The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “Are you still there?” asked my grandmother. I assured her I was, and she continued reading, only now she spoke of her garden and all the flowers that she’d grown in it when she was still alive, when she had been, in fact, an inspired although somewhat haphazard gardener. Her words at this point began to feel like a set of instructions gravely delivered, as if she had sought me out all these years after her death simply in order to impart some gardening advice, which struck me as a bit frivolous considering the many pressing mysteries that surround my mother’s early life and my grandmother’s early life and before that, even, the early lives of the Aunts . . . I was trying to come up with a polite way of interrupting her so that I might bring the conversation around to these much more important topics when I realized she was speaking of individual roses and lilac blooms that she’d grown in her garden, single flowers recalled with great affection.

  “If they were special, if they were beautiful,” she explained in her strangely tremulous voice, “it’s because I named each and every one of them: Thor, Inga, Linda, Becky, Nils, Elsa, Lucas—” In this way she listed out the names of all seven of her children. She was, of course, speaking in code by this point, but I understood it, and I knew that what she was really telling me wasn’t that I should name all the flowers in my own garden (although the thought did, fleetingly, cross my mind) but that she had tried her best as a mother and had loved her children in ways I could never hope to fathom.

  It’s astonishing really how dreams sometimes manage to unlock such long chains of emotional logic in us, miles of it, but that’s exactly what happened when my grandmother listed out each tulip and lily and, at one point, for some reason, even a potato by its individual name. As she did so, I understood that all the strange and unhealthy behaviors she’d exhibited during her lifetime—which I have always considered, ever since I was old enough to make such judgments, selfish and essentially perverse—weren’t, in the final analysis, so much a series of choices as a set of limitations.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked me finally, her voice more unsteady than ever, and I thought very carefully in my dream about how to answer her. On the one hand, I felt I should give my grandmother no quarter because for most of my life I have blamed her for not protecting my mother from my grandfather and in this way I have considered her guilty of aiding in the destruction of whatever essential thing my mother has always, for as long as I’ve known her, been missing. I could almost feel my grandmother’s anxiety pulsing on the other end of the line as I considered how much of an effort she must have gone through to arrange a call like this. I thought about all the wounded things that seemed to live in her voice and about how old I was now and about how, when I was much younger, she had been so much more than just a voice, so much more than just part of a story. Strange, messy, spiteful, intelligent, masochistic, and probably mentally ill—somebody who made good pot roast and drank gallons of tea and wrote novels in secret and had a special understanding of flowering perennials. And for some reason, in my sleep, I suddenly felt incredibly light. It was a tremendous relief—as if something in me had let go. And finally I was able to answer her. “Yes, Grandma,” I said, “I think I know what you’re saying.”

  Narcissistic Personality Disorder

  Of all the labels that doctors have given to what’s wrong with my mother, the only one that ever struck a chord for me is Narcissistic personality disorder. This is the only one, in any case, that begins to explain the extreme hermeticism that defined my childhood, that explains, even now, my state of mind when I find myself in the same room or even just on the phone with her. Wars might start or end, children might be, have been, conceived and born, people tortured, buildings razed, presidents elected, but speaking to my mother, you’d never know any of it. 9/11 came and went, and her only comment, when the phone lines finally cleared, was: “Oh, Kimmy, I’ve had such a terrible day.”

  Nasty

  I’m digging around in my baking cupboard, trying to remember what’s the best way to set a blackberry pie—with cornstarch or flour? tapioca? gelatin?—when my mother taps on our screen door. Bad timing. It’s August, and I’m packing up kitchen supplies to go on vacation for two weeks on a small island in Maine, where we try to go every summer. This time of year there are blackberries everywhere up there.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she says as I step out onto the porch. “But he did it. The nasty son of a bitch finally did what they wanted him to do all along.”

  “Which son of a bitch?”

  “He’s totally hooked into DMH. You realize that, right? It was obvious from day one. Honey, I don’t want to nag you, but I think you should have that looked at.” She touches a mole on my cheek. “It’s getting bigger.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  “Ha!”

  My mother has a special way of making this noise in times of great crisis. Sort of barky. Her neck strains in a way that makes it looks extra skinny. I think she’s going for tough, but she just looks scared. “Jerry kicked me out. As if I didn’t know that was coming!”

  “You got evicted?”

  She nods in a super huge way, like the absurdity of it all is just too much, then describes the entire humiliating scene to me. It’s all extremely déjà vu since she’s been evicted three times before, and yet you wouldn’t know it, judging from the tones of shock and outrage woven though her description of the moving truck, the police escort, the curious neighbors, the taciturn landlord, and the three social workers who kept asking her (“as if they really cared, as if they actually gave a flying fuck”) what she planned to do next. She is particularly annoyed by the social workers and finds significance in the fact that there were three of them, all pushing cards and telephone numbers and addresses at her, because she considers their concern, their insistence that she stay at a shelter, nothing but a poorly veiled attempt to get her one step closer to a locked ward.

  “But where are you going to go?” I ask, trying not to let my eyes dart toward our bags and suitcases, which are already lined up on the porch for our departure tomorrow morning and which are overflowing with beach towels, board games, swimming noodles, knitting projects, stuffed animals, sun hats, fishing rods, and a waffle iron, all ready to be loaded into our car.

  “I don’t know,” says my mother, letting her own eyes land quite pointedly on our bags. “I really don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to stay at a B&B.”

  I say I guess so, and she asks if she can leave a few things on our porch while she gathers her thoughts and comes up with a plan—just a few things she doesn’t want to put into storage but that are too bulky to carry around.

  “Everything’s still in the cab,” she says. “The cabbie is probably totally pissed at me by now. He already thinks I’m trouble. Says I’m giving him agita and he should charge me double. He definitely won’t help me bring down my bags.” This clearly is a hint, but I just raise my eyebrows. Actually, I am seething. But I tell myself I’m just raising my eyebrows. I watch as my mother scurries back up the path to the street, looking small and hunted, and then I go inside to finish packing.

  It takes a while for her to lug everything down. Then she hangs around on our porch, arranging and rearranging the two enormous duffel bags, a suitcase, and three cardboard boxes stuffed with a mixture of paperwork and cleaning supplies, but I don’t talk to her again, just stay inside doing the dishes, folding towels, and packing up a bunch of dried goods to take to Maine. When the kids come home, I can hear them talking with her. She laughs, and they politely but quietly laugh with her. When they come inside, Isabella asks me what’s going on with *Mormor. I explain that she’s been evicted, then I explain to Isaac what the word evicted means. I tell them not to worry because there’s nothing we can do about it. I say this kind of trouble, this kind of discombobulation, is just part of my mother’s sickness, which is why she gets into situations like this so often. Isabella gives me a lopsided smile and a hug.

 
; “I’m sorry, Mama,” she says. I hug her briefly back and say, “Thanks, sweetie,” but it sounds clipped. It’s only when David comes home from work and I tell him about what’s happened, tell him why all my mother’s junk is out on our porch, that a bunch of wet, crappy little tears fall out of my eyes. And it’s only when my husband gives me a hug that I allow myself to say something about how she might pull herself together, maybe, this time, and David says, “Shh.”

  Standing limply in his arms, I’m quiet for a minute before I say something even more hopeful, even more hypothetical, even more imaginative, about how my mother might really surprise us this time, might actually, finally, maybe, do something really interesting, something that would shock us all, like, who knows, you never know, it’s impossible to say, become a *florist or get a boyfriend or go back to school.

  Nearly Adult

  Our family was changing quickly, falling apart. I’d just turned seventeen when we lost the split ranch. I’d recently gotten kicked out of the boarding school my parents had sent me to for my junior year of high school, during which time I’d become completely unmoored—gouging my own skin, throwing up half my meals, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, skipping classes, and sneaking off campus several times a week. Not surprisingly, I got expelled, or, as the administration politely put it, “uninvited” for my senior year. When I came back home, there was no home—at least not the one I’d left.

  After the bank repossessed our house, my mother moved into a two-bedroom duplex three towns closer to New York City. She and my father had already started divorce proceedings. Officially, he lived mostly in South Jersey, where he worked, but on the weekends he often stayed with us in the new apartment, sleeping on the foldout couch in the living room, which only added to the confusion. By this point my mother was taking all kinds of pills—pills for the pain in her teeth, pills for the pain in her neck, pills for the pain in her head, pills for the pain in her jaw—and my father’s drinking, although still invisible to me, was, as we would soon discover, worse than it had ever been.

  College, adulthood, freedom—these things were so close I could taste them, but they weren’t quite mine, not yet. I knew all I had to do was be patient. Tracy wanted out too, of course, but she had longer to wait, and her philosophy seemed to be to just hunker down. For example, she stopped talking except when strictly necessary and slept in her clothes. She slept, in fact, in her boots.

  Nice and Lean and Lanky

  Because she was always late picking me up, by the time I was a senior in high school, I’d adopted the habit of adding a half-hour to whatever plan my mother and I had made, and still I often had to wait five, ten, fifteen minutes before she showed up. Only once that I can remember was I late to meet her using this method. It was a Friday afternoon, and we’d planned to meet in the small parking lot at the back of the high school I attended that year. When I came out of the heavy double doors, I found her parked about thirty feet away. I waved at her and noticed her face soften as an expression of relief came over her features. I thought this might have been because she’d been worried about my being late, but when I climbed into the passenger seat, she said: “Oh, my god, thank god it’s you. I was so confused. I mean I was completely mystified! A little while ago a girl came out of those same doors, and I thought: ‘Wow, I didn’t realize Kimberli was so dumpy! I thought she had style!’ But then the girl kept on walking, and I realized it wasn’t you. Then another girl came out of those doors, and I thought: ‘My god, I didn’t know Kimberli was so chunky and ungraceful! I thought she was nice and lean and lanky!’ But then that girl kept on walking, and I realized it wasn’t you either! Then finally you came out of those doors, and I was like: ‘There she is! That’s my Kimmy—long like a cool drink of water.’ And I was so relieved!”

  Nicknacks

  E—, New Jersey, 1984

  Someone’s lying on the couch in the new apartment. This could be any one of us—it’s impossible to say because whoever it is has thrown an afghan over their head and upper body. Only the legs are partially visible, clad in jeans, and the feet in black socks. The whole scene is drenched with silent hysteria. At least this is how I see it now. The couch is hideous—a big, tufted, suburbo-colonial thing with huge sprays of mint- and salmon-colored peonies on the upholstery. There’s an empty vase on the floor propping up a framed charcoal drawing of my mother. On the end table is a school portrait of Tracy at about thirteen. Her hair is flipped back in intricate layers, her teeth gray and complicated-looking with braces. There’s a chessboard on the coffee table and a few nicknacks: a tiny malachite turtle, a hotel ashtray, and the candle chimes we took out at Christmastime. The idea for these was that the heat from four small candles would send a tiny brass angel spinning over a set of bells. With the tip of his trumpet, the angel would strike each of the bells one at a time and make a steady tinkling sound until the candles burned down.

  Niche

  Before we leave for Maine, I spend some time thinking about where to hide our spare key. Normally, we put it in with the clothespins, in a small wooden box that we keep on the steps of our porch. I’ve always considered this a fairly clever hiding spot, but suddenly it seems completely stupid. Any idiot who really wanted to find our key would discover it in about five minutes. No, this time I want to find a really, really good hiding place.

  “What are you so worried about?” David asks when he finds me hunting around the yard. “We have to get going, or we’ll hit a ton of traffic and miss our ferry. You don’t actually think she’ll try to get into our place when we’re gone, do you?” But then, before I have a chance to answer, he makes a hmm sound and starts helping me look.

  “It has to be a really, really good place!” I tell him as we hike the perimeter of our yard.

  It takes a while, but eventually David spots a small chink in the mortar of the foundation of the house: a tiny crack between two gray fieldstones. I stuff the key into the crack, then stuff the crack with some pebbles so that it’s practically invisible. Then I lean an old folding chair against the wall, and then, just to be on the safe side, I stack some tomato cages in front of the chair. Finally, in the interest of thoroughness, I drag a potted impatiens over to the tomato cages and wedge it casually between their tines.

  Night Party

  E—, New Jersey, 1984

  Extraordinary pallor. Layered “shag” haircuts. Tracy and I sit at the kitchen table, slouched to the point of seeming only semisolid. We’re staring at a small birthday cake—my birthday cake. I’m turning eighteen. It seems I’ve just blown out the candles, and for some reason my sister and I both appear to find this very amusing—but not too amusing. We’re laughing yet at the same time we look as if we might just fall face-first onto the tabletop and start snoring. We wear pajama-y clothes—Tracy an old T-shirt and the Brooks Brothers robe the two of us fought over for years, me a loose white button-down shirt and an inside-out sweater haphazardly thrown over my shoulders. Our faces are sleepy, our eyes half-closed behind the drooping plastic frames of our glasses. It looks as if we both are either very sick or someone has woken us up at three in the morning for birthday cake. I feel certain that five years ago I would have been able to tell you the story behind this photo. The memory’s no longer there, but I know (what do you call the memory of a memory?) that it once was.

  Nimble

  I didn’t even know we owned a baseball bat, but suddenly there it was, slicing through the air at the back of my neck. Certain elements from that instant remain in focus with bizarre clarity, as if the room had suddenly opened up in a 360-degree visual sweep so that even to this day I remember the dictionary on its intricately carved wooden stand, the paneled closet door with its dull brass knob imprinted with an art deco design, the forest-green wall-to-wall carpeting, and the brightly colored flowers and interlacing vines on the wallpaper.

  I ran in a circuit through the living room, with its tufted couch, its glass-topped coffee table, its parquet floor and foldout daybed, into the dining
room, which was cool and dark and which contained, I believe, my father, who seemed to be reading a newspaper by the dim light of the north-facing windows, then I swept back into the front hall and scrambled upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

  As I ran, I could hear the bat behind me banging against things—banisters, doorjambs, it was hard to tell. In the bedroom I shared with Tracy, I hopped on top of my mattress, and then I hopped on top of Tracy’s, and then, as my mother filled the doorway, I slipped under her raised arms and ran back downstairs. And the whole time I was running, I was thinking about logistics. For instance, I considered the weather: it was a hot summer day. I also thought about the fact that I had no money. I thought about the fact that I was wearing an old pair of jeans with just a couple dollars in one pocket, and I knew that a couple of dollars wasn’t going to get me anywhere. My father, however, almost certainly had money in his wallet, and his wallet was almost certainly in his jacket, and his jacket, I knew, was downstairs in the armoire near the front stairs. As soon I’d put these elements together in my adrenaline-drenched brain, I had something like a plan, so once I was back downstairs (my mother still after me, though lagging), I stopped briefly at the armoire, where I dug around in my father’s wallet and extracted sixty-eight dollars. Then I raced out of the building and onto the street.