The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

by Kim Adrian

  “You should throw those out,” he said later that night when he found me sitting at the kitchen table, staring at my gift. But I didn’t. Instead, I put the jar on my nightstand—first next to our alarm clock, between a bottle of massage oil and a small, new agey figurine of a mother holding a baby that my doula gave me when Isaac was born. Later I shoved it behind my ever-growing pile of self-help books. It might sound strange, but for a long time those tomatoes were a powerful ally. Because whenever my mother called or stopped by to tell me something, such as I’m a sucky daughter or how she was having trouble extracting worms from her eye or she would never get rid of her bacterial infection if I didn’t go to all her doctor appointments with her, I could simply lie down in the comfort of my own bed and inspect the jar slowly, at my leisure. It was like a magical guilt eraser and, at the same time, strangely calming, like a low-tech lava lamp.

  But I’m ready now. I take the jar downstairs and hold it over the trashcan in the kitchen and look one last time at the brown tomatoes and slow yellow oil polluted by beige flakes of silt. Then I let it go.

  Yet

  Walking arm in arm down the stark, vinyl-tiled hallway of some hospital or another, I forget which, my mother stopped and turned to me. Pulling me close, she pressed her forehead against mine.

  “This,” she said, “is how you say ‘I love you’ in Irani.”

  Zigzag

  The last time I saw her, the day before she left for New Jersey, it was late summer, early September. The kids were already in school. I was on my way to pick up Isaac, and at first I wasn’t sure it was her coming toward me, about a block away, weaving this way and that on the sidewalk, wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt, baggy gray sweatpants, and a pair of flip-flops. As she veered back and forth, she picked at her hair. She was talking to herself.

  When I was a kid, I thought of my mother as awesome—fascinating and frightening. I knew that people considered her beautiful, but I noticed all the bits of her, not just the ones that were aesthetically pleasing. I noticed the subtle hint of cellulite on her thighs, the almost three-dimensional gleam of her hair, the slightly crooked line of her upper lip, the shockingly large brown nipples of her breasts, the bumpy bones of her pinky fingers . . . That day in September, as she came closer and closer to me, lurching down the sidewalk with violent left-and-right motions, talking to herself, and somberly wagging her head in a way that made me think of Richard Nixon, I noticed all of her again. She seemed like a stranger but one I knew well, almost from a dream, and full of too many details—too many to keep straight. For instance, I noticed her teeth—broken and yellowed—and I noticed her smallness, because she has shrunken, and I noticed her skin, which was rough and pale and which hung from her cheekbones like worn fabric. There was no greeting, no embrace, when we finally got close enough to speak. She didn’t change the timbre of her voice or start a new sentence, but suddenly it seemed clear that now she was talking to me, not herself, when she twisted her mouth sardonically to ask a rhetorical question about her phone service. Her eyes were more gray than green that day, and they were set on me but also not on me.

  “Mom?” I said. “Mom, what are you saying? What are you talking about?” She shook her head and kept speaking, only I didn’t understand anything she said because she was mumbling. Up close I could see that something was really wrong with her eyes. They were floating: there and not there. Also, she’d plucked her eyebrows, and there were sores in them. Her eyelashes, too, seemed very thin, almost gone. “Mom, what are you doing?” I asked, but she just kept mumbling, so I put my hands on her shoulders and asked if she was okay, and she shouted: “Am I fucking okay? What do you think, you fucking brat? How could I be fucking okay? You have no fucking idea how un-fucking not-okay I am!”

  Under my palms her shoulders felt bony and fragile, but I was mad, so I didn’t pull her toward me to protect her from the staring strangers who kept passing us. Instead, I said, “Why did you do it?”

  Most of the people walking by were parents, like me, on their way to pick up their kids from school. The crossing guard was there too—the one I always chat with but who today was careful to keep her back to me.

  “Do what?” my mother shouted.

  “You had a good situation. A nice apartment. You were safe. It was okay. Why did you throw it away?”

  I thought she was going to tell me about DMH and Bill Gates and Medicaid, but instead her eyes stopped swimming and she actually looked at me. Something moved at the back of her pupils, something took shape. Then it was gone, and she threw my hands off. “You’re talking like an ignoramus,” she said.

  “I just want you to be safe.”

  “You have no idea,” she screamed. “No idea. You have a nice bed. A nice family.”

  I knew she couldn’t see me. She was looking at me, but she saw something else. I understood this because I am used to it. But still it hurt, which is why I didn’t simply nod, which is what I wish I’d done. Instead, I said, “It didn’t need to be this way.” And she said, “Yes, it fucking did.”

  &

  Until the mid-nineteenth century the ampersand was considered the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. Not a letter like the other twenty-six—not a sound unit—but a word, and, represented by the graphic contraction of the letters e and t, or et: Latin for “and.”

  The opposite of except, but, not, closer to yes than to no, and opens the field, expands the view. It includes—brings together things and ideas and people and moods and realities to cover more than one possibility, a verbal umbrella:

  I am happy and I am sad.

  I am a mother and I am a daughter.

  I have told a story and I have not touched it.

  &

  My mother spent nine months in the seven hundred–bed adult in-patient facility in New Jersey. I don’t know what they did to her there. Or what she did. Maybe it was just a change in medication. But things are different now. For instance, she’s reading books again, for the first time in decades. Also, she cooks meals for herself and speaks much less frequently about DMH and her teeth and her paperwork, and I haven’t heard a single word of complaint about her new landlord. She lives somewhere in New Jersey, though she won’t tell me exactly where. I think she is lonely, but she says otherwise, and I understand this to be an act of love, because she doesn’t want me to worry, and also an act of pride.

  We’ve gotten into a kind of groove with something new—texting. I send her pictures of the kids, my knitting projects, the birds at our feeder, our yard in the snow. And she sends me pictures of the food she makes—quiches and omelets and stews—and of her houseplants and of herself. Not weird pictures of herself, just innocuous selfies. One of these I even printed out because in it she looks lovely—old and careworn but still pretty and somehow a bit Swedish. We are, for the time being, friends, sort of. She says, in her texts, that I make her laugh, and I say, in my texts, that she makes me laugh, and both of these things are true.

  It’s strange, but good. The word boon comes to mind. Of course, it’s all very long-distance, and maybe that’s why it works. But I’m not so interested in why.

  Often, when I get up in the mornings to go to yoga, it’s still dark outside, and the first thing I do, even before I turn on the light above the stove and put the kettle on to boil, is find my cell phone and check to see what my mother has to say. Sometimes her texts are bright and cheerful. Sometimes they contain good advice, such as “those navel oranges are fabulous now” or “you can probably get some plants / baby trees for free from the national conifer society,” and I take note. Other times her texts are far too long, and these I do not even scroll through because the point of a text is shortness and sweetness, and while it is much more difficult to do the whole pressure of speech thing in the form of a text message, it is not impossible. Sometimes my mother sends me ten or twenty texts before I have a chance to respond, and sometimes I don’t get back to her for days because I’m too busy or because her texts are annoying or the
y somehow touch a nerve or simply because I feel trapped by them. But I do respond eventually because I’ve come to appreciate this fragile thread of words between us. I imagine it as a thin, thin strand of something precious and strange. Something that glints as it runs through the fabric of my life.

  &

  For my mother’s birthday I bought her a candle that smelled like tomato vines and also a yoga mat and a microwavable bowl with a Japanese design on it. In addition, I sent a tin of her favorite cookies—saffron vanilla shortbread. For Christmas I made her more of the same cookies because she says she can’t get enough of them and mailed a pair of colorful socks and another, slightly different microwavable bowl as well as a mystery novel. I sent these things to an address that she has told me is not the address where she actually lives. It is a strange address with a curiously long street number and a complicated apartment number, and although I have Google-mapped these numbers, I have failed to attach them to an actual building, and yet, through the eerie window of Google’s “street view,” I have at least seen that the general neighborhood is suburban and treeless and a little dilapidated but not terribly so. In any case my mother always gets the things I send. Recently, she told me that she likes to light the candle and read the novel while wearing the socks and nibbling on the cookies. Then, she said, she is happy as a clam. Then, she said, she is in heaven. And when she told me this, I, too, felt happy in a quiet, clam-like way.

  &

  I had a funny dream the other night in which I was brushing my hair when I found a gray strand. When I tried to pluck it out, it wouldn’t budge. On closer inspection I could see why: it was attached, in a really complicated way, to several strands of brown. Disentangling the single gray hair proved a serious hassle, so I just yanked out the bunch of them. Looking at the clump in my hand, I realized that the thing in the middle wasn’t a hair at all but some kind of fibrous root, which now fell easily away. About four inches long, as thick as a pencil, it was knobby and pale, like an underground tuber. I snapped it in half and watched as a beautiful, waxy white flower bloomed in my hand.

  When I told David about this dream the next morning over breakfast, he said, “That’s your book,” meaning this one. I asked what possible connection a flower could have to these pages, and he said, “They both came out of your head!” And while I was secretly pleased by the comparison, I admit to feeling a little embarrassed by my own dreaming mind’s Buddha-like aspirations.

  Of course, it would be wonderful to grow a lotus like that—from your own head. But what I have grown is a something else. A glossary. A love letter. A reckoning. And this is it, I think. I think I’m done. I’ve made it through the alphabet, and the alphabet has made it through this material. These pages are something I’ve nurtured for years, and they are something I’ve torn out of myself, one line at a time. Writing them has been a difficult yoga, and I’ll tell you a secret I learned along the way: there’s something that lives next to memory that isn’t quite memory, and there’s something that lives next to love that isn’t quite love, and there’s something that lives next to hope that isn’t. It’s a muddy, leftover thing. And it’s enough.

  Acknowledgments

  For giving me the metaphor I needed to stick with this project: Sven Birkerts. For their encouragement on early drafts: Alice Mattison, Tom Bissell, Gail Vita Hamburg, Steve Carr, and Louise Elving. For taking me on: Alicia Christensen and Tobias Wolff. For their heartening support: the Massachusetts Cultural Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Key West Literary Seminars, the Boston Writers’ Room, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. For their artistic example: Sara Egan, Beth Woodcome Platow, Julie Carr, Julia Werntz, and Pandelis Karayorgis. For their reading: Rita Zoey Chin and Lisa Gozashti. For their listening: Rebecca Drill and Nancy Cetlin. For their understanding: my mother, my sister, my father. For their teaching: Kate O’Donnell and Rich Ray. For their inspiration: Nina Carr and Jonah Carr. For his friendship, editorial eye, straight talk, and humor: James Carr. Thank you all.

  About Kim Adrian

  Kim Adrian is the author of Sock and the editor of The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms (Nebraska, 2018).

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