“How’d they end up so normal?” Georgia wondered one night, staring at the maroon wall that separates the dining room from the kitchen where her sons scrub black grime from pots and pans, their aprons soaked through with grease and butter and the liquefied fat from salmon fillets.
Both boys are handsome, though Colin is the better looking of the two. He dates often, unlike his older brother, Michael, whose one brown eye floats away lazily if he’s not paying attention or if he’s paying too much attention, while the other eye remains locked in place. They are dark-haired and skinny and smile easily. They call Georgia “Mommy” without any hint of embarrassment and sneak her kisses when it’s not too busy.
“I never had big goals,” said Georgia. “I just always wanted to be a mother, ever since I was a little girl. That’s it. I just wanted to be a mother.”
“And now you are,” I said.
“People need me. It feels good to be needed,” she said.
I asked her if being needed made her happy. She said she thought she was as happy as she’d ever get. She folded a placemat into a paper airplane and added it to the collection next to the register. Each one was different. Some had colored wings, red or blue crayon designs, or little pilots that looked like Martians.
“I feel just like a teenager sometimes,” she said softly. “Like they should be raising me.”
She gestured toward the kitchen where her boys were cleaning up. Since she began attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings, Georgia learned that drugs like meth stunt you emotionally.
“That’s why I act like I’m twenty,” she said. “You’re left just where you were when you took to the drug.”
I asked her how a twenty-year-old could run a successful restaurant, raise two great kids, and tend to a small town like the local therapist or mayor.
“Well, what else?” she said, as if the script wasn’t hers to rewrite.
The boys stumbled out from the kitchen and tossed their dirty aprons onto the counter, sliding into the booth next to Georgia and me. She patted their chests and kissed each cheek as they grinned and leaned away, tipping back full beers and picking at their fingernails.
“Up,” she said, and they slid out of the booth so Georgia could make them salads and chicken fingers tossed with spicy buffalo sauce, her own secret recipe.
They ate without looking up. Georgia puffed on her bowl of pot and smiled at them. The dishwasher finally stopped its clacking.
The last time I saw Georgia was the day she fired me. She left me a clipped message on my answering machine after I overslept and missed our first staff meeting. I was devastated, inconsolable. I ran the twelve blocks down to The Crab Shack in just my sweatpants and a T-shirt. It was the middle of February and I remember the hairs on my arms standing straight up as I ran, my shoelaces slapping against the sidewalk. When I burst into the restaurant, Georgia was at the register and I could see Abram peeking out from the kitchen, his hand hovering over a plate of pink uncooked fish. I looked at Georgia and we both started to cry—ugly, choking sounds that startled the customers. She took off, slamming the kitchen door behind her. I gave chase. She had been my friend and I felt betrayed. I was also embarrassed for missing the meeting and this made me cry harder, like a child who falls off a chair and cries from humiliation rather than pain. Inside the kitchen, Michael caught my arm while Georgia slipped out the back door. I knew she regretted her decision and I wanted to grab her shoulders and make her say so, hold her thick hair in my fist and force a confession, demand her love, steal her good graces. I was that kind of kid. I couldn’t stand to be disliked and I’d never before confronted anyone about anything.
“She feels like she’s losing control,” Michael said to me. “She’s making an example out of you. There’s nothing we could say.”
He was talking to me but staring at my chin, the one wayward eyeball bobbing helplessly toward the door. The lights flickered and Abram banged on the metal freezer to make them stop.
“She threatened to leave,” Michael said.
He let go of me and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She wants to move to Arizona.” He blinked rapidly several times in a row.
I remembered Georgia once telling me how the doctor had forbade Michael from ever drinking again. How he had told him that one more drink would kill him, a complication of his severe epilepsy, and how later Michael had stood outside the doctor’s office slurping from a can of warm Budweiser he’d gotten from his trunk and kicking at the wall, beer foam sliding down his chin. Georgia had to drag him into the car and lock the doors. “Even then, he cracked the windshield and shook like a yearling all the way home,” she’d whispered.
“We had to give her something,” Michael said. “She needed to feel in control.”
Truth is, I was never a very good waitress. I didn’t care much that Joe Ruggle liked his scallops well done, that Coach Warner liked his Diet Coke in a wine glass. Years later, I’ll get fired from another restaurant for pouring the wrong year to a “very important” customer, and decide to quit the industry for good. But Georgia pays attention to these details. They matter to her. “People come to The Crab Shack because they crave it,” she said once. “It’s no fun satisfying a craving unless it’s just right. Besides, there are enough disappointments in life. You might as well have a good dinner.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again Michael was peeling a shrimp. I turned around and walked back through the restaurant toward the front door. Mr. Hurley looked up from his plate of broiled haddock but I couldn’t stop. As I was leaving, the door flew open from the wind and I heard the telephone ringing and ringing.
IN NEW YORK
IN NEW YORK, I am twenty-two and learning how to be a teacher with other twenty-two-year-olds. Nick moves with me from New Hampshire after college graduation and we get a small apartment together and play house.
In New York, I am twenty-two and learning how teachers will change the world.
In New York, I stay up all night drinking with a black woman in her thirties who is teaching me how to be a teacher. At dawn, she tells me that she’d thought I was just another precious white girl from the suburbs who thinks she can change the world.
In New York, I stay up all night drinking with a twenty-two-year-old lesbian who thinks she can change the world. At dawn, I beg her to kiss me and she says no.
In New York, I am a teacher. I never thought I could change the world.
In New York, a twelve-year-old boy brings me his drawings every day during my lunch period. I tell him they are wonderful and he should keep drawing. He believes me. They are wonderful, though I’m not sure it matters. But that’s not what I tell him.
In New York, I watch a mother beat the shit out of her kid during a parent-teacher conference. I am outraged. I go to the principal and tell her that we have to do something. Just like that: We have to do something! I go to the principal and she tells me to calm down. I go to the principal and she tells me to shut up and think. What will happen if we call someone? Do I think the kid will be better off in foster care? “Do you think this will be better for the kid?” she asks. “Think,” she says. I go to the principal and she tells me this isn’t “happy little white world.” I go to the principal and she holds my hand and says, “Just do your job.”
In New York, my students write essays about dead parents and drugs.
In New York, I write essays about dead parents and drugs. I don’t sleep. I come home and fall on the floor and cry. I never thought I could change the world. I don’t know what I thought.
In New York, my seventh-graders read on a first-grade level.
In New York, my students fuck in the bathroom. They throw chalk at me and put each other in choke holds. Together, we play word games and eat candy. We sing songs and have dance-offs. We line up like they tell us to. Other teachers give me dirty looks when my students are not quiet in the halls. Other teachers give me dirty looks when our line is not straight.
In New York, I
have a student named Quinesha who gets picked on for being small. She hides under my desk in the mornings and says, “Ain’t nobody gonna find me here. Ain’t nobody gonna find me here.”
In New York, I walk Quinesha home and she tells me I will quit soon. I am quiet, and then I say she can call me anytime.
In New York, I quit three weeks after my conversation with Quinesha. I get a job waiting tables at a little Italian restaurant and do cocaine in the bathroom with my boss. “You could be the manager here,” he tells me. “This could be your place soon,” he says. Soon, I quit.
In New York, I walk everywhere. I avoid the subway, the bus, the area in Brooklyn where I was once a teacher. I spend a lot of time in Chinatown looking at fish on ice, the slick octopus and the frogs in buckets, heaving. A man yells at me for running my finger over the wet eye of a John Dory. I watch the old men playing checkers in the park. I watch jugglers tossing fire.
In New York, I go to a book festival and sit in the back on the floor at a reading. I have to pee, but I don’t want to leave because I’m too excited. The author says he doesn’t want to be here. He says his best friend killed himself yesterday and he doesn’t want to be here, but he has to. A woman raises her hand and says, “Just leave then.”
In New York, I let Nick fuck me in the ass for the first time. We do it on the floor because we don’t have a bed yet and I laugh the whole time because it tickles. It really does.
In New York, I exaggerate on my resume and get a job at a fancy, expensive restaurant. I don’t make any money, but I wait on people like Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyoncé and Martha Stewart. Well, I don’t wait on them, but I bring their food from the kitchen. I meet a girl who says she makes her money in other ways and she will teach me if I want. I think about it. One night the manager gives me $20 because it was so slow and he feels bad for me. He is usually stoic and intimidating and I feel so grateful that I overdo it with the thank yous until he has to tell me to stop talking and go home. Then on New Year’s Eve, I make $600 serving the mayor’s table. After our shift, we drink all the leftover bottles of Veuve Clicquot and I forget about Nick waiting at home. I come in at five in the morning and he is drunk on the couch; his glasses are crooked, an empty bottle of champagne on the floor. “I thought you were coming home,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve seen him drunk and I help him to the bathroom to puke.
In New York, a man on the subway takes his dick out of his pants and presses it against Nick’s thigh.
In New York, I go for long runs along the river, but I usually get distracted and stop running halfway through.
In New York, we pay $30 for a Christmas tree that looks like the Charlie Brown tree, one thin crooked trunk and three wimpy branches. We decorate it with old MetroCards and a handful of silver balls from the dollar store. We are overly proud.
In New York, I accidentally kill all the plants on our fire escape.
In New York, I make a million plans to leave New York. I read Gretel Ehrlich and Cormac McCarthy and Joy Williams. I read Chekhov and Tobias Wolff and Annie Dillard—lots of Annie Dillard. I read about everywhere but New York.
In New York, we take ourselves out to restaurants we can’t afford and eat so much we stumble home groaning.
In New York, I get a job at a sports bar and work until four in the morning with girls from all over the world. We take shots all night with the customers and cheer for teams we don’t know or care about. We go home with wads of cash tucked into our short shorts. One time I walk home at eight in the morning and it starts to snow and I am so in love with New York in that moment that I start to cry. When I get to the front door of our building, Nick walks up behind me and says he’s been looking for me for hours.
In New York, a man tells me I’m “fuckable, but that’s about it.” He says he is an engineer and he can break my body down to all its parts and put them back together again. He tells me he can do this with his eyes closed. I work with a girl from Spain who tells him to get out. She says pussy so that it rhymes with loosey-goosey and I fall in love with her a little. We go to Central Park on our day off and lie in the sun topless and drink vodka and orange juice from water bottles.
In New York, I decide to become a vegetarian and it lasts for seven hours.
In New York, I do cocaine with a co-worker from New Zealand on his front stoop. He asks me if I want to move to Japan with him and I say yes, just to see what would happen. Nothing happens.
In New York, I start paying to have my laundry done for me because the way they fold it so neatly and wrap it tightly in shrink-wrap feels like tenderness. Also, because I’m lazy and we live in a fourth-floor walk-up.
In New York, I become obsessed with real estate.
In New York, I get drunk with Nick and we decide we want to have a threesome. We get into a cab and I ask the driver to take us to a lesbian bar and we only realize how ridiculous we are being when we get there. By the time we get home, I’m too tired to fuck anyway.
In New York, I get an apartment by myself north of Manhattan in Yonkers. I start graduate school. Nick moves away to start graduate school somewhere else. We visit each other on the weekends and have hard, hungry sex.
In New York, my landlords are an older Italian couple and they live above me. They are in their sixties and their grown son lives in the basement. On Sundays, the husband brings me fresh olive bread and the newspaper. He brings me dark plums from the backyard and balls of mozzarella that are still warm. He leaves these things in paper bags on my doorstep and knocks and runs away. I love him so much it hurts. The one time I have a friend over he leaves a pizza and a Post-it Note that reads “For you eat your friends.”
In New York, the husband wraps the plum trees in cheesecloth for the winter. He is short and stout and looks up at me with his chin tucked into his neck. He has bright blue eyes and frowns, but it doesn’t mean he’s unhappy. That’s just his face.
In New York, the husband is a barber and a casino pit boss. He works all the time. His wife wishes they could take a vacation, but they never do. He can’t sit still. He mows the yard and plants flowers and weeds the garden and rakes the leaves and walks up and down the street clearing the snow from neighbors’ driveways. He works from six in the morning until ten at night, every day except Sunday. The wife asks if I will write about them someday.
In New York, the Italian couple invites me up for dinners. They think I don’t eat enough. They feed me olives and pickled mushrooms and breaded veal. They feed me radicchio salads and hard cheeses and soft cheeses and cheeses so pungent they smell like farm animals and hay. They feed me fat grapes with seeds and watermelon and sliced tomatoes. They feed me the wine that the husband makes in the garage and I like the way he drinks it, by pouring single gulps into a mason jar and slugging them back, then pouring again. They feed me coffee so strong and bitter it clears my nasal passages.
In New York, I ask the husband to be the subject of an oral history project for a class I’m taking in graduate school. We sit for hours at his kitchen table and I record him talking about growing up in Italy during the war. He tells me about making bread out of chestnuts and sleeping with hot bricks by his feet. He teaches me how to tell stories. He gives me all of his family photos to scan. He takes me to the first places he lived when he got to the States. I make a video of him showing me these row homes in the Bronx and the tiny delis on Arthur Avenue and the parks where he spent most of his time. He tells me about Tar Beach, the rooftops where they would set up chairs and blankets in the summer. He tells me he will take me to the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy in September. He tells me he will take me mushroom hunting in the fall.
In New York, they fight so loudly that the walls vibrate. It makes me feel less lonely when they fight.
In New York, I invite his whole family to the end-of-the-year exhibition where everyone in the class puts their projects on display. I work day and night for months to put my video project together and I am proud and nervous and want to give back just a l
ittle of what he has given to me. He seems reluctant, but he agrees to come. He asks if he will have to answer questions. He takes off work. The whole family shows up and he is wearing a jacket and tie. The room is crowded and people wander around looking at our work. I put in the DVD of my project and it doesn’t work, not one bit of it. It never copied onto the disc. I run to the bathroom and throw up in the toilet. They are sweet. They say they understand. They leave early.
In New York, I make more plans to leave New York. On moving day, the husband says he knows I’ll come back. He says I can live in my little apartment for free. He says I am like a daughter. The wife makes me a plate of food to go. He whispers, “You’ll come back.”
But I don’t go back. It’s too hard. Nick and I will spend a couple of years in Connecticut and I’ll teach college writing to freshman while he does research in New Haven. Then, he’ll get a job at the University of Vermont and I won’t get a job, not right away, but I’ll move to Vermont with him and write all day.
Many months later, I drive down from Connecticut and drop a copy of Dante’s Inferno in Italian into the couple’s mailbox because the husband once mentioned that he’d like to read it. Once, I stop by the barbershop when I’m driving through, but he isn’t there. Once, I have a dream that they nurse me back to health. Once, I plant a plum tree in my new backyard in Vermont, but it doesn’t take. Once, I try to call, but only once.
IF ONLY YOU PEOPLE COULD FOLLOW DIRECTIONS
THE MOTEL IS flamingo pink, stucco walls dripping with humidity; the whole rectangular complex feels (from the fever, I suppose) like a gaping mouth. I am in the wet center of the mouth, floating in a pool of tepid water and staring up at the rain clouds that rush by. The muscular white sun squeezes my head like a stress ball. My mother smears cream cheese onto a bagel at the wobbly glass table next to the pool and worries aloud about my brother, Eric, alone in our motel room.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 13