Alice Sebold Read online

  Until she was eighty-six, my mother persisted in using the basement. It was the idea of her becoming disoriented or lacking the energy to climb back out that inspired me to buy her a cell phone. Until then, my mother would descend the first three stairs one at a time, bracing her hands against the wall and preparing herself to go unassisted. Then, setting her jaw, she would pivot and continue down sideways, stair by stair. It could take her thirty minutes to get to the bottom, and by the time she reached the basement floor, she might have forgotten what she’d come for.

  But just as Natalie’s father thought the ATM would eat his arm, when I’d placed the no-frills phone in my mother’s hand on her eighty-sixth birthday, she’d looked from it to me and said, “You’re giving me a grenade?”

  “It’s a phone, Mother,” I said. “You can carry it with you everywhere you go.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “So you can always get in touch with me.”

  She was sitting in her wing chair. I had made her favorite drink, a manhattan, and ruined, she said, her recipe for cheese straws. “I don’t know how you do it, Helen.” Delicately, she spit a half-chewed cheese straw into her cocktail napkin. “You have a gift.”

  On top of the old mahogany dresser, beside the brown refrigerator, I saw the cell phone, where it had been for the last two years. She’d left it there the morning after her eighty-sixth birthday, which was also the last time she’d been in the basement. I’d seen it at least once a week for the last two years. In the irrational way I’d always experienced her rejection, I’d ended up thinking that in order to avoid talking to me, she’d renounced an entire floor of her home.

  Despite my going slowly, my mother’s body swung out in an arc as the stairwell fell away halfway down. I watched the sheets unravel as her suddenly exposed lower half twisted backward onto the gritty cement floor. I held on despite the sounds—like Bubble Wrap being popped all at once—and rushed backward to the bottom, pulling her with me.

  It was then that I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen.

  I dragged her body free of the stairs and over to the meat freezer. I laid her lengthwise by the freezer’s side, then hurriedly did my best to cover her again. The sheets were twisted beneath her. No matter what I did, after folding and draping, her marbling knees were exposed. She lay there, silent and broken, and I thought of the horror that had finally come with control.

  When I was a teenager, I thought every kid spent sweaty summer afternoons in their bedrooms, daydreaming of cutting their mother up into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown. I did this both prone upstairs and gymnastically about the house. As I agreed to take out the trash, I cut off her head. As I weeded the yard, I plucked out her eyes, her tongue. While dusting the shelves, I multiplied and divided her body parts. I was willing to allow that other kids might stop short of this, that they might not, as I did, work out all the details, but I could not imagine that they did not explore this territory.

  “If you want to hate me, I encourage it!” I would say to Emily.

  “Yes, Mom,” she’d say. At six, she was already in possession of a nickname based on her greater reasonableness, her steely patience. “The Little Senator,” Natalie had dubbed her for her practical negotiations in the world of the sandbox, where Hamish, though her peer in age, was prone to tantrums and would often sit and cry.

  I grabbed at the prop boxes on the meat freezer and threw them in groups and singly into various corners of the basement, to keep temptation at bay. Even growing up, I’d known that the boxes inside the faded wrapping paper and frequently refreshed bows would not hold what I wanted most. They would leak from their seams or be smashed if the postman happened to fall on a slippery patch when delivering my mother’s shin to a printing plant in Mackinaw, Michigan, or her foot to a trout farm outside Portland. Always, in my daydreams, I kept for myself her thick red hair.

  I carefully placed the Sunset magazines on the edge of a nearby stair. Inside the meat freezer were the lean meat patties that my mother ate on her resumption of the Scarsdale diet five years ago, and two ancient hams from Mrs. Donnellson. I knew this without looking.

  I turned the key in the meat freezer’s lock and opened it. There it was, an almost-empty ice cavity for one.

  Jake had asked me questions concerning lividity, stiffness, what signs there might be of how she had died, but I was done with that. I had now not only broken her nose but managed to mangle her body postmortem. There was no reason why I shouldn’t fulfill my childhood dreams.

  “At what point did you give up?” I said out loud, my voice, as I said it, startling me. In the corner opposite was the metal cabinet, full of my father’s old suits. Tattersall; summer seersucker; flannel; dark, itchy wool tweed. I remembered the day I’d come down to fold the laundry several years ago, and opened up the cabinet. When I crawled inside, I was a child again, my upper body encased in his old suit coats. I had taken the tweed, with its suede elbow patches, and rubbed it along my cheek.

  The cool air coming up from the meat freezer felt good against my face. I saw the amber bottles set on the windowsill above the washer to keep belly-crawling burglars out. I saw the purple glass bottles on the ledge of its mate.

  I had never thought of how one cut up a body, only of the freedom to be had postsevering. The grisly reality of the sawing and the butchering had never preoccupied me. It was the instant flash, the twitched nose of Bewitched, the magic of going from having my mother to not having her that held me in its thrall. More than butchering her, if I could have chosen it, I would have changed her body from solid to liquid to gas. I wanted her to evaporate like water. Rising up out of my life and leaving everything else intact.

  “If you aren’t careful,” my mother would say, “you’ll fall in.” At eleven, twelve, thirteen, I would be in the kitchen, leaning over, looking into the refrigerator for what I could eat. I perused the food with such care only when I thought it was safe. At other times I tried to act as if food didn’t matter to me, as if it were too much of a bother. “Oh! There! That’s food? Hmmm.” But with my head in the refrigerator, I was the perfect prey, and as she listed my flaws—the ballooning ass, the “near matronly” thighs, the swinging arms I’d eventually have, like “a dimpled flesh bat,” if I went on in my way—I would look at the tiny light in the refrigerator and wonder, Could I move in there? Could I hide behind the cottage-cheese container and the orange juice made from concentrate? It would be quiet inside the refrigerator once my mother closed the door. I could disappear in there.

  I was staring into the meat freezer, at the millions of ice crystals built up along its sides and covering the two hams and lean patties in a shimmering mink of ice, and then I wasn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blue Pigeon Forge bowl.

  “Mrs. Castle, will you take that downstairs?” I could hear my mother saying. “Maybe bring something else up.”

  I walked over to the card table and picked up the bowl. Nearby, hanging from a hook on the wall, I found a heavy rusted pair of shearing scissors. I turned the bowl upside down on the table and brought the handle of the scissors down hard, like a hammer. The blue-glazed shards scuttled off the table and across the floor.

  I could not cut my mother up, so I walked over to her body and bent down near her head. I hovered over her briefly, then unwrapped the blankets around her face. There were her eyes, staring up at me, milky and blue. With the scissors poised in my right hand, I dug out her silver braid and sheared it off at the root.

  FIVE

  While my mother lay on the floor only a few feet away, I opened the old brown refrigerator and sat on the bottom step of the stairs with its light shining on me.

  I grabbed blindly at the metal tins, not looking at the age-old and carefully punched-out labels. I ripped off their worn lids and sent them crashing to the concrete floor like spinning cymbals. Then, and only then, when faced with the used and reused wax paper, did I slow down and lift that first layer lightly away fro
m what lay beneath. Here were brandy balls from my Tennessee grandmother’s recipe. Or pecan meringues that smelled of dark-brown sugar. Baking together was something we did until the end, even though, for the sake of my figure and my mother’s health, I routinely had to cycle through the freezer and dispose of what we’d made, pretending to my mother that I was giving the contents of the tins to the neighbors whom she still confusedly remembered living in the area.

  I held a meringue and crumbled it in my hand. I watched the light-tan dust and minced nuts fall to the ground. Always the admonition to use a plate, not to gobble like a turkey, to measure the heft and weight and imagine it applied to my waist.

  The first time I had made myself sick as a child—purposely sick—was the year I turned eight. My weapon of choice was fudge. I had gone into the kitchen and methodically, like a soldier taking bullets in the gut, eaten a whole baking sheet of butterscotch fudge. I was ill for two days, and she was furious, but it had made my father laugh. He had come home and hung up his jacket on the coatrack inside the door; placed his hat, on which he often changed the small clipped feather that was tucked inside the band, on the front table; and turned toward the dining room.

  “What are you doing there all alone?” he asked.

  I had been forced to sit at the table, though all I wanted to do was lie down and moan.

  “She’s being punished,” my mother had said, as she walked briskly over to him and took his briefcase from his hand. “I made butterscotch fudge, and she ate it all.”

  A particular intimacy of my father’s came when he removed his glasses. The metal-and-plastic frames bit into his nose on either side, and he would take them off when he walked in the house. For thirty minutes he was as blind as a bat, but he didn’t need accuracy, as this was the half hour before dinner reserved for a drink.

  He had done this that day, as usual, but he had also laughed, as he usually did not, and it had come from someplace deep inside him. During this, he had grabbed my mother and kissed her hard on the cheek and then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead through my wispy bangs.

  Working at the Pickering Water Treatment Plant, he measured water levels and analyzed the content of the local reservoirs. He traveled to surrounding cities and all the way to Erie to do the same.

  “It’s a little like you sat down and decided to eat a baking sheet full of sediment,” he said. “Anyone would be ill from that.”

  I had asked him to stay at the table with me, to talk about water, about how each droplet under a microscope differed from another. His eyes were unfocused without his glasses, and I wondered how blind he was and what he saw when he looked at me.

  I walked up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, the braid swinging from my fist. I pulled open the drawer near the phone, which held refolded tinfoil and salvaged twist ties, and found a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag. I tucked the braid inside, sealed it, and scanned the kitchen. My mother’s clothes lay balled up in moist clumps along the floor.

  When I was three years old, I had come into the kitchen and found my mother sitting on the floor, with her legs jutting out in front of her. I could see her underwear, which I had never seen before. She was staring at a white spill of flour at her feet.

  “Mom made a boo-boo,” I said.

  She stood up and grabbed the five-pound sack of flour from the counter, hugging it to her chest. She scooped her hand into it and let the contents fall from her fingers like snow.

  I shrieked in delight and ran to her. She responded by moving away just as I reached out for her. She threw more flour from the sack, this time in wide arcs across the kitchen. I chased her in spinning circles, around and around, shrieking louder and gulping back my own laughter.

  The chase went on until I stumbled and fell. I looked up at her for a moment. She stood near my high chair, laughing. I noticed the flour on her forehead and chin, and how it coated the invisible hairs on her forearms. I wanted her to come to me to pick me up, and so I wailed at the top of my lungs.

  My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a lit-up window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily’s husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.

  When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs—the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers—was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother’s basement.

  I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go. I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people’s knowing—the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs. Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle—wasn’t. And no one would go into the house without me there.

  I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car. Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.

  Mrs. Leverton’s house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest’s house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds. At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.

  I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest’s house, when I’d first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.

  “They call them muses, Helen,” he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude. “They are women who inspire great things.” I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.

  The thirty-minute drive between my mother’s house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer. The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.

  The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.

  At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.

  On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the crowded canopy above. A decade ago, excavation crews became a common sight here, and I would drive by to see one hundred birch saplings having been mown to the ground. I hated to say that Natalie’s house, which was halfway between my mother’s and my own, was one of the McMansions that had been carved out of these woods. It shouted up out of the forest, with mock storybook turrets and a front door fifteen feet tall.

  Natalie and the now thirty-year-old Hamish had lived inside this gingerbread palace for eight years, ever since Natalie successfully sued the manufacturer that supplied the tires to
her husband’s truck. He had been idling on Pickering Bridge in a stare-down with another car and had revved his engine. His front tire exploded, breaking the axle and ejecting him through the windshield, and he hit his head on the old fieldstone bridge that had lain in ruins for more than a century. He died instantly.

  Through the scrim of young white-barked trees that had grown back since the developers came and went, I saw Hamish lying in the driveway, one of his many cars ratcheted up, with a bright cage light hanging from the front fender. I slowed down and brought my car to a halt. Without a thought for what I would say when I saw her, I swung my car off the empty road and drove up the length of Natalie’s driveway. I seemed to be doing almost explicitly what Jake had told me not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  As my headlights mingled with the glow from the broken car, Hamish rolled himself out on his mechanic’s dolly and motioned for me to switch them off.

  I turned off the ignition and got out. My first steps were wobbly on the gravel drive.

  Hamish ducked toward me, flipping his hair to the side of his face.

  “Mom’s out,” he said.

  I had never stopped thinking of Hamish as the boy who played with Emily in the sandbox in the community park at the end of my street. “Hamish is going nowhere—fast,” Natalie said in the years after Hamish Sr.’s death. She seemed happy about it. As if she’d lost one Hamish, but this Hamish was sure to stick around.

  “Out where?”

  “She’s on a date,” Hamish said, and smiled. His teeth were as white as stadium lights. Natalie had told me that he bleached them every six months.

  I didn’t know which was stranger, that I found myself in the driveway of my oldest friend after killing my mother or that Natalie had gone on a date without telling me.