The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  She stayed for a while at a B&B in Cambridge until a space opened up at McLean Hospital. It’s a famous place. Sylvia Plath went there. Girl Interrupted was set there. Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell both spent time there. Located in a quiet Boston suburb, McLean looks more like the campus of a fancy New England college than a psychiatric hospital. Eloquently winding roads connect handsome old mansions that were once private residences but now serve as individual wards specializing in various psychological conditions. The slightly run-down grandeur of the place combined with the spotless confidence of its Harvard teaching staff made it seem, for a while (at least to me), like it was the answer to all my mother’s problems. But she never liked the place.

  “I’m nothing like these people,” she said when David and I visited her there for the first time. She’d been placed in a ward that specialized in obsessive-compulsive disorders, addiction, eating disorders, and depression. She’d already picked up one new habit since arriving: holding and puffing on an unlit cigarette.

  “It calms my nerves.”

  We’d brought her a bouquet of flowers in a swirled glass vase, which was now sitting on her bureau, next to her bed. Her room was sunny with tall ceilings. Even her roommate seemed all right—neat, not too talkative.

  “Half the people here are addicts,” she whispered, gesturing toward this woman, whose back was curled under the covers of her bed. “I’m not an addict. Not a true addict. Yes, okay, maybe the Percodan got a little out of hand, but given my dental issues, that’s understandable. True addicts are different. My brothers and sisters are all true addicts. My father was a true addict. Your father is a true addict. But I couldn’t be more different than those people. I’ve never been into drugs. You know me, Kimberli. I’m a Goody Two-Shoes.”

  At McLean the doctors stressed the importance of family therapy, so for several months my mother and I met with a social worker named Mary Ann Frederickson. Mary Ann’s office was in the attic of my mother’s ward, in a space that smelled strongly of creosote, for some reason, and also of tuna fish, which seemed to be Mary Ann’s preferred lunch and which she sometimes ate during our meetings.

  The time we spent in that office did nothing to improve my mother’s and my relationship, but it wasn’t entirely pointless because I found it informative to watch someone else watch us, to see how someone else reacted to the way my mother and I interacted. For example, Mary Ann often noted that I rushed to comfort my mother, while she rarely comforted me.

  “You constantly try to placate her,” she said. “It’s as if you’re the parent.”

  “That’s not true!” said my mother. “I was an extremely nurturing mother. I always have been. I still am! You just don’t like me.”

  “That’s not true, Linda,” said Mary Ann. But I actually think it was.

  Our sessions, though stressful (I invariably had stomachaches for a day or two in advance and a day or two afterward), also provided many clues for my secret detective. For example, it was during one of these sessions that my mother first told me why she’d left for Florida the day after my fourth birthday.

  “I knew I had to leave when I realized you were afraid of me,” she said. “I just waited until you were four so I wouldn’t ruin your birthday.”

  “How could you tell I was afraid?”

  She said it was obvious. I asked how so, and she said, “Some things are better left unsaid,” at which point Mary Ann leaned across her cluttered desk and said, “How so, Linda?”

  “Oh. All right. It happened in that little apartment, the one we moved into after I got out of the hospital. One day I called you for lunch, but you didn’t answer. I called and called, but you didn’t make a peep.” My mother was crying now, pressing a tissue against one eye, then the other. “Finally I got worried, and I went to look for you. I was afraid you’d gone outside. We lived on a busy street. But I found you just standing—perfectly still—in the middle of your room. You were just sort of braced there. It was like you were paralyzed. Your little shoulders up around your ears. I said, ‘Kimmy, are you okay?’ and you didn’t say a thing. It was like you were frozen on the spot, and when I came toward you, you looked right at me—your eyes were wide open—and you peed. That’s how scared of me you were.”

  My mother bit her lip and shook her head in a tight little semicircle. I moved to put my hand on her knee but stopped myself, as this was precisely the dynamic that Mary Ann had so often warned us against—me rushing to comfort my mother when it might just as easily go the other way around.

  “How does that make you feel, Kim?” Mary Ann asked, but I didn’t answer because my mother was now openly weeping, and I didn’t want to make things worse. We were both sitting in these huge, boxy modern chairs that had high, squared-off sides, and in these chairs you had to sit with your arms squished right next to your body.

  “That’s when I decided to leave for Florida,” my mother continued. “I couldn’t stand the idea that I scared you that much. I knew you’d be better off with your grandmother.” Then she reached awkwardly toward me around the arm of her chair, opening and closing her fingers in a way I knew meant “Quick, quick, hold my hand,” so I reached awkwardly around the arm of my chair to do just that. And Mary Ann Frederickson sighed.

  Proclivity

  During her first hospitalization at McLean, my mother still let me talk to her doctors, who asked me many questions about her personality in hopes of settling on an accurate diagnosis. They asked, for instance, whether or not she’d seemed depressed when I was growing up or whether she’d been addicted to prescription drugs for a long time. Mostly I didn’t have any answers for them. I think this is because the constant, active denial in which I was engaged at the time was more or less indistinguishable from genuine ignorance. At one point, however, somebody asked me a question I could answer without the slightest hesitation. It had to do with whether my mother had ever displayed signs of mania. To help me out, the doctor listed several behaviors typifying this condition, such as “seems to lack impulse control,” “goes on cleaning jags that last days at a time,” “speaks extremely quickly, perhaps even foaming at the mouth,” and “goes on huge shopping sprees, spending large amounts of money they may not be able to afford.”

  Yes! My mother went on huge shopping sprees. No! She could not afford them. This had been the case for as long as I could remember. In fact, from the time I was about eight or nine years old until I was a teenager, my mother would drag Tracy and me with her to the mall several times a year, and there she would drop six, seven, eight hundred dollars at a time, money that didn’t exist except in plastic form. She spent the bulk of her time at the makeup counters, where she put on embarrassing airs, waving sales clerks away or summoning them with imperious gestures. Bored practically to the point of tears, of physically melting, yet sick to our stomachs with the knowledge that an argument between our parents was in the near future, Tracy and I would sit on the tall, spinning stools and wait for her to finish debating shades and textures, demanding samples, more information, other brands, other sizes, and racking up the terrifying bill.

  Afterward she was always incredibly happy, almost childishly so, as she reviewed her purchases in the car, right in the parking lot, opening, sniffing, touching, and sampling again each and every cream, wrinkle treatment, lipstick, soap, and perfume.

  Psychobitchcunt

  A verbal invention of Tracy’s. Something from the old days. Used in such sentences as, for instance, “I just got off the phone with psychobitchcunt.” Or “Have you heard from psychobitchcunt?” Or “Pscyhobitchcunt told me I need to lose weight.”

  For a while the term was a favorite of ours. But eventually it got old, as all such jokes do. Now neither one of us would refer to our mother in this way, except perhaps as a shorthand way of pointing to those years when we were both much younger and our anger seemed, on some convoluted, unspoken level, to function as a kind of *hope.

  Puppy

  M—, New Jersey, circa 1958

/>   The photo is black-and-white, but there’s no black or white in it, just dense and denser grays. My mother stands in front of some deciduous trees on a patchy lawn. This must have been in the backyard of the house where she spent the first part of her childhood—a house I never saw but one that for some reason I know was painted red.

  She’s about ten years old, maybe eleven, and she looks so much like Isabella. She has similar eyebrows. A similar forehead. She has the same smile! She’s laughing the way Isabella often laughs, with her chin slightly tucked. And she’s skinny, almost painfully so, like Isabella is, like I was.

  In baggy trousers, a cap-sleeved sweater, and somebody’s fedora, my mother stands alone in the middle of the weedy lawn. There’s a bicycle upended in the background and a scrap of something pale—newspaper?—nearby. Her knees are slightly bent and she’s holding one hand up at her side, as if she’s about to snap her fingers. I can’t look at this photo without imagining a radio playing somewhere and the voice of one of her favorite singers—Otis Redding or maybe Buddy Holly—floating through the still, gray atmosphere. Her knees knock, her shoulders hunch, but she’s laughing. A round-bellied puppy near her feet looks up at her and raises a front paw as if to touch her leg. It wants to play.

  Q

  Quabalpa Porshitrosa Tanipnosnet!

  In my twenties I started speaking a made-up language. It was a very intuitive thing. I never knew exactly what I was saying, and neither did David, but he still listened. Sometimes I whispered the words frantically, and sometimes I shouted them. This language had no grammar, but it possessed inflections and rhythms that suggested something like meaning, no matter how fuzzy. There were times, especially late at night, when I went on at surprising length in my language. The slightly harsh musicality of it made me happy; sonically, it seemed a mix of Swedish and Yiddish with a bit of Russian thrown in. And a dash of Chinese. Sometimes the words came out kind of squeaky, and that was fun. Squeaks, I discovered, can be wildly therapeutic if you really throw yourself into them. Occasionally, while speaking my private language, I would also cry—but just like the words coming out of my mouth, the tears coming out of my eyes were unattached to specific thoughts or images, so I was never really sure what they were about.

  It was fun for a while, but eventually, even I had to admit that pretend words weren’t cutting it. I needed to talk to someone for real, using real words. I found a psychologist—someone cheap because she was fresh out of school. Rachael had a serious face and dark eyes that never rolled and never glared and never pointedly shut. In fact, she never drifted even slightly when I was talking to her. If I forgot what I was saying, she remembered. Our conversations, of course, were ridiculously one-sided, and they were often boring—even I knew that. But she never seemed bored, only earnest and interested.

  Over the years that I saw her (twenty altogether), Rachael helped me understand many things, such as how *boundaries work and how guilt has two modes—fact and feeling—and that these are often unrelated. Meaning: there’s a difference between being guilty and feeling guilty. In other words, you can experience guilt without actually being guilty, which is why it’s so important to make distinctions. She also gave me excellent advice regarding marriage and children, and on occasion she even helped me write businessy-type emails because those make me nervous. But the thing she did most of all, the thing Rachael was really tireless about, was teaching me that it’s okay to be happy. In this regard she was unbending and never once failed to remind me—when I needed reminding (which was often)—that willfully sacrificing one’s own happiness doesn’t help anybody, no matter how mentally ill that person may be.

  Quacks

  My mother is many things. Inventive is one of them. For example, once when I’d come to visit her at McLean, I noticed, as she shuffled toward me while I was signing in, that she was wearing two pairs of eyeglasses, one right on top of the other.

  “Well now, Linda,” said the nurse who was checking my bag for sharps, “why might you be wearing two pairs of eyeglasses?”

  “I already told you,” she mumbled.

  After I was done signing in, she took my arm, and a guard led us to the art therapy room, where I gave her a shawl and a one-pound box of fudge. She fussed appreciatively over both of these things, then gave me a kiss, which was wet and which I surreptitiously wiped away. Dozens of pictures were taped to the walls. There was a rose with every petal a different color, a girl smoking a cigarette, several cloudscapes, a unicorn or two . . . There were also many coloring book pictures of puppies and kittens, all carefully crayoned and sometimes dedicated to the art teacher.

  “Where’s yours?” I asked.

  “Oh. They don’t let me in here.”

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. “Ask them.”

  “So, Mom, why are you wearing two pairs of glasses?”

  She explained. It was complicated, but basically they were part homemade bifocals and part protest since her real bifocals were in her car and they wouldn’t let her go to the parking area to get them.

  “Do you get it?” she asked. I said I did. And she said: “That’s good. The people around here are too stupid.”

  It was on that visit that I started to worry about her in a different way. It suddenly occurred to me, actually for the first time in my life, that she might be seriously mentally ill. I know that sounds odd. After all, she was in a psych ward. But I’d allowed myself to believe that she was there simply in order to get weaned off the drugs she’d gotten hooked on in New Jersey and that once this was done, she’d go back to being “normal.” But as we moved through the ward that day, I saw many things that surprised me. For instance, I saw a man I’d passed on my way into the building still leaving the building.

  “He does that all day,” said my mother. “In, out, in, out. I’m telling you, there are a bunch of quacks in here.”

  Another patient, a young woman who, according to my mother, was taking a break from Harvard, wandered the halls with a small plexiglass suitcase filled with water. In the water a goldfish swam narrowly back and forth, back and forth.

  “That’s actually bigger than the first one. They made her get a bigger case for it.”

  Later, in her room, my mother showed me her roommate’s bed, which was still unmade. “They don’t let her make it,” she whispered, so the nurses wouldn’t hear. “She has OCD, and if they let her make it, she takes all morning. So, instead, she ‘unmakes it.” Exactly the same way every day. It looks messy, but actually it took her all morning to get it like that. Of course, they haven’t caught on. The dopes!”

  And still later, as I was signing out, I watched another patient float past me down the hall. It was impossible to say how old this woman was, but I think she was probably younger than she looked, probably around my age, early to midtwenties. She moved extremely slowly, as if trapped in an invisible network of pain. It was obvious she was going to die because her skin was so pale it hinted at blue and she didn’t blink and she didn’t have a nose anymore because she was in the most advanced stage of anorexia nervosa, meaning her system had already devoured its own cartilage. At that point it was starting in on her organs.

  “She’ll be dead next week,” said the nurse who was checking me out, after the woman had passed us. “The thing is, they have to want to be healthy.”

  Quadrillion

  I won’t lie, the guilt is fairly staggering at this point. Every day she comes by, and every day she seems a little more ragged, a little more deranged. Some days her eyes swim. Some days they don’t. When they swim, I stay away. When they don’t, I ask about her plans. She’s got a train ticket for New Jersey and has put her paperwork in storage. She says she’s found a place to land down there, a decent hotel that’s not too expensive. Part of me can’t wait until she’s gone, maybe because I want to believe what she keeps saying—that a better life will begin as soon as she leaves this state. Or maybe I just want her to go away so I don’t have to witness her falling apart anym
ore. Also, it’s late September. Soon it will be cold at night, and I have no idea where she’s sleeping.

  Today, when she comes by, I am up in my study, finishing a website design that’s due next week. This space is crowded with books and papers and art projects and yarn and wires and cables and photos and old mugs of dried-up tea and fancy pens and pretty stones I’ve found on various beaches. The window is open, and I can hear her muttering to herself on our porch. I notice that she speaks differently when she talks to herself. The whole pressure of speech thing drops away. Her words sound soft, worried. Eventually, I realize I haven’t been working for several minutes because I’m too busy listening to her zipping and unzipping her bags, sorting through papers, and making noises that sound vaguely exclamatory or inquisitive, like “oh!” and “huh?” After a while David comes home from work, and I listen to the two of them exchange a few words. When he comes inside, he says, “You’re mother’s out there.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s good you don’t feel obligated to engage with her.”

  I know he means this to be encouraging, but it just makes me sad, so I hop out of my chair and go downstairs, and as I head for the door, he says, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  On the porch I see that my mother has her things spread out all over the place, piles of toiletries and clothes and papers.

  “Oh, hi,” she says.

  I say hi and ask if she’s looked at the packet I printed out for her a couple of days ago—pages I got off the internet that list out resources for homeless and mentally ill people, pages I left on our picnic table for her in a manila folder with her name written on it in huge block letters.