Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  “Oh, yes, you do,” I said. “Don’t be coy with me. Don’t hide there in your little lemony haze. I know your number.”

  “You know nothing,” she said, and then I can’t quite remember what else was said. I am pretty sure I told her that she was a little idiot and that you were a big idiot. I know I kept my hands in my pockets the whole time because they were shaking. I was more Marsha Mason/Jill Clayburgh, but I was trying to channel my best Glenda Jackson/Anne Bancroft, so somewhere in there I said, “Fuck you,” at least twice, and then the last thing I said was that maybe after she fucked her way around the block several more times and gained some self-awareness, she might (I emphasized “might”) be intelligent enough to have a conversation with me.

  Then I turned and went to the door. I said, “I won’t hold my breath,” and she made some snide remark about my “behavior at the faculty party,” and before I could say anything else, I felt the jar of the door slamming behind me.

  The winter air was as brisk as a slap in the face, and I did something I have never done and probably never will again. I walked into a small bar there in Cambridge, all by myself before noon, and ordered Irish whiskey, my father’s drink, and then I sat staring out at the cold gray day. I realized then that my hands were still shaking, and when I looked into the dark mirror over the bar, I saw that ugly face we all make when trying hard not to cry. So I took deep breaths and replayed the whole scene in my mind. Nothing about it made me flinch, and no part of me regretted saying what I had said. I still felt superior in that moment. I thought if that was what you wanted, then you had no business with me. People don’t get stolen. People leave. They make choices, and choices have consequences. I said those exact words to you later that night, in fact.

  For the longest time, I imagined telling you this—my version. I felt I had a card in my pocket to pull out and play. I even imagined reaching an age where we might shake our heads and laugh about it, marvel at how we survived such difficult, desperate times. But then once we were back in a good place, I wanted to stay there, just as I had done all those years with my father. Humiliating you or myself was the last thing I wanted, and so we kept moving forward, time eroding my hurt and anger.

  You never said that you were sorry, but I knew you were. I knew by your attention, and your patience if I was having a bad day. I knew by the way you sometimes came and stood near me when I was cooking or doing the dishes, your hand on my back. I think you just never found the right words.

  November 1999

  When I was a girl, I wrote a letter to my mother. “Are you here?” I asked her. “Will you please let me know that you are?” And then I wedged it into a little hole in the kitchen cabinet we both knew about; we had decided one rainy afternoon that it was a wonderful hiding place, and she’d tucked a $10 bill in there and then held a finger to her lips. The money was long gone when I inserted my note.

  Jeff, do you remember when you took a whole carton of my cigarettes and soaked it with the garden hose? I wanted to make you work and pay me back, but your father called it “an act of civil disobedience” and sided with your concern about my health and my recent case of bronchitis. You, who the very next year, when you were in high school, would start smoking yourself, probably to hide the fact that you were smoking marijuana all the time, and, no, cigarettes didn’t work to mask the smell, and neither did the incense burning in your room, and neither did gargling Lavoris.

  That was around the same time you were begging to go to church, much to my surprise and your father’s delight, and you were playing electric guitar and drums in the sanctuary, and some were claiming to be high on Jesus, though I suspected that wasn’t all. “Day by Day” and so on. It was when you both began questioning us, examining us, striving to find your own way and do it better.

  As parents, we pack your bags and strap them to your little backs before you are even old enough to carry them, and then you have to spend the rest of your life unpacking and figuring it all out. Sometimes, I feel I can see it all spread out in front of me—dates and patterns, a clear path emerging, the design, the words that might define me, carved in stone.

  November 28, 1982

  I have never gotten over what I felt standing there at the Foundling Hospital, that wheel, wood scarred, the darkness up under the eaves, how hard to turn and leave a life behind. Once again, it is November 28—but 40 years later. I am stunned by the passage of these years and how there remains a part of me that is just the same.

  A woman in my childhood neighborhood, Mrs. Rubinstein, told how on Yom Kippur she would throw bread on the water to cast away her sins and my mother said she wanted to do that but thought she might have to go into the city where there are a lot of ducks eager to eat them up! We all laughed. When I asked Mrs. Rubinstein if it really works, she assured me that if you were sincere, then indeed it did.

  December 7, 2013

  I miss how fast I used to be, my mind so sharp, like it was on fire, spitting out several ideas at once, and I could hold them all in the palm of my hand. Now I sometimes wake and it takes a minute to remember where I am. Just the other day, I woke to the sound of the snow shovel, and it was a calm peaceful sound, from the street in front of our house, and I imagined my father, and I knew just what he was wearing, that heavy black wool overcoat, shovel in his hand, my mother in the kitchen sipping a cup of coffee.

  I really think my dad stayed alive because of me; a lot of people might have chosen a different course, but he hung in there, giving me all that he was able. I think it is why I write these letters. I want you to know things like that. Sometimes, I imagine myself on the platform waiting for the train. I stand there in the winter chill, and it is always dusk, with Christmas lights slung up into the bare branches of trees. I hear music and laughter and glasses clinking. And as I stand there, breathing into the warmth of the scarf around my neck, I think of you two.

  If your father is still here when I am not, please remind him of our word. Tell him I said, “Just because the Houdinis didn’t succeed doesn’t mean that we can’t.” I feel my mother has come and gone so many times over the years. In my dreams, in the wind, in odd little meetings with strangers when just the right word is said.

  I was 15 years old when I went to the Embassy Theatre with my friend Jean Burr, and we both sat there sobbing to watch poor Moira Shearer dance to her death in “The Red Shoes.” I remember looking up at the stars on the ceiling of that beautiful place and thinking how my mother had described the ceiling of the Cocoanut Grove, designed to make you feel you were under a warm summer sky, even on the coldest of nights. I held on to Jean’s arm and thought how my mother would have loved that movie.

  We stood there on Moody Street afterward, still wiping our eyes and blowing our noses, laughing at how we must look to those passing by and around us on the sidewalk. The streetlights were on, and we hugged before parting ways, and I remember I lied to my father when he asked about the movie. I said it was something silly based on an old fairy tale; I told him that he wouldn’t like it at all but that there was a film coming soon that starred Johnny Mack Brown that I bet he’d want to see.

  Then I’m on that wintry platform waiting for the train. I smell the river. I see the lights. And when the train approaches, the ground vibrates beneath my feet.

  November 28, 1980

  Every November 28 at 10:15, I stop and take a long inhale of my cigarette, and then I hold it as long as I am able. Some years, I have driven and parked there near Shawmut Street or sat in the lobby of the Radisson. Sometimes, I just walk outside to be alone. A lot can happen in 12 minutes.

  November 28, 1991

  Something I have never stopped thinking about: fate?

  There was a handsome young man from Missouri whose photograph filled the newspapers in the aftermath of the fire. He became the face of survival and hope in the wake of so much grief. No human had ever been burned so badly and lived. Everyone, even the young man, asked how he had survived. He, himself, asked why. He wanted to
die at times, and perhaps if he’d been able to walk, he might’ve just done that, flown from a window when no one was looking, like another young man had done when he could not live with his wife’s death and the thought that he could have done more to find her that night. But the young man from Missouri lived, and after months and months of trials and failures, he rose from his bed and walked. And then he fell in love and got married and eventually returned to his beloved home in Missouri, only to be in a freak car accident 10 years later, pinned and waiting for help, when a gas leak engulfed him in flames. So, what does that even mean? Did some great soul out there simply delay fate so he could experience love and some happiness in his brief life? Did someone out there say, “Please, he’s just a boy.”

  November 2015

  Southern Pines

  Sometimes, I wake thinking I am in my childhood bed. There is ice on the window, a hairline crack in the glass ceiling light. Home is that childhood bed on School Street, and home is Grove Street, where you grew up, and now home is here with your father, here in this humid world where I feel I live in a terrarium, a can of oxygen trailing me like an obedient dog.

  I don’t look like that girl on School Street, but I am still her.

  I miss Grove Street. I miss the radiators, and the large mirror plastered into the wall. I miss the marks we left on the pantry door, measuring your heights over the years, the smudge on the wall I could never clean, where Rudolf curled each night. I miss going to Mount Feake, where my parents are buried, there on the river, there within sight of the building where my father worked his whole adult life. They are there side by side, as if nothing ever happened, and who would even know their story if I didn’t tell it? Perhaps sometime you will go and visit them.

  Becca, did I ever tell you that my mother always wanted an engagement ring and she wanted a Philco record player? She told me I should grow up to have both, and a lot of other things, too. I’m not sure why the ring meant so much to her (perhaps an expression of romance). She would have been disappointed that your father did not give me one either, that we went the more practical route and put a down payment on a car. But we have always had a stereo of some kind, and more important than that, we have had time.

  I will always remember the day I looked over at your father, realizing how lucky that we had even found each other, and luckier still that we had survived some hard times. I suppose some of us have to see the edge before we understand how good it all is, and then if lucky, you still have time on the other side.

  November 28, 1966

  Newton

  It’s November 28, and I am out here on the back porch to remember the time. Frank is inside watching “The Big Valley,” with the promise to get me up-to-date at the first commercial when I return. We let the kids watch “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” since that’s what all the kids are talking about at school these days. Becca says the girls in her class fight over who is best-looking: Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuryakin. I said I prefer the Russian (I think he’s quite handsome, in fact), and she all but threw a tantrum, saying it was terrible for me to say that with her daddy sitting right there. I think this is what they call “a stage,” but Frank laughed and said, Who knew there would be so many stages? He said “goddamn stages.” He’s going up for tenure, so it was good to hear him laugh, even if at her expense, because it has been a while.

  I can see the blue light of the television in the Walkers’ house, their cat sitting in a windowsill, begging to get in, and I don’t blame her, because it’s cold. I have my big coat over my nightgown. Boots, scarf, hat. It’s tempting to go back inside, but I prefer the silence. It’s cold but clear, with a slip of a moon. It is 10:15.

  February 17, 2016

  Southern Pines

  Your father has said that when bad health comes his way, he plans to launch himself off the longest pier, take arsenic, tie a noose, or hold a gun to his own head. Not me, I tell him. Not me. I want to see Misty Copeland dance. I want to be a great-grandmother. I want to go back and walk Charles Street on a dark, snowy night just one more time, to peer in the windows of the card shop with the big fat cat licking her paws and then make my way across the Public Garden. I want to stand on the corner of Piedmont Street and listen: first, there is jazz, cool soul-defining jazz, and the clink of glasses and the murmured laughs, and then there is a hiss, a sizzle, a roar, a deafening roar, and somewhere in it all I will hear my mother; I will hear her as clear as a bell.

  March 8, 2017

  I woke today feeling afraid; I am afraid of losing your father. I am afraid of the distance he is keeping, and I feel it every time he walks out the door. I try to read or watch the television or the brightly colored Easter egg men passing by on the golf course, or I listen to music, but what I am really listening for is the door. He has promised that he would never do anything without letting me know, but as much as I want to trust him, there’s something that keeps me off balance. After all, I have promised him not to go out and smoke when here alone, but I often do.

  March 30, 2017

  Dear Frank,

  I am writing this note, and I want you to stick it in your wallet. I want you to keep it and read it often. Do NOT leave this house without telling me. Do NOT leave this Earth without telling me. If you do, I will be so mad at you, madder than I have ever been. I love you more than ever

  —Lil

  Shelley

  Shelley has never seen the courtroom so full, like something out of a movie. There is even a television crew from Raleigh, and she can see out the window that there are people waiting on the lawn. Her fingers are perched, like a concert pianist’s, on the keyboard, so much better than that contraption she wore in Atlanta.

  The jurors settle into their seats, twelve people looking very tired, like in that movie she loves so much with Henry Fonda. Jason had to read the play in high school, and the two of them rented the movie and watched it twice afterward. From the pictures early in the trial, Shelley has not been able to forget the image of the girl there naked in her chair with the needle in her arm. Her thin, pale body made Shelley ache with cold, and she kept thinking how she wanted to take the afghan there behind the girl on the chair and wrap it around her. The friend, Joanna, had testified that was the young woman’s favorite place to sit, that it faced the sunset and that the chair had once belonged to her mother, the only belonging she had from her mother, and Shelley realized that day that she really has nothing that belonged to her mother; at the time, she wanted nothing to remind her and took only a couple of things that had once been her brother’s—the stuffed dog, the Saint Christopher medallion he wore one summer, not because he believed but because everyone was wearing them and a girl he liked had given it to him for Christmas. He said the girl had said it would protect him; he’d laughed and said, “Good luck with that,” and yet he wore it faithfully that whole summer.

  Who could leave someone that way? Cold and naked in a chair? Did she ask him to stay? Or did she tell him to leave her alone. “Leave me alone.” That’s what Princess Diana said when people tried to get her from the back of that car in the tunnel. Shelley had read that in a magazine. She said, “Oh my God.” And she said, “Leave me alone.”

  Harvey doesn’t mean to get in trouble, she will tell the teacher. He’s a sweet, good boy who is afraid. That’s all. Then she will tell how he built a Lego structure that was a camp for runaway turtles and salamanders and skinks who need someone to love them. She will say, He’s a good boy. He just really misses his brother.

  “He took an innocent life,” the prosecutor had said, “just because she was in his way.”

  The room is silent now, finally silent, and tense with the waiting.

  “Guilty,” the jurors all say. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. And the courtroom rings with a thunderous applause that brings tears to Shelley’s eyes. The friend, Joanna, runs over and hugs all the old people who have been there every day of the trial. Their girl vindicated—C. J., her name was C. J.—if not returned to life. And the nasty jack-
o’-lantern smirks and looks at the judge like he’d like to kill her. And this is where on another day, if Shelley was working on her story version of it all, she would have the judge leap over that railing and beat the shit out of him, but she doesn’t dare type that. She types, Guilty. She describes the thunderous applause that now has gone for over three minutes and scans the crowd for any sign of anyone she might recognize.

  She reaches into her pocket for a Tic Tac, just in case she has to talk up close to anyone, and pulls out what Harvey must have slipped there this morning, an old empty matchbook from a place she’s never heard of—the Lorraine Hotel—with a little note written on paper from his wide-ruled writing tablet: You and my Dad shud go hear. The matchbook looks about a hundred years old and says: 100 modern rooms, air-conditioned for your comfort. Where on earth does he find these things? And doesn’t she wish they could be there in air-conditioned comfort, in a cool, dark room with crisp, clean sheets and a long worry-free afternoon up ahead. Another chance.

  Frank

  When Frank and Lil rode over to see Preston’s old house that first time, he was hit with a kind of sad longing that surprised him; perhaps it was simply the reminder of how many years had come and gone, and how for a long time it had been easy to fool himself, to continue to picture his mother alive and walking around that yard, tending to her flowers. She liked to cut blooms from the large magnolia tree that is no longer there, and float them in a silver bowl, the fragrance filling the small dining room. When Frank was a boy, it shaded a whole corner of the yard, the perfect climbing tree and an easy place to hide. The pods of the magnolia looked a lot like hand grenades, and Frank and the other boys in the neighborhood stockpiled them for when they played war.