The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “I don’t know! I don’t know how she does it. But she’s always done stuff like that. It’s weird.”

  Something has closed off in my friend. Her lips look stiff, her brow stern. I want to prove that my mother really does sneak into my life and steal little bits of it. So, instead of shutting up, I tell her about the time my mother called me in order to read some printed-out pages she’d “found” in her apartment. She said that she had no idea where these pages came from or who could have written them but that the writing was so elegant, and for some reason it reminded her of herself, almost as if she was reading inside her own head. I listened, then, to the introductory paragraphs of an essay I’d been working on for months.

  “The thing is,” I explain, “I’m always really careful to throw away any print-outs of my writing because I don’t want my mother digging through our recycling bin and finding them. I rip up my writing, if I’ve printed it out, into tiny, tiny pieces and put the pieces out with our trash. In our kitchen garbage. Underneath things.”

  “But that’s kooky,” says Emily, “that’s loony.” And I am dismayed to realize that it is entirely unclear exactly what the word that refers to in this sentence. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” she adds, before reverting to French and praising the pea soup once more, just as if we haven’t already done so half a dozen times.

  Lundbergs

  After my father stabbed Richie, things got awkward, socially speaking, for my parents, so they decided to move. We’d always rented, but this time they bought a house a couple of towns away. Because it was the middle of the school year, they asked the parents of friends of ours—the Lundbergs—if they’d take Tracy and me to live with them until June, when school let out. I had been close for a long time with the two oldest children, Lily and Lila, and Tracy was friends with their younger sister, a beautiful black-haired girl whose name I now forget, though I know it started with an L because all the Lundbergs’ children’s names started with L. The five of us slept upstairs in a cozy refurbished attic outfitted with many beanbag chairs and green wall-to-wall carpeting that smelled, curiously, of mashed peas, Tracy and I in sleeping bags on the floor.

  We ate dinner with the Lundbergs Monday through Thursday, then got picked up by our parents for the weekend on Friday afternoon. Although their food was less delicious than ours and much of it came out of cans, nobody seemed to mind. After dinner the father sat in an armchair to work on his duck decoys. The mother knit. Nobody mentioned what our father had done except once—an offhand comment by the brother that was quickly hushed. Still, I never breathed easy in the Lundbergs’ house, and I know why: deep down, I resented both their charity and their happiness. And over the months I grew colder and colder toward my friends, even the lanky, good-hearted Lily.

  Luxury Bath Products

  Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Something about DMH. Something about the cops. Her landlord. A neighbor and their cats. I try to be patient. I fail. I say I have to get off the phone. She says I have to stay on. No, I really have to go, I have some things to do. Then, suddenly, she’s furious. “You are so unbelievably jealous, Kimberli! Just like you’ve always been!”

  “Jealous of what?” I ask, although I’m not sure she hears me because my voice sounds small, even to me.

  “Jealous of me. Of every fucking thing about me! Every fucking thing!”

  It’s complicated, like origami, the folds in our relationship. My mother is talking about me, but really she is talking about herself, yet her wounds are my wounds; at least something in me hurts.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I say. Then I hang up.

  Later, after the kids are in bed, I climb into a steaming hot bath. Luxury bath products are good for days like this, which is why I buy so many of them. My current stock includes: a lemon-scented bath bomb (fizzes on contact with water); a large jug of jasmine- and honey-scented all-natural shower gel; a vial of hops and valerian-based organic German bath oil; a slim white brick of camellia oil soap from Japan; a heart-shaped “bath melt” composed of cocoa butter and infused with aromatic oils; a creamy white soap molded to resemble a scallop shell and scented with Nag Champa incense; a bottle of traditional fir-scented bath oil from Switzerland (disgusting, actually, but novel); and a tub of mustard-based muscle tonic powder from India. It’s this last that I throw into the bath in double the suggested dose. As I lean back, the gritty powder bubbles beneath my legs, making tiny, scorching explosions.

  M

  Maddening

  The thing I worry about with my mother’s eye isn’t worms, it’s shingles. Because it’s true—her left eye does not look healthy. It is often red, and the skin around it is very chapped, and both of these are symptoms of shingles when that disease affects the eye. Shingles of the eye is a highly contagious disease, which if left untreated for too long can cause blindness. But when I explain these things to my mother, she yells: “Don’t be stupid! Shingles don’t give you worms!”

  Mashed Rutabaga

  For most of my life, I’m not sure why, I had miles of fuse with my mother. Miles and miles and miles and miles of fuse. In fact, for many years my reserves of patience for her seemed virtually endless. But that changed all of a sudden one Thanksgiving about four years ago. David and I were hosting, and after some debate we decided to invite my mother. When I asked if she could come, she said: “Oh, Kimmy. Thank you so much! I’m so excited! It’s going to be so wonderful!” She even asked if she could arrive early in order to help prepare the meal, which she said was half the fun. So, for the week leading up, she called daily in order to pin down our plans, checking to see what she could bring and when she should come and also to ask what sort of gifts I thought the kids might like because she’d forgotten both of their birthdays that summer. She said she’d like to make a spinach dish that had been her specialty years ago, a dark silky mess of chopped spinach in cream sauce topped with slivers of hard-boiled egg. She also said she’d give me tips on the gravy because she makes a “mean” one, but when I said I already knew how to make good gravy, she said that really she’d just be my sous-chef.

  “There’s just so much to do on Thanksgiving. You can tell me, ‘Chop this, chop that.’ I’ll do whatever you say. Dishes. Table setting. Watching the kids. Whatever!”

  The truth is, I was getting kind of excited about having her over. She seemed so happy about it, so unusually centered and even considerate. We’d invited only three other people, friends of ours named Jess and Peter and their daughter, Sophie. Although we’d known Jess and Peter for many years and they are among our closest friends, they had never met my mother. So I warned them ahead of time that she might be a little hard to deal with—hyper and extremely talkative, maybe about inappropriate things.

  “Don’t worry,” said Jess. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  We said we’d eat at four o’clock, and my mother told me she’d come over at one thirty to help get things ready. Because she is notoriously late, I asked her to call before she left so that I’d know when to actually expect her. At two o’clock she phoned to say she was getting into her car. She lives fifteen minutes away, so at three o’clock, when she still hadn’t arrived, I called to see if she was okay. She said she’d forgotten something, but she was leaving that very moment, in fact she was getting into her car as we spoke, then she slammed her car door to prove it. At four o’clock Jess, Peter, and Sophie arrived with a salad, two bottles of wine, and a loaf of homemade bread. The turkey was behind schedule, but we had plenty to eat with the appetizers, which included a mushroom salad Grandma Bella used to make: quartered button mushrooms, chunks of Pecorino, olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped parsley, lemon juice.

  “This is amazing!” said Peter, about the salad. “Jess, we must remember this recipe. It’s so simple and good.”

  At five thirty I texted my mother to tell her we were starting the meal without her. She texted back:

  Soooooo sorry. Unexpected delays. Just down the street b 5 mins
.

  I don’t like turkey, but everyone else said it was good. I’d prepared it with a stuffing that included garlic, basil, and parmesan cheese, which is how I remembered one of my great aunts on my father’s side making it once.

  “So, I guess your mother’s not coming?” Jess asked halfway through dinner. I shrugged and said it was probably for the best. Isabella told Sophie (who is exactly her age), “My grandma is a little funny.” We cleared the plates, and Jess and Peter asked to look at the pies I’d made so they could at least ogle them since they’d promised to have dessert at Jess’s cousin’s house.

  After they left, David, the kids, and I decided to take a walk before starting dessert. I texted my mother once more to say we’d be out for a while but that if she wanted pie, she could come by around eight. She texted back:

  Apple?

  It was cold outside, but we walked for a long time anyway. The streets were virtually empty, and the air felt as if it were full of tiny, invisible needles of ice. At one point we wandered into the main commercial district of B—, and for some reason I remember this part of our excursion with tremendous tenderness. I remember, for instance, that as we crossed a deserted Beacon Street against the light, David took my hand and said, “You can’t really expect her to do what she says she’s going to.” I said that it had been a beautiful meal anyway. I asked if he’d liked the turkey.

  “Honestly, I wasn’t crazy about the garlic stuffing,” he said. I told him Grandma Bella would never have done it that way, even though her sister had. She’d always done her turkeys with just the most basic sage and sausage stuffing. He said that was his favorite kind of stuffing too, and I resolved to do it that way from then on.

  When we got home, I put on the kettle for tea and checked my cell phone, but there were no messages. The pies, if I do say so myself, were excellent. One apple, one squash. We ate thin slivers with whipped cream while watching Pink Panther II. It was about nine thirty—we were halfway through the movie—when I heard a faint knocking at the door. I said, “She’s here,” and David said he didn’t hear anything, but then she knocked again and he asked if I wanted to let her in and I said not really but I guess we should, so he went to open the door, and she came in talking a mile a minute about the bottle of fancy wine she’d brought.

  “It’ll go great with the turkey!”

  David asked if she’d like some pie, and she said: “Well, what I was really hoping for was some turkey and mashed rutabaga—I’ve been dreaming about mashed rutabaga all week long! Is there any left? I’m just dying for mashed rutabaga.”

  “We ate hours ago, Linda. Everything’s been put away.”

  “Just a little plate?”

  From across the room I said, “No!” Then I marched into the kitchen, cut her two slices of pie, dolloped them with whipped cream, and put the plate in front of her. She picked at these while telling Isaac about all the presents she was going to get him for Christmas. As I listened to her speak, my stomach started lurching around. This is often the case when I’m near my mother. You can actually see it move. That night it was so bad that I couldn’t stand up straight. I just wanted her to leave so we could get back to our movie, but I didn’t say so because I could feel the anger bubbling inside of me and I knew that if I opened my mouth, what came out if it would be ugly, and I didn’t want to be like that in front of my kids, so instead I hobbled over to the ladder that leads to David’s and my sleeping loft, climbed upstairs, and crawled under the covers of our bed to wait for her to leave. After about half an hour David started shepherding her toward the door.

  “The kids are tired. It’s late. It’s been a long day.” It took him ten minutes to get her out. Right before she left, she shouted, “Good-bye, Kimberli!” But this was barbed because she only uses my full name to indicate displeasure.

  Once she was gone, I hobbled back downstairs and told Isaac that he shouldn’t get his hopes up about the presents.

  “I know,” he said.

  David asked if I was okay. I said, “Let’s just watch the movie.” He turned it back on, then leaned over to give me a kiss, but I pulled away. I said, “I’m done. I’m done with her. For real.” He said, “That’s probably good. There’s really no point. It doesn’t help her, and it only hurts you.” Once again he leaned over to give me a kiss, and again I pulled away, but then I leaned back.

  Massachusetts

  A state full of sadists. A bona fide hellhole. A living nightmare, where everyone is in cahoots with everyone else and nobody ever gets off her back.

  Material

  Once, many years ago, I helped my mother run an especially exhausting and fruitless errand. I was in my midthirties when I put Isabella in her car seat and drove an hour and a half south of Boston to visit a tiny jewelry store, where I was supposed to act as a kind of character witness for my mother while she laid out a handful of blurry Polaroid photographs and unpacked a shoebox full of expensive rings and pins on the glass counter in front of the store owner, all the while spewing a nonstop verbal explosion of deeply paranoid logic. Needless to say, things ended badly, but it took a really long time—almost two hours—because the jewelry store owner was an exceedingly polite man.

  At the conclusion of this mortifying exercise in futility, I was not only humiliated but exhausted and hungry, and Isabella had long ago passed cranky. Luckily, we found an old-fashioned diner just a few doors down from the jewelry store, and there we ordered three grilled cheese sandwiches, two iced teas, and a glass of chocolate milk. Once we’d finished eating, the waitress brought us our check, which—I just so happen to remember—was for the very modest sum of twelve dollars and eighty-six cents. After glancing at this figure, my mother pushed the bill toward me. I was annoyed, but of course it wasn’t that much money, so I tried to let it go. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the fact that I still recall the precise amount, I have not as yet managed to succeed on that score.

  After lunch we took a walk across the street, where there was an old graveyard on a hill. This graveyard was of the type New England is known for, with slate headstones tilting at odd angles and inscriptions so old they’re often worn away and, when still legible, tend to describe tragically short life spans. It was a beautiful place—peaceful and cool and quiet, shaded by tall maples whose crowns merged to create a canopy of leaves that rustled every so often in the breeze. Overhead, pigeons flew in deep arcs. As we walked, I bumped my sleeping daughter’s stroller gently over the buckled brick path, and I remember thinking, This isn’t so bad . . . walking with my mother . . . talking . . . it’s actually kind of nice. Then, for a little while, it got un-nice. Then it got nice again. And then—I forget how it came up, but at a certain point my mother turned to me for some reason and said: “You know, you can write about me if you want, Kimmy. I don’t mind. I know I’m your material.”

  Memory Lane

  The memory was gone—for years, decades. But then, suddenly, it’s here. We’re at the table eating macaroni and cheese, the kind that comes out of a box, when Isabella complains about not being able to enjoy things like corn on the cob and candied apples because of her braces. Beyond the windows, behind my children, I can see our yard, and beyond our yard I can see the grounds of their grade school, with its track and its baseball diamonds, its basketball court, its picnic tables and swings. I know better, which is why I try (briefly) to reason with myself, but it doesn’t work. I dive in anyway.

  “When I had braces, do you know what Mormor used to do if she didn’t like what I was saying or how I was acting? Can you guess?”

  I ask as if we were playing a fun game. My children look a little worried, and a voice in my head tells me to shut up, but I don’t listen. “She used to take my face in her hands and squeeze my cheeks. Really hard. Rub them back and forth, back and forth, squishing them into my braces.” I imitate my mother crushing my cheeks between her hands, but it’s weird because I’m trying to be both me, as a kid with braces, and my mother, with the hands. Then I laugh. Ha ha.


  “That’s not funny,” says Isaac.

  “That’s awful,” says Isabella.

  “Well, you know Mormor,” I say, trying for an airy tone.

  Mental Illness

  In my embarrassingly large collection of self-help books, I have found very little that’s truly illuminating on the subject of mental illness. Thich Nhat Hanh, for instance, often speaks of “difficult” people, though not of mentally ill people, and there is of course an enormous distinction to be made. Generally speaking, most authors of the sorts of books that fill my collection, no matter how lucid they may be on the broadest spiritual truths, are content to say things that are plainly half-assed when it comes to mental illness. For instance, one idea frequently articulated is that difficult people ought to be seen in a special light, one that reveals them as valuable teachers who can reveal important truths about things like patience and empathy and also about our own neediness and other shortcomings.

  Once I heard Eckhart Tolle say something completely ridiculous on this subject in a YouTube video. Generally speaking, I like Eckhart Tolle. I have learned a lot from his YouTube channel. But I remember thinking that his rambling answer to this particular question (“What is the purpose of mental illness? How can something that is consciousness depriving have its necessary place and function?”), asked by a nervous and pained-looking young woman, was absurd in the extreme. I remember growing increasingly irate as I listened to him go on and on about the supposed “purpose” of mental illness. And yet afterward something curious happened. His answer stuck in my head, and over time I began to understand what he was really saying. He was saying that mental illness, as it manifests in the individual, is actually a reflection of a wider, vaster, deeper illness in the human species as a whole and, for this reason, should be understood as an indication of humanity’s lack of compassion or insight or maturity because we are all connected, and ultimately, if one of us is mentally ill, all of us must to some extent, on some deep, psychic level, share that fate. At least this is what I thought he said. But when I finally re-watched the video some time later, I realized that I’d gotten it all wrong—he actually was talking in circles. Still, I like the answer I thought he gave. In any case it remains the only explanation that makes any sense to me at all.