If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (9 page)

“Hold still,” she says, sitting on his knees and cupping his chin with her other hand.

“Hold still,” I say from the washing machine.

II

In India, there is a tale of memory and a man. The man, a yogi, is lost, and in his wanderings he falls in love with a queen. He is besotted by her beauty, so enamored that he follows her to her kingdom and stays—forgetting all about his convictions of
understanding and of purity. Finally, on a journey into the spirit world, a devoted disciple learns of his master’s enslavement and becomes convinced that this memory loss will cause the yogi’s death. Desperate to cure his loved one of this spell of amnesia, the student scours the Book of Fates in the realm of death and determinedly erases his master’s name from the list of the dead. With little time remaining, the student then flees to find his master in Ceylon and, disguised as a dancing girl, sings and dances until the afflicted man is finally returned to himself—his memory restored and his faith and identity replenished.

Science tells a different story of memory, though it is no less enrapturing, no less mystical. It starts with our origins in the ocean and it reveals a reliance on the salts of such tremulous beginnings. The neurons that become so tangled in an Alzheimer’s patient are what allow memories to be developed in the first place. They receive signals from outside the body, a tiny shiver of charge. And yet, it is the balance of salts within these tiny neural threads that cause the charges, and the firings back and forth. In their own complex and symphonic way, the neurons create a summary report of their activity. This summary is what we feel as experience—and memory.

III

2007.

This is the end of a life: a man in a box. The lid is ajar and an electric light beats down on his forehead. This man is old and
bald and thin, thinner now than ever before. He wears a dated suit, the one with the pale-blue satin vest that he wore to two daughters’ weddings. His hands are crossed over his stomach. There is a thick coat of liquid foundation over the deep purple bruises that spread from his bulbous knuckles to his child-sized wrists. His face is painted on, the earlobes swollen stiff with embalming fluid. There are six white hairs sprouting from his left ear. His chin bears a wash of new, spiky white stubble. There are thirty-one people here. I counted. Twice.

IV

In the end, he does not remember being thirteen, waking at dawn and tossing a heavy wool blanket to the floor. He does not remember the sweat and the impatient bleating of the milkman’s horse or the clanking of bottles on the porch below his window. His mother calling him for breakfast in Yiddish,
iberbaysn
, her voice loud through the thin walls of their narrow row home in Philadelphia. He does not remember the leather belt he stole from the bedroom of a heavyset neighborhood pal named Frank. Chiseling the extra notch through its thick skin with his father’s pen knife, his pants drooping anyhow. He does not remember when he began to introduce himself as Frank to the local Italian storeowners because he was certain they weren’t hiring him because he was a Jew. At sixteen, canning soup at the Campbell’s Soup factory across the river in New Jersey. Giving all his wages to his father. Relinquishing
their home to the bank anyhow, for the sake of $300. He does not remember losing his virginity to a neighborhood hooker and the bruises on her thighs. His tiny apartment in South Philadelphia that he shared with his first wife, Stella, who drank gin and tonics until morning and beat on his chest with her red fists. Finding out she was sleeping with his best friend.

He pretended not to remember the two children from their marriage. (And I never learn to reconcile these two ideas of him—the devoted father, the absent one.)

He does not remember working thirty years on the Philadelphia naval base. The black soot that he picked from underneath his nails every night. The upholstery samples that he carried door-to-door in the evenings, their ornate brocades like Braille only he could read. He does not remember Yiddish or the Torah. He does not remember how to wash a dish or how to hold a fork. How to speak. Being poor. Being middle class. How to write a check. How to fix an engine. How to wipe his own ass. How to make love. A family. How to call for them. Taste. Time.

V

2007.

This is a Jewish funeral in Northeast Philadelphia at a place called Goldstein’s on the side of teeming, litter-strewn Highway Seventy-Six. The place is gray and neon and inundated with sharp angles and low ceilings and a disharmony of
colors. An aunt has called in her rabbi for the service because Irving has not been to synagogue in thirty years.

There are also a handful of grandchildren here, of whom I am the eldest. Eric is beside me in a yellow jumpsuit and handcuffs. We are sitting in the second row behind the “principal mourners”—Helen and her children: our mother, two aunts, and an uncle. Notoriously creative, my brother and I have draped a gray suit jacket over his shoulders and I hold his hands. My wrist shields the handcuffs. My brother’s keepers lean against a wall at the end of our pew. One of these officers is chewing gum and blowing tiny bubbles that he hooks back into his mouth with his tongue. I sneak him dirty looks in between greetings from old family friends. I resolve to keep an eye on
them
for a change.

Two days earlier, Goldstein had showed us around the casket room. He looks like a used-car salesman. He is middle-aged and fat and has a full head of gleaming white hair that looks waxed into place. A thick mustache is perched above his swollen lips. He’d said things like “and because your mother’s such a sweetheart, I’ll throw in an annual power washing for the stone there, free of charge!”

The casket room was dimmed, a series of stoic spotlights showcasing each open box, highlighting the delicate folds and tucks of plush satin lining, baby blue and angelic white. Goldstein led us through the maze, running his fat fingers over gleaming bronze handles, demonstrating their magnificent heft and polish, their leak-proof locking mechanisms. Most of the caskets looked overwhelmingly large on their pedestals. Some
were child-sized. I stood behind my two aunts, my mother, and my grandmother and watched as Goldstein gently, dangerously toured us through our grief. He stopped occasionally to finger seals and talk numbers. When we were unresponsive he grew restless, excited even, a thin wash of sweat on his face. I sat on a bench while Goldstein went to get us some water. I watched as he handed my mother a plastic cup, slipped an arm around her waist, and led her to an immense mahogany number, all sexy curves and heavy, phallic handles. On clearance now, $7,999.

Irving Gordon, a lover of deals of all kinds, a penny pincher fitting the worst of Jewish stereotypes, would have balked at such a frivolous expense, cocking his thumb toward the precarious construction of two-by-fours in the corner before nodding his assent and retrieving his checkbook. Even this economy model, with its fraying rope handles and complete lack of any kind of leak-proofing, will run the savvy buyer a cool grand. I am sure Irving would have found irony in his last shameful scamming, the sum of his pittance from Veterans Affairs buried along with him. In this way and in others, we are wholly divorced from our heritage, eager to exchange the Jewish mandate that we bury our dead in a plain pine box for the easy comfort of knowing we gave him satin. Nonetheless, his women finally settled on a mid-range, Aurora brand box in “devotion silver” with adjustable handles, though sans adjustable headrest. This, Helen decided, will suffice.

In the end, Irving had grown so thin that Goldstein will have to pin his suit tenderly behind the shoulder blades,
discreetly at the small of the back. He paints my grandfather’s face with smooth peach foundation and presses earthen rouge into the hollows of his cheeks. It is a surprisingly tactful reproduction, a tender, vain dressing of the corpse—horrific and exactly right.

After the funeral, the mourners disperse. The rabbi goes home. My brother must go back to jail. His keepers rap their thumbs on the side of an open van door, waiting. I slip Eric a cigarette and the cop nods and looks away, squinting into a light rain. Eric takes quick drags by bending down toward his hands, which, in addition to being shackled together, are linked to a heavy leather belt cinched tight around his skinny hips. His dark hair is cut too close to his scalp, light fuzz beginning to develop on his chin and jawline. He is twenty years old.

The first offense is theft, though many others will follow—a wildly colorful rap sheet—but the disease that makes him do such things is just an infant now, just an infant throwing its peas. Right now, Eric and I are more distraught by the way he is attending this funeral than we are by the death itself. Death, this time around, is a small grace, we think, though we don’t say so aloud. When I look at my mother, her face puffy with grief, I feel a love so large I can barely breathe, and beneath that is something so dark and ugly I am only just able to translate it into words—something like,
At least you had your father for fifty-one years; we buried our father years ago
. Grief tinged with envy. This thought is so terrifying and cruel I won’t be able to look her in the eyes for hours, only hold her close.

“Can’t they just let him come to the cemetery?” Helen asks loudly, for the benefit of the two officers.

They are growing impatient now. The big one unlocks a door and nods at Eric.

“All right, let’s go,” he says. Eric takes one last drag from his cigarette and flicks it into a puddle of mud.

“Now, wait a minute,” says Helen.

“Lady, you think this is a joke?” says one of the cops.

My mother and I gasp. We can’t believe someone would speak to Helen like that. Sweet, grieving,
elderly
Helen. My brother clenches his jaw. The women glare. The man senses his misstep and backs down some.

“All right, kid, let’s go. Give Grandma a hug and then get in the goddamn van, okay?”

Helen clutches onto her grandson’s bony shoulders, pulling him into her neck. I see Eric pull away at the waist, trying to keep his handcuffs from touching the swell of her stomach. She pulls him in harder. He gets into the van and they drive away.

VI

I hate to consider that we are merely a sum of our memories—those which our minds choose to hold on to, those which we cannot help but let go, despite ourselves. That’s all we have, I think, that’s all we are. These memories, however, are far from fixed. They shift with the changing tides of the water on our brains, the dubious salt of mere matter. A cold northeast wind,
perhaps. Who can say for sure? Each remembering is different, each successive dredging more unreliable than the last. Our brains recreate (as a function of self-defense, or self-sabotage maybe) a slightly larger hand, a slightly longer hug, a steeper walk, a harder ache, a toothier smile, a smaller child. This time the joy was more acute, the eruption deeper, the color red not blue. This time it sounded from a distance; this time it felt more like this.

And the present? The present may be no more than three to twelve seconds, according to William James and a modest experiment at the turn of the last century—a compulsive attempt to “quantify” the present. Three to twelve seconds. A sip of wine. A violinist’s high C. A soccer ball drawing a white arc through the buggy air. Shifting the car into park. Failing to recognize your house key. Your own yellow toes. Samuel Johnson wrote that “the bright edge of consciousness moves quickly, and the present, after all, is in perpetual motion, a precarious ledge. It leaves us as soon as it arrives, ceases to be present before its presence is well perceived, and is only known to have existed at all by the effects which it leaves behind.” A heron beats his great wings against a southern-bound fog, lifts its long neck toward a hidden lolling sun, a dense rotating rudder raised to catch a breeze and shift direction. He leaves only a trail of memory in his wake. He is gone before he has even arrived. In
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, Annie Dillard recounts an experience, a moment of pure presence, in which she is simply petting a dog. As she is “patting the puppy,” however, she is suddenly gripped with the exquisite pleasure of
the now, an overwhelming awareness of her own consciousness and its inexorable end. “This is it,” she writes, “right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain.” Then it is over.

I feel this level of consciousness rarely. A moment of such clarity and self-awareness, the sense of brick and brain and the wood beneath my bare feet, of skin and wind and the rush, rush of cars passing and time tumbling over its shoelaces. The fly dancing down a windowpane, the robotic, slow-motion twitching of its legs when it lands on my wrist. That particular itch.

VII

2007.

Day one of Shiva. My mother and I wake late. She smokes a cigarette and we drink good coffee. There is a message on her answering machine from Helen.

“Susan, it’s your mother. I just wanted to
remind
you to wear your black mourner’s button because the rabbi will be here tonight and I think, well, I think he’s kind of
checking
.”

My mother on one couch, me on the other, we stare each other in the face and laugh. Then we cry. The two dogs hear the commotion and come bounding into the living room. They are panting and their tails are going and they trip over each other’s legs trying to get to my mother. They careen into
her shins and topple onto her bare feet. They are looking at her anxiously, waiting to know just what is going on. We have to get our shit together.