The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “Look at that!” she said, “What is that? I just threw up, and that’s what came out.”

  She pointed to a hard, small piece of flesh—oddly shaped, brownish pink—bobbing in the toilet bowl. It looked smooth and tough and muscular and for all these reasons struck me as worrisome. But my father, unfazed by the mysterious chunk or perhaps even amused (it was always so hard to tell), just shrugged and said, “Maybe it’s your heart.”

  Hedgehogs

  Y—, New Jersey, circa 1976

  We are completely out, lying next to each other in the twisted pink sheets of our parents’ bed. Our forearms are intertwined, our fingers lightly laced, our heads tilted at the same angle. We both embrace the same type of stuffed animal. These look vaguely hedgehoggy. Tracy’s is blue. Mine is yellow. We are just two sisters, asleep. Thoroughly unremarkable. Yet someone saw fit to pick up the camera.

  Helens

  A large group of us were visiting the Aunts in their apartment on Easter Sunday. Grandma Ellen was there, all my aunts and uncles were there, and so were “the Cousins.” The Cousins, like the Aunts, were always referred to in this way—as a pair. I remember them as sweet, plump middle-aged women with short hair and soft bodies. We saw them once or twice a year. Only one of the Cousins was actually related to the family and then only by the most tenuous connection. Still, they were the Cousins. Oddly, both women were named Helen, which is why we also sometimes referred to them as “the Cousins Helen.” In retrospect I suspect they were a couple, although no one ever spoke of them in those terms at the time.

  For some reason the Cousins Helen took a special interest in Tracy and me. On this particular day the four of us sat across from each other at a card table that had been set up in the living room because there wasn’t enough space for everyone in the Aunts’ dining room. One of the Cousins asked me a question, then leaned across the card table to listen to my answer. This was the Helen with dark hair—the one who was related to us. She smiled as I spoke, and her smile made a river of words rush out of me. This river kept bubbling out of me—it was almost embarrassing. But my cousin, who wasn’t actually my cousin, who was in her forties and who was probably gay although strictly silent about it, kept nodding and smiling—and not only with her mouth but with her eyes as well. I can’t remember what I was talking about—maybe my excitement at being assigned the role of a cloud in an upcoming ballet recital or maybe the plot synopsis of the latest Nancy Drew mystery novel I was reading. I only know that this invisible river kept spilling out of me with more and more force, more and more enthusiasm, more and more words, until suddenly I sensed my mother at my side. Bending down, she put her face very close to mine, so close that I could feel her breath pulsing against my ear. Pinching the flesh of my upper arm and twisting it, she whispered, “Don’t be so goddamned cocky!” then strode off toward the dining room. There was, of course, some awkwardness after that. I lost not only my train of thought but my voice. And even though both Helens urged me to continue, I couldn’t because the shame I felt was doing something strange to my eyes; it was as if they were stuck, so that even when I tried, I simply couldn’t wrench them away from the fake plastic weave covering the surface of the card table.

  Hens’ Teeth

  It is not at all easy to get a Section 8 housing voucher in Massachusetts. As a rule, they are rare as hens’ teeth (my mother’s term—but accurate). In fact, Section 8 housing vouchers tend to be issued almost exclusively in cases of domestic violence, but that’s the genius of my mother, of her resourceful nature, because she’s good at working with what she has. And mostly what she has is imagination.

  She got her Section 8 voucher by claiming that she was being domestically abused at the halfway house she was sent to after her last hospitalization. The abuser, she insisted, was DMH itself, and somebody, somewhere, believed her. Either that or somebody, somewhere, looked at her chopped hair and enormous eyes and broken teeth, and that somebody decided, in a moment of grace, that rules are for bending.

  Here We Go Again

  The day she chased him out of the house with a meat cleaver, Tracy and I screamed from the sidelines, begging them to stop. That was often our position. Even now I can see the cords sticking out from my sister’s neck as she leaned over the banister, shouting, every bit of her straining, and for some reason I found this funny—found the cords in my sister’s neck ridiculous and sweet but mostly pointless. She just seemed so earnest. We were standing at the top of the stairwell, looking down at the maniacs below us. My mother was thirty, maybe thirty-one, years old. At the time she had her hair done in a poodle perm. Rangy and thin, she might have been wearing, as she so often did in those days, some boldly striped item—an oversized rugby shirt perhaps. A pair of large, peach-colored, plastic-framed eyeglasses would have sat perched on her narrow, perfectly proportioned nose. But these are details dredged from the dim swamp of general impressions created over long years. Much more in focus are my sister’s corded neck and the musky smell of the stairwell itself, down which our father’s fat limbs went spiraling as he shouted: “You’re crazy! Are you crazy? You’re crazy!” And our mother, with her skinny arms, her pointy elbows, her kinky hair, went spiraling after him.

  Hershey’s Kiss

  Somewhere in New Jersey, 1978

  I look like any kid in this picture, any kid wearing overalls and a black T-shirt with a giant Hershey’s Kiss printed on it. Any kid with braces and straight brown hair squinting into the sun. Behind me a white, glare-filled sky hovers over the tarpaper roof of a stable. I stand next to a friend named Mikki. She sports designer jeans and flipped-back hair. My arm is slung around her shoulders. Nearby are four horses, all chestnut brown, and a slouchy guy. My hair is pulled back from my face, white plastic barrettes at both temples. My shoulders are scrawny. Although I’ve recently turned twelve years old, there’s still a trace of a much younger child in me—it’s in my cheeks, which hint at the chipmunk, and in my eyes, which are soft and unguarded in the way it seems only children’s eyes can be. On the back of this photograph, in slightly smudged blue ink, in my mother’s hand, is a single word: Punkins.

  Hidden Contexts

  The “booger board” hung over the washing machine in the basement. One of more disturbing documents of my mother’s arrested development, this was a canvas-covered tackboard, perhaps twenty-four by twenty-four inches square, covered with a thick layer of glossy white paint and, as the name indicates, mucus excretions of a nasal variety. I mean, how else can I put it? My sister and I both avoided even remote visual contact with this object whenever possible, were careful to take friends, when heading into the yard, the long way around (i.e., through the front door, not the back, which was off the laundry room), and to this day share a somewhat wild and uneasy laughter whenever one or the other of us invokes this old “inside joke.”

  I say it counts as evidence of my mother’s arrested development, and while this is true (in many ways it often seems to me that she is emotionally no older than a child of six or seven), there were other contributing factors—chief among them, her need to be constantly purging herself of one thing or another. Over the years this purging obsession has involved digging into her ears with bobby pins, attempting to pull out her own teeth with pliers, aggressively expressing all the glands in her body, and most recently, removing what she has described as foot-long, threadlike worms from her left eye. These activities (the list goes on—the list is long) always bring to mind, to my mind anyway, the roots of the word incest, which in Latin means “impure” or “unclean.” If etymology can offer in this case, as it so often seems able to, any instruction as to latent realities and hidden contexts, I think it’s safe to assume that whatever my maternal grandfather did to my mother on those nights when he sat by the side of the bed she shared with her three sisters (one bed, four girls) made her feel so contaminated inside that to this day she remains determined to work the filth out of her system by whatever means necessary.

  Hide-and-Seek
r />   During those years we lived in the stucco house, my father must have been chronically sleep-deprived because not only did he work full-time as an accountant; he also took night classes toward his bachelor’s degree at a local community college and worked part-time at a private tennis club on the weekends. He hated this job because he thought the club members looked down on him. I suspect he was right. Even at nine, ten, eleven years of age, I was aware of how luckless our car looked in the club’s parking lot, which was otherwise packed with sleek, metallic Jaguars, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benzes. And it’s true that some of the club members were rude. For example, I remember a tall man with silky gray hair pounding on the bell at the front desk to get my father’s attention one day. My father was in the back room—his boss’s office—just off the reception area. Tracy and I were watching Planet of the Apes on one of the televisions suspended above the leatherette couches in the lounge area, but I’d propped myself up on an elbow to watch this exchange. My father looked tired when he emerged from the office. I remember thinking that he might have been napping. The man with the gray hair demanded that something be taken off his bill.

  “I’m not authorized to issue refunds. But I’ll be sure the manager sees this on Monday.”

  “Oh, right. You’re just a clerk,” said the man, before turning on his top-of-the-line tennis shoe and striding away, leaving my father hunched over the front desk, his cheeks bright red.

  Tracy and I occasionally spent whole Saturdays at the club, flopped on those couches or doing our homework in the back room, where our father spent as much time as he could studying. All three of us would spread out our books and papers on the smoked glass coffee table. Sometimes he gave us change for the vending machines, and we’d bring back orange sodas and malt balls and peanut butter crackers and potato chips. In the lounge there was a long bank of plate glass windows overlooking the tennis courts, and sometimes Tracy and I would sclathe back and forth across these windows, trailing our hands over the glass, peering down at the activities of the little white-clad figures on the courts, figures whose actions seemed oddly disconnected from the sounds that floated up to our ears—pings and pongs and squeaks and occasional expletives. Sometimes we played Mad Libs, and sometimes we played hide-and-seek, putting the virtual jungle of ficus and rubber tree plants scattered all over the club to good use. Sometimes, if the courts weren’t full, our father’s friend Richie, who was an instructor, would set up the ball server for us so that we could whack away for twenty minutes or so. Neither Tracy nor I showed any aptitude for the game, and I remember the ball server as being a terrible bully. But Richie was handsome and nice and did an excellent imitation of Daffy Duck, so when he was around, we tried at least to look sporting.

  Highway (1)

  She was in one car, my father, Tracy, and I in the other. Sixty, maybe sixty-five, miles an hour. She kept making contact with the back bumper of our crappy old Chevy using the front bumper of our newly purchased Thunderbird. Each time, the Chevy would rock and sway, skittering dangerously into the neighboring lane.

  “See? See that? See how much she loves you?” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

  Highway (2)

  “Do you girls have your feet in those holes?”

  “No!”

  “I told you not to put your feet in those holes.”

  “They’re not in the holes!”

  “They’ll get ripped right off! You’ll have stubs for feet!”

  “They’re not in!”

  I have always been a bad liar. Unconvincing. Red-faced, mumbling, eye averting. Even now, as a middle-aged woman, if I sense that someone suspects me of lying, if I sense they half-suspect me of lying, quarter-suspect me, suspect me even one atom of lying, I do these things, like a child. Yet I lied easily, without the least hesitation, to Grandma Ellen about the holes in the floor of the back seat in her car because lying to her was a cinch. There was such an airy quality to the woman. Although she spoke with great drama, it seemed like she was never really there. Lying to my mother was a different story, and she often caught me at it even when I was telling the truth. The thing is, as soon as she caught me, I got confused. It all seemed so fungible around her: reality, fantasy, truth, untruth. But to lie to my grandmother only meant risking our feet, and many times Tracy and I spent the entire ride to Dunkin Donuts—ten miles, maybe, each way—perched over the rusted-out holes in the floor of her decrepit Malibu, our feet flexed inches above the gray speckled blur of the highway. And which was more exhilarating—the act of lying or the sense that we were flying as we held hands and crouched below our grandmother’s sightline, snorting with stifled laughter—I couldn’t possibly say.

  Hole

  Y—, New Jersey, 1977

  There are very few pictures of my father from my childhood because my mother destroyed most of them years ago. The ones that remain often show her to good advantage or him to poor, with just a couple of exceptions. Here is a photo out of which his image has been carefully torn. Where he would have been sitting at the head of the table is just a rough-edged rectangle of nothing. My mother must have deemed this one worth saving (for the most part) because it’s a nice one of me. This was at a holiday dinner, although which holiday is unclear. The table is beautifully set with Waterford goblets handed down from the Aunts, a silver water pitcher, and the good, cream-colored china. I’m passing a basket of rolls wrapped in a white napkin. I am eleven years old, an age at which I usually look, in photographs, like the shy, awkward girl I was, but here, for some reason—the angle, the lighting—I look very dignified and pretty in an almost doll-like way. When I was a kid, people often thought I was Asian, and in this photo I can see why: my hair, nearly black, falls straight, like a plank, down my back; my eyes are long and dark. They seem to tilt up, even though I’m looking down and to the side, away from that void where my father once sat. I imagine he might have been raising his glass in a toast or carving a roast, but now there’s just this hole.

  Things are different now, between my father and me. Now he sends me chocolates on my birthday and spoils my kids and buys me books he thinks I might like: volumes of poetry, genealogies of myths, the complete works of Beckett . . . He hasn’t had a drink in decades and is careful to say, “I love you,” at the end of every phone call, every email. But as a child, I was well aware of the violence he inflicted on others; I saw it up close. And when I look at this photograph of me sitting to the left of that empty space where he used to be, I see, behind my perfect posture and the almost somber composition of my features, a girl afraid to move.

  Holiday

  It’s Christmas Eve, and my mother calls to tell me a story. Because my father is visiting for the holiday and because my parents haven’t spoken for over two decades and because my father is pretty much afraid of my mother, afraid that she will cause him some sort of career- or relationship-based misfortune (as, in fact, she has so carefully contrived to do in the past), I step outside, onto our porch, to talk on the phone with her, even though it is very cold and I’m not wearing a coat despite the fact that every surface—the picnic table, the porch planks, my bicycle—is covered with a glittering layer of hoarfrost. I’ve come outside mostly because I don’t want my mother to be able hear, in the background, my father’s voice among the many voices that fill our apartment tonight and also because I don’t want her to feel isolated by the sound of all those voices in general since she is alone and uninvited and it is Christmas Eve.

  My mother prefaces what she was about to tell me by saying that I need to listen very carefully because what she is about to say is going prove that I have to believe her stories, that I should believe her stories, and that I will now understand, with the telling of this story coming up, that she is not actually paranoid, only unlucky and observant. I walk over to the edge of our porch as I listen, so that I can see the strand of Christmas lights David hung up a couple of weeks ago—large, colorful, old-fashioned bulbs. These are the same type of Christmas lights my grandfath
er used to string on the enormously tall pine tree in his front yard when Tracy and I lived with him and our grandmother, back when we were very young. David’s hung just a single long strand of lights—green and yellow and blue and red—along the edge of our roof, then loosely spiraled it through the limbs of the small fir tree under our bedroom window. But somehow it seems all the more magical for the minimal touch.

  My mother’s story goes like this: she went to Kinko’s a couple of nights ago and stayed there for a few hours because she can no longer use the computer in her own apartment, as her every mouse click is being tracked. So, for twenty dollars an hour, she went to Kinko’s and rented time on one of their machines. It was three o’clock in the morning, she said, when she arrived, and the people working the night shift were being really vicious to her. For example, at one point one of the clerks asked her to come over to the counter.

  “Look up,” he said. So my mother (who can at times be disturbingly compliant) looked up. “Not there,” said the man, “there.” He pointed.

  She said she looked to the spot he’d indicated, and his coworker, a woman about his own age—midtwenties—said real sweet only not really: “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!” Then the woman behind the counter took a picture of my mother with one of those goosenecked cameras, the kind with a large, single eye, attached, via cable, to a computer.