Alice Sebold Read online

  On my hands and knees, I crawled over to the screen door and looked out over my mother’s body and through the hedge into the adjacent backyard. Mr. Donnellson, who had lived in the house until his family put him in hospice care, had asked my mother to marry him a dozen years ago. “There’s no one left,” he said. “Let’s be companions, Clair.”

  He had seen her getting her newspaper and shown up a few minutes later with a bouquet of mauve-colored tulips. “From bulbs his wife planted!” my mother repeatedly pointed out. I remember being charmed by his offer, so charmed I had been tempted to rush over to his house after he’d been spurned to see if, perhaps with only a shift in generation, his offer might hold.

  When he died, my mother gloated in triumph. “I would have had to wipe up his drool for five years and then bury him,” she said. On the day of his funeral, she had blamed her watery eyes on the onions she was cutting up with her ancient hand-sharpened paring knife.

  Peter Donnellson’s house had been sold as is by his three daughters, and my mother had braced herself for a teardown. Despite what was obvious—that the area had been going downhill for years—she fretted over the emergence of a Phoenixville nouveau riche. She worried for the roots of her giant maple trees that extended over into Mr. Donnellson’s yard. She worried for the noise and for what she imagined would be the sound of children screaming almost every hour of the day. She had me research soundproofing schemes and considered replacing the windows on that side of the house with cinder blocks. “That will fix their wagon,” she said, and I went, as I often did, to fill the electric kettle with water and listen to its soothing hum.

  But Carl Fletcher moved in alone and didn’t change anything. He had a job with the phone company and went to work out in the field early each morning. He came home at the same time every day but Friday. On the weekends he sat in his yard and drank beer. He had the paper with him and a book and always, always, the portable radio that he kept tuned to sports or talk. Occasionally his daughter, Madeline, whom my mother called the “circus freak” because of her tattoos, would visit. My mother complained about the noise of her motorcycle and “all of that flesh spread out in the yard,” but she had never spoken to Carl Fletcher, and he had never bothered to introduce himself. What I knew of my mother’s neighbors at this point was all secondhand, distributed, along with frozen soups or potted jams, by Mrs. Castle when we crossed paths.

  As Mr. Fletcher turned his steaks over, I could hear the sizzle of the fat dripping into the fire over the noise of the game. From my kneeling position, one I refused to adopt anymore at Westmore—too hard on the knees—I crawled outside and knelt again at the edge of my mother’s body. I thought of a man I’d read about who felt so devout he dragged a replica of Jesus’s cross from one end of Berlin to the other, wearing only some sort of Gandhi-like diaper and traveling on his quickly bloodied knees.

  The small scratch on my mother’s cheek had congealed. Her eyes had purpled in halos around their sockets. I remembered turning her in bed and adjusting strips of sheepskin under her to stave off the inevitable bedsores during the lengthy convalescence that followed the surgery for her colon cancer.

  Mr. Fletcher placed the steaks on a plate, took his meat and his radio, and went back inside. He was the sort of man who could be counted on, I realized, never to look up. I saw the coals still orange in his grill.

  I would have had to yell “Fire!” for anyone but Mrs. Leverton or Mr. Forrest, who lived down the road, to pay attention. In the years after the final death throes of Phoenixville Steel, the streets nearby had become increasingly desolate. Properties often sat vacant, and from the spare bedroom where my grandfather’s guns had once been kept, I had watched the demolition of a beautiful Victorian two streets away. Once the conical roof fell in, there was nothing to see but ancient dust floating up and out above the house’s less prosperous neighbors.

  I had tried to get my mother to move into a retirement home, but she would not budge, and part of me admired her for it. There was an ever-diminishing network of the originals now: Mrs. Leverton behind her, Mr. Forrest five houses down, and the long-suffering widow of Mr. Tolliver.

  The one my mother had once considered her friend was Mr. Forrest. He lived at the end of the circle and didn’t have any family at all. He had a house the same size as my parents’, and his rooms were filled with books. When I drove by his house, I often thought of the afternoons he and my mother had spent together, starting cocktails at five in anticipation of my father’s joining them by six. I would answer the door, and Mr. Forrest would hand me a paper bag. Inside would be cured olives or fresh cheeses or French bread, and within thirty minutes of his arrival, I would tuck myself into a corner at the top of the stairs and listen to her laughter fill the house.

  I leaned my body over my mother’s, took the towel I had used to suffocate her, and covered her face with it. Then I made the sign of the cross. “You are so not Catholic!” Natalie said to me growing up, as I tried to imitate her. My cross remained a sort of flailing X marks the spot.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  I crawled back inside to retrieve the felt-covered brick that we had used forever to prop open the door. I thought of Manny, bringing in a month’s supply of staples from the big-box store. I had been standing in the living room, and ever so briefly, when I turned to be introduced to him, his eyes had traveled to my chest. Later, my mother admonished me for wearing such tight clothes.

  “It’s a turtleneck,” I said.

  She had burst out laughing. “I guess you’re right. The boy’s a perv,” she said. I remember wondering where she’d learned the word, if it had been something Manny had taught her. I’d known that, sometimes, when he’d had nowhere to go, he would bring movies over to watch with her. My mother had seen The Godfather more times than I could count.

  I stood and put my hands on either side of my lower back to arch backward in what Natalie called my “construction-worker stretch.” I was aware that I would have to pace myself as I did while modeling. That what I had done and what I was about to do would take the kind of physical stamina that a thousand dance classes might not have prepared me for.

  I walked back onto the stoop and towered over her. If Mrs. Leverton was watching, back upstairs with her husband’s binoculars, how would she account for what she saw? If she told her son, would he think that his mother was finally slipping? I smiled down at my mother. She would have loved that, loved that in reporting the way I handled her dead body, Mrs. Leverton might finally be knocked off her high horse and into the land of the elderly insane.

  I nudged my mother’s body with the edge of my jazz flats. Then there was nothing left but cursing and exertion.

  “Fuck,” I said repeatedly, regulating it like breathing, as I tightened my stomach to prepare for the lift. I grabbed my mother’s body by the blankets, making sure to grip her up under her shoulders so she wouldn’t slip. I kept cursing as I reentered the kitchen, dragging her after me. In one final tug, I got her whole body past the lip of the doorway and then lowered myself slowly down on the floor, with her between my legs. “In,” I said, and kicked the brick out of the way. The door closed a little bit on its hinge, and then, with my foot, I helped it the rest of the way. As the door clicked shut with that whispering mustache seal of black rubber along its bottom edge, I became aware of my mother’s death rattle. The long, slow rasp releasing from her chest.

  At my own house that morning, I had methodically dusted the clear-glass globes and painted wooden herons I’d strung from invisible thread over the bedroom window. Now, in my mind, the spread wings of these birds fluttered like a warning. I would be a different person when I saw them next.

  I looked at the clock over the kitchen doorway. It was after six. Somehow more than an hour had passed since I’d spoken to Mrs. Leverton.

  I stopped for a second, holding on to my mother’s body, and imagined Emily and her husband, John, climbing the stairs with their children
, John taking Jeanine, who, at four, was the heavier of the two, and Emily cradling the two-year-old Leo. I thought of the sometimes successful Christmas presents I’d sent over the years: the pink and blue PJs with boots were a hit; the hard-knocking marbles-on-string game was judged age-inappropriate.

  I stood up with the thought of Leo in his crib to bolster me, but then came its companion memory of my mother, her arms outstretched to hold him, allowing him to fall.

  After positioning her body closer to the stove, I turned to run the water in the sink as cold as it would come. Again and again I took water in my hands and brought it up to my face, never splashing, exactly, but pressing my cheeks into the shallow puddles that remained in my palms. On hot nights, my ex-husband, Jake, had taken ice cubes and run them along my shoulder and back, curving them onto my stomach and up to my nipples until goose bumps covered my limbs.

  I unwrapped the blankets from my mother’s body. First the red and rough Hudson Bay and then the softer white Mexican wedding cotton. I walked around her body, pulling each corner taut. The downy towel remained on her face.

  Leo did not bounce, as my mother confessed she thought he might, but his fall was broken by the edge of a dining room chair. Though he will have a scar on his forehead to mark the moment for the rest of his life, that chair may have saved him. Otherwise it would have been the much harder floor. My mother’s face that day was surprised and hurt. Emily had blamed her, wrapped the bawling Leo in a blue fleece blanket, and called her horrible names. I stood between them and then followed Emily down the steep walkway to my car. I did not glance back to see if my mother was watching us from her door.

  “Never again,” Emily said. “I’m tired of making excuses for her.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Yes,” I said. “I know the way,” I said, and got in the driver’s side of my car. I drove more competently that day than I ever have, all the way to Paoli Hospital, going at top speed along winding roads.

  I took my mother’s skirt and flipped it up to reveal her calves and knees, her fleshy thighs. The scent of her earlier mishap flooded me.

  “The legs go last,” my mother said once. We sat in front of the television, watching Lucille Ball. Ball’s hair, by then, was so red and false it looked more like Bozo’s blood sample than Bozo’s wig. She wore a specially tailored tuxedo jacket that created a largish hourglass shape and went down low in the back, but her legs, fishnet clad and decked out in high heels, went on and on.

  I remembered calling home once from Wisconsin. Emily must have been almost four. My father answered the phone, and immediately I heard it.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “Nothing to get upset about.”

  “You sound strange. What is it?”

  “I fell,” he said.

  I could hear the grandfather clock in their living room—its deep choral chimes.

  “Are you lying down?”

  “I’ve got that old quilt on top of me, and your mother is doing her best. Here she is.”

  I heard the receiver being fumbled, and I entered the anxious no-man’s-land over the wire while my mother came to get the phone.

  “He’s fine,” she said immediately. “He’s just drugged up.”

  “Can I talk to him again?”

  “He’s a horrid conversationalist right now,” she said.

  I asked my mother what exactly had happened.

  “He tripped on the stairs. Tony Forrest came over and took him to the doctor. It’s his hip and those damn varicose veins. Tony says Edna St. Vincent Millay killed herself that way.”

  “With varicose veins?”

  “No, stairs. She fell down them.”

  “Can I speak to him?”

  “You should call later in the week. He’s resting now.”

  I felt the distance of miles then. I tried to picture my father under the memory quilt, sleeping, as my mother bustled about the house, making meals out of dry cereal flakes and canned corn.

  I was sweating in the closed-up house but too afraid to open a window. Too afraid another death rattle might escape my mother’s lungs and seep into the air and wake the women who, like my mother, lived alone and feared such things. The nighttime intruder who comes and kills you. The dutiful daughter who suddenly finds her hand on top of a towel on top of your face, smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again with a child’s vendetta finally fulfilled.

  I turned on the tap in the kitchen sink again. I waited for the water to heat. I saw the dishes from the early morning washed and put in the dish rack by Mrs. Castle and wondered what made her keep coming to a house like my mother’s to help an old woman as the days, then years, passed by.

  The Castles had moved to the neighborhood when I was ten. Mrs. Castle became known as the handiest wife while her husband was considered the handsomest man. When the two of them would visit our house to take away the rocking horses for the church fair, my mother and father would sit in the living room with them, each of my parents happily distracted—my father with Mrs. Castle and my mother with Mr. Castle, or Alistair, as she called him, the last syllable when she pronounced it sounding wistful, as if his name were a synonym for regret.

  I suddenly knew what I would do. I would clean my mother as I had intended to, but this time without the possibility of protest, without her eyes clicking open like an ancient baby doll’s, the starburst blue glass an instant indictment. I did not care anymore about the watery mess it might make on the floor. The critic was dead. Carpe diem!

  I leaned down to my right and opened the old metal cabinet. Inside were enough saved-from-the-grocery plastic containers, with their bowed companion tops, to store the hearts and lungs of every citizen along Phoenixville Pike. But I was searching for something else. Something very specific in my memory. I burrowed in and tossed the plastic containers to the side and out the front until, in the very back, where no one had been in years, I found the saved-from-the-hospital sick bowl I was looking for.

  It was a pale aqua-green, the color of the surgeon’s scrubs. Seeing it again sent shivers down my spine. “He almost died” was always the last line of the story told. It had taken me years to wonder why, if the story was about my father, my mother always ended up as the main character.

  I filled the small container with near scalding water and squeezed in a little dish soap. If my mother was greasy, this soap promised to lift it right off her! I shut the water off, took the dish sponge and dish towel, and knelt to my task.

  I would start at the bottom and work my way up.

  I peeled off my mother’s blue men’s orthopedic anti-embolism socks and balled them up, resisting an urge to lob them over her body and through the small back hallway that led into the living room. With aim and enough upper-body strength, I could have landed them among the balls of yarn in the basket beside her wing chair. Instead, I placed them to the side, to be dealt with later.

  There were her toes, delicate when exposed. I had seen them intimately now for years. Mrs. Castle couldn’t be asked to trim her toenails, and so, once a month on a Sunday, I arrived for the tasks of ancillary body maintenance, cleaning and trimming the places my mother had ceased being able to reach. Attending to her feet gave us a peculiar way to revisit the past, a repositioning in which I, by being silent, disappeared from the room, my whole body acting merely as her own hand had once acted. I painted her toenails a coral color from Revlon that, if not an exact match for the one she had applied once a week for forty years, was so close it drew no comment or objection.

  I started with her feet by taking the dish towel and dipping it in the scalding water, wringing it out, and wrapping first one foot and then the other. Like a pedicurist, I worked one foot while the other was moistening. With the dish sponge—soft or rough side, depending—I scrubbed and buffed. On my mother’s legs I saw the veins I knew lived beneath my own skin and that had recently begun to peek out behind my knees and shins.

  “You have murdered your mother, true, b
ut we find her exceptionally clean!” I saw it being sung as if in a musical, where witches held up apples and swung on ropes by their necks.

  “It’s a hard day, Helen,” my mother would say.

  “It will be okay, sweetheart,” my father would say.

  On the day my father died, I had arrived at the house to the sight of my mother cradling his head in her lap at the bottom of the stairs. In the weeks that followed, she talked over and over again about his varicose veins and how much pain they had caused him. How he was stiff in the mornings and often stumbled or tripped over the smallest wrinkle in the carpet. She repeated stories of his clumsiness over the phone to the grocer, who still delivered food to her, and to Joe, my father’s barber, whom she had called in a deluded moment after she’d called me. Joe had shown up shortly after I had, worried that my mother might be all alone. He had stood in the front doorway, his mouth open, unable to speak. When our eyes met, he lifted his hand up and accurately made the sign of the cross before turning to leave. Was it from respect or fear that Joe had never commented on the open cleft at the back of my father’s head or the arc of blood against the wall?

  Slowly I worked my way up to my mother’s knees. “They smile at me,” Mr. Donnellson whispered to me once, delighted to catch a rare glimpse of my mother in shorts.

  A few moments later, I was wiping the shit from my mother’s rubbery thighs when I thought of the night my father nailed, straight into a wall upstairs, a list of hastily written rules:

  Keep the Upstairs Linen Closet Locked

  Do Not Leave Matches in the House

  Monitor Booze

  It took me a moment, as I thought of the tussles my father and mother frequently had—her in her nightgown and my father still dressed in his workday clothes—to realize that someone was pounding on the front door. I froze. I listened to the brass knocker sound against its base.