The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “Where will Grandma and Grandpa live?” I wanted to know.

  “We don’t need them, the old fuddy-duddies! We’re going to have so much more fun on our own, just us three girls. It’ll be like a party all the time!”

  Another sheaf of clothes wrapped in filmy plastic was draped over the seat in front of me, and still more clothing hung from a hook above the window to my right, blocking the view. Tracy was not quite four years old. As we drove, she chewed her nails and craned her neck to peer avidly out the front window. At some point on our journey, we came to an unmanned tollbooth. Such things are practically nonexistent nowadays, but they were common back then: tollbooths equipped with white plastic buckets into which drivers tossed their coins. Exact change only. The coins funneled down into a mechanism where something clicked that made the gate lift. That day my mother tossed her change into the bucket, but nothing happened. The gate didn’t lift. She reached out to give it a shake, but this accomplished nothing, so she put in more coins, but still the gate didn’t lift, so she leaned on her horn for a long time. When no one came, she tried backing up, but the driver behind us honked his horn.

  “Moron,” she said, then floored it. The white and orange barrier exploded against our windshield with a crunching sound. Useless shards of wood tumbled off the hood of our car. It felt impossible. Like backwards time. Like anti-gravity.

  After that we drove with the radio on loud, over unfamiliar highways, down wide avenues, into a town I didn’t recognize, and finally onto a dead-end street crowded with small houses, chock full, it was true, of children just our age. My mother pulled into the driveway of a modest white house with pink shutters and said: “Ta-da! We’re home! How do you like it?” Tracy was sleeping, her cheek pressed against a cardboard box. I said it was beautiful. Pink was my favorite color.

  “Aren’t we going to have fun?” she asked, hugging me hard into her collarbones.

  “Yes,” I said. “It will be like a party every day.”

  Effing Idiot

  Somewhere on the Jersey Shore, 1972

  Aunt Becky must have taken this picture of my mother, Tracy, and me posing in front of the ocean on a stretch of hard-packed sand. Our shadows are dark pools at our feet. My mother has one arm around my sister and one arm around me. I lean into her side as the wind whips my hair across my face. Tracy looks beside herself with excitement—a grin full of tiny white teeth, short, exuberant tufts of hair sticking out of her head. My mother wears a white-and-black-checked bikini bottom and a Dr. Pepper baseball shirt. Also a pair of violet-tinted aviator glasses. She has arranged her legs in a casual movie star stance, knees gracefully knocked together, one foot angled sideways.

  After a lunch of bologna sandwiches and lemonade that tasted musty from the old thermos we’d poured it from, my mother said, “Let’s do it!” She took my hand, and the two of us marched into the ocean together. I was afraid, but because I have never wanted anybody’s love and approval the way I wanted my mother’s when I was a child, I pretended to be brave. She taught me how to ride the waves that day, giving me instructions as we treaded water. I remember these instructions as being pithy but at the same time exactly right because all I had to do was follow them and I was suddenly able to climb onto the back of a wave just as it swelled beneath me. We did this over and over again, dozens of times—gliding on top of the waves as they rose and rushed toward the shore.

  But then there were no more waves. We’d gone out too far. And out there the water seemed much darker, much colder, and somehow denser. There were only long, low swells, like a sheet being smoothed in slow motion. Sunlight shimmered across the water, breaking into millions of reflections that looked like coins, so exactly like coins that I couldn’t quite believe they weren’t and tried to balance my mind for as long as possible on that fragile line—the one between imagination (coins) and knowledge (light)—because I wanted to decide, once and for all, if they were gold or silver.

  I was getting tired. My knees kept knocking into one another. My legs felt blocky, numb. My teeth were chattering, and they, too, felt oddly insensate in my head, like wood. My mother said, “Oh, your lips are turning blue.” I asked to hold her hand, but she said she wanted to practice her backstroke, so I dog-paddled in place as I watched her swim, the water quietly splashing around me. My jaw ached. When she came back, we searched the beach for Tracy and Aunt Becky, but the people there looked so far away—as tiny as beads. Actually, the word that occurred to me at the time was sprinkles. Eventually, we became aware of a faint whistle, and when we realized this sound was coming from a lifeguard as he swam in our direction, we laughed. How absurd! He was so angry, blasting on that whistle. So mad yet so tiny! We laughed and laughed. When he finally reached us, he asked my mother if she was crazy, then put his arm around me and explained how I was to hold onto him. I had to put my arms around his neck but grip my own forearms so that I wouldn’t choke him as he swam. His body curved and bumped under mine as we made our way back to shore, and yet something about the motion must have relaxed me because I remember waking with a jolt when he finally swung me around and stood up to carry me out of the water.

  Sitting on the beach, plastering her feet with wet sand, Tracy squinted at us but said nothing. Aunt Becky rushed up and wrapped me in a towel. She thanked the lifeguard, then looked at my mother and said, “Jesus H. Christ, Linda, are you insane?” My mother said, “Don’t start, Beck, don’t even start,” and marched off with her shoulders thrown back, her arms and legs stiff and goosefleshed.

  “That dope,” said Aunt Becky. “That effing idiot. She doesn’t even know where she’s going.”

  Elaborate

  I’m adamant, not obdurate. There were good moments, too, and I remember those as well. For example, the first Easter after she took us back, my mother was so broke that the Easter Bunny’s offerings were decidedly spartan. Rattling around at the bottom of our baskets were a handful of jellybeans, a few marshmallow chicks, and some rectangles of chocolate cut from a larger bar. But this is just how my mother describes things. What I remember is different. I remember that every piece of chocolate was individually wrapped in tinfoil, shiny side out, and tinfoil, as far as I was concerned, was a kind of silver. On top of this, every glittering square was tied with a bit of lavender ribbon and each marshmallow chick was carefully swaddled in a paper doily.

  Elegance

  Our Backyard, G—, New Jersey, 1972

  My grandmother, in bell-bottoms and a tank top, stands with her left hand on her hip. In her right hand she holds a glass printed with the American flag. She has the kind of old lady belly children get confused about—she looks solidly second trimester. I’m seven years old, wearing a shirred pink top and blue shorts, seated at the foot of my mother’s chaise lounge, fussing with something in both hands, my shoulders up by my ears. Aunt Elsa, wearing a bold, floral print shirt, sits in a lawn chair and gestures with one hand. Legs bent, bare feet tucked under the straps of her chaise, my mother is very tan and dressed entirely in white—a slim halter top and fitted slacks. Her lush dark hair falls around her shoulders; she wears sunglasses and a single gold bangle. Even at this scale it gleams. She is thin, her limbs almost extravagantly long. She inspects her sister with characteristic stiffness, chin high. In those days my mother’s siblings often accused her of arrogance, though she claimed they just resented the fact that she had class.

  Elderly

  Character is a favorite word of my mother, who is fond of referring to herself as a “real” one. In fact, I can clearly recall, even now, the first time I heard her do so. I was six years old. We had recently moved into the two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the white house with the pink shutters. I don’t know where Tracy was on this particular afternoon, maybe napping, maybe playing with some of the kids in the neighborhood; the memory includes only my mother, me, and our new sandals—two pairs of Dr. Scholl’s. My mother’s were in the adult style, with a raised foot bed curvaceously sculpted from birch wood, while
mine, meant for a child, had low, pancake-flat soles.

  She was at that time in the habit of wearing luxurious clothes, clothes I have since come to suspect were bought for her by the men she dated in Florida. Her belts, earrings, shoes, slacks, and blouses all transfixed me with a certain quality I now recognize as quality but back then could only identify as a mysterious sort of density. I felt extremely proud to be walking along our new street in my new sandals with my, in a sense, new mother, who seemed to me, after her lengthy absence, almost a kind of goddess—beautiful, exciting, and above all, glamorous. I adored her to an almost physically painful degree.

  Holding my hand very tightly, speaking almost incessantly, without space for dialogue, I remember that she painted a picture of herself as an old lady that day: “I’m always going to wear Dr. Scholl’s, you know that?” she said. “When I’m an old lady, I’ll still be wearing Dr. Scholl’s. Won’t I be a funky old lady? Can’t you just see it? A real character! And you—sweetie—you’ll never leave me, will you? When I’m an old lady, you’ll never put me in an old folks’ home, will you? Promise me. Do you promise? You’ll practically be an old lady yourself then, and we can be old ladies together. And I’ll be the funky one.”

  Embarrassingly Large Collection of Self-Help Books

  David, Isabella, Isaac, and I had gone to the beach. Also, two of our three dogs—the two who were still alive, Inky and Chimmi. It was an extremely hot day, which is why Isaac (just a few weeks old) and I stayed out of the sun under a makeshift tent while David, Isabella, and the dogs chased one another back and forth along a thin crescent of sand bracketed by red boulders. Watching them, I felt jealous and a little abandoned. I also missed our third dog, Oscar, who had died just a few days before Isaac was born.

  Though I usually found nursing a pleasure, that day it was sandy, sticky, sweaty. Tiny heat blisters bloomed on my son’s cheeks. His gums, I thought, looked dark. I told David that we should leave, but he and Isabella and the dogs were having such a good time that I was gently ignored, once, twice, three times. Finally, I made him look at the bumps on Isaac’s cheeks, which he said weren’t really that bumpy, and the darkness of his gums, which he said weren’t that dark. Still, he agreed we could leave, though not exactly with enthusiasm.

  When I feel guilty, it feels like my bones are rotting. It’s totally disabling. I think that’s what happened that day. Everything inside me broke because I’d insisted on going home when everyone else was having such a good time, and I felt guilty about it. Or maybe it was postpartum depression. It’s hard to say. I just remember that as we started packing up our things and loading them into the car, I had the sense that I was detaching from my normal life, from my own self—playacting somehow. I knew what I looked like to anyone else: I looked like a woman who’d gone to the beach with her husband and children and who was now packing up the car while holding her beautiful, sleepy newborn on one hip. But the feeling of dissonance between the woman I appeared to be and the disorder I felt on the inside was expanding at a frightening rate. This is a feeling I usually experience only in the company of my mother: a deep panic—a sense that there’s no escape. Only that day the thing I couldn’t escape was myself.

  On the way home we stopped at an old-fashioned corner store that also sold gas and had an ice cream stand. At the ice cream stand I ordered something odd, a flavor I’d never heard of—butter crunch. This is, of course, a well-known type of donut but not of ice cream—for good reason, it turns out. Isabella got a scoop of chocolate. And David, as he always does, ordered mocha chip. The butter crunch flavor was sweet and gummy, so much so that I started to cry. David offered to buy me a new cone, but I said it was too late. I said the line was too long, we had to get home, and I didn’t want to spend the money. He said that was silly, and I said it wasn’t. He said it was, and I said it fucking was not. Finally, he offered to switch cones with me. The mocha chip flavor was really much, much better, but I felt guilty for taking it, so I offered him a bite. He happily accepted, only the thing of it was, he took a really big bite. I mean, it truly was a very large bite.

  There’s a difference, of course, between yelling and screaming, and I screamed when I saw how big a bite he took. We were still in the parking lot near the ice cream stand, and I screamed, not caring who heard me—the flirting teenagers, the other mom standing with her kids in the sun, the girl working in slow motion behind the ice cream counter, my own children. Suddenly I hated everything—my husband, summer, ice cream, myself. I hated all the crap that I, for whatever reason, insist on carrying around inside me. I hated my childhood and everything it lacked, which is to say things I don’t even know the names of, which is seriously unhelpful. Most of all, I hated my own failures and frustrations and thwarted ambitions, of which I have many, although I usually pretend otherwise. This feeling of hatred was multiplying inside of me, like some kind of grotesque psychological cancer, kaleidoscopically expanding into a boundless field of self-loathing. I didn’t say any of this, of course—I couldn’t have at the time—but some version of it was streaming out of me anyway in the form of weirdly high-pitched sentences concerning what was and wasn’t fair about ice cream and beaches and babies. Isabella made the pithy observation that I was being “pathetic,” and while, mentally, I couldn’t have agreed more, I did not do so verbally. Instead, I threw the mocha chip ice cream cone out the car window and cried, silently, the entire fifty-minute drive home.

  That night, after a couple of quick Google searches, I found a book called Anger by a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh, and the next day I checked out a copy of it from our neighborhood library. Over the next couple of weeks, I read Anger three times in a row, once quickly, like a drowning woman, and twice more slowly. Later I ordered my own copy so I could make notes in the margins. And then I ordered other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, who happens to be quite prolific. Eventually, I ordered more books by the same New Age press that published Anger, and then I ordered still more books by other New Age presses and other Buddhist monks. In fact, over the last several years, I’ve bought and read many, many books by many Buddhist monks as well as ancient and contemporary yogis, experts on meditation, and psychologists who offer wise words about the plight of our inner child, not to mention a few mindful eating experts, child rearing experts, and marriage experts, even—in one especially pointless instance—a book about how improving your handwriting can change your life. In fact, for three or four years following that day at the beach, I read little besides books of this sort, which means that at this point my collection of self-help books has grown so large as to be frankly embarrassing, for which reason I keep it upstairs, in the sleeping loft I share with David, where it’s more or less out of sight but at the same time within easy reach.

  Endeavor

  When you touch the present moment, you touch the past and the future. When you touch time, you touch space. When you touch space, you touch time. When you touch the lemon tree in early spring, you touch the lemons that will be there in three or four months. You can do that because the lemons are already there. You can touch the lemon tree in the historical dimension or the ultimate dimension; it is up to you.

  —Thich Nhat Hanh

  Erase

  I asked my mother when I would get to see my grandmother again, and she sighed, sat on the arm of the couch, and pulled me onto her lap. Tucking my hair behind my ear, she said, “You really love your grandma, don’t you?” Her voice sounded complicated, so I didn’t say anything. She asked if I loved my grandmother as much as I loved her, and again I couldn’t bring myself to say anything because the way I missed my grandmother at that point was physical. It felt like salt or acid. It was making me sick.

  “Do you love her more than you love me?” she asked, and here, at last, was a question I could answer.

  “No!”

  “That’s good,” she said, “because your grandmother isn’t what she appears to be.”

  She then told me a strange story.

 
“For three days and three nights,” she said, “when we were still living in the basement, your grandmother locked me in the dog room.”

  I knew the dog room: it was the small, windowless space off the garage where my grandfather kept his dogs at night. Perhaps one hundred feet square, the ceiling of the dog room was slanted because it was tucked underneath the stairs. The floor was concrete and always covered with fresh newspapers to keep the dogs from getting a chill when they lay down.

  “Your grandparents would come twice a day to toss food at me—bones and crusts of bread—and every day they beat me, like a dog. For three days and three nights they did this. They stripped me to my underwear. I had to sleep on the newspapers, like the dogs, who were my only friends.”

  My mother’s words were too warm, too plosive. They made my ear itch, and the itch was like a contagion because as she spoke I could feel something growing in me. Of course, it’s easy to say now that this was a story told by a mentally ill young woman and for this reason was full of helpless lies and unintentional cruelty, but at the time I thought it was a true story about true things, and as my mother whispered it to me, everything I knew became unknown and everything I trusted became untrusted. The world as I had always understood it began to disappear, as if a corrosive fog were gobbling it up. I didn’t think she was lying, though I did ask if what she said was true.