The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  The clerk moved his white-gloved hand near his face, as if he were batting away an insect.

  “The thing is,” he said, “she was just wearing a robe.”

  “Just a robe?”

  “Just a robe. It was fluttering around in the wind. All over the place.”

  I knew which robe he was talking about. A silky thing, voluminous and clingy at the same time. She’d made it herself in a moment of sartorial inspiration when I was still in college. She’d also made two somewhat lower-rent versions of the same robe for Tracy and me. Mine was entirely too large and made of polyester, with a print of white geometric geese on a navy ground. I’d thrown it out years ago. Tracy’s, which was also huge, was made of a red tartan material. Our mother’s robe was made of a rich turquoise-colored silk with a damask pattern of swirling peacock feathers. It fit perfectly.

  “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”

  “Talk to her.”

  I shrugged. “What about?”

  “Propriety.”

  I suddenly hated this man, with his fake-fancy accent. Something about the word propriety and the idea that seemed to be behind it—that my mother could suffer all she wanted in private—enraged me, so I didn’t answer him, just gave him my best fuck-you smirk, pressed the elevator button, and let the doors slide silently between us.

  Rocket Scientist

  Boston, Massachusetts, 1996

  Rae’s arms are crossed over her heavy chest, one hand loosely gripping a roll of fat at her waist. Her hair—red, wiry, slightly gray at the temples—is a stiff helmet around her face. Her teeth are uneven and, like the thumb, index, and middle fingers of her right hand, stained from tobacco. Her eyes are brown and sweet, unguarded as a dog’s. She’s standing outside the little brick complex where she continued to live long after my mother had installed herself in the Regency.

  They were “married” by this point. I put the word in quotes because their union was a gesture of such acute irony as to seem, at the time, nearly sincere—or maybe it was so sincere as to seem ironic. In any case I found it confusing. Unfortunately, this was long before gay marriage was legal in Massachusetts, so there were no official documents or procedures involved, which could have been useful, fiscally speaking, down the line. But their union did involve a ring: an enormous green garnet set with diamonds that my mother wore for years, even long after Rae was dead.

  Rot

  One day I came over to find her in bed, sleeping as usual, Silence of the Lambs playing on the TV, muted. She was making small, helpless sounds as she slept. I stood at her bedside for a while, watching. For some reason she struck me as incredibly textured. I know that sounds strange, but I just couldn’t get over how detailed she was. Her skin was pale, her face shiny, every tiny pore apparent. Her lips were creased and slightly pursed, a filmy smear of peanut butter at one corner. Her hands, outside the covers, were ridged with blue veins. Her hair was thick and very dark, almost black, composed of strands that were, individually, also thick and very dark. The expression on her face seemed to me both worried and young, and I remember standing there for quite a while feeling maudlin about all of this before finally deciding I had to pee.

  The master bathroom at the Regency apartment was a cavernous space covered in bisque-colored marble with a deep, claw-foot tub and a huge glassed-in shower stall. It had two towel heaters and two sinks, and one of these sinks, I noticed, was filled to the brim with pink water streaked with viscous threads of red. The other sink held a bloody washcloth and a pair of pliers. I stared at this bizarre still life just as I’d stared at my sleeping mother, mesmerized, almost paralyzed, not sure how to process the visual information in front of me. Eventually, I heard her stirring in the next room, and I pulled the pliers out of the sink and stomped up to her bedside.

  “Oh, Kimmy,” she said, “you’re here.” She patted the bed so Oscar would jump up on it.

  “What are these?” I asked, holding up the pliers.

  “Ah. I have this molar in the back, the way back, that’s absolutely killing me. Of course, none of my dentists believe me. It’s filled with rot, but they won’t touch it, so I have to take it out myself, but I can’t do it alone. That’s why I’m so glad you’re here! You’re just what I need—somebody with a little upper body strength!”

  Ruin

  Eventually, her fiduciary said Rae couldn’t afford to rent such a massive apartment for my mother alone, let alone fund her exorbitant tastes in furniture, clothes, and jewelry, so Rae’s legal guardians cut off all financial support. Rather generously, I thought, they offered to buy my mother a small bungalow much closer to Rae.

  “I laughed in their face,” she said when she told me this story. “They want to shut me away in some crappy little house in some crappy little bedroom community—ha!”

  “I don’t know, Mom. A free house, no matter where it is, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

  “Trust me, Kimberli. They’ll be sorry they messed with me!”

  S

  Salad

  The yoga studio I go to every morning is two doors down from a Whole Foods, and when I stop by there after practice to pick up a few things, I notice someone who looks a lot like my mother sitting at one of the outdoor tables on the sidewalk. At first I figure this is just another doppelgänger and go inside to buy some almonds and eggs, but when I come back out, I see quite clearly that it actually is my mother sitting there. I know because for one thing she’s wearing the blue lace sweater I gave her. For another she looks much more fragile than the women I usually imagine to be her. Even from the back, she looks nervous.

  I can’t decide whether I should stop and say hello, which might easily become a long and involved and probably embarrassing conversation (there are many people seated at nearby tables) or if I should keep going, which I know would be the easier but also the more cowardly option. I watch her eating a salad out of a large plastic box and reading something on her cell phone for a moment, then I walk over and say hello.

  Squinting at me, she fumbles to remove her earbuds, then says: “Oh, my god, Kimmy, I didn’t recognize you! I saw this gorgeous woman out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t know it was you, and then you were standing right there talking to me, and I thought, Who is this gorgeous woman, and what does she want? and I still didn’t know it was you!”

  Several people have by now looked up from their cell phones or salads or muffins or coffees to watch us, and I definitely hate them. I want them to stop looking—not at me but at my mother, who I realize is making an odd impression because she’s speaking so loudly and everything about her seems too raw. I say that the salad she’s eating—full of dried fruit and nuts and beans—looks healthy, and she says: “It is. It is.” Then I ask if she’s still planning on leaving in a few days, and she says: “I have to, honey. I need a radical change.”

  I say okay, and she reaches out to give my hand a squeeze.

  “The sweater looks really good on you.”

  “Thank you. I really, really love it.”

  “I’m so glad.” Then I lean down to give her a kiss goodbye, at which point she kind of grabs me, gently, by the shoulders and whispers, “You took all the good in me and none of the bad, you know that?”

  Same

  When I was still in college, during one of our weekly dinners at L’Osteria, my father told me the story of how he fell in love with my mother. We were sitting near the windows, which were actually a bank of French doors that sometimes stood open in the summer but that night were closed because the AC was on. The glass was beaded with condensation, and on the other side the blurry shapes of people and cars and bikes and dogs and children shifted along Second Avenue. I forget what prompted it, what we were talking about, but suddenly my father got very quiet. Peering into his glass of sparkling water, he shook his head and said, “Just thinking about all those years.”

  A little later, over a plate of mozza en carrozza, he told me that when he first saw my moth
er, he was only twelve years old and she was just ten—a long-legged, choppy-haired little girl. They were standing on line at a movie theater. She was ahead of him, and he thought she was beautiful, which is why he announced—loudly—to his friends that someday she was going to be his wife.

  “The lesson?” he said, as if winding up for a joke. I smiled and put down my fork. “Be careful what you wish for!”

  My mother tells a different story about how she fell in love with my father. They were in a car, the very car on the very night in which and on which I would enter, no matter how microscopically, the scene. My father was driving, and my mother, in the passenger seat, was wearing a white blanket around her shoulders.

  “We were stopped at a red light, and your father caught my eye in the rearview mirror. He was such a handsome kid,” she said. “He winked.” We were talking long-distance, Boston to San Francisco, so I couldn’t see her face, of course, but I could still picture the subtle twist of her mouth as she spoke because that’s how she usually expresses irony, absurdity. “One wink,” she said. “So stupid.”

  San Francisco

  We moved there for no reason really, except that we were young enough and unencumbered enough to do it. We left our apartment on Beacon Hill, our friends, David’s family, my mother. Just took off.

  We lived there for five years, and they were really good years. One of the things we did while we were in San Francisco was get two more dogs—at which point, of course, we started walking around with three dogs instead of just Oscar, which was a little like walking around with a huge sign over our heads that said, “Go ahead, say something funny about our dogs.” All three of them were small and sweet and goofy and troublesome, and one of them liked to sleep at the foot of our bed, and another one liked to sleep up by our faces, but Oscar was more austere and liked to sleep on the hardwood floor, though in the mornings he always jumped up too. Another thing we did in San Francisco was eat a lot of donuts because we lived five blocks away from what is, I suspect, the best donut shop in the world, Bob’s on Polk Street. Many mornings—most, in fact—David and I walked the dogs down to Bob’s to buy buttermilk crullers from Urmilla, the nice and talkative, but not too talkative, lady behind the counter. We’d get coffee too, then walk up to Lafayette Park, where we’d throw sticks and balls for the dogs in the empty tennis courts. San Francisco is where I got pregnant with Isabella, and it is where she was born. It is also where I learned what it is like to be not depressed, although at first I thought I just felt funny. For the first six months or so that we lived there, I simply didn’t feel like myself. Eventually, I realized that this was because I was happy. And the longer I stayed happy, the more clearly I could see that I had been unhappy before, even though I’d never thought of myself as an unhappy person. But once I was living in San Francisco, with its gentle seasons and its generous distance from so many of the things that had caused my unhappiness, I was able to look at my life as it had progressed so far and see that depression had lain like a sheer black fabric over all of it—all but the bit that started in San Francisco because in San Francisco the fabric lifted. And yet the whole time we were living there, I kept telling myself that it was only temporary. I kept saying to myself and to David that we had to move back east. Had to had to had to had to had to had to had to. And every week or two, when I talked to my mother on the phone, I would say, casually, as if it were not really a question at all, “When we move back,” and she would say, “Oh, Kimmy, how I look forward to that day.”

  And so, in this way, every day I spent in San Francisco felt a bit like marching toward a sentence. I didn’t know what to call the sentence or how to stop the marching—I knew only that my time in that city where I was happy was meant to be finite. And as the years stretched on, something inside of me began insisting more and more vehemently that we move back east. David didn’t understand why.

  “We’re happy here,” he said. “If we go east, we might not be so happy.”

  I said, “My mother.” I said, “Our daughter should know her family.” And sometimes I said, “She should grow up with the seasons.”

  That’s a romantic notion, of course—the bit about the seasons—and I leaned on it a lot, but in reality it was as if I’d put on blinders. I didn’t care so much about the seasons as I did about the relentless voice inside of me that said have to have to have to have to have to have to have to. So I nudged and I nudged, and eventually David gave his notice at his job, and we bought a VW camper van, and we told each other and all our friends that we were going on a fantastic adventure, driving back across the country, taking six weeks to do it, but somewhere deep inside of me, some other part of me started screaming No! At first, though, it screamed very softly, so it was easy to ignore.

  Then, one day in June, after five years in our little apartment, with its pink silk curtains and its champagne crate window boxes, we packed up everything. There wasn’t much because we’d lived so lightly in San Francisco, planning always to leave it. We shipped Isabella’s crib and a few boxes of books and some clothes, and the rest we put in the back of our van, along with our dogs and a potted grapefruit tree that we’d grown from a seed, and then we started driving, only first we drove down to Big Sur and then farther south, to San Juan Bautista, just to say goodbye to those places one last time, then we drove back through the city to say goodbye to our friends. One night we had Indian pizza with our friends Katie and Steve, and I got drunk because by that point the small voice wasn’t so small anymore, and I was starting to freak out. So I tried to shut it up by having a lot of beer. In the morning we said goodbye to Katie and Steve, and then we drove past our old apartment on Russian Hill, where we had lived those five excellent happy years. And as we idled outside for a minute, we could actually hear the building manager inside our old apartment because it was on the first floor and the kitchen window was open, and she was sighing as she looked through all of our now empty drawers—“So, so, so,” she said. It was at that point that the voice took over my entire body. I started shaking as the black veil began moving back into place. At first it just went over my eyes. But as we drove out of the city, across the Bay Bridge, it kept descending, like a storm head. Suddenly, it was perfectly obvious that I’d been listening to the wrong voice, and that’s when I screamed. It lasted a while. In a way it was more like a seizure than a scream. David had to pull over. After several minutes, when I could finally speak again, I said: “This is a mistake. I don’t want to go.” But of course it was too late.

  Saving Grace

  B—, Massachusetts, 1998

  The transcript is balanced in the foliage behind the card, which is attached by a purple ribbon to a bouquet of pale pink peonies and green-veined calla lilies. In a stranger’s block letters, the card reads:

  DEAR MOM:

  CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR A’S.

  LOVE,

  KIM & DAVID

  The main way Rae expressed love was through money, and even though she was legally prohibited from doing so, she still snuck my mother large cash infusions on a regular basis. These paid for things like the last two classes my mother needed to complete her BA (two decades after she’d started night school back in New Jersey). Rae also paid for her rent, which is why she was able to live in such a cute apartment even after she’d left the Regency. The new place wasn’t nearly as grand, but it was clean and cozy, with a shining white kitchen, a bay window, a working fireplace, and a spacious fire escape that she turned into a hanging garden full of ferns and succulents. Only I didn’t understand about the money at the time. I had no idea that Rae was siphoning off her cash allowance to my mother. I just figured my mother was making due somehow. Staying organized. I guess I didn’t think about it too hard. Just knocked on a lot of wood.

  Scared

  “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” she said right before she left. But that was almost a week ago, which is why I touch her number on the screen of my cell phone. When she picks up, she doesn’t say hello, just: “Tha
nks. That’s terrific. Now they know exactly where I am. Good work.” Then she hangs up.

  For some reason, though, she doesn’t seem to mind talking to Tracy. And Tracy talks to me. And Tracy says that our mother has been calling her from the highway because that’s where she’s been spending her days, walking along the edge, studying the wildflowers, especially the Queen Anne’s lace, which is her favorite.

  “I’m scared,” says my sister.

  Scrawled

  The man my father once was is the reason the man my father is now finds it so hard to smile, I think. Because the man my father is now makes himself remember the man he once was, the slow, fat, angry man—the silent, drunk, and violent one. I know this because of something I once saw in a dresser drawer of his some nine or ten years ago. He’d broken his femur, and I was staying with him in New York City for a couple of weeks after he’d undergone a complex surgery involving pins and a metal cuff to put his leg back together. I’d come down on the train with Isabella, who was still in a stroller, in order to help out—walk his dog, do the shopping, pick up takeout, rent videos, bring out the trash.

  Not long after I arrived, my father, still groggy on painkillers and lying in bed, told me I could find an envelope of cash to buy groceries in the top drawer of his dresser. But when I hunted around in the place he’d indicated, I couldn’t find the money. He was half-asleep. I didn’t want to bother him, so I just looked in the next drawer, even though it was immediately apparent that I shouldn’t, since it was full of what were clearly personal effects. Still, I rummaged, curiosity guiding my hand, deeper and deeper into the papers, the old photos. When my fingers touched one particular photograph, I had the eerie sensation that there were suddenly three of us in the room: my father, me, and the man I’d grown up with. The photo showed my father in his early thirties. Behind his aviator glasses, his eyelids were half-shut, and behind his eyelids, his eyes were obviously swimming. Everything about the man was blurry. I don’t mean that the picture was out of focus—it wasn’t—but my father’s expression, his whole mien, was. On a curled, yellowing bit of paper taped to the front of the photo he’d written two words: Never Forget.