The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  Buttons

  I don’t let my mother into our house anymore because it’s too hard to get her out again and also because she often talks about things (child molesters, gynecological exams gone awry, parasites thriving in her body) that I don’t want my children to hear. But when I did let her into the house—when, for instance, we used to have her over for dinner every so often—she would usually arrive about an hour late, then spend much of her visit in the bathroom. One night, shortly after Isaac was born, I asked her over for a spaghetti dinner. The table was set, the sauce long done cooking, the pasta water boiling, the salad in bowls on the table, when she called from her car to say that she was parked on our street and, though she had looked and looked, she couldn’t find our place. So I ran outside to search for her. It was raining as I walked up and down the sidewalk. A man with a newspaper over his head gave me a funny look, because of my slippers, I guess, but I ignored him. Eventually I found her sitting in her car about a block and a half away. The interior lights were on. I could see that she was wearing a white tank top, had one arm raised over her head, and seemed to be washing her armpit. I crossed our street, which tends to be busy, and stood well out in front of her car so that I wouldn’t frighten her.

  “Mom!” I yelled. There was a bottle of mouthwash and a hairbrush on the dashboard. “It’s cold,” I said. “Come on.”

  As we ate that night, I noticed some marks on her neck—three or four dark, shiny spots about the size of dimes, running down each side. These spots, she explained, had just appeared on their own. I knew this wasn’t true but for simplicity’s sake pretended to believe her. She told us the spots were right over her salivary glands, which were clearly ossifying because they were hard as rocks. At one point Isabella stood next to her grandmother’s chair and touched each of the spots on her neck, one by one, and my mother said: “See? See how hard they are?” I had to resist the urge to jump up and wash my daughter’s hands.

  After dinner, while David was putting the kids to bed, I started telling my mother a story. This is always a very interesting proposition—trying to tell my mother a story. It rarely works. At first, though, I was encouraged because she said she was interested in this story. “I really want to hear this,” she said, “I just have to pee.” Then she went to the bathroom for about twenty minutes. When she came out, she asked for a bottle of cleanser. “Just something to scrub out the sink. Then I really want to hear your story.” She said she needed to disinfect the sink because she’d rinsed out her mouth and she was worried about leaving germs behind. I told her to forget about it. I’d do it later. But she insisted, so I found a rag and some powder and started cleaning the sink myself, and as I scrubbed, I attempted to pick up my story where I’d left off, but my mother interrupted to say she wanted to clean the sink herself and took the rag from me. She worked, then, for about five minutes, really throwing herself into the job, getting every nook and cranny—the gaps under the parts of the faucet that turn, the curved edge of the overflow valve, the stem of the stopper. “I know you think I’m crazy,” she said as I stood there watching.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I just worry,” I said, uncrossing my arms.

  Still bent over the sink, she turned to look at me. She had to tilt her head because her glasses had slid halfway down the narrow bridge of her nose. “I just want you to know, I’d do exactly the same thing if I were you,” she said. “I mean, if I had a mother who I thought didn’t have all her buttons, I wouldn’t let my children get too close either.”

  C

  Cahoots

  One of my mother’s favorite words, as in “in cahoots,” a phrase she frequently employs in sentences such as: “Medicaid is obviously in cahoots with *DMH!” Or: “DMH is obviously in cahoots with my landlord!”

  Cedar

  Many of the most important events of my childhood were unexperienced. Unfortunately, when things are unexperienced, they cannot be told or retold—they can barely be remembered. Technically, this is called “dissociation,” a straightforward enough term meaning that you disassociate from your surroundings. Pull out. Shut down. Close up shop. Oddly, I’ve found, the off-center focal point of many a dissociative episode can be recalled even decades later with almost perfect clarity. Memory clings to such a point with at least as much tenacity as it rejects the primary event. For example, when I was three years old, I saw my parents argue while standing in the doorway between the kitchen and their bedroom in our tiny apartment in the basement of my grandparents’ house. My father seemed both immovable and towering, also much too close to my mother, who for her part kept clawing at his face—as if she were daring him to hit her. This, eventually, he did, although I cannot actually see, through the thick haze of static, the blow. Nor can I see myself clamping onto his leg. I cannot see him peeling me off either, or throwing me across the room, but this is what happened, according to my mother, who years later would often recount this string of events like a weird mantra. All I remember for myself is the foot of my parents’ bureau on the other side of the room: a curved knob of reddish wood covered lightly in dust.

  Colic

  Isaac’s crib was arranged at the foot of our bed. This was back when I still let my mother into our apartment, back when David and I were sleeping downstairs in an alcove off the living room to be near the baby. She’d stopped by without calling ahead. I’d put on some water for tea, then showed her her grandson, fast asleep in his crib. His tiny, knobby legs were sticking out of his diaper, which was printed with images of a famous cartoon character based on a sponge. My mother shook her head and said: “You are so lucky. He’s so good. You’ve been lucky with both of them. They’re both such calm, happy, cheerful kids.”

  Then she told me a story I’d heard many times before. It was about Tracy as a baby and how she’d been allergic to formula, hungry and colicky all the time. She told me again about the terrifying weight loss, the frequent doctors’ visits, the constant crying. And then she told me something I didn’t know.

  “Sometimes I couldn’t handle it. I really couldn’t. I was so young. You have to remember. I didn’t have any role models. I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I’d put her in her crib and leave her there. Your grandmother worked in the factory three or four days a week back then, and when she was gone, I didn’t have any help. So I just put her in her crib and pulled the shades and shut the door and left her there. For hours she used to cry. Sometimes she’d cry all day long!” My mother’s mouth was stretched into an upside-down U, her brow collapsed. Her fingers, resting on the crib railing, shook slightly. I said something about postpartum depression and rubbed her back. But these were empty gestures. If she’d been a friend, I might have understood, but she was my mother, and Tracy was my sister, and my gestures were bogus. What I wanted was for her to leave. I wanted to lie down. And when I was done lying down, I wanted to call my sister—not to tell her what I’d just learned but to send something through the phone line, time-traveling magic that doesn’t really exist (I know that!), but I wanted to send it anyway.

  Comme des Garçons

  Isaac has a friend over after school, a boy in his first grade class. The two of them are busy making dinosaurs out of Legos when my mother knocks at the door. I’m not expecting her, but she never calls ahead because she thinks her phones are being tapped and she doesn’t want DMH to know when she’s leaving her apartment because she’s worried they’ll send someone over to search through her paperwork.

  Isaac’s friend’s mother and sister have both come along as well, and the three of us—the mother, the sister, and I—are sitting on the living room floor. I am trying to teach the girl how to knit because her Game Boy has run out of batteries and she is bored. We’ve gotten through the process of casting on and she’s working on her second row when my mother knocks. I excuse myself and step out onto our porch, careful to shut the door behind me.

  “Did he give you my message?”

  “Wha
t message?”

  “I thought so!”

  She is wearing an enormous white nylon jacket. It is square shaped, and it hangs down to her knees. I’m not sure if that’s the way it’s supposed to fit, but the effect is kind of preppy and vaguely Comme des Garçons at the same time. Underneath the jacket she has on a pair of white jeans that I gave her a while back and some white platform sneakers.

  “Mom, I have company. Isaac has a friend over. I can’t talk.”

  “You never want to talk, but we have to talk. I don’t expect you to believe this, Kimberli, but I am very, very ill. Things are happening quickly. We need to discuss certain technicalities. You have to come over and spend a few hours with me so that we can discuss certain extremely important, factual items.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like life insurance.” She purses her lips then, to make sure I understand that these words are code for I’m going to die soon, you know.

  “Mom, I don’t have time for this.”

  “You don’t have time for your own mother?”

  “I don’t have time for your endless problems, your imagined illnesses, your supposedly impending death, your paranoia.”

  She takes a step backward, as if she’d been literally stunned by an actual electrical shock, puts her hand on her chest, and says: “What are you saying? You think I’m paranoid? Me? Kimberli, this is not child’s play. When are you finally going to get it? When it’s too late?”

  I’m feeling pretty uncomfortable at this point because I know that Isaac’s friend’s mother and sister are in a perfect position to see me as our front door has a large glass panel in the middle of it, and beyond me they can also no doubt make out my old, frail, crazy mother in her huge white nylon jacket. And even though the door is shut, it’s also likely that they can hear us because our voices are raised. Things are heated.

  “How long is this going to last?” she asks, “all this anger, all these boundaries?” Then she begins to cry, and says, “Oh, Kimmy, if you only knew how much I miss you loving me.”

  I pause to consider the unusual construction of this sentence. Then the phone starts ringing. I tell her I have to go, but when I turn to open the door, she grabs my arm. I pull away. “That’s probably Isabella calling. I have to go.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “I have to. It’s Isabella!”

  “Don’t!” my mother shouts. I go inside anyway, shutting the door behind me, leaving her standing alone on the porch as I am now in the habit of doing. She stands there with her arms at her sides staring down at something. Her feet? The doorknob? As I run for the phone, I flash what I’m pretty sure is a shit-eating grin at my son’s friend’s mother, then pick up the receiver. Just as I’d predicted, it’s Isabella. She’s called to tell me that her play rehearsal is over and she’s coming straight home because she has to work on a science project that’s due tomorrow. I somehow hear her say these things even as my mother pushes the door open, not all the way but wide enough to shout inside: “Your shrink is destroying your mind, you know. She’s destroying your mind!”

  Concentration

  I’m not sure this counts as a memory at all. I know only that we’re eating something, my mother and I. Toast perhaps. Something that takes a bit of concentration. We’re sitting at our kitchen table downstairs, in the basement apartment, and for some reason I see us, all these years later, bathed in sunlight. But who knows? It was so long ago. It might have been raining. It might have been carrot sticks or cookies. The only thing I remember with anything approaching certainty is the act of chewing. Doggedly, doggedly chewing. And somewhere nearby, yet very far away, a baby is making complicated noises: ragged strings of spit and air.

  Confabulation

  My mother wore a fuchsia pink peignoir—layer upon layer of semitransparent chiffon trimmed with matching ostrich feathers—the morning she sliced her left wrist with my father’s razor blade. She was twenty-one years old. I was three and a half. Tracy was just learning to walk. I remember the peignoir most of all but also many legs—a whole forest of adult legs through which I battled my way toward the bathroom door. My father, his parents, his sisters—they were all crowded there, shouting, pounding. At one point my father threw himself against the door, but this did nothing, so Grandpa Joe threw himself against it. Over and over the two of them ran at the door until it finally splintered in its frame and someone reached inside to undo the lock. My mother stood there in her beautiful peignoir, holding her arm away from her body as the blood leapt in spurts. On the floor, near her feet, it ran along the right angles of grout in between the tiles. Later there were two paramedics who tied her arm off above her wrist with a tourniquet so the blood would stop jumping. But it was all wrong! They’d tied the wrong arm! I kept shouting at them to put the tourniquet on the other arm. One of them was young and kind. The other old and gruff. “Please!” I screamed, hopping from foot to foot. “It’s the wrong arm!”

  “Shhhhh!” said the older one. “This is how you do it.”

  Confusion

  The dominant emotion I hold in my heart (or whatever somatic port emotions actually reside in) for my mother is a complex thing: tender and livid, destructive, oppressive. To consider my feelings for her—even fleetingly—late at night is to experience brief but richly nauseating pulses of something like hopelessness, only more deathy.

  Connoisseur

  She buys cleaning products the way I buy luxury bath products, which is to say enthusiastically but with the discretion of a connoisseur. She collects them in large numbers, often in the largest sizes available, sizes you didn’t even know existed, sizes that are cartoonishly, industrially enormous, in containers you might be surprised to find even in a city hospital. She likes all the basics—bleach, ammonia, scrubbing powders—but also enjoys experimenting with more unusual products, such as ionized dust wipes or gels that claim to draw out deeply engrained mildew. My mother doesn’t simply amass these things but actually uses them because she really loves to clean and maintains a strict philosophy of cleaning, which boils down to one essential idea: it’s of utmost importance to clean deeply. Surface cleaning, she has told me I don’t know how many times, is next to pointless because anything can look clean on top but be absolutely filthy just beneath.

  Constellations

  Cabbage is a cheap and useful vegetable. I like the homey, simple taste of it in nearly every form—boiled, braised, fermented, and pickled. However, I cannot eat or buy or prepare cabbage without the certain visitation of a very old memory. In it Grandma Bella stands at the kitchen counter. She is about to cut up a large, pale head of green cabbage. The sun streams in through the window above the sink. I know this because my father stands over his mother, screaming, and tiny spheres of spit fly from his mouth, and these are illuminated by the sunlight. His face is red, his mouth huge, his black Buddy Holly–style eyeglasses wildly askew. His mother is much shorter than he. She is small and round, and she is also, at this point, the person I trust and love most in the world. On her olive-skinned arms are constellations of smooth white dots from the wax she handles in the munitions factory she works at three days a week. The dots are not technically part of this memory (I just thought I’d mention them), but my grandmother’s smallness and her roundness are because she seems especially these things with my father towering over her.

  I am in this memory too, at least physically—or maybe I should say proprioceptively, by which I mean that I feel myself to be exceedingly tiny, to be, in essence, all eyes—a low perspective gazing up at the scene. The emotions that fill me as I look on the adults and the sun and the cabbage and the knife are a fluctuating combination of dread and something like wonder. For instance, when my father grabs the cabbage his mother is about to chop and hurls it against the kitchen floor, I am completely awestruck. The act makes no sense at all to me. I doubt I could have been more surprised had he removed his own head and thrown it at the floor, had it been his head that smacked against the linoleum, then spun
crazily around the room, his head that my grandmother eventually retrieved, shaking slightly, and put back in its place.

  Constitution

  My mother has always described her father as a “Black Swede,” meaning dark, short, and wiry, like the so-called Black Irish. But my grandmother, when she first met her future husband in New Orleans, refused to believe he was Swedish at all until she saw his papers. His hair was too curly, too dark, his skin too brown, his Portuguese (he’d joined that country’s merchant marines when he was fourteen) too fluent.

  It’s odd—really odd, I think—but in our family Swedishness is infused with an almost mystical quality. For instance, the other night on the phone (my ear sweats she talks so much, so nonstop, for so long; it aches when I finally hang up), after telling me about the parasites she’s been massaging out of her gums, my mother exclaimed: “All I can say is, thank God for my Swedish constitution! If not for that, I’d be dead!”