The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  Conversion Disorder

  In people with conversion disorder, difficult, painful, or entirely unbearable emotions are sublimated or even transformed into mysterious physical ailments. For example, my mother’s systemic bacterial infection, her concerns about worms living in her left eye, sperm-like organisms proliferating in the glands all over her body, her vestibular issues and deafness in one ear, unusual funguses in her mucus membranes, strange objects nested in the roots of her teeth, and so on and so forth, all seem to me the likely manifestations of a hefty case of conversion disorder.

  Cookies

  Before I came to understand a couple of interesting facts about gratitude—for instance, that it’s a remarkably good tool for getting calm and feeling okay about a wide range of emotions, experiences, and realities, and also that it can be practiced just as good posture or effective joke delivery can be practiced—I relied on baked goods to accomplish roughly the same thing. Indeed, baked goods remain a hardcore habit of mine. I am particularly fond of making and eating cookies but also love to make and eat fruit pies and, on occasion, simple, old-fashioned cakes: devil’s food, coconut, burnt sugar, buttermilk, poppy seed. Call me retro, but being a good baker makes me feel like a good mother, and being a good mother makes me feel like a worthwhile human being. It’s my hope and sincere desire that my children, as they grow older, will not view my at times rather frenzied activities in the kitchen as a more or less neurotic emotional construction but instead will cherish memories of me at the oven, spatula in hand, with scents of chocolate, vanilla, mace, lemon, cinnamon, and honey redolent in the air, and with tastes and textures that they might, at some much later date in their lives, recall as incomparably sweet and yielding—tastes of childhoods safe, unhindered, and essentially happy.

  Crazy

  When I ask how she knows there are worms in her left eye, she says: “I know because I have actually pulled a worm out of my eye. It was super long and super skinny, and it just kept coming.” When I try, delicately, to suggest that maybe what she pulled from her eye wasn’t a worm but something else, I leave the “something else” unstated because she’d be insulted by the word imaginary, and the word capillary (which is the only other possibility to occur to me) seems too gruesome to verbalize.

  “Why?” sighs my mother. “Why are you so invested in this idea I’m just this crazy, crazy lady? I’m telling you, this thing was alive, and it was moving, and it came out with hardly any tugging at all!”

  Criminal

  Tap-tap-tap. She knocks very lightly on the screen door because she’s still afraid of waking up Isaac even though he stopped taking naps years ago and in any case he’s out of the house since it’s a school day and only lunchtime. Because it’s impossible to get her to stop talking once she gets going, I don’t answer right away but instead rush to fill a laundry basket with a load of damp clothes from the machine. I might as well hang up some laundry while she talks my ear off, is my reasoning.

  When I open the door, laundry basket in hand, neither of us makes any mention of her previous visit. Instead, she says: “Oh, that’s perfect, Kimmy. Those will dry in a jiffy on a day like this. I just love the smell of clothes that have been hung outside to dry. There’s nothing like it! So fresh and sweet.”

  We walk over to the clothesline stretched across our backyard, and I begin clipping things to it as she speaks. It’s not that I don’t listen. I do. Sort of. But in the same way I might listen to a buzz saw or a leaf blower. I hear certain words, certain all-too-familiar words—teeth, doctors, landlord, DMH—and these alert me to the fact that nothing new is being said. But at a certain point my mother starts talking about something that piques my interest, something I haven’t heard before concerning the psych ward she was committed to after her first suicide attempt.

  “God, I hated that place so much,” she says. She is helpfully holding out a pair of Isaac’s shorts for me to hang on the line, but she’s gripping them kind of hard, so I have to tug them out of her hand. “I was so stupid! So young! I didn’t understand that the only way I was ever going to get out of that place was to lie. My doctor—he was such a pathetic little man, such a short little itty-bitty man, classic Napoleon complex!—he used to ask me every day the same stupid, meaningless question. Are you ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, Linda? And every day, I refused to answer him. I had no idea what he was doing. His treatment of me was absurdly minimal. Criminal, really. It consisted of just two things. Two! Tranquilizers and that same stupid question, over and over.” Making her voice go comically deep and adding what I think might be a German accent she says, “Are you ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, Linda?”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, one day I finally—finally—got another patient to tell me what I had to do. She set me straight. Said the bastard just needed me to say it for his form or something. And so the next day, when he asked if I was ready to go home and be a good wife and a loving mother, I said yes. He said he wanted to hear me say the words, so I said, ‘Yes-I-am-ready-to-go-home-and-be-a-good-wife-and-a-loving-mother.’ And boom—what do you know—the next day I was released.”

  Crux

  The small two-bedroom apartment my parents rented after my mother was released from the hospital was part of a large brick complex of similar apartments arranged around a central lawn divided by half a dozen concrete walkways littered with children’s toys—balls and dolls and chalk and bikes. I spent a lot of time watching my mother clean in this apartment, which she did with formidable energy and an impressive array of tools. For instance, to mop the kitchen floor, she used a gigantic super-absorbent sponge that looked like a massive chunk of caramel-flavored cake, a thick rubber mat to protect her knees, rubber gloves that reached to her elbows, a kerchief to hold back her hair, and, of course, a bucket filled with soapy, sharp-smelling water. I often begged her to let me help with this chore, but she said I was too small, I’d just get in the way. I was allowed to watch, but this, obviously, was a tremendous disappointment. After all, watching someone mop the floor, no matter how secretly relieved you might be simply to keep an eye on them so as to make sure they’re not about to kill themselves, is not exactly a three-year-old’s idea of fun. I had given up hope of ever getting to participate in this fascinating operation when one day my mother came home with a bag full of wonderful surprises: a miniature bucket, a miniature sponge, a miniature rubber mat, a miniature pair of gloves, and a miniature kerchief. The kerchief I remember as being especially beautiful, made of a fine-wale blue corduroy and dotted with white flowers.

  That day we mopped the kitchen floor together, and even now, when I recall that ancient afternoon, I feel something molten—something golden, warm. Maybe this is happiness. Or maybe it’s sunlight because in fact the sun was shining that day, glittering on the soap bubbles that floated in the air then settled in quivering half-domes on the countertops and the linoleum tiles and the sides of the bucket. The kitchen was full of this rambunctious light. It ricocheted off everything, exploding in white stars on the spotless windows, in the watery streaks on the floor, in the lenses of mother’s glasses, and on her straight white teeth whenever she smiled her slightly crooked smile.

  Crystalline

  S—, New Jersey, May 6, 1970

  A photograph of my fourth birthday reveals a listless gathering of three children and two young women—presumably mothers. There are few strips of crepe paper strung above our dining room table and, stuck to the wall, a single red balloon. I perch at the edge of my chair, ready to blow out the candles on a store-bought cake, but I might just as well be in a doctor’s office waiting to get a shot. No one is smiling.

  That morning I’d received a new pair of Buster Brown shoes—sturdy little oxfords made of brown leather with bright red laces. I liked them very much, mostly because of the laces because I was interested in all things red. Red was a song around me—a mysterious pattern. Red was the round rug in our living room, r
ed were my sister’s bow-shaped plastic barrettes, red was the charm at the end of my mother’s favorite necklace, red were the stripes on my father’s athletic socks, red was my velvet jumper, and red were the buttons on my soft white winter coat. To this day I feel certain there’s some good thing hidden in red, though I’ve never discovered exactly what it might be or why it chooses red.

  Later that afternoon, after the party, while Tracy was napping, I played with my second favorite gift: a musical jewelry box with a pop-up ballerina hidden inside. I can still see this tiny plastic figure perfectly, chiseled in every particular. Standing next to my bureau, I repeatedly opened and shut the lid of the music box to watch her pop into view. I was mesmerized by her uncanny spinning, the tinny music, and the mechanism hidden in the base of the box that generated that music: a studded brass cylinder that also spun and, in spinning, resisted a stiff row of plinking metal tines. The ballerina’s red lips were printed slightly off-center from her plastic mouth, and I was preoccupied by the question of whether she would be prettier with her lips centered or less pretty. I remember this as well: when I heard my father come home from work, I slammed the box shut and ran like hell to hide.

  Culmination

  The next day my mother was gone. Aunt Inga had picked her up in the middle of the night, while the rest of us were asleep, and driven her to the airport, only we didn’t know this—at least I didn’t. All I knew was that something had made a huge crashing noise in the living room very early in the morning, when it was still barely light outside. When I got up to investigate, I found my father standing near a hole in the wall. He was wearing pajama bottoms, and in one hand he held a piece of paper.

  “Your mother’s gone,” he said. He was breathing heavily.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  The man terrified me, but the question had to be asked.

  “Gone!” he screamed, and I booked it back to my bed as fast as I could.

  D

  Dappled

  Although I count them as the happiest years of my childhood, I possess very few memories from the time we lived with my grandparents, when my mother was in Florida. What memories I do own seem oddly random. My grandfather putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs, for instance. Why do I remember that? Or my grandmother getting into the passenger seat of their taupe-colored Buick, sliding her bottom across the vinyl seat sideways before swinging her legs around and shutting the door. Why that? The smell of garlic on her hands. Or that of cigarette smoke and something spicier (nutmeg?) in her hair. The set of my grandfather’s mouth—a thoughtful frown—when he read the paper at breakfast. The jagged salt-and-pepper static of the TV. The itchy wool weave of the couch. The olive-green nubs of the living room rug. The dim, slightly dank coolness of the garage. The metal rack full of curvaceous green Coke bottles at the base of the stairs. The dappled shadows—sunlight fractured by pine needles—flitting across my bed at naptime. The heavy cut glass ashtrays, one amber colored, one amethyst colored, both spotted with gummy stains of nicotine. The oily, slightly iridescent jostle of black coffee in milk glass mugs. The soft, slightly pillowy give of the orange vinyl placemats under my elbows. The dusky finish on the black and green plastic grapes heaped in a dimpled pressed glass bowl in the middle of the kitchen table.

  Decoy

  The day I lost my first tooth I took it out of my pocket to study it on the bus ride home from school: its glossy planes, its bloody ridge. A kid in front of me hung over the back of his seat to inform me that the tooth fairy didn’t actually exist. “It’s really just your mother.” My mother had been in Florida for nearly a year at that point, only I didn’t know that. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. My father, my grandparents: nobody spoke of her. I knew only that I didn’t have a mother anymore, so that’s what I said. What I remember next seems too cinematic: a busload of children pointing, chanting: “Doesn’t have a mother! Doesn’t have a mother! Doesn’t have a mother!” The idea that not having a mother was something to be ashamed of was news to me, but I slid right into it.

  My grandmother was waiting for me at the top of the hill, a block away from our house. When the bus opened its door, I stumbled down the black rubber steps and into her arms, crying. She asked the driver what had happened, and he said something about “damn kids,” then pulled away. But by that point it wasn’t the damn kids I was upset about—it was my tooth, which had fallen out of my hand as I’d gotten off the bus. When I was finally calm enough to communicate this to my grandmother, she told me not to worry because the tooth fairy would come anyway.

  “The tooth fairy doesn’t care about the tooth, really!”

  I said I cared about the tooth, and she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll find it!”

  This, clearly, was impossible, but she squatted down at the side of the road and began to run her fingers through the dirt and gravel, and I squatted next to her. After a while she picked up a small white pebble and announced: “Here it is! I found your tooth!”

  “Grandma, I think that’s a pebble.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  She crouched again. We searched for a long time, side by side, running our fingers through the fine dirt and the larger pebbles. Even after it started drizzling, we kept searching. The rain was tiny, cold, prickling. My grandmother showed me another pebble, smaller and whiter than the first.

  “That’s not my tooth either.”

  “No. Look. I think it is.” It was obvious that this was just another pebble, but I felt bad for her, so I agreed it could be my tooth. As we walked home, she pulled the side of her cardigan around my shoulders to keep the rain off.

  Deer

  Stretching behind my grandparents’ house were several flat acres of swampy forest, and most days after work, still wearing his navy-blue factory uniform, my grandfather would walk his dogs along a network of narrow paths through those woods. Often I went with him. On these excursions we were generally quiet, but every once in a while he would point out something of interest: a cardinal flashing through the trees, a circling hawk. There were massive skunk cabbages—much taller than I—and bogs filled with snapping turtles, which my grandfather sternly assured me would bite my finger “clean off” if I got too close. There were animal prints in the mud and leaves rotting in puddles and scat everywhere—rabbit, coyote, raccoon, deer. Once he showed me a misshapen ball of gray toilet paper high up in a pine tree and told me it was an abandoned wasp nest. Another time he gave me a tiny, softly brittle fragment of shell the color of the sky, only slightly more acid, and said a baby bird had come out of it. Another time he held out a pair of shimmering pale brown wings attached to each other by white filaments and topped by fine antennae and explained that this arrangement had once been a moth but that someone—a bird or maybe a bat—had eaten its body. And once, he quietly lifted me above the brambles so I could see a deer standing a short distance away on an icy carpet of dead leaves. A fine-grained, saltlike snow fell from the sky and bounced on the ground. All around us—the faintest clattering.

  Deft

  At some point somebody used the term half-orphans to describe Tracy and me. This may have been one of my grandmother’s friends, probably one of her neighbors—maybe Nancy, who babysat us a few days a week when my grandmother was at the factory. In any case the kitchen suggests itself as a setting. The term struck me as tragic and therefore intriguing but not really applicable because if I were a half-orphan, wouldn’t I feel tragic? But I didn’t. I felt fine. In fact, ever since I was old enough to achieve any sort of retrospective distance on my childhood, I have always considered the two years that my mother was in Florida, which is to say the two years that Tracy and I lived with our grandparents, as the happiest part of it. The easiest, the most plump with affection. And yet there’s very little left of that time, memory-wise. This, I know, is only to be expected. But it smarts.

  Many of my most vivid memories are food based: lasagna and pizza and fried eggs and pans of crispy scrapple, whole roast chickens wi
th gravy, meatballs with spaghetti, chocolate pie with whipped cream . . . Even more than the food, though, I remember my grandmother’s hands: strong, soft, dark, quick, deft. Uncanny, almost as if they were independent beings, separate animals. They flew over vegetables, reducing them to chips and dice and chunks and strips. They dug into sugar and flour, cubed sticks of butter, measured spoonfuls of molasses, honey, lard. They scattered salt and herbs, dimpled pizza dough, whipped cream, squeezed oranges, stirred custards, junkets, sauces, all with such careless precision. She often let me help, but it was hopeless—my hands were slow and small. Flour exploded. Milk spattered. But now, as an adult, I sometimes watch my own hands, in my own kitchen, as I’m making something—macaroons, say, or my grandmother’s meatballs or birthday cake—and I think they look something like hers.

  Delivery

  For my fifth birthday my grandparents bought me an Easy-Bake Oven. Two friends came over, plus there was Tracy. We sat in my grandmother’s kitchen at a child-size table and drank weak tea out of tiny red plastic teacups and made little cakes—hardly bigger than an adult’s palm—from miniature boxes of cake mix: chocolate and marble and “cherry.” Even then, I loved baking. We were eating the red-flecked cherry cake when the doorbell rang, and my grandmother hurriedly ushered our party into her sewing room and ordered us to stay there. “Promise not to come out,” she said.

  Huddled in the sewing room—which was crowded with bolts of fabric, an ironing board, a spare bed—we wondered what was going on. It was my birthday. I think that must have emboldened me. Because even though I’d promised not to, I snuck out of the room, crept down the hall, and poked my head around the corner. Like an expert spy. From there I could see, at the base of the stairs, my mother and her sister, my aunt Inga, standing at the front door. They both held large presents wrapped in silver paper, tied with long, curly ribbons, and these, needless to say, seemed to promise great things. But something was wrong. My grandmother kept pushing the younger women out of the doorway. And they kept pushing back at her. Although of course I recognized my mother, she struck me as strangely unfamiliar. Almost too real. Aunt Inga was strange too: her hair was frosted nearly white and her lips were covered in metallic lipstick. The three of them whispered angrily at each other. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was clear that my grandmother wouldn’t let the two younger women into the house and refused even to take the presents.