The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “Are you telling me they want to kill you?”

  “Sh!” She looked around once more, then got back into her car and leaned out the window.

  “One day you’ll believe me, Kimberli. But by then it’ll be too late, and boy oh boy, do I feel bad for you on that day because you are going to feel so guilty, only I won’t be around to see it.”

  Paralyzed

  After a couple of years of living in New York City as a sober man, my father—still youngish, newly single, and thin again—got a good job, a decent apartment, and a cute girlfriend. It was at this point that my mother decided she actually liked him after all, decided he actually was the one and only for her, and became increasingly obsessed with getting him back. Unfortunately, her tactics were decidedly scary. For example, she pulled the suicide card, and when that didn’t work, she called his girlfriend to tell her that her new boyfriend had once stabbed a man, and when that didn’t produce the expected results either, she called his boss and told him the same thing, then faxed the police report to prove it. He was fired the following week.

  “I suffered all those years,” she said when I asked her why she’d done it. “I lived with the crappy Jake. I trained the violent Jake. Why shouldn’t I get the benefit of the nice Jake now that he’s stopped drinking?”

  But my father didn’t see things the same way, and when he cut off all communication with her, she started getting creative. For a while this meant calling him and leaving messages to the effect that either Tracy or I had been in a terrible car crash and were paralyzed from the neck down. But after she did that a couple of times, he stopped calling her back, so she started calling a police precinct that happened to be just a block away from his new apartment in order to get a cop to personally deliver equally awful messages to him. I found out about this because a cop once called me from my father’s apartment in the middle of the night to make sure I was alive.

  “I’m just calling to see if you’re all right,” said the unfamiliar voice at the other end of the line. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Well, I’m standing here with your father, and I’m here because your mother called the precinct and . . . Frankly, I don’t know who to believe. Your mother. Your father. I mean, I don’t trust either of them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother said you were in a car crash. Actually, she said you were in a four-car pileup and ‘burnt to a crisp.’ Said you were ‘incinerated,’ and she was trying to get in touch with your father because it was an emergency and he wouldn’t take her calls, but he needed to know because you were dead. So, I come here, and I knock on the door, and I say, ‘Sir, your daughter’s been in a serious accident,’ and he rolls his eyes at me, and I say, ‘Sir, there’s been a terrible accident involving your daughter,’ and he says, ‘That’s bullshit,’ and I say, ‘Something’s wrong here,’ and your father says, ‘Yeah, my ex-wife is wrong.’ But I guess I just don’t trust him—I mean, no offense, but I don’t trust the guy. So, he says I should call you, and that would prove that you’re alive, and I guess you are, cuz we’re talking. I guess he is the one to believe after all because I’m talking to you, so you must be alive.”

  “Well, I guess that’s right,” I said, gazing at the window box that David had hung outside our bedroom. We lived in a tiny apartment on Beacon Hill. The box was full of red and pink geraniums, but they looked black at night. Staring at them, I felt, as I so often did in those days, a curious shade of nothing. Not sad, not mad, just zilch.

  “Geez!” said the cop. “I can’t imagine how anyone could do that. Actually say those words about her own kids. I mean. I’m a parent, and I can’t even . . . The bond is not like that. It’s not natural. I mean, just thinking about putting those words in the same sentence as my kid’s name makes me want to throw up. I feel sorry for you, miss. Your mother—she’s a sick lady. If I were you, I honestly wouldn’t know what to think.”

  Partially Cropped

  J—, New Jersey, 1989

  When Tracy left for Chicago to go to college, my mother started living alone for the first time in her life, and I think that was the problem. The solitude. It didn’t take long before she got laid off from her job, which she’d held down for many years. Fortunately, she quickly found another gig at a smaller computer company, doing a job that paid less and was more demanding, but at least she could afford to move out of the cruddy one-bedroom where Tracy used to sleep in the closet. Her new apartment was the garden unit of a classic brownstone in a gentrifying neighborhood about thirty minutes from downtown Manhattan. The building was owned by two soft-spoken gay guys who made it a point to stay out of my mother’s hair, and it was there, in that large but somewhat gloomy space, that she would go through the experience of losing many more things. For example, she lost her new job. And then, a short time later, she lost a third job because by then she was taking so many pills that she could no longer get up in time to get to the office before noon, and when she finally did get there, she slurred her words and got into fights with clients, bosses, and coworkers. She’d already lost her husband, of course, and both Tracy and I were gone. Even her boyfriend—married but at least he was company—didn’t work out.

  These photographs were taken in that apartment. There are three of them, all very similar. In the first (there’s a clear chronology suggested) she stands about ten feet away from the mirrors that run the length of the living room. She leans gracefully against the couch, twisting slightly at the waist in order to face the mirror. A Christmas tree, decorated with ornaments I remember from childhood (the pink gumdrop man, the beaded satin pear), stands in one corner. The heavy black camera completely obscures her face.

  In the next photo she has taken off her glasses and moved a few feet closer to the mirror. She holds the camera with one hand, now to the side of her face. Her features, in this picture, are composed but uneven—the two halves quite distinct. She looks unusually intense.

  In the last picture she stands just a foot or two away from the mirror, which has the effect of placing her so far to the left that her shoulder is partially cropped. She has put her glasses back on and now holds the camera—a 35 mm Canon—with both hands, near her head. My sense is that she’s not trying to present herself in any special way here—she’s not striking a pose, only trying to capture something. She studies herself in the mirror the same way she might, I imagine, inspect the anatomy of some unusual insect. What I mean is, there’s a strikingly neutral quality to her gaze. Every defect in her normally beautiful face is accentuated: her mouth and the tip of her nose veer to one side; shadowy rings extend under both eyes; the bones of her forehead look bumpy, her neck thick, her skin tired. The reflection of the camera’s flash hovers in the dark plane of the mirror—a milky blue bar surrounded by a greenish aureole.

  Passage

  Ever since we came back from Maine three weeks ago, my mother’s been spending a lot of time hanging around our place, sitting every day for an hour or two on the stairs of our porch, doing searches on her iPhone, and rummaging around in the bags and boxes she dropped off the day she got evicted. The rest of her things have been moved by her ex-landlord to a storage unit (which Tracy is paying for) about an hour away.

  To be honest, I don’t know where she goes the rest of the time. I’ve asked, but she’s vague, and I haven’t pushed. Some days, I’ve noticed, are better than others. Some days she’s angry and her eyes are gone, and it’s obvious she’s taken too many of the pills that rattle around in her gigantic purse. But other days she seems almost centered, even sweet. For instance, today, when I come home from a grocery run with two armloads of bags to find her looking through the pages of her overstuffed Day-Timer, I can tell by her posture that she is in one of her better moods. She even looks cute, in a long dark-blue dress and a pair of sunglasses with purple plastic frames and a really huge, super-enormous black visor. When she sees me, she says, “Oh, hi, Kimmy,” and all of a sudden tho
se bits of her face that are visible behind and beneath the sunglasses and the visor crease into a lopsided smile.

  “Look at you!” she says, taking two steps toward me and putting her hands on my shoulders. “Just look at you!” She shakes her head so that the shadow of the visor makes dark swoops across her chest. “You’re perfect! Absolutely perfect! A little brainwashed, maybe, but basically perfect.”

  What blooms up in me then? So ancient and hungry? It rises instantly: grudgeless, happy. I give her a hug and ask how she’s doing, and she says, “Oh, you know.” I ask if she has any clearer idea about what she’s going to do next, and she says, “Well, I’d like to tell you my plans, sweetie, but if I do, you have to promise not to tell anyone. I mean anyone. If anyone calls you—any of my doctors or shrinks or DMH—just act stupid. I mean, you know nothing. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going back to New Jersey. Now don’t get upset. I actually have a plan. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but this whole thing, this whole eviction thing, is really for the best. The universe is telling me something. It’s time to get out of this hellhole. I’m finally going to get my life in order. This state has fucked with me for the last time.”

  “That’s the plan? Do you even know anybody in New Jersey anymore? Everyone in our family has moved out of there. Do you have any kind of a network down there? Any kind of safety net?”

  “My ‘network,’ as you put it, has practically killed me up here. Anyway, New Jersey’s just a pit stop. I have bigger plans. I’m putting together a whole new life for myself. I just have to get organized.”

  “But you have no support system in New Jersey. Here at least you have doctors and social workers.”

  “That support system has done nothing but try to fuck with me ever since I stepped foot in this state. They all want one thing and one thing only, and that’s to see me put away for life in some backwoods nuthouse mental institution where I won’t be a threat anymore. Seriously, Kimberli, if you ever listened to me, you’d know that. You’d know the whole thing. But for now you’ll just have to trust me. I need a fresh start. I know it doesn’t seem like I’m on track, but believe it or not, everything’s going according to plan. I just need to get a small efficiency apartment. Just someplace to land. Somewhere to sleep and study and plan the rest of my life. I only need a computer. I want to learn Spanish. You know Rosetta Stone? I’m going to learn Spanish using Rosetta Stone. And then I’ll get a part-time job—something easy, no stress, a little cash. And then, when I’ve learned Spanish and saved enough money, I’m going to move to Costa Rica, and in Costa Rica I’ll finally be able to relax. And if I lived in Costa Rica, you’d be excited to visit me, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Anyway, I can’t stay here. My whole life is in danger. A federal agent told me.”

  Pasta

  One day, over the phone, she told me she wanted to kill herself, so David put two plane tickets on his credit card, and we took the first flight we could get on, Boston to New Jersey. When we arrived at her place, she answered the door wearing nothing but a silk bathrobe, untied, wide open. I pointed out the problem, and she looked down at herself, laughed, then fumbled with the sash.

  When I remember that moment, it’s complicated because I know so many things now that I didn’t then. For instance, I know now that in the desk we walked past as she led us into her apartment, there was a drawer filled to the brim with empty prescription pill bottles. I also know what my mother’s father did to her when she was a child because she would tell me about it for the first time a couple of days later. But at that moment, as she tried and failed to tie the sash of her robe, all I knew was that she’d recently been fired from a job she’d had for only three weeks and that before that she’d been fired from a job she’d had for only a couple of years and that before that she’d been fired from a job she’d had for more than a decade. I also knew she’d been talking with increasing fervor and determination about getting back together with my father but that he had no interest in such an arrangement, and this rejection was making her crazy—needy and desperate in a childlike way I’d never seen her act before.

  That night David and I ordered takeout from a nearby Italian restaurant because my mother said they made her favorite dish in the whole world there on Friday nights, and even though it was expensive and we’d already spent a fortune on last-minute plane tickets, we wanted to do something nice for her. This dish was an elaborate creation made with two kinds of sauce poured over a gigantic mound of angel-hair pasta. We ate it at the coffee table in her living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The sauces came in two separate containers: one was white and creamy, the other red and flecked with bits of lobster. When mixed together, the two became a beautiful coral pink. My mother’s eyes rolled weirdly in her head as she ate. She called the food “ashooludilish.” David and I watched as she jabbed at the pasta on her plate, sometimes missing it, sometimes feeding herself forkful after forkful without chewing, so that the pasta kept falling out of her mouth and long swags of creamy pink angel-hair hung down past her chin, and the whole time she was talking, but we didn’t understand a thing.

  Patronize

  When it became obvious that the situation was even worse than we’d feared, David called a friend of his family—a psychiatrist—to ask for advice. This man suggested we get my mother to a hospital, preferably one in *Massachusetts, so that she’d be near us. He stressed the importance of keeping her safe until then and told us we should do a thorough search of her apartment, looking for what he called “sharps.” After David got off the phone, he and I dug into every drawer and cabinet and closet in the place, gathering up steak knives, razor blades, shish kebab skewers, even a pair of pruning shears and an electric carving knife. All of these things we put into a heavy-duty black trash bag, and we put the bag I forget where—someplace out of her reach. My mother agreed that this precaution made sense, though she didn’t help, which seemed reasonable, considering. Besides, she had a migraine and was laid up in bed.

  At one point during the search, I found, in the bottom of her desk, in a legal-sized file cabinet drawer, dozens upon dozens, maybe even hundreds, of empty emerald- and amber-colored pill bottles for things like Xanax, Soma, Valium, and Percodan.

  “For insurance purposes,” she told me when I brought a large handful of them into the bedroom. “I’m saving them to get reimbursed. Believe me, it looks like way more than it is.” She was propped up on a huge pile of pillows, leafing through a fashion magazine.

  “There are a ton of them, Mom!”

  She gave me an exasperated look and said, “Don’t patronize me, Kimberli.”

  Pekoe

  David had gone out to buy groceries, and I was making a pot of tea when my mother wandered into the kitchen, still in her bathrobe (half-open again). There were patches of moisturizer on her chest and neck that she’d forgotten to rub in. Even though the water had come to a boil, and I was holding the tea bags in my hand, I left the kettle on the stove because I didn’t want to miss what she was saying. It was hard because she was slurring—I couldn’t understand all the words. But I understood enough. She spoke of her father and her sisters and of the things he did to them at night when they were young. Sometimes, she said, she pretended to be asleep when he touched her. And sometimes she liked it. When she said that, her whole face collapsed. Something about her went away. Just disappeared. It was as if the light had gone out inside her.

  All the girls slept in a single large bed, she told me, and he would “favor” (that was the word she used) one of them for a while, before moving onto the next, but he did so in an irregular pattern, so they never knew whose turn it would be on a given night. It began when she was five years old and continued until she was thirteen. As I listened to her speak, I felt many things. Some of these were emotions you’d expect anyone in my position to feel: shock, sadness, anger. But I also felt relieved. I know that sounds strange, but I was relieved. Relieved the w
ay you might be if you’d spent your whole life wading through an opaque fog and then one day the sky opened up to reveal the sun’s position. What I mean is, it seemed to me that there was suddenly a north and a south. An east and a west. A reason for the way my mother was.

  Pithy

  You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

  —Henri-Frédéric Amiel

  Pressure of Speech

  A medical term indicating, essentially, the inability to shut up. A person afflicted by this condition—also called “pressurized speech”—may seem to possess an almost fantastic disdain for logic. Indeed, his or her thoughts often appear to be strung together by only the most tenuous threads even as the sentences unreel at a fantastic speed, slamming one right into another, without pause for breath or a whisper of concern regarding the auditor’s patience, interest level, or response.

  Probably (1)

  Childhood decides.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Probably (2)

  “I’m all id and superego,” my mother once told me. “No ego whatsoever.”

  Problem

  We did most of the packing. She still had that headache. David and I drove the U-Haul with all her stuff in it. She followed behind in her Corolla, blasting Ry Cooder, John Prine. In the rearview mirror I sometimes watched her driving. She looked not unhappy. Picking her hair.