The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “What do you mean? Like what?”

  “Like—crazy.”

  I knew enough about patient’s rights to know that this question fell well outside the bounds of patient confidentiality, and I knew enough about my mother’s pride to say, “I don’t think my mother would want me to answer that,” to which the doctor responded, “Don’t worry. She’s just stepped away.”

  She then explained that my mother had been insisting she’d never had a single psychological issue until she lost her job in 1990, and that her breakdown, at that time, had been completely out of the blue. But the doctor and her team had “serious doubts” about my mother’s account, and, in her gravelly whisper, she told me that my mother’s treatment would be significantly “tweaked” if I could help clear up this issue. And even though I could have, very easily, with one word, I couldn’t quite bring myself to literally whisper behind my mother’s back, which is why I told her, somewhat primly, that her question would no doubt be best discussed with her patient.

  Twice

  Isabella was in the passenger seat, Isaac in the back. It was raining and I was tired and for some reason Isabella and I were arguing. Really digging into each other. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but do I remember feeling unappreciated in the mothering department. This was a couple of years ago; Isabella was in sixth grade. I figured she was probably taking something out on me—some middle school social drama—but I also knew that to say as much would only make things worse. In any case, I think it’s safe to assume that my daughter and I were fighting about the issue of respect, because at the time we both felt we weren’t getting enough of it from the other. Traffic was heavy and as we went back and forth, I could feel a certain phrase trying to rise up, trying to escape, trying desperately to make its way out of me. It was an urge, more than anything else, like the urge to scratch a rash, or eat a third slice of cake—I wanted, extremely badly, to do something I knew I shouldn’t, and when my daughter finally said whatever it was that pushed one of my many buttons a little too hard, I gave into it and shouted, “Do me a favor, would you, and just shut up!”

  Isaac, in the back seat, gasped. Isabella drew herself up very straight and after a moment said quietly, with great dignity, “That’s twice.”

  “Twice what?”

  “That’s twice in my life you’ve told me to shut up.”

  I knew this was meant as an accusation of the most serious kind. It was clear from her wounded tone and solemn facial expression that I had, in her eyes, just committed a parenting crime, and while I did on some level appreciate her point of view, I mostly felt like I’d just received a gold medal . . . My daughter had made it to twelve years of age and could still count on one hand—two fingers—the number of times I’d told her to shut up.

  U

  Ultrasound

  After spending a few months in the city hospital, my mother was transferred to the psych ward of a nearby state hospital, which was a major step down. This place was huge and poorly lit. It looked and felt much more like a jail than a hospital, and it smelled like urine. The staff was barebones and largely Dominican, their English spotty. Once when I visited my mother there, I had to help the guard on duty fill out a form recording some of the things I’d brought her; files he spelled “fills” and pens “pins.”

  “They’re sadists,” my mother told me. “They don’t get paid much, and they’re mad about it. I don’t blame them. It’s hard working here.”

  Telephoning her at the state hospital was a serious drag because you had to call a pay phone in the hallway, and there was only about a fifty-fifty chance that someone would pick up. When they did, there was often a long period of negotiation.

  “May I speak to Linda, please?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Could you check?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Maybe she woke up.”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  If and when my mother made it to the phone, our conversations were sometimes accompanied by screams in the background—long, unraveling wails that came from a woman of incredible stamina. She could keep it up for an entire twenty-minute conversation, but my mother never deigned to notice.

  During the time she spent at this hospital, I became pregnant with Isaac. The day I got my first ultrasound, I called to tell her about the little pearl necklace of his spine, only we never got that far.

  “I’ve been here six months,” my mother said. She started crying. I said: “Don’t worry, Mom. You just have to go through these next few steps. Step-step-step. You’ll get there.” I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it seemed to help because she blew her nose and said I was probably right.

  Useful

  The ancient philosophical system of yoga teaches many useful things. For example, it teaches that the body consists of five koshas, meaning “layers” or “sheaths.” These enclose the human soul, just as the layers of an onion enclose the onion or the petals of a rose enclose the rose. The outermost layer is called the annamaya kosha, which means the sheath made of food (anna). It is composed of bones, organs, and muscles. Beneath this is the pranamaya kosha, or the energetic covering of the soul, which is sometimes said to be made of breath. The manomaya kosha comes next. It concerns the mind and its processes. Beneath it lies the vijnanamaya kosha—normally defined as intuition. The fifth and innermost kosha is extremely small. Often it is said to be “no larger than a mustard seed.” Despite this, the anandamaya kosha directs all the other koshas, although its influence can sometimes be difficult to perceive. This kosha is constant and invulnerable and it is made of pure joy. If we lose track of it, it is only because it has been obscured by confusion and disorder in the outer sheaths. The diligent practice of yoga, as I understand it, is one of the more efficient means for bringing equilibrium, steadiness, and strength to those sheaths and in this way allowing clearer access to the innermost kosha.

  At the risk of being pedantic, I think there are a few points here worth stressing:

  1. The anandamaya kosha is invulnerable.

  2. Everyone has one.

  3. It is made of pure joy.

  4. Our access to it may be occluded, but it is never entirely obstructed.

  There is one more extremely handy tip I’ve learned from yoga, which is that you can actually locate the anandamaya kosha quite easily, simply by closing your eyes and breathing softly while at the same time concentrating on the image of a tiny mustard seed floating just to the right of your heart.

  V

  Vanishing Point

  A Suburban Street Somewhere in New Jersey, circa 1979

  On a sidewalk bordered by velvety tracts of grass, a sidewalk that dwindles to a classic vanishing point, my mother stands towering over the camera. Whoever took this shot must have been crouching or else a child. The silhouettes of several trees splay down either side of the street. The quality of light in this Polaroid is bright and slightly pinkish. My mother holds her hand up to one side of her face. A bleached circle, one of those airborne sunspots, hovers in the upper-right corner. The fabric of her pants seems to luminesce—her legs look like two columns of marble glowing from within. Other than this, her form is indicated only by the bent angle of her arm, a glowing pouf of hair on one side of her head, the thin black band of her wristwatch. It must be a matter of habit, of knowing her features as well as I do, that I see her face here; in reality there’s nothing but shadow.

  Veggie Burgers

  She claimed there was a rapist on the first floor of the halfway house she lived in after she was released from the state hospital. But upstairs, in the women’s apartment, she got along pretty well with both of her roommates. I guess they didn’t care too much about the little pieces of paper she taped all over the walls, near the sinks and light switches. One of these, affixed to the bathroom wall next to the jerry-rigged paper towel dispenser fashioned out of a bent clo
thes hanger (my mother’s invention), read: “You MUST wash your hands BEFORE and AFTER touching ANYTHING else in the bathroom and dry them with a PAPER towel. This means AS SOON AS YOU COME IN AND AFTER YOU USE THE TOILET AND RIGHT BEFORE YOU LEAVE!!! (Plus use a fresh paper towel to turn off the light and open the door.)” There were many such pieces of paper scattered throughout the apartment, all giving detailed instructions about how to use things like the refrigerator, the microwave, and the oven while keeping them germ free, as well as many reminders scrawled on Post-its regarding the importance of flicking light switches on and off using your elbow, not your hand.

  After she’d been living there for a few weeks, my mother invited us over for lunch. Isaac wasn’t yet born, but I was extremely pregnant, and I remember that it was hard to get up the stairs because she’d stacked a small armory of cleaning supplies on them: boxes of extra-tall cans of Comet and Mr. Bubbles, multiple jugs of bleach and ammonia, industrial-size refills of Formula 409, Windex, and a job lot of that all-natural supposedly good-for-the-environment cleaning fluid they make from orange peel. The whole place smelled like manufactured orange zest.

  Eventually, she’d move into her own apartment (see *hens’ teeth), but not before getting into an intractable argument with the landlord of the halfway house, who leased his property to DMH. The argument concerned several serious health code violations as well as criminal abuses taking place on the property, but in the beginning she seemed like a happy camper. It was a nice old Victorian, in decent shape, in a bedroom community about a half-hour from downtown Boston. Her room was large and sunny, with two oval bay windows. She’d asked for a fresh coat of paint and had received it: the walls were plum red, the trim creamy white. Scattered all over the floor near her bed were dozens of course catalogs and magazines about landscaping and gardening. We spent most of our visit that day outside, on the rounded porch structure off the kitchen. She had made a beautiful container garden out there (though some of the support systems she’d used to attach the heavy window boxes to the railings seemed a bit cavalier).

  For lunch we ate frozen veggie burgers zapped in the microwave and a batch of tabouli that she’d made from scratch. The burgers were mushy, but the tabouli was delicious, and I remember feeling hopeful for a moment because it seemed like she was intent on making a fresh start. For example, she kept talking about how she wanted to go to graduate school to get a degree in landscape architecture. But over dessert I think she got confused because as she cut four pieces of frozen tiramisu out of a box, she told Isabella that she’d already been to Harvard and already had her degree, that she was, in fact, already working as a landscape architect and for this reason was “just like Daddy,” only he was an architect of buildings and she was an architect of plants. Actually, the way she put it was that she was “on par” with David, because both of them were extremely lucky to have such hard but interesting work.

  W

  Well-Worn

  NEW JERSEY:

  Only the strong survive.

  —my favorite T-shirt

  What I’d Choose

  I heard a woman on the radio the other day talking about how she’d once watched a movie in which one of the characters had to choose a single moment from his life to inhabit for all his afterlife—just one single experience to relive eternally. The woman explained that she was haunted by this question for months after watching the movie. Which moment would she choose? She studied the question carefully, from many angles, before deciding. In the end it took her years to make up her mind. As I listened to her speak, I naturally found myself pursuing a similar line of inquiry—only I was able to settle almost immediately on my answer.

  In Maine, after dinner, if there’s no pie, we make s’mores, roasting the marshmallows in the small firebox of the wood-burning stove on which we cook most of our meals. Isaac sits on my lap. Isabella perches close to the heat. David usually stands and orchestrates the ingredients—because there’s a surprising amount of orchestration with s’mores. And as he orchestrates, he often speaks of the merits of cold chocolate, which he prefers. I like my chocolate slightly melted on a piece of foil on top of the stove. Isabella likes it either way, as does Isaac, just so long as there’s a lot of it.

  They take a long time—s’mores—because each marshmallow has to be individually roasted and the firebox is small. Or maybe they take a long time because they’re sticky and chewy. They’re also messy, of course—the chocolate gets everywhere, the marshmallow goo, the graham cracker crumbs, not to mention the milk that we drink with them, which always seems to spill. In short, everything seems to multiply on those nights we crowd around the stove.

  Would-Be

  The phone rings just as I’m on my way out of the house, and I sense that electric tug I feel whenever my mother calls. It’s been so many months since I’ve heard her voice that I almost don’t recognize it when I pick up. She’s been in the seven hundred–bed in-patient facility for almost eight months at this point and, except for a couple of phone calls early on, entirely out of touch. I want to talk, I really do, but the timing is bad because I’m just on my way out of the house to pick up Isaac from soccer practice.

  “Just give me one minute,” she says. “I just need you to run a super short errand.” She explains, and to my surprise it really does seem like a simple task. Not much of an errand at all, according to her usual standards. It involves only running over to her post office box, five blocks from my house, emptying it, and Express Mailing whatever is in it to her at the hospital. She says there is a very important document in the box, a legal form that she needs ASAP because they are having a hearing for her next week on account of some trumped-up charges about how she supposedly assaulted a mental health technician when in actuality it was the other way around.

  “Basically, if I don’t have the documents, I’m a goner. They’ll commit me for good. I’ll be doped up for the rest of my life in this place, and you’ll never hear from me again.”

  The problem is that it’s nearly four thirty, and the post office closes at five, and I’m already going to be late for Isaac. I explain all this to her—I tell her about soccer practice and the distance I need to cover just as rush hour is heating up; I also mention the other boy I’ve promised a ride to.

  “The timing just doesn’t work right now. I could do it tomorrow, tomorrow morning even, but not today.”

  “This is crucial, Kimberli. Crucial. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? I’m talking about a lifetime commitment. I’m talking about the fact that they want to turn me into a zombie.”

  “I need more time, Mom. I need a heads up. I can’t just jump when you say jump. You know it doesn’t work that way. I need a warning. My life is busy. I can’t do things when you ask—boom—just like that.”

  This is a discussion we’ve had many times before. It never goes well. So I am not surprised when she suddenly changes the topic to inform me, calmly, that I am a bitter person.

  “I don’t know why you have to say things like that. I am not a bitter person. I’m just a person in a hurry.”

  “No, Kimberli. You are a deeply bitter person. A deeply disappointed and bitter woman.”

  “Why am I disappointed?”

  I would like to think that I ask this question in a facetious or rhetorical mode. Facetious/rhetorical is, in fact, the tone I attempt to adopt. But it is not the tone that comes out of my mouth. The tone that comes out of my mouth is closer to what I actually feel, which is worried. Because even if it means being late to pick up my son from soccer practice, I will pause long-distance to hear myself belittled, because for some reason I believe this belittling is necessary, believe that, on some level, my mother’s words can tell me the truth about me.

  “You’re bitter because you’re just a wannabe, would-be writer. You have no hope of ever becoming a real writer. You’re bitter because you have no talent, and deep down you know that.”

  “Why do you do this?”

  “Why are you s
o upset? I’m just being objective.”

  XYZ

  Xmas

  For years I’ve kept a very large jar of sun-dried tomatoes on my nightstand. On the bottom shelf of my nightstand, technically speaking, and behind some books, but still, it’s there. David has asked me repeatedly to throw this jar away, but I’ve resisted, only put more books in front of it so that it’s harder for him to see, because those sun-dried tomatoes are a great comfort to me. They were a Christmas present from my mother a few years ago, back when we still tried to get together on the holidays.

  Isaac was little—just a year and a half old—the night we drove to her apartment for a late Christmas dinner. This was sometime in January because she’d been too sick or too depressed to get together on the actual holiday, but it still felt like Christmas because we were bringing presents and the car was filled with the scent of the cranberry orange cake I’d made earlier that day. When we got to her place, she told us she was going to jump in the shower quick quick and we should make ourselves at home until she got out. We waited forty minutes, picking at cheese and crackers. After she finally emerged and got dressed, we ate the roast chicken and steamed carrots she’d made ahead of time. Everything was salty and buttery, which is how my mother likes to cook, but it was good. After dessert we went into her living room to exchange gifts even though Isaac was already asleep.

  I gave my mother a pair of leather gloves and a tea tin filled with her favorite cookies (shortbread made with saffron threads and vanilla sugar). David gave her a camel hair scarf. She gave David a handsome compact umbrella with a handle made of faux-tortoiseshell. Isaac got several children’s books with pages made of heavy cardboard and Isabella a top-of-the-line Game Boy. Then she handed me a large and somewhat ornate jar of sun-dried tomatoes three years past their expiration date. The label was stained and torn, the oil cloudy, the lid of the jar dented. I nearly cried but stopped myself. Instead, I said it was late and started bundling Isaac’s coat onto his floppy, sleeping arms. Although he was getting heavy, I held him just for the comfort of it while David helped Isabella lace up her boots. On the way home I stared out the passenger side window until I was sure Isabella was asleep, then I let the tears run wherever they wanted to—down my face, into my mouth. Every once in a while, David put his hand on my thigh.