Free If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson

cups and swallowing them down. Men tip him generously. He shoves the bills into his back pocket, winks, and pulses his hips to the last beats of music. The strobe lights have settled down and, just like prom, the DJ puts on one last slow dance. Some people get up from their tables, bleary-eyed and groping for their partners. A few drag queens crowd around a window with their cigarettes, talking quietly and blowing smoke rings that hang in the air like halos. An older man remains perpetually at the end of the bar, nursing a whiskey and speaking in tongues. His bottom lip is bleeding and I watch Jordan dampen a napkin and give it to him, pointing to the spot. There is a gold and phallic chandelier dangling in the center of the dance floor. It projects tiny dots of color that alight on the skin of the dancers, on their damp cheeks and arms. A spot of blue plays inside a young man’s belly button. I’ve been sitting too long and move out into the revelers with my glass of wine. I hear Jordan laugh as one of the queens takes my hand and twirls me around, then pulls me close to her. She smells like citrus and cloves, like the shed I used to play in at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid, the bags of peat moss piled high like a castle wall. A plume of purple feathers sticks out from the bodice of her dress and they tickle my cheek as she dips me back in her arms. We do a little do-si-do. Look at Mom, all smiles and good intentions, her hands folded in front of her as if in prayer. Beyond heris my old friend, clasped tightly in someone’s arms, his head on the man’s shoulder. They dance slowly, an impromptu love affair, a moment’s pardon from all that has passed and all that is to come.

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    THE PRESENT
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    The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone . . . No, the point is that not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
    —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
    I
    1998.
    In the beginning, he does not remember switches and directions. To blow his nose. To wash. Irving gives up napkins; he wipes his mouth with his sleeve. He pees on the floor. He farts in public, but louder than before. He chews with his mouth open. At this Helen hollers and we cringe and laugh, laugh at age and its particular idiosyncrasies.
    When is the beginning?
    When I still measure time by cracks in the sidewalk.
    How long?
    From here to the crack that looks like a volcano and back again.
    On my bike or running fast?
    On my bike, and as if I don’t have to get off to walk it across the street.
    Nights at Mom’s office are longer than that even, after she quits bartending and starts selling real estate with our maternal grandmother, Helen. It is like going to the crack with the dandelions at the top of the hill and back again three hundred times . We’re here almost every night. It’s called Tornetta Realty Corp., and we like all the men named Tornetta, especially Frank, who looks like a ship’s captain with his white beard and cigar. Eric and I are supposed to do our homework in the break room upstairs, around the corner from the office Mom shares with Helen, but instead we creep downstairs where the lights are off and all the desks are empty. We play hide-and-go-seek, but Eric always hides in the cubicle with the Hershey’s Kisses, so it isn’t much fun after a while. I stuff all the neon-colored paper clips into my backpack and use other people’s highlighters to decorate my shoes. If the secretary, old Barb, is still there, she’ll take us for rides in her little blue convertible while we play with the radio and she smokes long skinny cigarettes and talks about being alone.
    Sometimes our grandfather, Irving, picks us up and takes us to Burger King, or else he makes bananas ’n’ cream and I fetch the Tastykakes from