The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  Gesture

  M—, New Jersey, circa 1951

  In the only photograph I’ve ever seen of my mother’s father, he and my grandmother pose with the first four of their seven children in front of what appears to be a new black car, gleaming and voluptuous with silvery hubcaps and grill. Above the car is a clothesline with a dozen or so pins attached to it. The sky is white, and a gentle glare seems to press down on the scene. Things must have been good at this point. My grandparents are well-dressed: my grandfather in a double-breasted black suit, my grandmother in a long skirt, high heels, and a white ruffled blouse with a dainty bow at the neck. Her hair, softly curled, flows down both sides of her narrow, high-cheekboned face to her shoulders. She wears lipstick, an almost sultry expression, and nylons. Her shoes are half-hidden in the patchy grass. My grandfather looks to be about thirty years old. He’s got a Jean-Paul Belmondo thing going on. A tough-guy vulnerability. A face crowded with its own dramatic features. His hair is brown and wavy, his skin a good two or three shades darker than my grandmother’s. One of his hands rests on his eldest daughter’s shoulder. This gesture could be protective, or it could be reminding her to stand still, or it could be a statement of possession. On his hip, encircled by his right arm, is my mother, chubby and towheaded. She is playing with his tie. About three years old, she looks very serious about the tie. My grandmother holds the baby, my aunt Becky, in both arms, cupping one of her tiny, curling feet in one hand. The oldest child, my uncle Thor, squints into the camera and grasps the dark folds of his mother’s skirt with his fist. He can’t be older than five or six, yet he wears exactly the same expression he will for the rest of his life. The best word for this might be removed.

  Giant, Midget

  Some weekends Tracy and I slept over at our grandmother’s house, some we slept over with the Aunts in New York City. Technically speaking, the Aunts were Tracy’s and my great-grandaunts, and not surprisingly, they were extremely old. They were also kind and boring and impossible to keep straight, probably on account of their wigs—identical steel-gray helmets. Tracy’s and my confusion regarding which aunt was which forced us to construct sentences with enormous holes in them, holes where their names would normally have fit. But our troubles lifted one day when, sitting on a chalk-blue angora blanket spread across one of their twin beds (the smell of mothballs sifting up from underneath us), Tracy hit on a brilliant mnemonic: the short one, she said, had the name that started with M—Millie, which we could remember because M is also the first letter of the word midget. And G was the start of both Gert (who was tall and big-boned) and the word giant.

  After that our time with the Aunts was a little easier, linguistically speaking, but those weekends still dragged. There just wasn’t a lot to do besides eating the hearty meals Aunt Millie cranked out with remarkable energy (noodles with meatballs, potatoes and corned beef, chicken and rice in cream sauce, turkey pie, sardines smashed with mayonnaise, duck hash with poached eggs, stewed prunes, pickled watermelon rind, lemon pudding) and sitting on the Persian rug in the living room to “play” with the one toy in the entire apartment—a set of nesting Matryoshka dolls—while Aunt Gert thumbed through the pile of newspapers she kept on her damask footstool.

  Being so distant from their own long-ago childhoods, the Aunts seemed to have lost any insider knowledge they once might have possessed about children, such as how to play with them or talk to them. On top of this, they were obsessed with propriety and discouraged whimsy of any kind, so in short our visits with them—irregular but numerous—remained sterile encounters.

  Now, of course, at this much later point in my life, I really wish I’d been a different sort of child—more avid, more suspicious, less shy. For example, I wish I’d asked the Aunts questions, many questions. Such as, What is wrong with my mother? If I’d been less quiet, less fearfully polite, I might even have pressed them to reveal why the two of them had never married, and certainly I would have asked them the most interesting question of all—one I pondered often: how was it that the two of them lived in such decent, respectable comfort, while their niece, my grandmother, inhabited such a tiny, dirty, ramshackle house? Who knows—had I been more inquisitive, the Aunts might have enlightened me on these and many other points of interest, in which case my entire life may have unfolded in a completely different direction. Because if such mysteries had been explained early on, I might not find myself, as I do today, still struggling to solve them.

  Gjetost

  We called it the “Refrigerator Story,” although it was just a description, not a story. When I was little, I couldn’t hear it often enough. I used to beg my mother to tell it to me again and again. Like most of her stories about her own early life, the Refrigerator Story seemed like a fragment from a fairy tale: a glimpse into some other, much more intensely colored reality. At the very center of this story stood—yes—a refrigerator, and inside the refrigerator was a shelf that no one but my grandfather was allowed to touch. On this shelf he kept many exotic foods that reminded him of Sweden, his homeland. Some of these foods sounded woodsy and sweet, like limpa bread and lingonberries; others struck me as odd, like creamed herring or gjetost, a sweet brown goat cheese, which, I knew because my mother once bought a block to show me, looks and even tastes weirdly like caramel. But many of the foods she described seemed downright barbaric, such as the raw sirloin steaks she said her father chopped very fine, using two knives at once—chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop—until the meat was soft and silky as pudding. He would then make a mound of this mush on a plate (“rabiff,” he called it), cover it with raw onion (also very finely chopped), and over the whole, break a fresh egg. I had no idea, when I was young, what my grandfather did to my mother when she was a child, and yet I still understood him to be a kind of devil; the Refrigerator Story seemed proof of this. It was like being related to Rumplestiltskin or the Big Bad Wolf—some creature whose wickedness pushed right up against the brink of imagining—because it wasn’t just the raw sirloin and blood sausage and black pudding that amazed me with their grotesque otherworldliness; it was the fact that, according to my mother and her siblings (who also told this story), there were times that my grandfather went about making and eating his elaborately chopped rabiff when the rest of the refrigerator was empty.

  Glam

  She often enlisted Tracy and me to help her quit. “Stop picking!” we’d say whenever we caught her. Sometimes she’d say “thank you” and put her hand down, but more often than not she’d just keep going.

  Once she told me that she’d learned how to pick her hair during her two-month stay in the psychiatric hospital she was admitted to after her first suicide attempt. She was twenty-one years old at the time, and there was an older woman on her ward, a fellow patient, whom she found glamorous because she read thick, serious novels and had a Belgian accent and because she did something pretty and intricate with individual strands of her hair. My mother said she studied this woman’s motions: the dainty picking, the airy twirling—not unlike a one-handed game of cat’s cradle—and finally the subtle tug that resulted in the slow-motion sifting of a single strand of hair to the floor. She practiced all the moves. Got them down. By the time she came back from Florida, she was a bona fide trichotillomaniac. Her habit fascinated me as much as it had fascinated her when she’d watched the Belgian woman in the hospital. I thought it looked sophisticated, in a distracted sort of way, and tried to do it myself until she caught me at it and batted my hand away from my head. “Don’t do that!” she said. “It makes you look crazy.”

  Glimpse

  M—, New Jersey, circa 1952

  Squinting into the sun, about four and five years old, respectively, my mother and her oldest sister, Inga, sit outside on a wooden chair. Inga wears a white pinafore, my mother a plaid gingham dress with a lacy bib and puffed sleeves. Things have been carefully arranged for this photograph; the chair’s eyelet skirt, its placement out of doors, the bow in my aunt’s hair all speak to this.

&n
bsp; So, why is it that whoever took the photograph staged the scene in front of an abandoned bus, headed downhill, its front end hidden in some woods? Not far from the bus is a strange construction, about fifteen feet high. It looks like it might be a turbine or some kind of large generator, haphazardly boarded up with wooden planks. Whatever it is, it is not photogenic. My mother is eating something.

  For years, whenever I looked at this photograph, I didn’t see the bus or the weird whatever-it-is in the background, only the lace, the grass, the trees, the two tanned little girls—not exactly happy. Still, for some reason I assumed my mother was eating something delicious and that the deliciousness of whatever it was must have been the cause of her look of intense concentration. One day, studying the photograph more closely, I realized that she’s in fact eating a potato, a raw one to judge from the tautness of its skin and her grip on it. She’s chomping into it the way you would chomp into an apple.

  I’m sure I’d still see an apple there, despite the oblong shape, the dusky skin, except that once, while cooking dinner with my mother, I noticed her pop a slice of raw potato into her mouth. I’d never seen anyone eat raw potato before and had the notion that uncooked potatoes were mildly poisonous, the way potato leaves are or potato skins if too green. She seemed flustered when I asked why she’d eaten it, and in the offhand, somewhat aggressive way she adopts whenever she feels the roots of her poverty showing, she told me she’d eaten raw potatoes the whole time she was growing up—that raw potatoes were often the only snack to be had, and sometimes they were dinner.

  “Try it,” she said. “It’s not bad.”

  Gloom

  Hairbrushes and leather belts and wooden spoons. Bare hands on occasion too. My mother was strong, but you wouldn’t know it when she hit us. She held back, most of the time. Still, the spankings hurt, not least our pride. And generally speaking, they lowered the mood quite a bit. The internal weather could be negatively affected for days. Protests were met with sarcasm and statements to the effect that neither Tracy nor I had any idea what “real” physical abuse was and therefore no cause for complaint.

  Glossary

  A kind of door—this glossary is, anyway—a door I am in the midst of constructing, and when I am done with this door, I will shut it, and on the other side of it, I will leave my heavy boots, because I am pretty sure I will be more comfortable without them, and I suspect that if I am more comfortable, I will also be more useful, generally speaking—to my children, my husband, my community, my extended family, maybe even to my mother. Or not. Maybe I’m just talking through my nonexistent hat about my nonexistent boots, which are, of course, mere *metaphor, just like the door I would never actually be able to shut—not all the way—even if this glossary were one.

  Gods

  On holidays my grandmother’s house was crowded with my mother’s six brothers and sisters, their romantic interests, and the four of us. Grandma Ellen was there too, needless to say, brittle and strange.

  Those celebrations were crowded, warm, loud. But at the same time there was something wonderful about them, larger than life. This feeling had everything to do with my aunts and uncles, who, although they seemed at the time vaguely interchangeable (there were just so many of them), were as a group unlike anybody else I knew. Boisterous. Big-boned. Reckless. Even to this day, my aunt Elsa or uncle Lucas will suddenly come to mind whenever I am surprised by a shaft of pollen-lit sunlight or the sound of a single acoustic guitar played out of doors or the sight of young, bare, dirty feet.

  There were times when the holidays we spent at my grandmother’s house went the way holidays are supposed to go: nobody got too drunk or too mad or too mean, and at the end of the night everybody hugged everybody else goodbye before climbing into their respective cars and driving home. But at other times things unraveled well before that point.

  How does experience blur? How do once-specific memories smear, over time, into the haze of general impressions? I can’t say which gatherings at my grandmother’s house ended with a drunken insult tossed recklessly into the conversation, an insult that created a chain reaction of speech and gesture until the whole room came alive in a special way, yet I still remember exactly how the volume zipped right up at those moments. How the laughter spiraled more loudly, more sourly, more quickly. How plosives became more plosive, sibilants more sibilant.

  Yet when I search for concrete details, I can bring to mind only two fragile, bleached-out memories of actual physical fights. One began outdoors, in my grandmother’s front yard, near the driveway—first a shove, then another, then a fist grabbing a collar. I watched my father and my uncle go at it like this, as I stood near the lilac bush. The other argument was between two women—which two, I can’t say. One of them might have been my mother. One of them might have been my aunt Becky. Or it could have been my aunts Inga and Elsa. In any case I was sitting on a folding chair at the kitchen table, mourning my sweet potatoes, which suddenly seemed much less appetizing. And I remember this: the two women—whoever they were—fought like children. Like Tracy and me: slappy and spastic, lifting their heads away from one another while using the same frantic pawing motions that my sister and I used when we fought, only they were, of course, grown women. They were gigantic. And although I recognized even at the time that there was something pathetic about this behavior, in another sense it felt like watching the gods fight.

  Going Shit à la Ape

  Tracy and I were sitting at the small, white, formica-topped table in our kitchen eating cereal—cornflakes or maybe Life, which was a favorite at the time. We’d moved earlier that year from the top floor of the house with the pink shutters to the top floor of a house with black shutters three towns over because my mother had gotten into an irreconcilable argument with the landlady in the house with the pink shutters. This apartment wouldn’t last long either, for the same reason, but at the time Tracy and I were just eating our breakfast cereal and watching our parakeets, Greenie and Bluey, as they hopped around in their cage near the window, beyond which it was snowing—big soft clumps sifting slowly downward. My mother had recently started working at a new job—not as a secretary (which was what she’d always been before) but in a sales capacity at a large computer company. She was running late, so she called down the hall from the bathroom to ask our father to make her some toast.

  “Sure,” he said, and popped in two slices. Then he got busy with something else—maybe pouring orange juice for Tracy or lighting a cigarette for himself because both of my parents were still smoking at that point (despite the fact that Tracy and I went to great lengths every day to hide their cigarettes and break them or soak them or throw them out). When the toast popped up, Tracy and I kept eating our cereal and watching the birds and the snow. It took a while, but eventually my father retrieved the two slices, put them on a plate, and buttered them. Then he called down the hall to our mother to say her toast was ready.

  Seconds later, she swept into the kitchen wearing a long, pleated skirt, dark nylons, and a special sort of silky top she called a “blouson,” which had a big silk bow attached at the neck. Her hair was still up in heavy electric rollers.

  “God, I’m starving!” she said as she rushed up to the counter, only once she got there, she didn’t pick up the toast and start eating. Instead, she put both hands on either side of the plate, almost as if bracing herself, and suddenly that thing that terrified me more than anything else in the world began to fill the room.

  “What the fuck is this?” she said. Her voice went incredibly high, nearly bleating. “What the fucking fuck is this?” She swept the plate off the counter. It flew across the room and hit a wall, exploding shards of china everywhere. Squawking madly, our parakeets flew around in their cage, corner to corner to corner to corner to corner: a crazy blur of blue and green wings. “You call that fucking toast! I asked you to make me fucking toast, and that’s the best you can do?! Any retard knows you have to butter toast when it’s hot. When it’s hot! Otherwise, it’s fuc
king cement!”

  Goofy

  M—, New Jersey, 1976

  There was a time when this was my favorite joke, and this is a photograph of that time, that joke. I’m nearly ten years old (the date stamped on the back of the photo reads APRIL 1976) and wearing my favorite shirt. It was a slippery nylon thing, the weave of which had a texture of tiny grooves. On a pale heather-blue ground, dozens of fluffy white teddy bears float like almost-clouds. I loved that shirt, its cool, cheap silkiness, its sophisticated silver blue. I also wear bell-bottoms way too big for me—they cover my feet entirely. My hair, parted down the middle, falls straight around my face. My eyebrows are lifted, my smile broad and a bit gappy (not all of my adult teeth have grown in). I’m standing in Grandma Ellen’s kitchen: there’s the fruit cart wallpaper, the ochre-colored vinyl floor with patches of blackened plywood showing through, the card table set for what looks like a small buffet—a jug of wine, a cake, I think, maybe a casserole, some plates.

  The joke is this: I’m a scrawny ten-year-old, thin as a poker with no hips; everything’s small about me except my cheeks, which are very chubby, and my hands, which are amazingly, astoundingly large. In “my” right hand I hold a pair of John Lennon–style sunglasses and appear to be flipping them around with debonair nonchalance. With “my” left hand I gesture in a Can-you-believe-it? kind of way in the air near my hair. “My” hands are as big as my face, which is beaming, because I so love this joke. On her knees behind me, my mother crouches very carefully. I clasp my arms behind my back while she reaches up from underneath them, so that her hands seem to be mine. I don’t talk in this joke, just add the appropriate facial expressions as she speaks and swings her hands here and there.