The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  Mess

  There’s a predictable narrative arc to the dreams I used to have about my grandmother’s house. It always opened the same way, for instance, with great news: I inherited the property. What a boon!

  In this dream I used to drive straight down to New Jersey and roll up my sleeves. Not surprisingly, the house was always a mess: dirty, even disgusting. There were smells and sights to make me gag, but I had vision; I could see past the surface grime. And the thing of it was, now that the house was mine, I realized how badly I needed it! It was the answer—or would be, if only it weren’t so dirty—to all of my problems. Free housing: who could possibly say no to that? Plus, we were having another baby, or David had just been transferred to New Jersey, or we really, really, really needed a kitchen garden, so badly it was a matter of life or death . . .

  In these dreams, as in real life, the land all around Grandma Ellen’s house was green and gentle. But in my dreams it was always summer and always sunlit, and sometimes there were woods covering a hill that wasn’t actually there, and sometimes there was a lake or a mountain range. But the house was always the focal point because it offered such unheard-of potential. Maybe that’s why I loved this dream so much. Or maybe I loved it because it allowed me to revisit my grandmother’s house. In either case I looked forward to this recurring dream in much the same way I look forward to the first big snow of winter—as a magical occurrence. And I missed it when it evaded me for too long, as it has for the past several years.

  But back when the dream recurred more reliably, it always unfolded the same way. In it I really threw myself into the cleaning. I would clean nonstop. But no matter how hard I cleaned, nothing ever changed. The dirt was just so deep. The dirt was just so dirty. So dirty I might work for hours scrubbing a single corner of one room, and yet the minute I turned around, it was only to discover exactly how enormous the task at hand really was, how much bigger than I. Slowly, I’d come to realize that I’d never finish. Of course, it didn’t help that things kept changing. For example, as soon as I turned my back to my one little scrubbed square foot of floor or wall or what have you, it would instantly become dirty again. It would become *filthy.

  But then, just as I was about to give up, something very good would always happen: I’d find the secret room. Or else sometimes it was a garden, and in the garden there’d be a secret shed, which would become the secret room. Sometimes the room was in the basement, and sometimes it was in the attic, and sometimes it was off the porch. Sometimes it was simply a matter of cutting a hole for a door and the room would be right there, where it always was. The point is, no matter how many times I dreamed this dream, it was always exhilarating when I discovered the secret room because this room was always very special. Sometimes it reminded me of Café Pamplona in Harvard Square, and sometimes it reminded me of England. Once it was on the seashore and Seamus Heaney lived next door. And for some reason this room—and only this room—I could actually clean, even if the rest of the house remained forever dirty. This room I could really spiff up. There were even times when I found more than a single room, when I stumbled across an entire suite of rooms, a suite so large that the original house could be used for nothing but dead storage.

  Every time I dreamed this dream it was a little different but not much, at least until the last time, when things ended badly. This was five or six years ago—right around the time Isaac was born. I remember this: an ominous feeling pervaded the whole thing. And during the long, exhausting process of cleaning, before I got to the secret room, I unplugged some kind of weird storage compartment. It was like a boarded-up closet, only high above my head, and as soon as I did this, something loud and toxic and airborne came streaming out of it, spraying out of it as if out of a gigantic aerosol can. I ducked, of course, but the sense I had in the dream was that I’d been badly damaged by this stuff, whatever it was, permanently damaged somewhere inside.

  Metaphor

  Little puzzles, little toys, things to play around with in your brain, things that stand for other things that with the right mental shift can turn into still other things or even back into the original things. A glossary, for example, can be seen as a messy and confused attempt at storytelling as well as the exact opposite—an insistence on orderliness and organization indicating an enormous level of control freakishness borne of a profound sense of impotence stemming from an exceptionally heavy pair of *boots.

  Me Too

  I was laid up in bed, sick with the flu. My mother was away on a business trip, so my father stepped in to take care of me. He did so with surprising tenderness. For example, at one point he brought me a bowl of homemade chicken soup, at another a plate of saltines and a glass of room-temperature ginger ale. At still another he put his hand—unfamiliar, soft, dry—on my forehead to check for a fever. Perhaps it was after this brief, slightly embarrassing contact that I asked him to shut the door. He paused in gathering up my used tissues to make a joke. It was a very good joke, perfectly timed and low-key, because my father’s humor, when it does surface, is like that. In addition, the joke was in French, which is a language I was (and remain) deeply enamored of and one I assumed he didn’t know the first thing about, but apparently he did, because his accent was pretty good.

  “Je t’adore aussi,” he said.

  Mildew

  My mother’s apartment is about a quarter-mile away from the Charles River, which is why, from the bay window in her living room, you can just catch a gray glimpse of it, where it runs parallel to the Mass Turnpike for a while. It is near this window in her living room that something strange is happening to one of the walls: it’s begun to belly out, and the paint, where the wall is bulging, has begun to sag so that it looks like wrinkled skin, and in the creases of these wrinkles there are fine black lines that appear to be mildew. My mother has a special term for what’s happening to the wall, but I forget what it is. It’s a technical term that she looked up on the internet, and she says that this technical thing that’s happening to the wall in her living room is an indication of internal rot on account of excess moisture because of the proximity of the river and that her landlord knows perfectly well what’s going on—he knows all about this technical thing—but he doesn’t want to do anything to fix the situation because he wants her out because she complains about the neighbor’s cats too much and also because she knows he’s spying on her and because she refuses to turn a blind eye to numerous safety violations in the building overall. Eventually, she says, the wall will simply fall down, probably on top of her, and at that point her landlord will be under no legal obligation to house her. “He has it all planned out.”

  She’s been complaining about this situation for more than a year, and although I have always doubted the veracity of her account, it’s not until I come by to drop off a large, heavy box from Williams Sonoma that she had, for some reason, shipped to our address instead of her own, that I suspect she might really have a mildew problem because it’s only then that I notice two small machines in her living room set directly under the bulge. These look like humidifiers with upturned spouts, aimed right at the wall, which is why I say: “Why do you have humidifiers under that bulge in the wall? Won’t they just make it worse?” She says, “Those are de-humidifiers.” And I say: “Oh. They look just like humidifiers. That’s funny.” And she says, “Well, I have things to do,” and practically pushes me out the door.

  Mindmap of My Mother’s Childhood

  Over the years all the stories my mother’s told me about her childhood have come to take up a lot of room in my brain. By now they’ve all fused together to make an extended landscape, a kind of mental diorama. There are many people scattered throughout this map. My maternal grandfather is there, for instance, as is Grandma Ellen, and so, of course, is my mother when she was just a child, and all of her siblings are there too. There are several neighbors, some dogs, a few horses, a hermit, a handful of crickets, a bus full of kids, an unkind teacher, a cheerleading squad, and, of course, th
ere’s my father standing on line at a movie theater when he was still just a boy and he saw my mother for the first time . . . There are countless details glittering all over the place: tiny bottles of nail polish, larger ones of vodka, a wooden headboard, some raw potatoes, a slice of damp bread, an old yellow dress, a pair of red canvas sneakers, a white woven blanket, a box full of thin mints, a pot roast, an ironing board, a blue chair, a plate of raw beef, a fistful of candy . . . All of it’s packed in my brain, serving, as far as I can tell, no purpose. I mean, what am I supposed to do with something like the story she once told me about the time Grandma Ellen showed her, when she was no more than eight or nine years old, one of her miscarriages floating in the toilet bowl?

  “Come and see,” she said (my mother told me—so long after the fact, sitting in one of her rooms in one of the psych wards in one of the hospitals in which I have visited her over the years). Grandma Ellen wept as she took her daughter by the hand and led her into the bathroom, where she pointed out the wasted miracle floating in the pink water: ten nearly microscopic toes, ten impossibly small fingers, the almost invisible slub of a nose—all bright red. She was crying, and my mother, kneeling by her side, was crying too, though I suspect for different reasons. My grandmother showed the miniature corpse to my mother, and decades later my mother showed the miniature corpse to me. I can see it that clearly.

  Mired

  M—, New Jersey, 1981

  We’re at Grandma Ellen’s house, and the meal appears to be more or less over: a couple of empty plates, a few bottles of beer, an ashtray, some crusts of bread, are all that’s left on the table. My mother’s talking to Aunt Inga, leaning over her in a domineering way (although it occurs to me that maybe it only looks like this—maybe she’s just getting up from the table). Aunt Elsa, chewing something and glancing sidelong at her sisters, is apparently riding some great, barely controlled wave of annoyance. Emily, Uncle Lucas’s girlfriend, a woman I adored, is dancing into the room with a cup of coffee in her hand. (Why is it that Emily dancing into the room with a cup of coffee in her hand is so real to me? Even the precise shade of milk in that coffee seems absolute.) Mrs. Anders, my grandmother’s neighbor, in brown pants, a blonde wig, and bright shaggy pink slippers, is bouncing somebody’s baby on her knee. And I’m there too, sitting in a blue-and-white lawn chair, reaching a hand across the table. My head is tilted in the direction of Emily as I watch her dance into my memory.

  All of these people are oriented toward the table, even if not seated at it. Only my father, in the unfocused foreground, sits alone and angled away from the rest of us. He’s staring off, out of the frame of the photograph, through the semi-opaque plastic covering of the window in my grandmother’s kitchen. He’s heavy here, though not as heavy as he will eventually become. In one hand he holds a glass. It’s almost empty.

  Mishap

  The reason I think my mother hasn’t given up her license voluntarily, as she has always maintained, but has had it revoked is because I know something she doesn’t know I know: she had an accident right before she decided to opt out. I know about this accident because David saw it, only she doesn’t know he saw it. This was maybe a year and a half ago. David called me from the street sounding breathless and furtive. Nothing at all like he usually sounds.

  “God, I hope she can’t see me.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother!”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m walking. I don’t think she sees me. I feel so guilty. The cops are there.”

  I told him to slow down and start from the beginning, so he took a deep breath and explained that he’d been outside getting lunch in the neighborhood where he works, and had been waiting to cross the street at the corner of a large intersection where five roads converge when he heard someone lean hard on their horn.

  “There was this huge BANG! At first I thought, what kind of idiot would do that? because there was a car that had tried to cut across two lanes of traffic. They wanted to make a right-hand turn, so they just cut across as soon as the light was green. But then I looked closer and I thought, Oh my god, that’s Linda.”

  “It was my mother?”

  “Yes! For a second I thought I was seeing things, but it’s definitely her. It’s her car, the old gray Honda, and I could see her in the driver’s seat. She looked all nervous and worried. God, I have this sick feeling in my stomach. Probably I should have stayed and helped. The other driver was totally pissed off, of course. There was all this smoke. Oh my god, I feel so guilty. She’s probably still there.”

  “Are you a hundred percent sure it’s her?”

  “Positive.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just turned around. Now I’m walking in the other direction.”

  This, I knew, was probably smart. Probably sensible. Because to get embroiled in my mother’s problems is to waste many, many hours, and there’s never any payoff, even for her. It’s also very likely what I would have done had I been in my husband’s shoes, standing on that corner. But to tell the truth, I’m not at all sure I’ve ever forgiven him for it.

  Modest Split Ranch

  It was obvious from the start that we couldn’t afford it—a modest split ranch ten minutes away from the yellow stucco house. But it was a nice place, in a nice neighborhood, and my mother really threw herself into it. First, she had the whole thing painted pale gray. Then she had a pine fence erected around the yard. Then she had the front hall floor covered with dark slate and the kitchen counters covered with delicate blue tiles. She sewed curtains and chair cushions, and every day after work, weather permitting, she took a gin and tonic outside to tend her flower garden in the front yard. There, over the course of the three years we lived in that house, she planted phlox and aster and lily of the valley, Japanese iris, French iris, tulips, daffodils, lilacs, rose of Sharon, allium, hydrangea, bleeding hearts, and a stand of bright pink peonies.

  Morale

  On the first day of my freshman year of high school, I invited a classmate over after school. My mother was home for some reason that day, and in an unusual display of domestic busyness, she decided to bake us some chocolate chip cookies. Liz, who was also new to the town that year and also a freshman, wore small pearls in her ears and had a fancy way of pronouncing certain words. For instance, she said “litrah-lee” rather than “literally.” This seemed to put my mother on guard because I noticed that pretty soon, she, too, started talking funny.

  Liz and I sat at the kitchen table discussing our first day of high school. Our conversation was a bit stilted because my mother was just a few feet away, making the cookies. We could have gone down the hall to my room, but I didn’t want Liz to see it. I considered it an embarrassment, with its garish metallic wallpaper and bent-up Venetian blinds and bizarrely textured wall-to-wall carpeting with a rust-colored stain over half of it.

  “It’s just an ordinary room,” I told her. “But it doesn’t feel like me yet. I’d rather stay here.”

  “Please?” said Liz. “I just want a peek.”

  “Let’s just sit in the kitchen.”

  “Really, it’s no big deal,” she said. And then she jumped up to trot down the hallway in her designer jeans and cashmere sweater. “I’ll be right back!”

  In the kitchen, waiting for her return, my mother and I said nothing to each other, although she did crank out a fairly good imitation of Liz, silently wiggling her shoulders and flipping her hair.

  When she returned, Liz said: “It’s not so bad. You shouldn’t feel ashamed.” And my mother, still working on the cookies, said, “She’s not ashamed!” Then she tossed an eggshell over her shoulder. It landed on the floor with a surreal little splat. “She’s not ashamed of anything!”

  Mormor

  A Swedish compound noun usually defined as “mother’s mother” (although I think a stricter translation might be closer to “mom-mom”), Mormor is what my mother asked we teach Isabella to call her after she was born. I liked the id
ea on account of my own fixation with all things Swedish, but for my kids I suspect Mormor is closer to an abstract concept than a real name indicating an actual person (much like the name Pop was to me when I was young), since they so rarely see my mother at this point. Isaac in particular understands her, I think, almost as a kind of living ghost, a fast and jumbled voice at the other end of the telephone, a fixture of confusion and loss in his mother’s mind perhaps best identified as a facial expression—an etched-in disappointment that I often catch, myself, in the bathroom mirror, one that I try to erase with the assiduous application of expensive creams and to accept with a devoted, some might even say obsessive, yoga practice.

  Morose

  He could shut out the world and just sit there, turned inward, a miser of regret tallying his grievances. Although he never said so, it seemed obvious that my father’s biggest regret must have been getting my mother pregnant when he was just nineteen years old, and so, by extension (according to my calculations), his biggest regret was me.