We loved him instantly, though for different reasons, and followed him everywhere that night, hiding behind the felt partitions and whispering fantasies that again involved desert fires and a guitar, this modern-day Indian chief our own personal deity now, some munificent daddy sent to show us the way. If Jordan’s fantasy involved the lure of sexual tutelage, mine was just the opposite. I was after the press of the paternal, some utterly chaste discipline I sought out everywhere, anywhere. The truth is, we were vulnerable in those days, our minds all sweet and custardy from too many drugs, overwhelmed by the theater of the senses. We made a good show of normalcy when we needed to, but most of the time we retreated into our own basement novella and held on for dear life.
IT IS LATE June when I enter the dark tunnel that leads into Woody’s Bar, and I am a woman on a mission. It has been three years since I’ve seen my friend. My mother and I have come from a restaurant down the street. I’ve just graduated from college and returned to Philadelphia for a few weeks. We are celebrating my impending move to New York and also the sale of a big property my mother had listed for months. Real estate has been painfully slow, but business is starting to pick up and she is hopeful for the first time in a long time. I know this not because she tells me, but because she is laughing at my jokes and her eyes flutter girlishly in the candlelight.
When I first see Woody’s familiar red sign, I am startled. I almost forgot about it. I’d heard rumors that Jordan recently started bartending here and we decide to stop in. We are not—we agree to this on penalty of death—out to save him again.
We find him at the upstairs bar and watch for a while before he sees us. He moves quickly and confidently, no longer a boy agog. I see that he feels more secure, rooted and blossomed, but with the same nervous energy shuddering just below the surface. My mother holds my hand and I know we look like lesbians, given the context. There is a man watching Jordan make drinks. He leans on the bar, discreetly running a gaze down Jordan’s white neck, flat chest, and narrow waist, his short, thin legs wrapped tightly in pale denim. The man yells to be heard above the music.
“This drink is weak, sweetie!” he says.
Jordan snatches the drink from across the bar. I imagine the chilled glass feeling good on his chapped lips. He swallows the rest of the lime-green concoction and grins.
“No,” says Jordan, “it’s just fine.”
The man says nothing. He watches Jordan bend for another bottle of Stoli, then lays a five-dollar bill on the counter and begins to write something at the top. Jordan pockets the money without noticing.
“Well, he’s alive,” my mother says.
We are huddled in a corner. For a moment, I think we are going to turn around, to scurry down those graffiti-laden stairs and step back out into the alley, relieved. This boy breaks hearts and I am afraid.
The music is heavy techno, the sort of thing that my mother hates. She once told us that club music sounds like shrapnel hitting a rainbow. At the time, we laughed so hard Jordan spewed ginger ale from his nose. Now, I think she may have had a point. It feels like the music is trying to beat itself out inside me, to exhaust an energy I cannot contain. I haven’t been in a club for years. I feel world-weary and I’m only twenty-two. I look over and Jordan has spotted us, two ridiculous mother-hens tittering in a corner. He turns suddenly, like he hasn’t seen us, and begins to needlessly align the liquor bottles, turning them so that their labels face out. I see his hands shake. I see him wipe his nose with the bar towel. I see him muss with his hair, which is in a mohawk now, and take a deep breath. I know what these gestures signify—he isn’t done with the coke.
“I’ve been meaning to call,” he says as we approach the bar.
“Oh, please,” my mother says. “Make me a martini, will you?”
Jordan fills a silver shaker with ice, retrieves the bottle of Grey Goose from its spot on the shelf, and pours for a long while. She must look older to him now. She’s put on weight; the freckles have grown darker and more pronounced. Lines have begun to wend their way across her face. I don’t know how I look. My hair is dark and swept up instead of long and blond. My clothes have gotten more tailored, I suppose, and less tight. I try to do a credible impression of a model citizen, the professional young woman, but I suspect he sees through all that. He pours me a glass of Malbec and leans over to kiss me on the cheek.
“How’s Eric?” he says.
“Back at home. Stable for the moment.”
“You graduated?”
“Yes, sir.”
A man yells, his long-blond-haired head poking up from behind my mother’s shoulder, “What’s on draft?”
Jordan pours a Budweiser and hands it to him.
“Take this on the house,” he says. “All we got tonight, honey.”
The man winks, hands him a twenty. My mother looks around, as if just now realizing that she’s out of her element. She begins to stare. I believe she thinks this is good for Jordan, better for him than her blue-shuttered suburban home, quiet neighborhood, and golden retriever. Nothing wrong with learning a little self-reliance. I know she’s not angry, even though she misses him, misses smoking cigarettes on the back porch and giggling like kids.
Jordan works around us, answering questions in mumbles. Mom sits patiently, running her fingernail over breaks in the wood, turning her head to watch men kiss one another, intrigued. Jordan gives her pretzels and she nibbles through the whole bowl.
“Did I get fat?” asks Jordan. But my mother doesn’t hear. “Mom! Did I get fatter?”
She looks him up and down. “Thinner, if that’s possible,” she says.
“You guys look great,” Jordan says. He bites at his thumb. “Do you hate me?”
“I’m too old to hate,” my mother says.
“Another drink?” We nod.
He serves a few more drinks to other customers, sliding down the length of the bar, flipping bottles, pouring mini shots into plastic cups and swallowing them down. Men tip him generously. He shoves the bills into his back pocket, winks, and pulses his hips to the last beats of music. The strobe lights have settled down and, just like prom, the DJ puts on one last slow dance. Some people get up from their tables, bleary-eyed and groping for their partners. A few drag queens crowd around a window with their cigarettes, talking quietly and blowing smoke rings that hang in the air like halos. An older man remains perpetually at the end of the bar, nursing a whiskey and speaking in tongues. His bottom lip is bleeding and I watch Jordan dampen a napkin and give it to him, pointing to the spot. There is a gold and phallic chandelier dangling in the center of the dance floor. It projects tiny dots of color that alight on the skin of the dancers, on their damp cheeks and arms. A spot of blue plays inside a young man’s belly button. I’ve been sitting too long and move out into the revelers with my glass of wine. I hear Jordan laugh as one of the queens takes my hand and twirls me around, then pulls me close to her. She smells like citrus and cloves, like the shed I used to play in at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid, the bags of peat moss piled high like a castle wall. A plume of purple feathers sticks out from the bodice of her dress and they tickle my cheek as she dips me back in her arms. We do a little do-si-do. Look at Mom, all smiles and good intentions, her hands folded in front of her as if in prayer. Beyond her is my old friend, clasped tightly in someone’s arms, his head on the man’s shoulder. They dance slowly, an impromptu love affair, a moment’s pardon from all that has passed and all that is to come.
THE PRESENT
The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone . . . No, the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I
1998.
In the beginning, he does not remember switches and directions. To blow his
nose. To wash. Irving gives up napkins; he wipes his mouth with his sleeve. He pees on the floor. He farts in public, but louder than before. He chews with his mouth open. At this Helen hollers and we cringe and laugh, laugh at age and its particular idiosyncrasies.
When is the beginning?
When I still measure time by cracks in the sidewalk.
How long?
From here to the crack that looks like a volcano and back again.
On my bike or running fast?
On my bike, and as if I don’t have to get off to walk it across the street.
Nights at Mom’s office are longer than that even, after she quits bartending and starts selling real estate with our maternal grandmother, Helen. It is like going to the crack with the dandelions at the top of the hill and back again three hundred times. We’re here almost every night. It’s called Tornetta Realty Corp., and we like all the men named Tornetta, especially Frank, who looks like a ship’s captain with his white beard and cigar. Eric and I are supposed to do our homework in the break room upstairs, around the corner from the office Mom shares with Helen, but instead we creep downstairs where the lights are off and all the desks are empty. We play hide-and-go-seek, but Eric always hides in the cubicle with the Hershey’s Kisses, so it isn’t much fun after a while. I stuff all the neon-colored paper clips into my backpack and use other people’s highlighters to decorate my shoes. If the secretary, old Barb, is still there, she’ll take us for rides in her little blue convertible while we play with the radio and she smokes long skinny cigarettes and talks about being alone.
Sometimes our grandfather, Irving, picks us up and takes us to Burger King, or else he makes bananas ’n’ cream and I fetch the Tastykakes from the freezer in the garage. This is when kids don’t eat organic anything, before he forgets how to talk. This is when the world is no bigger than the space between home and the creek bed, and phone numbers don’t have area codes. When a stray Barbie leg still occasionally pops up through the couch cushions. When I can work myself into a panic just by thinking about death.
How long?
Forever.
Never coming back?
Never, never, never.
This is when Lawrence Welk comes on at eight and Irving uses the remote as a baton while we yodel like the Lennon Sisters. When the three of us whine every time Mom and Helen start talking real estate.
No more real estate! we cry out.
No more kvetching! they holler back.
Helen calls Irving “Mr. G” and he calls her “Mrs. G.” This is when they are feeling fond.
“What’s for big D, Mrs. G?” he asks.
He is one of those guys who retired early and can take off his thumb and see zoo animals in your ears. He makes ugly faces when Mrs. G turns her back and I giggle years after I no longer find it funny. He is as dependable as Saturday morning cartoons. He falls asleep in his Barcalounger ten minutes after he turns on the TV. He sneaks Reese’s Pieces from a cabinet under the bar and slips them into our cupped hands when the women aren’t looking. Half his retirement is spent grocery shopping and walking the mall before it opens at nine. He looks like a giraffe when he walks, lumbering, all limbs. He travels only when Helen makes him, and even then it’s only to the Jersey Shore, where he can pace the boardwalk and keep an eye on the grandkids flailing recklessly in the surf.
Their house is on the corner of Red Rowen Lane, across from the elementary school where I used to chase boys, where my mother used to chase boys, where she once caught one by the scruff and said, “How about a kiss, big boy?” It’s a split-level home, built during the housing boom of the sixties, with the Philadelphia skyline squinting in the distance. Until a few years ago, the furniture was still wrapped in plastic. The dining room is a celebration of Japanese tchotchkes and the floors are covered in plush beige carpet. Helen collects Swarovski crystal figurines. She gets them as gifts for every birthday and on every night of every Chanukah. To me, they are the most delicate and expensive gifts ever and I covet their tiny ruby eyes, the glinting sapphire stems and leaves. Glass seahorses and teddy bears line the windowsills, and hearts and pink roses fill a mirrored display case that hangs collecting dust in the living room.
Their house is the most beautiful place in the world, and the safest. We sleep over every time our daddy goes “off the nut,” though we don’t yet know what that means exactly. It is big and cozy and every room is its own universe. I like the master bathroom best, with the mirrors on every wall that let you see back into forever. A million little mes. As in, there’s me a hundred years ago, tiny as can be, wearing the same dumb purple shirt. And then there’s the shower like a Whac-A-Mole game; water spews from any one of nine different nozzles, and you never know which one will turn on next.
When we spend the night, Irving lets us fall asleep watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In the morning, he paces the hallway in front of the guest room and pokes his head in the doorway every few minutes, checking to see if we are awake, if we are breathing. Through half-closed eyes, I see his face flash blue and red in the television light.
“Let them sleep, Irv!” I hear Helen call up the stairs, but he never listens.
I squeeze my eyes shut and pray to fall back under, lonely for my dreams. During breakfast, Eric sits on his lap and I trace the scabs on the top of his bald head. I am going through a rare skinny phase and he pinches my ribs woefully, shaking his head. His hands are as big as baseball gloves. If he were my father, I’d be fat and safe, like a caterpillar in her cocoon. Later, in the laundry room, my mother trims the thin strip of white hair that rings his scalp from ear to ear and I sit on the washing machine, watching. It’s been her job for as long as I can remember and I think of myself as her apprentice. She dances as she works, drumming on the top of his head and snapping along to a song no one else can hear. She clips his nose hairs with the trimmer and he sneezes and swats her away like a cranky child.
“Hold still,” she says, sitting on his knees and cupping his chin with her other hand.
“Hold still,” I say from the washing machine.
II
In India, there is a tale of memory and a man. The man, a yogi, is lost, and in his wanderings he falls in love with a queen. He is besotted by her beauty, so enamored that he follows her to her kingdom and stays—forgetting all about his convictions of understanding and of purity. Finally, on a journey into the spirit world, a devoted disciple learns of his master’s enslavement and becomes convinced that this memory loss will cause the yogi’s death. Desperate to cure his loved one of this spell of amnesia, the student scours the Book of Fates in the realm of death and determinedly erases his master’s name from the list of the dead. With little time remaining, the student then flees to find his master in Ceylon and, disguised as a dancing girl, sings and dances until the afflicted man is finally returned to himself—his memory restored and his faith and identity replenished.
Science tells a different story of memory, though it is no less enrapturing, no less mystical. It starts with our origins in the ocean and it reveals a reliance on the salts of such tremulous beginnings. The neurons that become so tangled in an Alzheimer’s patient are what allow memories to be developed in the first place. They receive signals from outside the body, a tiny shiver of charge. And yet, it is the balance of salts within these tiny neural threads that cause the charges, and the firings back and forth. In their own complex and symphonic way, the neurons create a summary report of their activity. This summary is what we feel as experience—and memory.
III
2007.
This is the end of a life: a man in a box. The lid is ajar and an electric light beats down on his forehead. This man is old and bald and thin, thinner now than ever before. He wears a dated suit, the one with the pale-blue satin vest that he wore to two daughters’ weddings. His hands are crossed over his stomach. There is a thick coat of liquid foundation over the deep purple bruises that spread from his bulbous knuckles to his child-sized wrists. His face is p
ainted on, the earlobes swollen stiff with embalming fluid. There are six white hairs sprouting from his left ear. His chin bears a wash of new, spiky white stubble. There are thirty-one people here. I counted. Twice.
IV
In the end, he does not remember being thirteen, waking at dawn and tossing a heavy wool blanket to the floor. He does not remember the sweat and the impatient bleating of the milkman’s horse or the clanking of bottles on the porch below his window. His mother calling him for breakfast in Yiddish, iberbaysn, her voice loud through the thin walls of their narrow row home in Philadelphia. He does not remember the leather belt he stole from the bedroom of a heavyset neighborhood pal named Frank. Chiseling the extra notch through its thick skin with his father’s pen knife, his pants drooping anyhow. He does not remember when he began to introduce himself as Frank to the local Italian storeowners because he was certain they weren’t hiring him because he was a Jew. At sixteen, canning soup at the Campbell’s Soup factory across the river in New Jersey. Giving all his wages to his father. Relinquishing their home to the bank anyhow, for the sake of $300. He does not remember losing his virginity to a neighborhood hooker and the bruises on her thighs. His tiny apartment in South Philadelphia that he shared with his first wife, Stella, who drank gin and tonics until morning and beat on his chest with her red fists. Finding out she was sleeping with his best friend.
He pretended not to remember the two children from their marriage. (And I never learn to reconcile these two ideas of him—the devoted father, the absent one.)
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 6
