“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.
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 t
he 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.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 5