He frequently wrote me letters of complaint about our adoptive parents, and I found it easy to be in relation to him, I enjoyed them even, but as his letters turned to the frustration he was having in locating his biological mother in Korea, I began to feel burdened. You’ll never find her, I wrote back to him, because she doesn’t want to be found, give it up!
I have always been a great dispenser of advice and was surprised more people didn’t consult me or seek me out. Why was I always seeking others out and no one comes to look for me anymore?
I didn’t understand his impulse to investigate his biological mother, because I wanted nothing to do with my own biological mother, the stupid whore! The whore fucked and made a baby, I thought, and then the whore gave the baby away. If you’re going to fuck, keep the baby, I thought, keep it or abort it. It was that simple. I was not pro-life, I was ambivalent about life; I did not believe that its sanctity was a given, I did not believe life was itself a special privilege. Perhaps my world became too small to contain his complaints and disgust. I had my own complaints and disgust. He wasn’t that isolated, I told myself. If he got desperate, he had our adoptive parents to talk to. Now, since I’ve been at the house and around my adoptive parents, I can see all the gaping flaws of that logic. It’s like a piece of Swiss cheese. Fuck. Was there blood on my hands? I wondered. No, I had wiped my hands clean. I had even sanitized them.
If I did nothing for him, at least that’s neutral, at least a zero doesn’t cause anyone any harm. I had been so lost in my thoughts, I failed to notice a middle-aged man on his front doorstep, glaring at me.
What business do you have here? he shouted. Young man! Answer me now!
He must have been shouting because he was deaf.
I took off my hood. I’m not a man, I said loudly.
What’s your name, then?
Helen.
This is a private neighborhood.
I’m sorry to disrupt the peace.
The man didn’t say anything and returned to his estate. I’m sorry to disrupt the peace was my stock apology; I used it all the time at my workplace, it was a good apology because it could mean so many different things to people. It could mean, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I’m sorry, I’ll ruin you, bitch. On the way home, I stopped at the ice cream parlor. The parlor inside was empty and the cloying smell of sugar and milk overwhelmed me. A woman in a red apron came out from a door behind the counter. I ordered a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a cup. Because my adoptive brother was an occasional customer, I asked the woman if she knew him. I described him, what he looked like, etc. She told me she didn’t serve many Asians.
You’re the first one in a while, she said.
When I got home, I was so exhausted I drifted past my adoptive parents in the second living room. They were listening to a Beach Boys record, holding each other on the wicker-basket couch. Why wouldn’t anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?7 I went up to my childhood bedroom, where I took three tablets of sleeping pills plus one of my roommate Julie’s Xanax, and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.
20
The second day of my investigation I woke up to the sound of the garage door opening and closing. I woke up in an extreme state of anxiety over the things I had to do. Already so much had happened, I learned things, I received information from Thomas, a bounteous source of clues. Put the knowledge to use, I said. Organize yourself! I dressed myself in plain, gray clothes like a warden’s, and went downstairs where there were two notes on the kitchen table.
The first one was in my adoptive mother’s handwriting: Helen, we both are in meetings this morning. What happened to Pam’s cake? It was meant for the lunch reception after the funeral. It looks like you ate all of it. It’s 65 degrees out and unseasonably warm.
The second was from my adoptive father:
PAM USED HER SPECIAL RECIPE.
THAT CAKE WAS FOR AFTER THE
FUNERAL, NOT FOR YOU.
I crumpled up the notes; of course that cake had a special purpose! It would be a good time to bake the pie as a response, but I was not a pie baker. I never was. I did not please people, I did not please myself. I noticed a box of pizza had been left out on the counter. Because it was so large and awkward, I took it out to the garbage cans in the driveway. Despite their obsession with organization and tidiness, my adoptive parents never properly stored their garbage cans and recycling bins. They always left them outside and sometimes at night the animals from the woods got into them and they tore apart the food packaging and left it strewn across the driveway. This morning I noticed there were two egg containers, a can of whipped cream, and an empty box of Trojan condoms, which I was sure did not belong to anyone in my adoptive family.
That morning it was unseasonably warm for the beginning of October. There was no one outside walking the dog or running errands. No one watched me. I closed my eyes. It was the beginning of a bright day, and I felt the brightness burn through my eyelids. When I opened them, I looked across the street at a large modern house, a box of glass. Behind the house a relatively unmolested forest spread out, where I never liked to walk or think because when I was a child, there had been rumors of a child kidnapping taking place in the middle of the forest, or perhaps it was said that some kind of ogre-man lived there and kept a little boy as his sex slave, later as I grew older and came to understand those rumors as fairy tales designed to teach children a lesson (don’t go anywhere without your parents, don’t go off with strangers), I still avoided the forest for the simple reason that I thought the neighbors would see me, as there was a two-story glass wall the length of the house facing the forest. And as far as I knew, my adoptive brother never went into the forest, he came up with all of his ideas, probably even his suicide plans, by pacing back and forth in his childhood bedroom, the main place of rest for him. I stood at the end of the driveway looking out at the forest behind the neighbor’s house.
He was not a flexible person, I remembered, and therefore he was very uncomfortable when he visited me in Manhattan. To live in Manhattan one has to be extremely flexible. I turned toward my childhood home. In order to survive in New York City one has to be willing to bend to the city’s whims. Bend to the city’s whims! I thought. Bend or perish! Sometimes you had to be flexible enough to withstand being trapped underground on a train car in the Bronx at three in the morning after a night of dancing and doing drugs, so said my roommate Julie, or it might mean to take what you wanted when you saw it, wherever you happened to be. I saw that happen often enough, mostly when I observed my troubled young people take what they wanted and I will admit that I did not encourage them and I did not discourage them; I simply looked around and saw a great number of things, I saw the city as a horn of plenty, and after I looked at everything that everyone else had, I thought why shouldn’t my troubled young people have whatever it is they’ve taken, let it be theirs! When I considered all the things they had taken, I was always shocked at how small and inconsequential everything was. Cigarettes and candy and chips and sunglasses and toys from the hanging-claw arcade game and plastic trinkets made in China that didn’t mean anything to anyone.
A squirrel darted out from a bush with a piece of pizza crust in its mouth. The name Zachary Moon came into my brain. Zachary Moon from high school and beyond, what would he have to say? I decided to walk to his childhood house, a house I knew well since as soon as I passed my driver’s test, I was forced to drive there every weekend, dropping off and picking up, so my adoptive brother would have at least one male friend. Since I had been home, I thought he had no friends, but that wasn’t right.
Get it right, I said to no one. Organize yourself!
Perhaps he had more than two friends. Perhaps Zachary Moon’s parents would be home and I could question them. I went through the center of the suburb, and then in the direction of the city. People came out of their houses depressed and went into cars. The Moon house was on the edge of the suburb, right next to a small ceme
tery. On the way to the Moon residence, I stopped in at a gas station, and bought a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a bottle of water. To get to the house I had to walk through the cemetery, which disoriented me in the bright sun. I smoked a cigarette as I went up and down large mounds of grass, and each time I descended one, the gravestones, grand and imposing, overwhelmed me. I smoked another cigarette. It took me over an hour to reach the Moon house, a mini-mansion that housed nine children plus the two parents. There was a rundown tennis court in the front lawn, the net in shreds. I walked up the gravel driveway. I remembered the exact sound the car wheels made when I put the car in reverse. I went to the door and rang the doorbell. I waited five minutes. No one answered. People were at work, I thought. The last time I dropped off my adoptive brother at this house, he and Zachary Moon were smoking cigarettes in the car, which at the time distressed and infuriated me. After ten minutes of meditative thinking and smoking my own cigarettes, I gave up and left.
On my way back toward the cemetery, I ran into what I could only assume were the parents. I startled them out of a leisurely walk through the neighborhood. They were older than I expected and I was shocked to see they were Asian, perhaps Korean. It came back to me that they were the two Asian parents in a mansion on the edge of the suburb. They had converted to Christianity and adopted nine children of various ethnicities and abilities. The friend was white, perhaps with a disability. I stubbed out my cigarette quickly and asked them if they remembered my adoptive brother.
Oh yes, said Mrs. Moon. He was quiet and well-behaved. I really was so thankful he became friends with Zachary.
I told them he recently committed suicide; I began to go over the six most common reasons, and once I got to the part about losing control I noticed Mr. Moon pulling on his wife’s arm.
It’s not good to talk like this, he said. You’re upsetting her. Look at yourself.
21
They told me nothing. I hadn’t imagined anything, so it was nearly impossible to be disappointed, but still they told me nothing to help my investigation. I wandered through the cemetery, which put me in a philosophical mood, then took the bus, a foul-smelling vehicle, back to my childhood neighborhood. As I approached the house, I noticed the garage door was open. I smoked a cigarette, almost hoping my adoptive parents would come out and ask me what I was doing, what was wrong with me.
Inside the garage, I noticed something out of the ordinary. There was a car, my adoptive brother’s car, a cheap black Honda with the 666 license plate that my adoptive mother considered paying an exorbitant sum to have changed, the devil’s car, she shuddered, a Satan mobile. I looked at it for a while. What was so out of the ordinary was that it was parked in the garage at all, as the garage was for my adoptive parents’ cars, the children’s cars were always parked in the driveway, now his car was parked in the garage. The car’s exterior, freshly washed and gleaming like something out of THE BOOK OF CARS, reflected my disgusting appearance, my eyes looked wide and frightened. The car was unlocked, and as soon as I opened the passenger door, my nose was assaulted by the smell of cleaning disinfectant. For a few minutes, I sat in the front seat, dizzy from the fumes. There was a travel-sized pack of tissues on the floor and several quarters in the cup holder. Other than that, it was in immaculate condition. I got out and slammed shut the door. Looking at his car almost brought a tear to my eye. They’ll have to sell it, I said to no one. My adoptive father bought it for him when he graduated high school. There was a lot of tension over whether he would graduate on time. My adoptive father used the car as a way to motivate him to finish high school. It was always like that with my adoptive father. There were always bribes and rewards, even when we were little children, we would make deals with him to get things we wanted. With my adoptive mother we prayed for the things we wanted, and with my adoptive father we bartered. Before I left the garage, I found a spray can of insecticide.
I went into the house and brought the can up to my childhood bedroom, where I sprayed the flowerpot with the red dots. Before I sprayed them, the red dots moved very quickly. It was pleasant to see the spray turn into a white foam that froze the squiggling red dots. I pressed pause on their squiggling; then I ended their lives. It was so enjoyable to have an immediate and visible effect on something, I used up the entire can. All of the flowerpots on the sill were coated in a thick white foam like a man’s shaving cream.
Looking at the white foam covering the red dots, I felt something close to sexual desire, the first time in over a year. I went into the bathroom next to my adoptive brother’s bedroom, grabbed a towel, went back to my room, locked the door, took off my pants, and rolled the towel into a tube shape and rubbed myself against it as I stared at the clouds of beautiful white foam and thought of a scene from The Piano Teacher, when the woman gets out of her overbearing mother’s apartment, goes to an adult video store, rents a private booth, and sniffs a tissue. I kept looking at the foam and thinking of the tissue, foam, tissue, foam, tissue. I was on the floor with the towel for an hour. Satisfied, I brushed off the pubic hairs, then folded the towel and returned it to the bathroom. I put my pants on.
The house was as empty as I had left it. More flowers had been delivered and left on the front doorstep. It took me half an hour to bring in all the baskets, amongst three wreaths and five bouquets. The foyer was now full of wreaths and bouquets and cards. I collected all the flowers from their paper wrappers and baskets and placed them into the mop bucket from cleaning the hallway. It was my understanding that standing up in water helped the flowers stay fresh. I looked around for a box with my black sweater, but there were no boxes. The cards were addressed to my adoptive parents, and I noticed I wasn’t mentioned in them, it was as if I didn’t exist, perhaps because no one had seen me in years, even a few of my relatives forgot me.
To Mary and Paul, went the cards, and it was strange seeing my adoptive parents’ names like that, it jarred me into realizing that they were actual people in the world and not everyone had the special, troubled, and difficult relationality as I did with them. To some people, to most people in fact, they were just Mary and Paul. Simple Mary and Paul, Mary and Paul in the Catholic fortress, Mary and Paul with the coupons.
The more I said their names, the more I wondered if they were somehow at fault. It was impossible for me not to connect them to him and his suicide. He lived with them his entire life. Did living with them his entire life somehow drive him to suicide? Perhaps it forced him into depression, which led him to suicide. When someone commits suicide, we must look at the parents first in order to assess where to put the blame, then we can look at the siblings, and after we have examined those relations, we can look elsewhere, at girlfriends and boyfriends, and teachers and coaches, but first we must always begin with the nuclear family unit, we need to examine the intention and force of the members in relation to one another in order to assess the level of guilt and shame appropriate to each survivor-member. I stood in the foyer, paralyzed.
The two living rooms and dining room were brightly lit and if a stranger had walked by a couple hours ago and looked in and observed all the flowers and wreaths and warmth and brightness, he might have felt gladness in his heart, for it was indeed a very sentimental-looking tableau, it looked like something out of Currier and Ives.
Hello? I called out. Is anyone home?
No one answered.
Nothing had changed except the arrival of the flowers, etc.
I went into my adoptive father’s study, where I switched on the light, and sat in the chair. It was a leather chair that had an animal smell. I reviewed everything that had happened so far. The main thing that stood out to me was the image of my adoptive brother covering his mouth with one hand while he spoke. I tried to picture his teeth; I knew they were white and nicely shaped, possibly because he was the only one who kept up with his twice-yearly cleanings by the same dentist from our childhood. Our childhood dentist sang songs from the ’60s while he cleaned, and scaled, and examined, almost e
veryone hated the singing, it made going to the dentist unbearable, so even my adoptive mother stopped going. They never found a new one, the idea of searching for a more expensive, professional dentist was unthinkable to them. Better not to go at all, they thought.
I was the only one who didn’t mind the singing dentist. What really bothered me about going to my childhood dentist was the hygienist who always had her breasts in my face. She asked me every visit without fail if I had a boyfriend and every time I snorted with disgust. She told me once about her trip to Cancún with her boyfriend, her lover, she called him. I was probably in high school when she started asking whether or not I had a boyfriend and when she talked about hers, I pictured them fucking, which was so nauseating and appalling, I almost enjoyed it.
I turned on my adoptive father’s computer and I tracked down the phone number of the dentist’s office after a simple internet search. It became very clear to me what I would have to do: I would call the office and ask if my adoptive brother had been a recent patient. If I remembered correctly, the dentist’s office always kept immaculate records.
For the first time since I had been home, I knew EXACTLY what to do, I said to no one. When I called the number a receptionist answered pleasantly. I introduced myself and before she could speak, I asked her to picture in her head my adoptive brother, I described for her what he looked like, what our adoptive mother looked like, what I looked like, etc. Start with the physical and then proceed to the mental. I told her in great detail what happened to him, and she seemed utterly shocked.
Oh no, she said, oh no.
The pleasantry drained out of her voice and then there was a distracted silence.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 9