If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (10 page)

“Get your shit together,” my mother says.

And so, finally, we do. We finish our coffees and I take our cups into the kitchen. I hear my mother light another cigarette and speak softly to her dogs.

“It’s okay,” she tells them. “This is okay.”

My mother and I arrive at Helen’s house. She’s forgotten her mourner’s button after all. In truth, I think she lost it. Helen’s house is still empty, except for the rabbi, and we start unwrapping trays of bagels and fishes and sliced red onions.

“Actually,” our new rabbi says, “Shiva is traditionally seven days but we just don’t have time for that anymore. People still have to make a living—even rabbis.”

I am instructed to contemplate the cyclical nature of life and death as I grab a poppy seed bagel from a basket and slather on some scallion cream cheese; the round foods that are always served during Shiva are meant to drive this concept home. After a couple of bites I decide I do my best contemplating with a glass of wine, so this is just going to have to wait.

I am under the impression that this is a time for the “principal mourners” to rest, to reflect, to eat a lot. Yet Helen is still scurrying around the house, draping old dish towels over the mirrors in order to keep out the spirits and discourage vanity (but mostly, I think, to show off in front of the rabbi). When we finally get hold of her, her eyes are wide and panicky, her full face drawn together into a fierce look of concern.

“Sit,” we say, but she never listens, either, just like Mr. G. She
has
to clean the powder room toilet before company arrives.

At sundown in Helen’s house we all stand in a circle and say a prayer we do not know in a language we cannot understand. Helen’s face is serious as the rabbi sings the lilting Hebrew and the rest of us stumble through the English translation in what appear to be purple Prayer Books for Dummies. I am sitting on the steps with my little cousins, four and six and seven years of age, their newly acquired Hebrew in perfect unison. I am struck by the conviction of their Hebrew school educations (an education I never had), and I say a silent prayer for my brother and for the cousins, too—a prayer that this faith will be more sustaining for them than the one I am struggling to erect for myself.

But it feels good to stand with family, friends, and some strangers, and say a prayer of something, out loud, together. We say it for him.

VIII

2006.

We are visiting Irving at the nursing home, the whole family. The staff is throwing a hula party where we all dress up in grass skirts and bright leis to dance to quick beats and loose rhythms—the nurses and the families, and his favorite gal, nurse Jane, with the green smock and the ice cream spoon. I
dance in front of Irving. I am lip-synching to Jimmy Buffet and Irving is thinking
oy gevalt, crazy girl, what’s her name
—or is it just flashes of color sweeping across his blank, blue eyes? Eric has dressed him in an old Eagles’ jersey. We are devoted football fans. The shirt is baggy on Irving and reaches his knees, but Eric likes this and says, “Poppop’s chillin’.”

Eric is eighteen now, a popular high school senior. He uses vocabulary that he learns from rap songs and tries it out on Irving, who is inspecting his new shirt. Mom and I dance while Helen chats up the nurses. Mom is a better dancer than I am and she knows it. She has more rhythm. She does a slow tango with herself, one hand on her stomach and the other arm draped over an imaginary partner. An old man in a military jacket wants to know if I’ve seen Agnes. A nurse starts to feed him a virgin margarita through a straw and he sucks hard and smiles and licks his lips.

“How’s my love, Mr. G?” Helen says, covering her husband’s hand with hers.

I keep dancing and reach toward him, bringing my palms to rest on his cheeks. Beneath the blare of that old radio, the silence still stings. Rather than suffer the indignities of his mistakes, it seemed Irving made the decision not to speak at all. It happened early on and almost overnight. I pull at his cheeks, then press them together to purse his lips.
Smack
—a kiss—and I swear he’s smiled; wondered at that nose, that freckle; said my name. We are dancing to a restoration that will never come, swaying to a lost identity. But for now, he
is slumped over the wheelchair handlebars and drooling onto his lap, holding my hand, and watching his family dance this dance, this dance, this dance, this dance.

How long?

Three to twelve seconds. There to here.

TWO TINY MOUTHS
emerge from a bed of hay and sticks and yellowed leaves, brown beaks chomping on desiccated air. Black eyes blink frantically. The new hawks swallow the dust that rises in plumes from a dry nest as they beat their wings and scuttle their webbed feet. Their mother tucks her chin to her breast and nibbles at an insect burrowing into her feathers. She lifts her head to the sky. A cloud stutters in front of the midday sun and there is a second of shadow and chill and the yellow electric tinge of danger. She is completely still.

A great wind moves suddenly and the big hawk shudders and heaves, her long neck expanding and contracting, her bird-boned shoulders pressing back tightly. Her head moves in rapid, twitching circles. Stiffened wings beat quickly against her swollen flank and the two young hawks caw wildly in anticipation of food, careening forward and over one another, mouths ajar. With one final downward thrust, the mother
hawk inserts her curved beak into a waiting mouth and deposits a churned, milky stream of food. The little bird chokes and spits its breakfast to the ground.

My mother sifts through an oversized pocketbook. She digs past a fat wallet stuffed with credit cards, a smattering of wrinkled business cards (her own and others), ChapSticks and lighters and loose tobacco and empty pill bottles. She pulls out the soft, green corduroy case that contains her glass pipe and a big bag of good pot.

We sit on her back patio at dusk: Eric, Mom, and me. This is where we land whenever I am in limbo, between moves or jobs or schools; we collect like tumbleweeds into the hollow of the backyard. We hunker down like weatherworn old men, sated for a moment with warm food and red wine and an old familiarity that settles the heart. We drink and tell stories and smoke cigarettes. This night, in 2007, is August warm and the sky is beginning to darken, heavy on our shoulders like a navy blanket. My brother takes a long pull from the bowl, prodding expertly at the hot orange bud with the corner of his red lighter. His brow is furrowed, and as he exhales there is a moment when his face softens and his eyes roll back and he is no longer twenty-one but six, or five, or three, before he has learned the plain facts of death and disease and the self-sabotaging brain.

I have just returned from a summer spent studying at Oxford after three weeks of traveling alone in Scotland and so
I start to tell them about midnight on the Isle of Skye, off the western coast of Scotland, which in June means wet fog and violet skies and loud pubs that pulsate with the heavy trill of local fiddlers. Neither Eric nor my mother has ever left the States so I am being especially specific, as if I could transfer the memories directly, as if I could give them away like postcards.

“Yeah, that’s cool,” Eric says. “That’s real cool. I’ve been on a trip, too—a real trip. To the psycho doctor. And I am now the proud owner of a bipolar diagnosis!” He pauses to light the bowl. “The guy said it like I won something.” Eric lowers his chin, exhales, and clears his throat. “‘And with your family history . . . Yep, you’ve got it, kid!’”

“Well, we can see how he’s taken to the art of self-medicating,” says my mother.

The three of us shrug and nod and take long sips from stemmed glasses. I haven’t lived at home for nearly six years. I’ve never lived in this house, actually, the farmhouse that looms behind us, our mother’s dream home, which she bought the year after I left for college when the real estate bubble had not yet burst, when she was still making money. The farmhouse blocks the noise of traffic and the bushes obscure the strip mall that has taken over the land that once comprised the farm’s acreage, many decades ago. On nights like this, when the parking lot has gone still and the day’s business has ended, we are able to pretend the safety lights still burning at Genuardi’s Supermarket are pieces of the moon and the deer crunching over dead leaves are after fallen stalks of corn, and not the rubbish overflowing the dumpsters. Illusions like these
are what keep us coming back together; we are practiced in the art of pretend. We are able to convince ourselves that drinking and smoking are incidental, and not part of the fabric of our family, of the shared anxieties that causes us, each to varying degrees, to feel so dissatisfied with our own brain chemistry. We are trying to return to a place of innocence, to the time before, when Mother could still keep us safe.

We keep trying, but morning light is unforgiving.

In Oxford, I am studying Pre-Raphaelitism and Decadence, which means I am doing a lot of thinking about parlors and flagellation and Japanese kimono prints. But I am also thinking about the uncanny. What Freud defines as “that class of frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”
Unheimlich
, in German. A word that means unfamiliar,
not home
, but also unconcealed, what is revealed. A word that moves in circles until it finally coincides with its opposite,
heimlich
, belonging to the house.
Home
. But it would be incorrect to assume that only the unfamiliar is frightening. The uncanny is the red swell of recognition, the buried obsession, the glossy vaginal folds, the former
heim
. Yes, this
is
terrifying, we decide, and off we run.

After three months, I am travel-weary and punch-drunk on paint, lost in Rossetti’s blues and the pink tongues of Persephone’s pomegranate seeds. I am leaving Oxford’s museums thinking that the whole world is
now in HD satellite picture!
like a big joke, a commercial’s refrain having somehow mixed in my mind with the clarity of those images. This happens sometimes when I’ve been left to my own devices for a while, roaming foreign countries alone like some empty, vaporous disciple, rootless and hungry.

Between loneliness and exhilaration is a bit of madness, too. I have a trick up my sleeve. I am able to convince myself that I am unattached—come from nowhere, headed nowhere—without a home. Here, I subsist on worship, but my mother’s God never came for me. Instead of spirits and symbols, I kneel to the crooked trees and the yellow ageless finch, the silver and sallow riverbed that winds wanly through an old village, which is ashen and crumbling and useless. Every strange face is suddenly familiar, as if from long ago, and every train heads in the right direction.

When I call my mother from a pay phone she tells me to get my shit together and hangs up. It’s a good idea, I think, except that in the morning I tripped over my own feet, landing chest first on the stone steps of the Bodleian Library, my left breast now swollen to twice its normal cup size. Purple-red flesh capsizing over the edges of a black lace bra. I wonder why I missed out on my mother’s level-headedness, which gene got pinched.

In truth, I tell her, I might be too far gone.

At night we gather in the Trinity College dining hall for a supper of fish and chips and something vaguely broccoli-ish, all soaked in buttery Hollandaise sauce. The warm white room pulses like a fever—hot skin of the eager, the underdressed. Grim portraits line the walls; under the accusing scowls of
long-dead deans and bishops and moneyed benefactors, we sit and twitch and shift. We pull at thin dresses or khaki shorts and discreetly wipe away the sweat beneath our knees.