Read If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir for Free Online

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, somesecret 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.

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    THE WHITEST WINTER LIGHT
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    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 whenevershe 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