The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  Scrutiny

  Eventually, she’d storm off in a rage (although not before removing a full-length mirror from my bedroom wall—a mirror she’d previously given me as a gift—and cramming it into the passenger seat of her car), but at the beginning of the visit, things were fine. I’d made us a pot of tea and brought out a plate of homemade cookies—hazelnut wafers shaped like oak leaves dipped in chocolate. This particular type of cookie happens to be a traditional Swedish recipe, and when I mentioned this to my mother, she said, “Oh, Swedish!” and made a fancy little flourish with her fingers. I made a similar flourish and said, “Yes! Swedish!”

  Isabella was sitting near us on the floor under the table, playing with some plastic food—bananas, macaroons, long black eggplants. The dogs would have been somewhere nearby as well in that open, sunny space—the living room of our old apartment on Symphony Road in downtown Boston, the apartment we moved into after San Francisco. They would have been sleeping or scratching or drinking water from their bowl in the kitchen. Oscar, the largest and scruffiest, might have had his muzzle propped on my foot as my mother and I talked because he liked to do that.

  “You’re the only way this will ever get done,” she said as she pushed a box full of old photographs across the table. “You’re the only one who’s together enough.” She meant to put the pictures into albums. She wanted me to make three of them: one for her, one for Tracy, and one for me. I remember lifting the flaps of the box, peeking inside, and thinking, So, I’m that person now—the repository, the in-between, the link, the keeper of family photographs. It was, for a while, a vaguely satisfying idea, though within a matter of days it became perfectly clear that I wasn’t a good repository at all. The problem was to a large extent a philosophical one. For example, I started wondering what, exactly, the role of a family photo album actually was, and I decided that at root it is a form of storytelling or at the very least an elaborate storytelling prompt, and this, naturally, led me to consider the sorts of stories that were attached to the photographs inside the box. For the most part these were pictures from my mother’s childhood and my own, and when I imagined sitting on the couch next to Isabella, leafing through the pages of this hypothetical album, I knew that the only way to get around so many of these stories would be through the use of euphemisms, white lies, and silence. And while these are convenient verbal conventions under certain circumstances, I wondered: would they be right? I spent weeks scrutinizing this question from many angles, but in the end I still couldn’t decide. There was, in particular, one photograph that bothered me more than all the others. This happened to be the very photograph that would almost certainly constitute the natural centerpiece of our family history (see *gesture). But to include that photo in an album and at the same time evade or omit the stories connected to it would, I finally decided, be unfair or even worse. Not just a lie of omission but an actual injustice. And so I never made the albums. Instead, I keep the box under my desk, where it makes a decent footrest.

  Selfish

  She finally calls from wherever she is in New Jersey. I don’t know because she refuses to say. Just tells me she’s extremely sick and there’s blood in her sputum and they won’t give her any antibiotics because they’re trying to kill her.

  “But you probably think that’s okay, though, right? Because you don’t care, right? You don’t really care about anything having to do with me.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “What’s it like, eh, Kimberli?” Her voice sounds faint and sandpapery. “What’s it like to be so supremely selfish? To care only for yourself? Your mother’s homeless, sick, spitting up blood in her sputum, but you have other things to worry about, don’t you? Other things!”

  “Where are you, Mom?”

  “It’s really none of your business, is it? You and DMH.”

  Shrewd

  Ry Cooder was blasting on the stereo. Isabella was pounding on a tiny toy piano. The dogs were fighting over a rawhide bone that my mother had bought for them. Her kitchen smelled of Lysol and the breaded chicken cutlets we had frying on the stove. I was slicing tomatoes and my mother was washing parsley when I said something that made her laugh. “Oh, Kimmy,” she said, “you’re so funny.” Then she gave me a hug, and in return I touched her elbow, lightly, and she said, “You’ve always been like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, love me but from afar.” Flicking her fingers in a queenly sort of way, she added, “From over there.”

  Silk Couch

  B—, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving 2000

  Her hair is pushed away from her face in a sprayed-in-place but nevertheless charmingly windswept-looking arrangement. She seems relaxed, her smile easy, sincere. She’s sitting at the dining table in her apartment (the smaller, more modest one), holding Isabella on her lap. Their cheeks touch.

  In the foreground there are wine and water glasses, brass candlesticks, a bread basket, a gravy boat . . . In the background, lying next to each other on our mother’s white silk couch, Tracy and I recuperate after having eaten way too much. I remember that particular bellyache—the meal had been a ruthless stuffing, an even more gluttonous than usual Thanksgiving pig-out. The old childhood formula of food = love was clearly at work, and that day I’d eaten seconds and thirds under the delusion that I could munch away my worries. My mother had managed to stay out of hospitals for a few years by that point and had lived simply—quietly and undramatically—in that small but graciously proportioned apartment. She still talked crazy and took way too many pills, but she was safe, and I just wanted her to stay that way. A slightly loopy but engaged grandmother. A story with a decent ending.

  I’d eaten so much I actually worried, for a while, that something might tear. But by the time this photo was taken, I seem to have more or less recovered. Tracy looks cheerful too—laughing with her mouth closed, looking sidelong at our mother. Something about her expression makes me think she’s on the brink of making a wisecrack. I’m scrunched down low, half-lost in a sea of throw pillows. Only my face is visible and one hand, which is raised, for some reason, in a peace sign.

  Simpler

  Rae didn’t believe in exercise. She barely believed in moving. Over two hundred pounds, she spent most of her days hunched over a cheap black-and-white composition notebook in which she scrawled what she called her “equations.” In reality these were made-up physics formulas combined with devastating memory fragments that obliquely referenced the sexual and psychological abuse she’d suffered as a child. Her favorite meal was the one she ate three or four times a week: sixteen ounces of rare prime rib from the steakhouse five blocks away from her group home. She took a limo there. The long and the short of it was that my mother’s sorta-kinda-maybe-make-believe-maybe-real-I-never-could-tell-wife was a classic walking heart attack, and when the inevitable finally happened one cold January afternoon in 2001, my mother found herself homeless within the year.

  For a while she stayed at a youth hostel a few blocks away from us in Boston. After that she found a roommate situation on the South Shore, but it didn’t take long before she got kicked out. Then she went back to the youth hostel. They had a two-week limit, so every fourteen days she stayed with us for a few days, but she left pills everywhere, and when we found one in Isabella’s bed, we told her she couldn’t come back. Eventually, she found an old-school, hippie-style rooming house in western Massachusetts, and that lasted longer than expected—a month or even two. But after that she started living in her car.

  Over the phone Tracy and I had many long and anxious strategy discussions. I thought we should wait things out: our mother had been unraveling ever since Rae had died, growing more and more agoraphobic, sleeping through most of the day, and seeming to be on a crazy mix of drugs again. I proposed we encourage her to commit herself to a hospital, which would then lead to a halfway house, and after that—hopefully—to some kind of subsidized housing. But Tracy said it made her too sad to think of doing this, which is why she invited
her to drive out to Chicago and live with her.

  “It’s just simpler,” she told me. “I have no kids. A low-maintenance boyfriend. I’m at work most of the time anyway. It’ll be fine.”

  Sin

  I’ve spent years trying to understand how a person could do the kinds of things my grandfather did to his children. I came close to real understanding only once. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but my mother was coming up the stairs, and I was fighting with her. Maybe she was dropping something off, or maybe she was picking something up. In any case I think she was on her way to Chicago.

  Our Boston apartment was on the top floor of a four-story townhouse, and there was my mother, pounding up the stairs. She was mad, and I was panicky because I’ve always been terrified of her anger. I didn’t want her in my home, yet there she was, getting closer every second. Boom! Boom! Boom! I couldn’t possibly have heard each and every one of her footfalls on each and every one of those stairs, but I felt them . . . And the dogs did too. They started barking like crazy, so I shoved them into my study and shut the door. I told them to be quiet, but they kept barking because dogs, as everyone knows, are sensitive creatures; no doubt they read my alarm. Oscar, my favorite (yes, of the three, I had a favorite—Oscar smelled like woodsmoke, and we had him first; I couldn’t help it), raised his bark to a series of high-pitched yelps. My nerves were expanding, unraveling. Blood in my ears. Senses closing down. What I did was kick him. He was a muscularly built dog, but small: just over twenty pounds. His eyes were brown and round, and when I kicked him, he looked up at me as his abdomen curled and his legs buckled. And then, immediately overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing—black, absolute, nauseous—I kicked him again.

  Do you see what I’m saying? There’s a “because” in there. What I mean is this: because I kicked Oscar, I kicked Oscar again.

  Slaughterhouse

  “A Seven Hundred–Bed Adult In-Patient Facility.” This is how the hospital my mother was recently committed to in New Jersey describes itself on its website. I found this site through a Google search, even though Tracy warned me not to look because these days even state-funded psychiatric hospitals have reviews online, and the Yelp reviews for this particular institution include such helpful suggestions and commentary as:

  “Shut it down and burn it to hell.”

  “This is probably one of the worst of the worst.”

  “Patients there suffer at the hands of the staff and their military ways.”

  “A slaughterhouse.”

  “They profess to have a wellness and recovery care model but it has an abuse and death care model.”

  “No one wants to work there.”

  “Geriatric patients are treated badly.”

  “My grandmother was put in there for her ‘own good,’ and she never came out.”

  “I told you not to look,” said Tracy.

  Snow Day

  The kids are playing a made-up game called “brainwaves.” I can hear them from my study—a wooden platform that projects out over our living room.

  “Legos,” says Isaac.

  “No!” says Isabella.

  It’s the third snow day this year. The house is a mess. I should water the plants. Do some laundry. The roads are so bad that David stayed home from the office. He’s working on his laptop at the table, only not right now. Right now he’s making a fire in the woodstove.

  “Cake?” he suggests.

  “You’re not playing,” Isabella tells him.

  “Cake?” says Isaac.”

  “Think!” says Isabella.

  I have two design clients breathing down my neck and should really be working on those projects. Then again, I should also do some yoga because the studio was closed this morning so I didn’t get to practice and I always get a bit tetchy when I don’t practice. The problem is, I don’t feel like working, and I don’t feel like doing yoga. I could clean the bathroom because the ring around the tub is getting a little hard to ignore. I could also feed the birds, who keep darting up to the empty feeder, then flying away again.

  “Star Wars?” asks Isaac.

  “I’m not going to play with you unless you listen to my brainwaves!” says Isabella.

  When the phone rings, I know it’s my mother. I don’t know how I know, I just do. I always do. And even though I haven’t spoken to her for weeks (the last time was a few days before she was admitted to the hospital), as soon as I pick up, she says she doesn’t want to stay on long. She just has a favor to ask about her things in storage, especially the paperwork because—

  I interrupt to ask how things are going, and she says, “Same old shit.” I figure she’s talking about DMH pursuing her even to New Jersey, but we don’t get into it because all of a sudden she says she made a mistake and actually she doesn’t feel like talking. Then she hangs up.

  Now it’s Isaac’s turn. Isabella asks if he’s thinking of Ninja weapons.

  “No,” he says, grinning.

  “Hamburgers? Snow? Magic Markers?”

  “Harry Potter!” I yell from my study.

  Stitches

  It didn’t take long for her to start doing some crazy things in Chicago, but Tracy held out for ages. I’m talking about really inappropriate, boundary-crossing things. Bizarre things. For instance, once she sprayed insecticide in Tracy’s face. Another time it was oven cleaner. Another time, on the highway, while Tracy was driving sixty-five miles an hour, she karate chopped her in the trachea because Tracy had said something she didn’t like. There were other incidents more or less along the same lines. Some of them involved Tracy’s friends and invasive, pushy phone calls in which my mother pretended to be Tracy. Some of them involved Tracy’s employer and more phone calls in which my mother said things she hoped would get Tracy fired. Still other incidents involved Tracy’s underwear, which my mother found, for some reason, necessary to repeatedly steal, wear, and hide no matter how many times my sister told her not to and no matter how many new pairs of underwear Tracy bought and squirreled away in secret places, such as inside the zippered cases of the decorative pillows she kept on her bed. There were also many arguments concerning bathroom usage, and these, I suspect, were pretty bad, judging from my own bathroom usage arguments with my mother, who can easily spend a stretch of three or four hours at a time in even a public bathroom. The turning point for Tracy involved her boyfriend, at whom my mother, in a fit of rage, threw a can opener—one of the heavy ones. He wound up with a gash on his forehead that needed seven stitches. It was at this point that my sister finally told her she had to leave. But my mother, who had lived in Chicago by then for nearly two years, sleeping in the good room, on the good mattress, didn’t want to leave, mostly because she had nowhere else to go.

  The eviction—which is what it turned into, ultimately—involved two policemen, one of whom called me that afternoon, hoping I might intervene long-distance.

  “Could you please, please, tell your mother to get out of bed and get dressed?” he asked. She had stripped naked, which is one of her favorite techniques for dealing with law enforcement types.

  “The trick with my mother,” I told him (as if I knew), “is just to be really, really patient.”

  “We’re trying!” said the cop, “but she keeps throwing things at us.”

  Tracy called me later that day. I couldn’t understand a lot of what she was saying because her voice was garbled and squeaky, but eventually she calmed down enough for me to understand. “She’s just sitting there. On the sidewalk. Just . . . picking her hair. I’m a terrible person. How could I do this? Kick my own mother out of my house?” Then she started sobbing. It went on for a long time, but after a while she stopped and we got off the phone. I called a couple of times after that for updates, and at both 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tracy said our mother was still sitting on the curb. But by the morning she was gone.

  Within a week of the eviction, Tracy broke up with her boyfriend. Within two months she’d gained thirty pounds. Soon after that she
gained thirty more.

  Stricken

  Because my mother didn’t include me on her contact list, the hospital refuses to put my calls through to her, so it’s been months since I’ve heard her voice when she finally calls “just to check in.” She’s been in the seven hundred–bed in-patient facility for ninety-one days.

  “As you’ve no doubt gathered, I’ve been prevented from getting settled down here. I have no business being in this hospital, and everybody knows it. This place is for addicts. It’s for convicts. My roommate is actually a convicted matricide. Do you know what that means? I’m living with a murderer.” Then she says something about an assault and a guard, something about charges, but I don’t think she’s talking about her roommate anymore. When I ask her to clarify, she says never mind.

  I get off the phone just as Isabella comes home from school. I had been in the middle of making cornmeal cookies when my mother called, so I study the recipe for a minute, trying to remember what I was doing.