by Kim Adrian
In actuality I’m pretty sure there were just one or two things he could have said that wouldn’t have prompted me to throw something at him. Something like “I missed you, sweetheart” or “It’s so good to see you, darling.” But such statements fall far wide of my father’s personality, even at his most affectionate moments. Sweetheart is simply not in his vocabulary, and when he says “I miss you,” it is usually in code, and that code is almost invariably edible. In any case, instead of saying one of these impossible phrases, he held me at arm’s length and asked in a jokey sort of way what all the “spots” were on my face, at which point the marmalade practically hefted itself.
Orlaya grandiflora
I notice as I walk down the path that leads to our apartment that the little patch of a garden by our gate looks spectacular. There’s not a single weed, the pink tickseed is exploding, the roses are in full bloom, and the leaves of our potted oleander—normally a bit sickly—are a deep glossy green. This is weird because we’ve been in Maine for two weeks. Then I notice that our old plastic watering can—which I distinctly remember tossing in the garbage the day before we left on account of a hairline crack—is sitting at the base of our tomato plant, and my heart starts thumping way up in my head.
I push open the gate, and there, as I half-knew would be the case, is my mother. She’s sitting on an old stump of wood that she’s pulled onto our porch, staring at the screen of the brand-new iPhone Tracy recently bought her, wearing a pair of earbuds, lightly bopping her head and chewing on her bottom lip. She doesn’t see or hear me, not even when I crunch across the gravel path and get very close.
“Mom!” I yell. “Mom!”
She stands up and turns toward me, squinting as if it were dark out. Stepping closer, holding out one hand as if she were blind or as if I were some kind of a ghost, she waves her arm back and forth until her fingers finally touch my chest, then she says: “Oh, Kimmy, I didn’t recognize you. Can you believe this? It won’t let me do anything. Brand-new iPhone. Blocked already. Ridiculous! Plus I can only get reception if I sit here. Right exactly here, precisely on this exact piece of wood. It’s the only place in the entire neighborhood. A four-block radius. Rather curious, wouldn’t you say? Simply amazing, the lengths they’ll go to.” She shakes her head.
“What are you doing here?”
I ask this question even though I know exactly what she’s doing here. She’s staying in our yard. All her bags are open on the picnic table—clothes and papers and cleaning supplies tumbling out of them. A huge gray sleeping bag and a pillow are stuffed into our hammock; a toothbrush is balanced on the base of an upturned clay pot.
“I know it looks bad. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m actually staying at the B&B down the street. It’s just they’re giving me a special discount, and there are all these rules. One rule is I’m not allowed to stay in my room during the day. Also, I have to clear out all my stuff until 4:00 p.m.”
I sigh. But it is not a simple sigh. It is a sigh with many things in it. Resignation, disappointment, guilt, anger. Other things, too, but I’m not sure what they are.
“So, I’ve been coming here. Just for the daylight hours. It’s really been gorgeous. I’ve been so lucky. Did you notice the garden? Doesn’t it look amazing? I’ve been working on it every day!”
“I’m tired.”
I walk past my mother and start unlocking the door to our apartment and notice as I do that she’s looped the handles of a plastic bag around the back of one of our lawn chairs. It is filled with water, and nearby is a damp washcloth. On our woodpile an Elle magazine is opened face down. Next to the hammock there is a long stick on the ground and a pair of flip-flops.
David comes down the path holding a bunch of suitcases and bags. He looks at me, then he looks at my mother, then he says, “Linda.”
“Oh, he’s so good. When he gets mad, he just gets polite. Such a good man you married.”
“Mom, I can’t believe you’ve been staying here.”
“I promise I haven’t been sleeping here. I know it looks bad, but really.”
I ask what she’s going to do now, but she doesn’t answer because the kids are clomping down the path. Isabella is holding her backpack and an armload of board games, and Isaac is right behind her, and neither of them says anything to any of us; they just march straight into the house as if on a mission. Isaac’s cheeks are red.
“Did you know you have a rare strawberry plant in the herb patch back here? Did you know that? Purely decorative. You’ll never get a strawberry off of it, but it’s so charming. Pink flowers. And be careful with the tarragon. It looks exactly like a weed. But it’s so delicious, especially with chicken.”
“I know,” I say. It sounds very harsh. Too harsh, I think, so I add, “I love tarragon with chicken.” Then I let her show me around my own garden, as if I’m on a tour. She shows me all the plants I put in the ground myself and tells me their names and how to care for them.
“Be careful with the mint! It can take over. It was all over this whole side of the herb patch. I had to trim it way back, but don’t worry. It’s tenacious. It’ll grow back in no time.”
She explains about the watering can at the top of the path—about how the crack in the base is perfect for watering the roots of the tomato plant very slowly, all day long, just the way they like it. “And this,” she says, pointing to a small clump of white lace flowers I bought at a nursery a few weeks ago, “I haven’t seen this since my mother was alive. She used to love this flower!” As I watch her talk, something in me deflates. After a minute Isabella comes out of the house with her sneakers on.
“I’m going for a run,” she announces to nobody in particular, then jogs up the path. Watching her leave, my mother shakes her head and says, “Gorgeous.”
Osteria
After he got sober, my father lived for two years in a seedy SRO in Lower Manhattan, across the street from a park frequented by homeless people and junkies. I saw the inside of his room in this place just once: it had a single window covered by a grid of thick iron bars and was so small it fit hardly anything beside his bed. The walls, if I remember correctly, were painted black.
It took a while after the orange marmalade incident, but eventually we met again, this time for dinner. And as that event unfolded in a more or less civilized manner, we decided to do it again. This quickly became a routine. In fact, we met for dinner every Tuesday for the next three years, until I graduated from college and moved to Boston.
Every so often, he would come uptown, to Morningside Heights, but usually I took the R or the N train down to 23rd Street, then walked to his SRO and asked the “concierge” (in his bulletproof cage) to ring my father. I’d wait for him on the front stoop, trying to avoid eye contact with the junkies in the park, and with what always struck me as incredible alacrity, he’d appear next to me, dressed in what was at that time his everyday uniform: jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. We would walk down Second Avenue to our favorite restaurant, a tiny hole-in-the-wall place called L’Osteria, where we ate cheap and simple but well-prepared food from Southern Italy—food that reminded both of us of Grandma Bella.
For the first several months of this weekly routine, our conversations were absurdly cramped since we strayed only reluctantly from a handful of topics that were clearly safe. Among these the one that gave us the most mileage—and the one we enjoyed the most—concerned the foods we were eating, which, at L’Osteria, were often things my grandmother used to make: golden arancini, silky eggplant parmesan (dark and bitter, without a trace of mozzarella), sautéed rapini, stewed escarole, mozza en carozza, Sicilian style macaroni . . . Sometimes we talked to the owner, who spent most of his time at the front counter ringing up orders and making vasteddi (sandwiches composed of thin slices of oil-basted sheep spleen and a handful of matchstick shavings made from salted, cured ricotta). These sandwiches sold for a dollar fifty, and in this way, I’m pretty sure, L’Osteria kept several people in that neighborhood ali
ve.
I usually ordered iced tea, which came from a powder mix and which was almost unnaturally quenching, though sometimes I had a glass of wine. My father drank San Pellegrino. Gradually, the tiny circles of our conversations grew more expansive. I sometimes talked about David or my classes. Eventually, he told me about his AA meetings and his new job. He paid for our meals and always left a big tip. If it was nice outside, we often wandered around the Village for a while before heading to the subway station, where he would walk me up to the turnstile and give me two tokens—one for my ride home that night and one for my trip back the next week.
Overcoat
I was supposed to meet my mother to talk about “something.” I was nervous, but being with David made everything easier, even my mother, and I was relieved to have him by my side as we took the bus out of the city, then walked through curtains of freezing rain, first to a grocery store, where I bought a box of Mozart chocolates as a preemptive peace offering, and then to the one-bedroom apartment my mother and Tracy shared.
When we arrived, my mother was nowhere to be seen, and Tracy was asleep. Because the apartment was so small and my mother’s queen-size bed took up most of the bedroom, Tracy slept on a cot, the foot of which had been shoved into the closet. For privacy, at the head of the cot, she had hung an overcoat on a piece of twine using clothespins. We might not have noticed her there behind the coat, lying with her arms crossed over her chest, except that she was snoring. Just a little.
We decided to wait—either for my mother to show or for my sister to wake up. To pass the time, we washed and dried the dishes that had piled up in the kitchen sink: pots, pans, plates, and bowls, all with caked-on remnants of canned chili and minestrone and mac ’n’ cheese. We emptied the ashtrays that Tracy had filled to the brim with her cigarette butts (Marlboro Lights). Then we sat on the couch in the living room and waited a little longer. Finally, we put on our coats. But before we left, I went into the bedroom and leaned over my sister to whisper that I loved her. She mumbled something in her sleep and, without opening her eyes, found my hand with hers. She brought my fingers to her mouth, gave them a dry little kiss, then rolled over onto her side.
P
Pair
New York, New York, 1988
What are we? Puppies? We’re so cute, it’s unreal. A light rain hangs in the air; umbrellas are up. My graduation gown, pale blue with small black crowns at the shoulders, is dotted with drops. My face, sheltered under the tipped mortarboard of my graduation cap, is aglow. I don’t think there’s another word for it. David isn’t wearing a hat or using an umbrella, but he is so young, so fresh faced, I suspect he’s just naturally water-repellent. I hold my hand over the single button of his blazer. My nails are painted a bright mandarin red. His tie—a Liberty print of tiny blue flowers—matches my gown. We are children. Our hair is curly. Our eyes enormous. Our smiles just slightly uncertain.
Paltry
Last night I dreamed about grandfather in a different setting than the usual bathroom labyrinth. This time we met in a small windowless room. I understood this space to be the foyer of one of my mother’s old apartments. She and I were chatting, though what about I can’t remember, when somebody rapped at the door. My mother explained that she’d asked her father to come over so they could discuss a knotty problem of hers. It was obvious that she was both nervous and excited to see him and also afraid—so afraid that she refused to open the door. I very much wanted to meet my grandfather at last, so as my mother receded into the shadows of that strange little room, I swung open the door. He barged in, charged past me, talking a mile a minute with a heavy Swedish accent. He was tiny, perhaps only five feet tall, and rail thin. His skin was a deep, burnished bronze color, his features tight against his skull. He had no facial hair, no hair on top of his head, and it strikes me now, as I write this, that he was essentially mummified. His accent swung up and down in a Swedish, singsongy way as he admonished my mother, telling her that she needed to grow up, needed to stop dwelling on problems of the past. But he couldn’t fool me. I saw right through him. I knew this talkativeness, this aggression, was only his way of trying to camouflage himself so as to prevent our attention from settling on him too long.
I finally stepped right up to him and told him who I was. I insisted on shaking his hand, which I found, as soon as I took it, to be extremely small and fragile, almost friable, like something that’s been baked too long. Though I can’t say for sure, I think it was more out of curiosity than malice that I squeezed his hand harder and harder until the bones splintered and disintegrated in my palm. I had the sense, as the dream thinned out and I began to wake (the sky was gray this morning, smeared with bits of blue), that I could easily keep crushing my grandfather—different parts of him—if I wanted to: his arms, his neck, his head.
What’s so unsettling to me now about this dream is the lack of satisfaction that final image provided. I spent so much energy as a child fantasizing about the various ways I might save my mother—fixing her teeth, taking her far away from my father, doing everything she asked of me . . . But there I was, face to face with the root of so many of her problems, crushing him like a bit of charcoal, like—how weird dreams are—the chicken wing I ate for dinner last night, and nothing changed. My mother, cowering in the shadows, stayed there.
Papaya
I was waiting for a bus that I was going to take, for some reason, downtown (normally I’d head north after one of our dinners), and my father was waiting with me. It was summertime—sunlight flashed off the shop windows and spiked off the ground glass in the sidewalk. The bus stop happened to be right next to a Korean grocery store, the kind with fruit and flowers arranged in opulent outdoor displays. One of these was an enormous pile of papaya, each fruit cut in half and individually wrapped in plastic so as to reveal the vivid orange interior, with its shining black seeds. These must have caught my father’s eye because he said, “I’ll be right back,” then hurried into the store.
I’m not a huge papaya fan, and I remember thinking it was a little awkward, this gift of half a papaya that he gave me—awkward to carry, to hold, and eventually, to dispose of—but the gesture must have touched me in some way because when the M-103 pulled up to the curb, I said something to my father that I hadn’t said in many years, tossed it over my shoulder. I pitched the volume of these words (there were just three of them) so that the driver wouldn’t hear but my father would. Then I took a seat by the window, and holding the seeping piece of fruit in my lap, I looked outside to find him exactly where I’d left him, standing there on the street corner. Only now he was doing something funny, something that struck me as tremendously private, pinching the skin on either side of the bridge of his nose—pressing the inside corners of his eyes, which, although tightly shut, still glinted in the sun.
Paperwork
The day it finally hit me that she was actually gone—that I’d really lost her—she still had a home, a car, and a functional cell phone on which she called to say she was parked in front of our building.
“Can you come outside for second? I can’t leave the car. I have something for Isabella.”
It was hot outside. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with the windows rolled up, the AC blasting. Staring pensively ahead, she played nervously with a strand of her hair. When she saw me, she opened a window and said, “Oh, good, you’re here,” then gave me a card full of tiny iridescent hair clips, every color of the rainbow. “I saw these at CVS, and they just screamed ‘Isabella!’”
“Thanks, Mom. She’ll love them.”
“Hold on a minute,” she said, then got out of her car. She motioned for me to stand closer to her and started picking her hair again.
“Now that I have you here, there’s something you should know. Things are really heating up. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to see you again. I may have to go into hiding.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Do I have to spell it out every tim
e? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.” She looked up and down the street.
“Mom, nobody’s there.”
“I can’t even leave my house anymore. They’re so desperate to get me out of the way. I’ve started using Peapod because I can’t leave my paperwork unattended for more than two minutes, max. That’s all they need to get their hands on this.” She gestured to the boxes in the back of her car, familiar boxes that I knew were full of ancient X-rays and MRI films, doctors’ reports, dental records, medical reports, insurance vouchers, outdated leases, rumpled old Day-Timers, bills, decades-old mortgage receipts, bank statements, and, of course, her own illegibly scribbled notes on god knows what. These were boxes she’d been lugging around with her for half her life, maybe more. “Just two minutes, and years and years of work would be over. Kaput.”
“Mom, I hate to say this, but I think you’re being paranoid.”
She repeated the word paranoid almost silently, with her eyes shut, as if miming great exhaustion. “This is so much more serious than you’re willing to admit. When are you going to realize that?” She made a funny gesture then with her hand. Forefinger extended, thumb cocked above it. She seemed to be making the sign for a gun.