If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (22 page)

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 Vermont. 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.

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.

“He’s terrified,” Nick says.

“I’m terrified,” I say.

“This was a bad idea,” he says, and heads outside with the mouse.

I follow him down the street and watch as he gently pours the mouse into the snow. It twitches once and takes off toward the lake, stops, thinks better of it, and skitters back up to our cabin.

“That’s your problem,” I say. “You show too much mercy.”

It is so quiet that tonight, from our living room, we can hear the ice groan as it splits and shifts and freezes again. It sounds like thunder, or a whale song, some distant cry of the belugas that lived in the lake ten thousand years ago. There are fossils to prove it. We open all the windows and sit by the woodstove with our eyes closed, listening. Later, he leads me down to the lake and we shuffle onto the ice and watch the stars. I keep hearing the ice crack, jagged pings from here to the mouth of the bay. I am sure it will give out at any moment and we’ll be sucked under, left to hold eternal court with the slow bass bellying along in their winter stupor. I keep picturing our faces bobbing lightly against the underside of an ice floe while, in some nearby shanty, a grizzled angler slurps his morning coffee and tunes the channels on his portable television. Nick laughs and says, “It’s fine, it’s fine,” and “Why so dramatic?”

Pardon me, but I am my mother’s daughter after all.

This is his country, my mountain man, and he is all ease. I keep forgetting not to ask about the tide schedule. I’m not yet convinced that there aren’t any sharks.

I SHIVER IN
my dreams and wake to the sound of the phone ringing at 4
AM
. It is my friend in Queens. We used to be roommates. She stayed in New York and made a life there, while I took off after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, MFA in tow. I was too lonely in the city, too overwhelmed. Like an overstimulated child, I couldn’t block things out, narrow the focus. Edit. Instead, I took it all in, all the time. A friend once told me that New Yorkers have mastered the art of being publicly private. New York made me crazy and tired. In rare moments of quiet I became paranoid, a strange specter in empty subway terminals searching for rats scurrying across the tracks. I made a game of it. If I couldn’t spot one before the train arrived, I’d be doomed to mediocrity forever, or something equally torturous. I still visit my friend often, though, and she keeps the guest room ready for me, my earplugs on the nightstand, my name scribbled on the box in black Sharpie. We eat large meals in small restaurants and pay for them with our credit cards. Before bed, she hands me a glass of water and kisses me on the mouth. She would be a wonderful mother, but at thirty-seven, she relishes her independence, the ability to pick up and go when the mood strikes, lavishing all those maternal instincts on wayward friends like me.

Now she is upset, she says, and needs to talk. The police showed up at her apartment a couple hours ago, around two. She had been awake and reading and noticed lights flashing on her bedroom walls. Her small dog yipped and snarled, running frantically from window to bed and back again, his whole body
shaking. It is not so cold in New York this winter, and she had her windows cracked open because the landlords, who live below her in the brownstone, like to keep the heat up high. I’ve met them a few times—an attractive couple in their early forties with a two-year-old daughter, a small girl with tight curls of red hair and three pill-sized teeth. They fight often and loudly. The husband has beautiful tattoos covering both arms and his wife is a psychiatrist who once kindly offered me Lexapro samples when I’d forgotten to pack my own.

My friend watched flashlights move from the front of the house to the back. She heard the low muffling of voices and the beeping of walkie-talkies. Her roommate, a waiter who works late nights at a posh Manhattan restaurant with a temperamental celebrity chef, was still at work.

She heard clomping up the stairs and grabbed the dog just as one of the cops flung open her front door, left unlocked for the roommate who never remembers his key. The high beams of the flashlights bounced around her backyard.

“You seen some cops around here?” he asked.

“They’re in the backyard,” she said. “What’s going on?”

Without answering, the young cop turned and bounded back downstairs. She thought there may have been a break-in and she locked her door behind him, an afterthought. She considered the confrontation the husband had had with a neighbor just a few days before, something about a parking spot. It could have been anything, she said.

“What’s going on?” she yelled again, this time through the door, but the cop continued to ignore her. She walked to
the back window and drew open the curtains. She could see Manhattan lit up in the distance like a carnival. She’s grown to love this skyline and the adventures it dangles in front of her, even while she spends most of her free time holed up inside the apartment, reading books and watching movies while the dog dozes on her belly. She is a California girl,
a country bumpkin at heart
, she insists, but her hippie parents also instilled gypsy tendencies that render her helpless to the lure of the new and better. Like me, she jumps state lines every few years.

She’d pulled her red hair into a knot in order to see more clearly. A small purple bicycle leaned against the fence and an abandoned bottle of bubbles lay sideways on the picnic table. Some leftover streamers from a recent birthday party hung limp from a tree branch. Below her, she saw the flat white blade of a stretcher illuminated on the patio, and then draping over the side of a deck chair was a single arm, tattooed in faded reds and blues.

Here she pauses and breathes deeply into the phone line. I realize I am still in bed next to Nick, who is sleeping with one leg drawn up to his chest like an unspent arrow. I get up, wrap myself in a quilt, and open the front door. I hear the bed creak as Nick rolls over in his sleep. I sit down on the front steps. A neighbor is getting into his mail truck, readying himself for the day. He has a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I am still half-asleep, a dull anxiety thrumming its way up my throat. The postman sits in his truck while the engine idles and warms, the exhaust from his tailpipe fogging up the windows of his
cabin. A slice of dawn catches the mast of a sailboat moored for winter beside the docks.

My neighbor nods hello and backs out of his driveway, turning left at the lake.

LATER THAT MORNING,
the cold wakes me up again, as it has almost every day since I arrived here from the tumbling beach town in Connecticut where I’d been pleasantly discontented. I’d had a job, at least, which is more than I have now. This is our seventh home in the eight years we’ve been together, and for the first time, it’s on his terms. He likes New England best, despite my argument that he ought to see more of the country before he makes that decision. I’m inclined to agree, though; I like New England best, too. I’m just not ready for the picket fence. I’m into fucking around, slowly dragging us further south since we left New Hampshire after college. But suddenly, in one fell swoop, we’re all the way up in northern Vermont—an hour from
Canada
, for christsake—and I’m cold and bitter and cold. I resolve to act like a brat for another couple of weeks and then I’ll have to let it go.

Truth is, I’m living off the fat of the land, as they say, though it is an odd metaphor in a landscape so doggedly hard. Spring will arrive eventually, the land will soften, the garden will murmur and open, but not yet. I prefer to call myself a kept woman, joking with my friends, which at least bears the whiff of silk robes and a leased Lamborghini. In reality, I roll out of bed hours after Nick has left for work. I sit huddled next to the
stove and write for as long as I can stand it. I take long walks in the middle of the day, and in the afternoon, cook elaborate dinners that taste like shit. The cooking is a way to avoid the writing, which is all I want to do and the one thing I don’t want to do. The cabin we’ve rented is charming and falling to pieces. The woman who owns it has a famous daughter and a summer place fifty yards away. Few people in this neighborhood are foolish enough to stay on all winter and those that do keep hay bales stacked against the siding as insulation. I like watching the way they live through my window, drowning in coffee, crying when I damn well feel like it—benefits of this solitary lifestyle. We keep the woodstove running all day and use a space heater at night, avoiding the expense of oil heat. I’d throw a fit except I’m not paying any bills, so instead I shiver wildly and refuse to take off my wool cap. I’d surprised myself by following him here and I’m not ready to admit that I’m staying. When he got the job as a researcher at a nearby university, he decided he would take it, with or without me, and I’m still adjusting to his new confidence.

It’s Saturday morning so the frozen bay looks like a theme park. Kids in oversized coats skate in clusters and fall on top of each other and laugh and whine and shout. A group of teenagers play hockey beside the docks, between the old Christmas trees that stick out of the ice like broken toothpicks. No one knows how they got there, or at least they’re not saying. Wooden shanties lean precariously while fishermen gather in tight circles around a single drilled hole, chatting and smoking and swigging from cans of beer.

When we first slide onto the ice, I shimmy like a toddler before I realize that it isn’t so slippery after all. It feels strange and illicit to stand in the middle of the lake and look up at the mountains towering in the distance. Mount Mansfield winks at us from behind a veil of clouds. In the summer, I will climb her ridges like a tethered donkey, and later this winter, ride her broadside on a pair of rented skis. That’s the thing I’m learning about savage landscapes: intimacy is inevitable.