The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “You must have had a weird dream last night. You kept saying, ‘Oh god.’”

  “Oh my god, that’s right!” says David. “It was sort of a bad dream and sort of a funny dream. About your mother.”

  I groan and say, “Oh no,” as if I don’t need or want to hear about it, but because I am and always have been and likely always will be obsessed with my mother—obsessed with finding clues that might offer the slimmest insight into the mystery that is my mother, I am in fact impatient for him to tell me his dream, but he’s chuckling and shaking his head, so it’s taking a while.

  “Spit it out!”

  “Actually, it was kind of gross.”

  “What?”

  “My dream. She’d thrown up some kind of mess—it was horrible. Scary looking. All red and black. And she was all like, ‘See, I told you! I told you!’ as if she was dying, the way she always says she’s going to. It looked so bad we got really worried and started getting ready to take her to the hospital. You were freaking out because you thought she was about to die. And Tracy was flipping out too. And all of that went on for a while, but then I realized—I just looked really closely, and I saw—she’d just mashed up a bunch of kale and mixed it with pomegranate juice. She’d just mixed them together, and I was like, ‘Linda, that’s just kale and pomegranate juice,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, damn! Well, I almost had you!’”

  Karma

  At heart, my mother says, she’s a Buddhist. I say the same thing about myself, and curiously, so does my father, about himself, only I think we’re all sort of Buddhist in different ways. My father is sort of Buddhist because he occasionally meditates and tries for a big-picture view and because I think he attempts, every day, to bring to mind—to the forefront of his mind—the quote from Plato with which he signs off every email:

  Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

  I am sort of Buddhist because I associate things like simplicity and humility and equanimity with Buddhism and strive to embody these qualities despite the fact that striving is pretty much antithetical to them.

  My mother is sort of Buddhist because she believes in karma—past lives. Of her own past lives she once said: “I must have been one hell of a bastard! I mean I must’ve been some kind of serious bastard. Because how else do you explain all this?”

  Katadin

  Baxter State Park, Maine, 1979

  Speckled in the lower-right-hand corner by a spray of red spots (photo developer? spaghetti sauce?), this photo is from our second and last vacation taken as a family—ten days in Maine. In the picture my father and I hold hands and jump as high as we can on top of Mount Katadin. I’d danced ballet for so many years at that point, it’s not surprising that I’ve got some pretty impressive air under me. My legs are turned out, my knees sharply angled, my heels, in their hiking boots, neatly touch. My father leaps too, one leg outstretched to the side, the other bent beneath him. He’s lacking what my ballet teachers used to call “extension.” Still, you can’t say he isn’t trying.

  Key

  This winter has been a tough one, and there are predictions for a huge late-season blizzard to hit tonight, so David and I decide to bring my mother some groceries. She comes outside as soon as we pull into the parking lot in front of her small apartment complex but stays there only long enough to slip a bungee cord over the doorknob and attach it to a metal trellis that runs along one side of the front stoop.

  “Now it will stay open when you bring them in,” she says, meaning the door and the groceries. Then she points to the bottom of one of her flip-flops, which briefly touched the concrete surface of the stoop during the bungee cord operation, and says, “I’ve got to go spray this down.”

  We bring in six or seven bags of groceries, and I start packing away the frozen foods in my mother’s worrisomely empty freezer and the more perishable items in her equally empty fridge, and as I do so, she comes out of the bathroom with her clean flip-flops to stand next to me, warning me that she has something important to tell me and that it’s going to take a while but that it’s crucial I listen carefully because it’s for my own good and also I have to understand the background fully before I can understand the really important point, so I am just going to have to be patient. Already I am tuning her out. She starts talking about DMH and her hometown police force and also, for some reason, my kids. I don’t like talking about my kids with my mother, so I get peckish pretty quickly.

  “Just say what you need to say, Mom. We don’t have much time.”

  The thing is, peckishness doesn’t work at all with my mother. She takes it as a kind of bait or challenge, so in response she purposely slows her speech to a menacing drawl interjected with long hisses. This is something she has always had a talent for—hissing. Her technique involves barely moving her jaw at all while at the same time setting her teeth slightly on edge and widening her already enormous green eyes. She can stare you down for ages like this, never blinking.

  “Thisss—isss—important—Kimberliii. I’m trying to tell you. It hassss to do with the kidsss. Now you’re jussst going to have to sssslooooowwww down and lissstennn.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ, Mom.” I try to sidle past her and make my way to the door. “We really have to go now.”

  But she keeps talking, and I don’t go as fast as I could because part of me is worried that maybe she really does have something important to tell me about my kids, even though I am at the same time beginning to understand the general shape of what she’s saying and so on another level I know perfectly well that what she’s talking about has nothing whatever to do with my kids in any real way because she’s talking about some ancient lawsuit—one that may or may not have taken place (I’ve never been sure)—and the gist of things is that David and I need to find a way to purge our children’s records because everything is genetic.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom, okay? It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

  “Don’t be so blasé, Kimberli! It’s your kids we’re talking about. This is important stuff.”

  I tell her I’ll worry about my own kids. She can take that off her list. And then I say we have to go.

  “Don’t you understand? They’re tracing Isabella and Isaac’s every move!”

  I say we’ll look into it, and I give her a kiss, which lands on her jaw, which is hard as a rock. Then David and I leave, but she follows us outside, still talking, this time apparently not at all concerned about the soles of her flip-flops.

  “Don’t you see? School records, dental records, medical records? Their chances of getting into a decent college are going to be nil if you don’t take action now!”

  Even as we get into our car, she keeps talking—still hissing, still bug-eyed and threatening. When I try to shut the passenger side door, she puts herself in front of it, so that I have to shove her out of the way in order to shut it, but that doesn’t matter because as soon as I do, she opens it again, and we do that a few times, always with her talking and staring and setting her jaw on edge, until finally I succeed in not only pushing her out of the way and shutting the door but locking it as well, at which point David starts backing out of the parking space, while my mother looks all hangdog and rejected, standing there with her arms at her sides as wet, irregular clumps of snow get stuck in her hair. David is making a K-turn in the cramped lot when she starts trudging toward the front door, which is no longer bungee-corded open. When she reaches her stoop, I watch how she tries but fails to open the door and how she, at this point, turns back toward us, looking seventy-two times more hangdog than before. She nods or maybe shrugs—makes some kind of gesture, in any case, that seems indicative of her fate, which she considers cursed—and it is this gesture that gets me.

  “Stop the car.”

  “Oh forget it. She’s faking!”

  “David, she’s locked out of her apartment. It’s freezing out. They’re predicting a major storm. She’s an old woman. I can’t leave her standing there like that. I’d never forg
ive myself.”

  “Fine,” he says, but he’s shaking his head.

  I get out of the car and start walking toward my mother where she is standing on the stoop, and as I approach, I ask impatiently if she’s actually managed to lock herself out of her own building.

  “I didn’t do it!” she says. “He must have shut it—he must have moved the rope!” She flings her hand in David’s direction. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I just say, “Oh Jesus,” and ring one of the six little brass buttons lined up on a plaque beside the door.

  “What did you just do?”

  “I rang a doorbell.”

  “And exactly how did you know to ring number 3? Do you have any idea how evil that woman is?”

  “I just picked a doorbell, Mom. Any doorbell. And anyway, I pressed number 2.”

  “Oh great!” she says, rolling her eyes in a huge circle. “She’s even worse! Do you know what that woman did the last time Tracy visited?”

  I say I don’t care. I don’t care who any of the people in the building are, I am just going to stand there and press every single one of the buttons until somebody buzzes her in, at which point my mother does this thing she does every so often that’s sort of a relief and sort of just flabbergasting, sort of just mind-blowing, which maybe could be described as letting down her mask. What I mean is, all of a sudden she doesn’t look quite so old or pathetic or crazy anymore but almost childlike as a smirk pops up at one corner of her mouth and she says, not hissy at all, just resigned, “Oh, fine.” Then she digs deep into the pocket of her sweatpants and pulls out a key at the end of a long black ribbon. And with this key she opens the door.

  As she steps inside, I start walking back to the car. There’s a familiar jellylike sensation in my legs that’s getting worse with every step, but I manage to make it across the parking lot and wobble myself into the passenger seat.

  “I told you,” says David.

  “Really?”

  “I’m sorry. Are you okay?” He puts on the wipers and the blinker and waits for me to answer, but I don’t. Not for a while. Finally, I shrug, and he gives my hand a squeeze, then we pull out of the lot.

  Knife

  Most everything I know about that night comes from my mother and from a police report I once read, years after the event, when I was helping her organize her enormous reserves of paperwork. There’d been a New Year’s Eve party at the tennis club, and my father, who’d had too much to drink, had gotten mad when Richie danced for too many songs in a row with my mother.

  He just sat there, she told me years later, like a stone, getting drunker and drunker, watching her and Richie having a good, innocent time. When he finally got up, he insisted on leaving and dragged her off the dance floor. Richie followed them downstairs, watched them get into their car, and decided my father was being too rough. So he got into his own car and followed them home. According to the police report, he wanted to make sure my mother got there safely. Twenty minutes later he watched again as my father pulled into our driveway and my parents went into the house. Apparently, Richie still didn’t like what he saw, so he got out of his car too.

  “He was just playing the gentleman,” she told me. “He was so very young.”

  Tracy and I were upstairs, sleeping. I was thirteen, Tracy eleven. It’s likely we’d stayed up late that night watching sitcoms and talk shows, eating peanut butter cookies. Even when Richie rang the doorbell, we didn’t wake up.

  The three of them stood in what we rather grandly called “the foyer”—a cold, square, windowless space with walls covered in cheap wood paneling. At first the disagreement was strictly verbal. I can, of course, only imagine the exchange, but it seems likely that my father would have demanded to know who Richie thought he was and that Richie might have said he just wanted to make sure things were okay. Then my father went upstairs. And this is the part I wonder about—the part that isn’t in the police report. The part my mother never described because she stayed downstairs the whole time, talking to Richie, maybe about my father, maybe joking about him and his anger, his drinking, his jealousy. But upstairs in the kitchen, my father was looking for something. I imagine him rummaging in the dark, and I wonder: was he searching for it? Did he know what he was after? Or did the knife somehow present itself?

  A beak-nosed paring knife is shaped, in profile, exactly as the name suggests: like a beak, or, to be a little more specific, like the curved beak of a hawk. Or the claw of a cat. Or its eyetooth. A doctor once explained to me as he stitched up my wrist (which I’d stupidly put between two fighting dogs) how lucky it was that I hadn’t been bitten by a cat. “Dog teeth,” he said, “are straight: they go in and out, making simple punctures. But cat teeth are curved. They go in and tear a path out, ripping through everything in their way.”

  When my father went back downstairs, he’d hidden the knife in his hand so that at first neither Richie nor my mother understood what he was doing when he took a swing. Richie laughed, my mother told me, and said, “Jake, what kind of punch is that?” But even as he spoke, his shirt, which was white (again, according to my mother), filled quickly with blood.

  It’s easy enough to imagine the reactions of Richie and my mother at that point—though that’s all I have, imaginings. I imagine Richie stopped laughing. And I imagine she started screaming, then ran for the phone. But my father? What did he do? When I imagine him, I come up blank. A man on pause. Mindless.

  Tracy and I slept through it all—the fight and its aftermath, which included the arrival of the ambulance, the police, the paramedics, and their respective departures. We slept straight through until morning and even then didn’t notice anything odd, since our father (who was being held at the police station) was often gone by the time we woke up. Our mother told us nothing, maybe because she thought she was protecting us. Or maybe because she wanted our new year to seem bright. Or maybe she was just tired.

  L

  Landlord Problems

  Being authorities of a certain stripe, landlords are among my mother’s favorite people to get embroiled with in complicated, usually vicious, often violent, sometimes litigious arguments that inevitably conclude to her disadvantage. For example, her last landlord, who happened to be an ex-cop, threatened her with a gun when she attempted to kick in the front door of his two-family house in M—. I might have assumed this story to be just another one of her many verbal inventions, but Tracy was there because it was Christmas Eve and she’d just driven out from Chicago. This was a few years ago. Tracy and my mother had come over for dinner at our place that night—roast chicken and apple pie—and afterward they drove to my mother’s apartment, only my mother couldn’t find her *key, and that’s when the door kicking started.

  Tracy saw the whole thing—how our mother rang her landlord’s doorbell and how, because it was close to midnight, he didn’t answer at first and also how, because there was no answer even after she’d pressed the bell several times, she said something in a very loud voice about the man’s unbelievable laziness and vindictive nature. Then she leaned on the doorbell for a while.

  “When he still didn’t answer, she started kicking the door,” Tracy told me a couple of days after the fact, when she came over for dinner by herself. “She was wearing those boots with the heels, and the heel started cracking the wood, making holes. I told her not to do it, but she was already gone.” She illustrated the word gone with a facial expression I can only describe as “mental.” “Needless to say, she ignored me.”

  We were making meatballs together—Grandma Bella’s recipe—when she told me this story. We were getting tipsy because that’s a thing we like to do—talk about our mother while cooking and drinking red wine.

  “After a few minutes of her kicking the door, the landlord finally stuck his head out the window and told her to shut up. I tried to shrug to show I wasn’t part of it, but it was dark. I don’t think he could see. Mom told him to open up the fucking door or else she’d kick it in. She said, ‘It’s Christ
mas Eve, you bastard! Have you no heart?’ Then she kicked the door again, and he said, ‘Get a locksmith.’ And she said, ‘Fuck you and merry Christmas!’ And that’s when he got his gun. Actually, I think it might have been a rifle. It seemed kind of long.”

  Late

  I go to pick up Isaac from an after-school movie presented by the PTO because it’s a half-day, and when I come into the auditorium, I find he’s one of the last students left. The principal and vice principal are running around frantically trying to connect the remaining students with their guardians. One boy is clearly struggling not to cry. But Isaac, already in his jacket, backpack on his shoulder, is calm. When he sees me, he hops up from his seat and takes my hand, and as we walk out of the auditorium, he starts describing the plot of the film, which concerns a lot of different kinds of food that come alive and have adventures together. This explanation takes a long time, and I find it hard to follow because I’m distracted. Once we’re back home, I put out a plate of chocolate shortbread cookies and hand him a glass of milk. Then I apologize for being so late to pick him up. He thinks about this for a second and says, “Actually, it’s more like the other parents were really early.”

  Laughter

  My mother rode in the ambulance with Richie. In the story she tells about that night, the paramedics were having a hard time staunching the flow of blood from his abdomen, and he was delirious. But still he kept joking around, doing his Daffy Duck imitation. “Do you remember his Daffy Duck? It was so good! I’m telling you, he had everyone in that ambulance in stitches. Absolute stitches!”

  The wound was complicated because of the shape of the knife, which had sliced through his intestines in several places. At the hospital he was rushed into surgery, and afterwards my mother waited with his parents all night for Richie to regain consciousness. Once he was awake, the police came by with a bunch of paperwork. They wanted him to press charges, and so did his parents. But he refused. He said he didn’t want Tracy and me to grow up with a convict for a father.