If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (5 page)

Years later, years during which we will move many towns apart and grow big and graduate from separate high schools and leave home, I will see Little Benny’s picture on the news and learn how he killed a girl while driving drunk in the wrong lane, going in the wrong direction on the highway. And suddenly I’ll realize it isn’t Little Benny at all, but a stranger that, in truth, looks nothing like him, and I’ll wonder at how quickly I’d judged him, like I’d been waiting for it all along. I’ll worry about what that means about who I’ve become: a woman who assumes the worst.

I will find Charlene’s wedding pictures on the Internet and marvel at how fat she has become, and how beautiful, and how her mother appeared small and shriveled beside her, both of them beaming. Months later a baby will appear, then another and another, and one will be called Little Benny Jr., after her father and her brother. I’ll feel dried out and barren, even though I’ll still secretly hope for kids of my own one day. I will wonder at my fear of mothering like a detached thing, some
secret scar nobody else has to look at but me. I’ll learn from a mutual friend that Charlene manages a local Genuardi’s Supermarket and I’ll suddenly recall a day when I was sixteen and walked into Genuardi’s with a new friend I desperately wanted to impress. I saw Charlene bagging groceries and made up some excuse so we had to leave, afraid she would see me and call my name and I’d have to admit to this new friend that yes, we grew up together and yes, I had loved her unconditionally—this heavy girl in off-brand jeans and dirty sneakers and dark eyeliner like a superhero. I had been just a kid, and she was the last person I would ever love in that same, wide-eyed way.

“Now we hug,” Charlene says.

We lie beneath the window with our arms around each other and listen to our brothers beat up bad guys. “
Hiya!
” they yell. Our clothes are strewn across the floor and the bar is closed. Somewhere, my daddy is on his third Budweiser and feeling better and better. My mom is fixing bologna sandwiches on white bread and ironing her work apron and smoking a cigarette all at the same time, trying not to let the ashes fall on the carpet. The ice cream truck is on the next street over playing “This Land Is Your Land” through the megaphone and Little Benny is whacking their old terrier, Jacko, for peeing on his “numb chucks.”

“Let’s pretend we fell asleep,” Charlene whispers, pulling me closer and closer until I feel her breathing in my ear. It makes me sleepy. The music is getting louder and I hear the boys calling out to our mothers. I close my eyes and wait for the sound of the door swinging open.

I

JORDAN STICKS THE
end of a safety pin into the pad of his thumb, saying that a moment of pain is the only relief from all of our past and all of our future. I laugh and grab his arm, pulling up his sleeve as if to check for scars. It’s our first introduction and we are already huddled alone in a corner, the tulle of my dress clenched in his fist, the party devolving around us. I am cavalier. I laugh. He looks at me with resignation. I laugh so hard, until I start to cry.

We are both fifteen when we meet. I arrive at the party with a friend named Rachel who knows the hostess, a popular girl named Angel whom I have never spoken to before this night, though I’ve seen her around school. Rachel is my friend by accident. We met when we were both too young to be discriminate, and I think she’s felt pity for me ever since. Though she’s never said so, I think she has defended me to her friends in the past, and so I feel both grateful and pathetic whenever
she calls. Since grade school, I have had a habit of befriending mostly foreign exchange students. The purpose of this is twofold. For one, they don’t know enough English to dislike me, or to fob me off for cooler friends. Also, I ern brownie points from my teachers for helping these students improve their English, which makes their job easier. And while I am too shy to be “teacher’s pet,” my very survival has always seemed dependent on the approval of adults.

Angel ushers us in and we spend many minutes in the hallway telling her how “cute” she looks and how “fantastic” her new shoes are. I follow the two girls down into the basement where a bunch of teenagers sit on old Victorian sofas. The walls are bare and the ceiling is low. The TV is on and I stand there awkwardly staring at the screen, pretending to be absorbed. I squint my eyes and tilt my head. I hope this expression conveys approachability and deep introspection, a chance for someone to break the spell and say,
Hey, what’s up?
or
Whatchya watching?
But no one does. I don’t like the idea of sparking conversation. The whole practice is lost on me; my mother’s penchant for charm and wit skipped over me and settled on Eric, thirteen now, whom I hate, envy, and love in equal measure.

This is the popular crew, the kids I’ve been longing to know for as long as I can remember. Instead, I’ve managed to get by with a few “mid-level” friends. Not nerds, exactly, but not members of this higher echelon, either. I am reminded of this as Rachel introduces me to a handsome boy named Dave who looks at me curiously through a thick fringe of blond curls.

“Do you go to Wissahickon?” Dave asks. I’ve been in school with him since the second grade.

“I just moved here,” I say, shrugging.

Dave takes a drag of his joint and hands me the tattered end, then jumps up from the sofa to change the station on the radio. The cherry burns a dull orange and then goes out by the time I get it to my lips. I roll the remnants between my thumb and forefinger and drop it to the ground. A girl I do not recognize is pouring shots of vodka into a variety of mugs and passing them around. I take a mug from Rachel. It has a picture of two gigantic cartoon breasts, the nipples distended and glistening.
Cream?
it reads.

I stick close to Rachel the entire night. Occasionally, Angel’s mother yells for someone to
turn down the fucking radio
or
take the cigarettes outside
.

“Pot is okay,” I hear Angel explaining to Dave. “The smell doesn’t last so long.”

By midnight I am drunk and warm, the chaos distilled into an even hum. The boy named Jordan is sitting next to me watching a TV show about a hamster, a
real, live
hamster, and his adventures in an overgrown backyard. The creature wears a tiny red helmet that Jordan finds
so freakin’ adorable
. He laughs hysterically. Rachel laughs, too, but I can tell it is just an act. I don’t find it that funny, either, just ridiculous. Jordan improvises dialogue in a high, squeaky voice and a bunch of girls begin to giggle with him.

I think this boy is beautiful and effeminate, delicate and self-conscious. I have never spoken to him before but have
always wondered what it would be like to be his friend. He is close with all the most popular girls in school. Rachel tells me they fawn over him and let him dress them up for parties. They tend to him like a sick child when he gets too drunk, which is often, and defend him in front of their boyfriends. The boyfriends are beautiful, too, but not as bright as Jordan; they are confused and feel threatened by his effeminacy and the gentle way he braids their girlfriends’ hair in our school hallways. These are girls Jordan’s known his whole life; he’s slept beside them at birthday parties, and at times when his parents needed him to go away. Their mothers have fed him, bathed him, and watched over him as their daughters dolled him up in their Sunday school dresses and matching pink sweaters.

For now, the party has died down and just the two of us remain on the basement floor. A girl named Sarah plops down beside us to tell me how her mother used to toss them in the same bathtub when they were young. She tells me that Jordan would shit every time the water was too warm, and so now she bathes only in cold water. She tells me how scared he became when the lights went out at night and how once, after they were a little older, she caught her brother masturbating beside the couch where Jordan slept, her brother’s pink prick hovering over the soles of Jordan’s bare feet.

“Did he jizz on you?” Sarah asks him. “Gross.”

We are silent as the car climbs the steep, cobbled hill in West Philadelphia where Jordan’s father was last seen. He takes hard drags on one of my cigarettes and picks at the black ringlets of hair on top of his head.

“Your head looks like an octopus,” I say, and he blows smoke in my face.

Jordan needs money—for food or drugs, or his own goddamn cigarettes, that’s for sure. The tip regarding his father’s whereabouts came from his aunt, whom Jordan had stayed with briefly when he was fifteen and his mother had first kicked him out of her condo. It was a good thing, though, because management would evict Jordan’s mother just a few weeks later and, the aunt had told him, she was naked and high when the manager came to serve the notice.
So high she threw a frozen hot dog at him
. She left all of their stuff behind, including Jordan’s broken bed frame and the cat, Snickers. Jordan does not care to know where his mother went and assumes that she is staying with one of her drug dealers. For a while, we would sneak into the condo through a basement window to give the cat fresh food and water. Snickers hid every time we came in, which forced us to clamber over boxes of clothes and unused exercise equipment to find him. We tried to avoid eye contact with the mannequin heads, Styrofoam models his mother had once used to hold the wigs she styled for beauty school. The heads, white and stoic, lay helter-skelter on a metal shelf like dejected parts in a doll factory. After a few months, we stopped showing up and the condo sold. Nobody knows what became of its contents, or the cat.

When we find Jordan’s father he is in front of an open garage, slouched in an old metal wheelchair like a lifeless marionette, a dirty, white puff of a dog curling in and out of the rusty wheels. His pink scalp is chapped and flaking and he
is fiddling with something on his lap. A few old men sit in folding metal chairs inside the garage. They smoke and pass around a bottle of brown liquor. They watch a television set that is rigged up in a corner on top of some cardboard boxes. A younger man, maybe in his fifties, stands against a wall and rubs his forehead back and forth, back and forth against the coarse concrete. I stay in the car while Jordan gets out and moves toward his father. I notice that his walk is stiff and awkward, a feigned masculinity. His father hands him a twenty-dollar bill that Jordan stuffs into his jeans pocket. He turns around and rushes to the car, gets into the passenger seat, and slams the door.

“Go,” he says, sliding another of my cigarettes from the pack.

How many nights have we spent in this basement? A hundred? More?

Angel’s mom is crazy. Everybody knows that. So is Angel, for that matter, all of five feet nothing, her tiny, olive feet jammed into shimmery stiletto heels, shoes built for a steadier gal—but here we are. Angel is like a wind-up toy, fueled by booze and prescription pills and countless joints, wholly reliant on boys who will pick her up from the floor and toss her little body over their shoulders. They take her to bed. Her black skirt slips high over her hips, delicate as wishbones. And her ass, compact in the requisite G-string, is warm against their cheeks.

We all use her, this sixteen-year-old girl, for her house and her drugs and the entertainment she provides. Her mother’s negligence is a boon, her father’s absence merely a convenience.
Some say he died a couple of years ago. Others say he moved to Las Vegas and runs a casino. We don’t feel bad; few of us have fathers anymore. We like to watch as the self-awareness drains from her eyes. It is so tangible, that moment, composure puddling around her ankles like a silk slip. Jordan passes her the joint and she inhales greedily, desperately.

“Jesus, Angel,” he says, and snatches the television remote from her lap.

Her boyfriend, Rick, watches her and laughs, her pretty face scrunched in concentration, tossed back toward the ceiling. Her eyes are closed. She digs the thin heels of her shoes into the floor, drawing black lines through a collection of ash.

“All right, baby. Damn!” he scolds, pushing her into the couch cushions and stealing the joint. The gesture is neither affectionate nor aggressive. I know from experience that Angel can snap in an instant; she is prone to scream wildly when it is least expected. This is part of the fun. Jordan looks at me conspiratorially.

“I love you, Peanut,” he mouths.

He disappears upstairs for a while. I hear him talking with Angel’s mom about pierogis, and then I hear her offer him a plate. He has a look that makes women want to feed him. Rick and Angel have settled into the corner of the sofa, his arms around her as she dozes on his shoulder, the strap of her dress dangling, revealing the edges of a deep-crimson bra. It surprises me to see them behaving so intimately; they look so young. Last night, a blonde from a neighboring school had shown up at Angel’s door looking for Rick. Before he could get to her,
Angel had spit in the girl’s face and somehow torn the front of her shirt. The night ended with Angel yelling curses at the back of Rick’s rusted, yellow Volkswagen and Angel’s mother screaming from her bedroom window, “Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up, Angel!” But now, Rick kisses her neck and she wiggles her small fingers into the pocket of his jeans.

“Crazy bitch,” Rick whispers tenderly.

I get up to retrieve my school bag from the corner of the room where I’d dropped it hours ago. I don’t have any boyfriends and I am beginning to worry that I never will. I still scribble the names of my crushes inside school notebooks and ignore them in person as a matter of course. I know my aloofness to be a symptom of shyness, but secretly I hope that it conveys some measure of mystery and seduction. So far, it hasn’t.