The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  My mother first told me all of this years ago. But much more recently I may have heard another take on the events from that night. I don’t know for sure. It’s impossible to say. But coincidences do happen. This was about three years ago. I was listening to an NPR special about the curative effects of laughter. The doctor on the show was a pioneering specialist in this field, and when asked how he got his start, he explained that he’d become interested in the power of laughter decades earlier, when he was fresh out of medical school, working in a hospital in New Jersey, and a young guy came into the emergency room with a terrible knife wound.

  “His chances were slim,” he said. “Extremely slim. I thought for sure we were going to lose him, he’d already lost so much blood. But he kept joking around as we got him prepped for surgery. He just wouldn’t stop. He did this incredible Daffy Duck imitation. He was making everybody crack up, and the laughter was amazing. It buoyed us all.”

  Library

  It’s a beautiful spring evening—warm, and the magnolias are out. We’re walking to the library, and Isabella is full of stories. These are mostly about her friends—the shy one who’s good at math, the sweet but competitive one who cheated on a test, the insecure one who constantly checks her cell phone . . . I make a comment about cell phones, say something about how much I loathe them, and Isabella asks why I’m so bad with mine, meaning, why do I so often lose it or let it run out of juice for days at a stretch or simply don’t bother to pick it up when it rings.

  I used to speak in extremely tight circles about my mother to my daughter, but Isabella recently turned fourteen years old, and she is curious about her grandmother. Also, I think, she is curious about me. So, I tell her about the stretch of time, a few years ago, back before my mother was convinced that all her phones were being tapped, when she used to call me much more frequently—two or sometimes three times a day.

  “It was just too much. I guess I started associating my phone with her. And you know what she’s like.”

  “But you have that special ringtone for her—that duck. You could have just avoided the duck.”

  “Well, true. But she also texted, and texts just pop up on your screen. You can’t really avoid them. They’re just—boom—right there.”

  “What was so bad about her texts?”

  “Oh, you know, crazy stuff. All her paranoid stuff. Plus, sometimes she can be mean. Demeaning. It hurts my feelings.”

  We walk for a while without speaking, and as we do, I rack my brains, trying to remember what it was about my mother’s texts that had, during the years they’d been so frequent, made me so phobic of my cell phone. Then I remember. She used to send pictures.

  “Of what?”

  “Herself, mostly.”

  Normally, I would stop there, but my daughter is almost as tall as I am. We wear the same shoe size. And when I look at her, I see that her gaze is, for lack of a better word, searching. So I describe some of the photos my mother used to send, photos that were, more often than not, of her own face. I don’t talk about the really disturbing ones: the pictures of her teeth or of her eye inflamed and red or those of her mouth “reacting” to something, in short, sad and gross photos offered as documentation of her many ailments. Instead, I tell her about my mother’s more conventional self-portraits, some of which were just ghostlike hoverings in a mirror or a window or a computer screen and some of which were tight close-ups. And here I start hamming things up, framing portions of my own face to indicate the dramatic croppings my mother used: her mouth, her jawline, her cheekbones, her eyes.

  “Looking right,” I say, imitating my mother’s expressions. “Looking left . . . Looking up. Looking down. Both eyes! One eye!”

  At this point Isabella has stopped walking. We’ve made it to the library and are standing on the sidewalk at the base of the stairs leading up to the entrance. She is bent over, laughing, trying to catch her breath. Finally, she makes a funny little gasp, puts her hand on my shoulder, and says, “I had no idea!” as if the story I’ve just told her contained some astonishing piece of information.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had no idea you were dealing with that!”

  License

  My mother loves driving, but she’s very bad at it. Actually, that’s not precisely the case. She is, in fact, a highly skilled but completely reckless driver. For instance, once she drove backward several hundred feet on the highway in the middle of the night at sixty miles an hour because she’d run over something and wanted to make sure it wasn’t a body. It was Christmas, and David, Tracy, and I were in the car because her present to us that year (we were all in our early twenties) was a weekend stay at a cross-country ski resort. I don’t remember much about that trip except that it rained both days and Tracy slept practically the whole time. But I do remember driving backward on the highway as we all screamed at her to stop. Needless to say, she ignored us, just kept zipping backward, jaw clenched, eyes squinting through the rear window. After she verified that the thing she’d hit was in fact a duffel bag (as we’d already assured her), she started driving in the right direction again, saying, “Gee, for a bunch of kids, you guys sure are wimps.”

  It’s telling, perhaps, how much more vividly I remember those words than I do the ridiculous antic that preceded it. But that’s how it is for me around my mother. I get lost so quickly. Especially if she scares me. I stuff the experience somewhere dark and airless. After we arrived at the cabin, before we went to bed, David, Tracy, and I took a walk on the deserted mountaintop road. The moonlight turned everything different shades of the same eerie indigo color. The gravel crunched under our boots with an icy sound. We walked into the white clouds of our breath, which grew bigger as we began talking about the stunt on the highway. David said, “She’s crazy!” then imitated how my mother had looked peering through the back window. He and Tracy laughed and it sounded so good—so easy. I wanted to laugh too, and I did, eventually, but it took a while because I’d already buried the incident somewhere deep, where words don’t reach and feelings don’t register. It probably would still be there if David hadn’t told that joke.

  Lilacs

  I ring the doorbell, then stand in the stuffy entry hall for several minutes—five, maybe six—while she slowly shoves the butcher-block counter out of the way because the door to her apartment opens directly into her kitchen, and in order to keep DMH and their various associates from sneaking in when she’s asleep or watching TV, she keeps the butcher-block counter in front of it. This counter, which is set on wheels, is piled high with ancient boxes of paperwork as well as pots and pans, vases, and a wide assortment of cleaning supplies, all of which, of course, make the counter even heavier than it would be otherwise.

  “Oh,” she says, once she’s managed to open the door maybe half a foot and can peek out of the crack. I’m standing there holding a bouquet of flowers. I offer them to her. “You remembered.”

  It’s Mother’s Day and close to dinnertime. Earlier, in the morning, David and the kids made popovers and eggs and fruit salad for breakfast, and we ate outside on the porch. The kids gave me hand-drawn cards, and David gave me a bottle of my favorite perfume. Isabella took a yoga class with me in the afternoon, and later Isaac curled up with me in the hammock to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Finally, I picked a few flowers from our yard—a couple of lilacs, the first pale pink roses (which smell ever so slightly of peppercorns), a single white daffodil, and some Scotch broom. “Are you sure you want to do this?” David asked as I wrapped the stems in damp paper towels, then stuck the damp paper towels in a plastic bag, then twisted a rubber band around the bag to secure everything together. “You don’t have to,” Isabella chimed in. But I assured them both I’d be quick, and I promised I wouldn’t get depressed.

  “Of course I remembered,” I say. “Happy Mother’s Day!” Then I hand her the flowers through the crack.

  She mumbles the word beautiful and takes a careful sniff. She says something about my birthday, whi
ch was just a couple of days ago, and starts to explain why she’d forgotten to call, but since this explanation begins with DMH, I cut her off and tell her not to worry about it, and then, mostly in order to change the subject, I say, “Maybe you should rethink the butcher-block thing, Mom. In case of a fire it doesn’t seem like such a safe thing to have it right in front of your door.”

  Considering the angle she has to work with—the six-inch slot between the door and the doorjamb—she has pretty good aim. The flowers hit me right in the face. Something snaps in my eye.

  “Happy fucking Mother’s Day yourself!” she shouts. “You think I need your fucking flowers? I don’t need your fucking flowers! I just need you to believe me!” Then she slams the door and bolts it, and as I grope around for the exploded bouquet, tears swelling in my eyes, I can hear her struggling to shove the butcher block back in its place.

  Limburger Effect

  I don’t actually, in real life, my everyday life, tell that many stories about my mother or my childhood or my mother’s childhood because of a certain effect I’ve noticed my family history has on people whenever I discuss its details: something crosses their faces—a strained, politely muted, but unmistakable expression of dismay and some vague relative of panic. David knows what I’m talking about. He’s seen it. He laughs when I joke that my stories smell like Limburger cheese—the Limburger part no doubt suggesting itself because it was one of the items my mother always listed as being on her father’s special shelf when she told the Refrigerator Story. But to be honest, the Limburger effect makes me angry. Why shouldn’t I tell these stories? Just because no one wants to hear them? Listen!

  Liminal

  I know from being married to an architect that a porch is a liminal space: neither inside nor outside. Connected to the home but not strictly part of it. Additionally, there is a door that leads to the porch from the house, and this door can be shut. If need be, you can lock it.

  Local Paper

  My parents gave me a beautiful winter parka for Christmas that year. It was pure white, down filled, with a fur-lined hood. I considered it the height of elegance and was certain it would change my image at school for the better. So, the first day after winter break (which is to say, two days after my father stabbed Richie, two days after he was arrested and then released, two days after Richie nearly died but didn’t—only I didn’t know any of this because nobody had told me) I put on this coat and wore it proudly to school.

  I hung my new parka carefully in my locker and later in the day wore it onto the playground at recess even though it wasn’t very cold. It made me feel like a movie star, and I was hopeful that wearing it would reveal to my classmates, and everyone else in the bleak and massive middle school I attended, my true nature, which is why, as I stood in line on the asphalt-covered playground, waiting to walk, single file, back into the school, I put my gorgeous fur-trimmed hood over my head and slipped my hands into my silky pockets and gently swayed in a manner I considered subtly movie star–ish.

  “What are you so happy about?” asked the boy standing next to me. Not the boy I had a crush on. His best friend. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t be happy.”

  I found this less rude than scary. Was I so transparent? Were my faults—the ones my mother pointed out every day—so clear to the casual observer? I started to cry, and the boy apologized, but at that point the conversation took an even more confusing turn because he began talking about my father and his father and the police and some kind of a fight. A knife. A stabbing. New Year’s Eve. Someone was drunk. It took me a while to figure out what he was saying, but eventually I understood that the boy’s father had read an article in the local paper about my father, then told his son about what he’d read, and now his son was telling me, and what the boy’s father had read was that two days earlier my father, my own dad, the man who’d bought me my beautiful winter coat and took a picture of me wearing it in front of the Christmas tree, holding up a stocking full of pistachio nuts, had stabbed another man in the abdomen with a kitchen knife.

  “There was a whole article!” said the boy.

  Locked Ward

  There is some logic at work, no matter how private. For example, everything my mother does in service of her ever-growing paranoia is done to ensure that she will not spend the rest of her life in a locked ward in some hellish, state-run psychiatric hospital because, according to her private and deeply convoluted reasoning, it is only by being ever vigilant, by being wily and smart and constantly onto them, that she stands even the slimmest hope of avoiding such a fate.

  Loft

  I don’t know what made me do it. Or rather, I know exactly what made me do it, but I know this only now. At the time I simply felt the urge come over me, and I acted on it. For some reason we were eating off paper plates that night: mashed potatoes, meatloaf, salad, bread and butter. Once the thought occurred to me, I didn’t stop to reconsider, just picked up my plate, my satisfyingly hot and hefty plate, and sent it flying across the table. The simplicity of the action—a soft overhand toss straight at his face—seemed like magic, and for just an instant I felt powerful. But as I watched my father wipe the steaming mess away from his glasses, dread set in, and time did then what it does in nightmares—slowed down and speeded up simultaneously. I ran to my bedroom and fumbled at the lock. It took forever. The hollow core door jumped in its frame when he pounded against it, screaming at me from the other side. I don’t remember what he said, but it didn’t last long. My mother called him off, and the house grew quiet again.

  I lay on my bed for a long time then, staring at my nylon bedspread, dotted with colorful flowers, waiting for the electric discomfort of excess adrenaline to drain away from my limbs, listening to the muffled noises of my family: the clatter of dishes, the drone of the television, the toilet flushing. I felt so lonely.

  Logic

  I would have liked more of it when I was a kid. A lot more. For example, where is the logic in a commonplace statement such as “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about”? It was like being trapped in an idiot world. I could have ripped out my hair with the frustration of it. But I didn’t. Instead, I sucked back everything hot—tears, snot, anger.

  Loony

  I’m sitting outside at a pressed metal table at a Frenchy café eating French-type food, speaking French. Well, technically, “speaking” is stretching things because although my friend Emily is fluent, I can only crank out sentences in that language very slowly. Still, we’re having a nice time, sitting in the sun, talking at two different speeds, praising our fresh pea soup and debating whether our waiter is handsome or simply young. But then we start talking about my mother. This is a topic I generally try to avoid in real life, but for some reason I’m just in it, describing the time my mother came to a birthday party at our place a few years ago. David and I have the same birthday, and two of his sisters were there too. And our kids, of course. I can tell as soon as I start this story that I ought to stop. Emily doesn’t get my mother. She’s never met her, and I often have the sense that she suspects me of exaggerating when I talk about her. This hurts my feelings, and I don’t want to ruin the whole Frenchy, sunshiny, pea soupy vibe by getting my feelings hurt. On the other hand, I don’t want to not tell the story just because of the Limburger factor because that makes me angry. So, I forge ahead and tell her—more in English than French—that on the night in question my mother brought over a paper bag full of photographs to give me as a present and that at some point during dinner she pulled a few pictures out of this bag and passed them around the table.

  “Look—just look—at that body,” she told my sister-in-law Judy, who was sitting next to her. I could tell from the expression that came over Judy’s face that something wasn’t right.

  “Um,” she said, holding the photos toward me, “I think you might want to keep these.”

  I grabbed the pictures and saw that in one I was standing on a beach in Spain, topless in a red bikini
bottom, throwing a stick for our dog Oscar (whom we’d brought along on our honeymoon because we loved him like that, like a child, practically). Another picture showed me naked and heavily pregnant, flopped on our bed in *San Francisco, my belly sagging sideways, my eyes half-closed. In the third I sat laughing with a friend on a granite boulder in front of a waterfall where we’d just gone skinny-dipping.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  “I don’t know! How should I remember? I guess you gave them to me.”

  I tell Emily (whose expression I can’t quite read behind her dark sunglasses) that after dinner, once everybody had left, I searched through the rest of pictures my mother had brought and found several more that didn’t make any sense. These were photos she should never have had in her possession: pictures, for example, of my father with a girlfriend and some of a very young Isabella on vacation with David’s parents.

  “So, what are you saying?” asks Emily, in French, a little clipped. “You think your mother stole the pictures?”

  “Yes! Or maybe. She just manages weird stuff. I don’t know how she does it.”

  She tilts her mouth in a funny way and says, “You think your mother broke into your apartment and took the pictures when you weren’t there?”