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.
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 und
erstood 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.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 2