If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (12 page)

On the bus, I sit next to a curious man named Lin who wants to show me his very elaborate cell phone, which I cannot understand even after several demonstrations. He wants to know why I am on this bus with them—Why am I here? Where am I going?—and I try to tell him about the summer program at a British university and the rail pass that lets me wander the United Kingdom at will, and we try so hard to communicate that by the time the bus lurches to a stop I am no longer sure how I’ve gotten here myself. We stop in the middle of the road and I am almost certain that we have not made it to the island’s unofficial capital, a seaside town called Portree. Graeme slams
the bus into park and leaves us without a word, the open door shivering on rickety hinges as the wind continues to blow. We cannot see him through the windshield, opaque with fog. I hear him grunt once—“Shite”—as he stomps back onto the bus to gather a pair of muddy gloves from beneath the driver’s seat. He faces us.

“Sheep,” he says, and stomps down the steps and out to the road.

At the exact moment when, five years ago in April, Jon finally finds the railing, a single electrical charge wanders beyond its constituency. This tiny, hot-yellow pulse of energy sparks another and another and another, a lightning storm in the brain. Like a man in an electric chair, my father’s body erupts in a series of violent convulsions, each muscle spurned out of complacency, and he falls, headfirst, down a single flight of stairs.

By the time Cynthia finds his body at ten o’clock the next morning it is cold, wide-eyed, a blue sea of skin in flannel, a single yellow boot. A healthier man would have survived that seizure, but my father’s body couldn’t take any more. It was waving the white flag, and in reply he said, “Fuck you,” and took another shot. After he died we cleared our basement of his things, certain now that he would not return. Half-constructed model sailboats, boxes of old flyers for the construction business he had once failed to create, rusty tools and broken skis and fifty-seven empty bottles of vodka hidden in the crawl space. If he saw a light he would have steered toward it, elated to have finally found the way.

The carcass is a mound of snow. It is a pink, lunar heart. I watch from the side of the road as Graeme drags the ewe across the pavement, his glove and the cuff of his flannel shirt dipped in red like a candied apple. Her neck hangs limp over his forearm and a strip of black fur on her muzzle is peeled back to reveal the clean, pearlescent bone and the crimson underside of skin speckled with tiny stones. I cannot look away. I am stunned still by what seems to be an affirmation.

I never saw my father’s body after he died. For a long time I was resentful that I hadn’t been given the option. I don’t remember asking to see him, but I do recall a day many weeks after the funeral, after the shock had worn off, when I realized I could have asked and hadn’t. There wasn’t a viewing. We didn’t perform a wake. When I asked my mother about it she admitted she had gone to see his body in the hospital, but she’d felt she was protecting us by not bringing my brother and me along. I’d felt a sudden rush of anger and regret. There are reasons we sit with our dead. To bear witness is to usher them into death, and in kind, they return us to the land of the living. Because I seldom saw my father in the years prior, his final absence never felt real. It was like a fugue state, our twinned souls circling in purgatory. The ewe isn’t my father, I know that, but this corpse, she is death itself. This is tangible. This I understand in a way that I need not translate to myself. There was nothing, nothing I could do.

I look and look and look. Graeme takes hold of the tag stapled through the ewe’s ear and quickly tears it from the body, removing extra strips of skin and tucking it into his pocket.

“She’s got to be claimed,” he says, climbing onto the bus.

We settle back into the vinyl seats. Graeme puts the bus in gear and we continue down the empty road. He is a young man, his face pocked with scars. He is solid with strong, blunt hands. He is building a hostel of his own during the winter months when he isn’t giving tours, a log cabin on the Isle of Mull where he grew up. Graeme clears his throat and drives fast. He speaks into the microphone and watches us in the rearview mirror.

“Sometimes,” he says, “sometimes the heather is dead and dry and the sheep eat it and get stoned—hallucinate, like magic mushrooms. Some seasons we have to be very careful. They fall from the sky and land on the roofs of the cars. They think they can fly. That ewe thought she could fly.”

I’ve heard about this phenomenon before, of some animals imbibing just as recklessly as humans: deer tipsy on late-season apples and goats that climb to the tallest peaks of the Rockies to chew on high-altitude weeds that get them, well, high. And like their human counterparts, animals are most vulnerable to the lure of altered reality when times get tough, right before hibernation or during the deep cold of mid-winter.

He fingers the plastic tag in his pocket and thinks about the man he’ll later call to report the accident. A jovial farmer named Pete who has lost more sheep than any other man on the island, which Graeme feels is a shame and yet, a little funny, too.

Once, when Eric and I were young, Jon was in a bad car accident. Our mother roused us in the middle of the night and shuffled us, lank and ghostlike, into the backseat of the old
blue car. We drove the empty streets in silence, save for our mother’s muffled swears and my brother’s bare feet kicking at the back of the front seat. We’d done this before. If he could avoid the police, if the accident was just between him and the inanimate objects littering his way, Jon would call us to come get him before the neighbors got nosy. I never knew what became of the crumpled cars and trucks. As far as I knew they were left right there, like dejected toys.

We found his battered truck in a ShopRite parking lot, the smashed headlights still pulsing lazily into the mist like two dying fireflies. The parking lot was empty except for the truck, a few wayward shopping carts, and the streetlight that had blocked my father’s passage. I wasn’t yet able to distinguish my waking life from my dream life, and so it all felt like fantastic fun. I knew money didn’t grow on trees, but it did spew from machines just by someone tapping a few buttons. Likewise, bodies were a given and death was an illusion. Nighttime was the stuff of movies and dreams and so was without consequence. Whatever unfolded in the cover of dark was a separate reel. Its only link to the calm of morning coffee and cartoons were the thin threads of memory, and I knew that couldn’t be trusted.

When he got into the car he was wet with blood and something else, something glittery spread into the new yellow hairs along his chin. When he turned around to face us I could see a swathe of shattered glass smeared over his skin like tiny kernels of sand. I thought he was beautiful, a beautiful shimmery monster in the flashing light of another broken car. My mother looked straight ahead and said nothing.

“I got you guys something,” he said. “Candy.”

My mother whipped her head around.

“No!” she said. “Don’t you give them anything.”

I felt my brother reach out in the dark as my mother smacked away my father’s hand, the two pink sugar cubes clattering onto the metal floor.

“Your fucking hands are covered in blood!”

“It’s only candy, for God’s sake! It’s wrapped.”

But he didn’t say any more, just sat there mute as we drove home, his magic cheek turning colors with the changing stoplights on the way.

Slowly, I reached down and collected our treats from the floor. I unwrapped them quietly and shoved them both into my mouth. I let the pink sugar melt slowly and silently onto my tongue and finally I fell asleep on my brother’s lap, content.

Until a few months earlier, Jon had been sober for a year. He’d taken us to the Poconos to teach us to ski. When we arrived, he dressed us in six layers of clothing each and sent us out to get a feel for our new mobility. After he finally left the lodge, he found us both at the top of the mountain. Somehow, we had managed to figure out the ski lift on our own. I heard my father calling to us from the lift, “Don’t move!” We were unaccustomed to such forceful, masculine instruction. We froze, clutching at each other’s arms until Eric began to giggle helplessly beneath his two woolen caps and I couldn’t hold back; I began to laugh, too. I remember how red our father’s face became as he realized that we no longer took him seriously. By the time he reached us he was not angry, but stiff with embarrassment.

We took off down the mountainside, our little bodies banging into one another, barely upright, barely controlled. Our father passed us, demonstrating the “pizza slice,” a way of narrowing the skis into a point in front of you to manage your speed. We picked this up immediately and began to move more slowly, delighting in the mastery over our own skinny limbs. I held Eric’s hand. We were too small yet for poles. As our father sped ahead, we lost sight of him in a great flourish of snow, but we were confident he would find us at the bottom, scoop us up, and take us onto the lift for another try. And then, incredibly, he did.

MY FATHER WAS
Cynthia’s firstborn and she likes to tell the story of his beginning. I am twelve and sit cross-legged on an Oriental rug inside the townhouse she bought after divorcing my grandfather. She rocks in her rocking chair and works a needle through the hem of my overlong pants. I sit rapt, a blanket over my bare legs, popping cold green grapes into my mouth and chewing like a cow.

“Don’t chew like a cow, child,” she scolds. “You’ll get fat like Helen.”

Helen is my mother’s mother and my love for her is uncomplicated and soothing, like cake. It is different with Cynthia, I am realizing, though I haven’t seen much of her since I was eight and she and my grandfather moved to South Carolina after his retirement. Now she is back in Pennsylvania and I am learning how to please her. I wear the shiny penny loafers she bought for me at Lord & Taylor and call my brother
icky
because all males, according to Cynthia, are
icky
. She does not invite Eric over. It is the beginning of a swift and merciless erasure, my brother’s gender relegating him to nonpersonhood. She does not call or speak to him and nobody understands why. Cynthia had four sons and has buried one already, though two more are slouching ever closer and there is nothing she can do about it. Eric, it seems, might as well join them now and without much fuss. “I’m no good for boys,” is all she will say when pressed, though I rarely press. Her wrath is unpredictable and I know, even at twelve, that my abdication would be forever. She refers to me as her daughter and speaks of my mother (once her pet, too, and now, it seems, her competition) as if she is no better than the squirrels digging in her trash cans.

“Well, I was the one who had to pay for all those abortions,” she says to me casually one day. “Oh, you didn’t know? A ploy to keep your father around, that’s for sure.”

But here on her rug, one winter day when I am twelve, crackling heat rushing from the fireplace, the soles of my feet warm and the bursting grapes sweet and pulpy as I chew one and then another, I feel only gratitude for my inexplicable specialness, my new role as the chosen one. I do not yet realize how many have come before me, that each of her sons received this same treatment at one time or another—the shopping sprees and chin-lifting adulations—and that my own mother, whom she now so disdains, was once her “daughter,” too, a thin girl from a middle-class Jewish family who ogled what seemed only opulence and discretion, the new boyfriend’s family like
a wealthier version of the Cleavers, practically aristocratic, the very blood in their veins like gilded silk.

Cynthia was an only child from a small town in Illinois and she loved her father with singular ferocity. He sold high-end lawn mowers for a company named Barbara-Greene. He also flew small single-engine planes over wheat-cracked fields and once, in the 1920s, before he married my great-grandmother, he fell in love with a Parisian burlesque dancer named Lucienne. Her photograph hung behind Cynthia’s desk for years: Lucienne’s small perfect breasts bare between the sparkly straps that hold up a large billowy skirt. She wears ballet slippers, her ankles crossed in perfect fifth position, and her plump white arms reach high over her head, her fingers laced into the plume of peacock feathers she wears on her back. Her expression is girlish and amused. If sadness is there, I don’t see it. She smiles with one side of her mouth. Her eyes are dark and round and lined in kohl beneath straight black bangs.

Cynthia had many fantasies about Lucienne’s life, as she did about any lifestyle she imagined exotic, and she whispered them to me gleefully when I was a child, as if relating the red pockets of her own past. She lamented how her father’s parents had forced him back to Illinois to marry a local girl who cooked well and collected porcelain. She imagined his alternate life the way most girls covet fairy tales; she spoke of dark curtains and snifters of brandy and crinoline petticoats hiked above Lucienne’s knees, her thighs cold and chiseled like marble. But there was propriety in it, too, because Cynthia was a woman who valued intellect and social status above all
else, and she learned to play puppeteer to her loved ones with long strings of money. And so Lucienne is an orphan escaped from a rural convent and forced into the sordid life of the Folies Bergère, until one day she meets my great-grandfather and is given the opportunity of education, Cambridge or Oxford of course, where she becomes a brilliant art historian, traveling the world on cruise ships with her devoted husband, her early career just a cheeky anecdote revealed to certain enlightened company during small but decadent dinner parties.