The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet Read online

  “A stunning merger of form and content; a remarkable portrait-becomes-self-portrait; and something like a master class in complicity.”

  —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

  “The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is a revelation. By structuring the book in the unconventional form of a glossary, Kim Adrian allows the reader into the very intimate mechanics of her memory. Each page I read pulled me deeper under the book’s peculiar spell. Through Adrian’s rigorous attention to detail I found myself involuntarily drawn into her perspective, both as a child and a grown woman, hungry to make sense of this troubled family and this vibrantly unstable mother.”

  —Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

  “A vivid, vibrant glossary of a life. Adrian’s sharp prose and unique form combine to illustrate how powerfully our childhoods reverberate throughout our lives.”

  —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

  “This is desperately serious work, an exacting memoir that excavates, with compassion for all involved, the harrowingly repetitive patterns of abuse as well as moments of something like hope, crushable and delicate, thwarted, and yet renewable. An agonized, beautiful, unflinching account.”

  —Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories

  “Kim Adrian’s The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is an intimate portrait of the chaos and confusion of her mother’s mental illness. It’s also a deep meditation on storytelling itself—our desire to impose order, discover meaning, heal what is broken in us, and find a way to live with what can’t be fixed. Innovative in form and comprised of razor-sharp vignettes, Adrian summons a rare, hard-won compassion for both her mother and herself.”

  —Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry

  “Out of a fragmented, deeply moving, and dazzling narrative, the author pieces together a hard-won love, made possible by her refusal to give up. Many books are described as ‘brave’—this one really is.”

  —Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

  “The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet astonishes from ‘A’ all the way to the end. Funny, sad, unassuming, wise—exquisitely written—it will make you laugh, cry, wonder, and hope. You (and your vocabulary) will be the better for reading this beautiful book.”

  —Dinah Lenney, author of The Object Parade

  “Kim Adrian’s portrait of her mother—a woman who inflicts considerable damage, having had plenty done to her—is darkly comic, probing, and full of compassion. This memoir unfolds in the startling form of a glossary: an A-to-Z of key words that have shaped Adrian’s coming-to-terms with family and its mysteries. The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is altogether remarkable.”

  —Martha Cooley, author of Guesswork: A Reckoning With Loss

  “Adrian has written the logical, not chronological, order of her family’s treasures and skeletons. These snippets, snapshots, and sequences are the ABCs of answering those age-old family questions—who are we and what have we become? With compassion, humor, and heartrending love, Adrian uses the alphabet to compose redemption’s glossary.”

  —Amy Wallen, author of When We Were Ghouls

  The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

  American Lives

  Series editor: Tobias Wolff

  The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

  A Memoir

  Kim Adrian

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2018 by Kim Adrian. Portions of this memoir originally appeared as “The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet: Excerpts from a Memoir,” Agni 84 (2016): 171–86; “Five Photographs,” Ninth Letter 6, no. 1 (2009): 82–94; and “Eight Photographs,” New Ohio Review 4 (2008): 42–45.

  Publication of this volume was assisted by the Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of the University of Nebraska Press.

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image courtesy of the author.

  Author photo courtesy of the author.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Adrian, Kim, author.

  Title: The twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet: a memoir / Kim Adrian.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018] | Series: American lives

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057646

  ISBN 9781496201973 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496210265 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496210272 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496210289 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adrian, Kim. | Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. | Children of mentally ill mothers—United States—Biography. | Adult children of dysfunctional families—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HQ755.86 .A37 2018 | DDC 306.87—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057646

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To my family

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  T

  U

  V

  W

  XYZ

  &

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  In the interest of privacy, the names of all the people mentioned in this book have been changed.

  A

  Abecedarian

  One day as a child of eight or nine I went to school, sat down in my plastic chair, and proceeded to forget how to write. We’d been assigned a simple penmanship exercise, asked to transcribe a passage from a book into longhand script. I was the teacher’s pet that year, and until that bright morning, when my mind seemed suddenly to empty itself out, my cursive exercises had been held up by her as examples of what the other children should be working toward. I took pride in copying the letters almost exactly as they were drawn on the green paper band above the blackboard, albeit with a unique twist or two of my own. I was especially proud of the bold proportions of my capital P ’s, capital L’s, and small g’s, b’s, and d’s. In fact longhand was one of my favorite topics that year, allowing, as it seemed to, a back alley passage to the more adult realm of communication—where style and quickness were practical matters. But suddenly I was at a loss as to what exactly was supposed to happen between the pencil, the paper, and my hand, and I sat staring at the page for several minutes as a silent panic took root inside of me, somewhere behind my lungs, and grew.

  After a while the teacher came over to my desk.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, and in attempting to respond to what I knew was a perfectly simple question, I found it was not only my fingers but my mouth as well that could not form words.

  “Come on, kiddo. You tired or something?” She left without waiting for an answer and walked back to her desk, the tweedy chafing of her slacks, the flat clack-clack of her sensible heels the only noises in the classroom aside from the steady ticking of the enormous clock above the door and the busy hoarseness of cheap paper eating the soft graphite cores of twenty-five No. 2 pencils.

  Eventually, something inside of me clicked—freed up, just a little, just enough—and I began to write, copying the typed
text from the book onto the sheet of paper in front of me, my pencil racing across its lemony expanse, filling its blue lines with shimmering threads of silver-black arabesques. Amazed that such a ridiculously easy task had only moments earlier seemed so impossible, I drew a breath of relief and looked at my page. It seemed off somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. The words on my paper seemed weirdly empty, as empty as their typeset cousins had been a few minutes earlier, staring at me from the pages of the book. They signified something, surely, to someone—but not to me. Besides, my work clearly ended before it should have, stopping halfway down the page while the other children were already toiling at the bottom edges of their papers. My words looked bizarre—I knew that, but I couldn’t understand why. Still, I figured I’d completed the exercise as best I could and began reading for the next lesson. Glancing up at the teacher, I received a subtle wink as if to say, “That’s my girl.”

  A few minutes later, when she came to collect our papers, she stood for a long time at my desk, staring at my page as if it were not a penmanship exercise at all but some kind of strange animal she’d never laid eyes on.

  “What’s this?” she said. “You’ve run all the words together! How can I read this? You’ve forgotten to put spaces between the words.” She laughed then and said, “Or is this a little joke?”

  Ab Ovo

  A Latin term meaning, literally, “from the egg,” and, less literally, “from the beginning,” “from the very start,” or “from the origin.” But I’ve found that such things are often impossible to pinpoint.

  I could, of course, begin with my own birth, which took place in M—, New Jersey, 1966: a typical midcentury hospital affair, complete with a spinal block for my mother and, at first feeding, a bottle of man-made formula for me. Or I could start with my mother’s birth, a mere eighteen years earlier, since I’m never quite sure whose story this is anyway—hers or mine. It might even make sense to begin with my grandma Ellen’s entrance into this world in 1916 somewhere in Upstate New York because my mother’s mother was a tragic but fascinating woman, and many of the tragic but fascinating elements of her character informed the equally tragic and fascinating elements of my mother’s character, and those elements have informed if not exactly my own character (I’m more of an ordinary type), then at least my deepest narrative urges. In the end, however, the real start, the true egg of this story, probably lies with the first time my grandfather sexually molested my mother, which, according to what she’s told me, would have been around 1953, when she was five years old. Or maybe something cracked open and hatched roughly two decades later, the first time she picked me up and threw me down, which for a while was a bad habit of hers, one I sometimes think may have shaken something important out of me—perhaps the ability to decide where stories begin?

  Then again, it’s possible that the richest and most reliable place from which to begin this endeavor rests, instead, in a happy event—I’m thinking about the first time I met my husband, when we were both in college and he still had all that hair. Or maybe this story begins with the birth of our first child, a girl who’s now thirteen years old and likes to paint each of her fingernails a different color. Or maybe, instead, this elusive ovo is actually hidden in the birth of our second child, a little boy who just two days ago lost his first tooth. Yes, something did shift in me then, when Isaac was born—I remember it distinctly. I don’t know what to call it, this thing that started giving way (but has never completely gone) right around his birth, though I think it has something to do with being a daughter—with being my mother’s daughter.

  In those first few days following my son’s birth, six years ago now, I spent most of my time simply watching the newness stream off of him. I’d had a C-section, so he and I spent four days in the hospital while things healed. My mother, Linda, visited toward the end of that period, and the first thing she said when she walked into the room was that I looked weird. She refused to hold Isaac because she was afraid of giving him one of her infections, but she scrutinized me, as she always does, very carefully and at the same time from behind a thick pane of distortion, and what she said was: “Kimmy, you look so weird! So weird! Are you all right?” I wanted to tell her that I’d just had a baby and a not insignificant surgery. I wanted to point out that we were in a hospital room with a brand-new human being—my son—and that he was all there was to talk about, think about, or look at. But she seemed almost oblivious to her grandson’s presence and hardly glanced at him. Instead, what she did was explain, at some length and very high volume without the briefest of pauses (see *pressure of speech), why it had taken her so long to visit—something about her car. And then she told me about my sister’s birth, which, although it took place, of course, a long time ago, still seemed quite vivid in her mind as she described the protracted eighteen-hour labor that had resulted in the grinding away of the posterior wall of her vagina as well as portions of the anterior wall of her colon.

  As she spoke I watched my son, who was lying in his hospital bassinet with its tall plastic sides, staring intently into the mid-distance while poking first one foot and then the other into the air as if he were testing some kind of invisible, semiviscous surface, the whole time thoughtfully pressing his lips together and then, just as thoughtfully, unpressing them. It made me so happy just to watch him. Actually, all those days in the hospital had been for me indescribably happy. I wanted to tell my mother this, but she was still talking, now explaining how for many months after my sister’s birth, she’d leaked fecal matter from her vagina. So I didn’t tell her that I was happy. Instead, I watched my son, and even though my mother continued to talk, I no longer listened. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but what I’m saying is, it was, because I’d always been the kind of daughter who listened very closely to her mother. Very closely.

  Acceptance

  A good idea, although quite often the very presence of this word in one’s everyday vocabulary indicates conditions under which such an act (of acceptance) may prove difficult to implement. In my experience meditation and yoga are of tremendous use, as are homemade baked goods, luxury bath products, and the presence of young children. (See also *embarrassingly large collection of self-help books.)

  Adamant

  “I just remember the Dairy Queen,” says Tracy. We try to talk every weekend, long-distance: Boston to Chicago. Sunlight rakes through the openwork of the lace shawl I’ve draped across the bedroom window. Irregular polka dots of light scatter over the bed I share with my husband.

  “What do you mean, the Dairy Queen?”

  “Before we went to the bakery on Sunday mornings. Dad and I used to stop to get ice cream. That’s why it took so long.”

  “It did take a long time.”

  “Oreo Blizzards. I just remember those. I don’t know how you keep all that other crap in your head. All those memories.”

  “I don’t know how you don’t.”

  It’s something we often discuss, my sister and I—the different ways we remember our childhoods. “There are worse,” says Tracy, and she would know, having taught in a Chicago high school for nearly two decades to students who sometimes have crack addicts for mothers and convicts for fathers, to kids who sometimes get pregnant or shot dead before they’re halfway through freshman year. But I, for whatever reason, have always been clear about this: that time, those years—our childhoods—sucked. On this I am adamant.

  Of course, we had different childhoods, as siblings invariably do. For example, Tracy was my father’s favorite. I was my mother’s. Tracy was barely a year old at the time of our mother’s first suicide attempt, while I was three and saw the blood, the razor blade, and the paramedics firsthand. Tracy wasn’t quite two when our mother left us, and when she returned, Tracy was four, while I was already six. Beyond that, our natural temperaments are in many ways almost opposite. Those temperaments were often parsed by our mother, who liked to say that Tracy was athletic and I was artistic; Tracy good at math, I at
English; Tracy practical and happy-go-lucky, I dreamy and oversensitive. Tracy, she often said, was easygoing, but I was incredibly stubborn. If Tracy wanted a lollipop, she’d joke, you could promise to get it for her the next day and never hear about it again. But I have always had (as my mother still occasionally puts it) “the memory of an elephant.”

  Agoraphobia

  On one of her many cell phones, my mother calls to inform me that I am now her only link to the outside world. This is why, she says, I must do her grocery shopping.

  “I can’t do your grocery shopping, Mom. I have my own life. Remember? I have things to do.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “I can’t go out of my apartment anymore. I don’t know why, but as soon as I step foot out of this place, everything I do gets immediately fucked up. Everything I touch turns into a disaster. I don’t know if I just have really crappy karma or what, but everyone I meet seems to get angry at me, and it just works a whole lot better when I don’t leave the house.”

  Albatross

  I’ve wanted to tell this story for as long as I can remember wanting anything at all. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it’s not. I clearly remember waves of that rousing sensation—a kind of primitive narrative impulse—washing over me as far back as early childhood. But this story is complicated in the same way that mental illness is complicated. It has no *boundaries. There’s no up or down to it. No right or left.

  Amygdalae

  Rooted etymologically in Greek words meaning “almond tonsils,” referring to their tapered and somewhat pendulant shape, the amygdalae are a paired set of ganglia located at the base of the brain. Considered part of the limbic system, they control, in concert with the hippocampus, the processing of both memory and emotion and for this reason are considered the seat of our fight-flight-or-freeze impulses. In people with post-traumatic stress disorder, the amygdalae tend to be enlarged. According to my mother, who has a remarkable but perhaps distorted knowledge of brain anatomy (and whose amygdalae are “big as grapefruits”), people with PTSD often experience even the smallest decisions and most innocuous encounters as fight-flight-or-freeze situations, as a result of which their amygdalae are enaged in near constant activity. Hence the enlargement.