by Kim Adrian
What I didn’t understand (and wouldn’t for many years to come) was that despite all that was taking place around me, something else, also quite enormous, was happening inside of me. Inside of me something was growing with tremendous speed, racing through me, taking form, saturating my being on a cellular level. It would take decades for me to begin to recognize the character of this internal event, which I now understand to be the blossoming of rage, because I was, at the moment, so involved with the task at hand, and yet nothing I did—not even throwing my entire body at my father—had any effect on him. Or almost no effect, because I did get in his way eventually. I know because there is a blank spot, and then there is a hammered copper hinge. This hinge was part of the cabinet under the stove, and even now, in memory, it remains spectacularly in focus: tarnished and spade-like, it is full of tiny, shallow divots. A fine line of grime runs around its edge.
Frankly
I’m not sure why I bother with this. Except that the past calls to me so plaintively. As if I could help, all these years later. I feel like one of those avid old men who troll the beaches at odd hours, hunched over metal detectors, searching for something. But what?
Frantic
All that remains are a few random details, like the placement of the gray rectangle that was the television in the corner of the living room and the diffuse glare light from the streetlight seeping through the semitransparent curtains and the harsher trapezoid of fluorescent light spilling from the kitchen into the dining room.
I think of that night, now, as a kind of hinge. So many things depended on it, so many things fell out from it. Huge chunks of my personality, for example, were forged that night, despite the iffy quality of my memories, which are staticky and truncated. I know this: at some point my parents moved from a standing position in the kitchen doorway to a prone one in the middle of the living room floor. And there, in the center of this uncentered memory, is a mound. My father is sitting on top of it, and one arm is going up and then it’s coming down. Then it goes up again, and then it comes back down. I am not in this picture at all. I am only a monkey-like presence, a scrawny frantically hopping shadow trying to pull him off of her. Years later my father told me over one of our weekly dinners (see *Osteria) that if it hadn’t been for my pulling and screaming, he might have killed her because he was in a “blackout,” meaning so drunk that his senses had shut down.
“Nothing can get through when you’re in a blackout,” he explained, more than a decade later. “But for some reason, at some point, you did. That’s when I stopped.”
I remember his feet on the stairs: each step a slightly different sound.
I remember my mother’s unmoving form. Her face was swollen and lumpy and smeared with things. It was a mental challenge to simply recognize her. Long dark strands of her hair were stuck to her cheeks and forehead. One eyelid and both lips were swollen and bright red. They looked like rubber. I decided she must be dead, and I started keening. I was just a kid in New Jersey, but I was keening my head off, rocking back and forth over my mother’s still body. I see all this as if in a movie, more or less from above. In this way it’s almost entirely false. What’s real, the only detail that flares for me, is the shag carpet under my knees: it itched. Somehow it still does.
Freak
When she knocks on our door without warning, I step out onto our porch and tell her right off the bat that she can’t do it anymore—come by whenever she feels like it and just expect me to stop everything I’m doing in order to talk to her.
“Why, Kimberli? Why do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t hate you! I just have things to do. I have a whole life, you know.”
It seems clear we’re headed toward a fight, the same fight we always have, but suddenly she looks very concerned as she puts a hand on my forearm. “It’s because of that time when you were seven, isn’t it? I’m so sorry about that, Kimmy. You have no idea. I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to you that day.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The day I threw you,” she whispers.
“Mom. You threw me more than once.”
“No! Don’t make things worse than they were! It was bad enough. Even to do it once. I make no excuses. None. But you have to understand where I was coming from.” There are creases on her forehead I’ve never noticed before. Her eyebrows are sparse and speckled gray. The skin of her face hangs listlessly from the beautiful old bones. I just wanted to protect you. I thought people would think you were a freak. You masturbated so much. It was scary.”
Funky
M—, New Jersey, 1975
How’d she figure things, afterward? After half our block had stood outside in the middle of the night, bathed in the pulsing lights of police cars and the ambulance, watching as she was brought outside on a stretcher? After she returned home, so bruised and swollen that Tracy and I had to eat our meals at the next-door neighbor’s house for half the week because she was too sore to get out of bed? What stubborn, sad, or twisted thing in her thought, Sure! Let’s give it another go?
My father’s hair is long in this photograph—it reaches almost to his shoulders. It is wavy and shiny and black. His aviator glasses are amber tinted, his shirt collar enormous, his woolen vest knit in a large-scale argyle pattern of green and red diamonds. The best descriptor for this outfit might be funky. He is just beginning to get fat, which is the way I remember him from my childhood. My mother, though, looks svelte and fashionable in her tilting white beret and gold hoop earrings. Her brow is high, her smile wide—every tooth still sound, still white.
This is the only photo I know of that shows the four of us together. It was taken on Christmas Eve at Grandma Ellen’s house (my mother’s mother). I can tell because of the holiday cards pinned to the wall behind our heads; the cards encircle a poster of wild horses kicking up dust in a bleached-out western landscape. This poster is duct-taped to the white wood paneling, and the four of us are sitting on the couch just beneath it. Sliding off my mother’s lap, I hold two gingham-printed stuffed animals that have been sewn together in a permanent hug; their species is unclear, but one is blue and one is pink. On our father’s lap, looking as if she might fall asleep at any second, Tracy holds a similar pair of animals, red and white, also locked in an eternal embrace.
Furphy
Drugs, according to David, are my mother’s real, essential problem, not mental illness or childhood trauma. I find this take simplistic, but I do wonder if all those other things—the worms, the landlord problems, the paranoia, the endless issues with her teeth—wouldn’t be half so bad without the drugs, which she gets from various doctors, whose prescriptions she fills at far-flung pharmacies, one of which is in Rhode Island and another in New Hampshire. These drugs she combines in ways I don’t understand, ways that seem to essentially obliterate her. Yes, surely my mother is an addict, yet I find it hard to square this thought emotionally because she has always, for as long as I can remember, insisted that she hates drugs—she hates drugs and everybody who does drugs and all varieties of addicts because addicts are weak. Addicts are users. And they lie, lie, lie, lie. She often takes great relish in listing out the addicts in her life as examples of precisely the type of person she is not: “My brothers and sisters are addicts. My father was an addict. And your father is the ultimate addict. And nothing—nothing—makes me sicker than an addict!”
G
Gallberries
The most exciting thing I knew as a child was driving down the long dirt road that led to my grandmother’s house. Why this was such a thrill, I can’t say, but to this day I still occasionally dream about that road, and these dreams are always exhilarating, despite the fact that when I stop to examine the actual experience, there was hardly anything to it: gravel spitting up from our car wheels with a sound like heavy rain; thin blades of sunlight stretching through the birch tree branches; thickets of gallberry holly coated with gray dust; pollen so heavy that, in the summe
rtime, our windows were yellow with it by the time we reached my grandmother’s.
The house itself was small and dirty. Everything in it was amiss—broken, peeling, mildewed, crumbling, rotting, smelly (especially in the bathroom, as there was no running water and we flushed with a bucket, though only when absolutely necessary). Yet despite all of this, it was to me a place of wonder, almost part of another world, as if it had sprung from the pages of a half-forgotten fairy tale.
In the kitchen there was a pump at the sink and a cast-iron potbellied, coal-burning stove set on a platform of wobbling bricks. In the wintertime I liked to stare into the narrow slots of this stove, at the jagged chunks of coal inside that burned neon orange and emitted an icelike sound, a kind of tinkling or crinkling. There was also a “painting” over the table that depicted a jug of wine and two apples as well as an old-fashioned clock, the hands of which were real hands—made of metal with filigree tips—that stuck out from the surface of the painting and traced the hours of the day like any other clock. The stairs leading from the kitchen to the bedroom on the second floor were painted fire-engine red, and the wall in this stairwell was covered with several decades’ worth of wallpaper. Tracy and I spent hours on those stairs, peeling away chips of chalky paper, revealing endless variations of plaids and florals and hunting scenes, yet we never got to the bottom of it.
When we slept over on the weekends, Grandma Ellen gave us her double bed upstairs and she slept on the couch in the living room. Under the slanted roof upstairs, there were two windows, dusty and busy with insects: large moths, angry flies, drunken-seeming bumblebees all noodled at the panes. Spiders fussed in the corners.
The smallest room in that three-room house was the living room, which was paneled with fake wood—white with gray striations—and crowded with potted plants and a large, staticky television with rabbit ear antennae. For some reason this room terrified me—maybe because it was dark and always felt cool or maybe because we sometimes watched scary movies in there with Aunt Elsa, our mother’s youngest sister. In any case this room frightened me so much that I used to hold my breath as I ran through it whenever I had to use the bathroom. But it also contained an object I found almost unbearably beautiful: that poster of wild horses stampeding across a desert landscape at sunset. I loved this image not so much for how it looked as for how it sounded because every time I ran past it, I could just make out the faint thunder of distant hooves.
Gape
Grandma Ellen’s forehead was high and elegantly rounded. Her jaw was dramatically angled, her cheekbones lofty but narrow. She might have been pretty if not for her pronounced underbite, which gave her a vaguely pugnacious look. Her nose was scooped and conspicuously small—a rarity in our family, so rare, in fact, that I have often wondered whether she hadn’t at some point (perhaps in New Orleans—see *hair shirt) gotten a nose job. But it was her eyes that were her most striking feature—blue with a violet tinge, forever shadowed underneath by two dark, nearly purple semicircles.
Grandma Ellen was so perennially exhausted that whenever she rode in the car with us, my mother at the wheel, she’d drop off after a mere five minutes—her head thrown back against the passenger seat, mouth wide open in a helpless surrender to her own bottomless fatigue. Amazed and a little disgusted by the gaping black hole of her mouth and the snores that issued from it, Tracy and I would spiral into hysterical fits of laughter in the back seat. Now I wonder if maybe our grandmother wasn’t tired because of the coughing—she coughed all the time, every three or four minutes because of the whooping cough she’d barely survived as a child, which had scarred and weakened her lungs. The cough itself always followed precisely the same trajectory: a hoarse, deep rattle followed by an attenuated, almost musical wheeze.
She often served us canned soup with saltines for lunch and cups of milky tea and slices of toast spread with deviled ham or sprinkled with sugar for a snack. She sang us children’s songs, like “Pony Boy” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “I’m a Little Teapot,” as well as an unorthodox version of “Miss Mary Mack” that I can’t quite remember now, outside of the fact that the silver buttons played a slightly X-rated role. She loved animals and fed the hoards of feral cats and dogs in her rural neighborhood with huge pots of rice that she put outside for them (or if it was raining, inside) and allowed all the pregnant cats and dogs to have their litters in a hole at the back of her house, where part of the foundation had caved in. She loved animals so much that there was a period of time—a couple of weeks or maybe even longer—when she refused to wash her hair because she insisted that there was a spider living in it and she didn’t want to hurt it.
Garlic
My father learned how to go stony—face red, nostrils flared, hands clenched, still as a statue. But he never hit her again. My mother, on the other hand, grew more and more wildly antagonistic. Often her aggression manifested in unusual ways. For example, she occasionally sliced cloves of garlic paper thin and tucked the slivers into the pockets and linings of his suits before he left for work so that the stench rose up around him, a mystery of embarrassment that twice got him sent home from the office.
For years this memory seemed suspect to me—it’s just so odd. Slivers of garlic? Hidden in suits? I figured I must have dreamed it: a baroque *confabulation inspired by my father’s Italian heritage. But once, in my thirties, I asked my mother if it was true. Had she actually put garlic in my father’s suits?
“You betcha!” she said. Then she explained how she used to slice the cloves using a razor blade so as to make the slivers as thin as possible, so thin, in fact, as to be nearly transparent and in this way practically impossible to detect.
“But why?” I asked, and she looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Then she said my name in this way she does sometimes, very quick, very boxy. All sharp angles. “Kimberli. You’ll forgive that man anything. But me—a little garlic and you’d think it was the crime of the century!”
German
Grandma Ellen’s father was English, but he disappeared just months after her birth, so whatever blood he contributed to that line of the family has always seemed to count for less. For next to nothing, in fact. Instead, I think of my grandmother as being mostly German because her maternal grandparents came from Germany around the turn of the century and settled in the Catskills, where my grandmother grew up.
In 1918 Grandma Ellen’s mother died in the influenza pandemic, which left her essentially orphaned. Just two years old, she was raised from that point on by her teenaged aunts (or as my family has always called them, “the Aunts”—always with the definite article). This is why I think of Germany when I think of my grandmother—because the Aunts were practically German in every respect except birth, and in raising their young niece, they managed to shape her character almost completely. Which isn’t to say directly, because Grandma Ellen would eventually build her entire adult life in opposition to everything her aunts stood for.
Some of the more stereotypically Germanic attributes of the Aunts included an emphasis on propriety, an adoration of all things solidly bourgeois, strict habits of diet and self-care, restrained facial expressions that often conveyed an apparent lack of emotion, a taciturn Protestantism, an uncomplaining work ethic, and an almost fetishistic habit of coupon cutting. All these, of course, are admirable qualities seen in a certain light, and the two old spinsters (when I knew them) in fact led a very comfortable life. But my grandmother inherited not a single one of these traits or habits.
As a child, I often compared and contrasted my grandmother with the Aunts. It seemed unthinkable that Millie and Gert, with their countless lace doilies, their white gloves, their fine china, their towers of hatboxes, could in fact, in real and actual life, no matter how many years earlier, have raised my grandmother, who lived in such a small and squalid house, with floors so saturated with coal dust that to walk around barefoot on them for even a few minutes turned the soles of Tracy’s and my feet a shiny, silve
ry black. Not to put too fine a point on it, my grandmother was gossipy, coarse, and dead poor. I don’t know if she was lazy or just uninterested in the “finer things” in life, but she didn’t seem to care about how she looked or what sort of impression she made. Certainly she was not religious. If she dedicated herself to anything at all, it was to books, which she loved to read one right after another—fat, cheap paperbacks bought at the drugstore counter, half a dozen at a time. These she read by the dim light of her kitchen window, which was made not of glass but of a sheet of plastic that snapped in the frame when the wind was up.
Gestation
She said the spider had laid an egg in her hair and she wanted to give it time to hatch. It smelled mustardy in my grandmother’s kitchen. Warm and sour and a little bit like piss. She looked not at me when she spoke, and not at Tracy, but above us, maybe at the clock painting on the wall or at the dim, speckled Budweiser mirror that hung next to it. I remember wondering if she actually believed this story or if she was just teasing us. Maybe she was telling us this story because she thought it would entertain us. Or was it some kind of a game? Or a test of some kind? If so, would I fail if I didn’t believe her? Or if I did? Did she think the story would make us laugh? Enchant us? All of these possibilities ran through my mind, and this too: I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. If she truly believed that a spider was living in her hair, I didn’t want her to know I thought that was crazy. It was a lot to consider, but I was used to it. I had long ago perfected a strategy for such situations: I simply arranged my face in an expression of genial neutrality.