by Kim Adrian
Which do you like best?
The beef with the curry sauce!
The chicken with the horseradish!
The bread with the tomato sauce!
Fondue was my favorite, but many of our meals were great, and we were often happy eating them: chicken sautéed with rosemary and cream, sausages and fried potatoes, chili con carne, beef stew, ravioli with red sauce, TV dinners on occasion, yes, and frozen pot pies—but even those were eaten with gusto and a sense of communion. I know it doesn’t compute, but it’s true. Despite the addiction, the violence, the generalized group depression, despite my father’s double shifts, my parents’ night school classes, my mother’s not-so-slow unraveling, we somehow managed to eat a tremendous number of excellent meals together, and we were often happy eating them.
Hush
Y—, New Jersey, Christmas Morning 1979
In a way the best pictures catch people off guard. Lampposts coming out of heads. Bad shadows. Cold sores. Regular spastic life. Me with some food not quite all the way in my mouth. My father wrestling—literally wrestling—a roast goose on its platter. My aunt Becky, clearly a little drunk (but in a wonderfully regal sort of way), unaware that she’s flashing some boob . . . But the very best of these impromptu portraits, the photo that makes me absolutely giddy with love for my sister, shows Tracy and me on Christmas morning, so early that the sky through the dining room window is still black. We’ve been posed in front of the gingerbread house we’d made a few days earlier. I wear flannel pajamas with a repeating pattern of a little Dutch girl in a flower garden. I have that serious, spaced-out look I so often do in photos as a kid. But Tracy . . .
I remember those pajamas. Made out of some thick, fuzzy yellow material that’s probably illegal now, they are school bus yellow and sport the iron-on image of a sappy-faced clown. They had plastic-bottomed feet that smelled horrible. Her shiny brown hair is lank, shoulder length, and parted right down the middle. She’s looking sidelong at the camera, not so much smiling as propping up one side of her mouth. She’s slumped—clearly, she could use about five more hours of sleep—but at the same time, she looks as if she’s got big plans. These no doubt involve unwrapping the dozens of presents piled beneath the Christmas tree, glittering in the corner. Under her nose is one of those tissue burns you get when you have a bad cold.
I
Ice-Skating
She was making hot chocolate to put in a thermos to bring with us. I was leaning against the kitchen doorway, watching her stir the pot, and I remember for some reason feeling unusually tall as I listened to her describe, in one breathless rush, how everything would unfold once we got to a popular ice-skating spot one town over.
All your friends will be there—it’s always such a great social scene. Today’s the kind of day you’ll remember forever, sweetie! Maybe there will even be a boy—wouldn’t that be nice? A boy who has a little crush on you, nothing too serious—just an innocent childhood crush, he might even ask you to skate—don’t be shy, don’t be bashful, you should accept. Maybe you’ll hold hands—just go ’round and ’round and ’round the pond with him. There’s nothing wrong with that, and when you stop skating, he can escort you back to me, like a gentleman should—I’ll be waiting for you, right next to that steel drum they sometimes make a fire in. If they don’t have a fire going already, I’ll make one! I can build a mean fire. It’s so nice to stand next to that big barrel when it’s really cold out, like it is today—it just makes you feel so alive. I’ll be there with a big thermos of hot chocolate, pouring it out for anybody who wants some—all your friends. You should always introduce your friends to your parents, you know that, don’t you? And make sure you introduce the younger person to the older one first, if they’re the same age, introduce the man to the woman, and when someone introduces you to somebody else, if it’s a man, you should always hold your hand out first. The Aunts taught me that. I’ll give all of your friends a cup of my famous hot chocolate. Won’t that be nice? Won’t it be extra delicious right then! After you’ve skated so long and are so tired your legs are just numb with the cold and the skating. I just love that kind of tired, when my cheeks are all rosy and the air is so fresh!
Why did I feel so tall? And why did she look so slight, with her back to me, her elbow jutting out to the side as she stirred the hot chocolate with a plastic ladle? Looking back on that moment now, at the two of us in that kitchen—me leaning against the doorjamb, my mother at the stove, the black branches of a bare tree outside lightly tapping the windowpane with each intermittent breeze—I recognize in my own emotions something parallel to what I felt as a much younger child when I spied on my mother and Aunt Inga from the top of the stairs on my fifth birthday. Only this time the source of the exhilaration I felt was clearer to me. I was separate from her. She was different than me. Her weaknesses were not mine. My strengths weren’t hers. With the arrogance of a teenager, I even pitied her as she spoke, now elaborating even further about the boy I would meet that day.
He might be a year or two older than you. That often happens. It’s no big deal. He might be a little clumsy. That’s okay. He could even have acne—it’s not all about looks, you know. As long as he’s a nice boy, that’s all that matters. Your friend Donna will probably be jealous. She’s a little homely. She can’t help it. But she can’t expect to skate with boys just like that. If she gets a bee in her bonnet, just ignore her.
And yet my inklings of autonomy weren’t entirely pure. Something else was happening as I listened to her speak. Some part of me was shrinking, as it always did when my mother talked like this—about me but not me. Perhaps it was in order to reclaim this part of myself that I refused, later that day, to put on my skates at all but instead trudged in loops around the crowded pond, staring at the tips of my worn-out tennis shoes, which were the same color as the dingy slush I kicked with every step.
Infestation
“I am so infested with something. Some kind of fucking parasite. I think they’re in my blood.” She tells me she’s spent the bulk of her day in the bathtub, expressing the glands all over her body. Many, many thin, undulating, hairlike organisms came out.
“There were a ton,” she says, “I mean a ton from the Bartholin’s glands.” Then she explains the anatomy of the Bartholin’s glands, which are located on either side of the vagina. I make an effort to speak calmly as I suggest that the things she’s describing bear a creepy resemblance to sperm. “I know!” she says. “It’s so gross!” I then suggest that it seems possible, even likely, that there is something psychological going on.
“You know, something about your father . . .”
She assures me that the exact same thought occurred to her and that this is precisely why she was so careful to perform the many experiments she performed on the squiggly little things that kept swimming so maddeningly out of her reach in the tub.
“I needed to be sure they weren’t some kind of tricky lint!”
Inheritance
I inherited Grandma Ellen’s hands, more or less, and a milder version of her dramatic jawline. I often take my tea with honey, lightened with cream or condensed milk, like she did. I am, as she was, a voracious reader, a good gardener, a lax housekeeper. Also, my grandmother wrote, although according to my aunt Becky, what she put down on the page was straight-up pornography. Nobody in the family knew anything about my grandmother’s writing until after her death, when my aunt discovered two book-length manuscripts under her mother’s bed. These consisted of two three-ring notebooks, the pages written out longhand—Aunt Becky told my mother (and my mother later told me)—in blue ballpoint pen.
In retrospect it shouldn’t have surprised any of us that my grandmother had written so much since she was such a bottomless pit of a reader. In fact, my most abiding memory of Grandma Ellen is of her sitting near her kitchen window in an old red wicker chair with a book open on her lap, a balled-up tissue curled under the last three fingers of her left hand, and a cup of milky tea nearby. But wh
at did she write in those notebooks? Unfortunately, I’ll never know because just leafing through their pages, Aunt Becky said, made her “want to puke.” So she threw them away.
Intermingled
I think they were pink, when I was growing up, not green, as they seem to be now, at least according to a recent Google search. Pink and heart shaped is how I remember Valium: a regular decoration of my childhood, like the wax begonias my mother was so fond of or the bobbled peds my sister and I favored or the corks in the kitchen drawer. Pretty, tiny pills one came across every so often, scattered on the floor of the car, at the bottom of her purse, or hidden deep in the cracks between couch cushions.
Instead
Because cutting up suits is an expensive habit and because my mother can be, when she feels like it, an extremely practical person, she eventually evolved her tactics so that instead of ruining my father’s suits, she simply ripped them along the seams, a task almost instantly accomplished by running a pair of scissors through the stitches. The beauty of the seam-ripping approach, she once explained to me (laughingly and long after the fact), lay not in the destruction of the suits themselves but in the humiliation my father was forced to endure whenever he brought the deconstructed garments in to the tailor for repair.
Invisible
“Kimberli, if you don’t get down here right now, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
“Kimberli, if you don’t wipe that smirk off your face immediately, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
“Kimberli, if you don’t clean up that mess pronto, and I mean pronto, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
It’s not that I ever believed she would—I didn’t—but a threat like this does something to you. Teaches you something. How to scuttle. How to get out of the way. How to hide before anyone starts looking.
Itty-Bitty
Tracy and I are running away. Our parents are chasing us, and we’re afraid, but at a certain point we just get brave and say fuck it (only not in so many words because we’re only kids), then jump into a car. It’s always the same car, for some reason, a navy-blue VW Bug. Tracy usually gets to drive, but I don’t care because no sooner does she start the engine than the car lifts off. Like smoke. Suddenly we’re floating way up high. We can hear our parents behind us, but their voices are faint and getting fainter. We are already far beyond them. When I look down, they are tiny. We are so high up in the sky. So incredibly high in the sky, my sister and I. Laughing our heads off.
J
Jamboree
Isaac crawls up the ladder to our sleeping loft and squiggles into bed between David and me—warm soft little boy feet, chubby little boy toes, pokey elbows, bumpy knees . . . It’s Saturday morning, eight, maybe eight-thirty. From downstairs Isabella asks if we’re having pancakes for breakfast, and we shush each other. “Guys?” She climbs halfway up the ladder and, when she discovers us cuddling with her brother, says “That’s not fair.” She climbs the rest of the way up, then curls at the foot of our bed like some delicate, angular animal. David says, “Jamboree!” and the kids say, “Jamboree!” It’s an old joke. Then everyone’s talking at the same time—about breakfast, about sharing the blankets, about the movie we watched last night. I try to be in the moment because I understand the importance of staying with the instant that is but never remains, but I can’t quite swing it because I keep thinking I have to remember this, everything about it, because this is it—the thing I’ve always wanted. The thing I want never to end.
Jane Birkin
I keep a photograph of my mother in our living room. People often comment on it. The other day a friend asked why I have a framed photo of Sophia Loren on the shelf. I said, “That’s not Sophia Loren.”
“Catherine Deneuve?”
“What are you talking about? Catherine Deneuve looks nothing like Sophia Loren!”
“Well, whoever. Jane Birkin?”
It’s a self-portrait, but you can’t really tell that just by looking at it. I only know because my mother has always taken pictures of herself, and also I recognize the hazy blur of light-blue wall-to-wall carpeting under her head. You can just barely catch a glimpse of her mask—studied, defensive—moving into place across her face. But it hasn’t quite arrived. Instead, she wears an expression I’ve rarely seen her wear in real life. You could almost call it gentle.
Jell-O
From the bottom of a box of family photographs, I gather up all the old negatives. They are orange-brown, brittle with age, and seem slightly heavier than I expect them to be. I put them in an envelope and take them in to have them developed on contact sheets. When they’re ready, I bring the sheets home and strain to see, through the little spyglass of a plastic loupe, long-lost details of the past trapped in the bars of intricate color hovering in fields of deep, glossy black. In one tiny square Tracy sleeps on the living room floor in the house with the pink shutters, her arms flung overhead. Her face is turned to one side, so you can see the straight line of her jaw, her small, pointed chin, the feathery layers of her hair. It strikes me, maybe for the first time, that something about the composition of her features, in particular the relationship between the nose and jaw, reminds me of Isaac. In another miniature image my aunt Elsa, maybe sixteen years old and slightly overweight, casts an imperious, blue-eye-shadowed glance over her shoulder. Another shows nothing but our dining room table decorated for my seventh birthday: crepe paper streamers crisscrossed overhead and eight paper plates.
I squint and shine my desk light directly on these miniscule photographs, which have a weirdly gelatin quality, a soft-edged, supersaturated intensity, as if they’ve been set in blocks of Jell-O. The stillness of these images is somehow more impressive than it is in normal photographs. There is, for instance, not the faintest suggestion of wind on the cloudy mountaintop where my mother stands in ski goggles and snow pants, and the clowning of my uncle Thor as he reaches up from the soft brown waters of Big Pond, pretending to drown, seems the art of the world’s most silent mime, while in those overexposed squares in which Tracy and I eat green spaghetti from yellow dinner plates, our laughter is so fixed as to seem merely theoretical.
Jolly
My mother calls to inform me she’s just been to a new dentist, and she actually sounds happy about it. Almost jolly. She says this dentist is young and caring and that maybe—who knows—maybe she’ll be able to help her with her teeth.
“That’s great. It’s good to have a dentist you like.”
“I made her cry, though,” she says, and still, there’s something bright in her voice.
“How?”
“I don’t know! I just opened my mouth and she started crying.”
Jug
Y—, New Jersey, 1979
In a sharply black-and-white photograph Tracy stands in the kitchen, holding the phone to her ear. The tightly coiled cord, wrapped behind her back, emerges from under one arm. She’s eleven and either quite perturbed by whatever’s getting said on the other end of the line or else eating something kind of tangy. She stands with a tomboyish swivel to her hips, and there’s something mischievous in her—something impish and unpredictable. This was a strong physical characteristic of my sister when she was young—this upwardness, this springiness, or sprightliness. People carry their energy in different parts of their bodies, and in those years Tracy carried hers in her chin, in a playful thrust there. With the hand not holding the phone, she picks at the cork in a jug of wine on the kitchen table.
Juxtaposition
I was shy. Plus, we moved a lot, which meant that as soon as I started to open up, to make a connection, we were gone. But during the time we lived in the stucco house, I managed to make a small handful of friends. Four, to be exact. The closest of these was a girl named Lily Lundberg. I was friends with her twin too, Lila, but Lily was my blood sister, meaning that one day we licked our thumbs, then pricked them with a Swiss Army Knife, then smashed them together and said it was forever. We invented secret code names for one a
nother and climbed pine trees and rescued half-dead mice from her cat and had Pop Rocks eating contests.
Temperamentally, I was much closer to Lila—quiet, observant—but that’s exactly why I loved Lily, who was all angles and muscles and nerves. Lily reminded me of Kate Jackson, on Charlie’s Angels, and Kate Jackson, the actress, reminded me of my mother, so obviously there was some complicated psychology going on. But Lily also reminded me of not-my-mother because she was fierce and happy and she never felt sorry for herself; even when she fell down and gashed her shin, she just got right back up.
K
Kale
It’s Sunday morning. David is stirring melted butter into pancake batter. I’m making tea in our old pot, caramel colored and cracked with age. The kids are still sleeping, or else they’re reading. In any case they’re quiet. Outside the bank of windows near the dining room table, the snow in our yard is melting almost visibly. Three house finches dip their heads into a mud puddle and shimmy the water down their backs.