The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

“What’s wrong?” Isabella asks as she pours herself some juice.

  “Nothing!”

  “Then why do you look so . . . stricken?”

  “What, this?” I say, exaggerating whatever I’m doing with my mouth. “Honey, I’m just concentrating. And smiling. I’m smiling.”

  Stunner

  New York, New York, Christmas Eve 2001

  I’m sitting on a couch, holding a glass of wine up high, away from Isabella. I have on my dressy gold-and-pearl seashell earrings, a black mesh top, dark slacks. Isabella is wearing a gray ribbed turtleneck and a velvet skirt printed with pink flowers. These are gifts from Grandpa Jake. They come from Saks and are quite chic, especially on a three-year-old. Isabella reaches toward me as I study her face. You can’t see her green-gray eyes in this picture, but I can still find the strangely gilded image of myself floating in her pupils, an image not unlike the one my own eyes once reflected back at my mother.

  I don’t know if it was before or after this photo was snapped, but I remember asking my father that night if he thought my mother had been crazy the whole time I was growing up. His answer was as unequivocal as it was immediate: no.

  “Of course she was addicted to Valium. And of course she made a few suicide attempts. But she wasn’t crazy. Not like she is now. No way.”

  We’d driven down to New York to spend Christmas with my father and his girlfriend, Amanda. Amanda was sharp and snappy, and I wasn’t at all sure I liked her. But she was about to do me a great favor.

  We had this exchange over appetizers in my father’s living room. Amanda, David, and I were drinking wine, my father a glass of sparkling water. I asked if he was sure about my mother, and he said of course he was sure, then reached for another stuffed mushroom, at which point Amanda put her wine glass on the coffee table kind of harshly and said: “Exactly how would you know the answer to that question, Jake? You were drunk the whole time!” And with that one sentence my whole childhood slipped instantly into clearer focus. It was, for lack of a better metaphor, a serious V-8 moment, a real head slapper. Of course. He’d been drunk the whole time. I should have thought of that!

  T

  Teeth

  “The only thing my father ever did,” my mother once told me, “the only thing that could be construed as the least bit fatherly, was he used insist that we kids take care of our teeth. ‘Above all,’ he used to say, ‘you must brush your teeth!’”

  Three-Unit Bridge

  When she left Chicago, she started driving east toward Boston. Along the way there were many complications. Chief among these was a mishap involving a three-unit bridge—the kind a dentist puts in your mouth. Actually, I’m talking about half of a six-unit bridge that at some point during my mother’s cleaning rituals cracked down the middle and as a result became so loose that when she took a swig of water, half of it got swept down her esophagus.

  Three-unit bridges are weighty little constructions made of porcelain and gold. At the base, where they fit into the gumline, they are, as my mother described it, “sharp as razors.” I don’t think they are actually that sharp, but that the metal tapers to a very thin point is undoubtedly the case.

  For a while, I remember hoping that the problem would somehow evaporate, as some of my mother’s more exotic predicaments occasionally do. Her brain tumor, for instance, disappeared when her systemic bacterial infection started acting up. And her TMJ pain went away when her balance became an issue. She, herself, was convinced that the bridge was going to kill her. That she was bleeding internally and high up in the intestine was proved, she said, by the blackness of her stool.

  Once she arrived on the outskirts of Boston, she stayed for a couple of weeks at a youth hostel that advertised itself on the internet as having an easy, laid-back, party-hearty atmosphere. After that, she lived in her car for several weeks while I, for my part—having refused her lodging for even a single night—entered a depression unlike any I’d ever known. This was deeper, more determined, almost businesslike at its darkest moments. There was even a stretch of time, shortly before I became pregnant with Isaac, when I occasionally found myself thinking about the mechanics of suicide in the same way I might consider the execution of a particularly complicated recipe. As in, technique, efficiency, clean-up.

  Tornado

  Isaac is going through a tornado phase. He often draws tornadoes and frequently finds creative ways to insert tornado references into everyday conversation. For example, on the playground today I overhear him explaining to a friend what’s wrong with his grandmother this way: “It’s like Mormor basically has a tornado in her brain!”

  I can’t imagine that the other child, a Chinese-American girl named Lucy, has any idea who or what a “mormor” might be, but she seems to understand the idea of what he’s saying because she nods gravely and says, “That’s really bad.”

  Trey’s Place

  New York, New York, ca. 2004

  That’s his favorite diner, Trey’s Place, across the street, which puts us on 3rd Avenue. We’re headed downtown. And here’s a shocker (I’d never noticed this before, not in real life, only after looking at this picture): I’m nearly as tall as my father.

  We’re walking four dogs—my father, his 100-pound mutt named Roxy (half-wolfhound and half-lab and rather majestic in a lumbering sort of way), and me our three little scrappers. Chimmi, who’s part Chihuahua, lags miserably behind, but Oscar and Inky are prancing right along. You can’t see our faces—my father’s and mine—because the picture was taken from behind, no doubt by David. Even so, it’s clear we’re talking and very involved in whatever it is we’re saying. Our steps are synchronized: both our right legs are forward, our heels just touching the ground. My father’s wearing a leather jacket and jeans, a T-shirt. The hand not holding Roxy’s leash is hidden from view, but it’s a pretty sure bet that he’s holding a cup of coffee from Trey’s—black, no sugar. We’re just walking along. It’s nothing special. But in a fire, I’d save this one.

  Tug

  After she’d come back from Chicago, we invited my mother over for dinner a couple times, but she declined. In fact, she seemed to be avoiding us. This meant I hadn’t seen her in over two years when I ran into her in downtown B—. It was Memorial Day. I remember because Isabella had off from school and in the morning, she, David, and I took the dogs for a long walk in the woods, then went to our favorite farm stand. Among our purchases were strawberries and rhubarb, which Isabella and I had put in a pie later that afternoon. This is why I’d taken a walk to the small commercial center near our apartment: I wanted to buy a pint of vanilla ice-cream to top the pie for dessert.

  When I emerged from the over-air-conditioned vault of the ice-cream store into a blast of early summer heat, I noticed a woman crossing the street with purposeful intent. She had heavy, pewter gray hair cut to her jawline and a determined expression on her face. She wore a white sleeveless shirt and a tan shoulder bag, and she looked thin and strong, and I thought: That looks like Mom, only German. And actually, it was my mother, although about the German part, I can’t really say.

  We talked for a while on the sidewalk. She held her hand over her mouth when she spoke because of having lost the bridge in the front, on the bottom. She told me she’d been trying to go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, but because it was Memorial Day, it had closed early. Then she said, “I recognized you by your carriage. From across the street, I knew it was you as soon as I saw you come out of that store.”

  It was very hot out and I found myself worrying about the ice cream in the brown paper bag I was holding. Although I wasn’t crazy about the idea, I asked if she wanted to come home with me for dinner, but she said she couldn’t.

  “I can’t bear for Isabella to see me this way.” Then she took her hand away from her mouth and pulled down her lower lip, and I could see that she was right: what was there—six tiny yellowed nubs—looked like witch’s teeth and would certainly have scared my daughter.

  At that point, I
started to cry, but fortunately I was wearing a pair of black sunglasses. I suggested we sit on a bench for a few minutes, so we did, and still I was worried about the ice-cream. We talked about my mother’s housing options, which were few, and also about how she might speak without holding her hand over her mouth, but also without showing her bottom teeth, and she practiced doing this for a while so I could tell her when she got it right.

  “Does this look okay?” she said, holding her lower lip very stiffly.

  “It looks fine,” I lied, because in reality it was obvious that she was missing a lot of teeth by the way her lip moved, and again, I started to cry, and again I was grateful for the fact that my sunglasses were so dark.

  Eventually, I said that I needed to go since it was getting close to dinnertime, and she said, “Yes, you’d better. Your ice-cream is probably melting!” Then she told me that she, too, was hankering after some ice-cream. But she was worried she didn’t have enough money for a cone, so I started digging in my pocket, at which point she stood up and said “No!” and started walking quickly away. I found some coins and ran after her, and we had a weird tug-of-war there in the middle of the sidewalk, with me trying to put the change in her hand and her trying to push the change away.

  Turd

  She lived in her car for six or seven weeks before finally checking herself into a city hospital. It was all part of a larger plan, she told me over the phone—she was just using them, the hospital, the doctors—to get what she really needed, what they should have been giving her anyway. Treatment. Actual healing. For instance, she was going to use this hospitalization to finally get her teeth fixed. But her doctors didn’t see it the same way and as soon as she was admitted they put her on high doses of lithium and anti-psychotics. Pretty soon she reported that she was experiencing many unpleasant side effects from these drugs, including the sensation that her skin was turning itself inside-out, uncontrollable drooling, thinning hair, and rapid weight gain. But none of these things, I think, bothered her quite as much as the fact that the hospital had no immediate plans for dealing with the issue of the three-unit bridge.

  David, Isabella, and I had been travelling in Greece on vacation when my mother first checked into the hospital, so it took me a while to visit. When I finally found a free afternoon to go see her, everything seemed to go wrong. I got lost on the way over and then, when I went to a grocery store to buy her some jellybeans (specially requested), I realized I’d forgotten my wallet and had to dig around in my purse for loose change. Then I couldn’t find a parking space near the hospital, and, when I finally did, I didn’t have any change left for the meter. I felt truly defeated by this last problem, which is why I put my forehead against the cool metal stump of the meter. Just then, a man walking by stopped to ask if I was okay. It was a beautiful summer day, and every second I spent within sight of that hospital felt like a penance, but I couldn’t explain this to a perfect stranger, so I just shrugged, and he said, “Here,” and put two hours worth of quarters in the meter for me. I figured my destiny was set.

  The thing—probably the main thing—to remember about my mother is that she is, first and foremost, a drama queen. This is what I reminded myself when I saw her stumble out of her room with her hair in front of her face. She was wearing gray sweatpants, a green T-shirt and black platform flip-flops, and she was staggering the way a really hammy actor, trying to be subtle, might stagger in a movie where he’s just gotten shot and has a long, agonizing death ahead of him.

  It had been a few years since I’d been in a psychiatric hospital and I’d forgotten certain basics about visiting people there, like how the doors are locked, and how you get a suspicious once-over from the staff before they let you in, and how you have to register while somebody checks through everything you’ve brought for the patient, taking away plastic bags, pills, sharps, anything made of glass . . . But it was all coming back to me as I stood there in the hallway—not sure what to do with my hands, my feet—and waited for the guard to get my mother.

  I figured she couldn’t see me because her hair was hanging in front of her face like a curtain. The guard, who wore no expression, stopped my mother’s progress when they got close to where I was standing, and although I’d called just before I’d left home to say I was coming, although I now said, not two feet away from her, “Hi, Mom. I got your Jelly Bellies,” she still wondered aloud, as she fussed with her hair, who might have come to visit.

  It took a long time and both hands for her to get her hair out of her eyes, but when she finally did, she said, “Oh, Kimmy! You look like a movie star!” Then she touched my hair and said, “People pay a lot of money for that color” and then she said, “Cute, cute, cute,” touching the three plastic beads, borrowed from Isabella’s extensive collection, that I’d put on a gold chain around my neck. These comments might have felt nice but I couldn’t shake the sense that they were largely for show, for the sake of the nurse and the guard, who were standing nearby and whose vaguely appraising eyes I could feel traveling over me as my mother spoke. She then took my chin in her hand and asked the nurse, Nancy (according to the tag on her sweater), “Isn’t she pretty?” Nancy nodded an expert mental health worker’s nod, meaning there was no telling whether she agreed with my mother, intended merely to appease her, or simply wanted to save me embarrassment.

  The guard then took us past a man wearing several hospital gowns doggedly rolling himself against a wall, and to a small room crowded with nine or ten vinyl-upholstered armchairs and a coffee table. The room had shatterproof glass walls and a shatterproof glass door, which he allowed us to close so that we could talk in private.

  “Mostly they’re nice here,” my mother said after he left. “There’s one guy I don’t like. A real turd. But the others are okay. They like me. Can you believe that?” Her speech was slurred and slow because of the meds. I thought her tongue might have been swollen—it didn’t seem to fit right in her mouth, and every so often a long, viscous strand of saliva would drop from her lower lip onto her lap. When the saliva happened to fall on one of her hands, she absently swiped at it as if she were shooing away a fly.

  She’d been in the hospital for a few weeks at that point and had gained a surprising amount of weight since the last time I’d seen her. During that time, David, Isabella, and I had spent nearly a month in Greece, lying on beaches and eating late dinners of perfectly cooked fish and drinking enormous quantities of ouzo with friends and visiting islands of incredible beauty, and for this reason I was acutely aware of an intense sensation of guilt sparking electrically on and off inside of me as we spoke.

  She asked to inspect my sunglasses, which I had tucked into the V-neck of my T-shirt. They were made of plastic the color of caramel and had green lenses and they were exactly the kind of thing my mother has always adored. In fact, the reason I’d wanted them in the first place was because they reminded me of her when we were both much younger. I handed them over and she examined them appreciatively.

  “Très cher. Non?”

  I said, “très” and explained, perhaps a little defensively, that they’d been a birthday present from David.

  She shook her head and said, “You still have that man wrapped around your thumb.” And then she said, “No!” and shook her head again, more vigorously. She said, “No, no, no, no, no!” and we both laughed and shook our heads and stamped our feet. When she finally caught her breath, she said, “Finger! You have him wrapped around your little finger!”

  Then she told me to put the sunglasses on, so I put them on, and then she asked to wear them herself, so I gave them to her and I noticed that her posture instantly improved as she flipped back her hair and slid on the sunglasses—which are Chanel, and very glam—and she looked, for a minute, like her old self. With her mouth closed, I saw with relief that she was still beautiful.

  One of the hospital attendants—the one she didn’t like—came in with her dinner on a tray. This dinner included a pile of meat all smushed up because she said
she couldn’t chew regular food anymore on account of her teeth. There were also overcooked string beans and some mashed potatoes. But she skipped all of these things in favor of a strawberry mousse, and reminded the attendant, somewhat impatiently, that she’d asked him to bring her two butterscotch puddings and an apple crisp. She said, “Do you think you can do that?”

  He was a young guy, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. And as we waited for his answer, I realized that he probably didn’t recognize—even though she was wearing my sunglasses, even though her mouth was closed—my mother’s natural beauty.

  Tweak

  I could hear her in the background reminding her doctor to cover certain points, and I could hear the doctor telling her to calm down, that she’d be sure to get to all the things they’d discussed before placing the call in the first place. Then the doctor explained to me how the conversation was supposed to go: first she, my mother’s psychopharmacologist, was going to tell me all the reasons why my mother needed to be on the particular drugs she was on at that particular time, at which point she would pass the phone to my mother, to whom I was then supposed to reiterate, with an appropriate infusion of daughterly concern, everything the doctor had just told me.

  This woman spoke in clipped, almost metallic tones, saying she hoped I could talk “some sense” to my mother, who didn’t want to take the anti-psychotics and lithium anymore, as she considered herself neither psychotic nor manic-depressive.

  But things didn’t unfold exactly the way the doctor had said they would, because in the middle of explaining how antipsychotic drugs are not used to treat psychosis exclusively, and how lithium can be thought of as merely an antidepressant, the woman’s voice suddenly changed from that chilly, almost mechanical tone to a hoarse, even, you could say, desperate whisper, as she asked whether my mother had always been “like this.”