If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (6 page)

Rick carries Angel upstairs. I sit and wait for Jordan to return, sipping on bad red wine and finishing up some homework. My mother thinks that I am here to tutor Angel, and sometimes I stay overnight. She doesn’t actually believe it, but we play the game anyway. It’s a precarious arrangement that works for now. She’s spent so many years dealing with a drunk husband, she hasn’t the energy to worry over me. I’m the good egg, and that’s that. In the meantime, Eric has been diagnosed with ADHD and is getting in trouble at school. Homework is a nightly battle. He smokes pot all day, every day. She works constantly, selling real estate alongside her mother, and she does well. We get by. I keep my shit together, and that seems to be enough for now.

When we are not at Angel’s, Jordan and I are at my house. He rarely goes home anymore. We sleep side by side in my bed,
and by the time we get there we are too stoned to talk properly, preferring to tell each other fairytales involving young Robert Plant and a desert at night. Campfires blooming in the dirt. A fifth of whiskey. In our dreams, we sing like Stevie Nicks. We dance wildly like Janis Joplin. Once, in the middle of the night, I stuck my hand up the back of his T-shirt and felt the cold knobs of his spine. He wasn’t asleep like I’d thought and he rolled away slowly and sighed.

Jordan comes downstairs with a second helping of pierogis in a glass bowl. He places three blue Ritalin in front of me on the coffee table, though I know there are more in his pocket. He is an unabashed thief. He licks the gravy from his spoon, dries it on his jeans, and begins to crush one pill into a fine powder. “Wait!” I say. “Take your time.” He ignores me now, because he knows I am as addicted to the process as to the drug itself. I am hooked on the anticipation, the crunch of the pill, the swirl of blue sand, and the careful way Jordan builds the lines, like distant desert mountains. We take turns with a rolled-up dollar bill. The smell of money, that particular synthetic burn, will years later still elicit a Pavlovian shudder and a cold ache in my jaw.

We swig back glasses of wine and light cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” I say.

“I can’t move,” says Jordan. “I mean, I just want to be right here, with you.”

We sit quietly, smoking, and I feel my thoughts begin to trip over one another, my heart racing. I watch the old flip clock clicking through those arbitrary numbers, and it seems
so loud, that clicking, like Ms. Gregori’s heavy black heels echoing down the hallway. She was our ninth-grade English teacher who smoked incessantly and wore the same clunky black heels every day, even in the heat of late spring.

“Doesn’t that clock sound like Ms. Gregori stomping down the hallway? Like when it’s empty, you know, when everyone’s in class and you’re going to the bathroom or something? And then she’s just there, all of a sudden. You know how she’s always just
there, everywhere
, all at once, with that notebook and all that red hair? I think she might be psychic, or like a witch or something. Do you know what I mean?” I ask. “How she’s always
there
, wherever you are.”

Jordan reaches over and covers the clock with a blanket. It goes silent, which we soon realize is not the same as stopping time.

“I love her,” I say.

“She hates me,” says Jordan. “They all hate me.” He takes another gulp of his wine, and then refills our mugs from the giant bottle of Carlo Rossi, the one with the glass handle that Angel’s mom bought for us earlier that day.

“Do me a favor,” she had said to Jordan. “Don’t steal Angel’s Ritalin tonight. I can’t afford to keep refilling that girl’s prescription.”

“Mrs. Farley,” he said from the front seat of her car, “it was an experiment, that one time. I’m sorry it happened,” he said, as if it were something beyond his control.

I said nothing, the mute accomplice, the silent partner. Nobody expects anything bad from me. My own mother, least
of all. Then Jordan had leaned over and gently kissed Angel’s mom on the cheek, and pulled her pale hair from the rubber band that had held it away from her face.

“There,” he had said. “You are so beautiful.”

Around 2:30
AM
, we hear footsteps on the kitchen floor above us. We hide our notebooks under the sofa and feign sleep, clumped together on the floor, our feet tangled under a yellow blanket. The heater clicks on and then there is the rush of water pouring through old pipes. I turn off the lamp. I yawn despite the pounding in my chest, despite the water crashing through a terrible quiet and the cold tears on my arm that make me shiver.

“Why are you crying?” I whisper to Jordan.

“Shut up,” he says, as Angel storms across the room and tears away our blanket.

“What the fuck?” she yells. “Are you guys, like, making out?”

She turns on the lamp. The room spins into focus. Our mugs of wine sit next to us on the floor. She looks like a lion, her skin yellow in the artificial light, all that curly hair sticking straight up in the air. She is wearing a Boyz II Men T-shirt and that stupid purple thong. Jordan starts to laugh. We were not, of course, making out, but instead writing poems in our spiral notebooks—serious poems that we imagine ironic and witty, but are really just sarcastic.

“Angel!” he says. “Your hair is trying to escape from your head!”

“Where’s Rick?” she says. “Where’d he go?” She turns around and surveys the room as if he might be hiding in a corner, or crouched behind the giant television set.

“Lost him again, have you?” says Jordan, but by now she is gone, turning off our light with the main switch by the staircase, all the way over there.

“All the way over there,” I say.

“What?”

“All the way over there. The light. It’s all the way over there.” Jordan sighs and wipes at his face.

“I think I can do it,” he says gravely, “if you set up another line.”

“This is not good,” I say, because that’s what I always say. Jordan gets up and heads toward the stairs.

“Pean, it’s fine,” he says, because that’s what he always says. “Read me the last stanza.”

We read our shitty poems and drink our shitty wine. We talk about our parents and how awful their drug problems are, and yet, how much we love them still, and we try to make sense of it all because now would be the time to do that. We think aloud,
Now would be the time to do that one thing
.

“Let’s take a walk,” I say.

“Pean,” he says, crying again. “I like girls
and
boys.”

This crying is really getting to me. Here I am, and that sun, which isn’t here yet, could show up at any moment unannounced, as it tends to do. The world will start up its endless, painstaking rotations, and all the people will get out of bed. Rested and cogent, they will slip into their hot showers and later drink coffee with cream and head out into their driveways to start the car, to go to work or school, and here I haven’t even managed to finish my homework. I can’t even finish my
homework and the night has come to an end. Or it will end. And then there’s everything else to contend with.

“Pean,” I say, because we are both “Pean,” short for “Peanut,” short for brevity’s sake, for the sake of time. “Pean, is that the sun? Please tell me that’s not the sun.”

“That’s not the sun, Pean.” Jordan covers us with the blanket again. I throw my sock at the wall, which is covered in planks of synthetic wood. “Pean, did you hear what I said? Did you hear me, Pean?”

“If you would just stop
crying
,” I say, “we could have a rational conversation for once.”

I am panicking. The television suddenly flickers and black lines begin to fall down the face of the screen before it all turns to fuzz. It’s muted, but still.

“Oh my God,” I say. “Do you know what that means? It means it’s late, really late, and soon the sun will come up. I can’t bear to see the sun. God, I hate that fucking sun.”

Jordan constructs another line on the table top.

“We should go to an Al-Anon meeting!” he says suddenly, as if this would solve all of our problems.

We’ve been to meetings before, doted on by forsaken wives clustering around us like mother bears. We couldn’t find our “higher power.” That was the problem. A heavyset woman named Sheryl once told us that if we couldn’t imagine anything larger than ourselves, we’ve got some real ego issues.

“Well, you’re certainly larger than us,” Jordan had said, dropping the end of his cigarette into one of the Styrofoam cups set out for this purpose.

It all seemed like faulty logic to me, but I didn’t say so aloud, and I think we both spent the better part of a month more insecure than ever. When my brother and I were kids and our father had started drinking again in earnest, my mother had us go to Alateen meetings. Even then we were cynical, willfully refusing to hold hands for the Lord’s Prayer. Eventually, the group leader asked our mother to send us to a different meeting, perhaps coupled with some quality talk therapy.

“I know your kids are Jewish, Ms. Nelson,” she said, “but the Lord’s Prayer is for
everyone
, no matter what your higher power may be.”

Well, that pissed her off, because when it came to religion, our family was about as faithful as a used-car salesman, so she knew we’d been giving this lady a line.

“I’m not going to any more Al-Anon meetings,” I say. “I would like, however, to go for a fucking walk. I have to get out of this basement before the sun comes up.”

This seems imperative to me now, as if I could somehow outfox the sun simply by getting there first. Jordan takes a final sip of wine before tucking into the fetal position and covering himself with the yellow blanket.

“I think I like girls
and
boys, Pean,” he says.

“No, you don’t, Pean,” I say. “You just like boys.”

I sit on the floor by the side of the couch and dig my toes into the curls of Berber carpeting. I’m scared to be left alone here, but I know that once he closes his eyes he’s gone, and that will be that.

“I guess you’re right,” he says, closing his eyes. “You’re probably right.”

I lie down beside him and try to slow my racing heart by matching my breaths with the rise and fall of his ribcage. The whitest winter light travels through a small rectangular window near the ceiling. In this light, I think I see the pores on the curve of his earlobe and feel the pinch of a silver safety pin still lodged in the pad of his thumb.

II

“Somebody found his bag,” my mother says when I pick up the phone.

I’m in my junior year at the University of New Hampshire and I’m late for class. My cell reception fades in and out. I watch girls in miniskirts flounce past me, their white legs glowing like heat lamps in the spring sun. Some boys play Frisbee on the lawn, barefoot and bare-chested. I light a cigarette as I listen and try to look casual. Jordan’s disappearing acts are not new. My mother has grown accustomed to his sudden absences and has even received similar phone calls about the bag. Some Good Samaritan finds his wallet inside and locates my mother’s number. The first time, we panicked. We don’t do that anymore. We have to function, my mother says. Now, I imagine Jordan in Philly with a lover late at night. They are both drunk and stumbling and Jordan’s blue eyes are red
and wet like hard candy. Maybe there is an argument between them. Maybe Jordan storms off, or jumps in a cab, only to realize later that he doesn’t have any money, that the bag has become as irksome as the rest of his responsibilities, and when he trips over the curb and skins his knee and drops his bag, he’ll leave it lying in the gutter like so much trash, the green corduroy swelling with yesterday’s rain.

My mother retrieves his bag from Good Samaritan number three, a retired police officer, and Jordan shows up at her door a few days later. He is strung out and toeing the zinnia plant in front of her porch. She yells. He cries. She makes him a sandwich and puts him to bed. He calls my phone that night but I stopped answering months before. I am done saving him, and pretty soon so is my mother. We aren’t the only ones. He has other women, moonlighters who provide the occasional ride or free meal. As he gets older, he turns increasingly to men for that comfort, but he abandons them before they can abandon him. That’s how the game works, he tells me.

I imagine Jordan does not sleep well that night in Eric’s old room. I imagine he sweats out the booze between the sheets and cries all alone with only the entrails of a coke binge to keep him company. I imagine he thinks about last night’s boy, his vodka kisses and the mercurial currents of spent lust. I imagine him biting the pillow and then thrashing his legs like he does when he is tired but cannot sleep. I believe he decides, quite suddenly, that the best way out of the guilt is to just disappear.

My mother recalls leaving for work around ten and hearing him softly snoring behind Eric’s bedroom door. When she
comes home, he is gone again. This time he never comes back. No more phone calls, no more recovered bags. His old boyfriend, Michael, will call me much later to say that he and Jordan have broken up, that he could no longer take the theatrics, the well-deep depressions, the finely tuned addictions, and the inevitable disappearances and infidelities that went along with them.

“I came home one night and he was using a paring knife to cut a star into his abdomen, yakked out of his mind.” Michael told me.

Two years earlier, though, when I went off to college for the first time, things had been different. Together, Jordan and my mother had been devoted fans of reality television, late-night bowling, and antidepressants. Jordan would listen to her “realtor voice” as she negotiated sales over the telephone, and then mimic her assertive tone in his voicemail messages.
Jessica, it’s Jordan. Listen, I need you to call me back a.s.a.p. regarding those contracts. We’re not budging without an inspection
. We pretended it was practice for the real world.