Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  “They were people with problems,” his mom said. “I looked it up. They couldn’t walk and were left to sit on a porch all day, and cruel people called them names and they defended themselves the best they could. And now they are all dead. End of story.” Then she drove him through the cemetery and they both sat on the lap of the dead woman who looked like the music teacher. Harvey told her how they say if you kiss her you will die, and she said that was why they were there. To prove to him that that was nonsense.

  “See?” his mama said, and before Harvey could stop her, she kissed the woman’s hard face and he really wishes she had not done that.

  Then they drove out to the Dog House but Harvey didn’t feel like eating. His mama said it seemed wrong that the place was still open, even though the people who owned the business couldn’t help that a bad person had gone in there and murdered that girl. Harvey watched the upstairs window the whole time, because if her ghost was there, he knew that was where she would be. And if only Super Monkey had been there that night the mean doctor came. “Please, Mr. Doctor, don’t kill her,” he would have said. “She has a little boy. She makes people happy with hot dogs. She can make you a hot dog, like a Chihuahua or a Collie. She won’t tell nobody you were about to do a bad thing and then you can maybe do a good thing instead.”

  Harvey’s mama says, “It’s okay, Harvey,” and he wants to believe her, especially when it’s just the two of them and he hears their ghost coming in the back door. He knows the ghost has been in his room too and he wants to open his eyes but is afraid to, because what if it got mad? Then what?

  “It’s okay, Harvey,” she said, but when he asked her to explain what he’d heard about a woman’s head that was found in a freezer and those children murdered by their daddy and left in the river, his mother took in a great big breath like the Big Bad Wolf and then put her head down. “Jason didn’t tell me that,” he said and that was true. He heard those stories at school. One kid saw it on the news and another has an uncle who is a fireman and went there to help those children. Kids listen to stories like that so Harvey told everyone at school what Jason told him, about a boy in a long black coat killing kids at school, and then the teacher said she needed Harvey’s help with something. She had over a thousand paper clips that needed to be divided up into colors and if he did all that quietly, he would get a page of stickers to take home, either Ninja Turtle ones or puppies. He took the Turtles. He can make a picture for his mom, because she likes things with shells, and he can put something in Klingon. Something good, like Cowabunga or Roses is red.

  Lil

  February 7, 2005

  Newton

  Today, Becca asked what I remember about that last night with my mother:

  That night, my mother called out, “Good night, Lilliput,” and then she said something to my dad that left me puzzled. Had she known what was up ahead, she would have chosen her last words with great care, but of course, had she known, she wouldn’t have gone at all. A premonition would have kept her there with us and perhaps her last words to me, “Good night, Lilliput,” could have lingered there on my scalp, her warm breath in my hair. She would have curled there beside me. If she had been angry with my father, they would have resolved it and been sitting together at the kitchen table when I woke up.

  It would have been so much easier if she had been diagnosed with something. We would have treated her illness like Gladys Fitzhue’s visit, when she came to town and wouldn’t leave. It was awful, but the visit pulled the three of us closer than we had ever been; they let me climb in their bed with them as we told the despicable things she had said and done that day, the way she insisted on cloth napkins and a china cup and extended her pinkie to bite into her toast but then chewed with her mouth open and also belched as loud as a man when she thought we couldn’t hear. She gossiped and even admitted she sometimes told people she liked their hair or clothes when she didn’t so she would look better.

  We huddled there laughing. All it took was for one of us to offer a fake belch and lift a pinkie in the air. Lying there between them, the room was so dark I could barely trace the lines of my mother’s dresser and the rack where my father hung his coat, Gladys Fitzhue down the hall, snoring and burping away, with no knowledge of all we had whispered about her, my father’s arm curled up and over his pillow, my mother’s warm backside safely tucking me in, their breath in the rhythm of sleep. I had no idea how hard life could be. I lay there safe and pretending we were on a boat far out at sea—my father’s snores, the ocean, my mother’s sighs, the wind.

  She said, “Good night, Lilliput,” using the pet name she had called me as long as I remember. When I was in high school and had to read “Gulliver’s Travels,” I was shocked to find my name there, a name I thought she had made up herself. She was not a reader, and so I suspect it was something my father had probably said first and then she’d claimed for her own; in fact, I’m sure of it, because later he told me how she should have called me “Lilliputian”: a person and not a place. Had they aged together, she would have grown to love the bits and pieces of knowledge he housed in his mind, the mechanics of which were not unlike the many watches he worked on there at Waltham Watch. He was precise and constant, and she was anything but; what brought me a great sense of security in life (his steady sameness) probably bored her. In fact, I sometimes have worried that my steady sameness bores your father.

  My mother said dance is making something from nothing, that you use your body to stir the molecules, paint a picture on the air that then only lasts in memory. It was like when she once gave me a paintbrush and can of water and told me I could paint anything I wanted anywhere in the house. I painted the front porch, and then I painted the front door. I painted my name, and I painted a bird, wispy wings like a swan, like the many photos my mother had shown me of dancers, feathery circles moving in unison, like the ghostly ones all in white—the wilis, those restless creatures in “Giselle.” My mother told me the story before we saw a performance, and I cried for days thinking of her, a girl dead from a broken heart, and then all of the other girls, an epidemic of them rising from their graves to torment the men who had hurt them. We agreed that was the good part, they at least got a turn, but how tragic that they had to die to get there. I didn’t want to be one of them, these angry girls with their unrequited loves. I wanted to be Swanhilda in “Coppélia”; I wanted laughter and comedy and happily ever after.

  My mother once told me Anna Pavlova’s dying request was to hold her swan costume and that her last words were “Play that measure very softly.” In a performance right after her death, a single spotlight marked the stage where she should have been dancing. My father asked why she was always filling my head with such sad things. We were in their bedroom, sitting on the bed, my mother trying once again to teach me how to make a French knot in the pillowcase she was letting me embroider, and she just shook her head, a needle threaded with pale-pink floss in her hand, and she told him he knew nothing about romance, that ballet is full of the heartbreak of romance: “Giselle” and “Petrushka” and “Swan Lake.”

  “Good night, Lilliput,” my mother said, and then she said something to my father, who was seated in his chair, listening to the radio, as he usually was that time of day. And then she was gone from our lives.

  My mother had said she was teaching a dance lesson that night, something she had been doing for a couple of years. She didn’t say a private client; she didn’t say in a nightclub. She said, “Good night, Lilliput.” Then she said, “See ya, dope,” or did she say, “I can’t cope,” or, “I have no hope,” or, “Not me, nope”? I once asked my father what she’d said to him, and he said he couldn’t recall, that he didn’t remember her saying anything other than “Leave the light on,” which was what she always said.

  Then, all we knew in that early morning light was that the hall lamp was still on and she had not come home.

  She had told me about the Cocoanut Grove one night when I sat on the bed and watched her
getting ready for sleep. She put big white circles of cold cream around her eyes and then tissued off the mascara, the eyeliner, saving a corner to dab all around her lips. She tied her hair in a turban, something she had seen Rita Hayworth do in a movie.

  “Stars are painted on the ceiling,” she said. “It can be a blizzard outdoors or pouring rain, but inside, it’s always warm, and the palms are swaying and the stars are shining and the music is playing. On a beautiful night, they can even open the ceiling to the real night sky.” There were zebra-skin couches, she told me, and palm trees that looked so real you needed to go up and touch them, and famous people were always surrounding the bandstand and the long shiny bar.

  My father had taken her there for her birthday, and it was all she’d talked about for weeks after. There were leather walls and a rolling stage: She had seen Jimmy Durante. She had seen Rudy Vallee. She turned then and looked at me, her whole body animated with the descriptions of what people were wearing. One woman wore a floor-length sable with matching hat, and another was in leopard. She said that was the kind of place where people got discovered; she had even heard about a young woman who got noticed just because she looked like Claudette Colbert.

  Just a couple of weeks before I lost my mother, she called me into the kitchen to explain menstruation and to tell me where she kept her pads. I was horrified at the time, and even cried and asked why she was doing that to me. I thought she had called me in there to taste what she was cooking or to tell me something funny. Why, on that beautiful afternoon, was she telling me those things? And now, I feel so lucky that she was the one to tell me. and that I remember it all so clearly.

  “Used to be mothers would slap their daughters when this happened.” My mother laughed. “But I would never do that to you,” she said, and waited for me to look up. “It’s a good thing. It is. It’s how I have you.”

  Sometimes, I close my eyes and work hard to hear that again: “It’s how I have you.” The limbs on the tree outside the kitchen window were bare, the sky gray and promising snow. She had just cut up a chicken and the pimply-skinned parts lay sprawled there on the counter, her damp hands warm on my back. Sometimes, I stay there as long as I can.

  So many times, I have followed what I assume was her path. My mother would have taken the train and gotten off at Tremont Street. I have gone and stood on that corner of Piedmont Street. Now, it is hard to even find, or it was the last time Frank indulged me and went along, because it was icy and because he said I was way too old to be out walking around the city like that. There’s a parking garage and a hotel (the old Radisson, now something like the Revere). It’s the same geography, the same earth below all the glass and metal and concrete; it’s as close as I could get.

  I always thought that if I stood very still and turned my ear just right that I might be able to hear it: the music, the clink of glasses and laughter, the screams slow at first and then rising, the roar of fire. There are people who claim to have seen ghosts there, and I have always wished I would. There is a pull more powerful than anything I can describe; it is not unlike the pull of homesickness, and the way that you can feel homesick for a time and a place even when you know that life was not good then. You might miss a particular tree outside your window or a sweater you owned at the time, or the place you liked to sit at the end of the day. You might miss the wave of hope that years stretching ahead of you lends even in the darkest of times. I think I will always think of that place, to get as close as life might allow.

  That Sunday morning was cold and gray, and I remember going with my father from place to place and then finally sitting there in the lobby of Massachusetts General Hospital, the sky still misting while we waited there with all the others to eventually be sent across town. I overheard someone say that he wasn’t sure what to hope for, what was best to hope for in such a situation. There were many stories of those burned beyond recognition. There were people with the letter M on their foreheads, lipsticked in the frenzy and haste of the night before, marking who had been given morphine and who had not.

  Perhaps the best we could have hoped for is that she had left us: that sometime in the night she had made a decision and ridden away to a brand-new life, that somewhere, perhaps in a car with someone we didn’t know, perhaps in a bed with someone we didn’t know, she was feeling heartbroken, knowing all that she would miss about my father and me. She would miss that chestnut tree at the end of our street and the Christmas decorations she had collected. She would miss going to the Embassy Theatre, where she had just seen “To Be or Not to Be,” a comedy that was not so funny when you knew that Carole Lombard had died in a plane crash just before the movie came out. That’s what she had said at the time, and that is the kind of irony she would have seized on if she had had the power to send a message from the grave, to rise up like the wilis and circle round me: “I had a premonition, Lily.”

  But that afternoon, I was still clinging to the possibility that maybe she had run away from home, gone to become the great dancer she thought she was destined to be, gone to walk someone else’s stairs in a home where I would one day find her and reconcile. She was in a car, the cold wind in her face, her scarf tied around her hair; she was in a warm bed, curled on her side in the way she always slept, eyes closed, hair mussed, her heart still beating.

  Shelley

  How can you possibly work on a grocery list while speculating about the case and still do your job? That’s probably what the judge will ask her, and she is still working on what to say: how it is like walking through a house where there are many televisions on and you tease out little threads from each, just enough to know what is going on even as you stay fixed and focused on the one in front of you. Come on down! She hears game-show applause and laughter and jingles. Then she hears: But I don’t understand. How can you carry the child of a man who was dead before you got pregnant? And then the soap opera music gets louder and louder, because it’s getting near the end of the hour and the end of the week.

  Her mother watched One Life to Live and All My Children. Her grandmother, who’d sometimes lived with them, watched the game shows. Her older brother watched reruns of old westerns—“Saddle up, Hoss. Find Little Joe”—which was totally out of character for somebody who stayed stoned all the time and loved Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols, but he did. He said he liked those simpler times, when you just shot whoever was fucking with you and then rode off into the sunset. She wishes she could tell him that is exactly what is going on in the world today, only there are no horses or sunsets or somebody like Ben Cartwright pontificating on whatever bit of a moral there might be. Shelley had loved Dawson’s Creek and MTV, but good luck getting time all by yourself with a television in that house.

  And now she does have time to herself, sometimes too much time, especially at night when Harvey is asleep and she starts to hear things. She certainly had not planned to add losing a job to her long to-do list, but there it is, or at least the possibility if they don’t find a way to forgive her for doodling and writing all kinds of other weird shit in the midst of a murder trial. She knew better. Of course she knew better, but this particular trial bothers her more than all the others, and that is saying a lot, because there have been some really terrifying ones!

  But still, she can explain how she is able to transcribe everything that is being said on the stand while thinking of a couple of other things, too. It’s no different than knowing the commercial break was about to bring her mother out into daylight (“Yes, I bought your cigarettes and took out the trash,” Shelley had said, instead of what she’d wanted to say, which is, Who in the fuck do you think you are watching television on your fat ass with no food in the house and then judging me?), or when the Ponderosa was signing off and her brother said, “Please leave me alone. I hate them as much as you do, so don’t take it out on me!” She can do that and still solve the word puzzles on Wheel of Fortune before her old grandmother (LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE, you old idiot). She can do that, and it is actually a soothin
g kind of thing to do when disturbing things are introduced into the world.

  And maybe, if the judge shows any signs of understanding, she will then say, I am alone, or Harvey is driving me crazy with all of his fears, or Now I am terrified at night, too. Or maybe she could show how sometimes she doodles while the judge pauses or someone takes a long time to answer a question. She could show how it looks like she just drew a little picture, when really it says: I am, I am, I can, I can. Marks, curves, horizontal, perpendicular. She learned Teeline, which some think is faster, but it looks so loud and harsh to her; she prefers Gregg, enough loops to soften and lower the volume. I can be good. I am good. Fuck whoever doesn’t think so.

  If Shelley were in a movie, she would pay attention to that old man appearing out of nowhere and saying he wants to see inside her house. There would be creepy music every time he rides by. A lot of the people she has seen convicted have at first seemed nice and normal. There was a serial killer who was also a religious grandmother. A special ed teacher teaching things that should never be taught. A preacher with purification rituals that involved children taking off their clothes. The last time the old man showed up at the door was when school was still in session and she was having to battle every day to make Harvey go. The man said he understood and he would keep trying; he gave her his phone number, and then he disappeared for a while and she thought maybe he’d forgotten, but lately she has seen his car again. He says he just wants to see inside once more and to wander around the yard, but the whole thing unnerves her. If she really thought he would look once and go away forever, she might, but there’s almost always a string attached. Nothing is that easy. He might be trying to buy that house back from her landlord, and where would that leave her?