said, beaming at my mother.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “our little college girl.”

She’d been trying to get Jordan enough financial aid to attend community college. It was a lot of paperwork and then there was the question of his missing parents. It was a question without answers. My mother had walked him through the process of acquiring free, need-based healthcare and he’d finally found a job at a nearby beauty parlor washing hair and sweeping up after haircuts. My mother dropped him off and picked him up every day. It was the longest he’d ever held on to a job, five months, and he felt good about it. He’d even tried to give my mother some rent once, a couple hundred bucks, but she’d surprised us both by turning it down. He said he might want to try beauty school again, if he could just save some money.

After my mother went to bed, we rolled up some of her weed and sat out back, as we’d done so many times before. The dog came, too, and darted into the bushes, dirt catching in the wind and flying back at us.

“This is her new thing,” Jordan said, rubbing at his face. “That and wiping her ass all over the carpet.”

We sat silently for a while, watching the dog bury her toy in the ground, then unbury it, then bury it again. She worked inside the fog of her own breath and the midnight gray of winter stasis.

“I’m gonna bury your feet,” he said, “so you can’t go back.”

I thought about this for a long time. There was the sound of the dog’s scraping and the crackle of the joint as we inhaled. I reached over to pick at some dead skin hanging from his bottom lip.

“What if it rains?”

“I guess I’ll get you one of those hats with a built-in umbrella.”

“That would be nice of you,” I said, my head suddenly light.

“Oh well, then, forget it.”

My feet itched, but I didn’t feel like taking off my shoes. I sensed the hairs on my arm standing up from the cold while the warm smoke rushed into my lungs. The dog barked and the whole world shook. We talked about his new boyfriend, a freckled boy named Michael whom he’d met at his last job waiting tables. Jordan was fired for drinking during his shift, but the two had exchanged numbers and they’d been dating ever since.

“Mostly we do blow and watch Björk videos,” he said dreamily.

“My feet itch,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s pretty great.”

Jordan licked his fingers and put out the joint, sticking the roach into his cigarette pack. The dog had finished with her
ritual and made herself comfortable atop Jordan’s feet, panting softly and nibbling between her toes. He reached down to rub the dog behind her ears and she looked up at him gratefully, all love.

Jordan disappeared only once during our senior year of high school when I was still living at home. He wasn’t there when I went to pick him up from work. We didn’t know where he was for five days. My mother and I paced the house together, both in pajamas, the dog running circles around our legs. It was winter and very cold. I scraped the frost from my car windows and drove aimlessly around the city. On the sixth day, I woke up early. My nose tickled. I came to slowly and blinked into Jordan’s big blue eyes, his nose pressed against mine. He was straddling me in the bed and smiled broadly when I awoke, kissing me on each cheek and laughing. My room was filled with the sugary blue of early dawn. I wanted to slap his face, but all I could do was hug him and pull him beneath the blankets where it was warm.

“I met someone special,” he whispered.

“You’re special,” I said. “Like eats-the-paste special.”

He nibbled my shoulder.

“I’m too excited to sleep,” he said.

“Shh,” I breathed, a new exhaustion already pulling me under.

Outside, winter birds were calling out from the shadows. I heard a great gust of wind hit my window and felt his breath against my neck. Within months, I’d be off to college.
We find what sustains us
, a professor will tell me later,
and if we are very careful, or very lucky, we do not lose it
.

Those last few months of high school were like a dream. It was 2002. In March of that year, I learned that I had not been accepted into any colleges outside of Pennsylvania. My father died on April 4th. Eric picked up where our father left off then, entering the endless cycle between rehabs, halfway houses, jails, and relapses.

Jordan started to steal things: money, clothes, cigarettes. When we fought, he whined and begged for forgiveness, which drove me crazy. “I’m such an asshole,” he said over and over. I agreed, but we made up because I was too tired not to. He called Angel often and went over there just to schmooze some Ritalin. I’d stopped joining in, but only because I couldn’t stand coming down from the stuff, my whole psyche shattering at my feet. I didn’t talk to anyone. I turned off my phone.

Jordan and I spent three months in my mother’s basement, idly peeling glow-in-the-dark pot leaves from the walls and trying to convince ourselves that we were going somewhere. Occasionally, one of us would climb upstairs to make toast and, at some point in mid-April, I filled out a bunch of last-minute applications to colleges in New England. Meanwhile, my mother gave up any pretense of ignoring our pot habit and started joining us for bong sessions in the basement. It was like family dinner, but without dinner. Instead, we ate only things that could be peeled or buttered. Jordan went to parties and called me to pick him up at odd hours of the morning. I didn’t really mind. I was sleeping in snapshots.

In September, I climbed out of the basement, packed my bags, and drove to New Hampshire with my mother. As we
crossed the bridge into Durham, I saw white sailboats bobbing innocuously in the bay and a pair of sleek silver birds dive into the water like bullets, one and then the other. Yes, I felt I would finish what my father could not. Yes, I had never felt more his child. I was grieving, and those boats, this place—it was the closest I could get. It was home before I’d ever arrived. “This is it,” I told my mother. “So long for now.”

My mother laughed and giddily slapped my knee. I smelled pine needles and, inexplicably, Tabasco sauce. I watched the herons placidly drift beneath the bridge and a woman shaking a blanket over the stern of an old wooden boat. The sky faded to black. We saw the stars then, so far from the familiar city lights. Nobody honked, even when we forgot to go.

“Almost there,” said my mother, “and just in time.”

III

Rachel calls on a sunny day in April. She’s recently finished college and moved back home, sort of, to a place called Manayunk just outside the city limits. I am busy fishing the remnants of a taco dinner from deep in the kitchen drain. My hair is wet from the shower and I have to keep putting the phone down to wipe it away from my face. She tells me that Jordan is in town for a few days, that an old beau paid for a round-trip plane ticket from Austin. And yet, he showed up at
her
apartment and is now sleeping on
her
sofa and leaving swathes of liquid foundation on
her
bathroom counter. He is also eating
her
food and helping himself to the
good
wine she received as a Christmas present. I am living in New York now, just north of Manhattan in Yonkers, and recently started graduate school at Sarah Lawrence College.
But still
, I think,
he could have called
.

“He’s so skinny, I can see his black little heart,” she says.

I don’t ask why she’s letting him stay in the first place. I know I’d probably do the same. And then, as if she is reading my mind, she says, “I’m not driving him to the airport. That is where I draw the line.”

Later, I work a fine, dark topsoil into my garden while wearing new magenta gloves. I get tomato seeds from my landlord. I sit back in the sun, chewing and squinting into the sky. My arms feel tight and strong. There is the smell of cilantro, like soap, and the buzz of the cicadas on the tree trunks. I sip a glass of ice water and imagine swimming. It is a Sunday, which means that tonight I will make a salmon dinner and wash my hair and read a book and fall asleep early. I am working toward a Masters of Fine Arts in writing, a degree I suspect will not help me find a job and I’m certain will sink me $40,000 in debt. Right now, I don’t care. Everything is white. I am hooked to an IV of words and ideas and I am fading, faded, and gone. In the morning, I will drink coffee with cream and go to class and this is just fine. I am taking care of my body, my nerves, my feathery brain. I am saying
I forgive you
, this missive to myself.

Two days later, Rachel calls me back. She is on her way home from the airport.

I sit outside on a lawn chair, remembering. I am searching for usable scraps, memories of what was good and pure between
Jordan and me, but find only the metallic ends of a winter drive. Or else, the rusted edges of those endless nights in that basement, where we drank wine and snorted a friend’s Ritalin until we felt our teenaged, suburban angst change to a tentative self-assurance. While I wait, another day turns into night and I am that much further away from the girl and the boy who loved each other once, for a few painful years, and now do not know each other at all. And this, too, I know, is just typical, and yet we never thought we were typical at all. I would like to write a letter to that boy, to tell him that I am no longer a young girl and all is forgiven—if not, as they say, forgotten. I do not trust my memories and so I wait, and in that time the memories continue to swell and change shape.

The last time I see Jordan he is tending bar at a club called Woody’s, which is tucked into an alleyway near the Delaware River, the
gayborhood
, we called it, south of the Avenue of the Arts. If we stayed within a six-block radius, we could pretend the whole world was a carnival, and love and sex and rainbows were free and in abundance, an edible candy land like Willy Wonka’s factory. We used to come here when we were young and bored. We liked to watch the boys float around the dance floor. Bisexual angels, all glitter and pomp. There were moments of transcendence here, too, when the neon light struck a silver crescent on the cheekbone of some man-boy, his face upturned and his arms thrown back and slick with sweat. One night we met a man who dressed in tunics and spoke in pastels. “He speaks in pastels!” we told each other, on account of the drugs, but also because of the way the strobe lights reflected
off his tongue. He wore his hair in two long black braids that slid over his shoulders like ribbons.

We loved him instantly, though for different reasons, and followed him everywhere that night, hiding behind the felt partitions and whispering fantasies that again involved desert fires and a guitar, this modern-day Indian chief our own personal deity now, some munificent daddy sent to show us the way. If Jordan’s fantasy involved the lure of sexual tutelage, mine was just the opposite. I was after the press of the paternal, some utterly chaste discipline I sought out everywhere, anywhere. The truth is, we were vulnerable in those days, our minds all sweet and custardy from too many drugs, overwhelmed by the theater of the senses. We made a good show of normalcy when we needed to, but most of the time we retreated into our own basement novella and held on for dear life.