The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “Of course it’s true. Would I ever lie to you?”

  Then she told me the whole story all over again, and when she was done, she brushed a few strands of my hair away from my face and asked if I still missed my grandmother. When I said no, I understood for the first time how, with just a single word, it is possible to erase a part of yourself. Then she asked if I hated my grandmother, and after some hesitation I said yes. I said I hated my grandmother, and again I understood how easy, how nearly effortless, it can be to erase vast portions of yourself.

  Errand

  Usually complicated and pointless and hard to explain, often time-consuming and embarrassing, not to mention necessitating my complicity—no matter how passive—in some form of deceit, the errands my mother asks me to run for her are nothing but trouble, which is why I usually say no. No! No! No! But her most recent request involves something so perfectly simple that I can’t refuse. All I have to do is hand-deliver a thick manila envelope to the municipal office that’s in charge of her Section 8 housing. This office happens to be right on my street—just a few hundred feet away, literally a three-minute walk, door to door, so the whole thing, she assures me, won’t take more than ten minutes, tops. Because I am extremely concerned that my mother never, ever, lose her Section 8 housing voucher and because she tells me that keeping this voucher depends directly on dropping off this thick manila envelope, I say okay, even though I don’t understand why she can’t do it herself. After all, she just handed the envelope to me, and I’m practically across the street. Why the extra step?

  “Trust me. It will make a world of difference if they see this coming from you. They think I’m crazy!”

  No matter how disastrous they usually are, running errands for my mother is like putting money in the guilt bank, where I’m so massively in debt, and I figure this particular errand is an easy way to pay down at least a small fraction of my outstanding balance, so the next time I have a bit of spare time, I walk over to the Municipal Housing Office, where I tell the woman behind the desk that I am dropping off some papers for my mother. When I say her name, the woman purses her lips.

  “Oh. Hold on.”

  “Can’t I just leave this with you? She said I could just drop it off. She said you would know what this is about.”

  “You’re going to have to hold on. Just wait right there. Those have to be hand-delivered.” She goes behind a partition, where I can hear her talking to another woman with a deeper, more annoyed-sounding voice. There is a big sigh, and then a middle-aged lady dressed in a burgundy-colored pantsuit emerges from the back offices and pumps her fingers at me, like, Give me the envelope. She peeks inside it and says, “So, they’re here.”

  “What are?”

  “Does your mother have some kind of death wish? How self-destructive can one person get?”

  I suddenly feel like an idiot for not checking to see what was inside the envelope.

  “It’s like that woman’s trying to get evicted,” she says as she turns to go back behind the partition.

  “Wait!” I yell. “What’s in there? She’s my mother. I don’t want her to get evicted.”

  “It’s out of your hands. It’s out of all our hands. Your mama just loves trouble. Most folks feel thankful to have a landlord like that. But not your mother. No, she just has to stir things up, that one.”

  F

  Facade

  G—, New Jersey, 1974

  I’m in the kitchen in the house with the pink shutters—there’s the brown stove, the Revere Ware pots and pans with the black plastic handles, the stainless steel teakettle, the enamel butterfly chimes dangling above the sink. And there’s Fannie Farmer open on the counter, still newish. I’m putting something very small—a peanut, a jellybean?—into my mouth. Seven years old, I wear an oversized pair of purple-tinted sunglasses and lean toward the camera in an uncharacteristically punky sort of way. No doubt it’s because of the sunglasses, because of the kind of psychic protection they provide, but I’m projecting something kind of spiky. It almost looks like defiance.

  Fantasy

  My mother’s teeth are small and broken and yellow. Several are missing. When she talks, she often hides her mouth behind her hand. But this was not always the case. There was a time when her teeth were large, white, straight. Yet even then there were problems—alignment issues, muscle tension, mysterious needles of pain. These things required prescription drugs and long periods of rest spent in silence and darkness. When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about fixing her teeth. The first time the idea occurred to me, I was sitting on the lid of a large wooden toy chest in the bedroom I shared with Tracy, looking out onto the street, onto the bleak suburban landscape—white sky, black tree branches, empty sidewalks—when I suddenly found myself buoyed up by an incredible vision: one day, when I was grown-up, I would become very rich, so rich I’d be able to rescue my mother’s mouth, alleviate her pain, fix her “bite.”

  Father

  Even at the time I felt it was a grave tactical mistake on my mother’s part, my father coming to live with us. But soon enough—maybe eight or nine months after she’d put Tracy and me into her overcrowded hatchback and taken us to live in the little house on the dead-end street full of kids our own age—we were a family of four again. For a while I didn’t recognize him. This, clearly, is a deformed memory. It hadn’t been that long since I’d last seen him. All the same, this was my genuine experience—it’s how I remember it, in any case. Who is this guy? Once I even asked him, “Who are you?”

  “I’m your father,” he said and gave me a Tootsie Roll, as if to prove it. But I still didn’t trust him.

  Fedora

  A Party Somewhere in New Jersey or Perhaps New York, 1974

  I think of this as a picture of the man my father might have been, of the man I think he wanted to be, at least for a while. He is twenty-eight years old and still lean, clean-shaven. Sitting on a couch in front of a picture window hung with apricot-colored drapes, he wears a brown fedora pushed far back on his head and a beautiful shirt of shimmering white-on-white checks. His gaze is directed downward at something in his lap, so that all you see behind his gold-rimmed glasses are his eyelashes and, above them, the dramatic sweep of his eyebrows. His face—every angle of it—is an elegant contradiction, masculine yet delicate: the long Sicilian nose, the nostrils slightly flared, the glossy black ringlets, the perfect skin. His cheeks are pink! He looks like a poet.

  Feliz Navidad

  In a Department Store, 1974

  Santa’s totally drunk or on drugs or something, nodding out. There’s a placard hanging around his neck. I think this must be some kind of ID. It says “2–12324 Miles to the North Pole.” I’m only eight, but already I seem completely unconvinced by the whole deal. Tracy, on Santa’s other leg, appears deeply troubled by something. Maybe, on top of everything else (the closed eyes, the slipping beard, the sweaty face), Santa has bad breath—Tracy’s upper lip is raised in just such a way as to suggest this. We wear matching beige tights and turtlenecks, matching plaid jumpers with intersecting bars of olive and brown. I remember those jumpers. They itched like hell. But they were very cute—our mother made them. She was (no doubt still would be, if she put her mind to it) a very talented seamstress.

  Filthy

  What we called “kneeling” in my family, psychological literature calls “self-soothing,” other more familiar forms of which include head banging, nail biting, and thumb sucking. Although I started kneeling right after my mother’s first suicide attempt, when I was three years old, I continued to do so long after her return. I knelt everywhere—in school, on buses, at restaurants, in friends’ houses, on neighbors’ lawns.

  Isaac has a friend who masturbates in a similar way, only she doesn’t kneel. She stretches her legs out straight in front of her and squeezes her thighs fiercely together. I’ve seen her do this at school, and what struck me most—beyond the fact that she appeared trapped in a quiet agony—was that no one else seemed to not
ice, not the other children, not the after-school science teacher, not the teacher’s college-aged assistant. Or maybe they did. Maybe everyone in the room simply chose to let her do what she seemed so bent on doing by ignoring it. Perhaps they understood that she couldn’t help what she was doing, just as I couldn’t when I was her age. She wore, I suspect, the same expression I must have worn back then; and all these years later, watching her, I felt both sad and ashamed. A compulsion is so terribly private.

  When my mother explained to me that what I was doing was sexual and therefore constituted a form of pleasure, I was not only mortified, I was confused. I was outraged. How could this act—so ugly, painful, and relentless—be called pleasure?

  Like Isaac’s friend, I sometimes knelt in very public settings, yet no one seemed to notice—at least no one but my mother. Unfortunately, she saw me all the time. In fact, during the two years we lived in the house with the pink shutters, it seemed to me that her primary objective in life was to cure me of what she called my “filthy habit.”

  She was always catching me in the act, no matter how carefully I hid or how quietly I went about my business. And when she caught me, she would pick me up and throw me down. Usually, she threw me onto a soft surface, such as a nearby couch or bed (two pieces of furniture I often hid behind), but occasionally she threw me to the floor, and at those times I became acutely aware of the bones in my own body. At a certain point I realized I could masturbate in the bathroom, and for a while this was a tremendous relief. I imagined the endless game of cat and mouse had finally come to a close. But it didn’t take long for her to spy on me through the crack under the bathroom door, and when I came out, she still picked me up and threw me down. After that I started rolling up the bathmat and wedging it into the crack under the door, but this, obviously, was a shortsighted strategy. One day I emerged from the bathroom to find her standing in the hallway, arms crossed over her chest, eyes narrowed. She spoke very softly as she put her hand against my face and asked, “What did you just do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to change your mind about that? Because your face is bright red, and your cheeks are burning hot, and I know exactly what you’ve been doing, and it’s a filthy, disgusting habit!”

  I tried to run down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Tracy, but my mother was somehow attached to me. Her voice was a physical thing. It touched my brain directly. “You disgusting little brat,” she whispered, her breath hot on my ear. “I can see right through you. I know everything you do. I can see you through doors and through walls. I can see you when you’re at school. I know exactly what you’re up to even when you’re miles away. I know you better than you know yourself! Don’t you ever forget that.”

  Float (1)

  In yoga, to float is to execute a slow, controlled, seemingly magical transition between two dissimilar postures. For example, in the transition from adho mukha svanasana (downward-facing dog) to the one officially known as dandasana (stick pose, or seated at the front of your mat with your legs extended), the most graceful float is, in fact, a subtle handstand half-pike followed by a quick pelvic tuck, which allows you to slip your legs in a graceful arc between your hands and then out in front of you at exactly the same instant you settle your hips on the floor.

  There is also, of course, a metaphorical sense to the idea of floating, which is more or less the same thing Buddhists call “being in the present.” In this second sense it is entirely possible to float while doing the dishes or designing a website or driving in heavy traffic or even, theoretically speaking, while talking on the phone with one’s mother about the worms in her eye (although this last example would, obviously, constitute a very advanced form of floating).

  Although I practice yoga daily, I still cannot float physically, but every once in a while I find myself floating in the second sense. This happens most often in the company of Isaac, who is still young enough to float, himself, for long stretches at a time without even realizing he’s doing so. For example, if we eat pistachios together or read Asterix and Obelix together or practice karate together, he usually floats while doing so, and sometimes it’s contagious. Floating is easy around him. Even with Isabella, seven years older than her brother, I occasionally catch a little air time.

  Float (2)

  If I love yoga, and I do, it’s because I studied ballet as a child, and yoga is to me an extension of that experience, which taught me many curious things about living in a human body, such as the fact that movement can sometimes travel through you as breath travels through a hollow reed and the related fact that vibratory sensation is the root impetus of all physical expression and the fact that if you point your toes, it is not merely your toe muscles that do the work, it is not even in your leg muscles, but something deep in your belly and even further than that, something—a vibration of sorts—in your mind.

  I danced in three different ballet studios from the age of six to the age of thirteen. During that stretch of years my parents fought nearly constantly, moved house much too often, launched two fairly robust careers, made some excellent meals, went to night school, and became, in their own individual ways, increasingly unhinged. Through it all I danced. I wasn’t talented, but I was hardworking, and in many ways ballet was the most constant, enjoyable, and reliable element of my childhood. I loved especially to leap, and I loved also, especially, to sweat.

  Float (3)

  The idea is that alcoholism hopscotches through the male line of my father’s family. For example, my father’s mother’s brother was an alcoholic. So was my father’s father’s grandfather. Clearly, there’s no genetic connection between these two examples, yet they are often cited—by my father, his sisters, even me—as a form of explanation.

  But when I was a kid, I had no idea my father was an alcoholic. I only knew that he drank a lot of wine. So much wine, in fact, that when Tracy and I decided at some point to collect all the corks from all the wine bottles that came through our house, we filled an entire kitchen drawer inside of a year. After that we began filling a spare colander. After that our mother told us we either had to throw out the corks or do something useful with them, so we dumped them out on a blanket and contemplated. What could we make with so many corks? My father proposed the construction of a raft. “But what would we do with a raft?” “Float away,” he said. I understood that he was joking, but at the same time something about his tone gave me pause.

  Florist

  My mother calls at 11:23 p.m. to say I need to come by and pick out anything of hers I want.

  “I’m giving up my Section 8 voucher. I’m leaving the country. You can have anything. That nice little mahogany table.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “You don’t need to know the specifics.”

  “How are you going to afford it?”

  “That’s my concern, not yours. Now listen, I know how much you and your sister love DMH and do anything they want you to. But you need to not call them. You need to not tell them that I’m moving. I just have to get away from this hellhole. I’ve finally forgiven you for bringing me here, Kimberli, but as you know, *Massachusetts has been a living nightmare for me, and I just need the freedom to be happy—to go somewhere where I can just be me. A florist.”

  Flower

  Have you ever seen somebody beat somebody else up? I mean in real life. It gets very slow after a certain point because the person who’s winning has to do a lot of heavy, clumsy lifting simply in order to keep the fight going, organizing the basic physical bulk of the person who’s losing so as to land another punch. I once watched my father beat my mother in this slow-motion way. The fight woke me up. At first it was just a lot of shouting and moving in and out of rooms, back and forth along the hallway of our apartment. My mother made dramatic gestures while saying things I couldn’t understand except in the most general terms, by which I mean it was clear that she was mocking my father, while he, for his part, did that disturbing looming trick of his, breathin
g heavily through flared nostrils and leaning in very close to her face. It didn’t take long before their legs and arms started going haywire, flying around in all the wrong places. Everything was getting mixed-up. I shouted at them, begging them to stop, but was ignored to such a degree that I remember actually wondering if I’d somehow become invisible.

  I had, by that point, already witnessed a number of physical fights, not just between my parents but also between my mother’s siblings (see *gods). But something about this fight seemed different—harder to keep track of. It was as if the three of us were being swept down some secret, hidden vein of reality. As if we were getting siphoned quickly off, transported somewhere far away from the familiar world, someplace where the normal rules of existence had no bearing.

  At a certain point my mother started moving very slowly, barely responding even when my father pounded her upper body—in particular, her head—against the corner of the kitchen doorway. In between hitting her head against the doorway, he pulled her body upright, as if to align her spine and in this way more accurately hit her head against the doorframe another time. And every time her head hit against the doorframe, a soft, almost prim sound came out of her, as if she were clearing her throat in her sleep. It was the smallness of this noise that worried me more than anything else, though at the moment I was of course almost entirely preoccupied with my father—all my energies bent on trying to pry him off of her.