If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (21 page)

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 relapse 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.