Here we’d sit, waiting.
It is overcast today and the ocean wind blows back at us a warning. Palm trees shudder, a hint of sex, a flash of Mother Nature’s fleshy thigh. In this light, I see now that Eric is going bald, fallibility rising to the surface. He digs his heels into the sand until his toes find water. I can see it, Little Brother; almost there—China. I watch desire working on his jaw, appetite gnawing every joint. He cannot sit still. Here, I want to scream, is my surgeon’s blade. Hold still and I’ll cut the sickness out of every bone and suck them clean. Yours, mine. Here it is; here, I have it.
Run.
Finally, Jeff gets up and says he has to get back to work. He washes dishes at a nearby restaurant. “My son needs a job,” my mother blurts out. “Could you find him a job?” She is pleading, though I know it had not been her intention. Eric looks away, embarrassed.
“Sorry, man,” Jeff says, and we can see that he is. “I’m lucky I got myself a job.” He picks up his duffel bag and slings it over a broad, tanned shoulder. He looks over at me, slumping under the towel, staring and vacant. A job. Don’t I have one of those somewhere? My own little plot to tend? His expression changes as he realizes what’s really going on here, that this isn’t just some half-baked family reunion, some pleasure cruise through the tropics, the three of us squatting on this beach, sans bathing suits and suntan lotion, mid-August in Florida, for God’s sake, shivering in our sweat, bug-eyed from exhaustion.
This is not where we ought to be, beating our brains against the rocks on this shore and then standing back to survey the wreckage, wondering dumbly where we went wrong. We are not helping him, are we? Free dinners and a new pair of jeans won’t do the trick. There is no reviving this horse, no A for effort, no stopping the ocean—be it so inclined—from reaching out right now and breaking our scrawny necks in two.
“You should get that fever checked out,” Jeff says to me, turning to walk back up the beach. And then I, too, almost beg him to stay.
Later, we walk back to the motel, Eric leading us through the pearlescent, shrink-wrapped streets of Delray Beach, past the spit-shined bistros and fusion taquerias, feathery sago palms wrapped in hot white lights and poised, sentry-like, on every patio. Waiters stand in air-conditioned entranceways, pressed and tucked, surveying orders and women’s formidable pumps. These women, I notice, totter, too.
And then on into the pink slums, where everything is shredded, jacked, and naked, and we feel free to come undone.
Another year passes—August to August—a year of rehabs, relapses, and incarcerations. A year of purgatory, a year of waiting for the death that never quite comes, but comes close so many times I nearly go mad. Our mother wears her grief like a slit gown. August 26, 2011. One last visit before I move to Vermont. She and I walk side by side on the New Jersey coastline, listening to the alarms howling in the distance, demanding our immediate departure in the days before what is supposed to be a devastating hurricane. Irene, they call her, and we hum her tune. Come on, Irene. We want to stay on, but evacuation orders eventually drive us from the tiny barrier island and back to our own homes, hundreds of miles apart. We have been living so long under the threat of disaster that its physical manifestation would be a relief, I think. We might welcome the winds and stand open-armed and knock-kneed while she weeps at our feet and shoves glass down our throats. Why the cutters cut and the jumpers jump and the junkies drive needles through their hearts, and why, one night in early August, I drink every drop of alcohol I can find in my cupboards and then vomit violently—that we might find a pain we can name and point to and say, This is it.
Irene comes and goes.
We wake. My mother, my brother, and me. We wake and wake and wake. Give it to God, they say, that the curtains might close.
NOTES ON THE NEVER ENDING
OCTOBER 10, 2011.
My mother picks Eric up from the halfway house in Northeast Philly where he’s been staying. It is 10 AM. The halfway house is the right side of a narrow duplex. Houses brick and broken. Next to the halfway house is the crack house. Next to the crack house is the whorehouse. Next to the whorehouse is a family with two adorable little girls. There is a picnic table beside the halfway house with a single clematis vine wrapped around its base. The second- and third-floor windows have bars. It is not a boisterous block. People don’t gather on stoops or around the open doors of parked cars. Music isn’t coming from windows or boom boxes; women aren’t shouting. With the exception of the men from the halfway house, who sit on top of the picnic table and smoke, the few people on the street move quickly and deliberately.
You go about your business and you get gone.
As my mother idles out front, men wander in and out of the screen door, letting it slam against the doorframe every time. She watches for her son’s face somewhere in this procession of baggy clothes and hunched shoulders. These are men from everywhere, of all ages. Men with dirty fingernails, mostly, and scraggly facial hair, and receding hairlines. Men with a sense of humor. Men without jobs. Men who make each other spaghetti at night. Men who watch movies in groups of ten, sitting on a sofa, stretched out on the floor. Fat men and very skinny men. Levi’s and baseball caps. Transient men without lovers. Or men with ex-wives and children far away. They are as familiar to her as her ex-husband, and now, as her own child. She grew up with these men and these men stuck around. She thinks she knows these men well, how they think and why they do what they do.
It is tempting to put all of these men into a box and watch them not even try to get out. It is tempting to impose your expectations on them and watch them not care. It is tempting not to look at your own failures, which are often so fucking ordinary.
Eric plans to stay for a few days. Though he claims to be sober, he is not well. He is having trouble sleeping. He is depressed and lonely. He’d called our mother in hysterics last night and she agreed to pick him up, though she’s nervous about it. He tends to unravel when he is with her. There is always the possibility of a scene or a relapse or that he will steal something of hers and use the money for drugs. Still, why should she not pick up her child in his time of need?
Wouldn’t she do the same for Jess? he’d argued.
She would.
And wouldn’t she do whatever it took to help her child? Her child?
Yes.
And without evidence he’s been using, has she any right to accuse him?
She does not.
She takes Eric to the psychiatrist so that he might get some medication to help with his unbearable anxiety and depression, to a doctor who has treated our whole family at one time or another, a man well into his eighties and unprepared to deal with the history of an addict and a convict. It is one o’clock in the afternoon. He knew our father. He knows our grandfather. He’s met us both before.
The doctor is wearing two different shoes today, Eric tells her later in the car—one black, one brown.
These details, all of these details—this is what I do not want to know anymore. Every story about Eric has an arc that threatens to catapult me into oblivion. I have to get off the ride. I watch the way these years have laid into my mother’s body like an abusive lover; the ecstatic highs of his wellness and the crashing lows of his relapses. Who can stand this shit? Who would lie down only to be bullwhipped across the heart? Do it enough and you’re apt to forget how else to be. That’s you, the woman on the floor. There, still red from prayer.
I miss my brother. I love my brother, but I can’t be near him. I pack my bags and keep my eyes on the ground, only glancing back.
After my mother brings Eric home from the psychiatrist’s office, they have dinner and watch a movie. Eric sprawls on the sofa and gently pets the dog, who lies heavy on his feet. I call around 11 PM. “Oh, and how are you?” she asks, careful not to suggest the real reason for my call, as if I am in the habit of calling so late just to chat.
I need to know that everything is okay, that he’s there, alive, and not breaking shit. I r
elapse sometimes, too.
Nick sits beside me on our bed and kisses my throat anxiously, needful. I should hang up the phone. I should turn to him. I should take off my pants and give myself over, but I can’t, not yet.
She hands the phone to Eric. He tells me that I am in trouble, that he’s spoken to our paternal grandfather, Harry, and he’s very angry that I never call him. I can tell that Eric is delighting in my misbehavior, relieved that for once it isn’t him in the hot seat.
“He’s our grandfather, Jess. For God’s sake, the man has cancer and he’s lonely. He’s sitting at home right now reading a book about Poland. We can at least call him once a month.”
He’s right, of course, and all of my reasons for not calling disintegrate beside these simple facts. He sounds like the adult, and I enjoy arguing with him and losing. He is being mature and I am not. I even take a little pleasure in his reprimands. It feels good to hear him be the voice of reason, even if I don’t like what he is saying.
When I call him for our grandfather’s number the next morning, Eric’s phone is off.
I’m not sure what makes my mother suggest to Eric that he ask for Ativan, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety. I suppose it is the desperation in his face, his trembling hands as he lights one cigarette after another. Whatever her reasons, Eric returns from the doctor’s office with a prescription for Ativan.
My mother sleeps soundly that night for the first time in weeks. Eric starts to feel better.
“My heart has finally stopped pounding,” he tells her shortly before bed.
It is a warm night for early spring. She coughs her smoker’s cough; the fan blows over her through the night. At dawn, she kicks at her blankets, coughs, and turns over. The dogs doze beside her bed. Around eight, she hears Eric coming up the stairs and smells smoke from his cigarette. He is mumbling to himself and she bolts upright.
October 11, 2011.
Nick and I are searching on the Internet for a place to rent in Vermont. He’s been offered a job at the University of Vermont. He is not fond of Connecticut anymore, and not persuaded by the quick access to New York City on the Metro-North. I don’t blame him, but I can’t find work in Vermont, even while I love the idea. I’m reluctant to give up my modest-paying but secure teaching job at a nearby college. I can’t commit to moving again. I can’t decide. We search through the photos of mountainside bungalows and converted barns. Everything broken charms me. I like the vaulted ceilings with cracked beams, the wide wooden siding gone soft with age. Nick scoffs at the way I romanticize the dilapidated and scans through the fine print for utilities and maintenance costs. I will forgive a lack of indoor plumbing if the view is right. He won’t go near a place with oil heat. Since I haven’t said for certain if I’m moving, he has the say-so and I’m pouting. We take a break and walk around the corner for sandwiches. We’re not talking much these days and it is wonderful. Instead, we listen to the ocean slam against the piles of empty oyster shells collecting by the docks, and the sizzle as it recedes. Metal casings clink against the masts of docked sailboats like wind chimes. These are my father’s sounds, and for a moment I wonder what he’d counsel.
“Eric? What’s going on?” she says.
“I can’t,” Eric says to Mom softly, “I can’t find the cherry on my cigarette.”
She gets up and opens the door. He stands there stooped, a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers, and she sees that everything has gone awry, suddenly and again.
She sits him on the sofa and says, “I’m making eggs.”
His bottle of Ativan is almost empty. He must have taken over twelve. Plus a handful of Unisom, he admits. While she tries to find a pan, she listens to Eric ramble in the living room.
“I said Lexapro. I said my mother and sister both take Lexapro and Ativan. Must be the family cure,” he says, “must be the family cure.”
For whatever reason, this is the loop that sticks and he says it over and over, staring into a glass of water, curls of dog hair floating on top. Must be the family cure, must be the family cure.
I run errands all morning, preparing for our move to Vermont. “Forget work,” Nick had said finally, late one night and after hours of conversation, the most we’d spoken in weeks. “You’ll sit in that cabin and finish your fucking book. As long as it takes. We’ll work it out.” I knew he was right. The cabin we’ve rented is on the lake and so small we won’t be able to entertain. This is fine with Nick. The view obliterates rational thought, which I consider good for the soul. Vermont is an eight-hour drive or a two-hour flight from Philadelphia. I can be in my cabin in Vermont and make it to a Philadelphia hospital in four hours, give or take. I consider this line of thinking bad for the soul, and look forward to morning coffee in front of the lakeside window. When I talk to my mother now she is enmeshed in Eric’s daily dramas—his breakups and job losses and missing IDs and parole violations and backaches and lies and bowel movements and money woes and yet another girl’s possibly positive pregnancy test. She pays his rent at the halfway house when she knows she should not. She buys his cigarettes and fills his cupboards with nonperishable food items. She takes him to his court hearings and to the methadone clinic. She calls me and says she has to have a cancer removed from her lip. She calls and says she has bronchitis. She calls and says she has a fractured knee. She calls and says she has shingles. She calls and I cringe.
Mom dumps the half-fried eggs in the trash and walks upstairs to call an ambulance. Eric protests weakly from the sofa. She does not panic. She does not yell. She moves slowly and purposefully. Seconds after she hangs up the phone the sirens begin to trill in the distance. She comes back downstairs. Eric looks up at her.
“I guess I should put on my shoes,” he says.
Maybe I worry about stasis because it fails to distract me from whatever is looming in my family’s future. Nick is nothing if not static, content, solid. I would like to sit still for a while. By a window. In Vermont. It’s tough. Eric’s relapses ring like a keening bell and I either sit still and listen or get loud.
Flap, flap, flap, I say to Nick. Do something! I cry. Move!
Every time the phone rings, I panic. Every time the phone rings, Eric is dead.
The sirens grow louder and closer. A spring day hurtles on. But here, right now, the kitchen smells of fried eggs and Windex and the refrigerator hums. The wooden floors are sun-warmed and Eric blinks, his eyes like jelly, black and pink. I am asleep, three hundred and eighty-four miles north and splayed naked, Nick’s breath on my neck and my cell phone under my pillow. It won’t ring, mercifully, for another three hours.
An ambulance arrives. The police come with the ambulance, standard protocol. A warrant is located; who knows what this one is for? A cop apologizes to my mother. They’ll have to take him in. Handcuffs are drawn slowly from a cop’s thick black belt. Eric hunches over on the front stoop. The dogs clamber over themselves to get to his lap, to lick his chin. Back to jail. Back to jail. Back, back, back.
“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck.” The cop is gentle. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “He’s sick,” she says. “Please don’t take him. He’s sick.”
“Your son is very polite,” the cop says. “They’re not usually so polite.”
“Please don’t be mad,” Eric whispers into our mother’s ear.
She hugs him.
“Please don’t count this as a relapse,” he begs. “I had eight months.”
Like hell, she thinks.
“Yes,” she says.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says. “This isn’t a relapse.”
“Yes,” she says. “Okay.”
And for the first time, she lets him go.
That night, Nick and I take a walk. He holds my hand. We watch people stumble in and out of bars. We watch the lights change: red, yellow, green. We are tired, but content. We ate well. Eric is in jail, but alive.
In the morning, Nick will load his U-Haul with six boxes and an air mattress and drive to our cabin in Vermo
nt. He’ll start his new job as a health care researcher and I will finish up the semester at the State University of New York, where I’ve been teaching for the past year and a half. I’ll join him on New Year’s Day, driving out of our old neighborhood through the sea of confetti lapping at the streets. On the highway, the landscape changes slowly, then all at once. My little truck strains to climb the steep inclines, then barrels down and down with abandon. Mountains charge into the clouds on either side of the empty road. Driving alone, I feel cradled inside something both tender and cruel. I watch the temperature gauge on the truck’s dashboard tick down the degrees, one every ten minutes or so. I turn off the radio. I smooth my hair and adjust my gaping sweater, as if it matters. My foot flattens the gas pedal as I try to push the truck up another mountainside, beside a crevasse draped in daggers of ice.
THE END OF THE EARTH
MID-FEBRUARY, 2012, AND Mallets Bay is frozen over, the small enclave of Lake Champlain that stretches out in front of our cabin in Vermont like a slow yawn. I spend the better part of an hour listening to the mice tittering in the walls. When Nick gets home from work he opens up an electrical socket, places a hunk of cheese into a trash bag, and tapes the bag around the hole. He doesn’t care—he hates cheese—but my heart breaks a little. For three hours, we entertain ourselves by listening to the mice scurry in and out of the bag, absconding with my good Piave. I squeal every time I hear the rustling, until finally Nick closes off the bag and scoops its contents into a drinking glass. The mouse blinks rapidly and then settles back to gaze at us with bored resignation.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 15
