by Kim Adrian
I remember a period of weeks—I was fourteen, fifteen—when his silence and stillness were at their most extreme. It was a dark time: we were going bankrupt. During these weeks my father took to sitting in a velvet-covered armchair in his study for hours on end, whole days even, on the weekends, staring into the vague middle distance, refusing to speak. I fought with my mother almost every day at that point, but I never confronted my father (the occasional throwing of things notwithstanding). In fact, we barely spoke. But his habit of slumping in that chair and exuding all that funky black energy really bothered me, and one day as I walked past him I hissed, under my breath, “I don’t know why he has to be so goddamned morose!” I said it like that, in the third person, but he didn’t bat an eyelash. It was only my mother, who happened to be around the corner, in the kitchen, who reacted.
“That’s it!” she said, grabbing my arm. “That’s it! That’s exactly the right word! I’ve been trying to think of it for years!”
Muck
R—, New Jersey, 1982
She looks a little like Michael Jackson’s wacky white sister in this picture. She’s got gloves on, for one thing—long white rubber gloves that reach all the way to her elbows. Also, a white oxford shirt buttoned up to the neck. Her nose is dwarfed by a pair of enormous sunglasses, while her hair, which is apparently in the awkward stages of an out-growing perm, lies flat at the crown of her head but gets fluffier and fluffier as it descends past her shoulders. She’s in the backyard, picking a path through some kind of muck, arms raised for balance. So, yes, she looks wacky, but she also looks happy because my mother truly loves cleaning, and whatever it is she’s fumigating or sterilizing or scouring or scraping out there in our yard seems to be an especially rewarding challenge.
Munchausen Syndrome
To roughly paraphrase the Mayo Clinic website, Munchausen syndrome is a serious mental disorder in which a deep need for attention results in the pretense (or even in the artificial manufacturing) of illness. A person with Munchausen syndrome may invent symptoms, push for high-risk operations, or try to rig laboratory test results in order to win sympathy and concern. It is notoriously difficult to treat people afflicted by the syndrome as they go to such great lengths in order to avoid discovery of their deception. It should be noted that Munchausen syndrome is not the same as inventing medical problems for practical benefit (such as getting out of work or winning a lawsuit), nor is it related to hypochondria. Symptoms may include (but are not limited to): dramatic stories about numerous medical problems; frequent hospitalizations; vague or inconsistent symptoms; conditions that get worse for no apparent reason; eagerness to undergo testing or surgery; extensive knowledge of medical terminology and diseases; seeking treatment from many different doctors or hospitals; having few visitors when hospitalized; reluctance to allow health professionals to talk to family or friends; arguing with hospital staff; and recurrent requests for pain relievers or other medications. People with Munchausen syndrome have been known to falsify their medical histories, manipulate medical instruments in order to skew results, tamper with laboratory tests, fake symptoms, injure or sicken themselves in inventive ways, take medications with effects that mimic diseases, and repeatedly interfere with the natural healing process.
Mute
Like clockwork, I used to get a painful ear infection right around Christmas. When this happened, my mother would fill the afflicted ear (usually the left) with hydrogen peroxide, then dig around in the bubbling liquid with a bobby pin, searching for pieces of wax. These treatments lasted about half an hour and did nothing to relieve my pain or resolve the infection, which meant that eventually my parents would take me to the doctor, who would prescribe antibiotics, and, god, how I loved those antibiotics. The sweet, spreading relief of them.
Sophomore year of high school I had an especially bad earache, but because we were so tight on money, I didn’t go to the doctor for a long time. Instead, I received many bobby pin treatments, one after another, several days in a row. At a certain point the pain took me somewhere else—inside myself but far away—and I stopped talking.
When we finally did go to the doctor, I saw someone new—a man who must have been covering for my regular pediatrician. In the examination room the doctor told me that my eardrum had been perforated but not completely torn. It would heal eventually. He explained that sometimes these things happened when an infection goes on for too long—the pressure builds, and the eardrum bursts. He said I’d have some trouble hearing for a while, but he could give me pills that would at least stop the pain. Then he asked why it had taken us so long to come in. My mother explained, in the half-joking tone she often used when complaining about me to other adults, that I was a bit of a whiner and that this made it hard for her to know when I was really in pain or when I was just being a baby. She also mentioned that she had been working on the situation with her hydrogen peroxide–bobby pin method. And as she spoke, I noticed that she faltered. I also noticed something on the doctor’s face and on his assistant’s face too, which made me wonder if my mother hadn’t been wrong about the bobby pins and about the pain and about my whining. I tried to see her then as the two of them seemed to be seeing her, and for the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of a nervous, somewhat strange woman.
Muzak
Once I threw an apple at my father. We were all getting into the car—Tracy, my father, and I—on a Sunday morning, about to drive to the bakery. It was midwinter and very cold outside, ice everywhere. I was eating an apple—a green one. My father didn’t do anything to prompt my action, just got into the car. But he was slow and fat, and I think that might have been what upset me. I don’t know why, it just made me so mad. I threw the apple—hard—and it got stuck in the puffy folds of his down coat. Without saying a word, he examined the fruit where it had landed in the soft ridges of his sleeve, plucked it out, and dropped it onto the icy driveway before shutting the door, starting the engine, and pulling away. We drove to the bakery then, as we always did—with the radio on low. And once we got there, we bought the usual things: a pecan ring, a loaf of rye bread, a loaf of sourdough, a half-dozen cupcakes.
My Room
Spurred by the awkward encounter with my classmate Liz, my mother spent more money redecorating my bedroom than she did on any other part of the house. Whenever she showed someone my room, she was careful to point out the various design features, such as the two subtly different wallpapers and how they tied in with the carpet or the frilly lace pillowcases she’d sewn herself and the exorbitantly expensive drapes she’d had made. A symphony of blues and greens and creams, crowded with faux antique furniture and two twin beds topped by two handmade lace coverlets and masses of pillows that had to be carefully “carelessly” arranged every morning, my room was devoid of anything even tenuously connected to my own ideas of beauty or comfort. Even my telephone was a faux antique, impossible to hold.
Just down the hall, Tracy’s room seemed to exist on another plane entirely. “That’s Tracy’s room,” my mother would say when giving family and friends the grand tour. Often she didn’t even open the door.
The wallpaper in Tracy’s room was the same stuff that had come with the house: a beige plasticky corduroy. There were posters taped to her walls, and she had a sprawling stereo system, which I wasn’t allowed to have in my own room because black, bulky machinery would have clashed with everything else. Tracy’s room smelled like Cheetos and spilled chocolate milkshakes and broken pens’ leaking ink and my sister’s sleepy body. It felt private, and I liked it a thousand times better than my own room, which is why, whenever she stayed over at a friend’s house, my sister let me sleep in her room. That’s where I was the night my mother accused me of being with a boy. She banged open the door to Tracy’s room and stood there, wearing a long white night gown and making crazy eyes. Her hair was a wreck around her face and for the first time in my life, I thought, “She’s insane.”
“All right!” she shouted. “Where is he?”
“Where’s who?”
“I heard you in here, the bedsprings, where is he?” She stomped over to the closet and looked inside it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You’re crazy.”
We fought then, about whether or not she was crazy. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you check under the bed?”
She cocked her head. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” Then she marched over to the bed, dropped to her knees, and lifted the dust ruffle. When she didn’t find anyone there, she said: “I don’t know how you did it, Kimberli, but you’d better be careful. I’ll catch you next time.”
As she was leaving, I said, “You’re nuts,” but so softly she didn’t catch it.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“It had better be.”
After she was gone, I waited for my heart to stop hammering. Then, one centimeter at a time, I rearranged my limbs on my sister’s soft, lumpy mattress. It took forever, but finally, with my arms crossed over my chest and my legs stretched out straight, I willed myself back to sleep.
Mystery
R—, New Jersey, 1983
The street is shiny with snowmelt, the power line hanging over my father’s head encrusted with ice. Where it hasn’t been shoveled or plowed, the snow stands about three feet deep and is dingy near the road.
Although he’s in his midthirties, overweight, and bundled in a puffy blue parka, there’s a boyish jauntiness to the way he negotiates the slush on our front walk as he makes his way from the front door to the car in the driveway. This sense of jauntiness is probably on account of his neck, which is exposed and seems thin and therefore vulnerable and therefore young. Or maybe it’s on account of the way he’s high-stepping it, holding both arms slightly out to his sides, grasping one glove in each hand, carefully picking a path through the icy gray mousse in his big black boots.
*
If I were a playwright, I’d write plays with interesting special effects. For instance, if I were to write a play about a household in which generalized group depression constituted, as it did in my home when I was growing up, the usual atmosphere, I would have the characters slug around on their knees, not walking upright. And I would have them speak through some kind of kazoo-like device so that their voices were distorted and difficult to understand but also sadly comical. I would include directions for clouds to float across the stage while the characters spoke in more or less unintelligible tones to one another, and these clouds of strange colors—colors indicating some kind of disease or pollution: brown, acid pink, greenish yellow—would float above and between them. Sometimes the characters would flop down, no matter where they were—on the kitchen counter perhaps or under a table, on the front stoop of the house, or at a schoolroom desk, maybe even over the shoulder of a disinterested boss—they would just flop down (as I so often flopped down on my bed) and lie there with their eyes open, staring, clearly at something, but exactly what would be unknown, even to them. Every character in this depressed household, if I were to write such a play, would also own an exceptionally heavy pair of boots—large, black, extremely bulky, and difficult to lace up. And every morning each one of these characters would spend a long time getting themselves into these boots as well as some additional time inserting the kazoo-like distortion devices into their own mouths. Yes, if I were a playwright, I would include stage directions like these. But I am not a playwright. I am a glossator.
N
Nada
Negative adjectives are popular vehicles for some of the most common forms of verbal abuse. For example, “You are miserable” or “You are pathetic” or “What are you—retarded?” Such adjectives are frequently followed by derogatory nouns, resulting in constructions like: “You spoiled little brat” or “You disgusting little slut.” For some reason diminutives are employed with great relish by verbal abusers, probably because the point, when all is said and done, is belittlement, reduction, even a form of erasure.
However popular they may be, it should be kept in mind that adjectives and derogatory nouns are but two of the most basic tools at the disposal of a truly inspired verbal abuser. Indeed, there are times when the most elemental declarative statements (e.g., “You look fine”) strike deepest—though the effect of such statements, of course, depends directly on irony, sarcasm, and/or the slick dynamics of faint praise. For an example of this last tricky maneuver, consider the compliment my mother once paid me when I was sixteen years old: “There is at least,” she said, “one positive thing I can say about you—you always have a nice toothbrush.”
Naive
Thirty years ago she went to a famous endodontist to get treatment for an abscess. As this man was operating on her molar, he discovered several strange objects stuck deep under the gumline. These included the broken tip of a pink plastic toothpick, a tightly curled metal shaving, and two or three extremely small balls of what appeared to be some type of super-absorbent fiber. I know because my mother saved all these things in a tiny green caper bottle. This bottle, a fixture of my childhood, is still hanging around—the last time I saw it, it was sitting on a little glass shelf in her bathroom, next to some potpourri.
You might wonder how this odd, not to say eerie, assortment of miniature objects could have possibly wound up deep under the gumline of one of my mother’s molars. But if you were to address this question directly to her, as the famous endodontist did some thirty years ago, she would tell you (as she told him, as she has since told me) that another dentist put them there. If you were at that point to express even the gentlest hint of doubt regarding this explanation, she would likely respond with a look of withering pity because dentists, in my mother’s book, are all, to a man, patently evil, and anyone who doesn’t understand this is hopelessly naive. Case in point: it was that very endodontist—the world-famous one—who pierced her maxillary sinus during that very treatment. And this was not a mistake but an act of pure aggression. On top of this, that operation, with its malicious piercing, is the root cause of the infection that has over these past three decades spread to the deepest fibers of her body, evolving into a deadly systemic bacterial infection that will ultimately, she often assures me, kill her. It’s only a matter of time.
Names
The only presence I’ve ever experienced in a ghostlike capacity is that of my mother’s mother. I might have preferred a visit from my father’s mother, but I’ve never received one of those. Grandma Ellen’s visit occurred in a dream, which I know makes it sound like it was just a dream, but there was something about the encounter that was more saturated, more substantial than that. How can I explain? I heard her voice, for one thing—I mean her actual voice, an embodied thing, full of vibration and feeling, a real physical presence. When she was alive, my grandmother’s voice was remarkable for being simultaneously hoarse and musical. I’d forgotten that odd combination, a sort of wheezy lilting punctuated by violent spells of coughing, but it all came back to me in this dream as I was talking—listening mostly—to my grandmother over a very large, old-fashioned telephone set.
I’m not prone to mystical thoughts, so of course I’ve pondered how a woman who’s been dead for decades could possibly possess a voice. After all, a voice is the product of a specific physical body, shaped by real tissues—the tongue, the throat, the teeth, the lips, and many of the facial muscles. It is fed by the lungs, which were, in my grandmother’s case, deeply scarred, supported by the diaphragm, and amplified by the hollows in the skull. All of which suggests that no matter how convincing my dream may have been, it was not really my grandmother’s voice I heard during it but my own vivid imagining of that voice. And yet in all honesty, when I think of that dream and the things my grandmother said, I feel certain that it really was her, some version of her, talking to me. Yes, deep down, I can’t help but believe that something—let’s call it my grandmother’s spirit—actually managed to organize itself and move through some kind of time or space hole
in order to visit me.
The dream, her visit, took place at the yoga studio I go to every morning. I was sitting in the small reception area, wearing my old peacoat (the one I wore when I was pregnant with Isabella), holding my yoga mat. It was much busier than it is in reality at the hour I normally arrive (before dawn), and for some reason I felt it necessary to avoid eye contact with all the other people in the room, which left me with little to do but study the many rubber tree plants arranged randomly throughout the space. Despite all the people milling about, things were more or less quiet until, at a certain point, the phone jumped to life—a strident trill. The woman sitting behind the reception desk picked up the heavy, old-fashioned receiver but was clearly reluctant to speak into it, as if she thought it might be coated with germs. Nevertheless, she somehow deduced that the call was for me and held the bulbous, shiny thing, attached to a long and intricately tangled cord, in my direction.
“Hi, honey. It’s Grandma,” said the voice at the other end of the line—a voice that, as I’ve already described, was rich with life. It was also, I noticed right away, nervous. Almost shyly, my grandmother told me that she wanted to read me something she’d written. I have always been deeply curious about the novels she composed in secret during the last years of her life, and so I encouraged her to go on, thinking that maybe I’d gain some insight into whatever those lost manuscripts might have contained.
She started reciting a predictably creepy narrative (I have not yet perhaps mentioned this, but my grandmother loved scary stories and told them with gusto). It began in the third person but quickly transitioned to the first and concerned a young woman who had traveled to Portugal, where somebody slit her throat, as a result of which, went the gist of things, she was drained of all promise. I could, of course, piece this puzzle together: my grandmother was the girl, and the man who slit her throat was her husband—his identity made clear by the country of Portugal, since my grandfather sailed for many years with the merchant marines of that country. I was silent for a while as I absorbed the import of this story.