Alice Sebold Read online

  Grief was coming heavily now. Something about being outside, being in the fresh air, away from the acrid scent of her and the mothball smell of the closed-up house. My mother lay in her blanketed cocoon on the small raised side porch, which thankfully was at least partially shielded from the next-door neighbors by vine-covered latticework.

  I went down the three stairs to the cinder-block path and walked around to the back of the porch, where as a child I had sat and kicked my legs over the edge and where now my mother lay as if on a shipping-and-receiving shelf. I was sweating, but I knew by the slant of the sun at my back that it would be less than an hour before light slipped below the houses that surrounded my mother’s and left us alone in the last long night we would spend together.

  I touched her treasured braid again. Some years ago her hair had passed out of its wiry stage and become soft. It had always been her crowning glory. Her brief life as a lingerie model before she met my father was one I’d envied growing up. Whatever else she was, she had been the most beautiful mother in the neighborhood, and watching her had taught me everything I knew about physical beauty. It was a bitter truth—my discovery—that daughters were not made in cookie-cutter patterns from the genes of their mothers alone. Random accidents of ancestry could blunt a nose or tip a forehead until beauty’s delicate tracery gave way to an ordinary Jane.

  Outside, with the air rushing over her, the fecal scent dissipated and I could think realistically again. I would not make it to the shed. What had I thought? The damage of dragging her down the three steps, of trying to heave her off the porch. And what would I fill the ancient bathtub with? Cold water from the backyard hose? The bathtub would be dirty and full of old lumber and broken bits of refuse that I would have to clean out. The last time I’d been in the shed, I’d noticed that my father’s tool board, with all the ghost shapes of tools, had fallen off the wall and pitched forward against the tub. What had I been thinking?

  “This is it, Mom,” I said. “This is as far as we go.”

  She did not smile or say “bitch” or wail some final lament. I like to think, when I think about it, that by that time she was busy taking in the scent of her garden, feeling the late-afternoon sun on her face, and that somehow in the moments that had elapsed since she’d last spoken, she’d forgotten she’d ever had a child and that, for so many years now, she’d had to pretend she loved it.

  I wish I could say that as my mother lay on the side porch and the wind began to pick up more and more so that the crows clinging on to the tops of the trees took flight, that she made it easy on me. That she pointedly listed all the sins she had committed during her long life.

  She was eighty-eight. The lines on her face were now the cross-hatchings of fine old porcelain. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing ragged. I looked at the tops of the empty trees. There is no excuse to give, I know, so here is what I did: I took the towels with which I had meant to bathe her, and not thinking that near the latticework or by the back fence there might stand a witness, I smashed these downy towels into my mother’s face. Once begun, I did not stop. She struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms. First her diamonds and then her rubies briefly flickered in the light. I pushed down harder. The towels shifted, and I saw her eyes. I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died.

  TWO

  My clues to my mother’s life before me were not many. It took me a while to notice that almost all of them—the Steuben glass paperweights, the sterling silver picture frames, the Tiffany rattles that were sent a dozen strong before she miscarried her first, then second, child—were chipped or dented, cracked or blackened in various ways. Almost all of them had been or would be thrown either at a wall or at my father, who ducked with a reflexive agility that reminded me of Gene Kelly tripping up and down the sodden curbs in Singin’ in the Rain. My father’s grace had developed in proportion to my mother’s violence, and I knew that in absorbing it and deflecting it in the way he did, he also saved her from seeing herself as she had become. Instead she saw the same reflections of herself that I pored over when I snuck downstairs after dark. Her precious still photography.

  When my father met her, my mother was fresh from Knoxville, Tennessee, and made her living as a showroom model of underwear and support garments. She preferred to say, “I modeled slips.” And these were the photos that we had so many of. Framed black and whites of my mother in better times, wearing black slips or white slips. “That one was eggshell,” she might say from the corner of the living room, not having said anything to anyone all afternoon. I knew she was referring to a specific slip in a specific picture, and sensing this, I would choose the white slip I thought could be eggshell. If I got it wrong, the moment would burst—as fragile as a blow bubble glistening in the yard—and she would slump back into the chair. But if I chose right, and I would come to memorize them over time—there was the bone, the ecru, the nude, and my favorite, the rose-petal pink—I would bring the framed photograph to her. Hanging on to the thin cord of her smile, I pulled myself into the past with her, making myself small and still on the ottoman until she told me the story of the photography session or the man involved or the gifts that she had received as partial payment.

  The rose-petal pink was my father.

  “He was not even the photographer,” she would say. “He was a junior water inspector in a borrowed suit with a pocket square, but I didn’t know that then.”

  These were the years of my earliest childhood, when my mother was still powerful, before she collected what she considered the unforgivable flaws of age. Two years short of her fiftieth birthday, she began covering all her mirrors with heavy cloths, and when, as a teenager, I suggested we remove the mirrors completely, she objected. They remained there as she grew infirm. Her shadowy, silent indictments.

  But in the photos of the rose-petal-pink slip, she was still worthy of her own love, and it was this love for herself that I tried to take warmth from. What I knew, I think, without wanting to admit it, was that the photos were like the historical documents of our town. They proved that long ago, there had been a more hopeful time. Her smile was easy then, not forced, and the fear that could turn to bitterness had not tainted her eyes.

  “He was the photographer’s friend,” she said. “He was having a big day in the city, and the suit was part of his friend’s lie.”

  I knew not to ask, “What lie, Mom?” Because that took her to a bad place where her marriage was just the long, arduous playing out of an afternoon con between schoolboy friends. Instead I asked, “Who was the shoot for?”

  “The original John Wanamaker’s,” she said. Her face glowed like an old-fashioned streetlamp lit from the inside. Everything else in the room disappeared as if into a dark fog. I did not realize then that there was no place in these memories for the company of a child.

  As my mother drifted into the past, where she was happiest, I appointed myself the past’s faithful guardian. If her feet looked cold, I covered them. If the light left the room too dark, I quietly crept over and turned on a bookshelf lamp that would cast only a small circle of light—not too big—just enough to keep her voice from becoming a scary shapeless echo in the dark. Outside, in the street in front of our house, the workmen who had been hired to install the stained-glass windows in the new Greek Orthodox church—green because for some reason this color of glass was cheaper than most—might walk by and make a noise too loud to ignore. When this happened, I would meet the drowsy blank stare that came over my mother with ushering words meant to slip her back to the dream-past.

  “Five girls showed up, not eight,” I’d say.

  Or “His last name, Knightly, was irresistible.”

  When I look back, I think how silly I must have sounded, parroting the phrases of my mother’s lovesick girlhood, but what was most precious about our
house back then was that no matter how wrongheaded everything might be, inside it, we could distill ourselves to being a normal man, woman, and child. No one had to see my father put on an apron and do overtime work after he got home, or watch me cajole my mother, trying to get her to eat.

  “I didn’t know he wasn’t in the fashion industry until after he’d kissed me,” she’d say.

  “But what about the kiss?”

  It was always here that she teetered. The kiss and the weeks immediately following it must have been wonderful, but she could not forgive my father once he’d brought her to Phoenixville.

  “New York City,” she’d say, looking down dejectedly between her splayed feet on the floor. “I never even got there.”

  It was my mother’s disappointments that were enumerated in our household and that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge—a static list that my presence could not assuage.

  I must have petted my mother’s head for a long time. Eventually I saw the blue light of a television go on across the street. When my parents had first moved to Phoenixville, this neighborhood had been a thriving one, full of young families. Now the squat 1940s houses on quarter-acre lots were often rented out to couples down on their luck. My mother said you could tell who the renters were because they let the houses rot, but in my mind it was these very people that kept the street from turning into a place where the isolated elderly were slowly dying.

  As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother’s body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again.

  “Over now,” I said to her. “It’s over.”

  And for the first time, the air was empty around me. For the first time, it was not full of hatchets and blame or unworthiness-as-oxygen.

  As I breathed in this blank-space world—where my mother ended at the border of her own flesh—I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I slipped off the back of the porch and walked back past the latticework. On the next-door neighbor’s empty porch, I could see the local tomcat grooming himself. Growing up, Sarah called such cats “orange marmalades.” I saw the old metal lid cocked at an angle on top of the neighbor’s neatly tucked and rolled paper trash bag and made a mental note to take my mother’s trash out. My whole life, she would instruct me about the proper way to fold a bag. “Paper bags, wax bags, are like your sheets. Hospital corners improve them.”

  The phone rang again and again. I walked up the three wooden steps to the door. My mother’s feet extended out over the top stair. She had insisted that the answering machines I brought her did not work. “She’s afraid of them,” Natalie said. “My father thinks the ATM will eat his arm.”

  I smelled something as I shoved my mother’s body just far enough aside to squeeze back into the house. It was the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal mingling in the air. By this time the ring of the phone was a hammer pounding from inside my skull, or a voice calling me from outside a nightmare.

  The first thing I saw when I entered the kitchen was the step-stool chair beneath the wall-mounted phone. The red vinyl was cracked and taped thirty-five years ago, more than a decade after it served as my first high chair. Seeing it in the kitchen was like seeing a lion left standing, ignored. It leaped out at me, roaring with the voice of the phone above it, propelling me back to my father placing me there. I saw the slash of my young father’s smile and my mother’s wobbly wrist bringing peaches and bananas—all pureed by hand—up to my lips. How hard she had tried and how she must have hated it from the start.

  I grabbed the phone as if it were a life raft.

  “Hello?”

  “Do you need help?”

  The voice was old, feeble, but I was no less startled than if it had been coming from just outside the door.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been out on that porch a long time.”

  I would recall this later as the first moment where I began to be frightened, where I realized that by the standards of the outside world, what I’d done knew no justification.

  “Mrs. Leverton?”

  “Are you two all right, Helen? Is Clair in need?”

  “My mother’s fine,” I said.

  “I can call my grandson,” she said. “He’ll be glad to help.”

  “My mother wanted to go into the yard,” I said.

  From where I stood, I could see through the small window over the kitchen sink and across the backyard. I remember my mother arduously training a vine to grow so that it masked a view of our house from the Levertons’ upstairs bedroom. “That man will stare right into your private places,” my mother would say, hanging her front half out my bedroom window, which was directly over the kitchen, threading the vines and risking life and limb to make sure Mr. Leverton never caught a peek. Both the vine and Mr. Leverton were long dead now.

  “Is Clair still out there?” Mrs. Leverton asked. “It’s awfully cold.”

  This gave me an idea.

  “She’s waving at you,” I said.

  “The Blameless One,” my mother had called her. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and stupid as the day is long.”

  But there was silence on the other end.

  “Helen,” Mrs. Leverton said slowly, “are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your mother would never wave at me. We both know that.”

  Not so stupid, apparently.

  “But that’s pleasant of you to say.”

  I had to get my mother’s body in. It was as simple as that.

  “Can’t you see her?” I risked.

  “I’m in my kitchen now,” Mrs. Leverton said. “It’s five o’clock, and I always start making supper at five o’clock.”

  Mrs. Leverton was the champ. At ninety-six, she was the oldest fully functioning member of the neighborhood. My mother had been nothing in comparison to her. When it got down to it, the final competition among women seemed just as inane and graceless as all those in between. Who grew breasts first, who scored the popular boy, who married well, who had the better home. In my mother’s and Mrs. Leverton’s life, it came down to who would be the oldest when she died. I felt like saying, Congratulations, Mrs. Leverton, you’ve won!

  “You amaze me, Mrs. Leverton,” I said.

  “Thank you, Helen.” Is it possible to hear preening?

  “I will encourage my mother to come in,” I said. “But she does what she likes.”

  “Yes. I know,” she said. She had always been careful with her words. “Stop by anytime and give Clair my best.” Her best, I did not point out, was as improbable as my mother’s wave.

  I hung the phone back on the upright cradle. Like my mother, Mrs. Leverton probably still insisted that phones were most efficient when they were connected by cords. I knew that she had been weakening in the previous year, but she had informed my mother that she still did exercises daily and quizzed herself on state capitals and ex-presidents.

  “Unbelievable,” I said to myself, and I heard the damp echo of it bounce off the green-and-gold linoleum. I wanted to rush out and tell my mother about the phone call, but when I looked her way through the screen door, I saw the marmalade tom standing on her chest and playing, like a kitten, with the ribbon of her braid.

  Inside me, the child who had protected her mother ran to the screen door to shoo the marmalade tom from the porch, and yet, as I watched the huge scarred cat that my mother had taken to calling “Bad Boy” fall on her chest with his full weight and bat her braid with the ribbon attached to it with his front paws, I found myself unable to move.

  Finally, after all these years, my mother’s life was snuffed out, and I had been the one to do it—in the same way I might snuff out the guttering wick of an all but extinguished candle. Within a few minutes, as she struggled for breath, my lifelong dream had come true.

  The marmalade tom played with the ribbon in her hair until he freed it, an
d it went sailing up into the air and landed on her face. It was then, the red ribbon on her cheek, the cat claw reaching out to grab it, that I shoved my fist in my mouth to cover my scream.

  THREE

  I sat on the floor of the kitchen. My mother’s body lay positioned outside the door. I felt like turning on the bug light above her but didn’t. Look upon this, I imagined saying to the neighbors. This is where it all ends up.

  But I didn’t really believe that. I believed, as my mother always had, that there was them and there was us. “Them” were the happy, normal people, and “us” were the totally fucked.

  I remembered throwing water in her face when I was sixteen. I remembered not talking to her and seeing her dismantled, as she had never been, by trying to learn the language of apology. Watching her do that—admit that she was wrong—was one of the most helpless moments in my life. I had wanted to save her with a rush of talk about high-school chemistry and my recently failed algebra exam. To fill the silent moments while she toed the edges of the carpet with her foot as I sat in my bedroom chair and restrained myself.

  Suddenly I spied, through the thick hedge that bordered my mother’s yard, Carl Fletcher coming outside with a plate of steak. As his own screen door banged and he plodded down the three wooden stairs to his lawn, a beer in one hand, a portable radio tuned to WIP sports in the other, I pictured a circle of tiki torches and throbbing white people in loincloths raising the remains of my mother high on a special catalog-ordered all-weather funeral pyre.

  “I like the man next door,” my mother had said when Carl Fletcher moved in six years ago. “He’s pathetic, which means he keeps to himself.”

  Now he was on the other side of the latticework, in a yard that had been empty only moments before.

  If Hilda Castle had called one day later, Sarah would have been visiting for the weekend, and she would have helped me carry my mother up the stairs to the bath. But more likely, Sarah would have made phone calls. The simple phone calls that any sane person would have made. I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, “Mother, let’s kill her. That’s the only choice.”