If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (23 page)

Vermonters interact with the land in more ways than I’ve witnessed in other places. Winter sports are not just recreation; they keep you sane. And while Vermonters are a notoriously self-reliant people, the weather is a shared and worthy adversary. They work together to beat back the snowdrifts, to till the hard soil, to bring produce to market. Once, when my car was stuck trying to ascend a hill during a snowstorm, an entire block of neighbors shoveled sand under my tires while I gunned the engine and teenagers pushed the car from behind. After half an hour, and more than one lecture on snow tires, we were regular good-time buddies.

An iceboat whips by, carving two thin parallel lines. A gust of wind catches her sails and the whole job topples over, splayed out like a crippled bird. I feel suddenly excited, electric, turned on. The sun is high and I’m feeling safer on the ice. Here are the natives, running wild and fearless. Still, I move gingerly and watch Nick glide in his sneakers like an overgrown kid. I’m still shaken by the late-night phone call; images from my friend’s story are reverberating through my head, projecting on the ice like a silent film.

Where the ice has frozen and refrozen it is white and opaque, pentagon-shaped pancakes, and in other places it is like a clear glass, struck through with the bent bodies of dead pickerel, old fishing lures, and leftover autumn leaves still a brilliant burnt orange. Nick’s hat falls from his head and as he reaches to pick it up, he loses his balance and falls to the ice. His camera goes skidding and he rolls over, legs and arms splayed, defeated and grinning at the sky. Silver in his dark hair and red in his beard and eyes a burnished blue. A thin-lipped, long-lashed beauty. Contemplative and quiet. I want to make love to him right there on the ice. Thankfully, he has more discretion.

There is a stress fracture in the ice about a half mile from where we stand. I know it is a stress fracture because Nick told me. I had thought it was something else: the end of the earth.

“From the tide change?” I offer, but he only shakes his head.

Nick says that the only time I want to have sex is when we’re in public. We spend the next fifteen minutes theorizing on why this is, Nick suggesting it’s just some misplaced voyeurism, while I insist it’s probably more perverse than that. We make our way toward the stress fracture, drawn by the reflection of the sun on the sharp chunks of ice that stick up in the air. Increasingly, it looks like a line of fire splitting the lake in two. Beyond it, men are playing hockey with one net. Someone rolls a keg onto the lake and a camera flashes and one of the men yells out, “Crack her open, Gibbons made a shot!” For a moment, I wish Nick were the type of man to play hockey with friends and drink beers and chuckle deeply, elbowing buddies in the ribs. I like to watch men with other
men, all those precious manners trimmed away like excess fat. Instead, he is all sweetness and gentility, a time traveler having lost his way.

As we get closer, I see the men have finished their game and are standing around reciting blow-by-blows. It is late afternoon and the sun is melting the top layer of ice, though there are still a good twelve inches below us. Surely, I think, I have chosen wisely this time—this small life and its reassuring rhythms and routines. It all feels so
wholesome
, the kids on their skates and the mothers eyeing them from shore, handing out granola bars and kisses when they fall. It was nothing I ever imagined for myself, but here I am.

“I could raise kids here,” I tell Nick, feeling suddenly flush with gratitude.

It is undeserved, I am sure, but maybe I can do this—absolve myself of my brother’s debilitating addictions, the calamitous city, my own desperate ambitions and depression. We’ll grow our own vegetables and
volunteer in the community
. What a thought. I can hear my mother laughing, her brow cocked in suspicion. But the brutality of the weather and the inhospitableness of the land seem to bring people together here, a hardscrabble let-me-help-you-with-that type of thing, which I think might make me a better person, too. The kind who bakes casseroles for ailing neighbors and untangles your fishing line. I cannot fix my family, but I can learn to fix an edible dinner. I want to know the names of the people at the gym and at the bank. Their kids’ names, too. Isn’t Vermont the kind of place where people do that? Where the local handyman
will pat your ailing woodstove and coo, “It’s all right, girl, just having a bad hair day, is all.”

Having grown up in a small New England town, Nick sees a different side to all this camaraderie, how nobody can keep their fingers out of anyone else’s pie. He draws our curtains tight at night and shushes me quiet when I laugh too loud or call out from our bed. He doesn’t understand the safety I feel here, and how little of it I’ve known. Does spring not return here, too, eventually? I insist. Does the lake ice not come apart, the leaves not unfurl from weather-beaten branches, predictably, annually? It had not been like this in the city—Philly or Manhattan—where the only signs of renewal seemed relegated to the margins, the dandelions poking up through cracks in the sidewalk, grasses muted in their designated six-by-four plots. Yes, I can make a go of it here. I can learn to mollify myself with routine—now the seven o’clock news, now the beef stew. Here, your Sunday paper.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Nick warns me. “You’ve been here less than a month.”

But I know this is what he wants, has always wanted, and my new openness is both heartening and scary for him. I, too, have the gypsy in me—a restlessness we have both grown to fear.

By the time my friend made it to the bottom of her steps, the landlady was in the hallway with the child clutched in her arms, a gaggle of police officers beside her. The child was in her pajamas and her winter coat and looked wide-awake, even though it was after two in the morning.

“I have to go to the hospital,” the woman cried out to my friend. “He tried to kill himself.”

My friend was relieved that her landlord was still alive, and frightened for the small girl, her arms wrapped tightly around her mother’s neck, though she seemed calm. She looked up at my friend and reached for her, even though they had no more than a passing acquaintance. The woman was crying and my friend hugged her tightly, the girl pressed between them.

“Do you want me to take the baby?” my friend asked.

She didn’t see the sense in dragging the child to the hospital in the middle of the night just to watch her daddy suffer, or possibly even die. She was surprised when the landlady said yes, thrusting the child into her arms before reeling through the front door, the cops following behind her obediently. She heard radios screeching and a succession of car doors slamming, and then the cry of the ambulance as it tore off into the night. Soon, it was all over. The child in her arms sat placidly sucking on a pacifier now, her fingers coiled into my friend’s hair.

“Well,” she said to her, “shall we go to bed, honey?”

The child laid her head on my friend’s chest. For a moment, she didn’t know where to take her. Her apartment? Theirs? What was in there? What had the child seen? While her landlord had been in the backyard, she didn’t know what could have happened inside, if any of the night’s detritus would be left out for the child, or her, to see. She slowly opened the door to their apartment. Better that she sleep in her own bed, she thought.

“My sweet girl,” my friend whispered. “You poor sweet girl.”

I try for calm while the ice moans beneath us. I hold Nick’s
hand and try to feel comfort in the simple gesture, the security in our time together, past and future. My legs tense as we slide on top of the lake. We are miniature dolls in the shadow of the mountains, time before time. The bottoms of my feet are so cold they feel disconnected from the rest of my body. The wind races through the valley, shooting sprays of snow from the piles on shore. Pure energy dissolving into dust.

Though I don’t know it yet, back home in Philadelphia my family is coming apart again. My brother lies in a hospital bed with our mother beside him. He’s had his first overdose. He’d left rehab with a girl, their twinned hearts racing as they drove straight into the underbelly of the city. This morning, as I sat outside on the cabin steps and listened to my friend cry quietly into the phone, afraid to wake the child who had finally fallen asleep; while I watched the sun patiently rise behind the lake, and the mailman set about his rounds, and a mottled robin peck at the seeds fallen from the birdfeeder onto the frozen ground, my brother’s breathing shallowed like a receding wave. His heart seized and his skin drew blue and the tiny scalloped muscles behind his eyes began to quiver. When the girl found him in her living room, a boy she barely knew, a wretched shucked thing, turned out and writhing in his own puke, I’d crept back into our warm bed and returned to sleep, unaware.

I am delighting in the weight of the slabs of ice that formed in the seam of the lake. They are both homage to and mockery of the great mountains that surfaced from glacial shifts so long ago. I pick them up and hurl them back down to shatter into
a million shots of light, while Nick captures the destruction, and my ecstatic reaction to this destruction, with his camera, the shutter clicking and clicking while the sounds of the people hush and go flat. There is only the breaking—heave and crack, heave and crack—so loud that neither of us hears the lake open up beneath me, sees my boot slip two inches too close and the water rise up past my ankles, my calves, the thick fabric of my ski pants swelling and drawing me under, heavy as an anchor. We don’t realize what is happening until it has happened, until the panic is in my throat and the camera slips out of Nick’s hands and I feel (not
feel
exactly, but
sense
) the icy water filling my clothes, gripping my thighs; and there is no thought but dreams, the way that dreams will take the shape of recent, but not too recent, memories. A child sitting completely still on her parents’ bed, her red hair lit up by the streetlight coming in through the window, staring into the backyard where her father acted out his private despair, my friend frozen in the doorway, the child too young to communicate what she knows or how she knows it, what it feels like inside a dread so private it can only be expressed this way—the body fighting instinctively for what the mind has all but given up. My father, her father, fathers falling. Sometimes, there is a note glowing on a computer screen in a dark room. More often, the message is beyond language, or pre-language.

A girl holds a boy’s hand in an ambulance.

A wife, her husband’s.

A mother, her son’s.

A childless woman wraps her body around a small girl on an unfamiliar bed in a city where such intimacies seem suddenly inevitable. Only
here
, my friend thinks. Only in this place, this city, with all these hot souls drawn together to thrive or suffer or go under—but we’ll be damned if we’ll go unwitnessed.

I make love loudly, I told Nick once, because you want to hear it and I need to say it. We suffer, but I am happy right now, and I am safe in this moment. I needn’t feel guilty about that. I’ve run away before. Believe me, I will do it again.

Believe me, I will not want to.

I sit in the shower and let the hot water thaw my skin. Nick had dragged me out of the icy water and worn my wet boots to shore. My feet felt small and numb inside his dry boots. A bruise forms on my thigh where I fell. It will remain there for weeks, a caution:
Don’t get ahead of yourself
. My hero makes soup in the kitchen. The child is returned to her mother, bathed and fed and resolutely silent. My friend climbs the stairs to her apartment and falls into bed while water puddles between my toes and my brother is pumped through with Propofol. Her roommate tries the locked door and realizes he has forgotten his key.

He knocks, but she is already asleep.

My mother holds her son’s hand while he breathes through a tube, sedated. She reaches into her purse for a cigarette and her phone, and then heads toward the door. I hear the soup bubbling in the pan and I watch a spider cling to her web in the corner of the shower. In another moment, my phone will ring. Nick will bring it into the bathroom and hold it out to me.

“Your mother,” he will say. “You want it?”

I watch her picture grinning on the screen, radiant in last summer’s sun. I hear the mice in the wall.

“I’ll call her back,” I say. He nods and kisses my forehead.

“Dinnertime,” he says. “When you’re ready.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am forever in gratitude to my family and friends who have shared their stories in the pages of this book.

For the love and support, always: Susan Nelson, Eric Nelson, Helen Gordon (I love you, Mommom!), Carole Gordon, Adam Gordon, Denise Gordon-Weisman, Jessie McLaughlin (M&N), Hannah Campbell, Angela Palm, Greg Falla, Aryn Hood, Meredith Grinnell, Ellen and Lou Vitola, Debra Hoffman, Nick Adams and the whole Adams family.

Thank you to Andrew Merton and Meredith Hall, who provided the tools and encouragement that have sustained me these many years. To my mentors and guides, Jo Ann Beard, Vijay Seshadri, and Alice Truax. To my steadfast agent, Joanne Wyckoff, editor extraordinaire, Dan Smetanka, and the incredible team at Counterpoint Press. What a gift. To everyone in the Renegade Writers' Group who helped shape these pages.

In loving memory of Irving Gordon, Cynthia Ann Turner, Harry Nelson, and my father, Jonathan Robert Nelson.