The Alphabet in Reverse

David Crouse

The Alphabet in Reverse

 
 
Peter remembers it all with a perverse clarity: the hard knock on the back door, his mother rising from the couch, the happy violence on the TV. Batman and Robin were fighting criminals against a brightly colored background, spinning around like ballerinas, throwing punches. He knew that the show was in vivid color, it even said so at the beginning, but he had to imagine that part. It was the old black-and-white TV that smelled like burning toast if you left it running too long and his mother was always telling him to give it a rest, let it cool down.

His mother said, “If that’s your little friend from down the street I’m going to kill him.” They headed to the back of the house, the dogs circling around their feet and barking. It was a good part of the show and he remembers being as annoyed as his mother. He could hear the excited voices yelling from back in the living room as they knocked around the bad guys. “Yeah,” he said, as if they might kill him together.

But it was his father at the door and he was holding the new baby, the one his mother had said was no excuse. “He’s using it as an excuse,” were her exact words, “but it’s no excuse at all and the law agrees with me.”

That’s what he thought of, those exact words, when his father said, “Sorry for the unannounced visit but I didn’t know where else to go.” And he smiled like a salesman who had been clever enough to come to the back door. A salesman who went up and down the street trying to sell people babies. Let me in and I’ll show you what it can do. Peter doesn’t know if he thought that then or later but it’s attached itself to the memory seamlessly. Of course, his father was not a salesman at all. He worked building houses, or picking up after the people who built houses, wandering the construction site, sweeping up stray nails and scrap wood. His truck was still running in the driveway, the passenger’s-side door open and the headlights on in the light rain. Peter remembers that the baby’s hair was wet and dark as the fur of a Labrador retriever, and he wanted to touch it and feel that softness.

The dogs tried to push their way out of the space between his mother’s leg and the door but she kicked at them and they scrambled backwards. She said, “Where the hell did you come from?”

“From Whitehorse,” he said. “Now are you going to make me a cup of coffee?”

“That’s not my responsibility anymore,” she said. “You have someone else to keep you caffeinated.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “About that.”

But she interrupted him. “And where is your car seat? How did you get that poor kid here, bounce it on your lap the whole way?”

“I’m a safe driver,” he said. “You know that. Now let me in. I want to see my sons. And this is a good thing that’s happening. Let me tell you what’s going on.”

Peter’s brother was upstairs pretending to read. He liked to say he was going to finish his novel and then head up to masturbate dreamily with his sleeping bag over his head. His mother would bang on the door. She knew what was going on.

That’s what Peter remembers most about his mother. She was a woman who knew what was going on. She liked to say that about herself. In fact, he remembers her saying it as she held the door half-open. “I know what’s going on.” And even though he does not remember her as especially kind, it would have been impossible for her to turn his father away, a man who had just driven hours to his ex-wife’s door, holding a baby in the rain. She had to let him in. Her son was watching her. So she opened the door and his father moved inside, sniffling, looking around the place, the pictures on the walls, the arrangement of shoes just inside, placed in a long row, sneakers, boots, slippers. He managed to remove his own boots while still holding the baby, lifting a foot and pulling at the laces, shifting his weight. He seemed as comic as the stuff on the TV, just as heroic too, and just as impossible.

“There’s a difference between obligation and kindness,” his father said. “And all I’m asking for is some kindness. Now how about that coffee?”
 
 
Peter and his mother ride the SkyTrain across the city. Below them the trees and people. A cluster of families surrounding a man on a horse. He’s holding balloons, leaning down to hand them to children. Why is he doing this and why does Peter care? Because for some reason he’s jealous of the man, of the children scrambling around him too, and even of the parents who look on as contented bystanders. It’s a nice scene and if he could he’d spit on it, but the SkyTrain is enclosed, of course, and he’s never done anything like that before, even as a kid. The guy on the horse steadies the horse to perfect stillness, its head lowered to receive some strokes from childrens’ hands.

What would it be like to fall into all that, to become the center of everybody’s panicked attention? His mother sits rigid with her pocketbook on her lap. She gives the impression of being immune to it all—muggers, disaster, his own words. She seems to have surrounded herself with an invisible bubble. If the impossible did happen, she’d simply remain sitting there, staring straight ahead, everything dying below her.

The SkyTrain reminds him of rocket ships and space travel, but it’s rickety as a state fair roller coaster. He can feel the vibration in his thighs. Any second it seems like it might collapse. He reaches out to hold her hand—this is a very important trip for her—but he knows he’s the one searching for comfort. Her hand is a cold, dry thing. He grips it tight anyway. Even now, on this trip to the memory clinic, her nails are polished and perfect, her hair freshly done.

Two weeks ago, when he called her in Fairbanks, she told him that she’d been getting lost in grocery stores. “I go up one aisle to get the milk and the milk’s not there,” she said. “Then I turn around and head to produce and I wind up in the bakery.”

Of course it was much worse than that. “She’s been shitting herself,” his father had said, when he called from Montana. “You need to talk to her.”

Yes, she’d been shitting herself, and yet here she is with her precise make-up, her reassuring look in his direction when they touch.

He’s sure it’s all going to just come apart around them. It feels like they’re hurtling forward surrounded by an eggshell. Everybody else reads newspapers, trapped in their headphones.

If his father had not called him he might not have known at all.

At first the call had displayed the usual symptoms: it arrived after midnight, his father’s voice a little slurred, although maybe Peter imagined that. First they talked about his brother, his own children, his wife. And then the call passed into an even stranger world when his father said, “When did you last speak with your mother?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

The kids were coming out of their rooms. Carol too. All of them squinting through the hallway light. The phone had woken them all up, but this was not that abnormal. It happened every couple of months, and then Peter would move quietly all through the next day, work on his projects in the garage or go for a long drive. He motioned for them all to go back to bed and they inched back into their rooms to their tropical fish nightlights and princess bedspreads.

“Yeah, well,” his father said. “She’s in trouble and she’s not exactly the kind of person to ask for help, right? Unless you know something about her that I don’t.”

He wasn’t aware that his parents even spoke anymore, not for years and years.

He remembered his father at the door, filling the door frame, and then the sight of him at the kitchen table, so much smaller somehow, bouncing the baby on his knee and reaching in the other direction, across the table, for a spoon. His mother put the water on. She even put something on a plate. The baby seemed happy, or at least oblivious, and he remembered feeling envious of its ignorance even then. Possibly all it cared about was the lights above its head.

His father said, “Peter, are you listening to me? This is important,” and he felt like a kid who’d been caught dozing off in class. But he knew he was the responsible one, the man who loved his wife and children. He wasn’t a boy anymore for Christ’s sake so why did he feel like one?

Not just his father’s words, but also that other thing, the desire he knew he’d feel when he returned to bed. He’d want to grab Carol, pull his head between her breasts. She’d stroke his hair and then finally he’d be able to sleep.

If he’s honest with himself he’s known his mother is in trouble for weeks. The writing on the postcards had grown bizarre, the one last week just a complaint about the price of gasoline, the one before that blank except for a few words, a list of household chores. Clean the floor. Wash clothes. Fold. He puts the postcards on the fridge with the others, writing side down. Pictures of bears and ice. The same things she’s been sending him since he left the state fifteen years ago.

His father said, “If you love her, then you’ll go see her.”

At the memory clinic they sit in a white room waiting for the doctor. “I’m perfectly fine,” his mother says.

The doctor is charming, young, handsome, with three pens standing at attention in the pocket of his jacket. First he speaks to them about their trip here. Was it a good one? What about Alaska. Is it true what they say about the Aurora?

“It depends what you’ve heard,” his mother says from her small plastic chair.

She is as unsmiling as a shark. But the doctor grins and says, “I’ve heard it’s beautiful.”

“It is that,” she says.

Then they talk about the names of presidents, the days of the week, and the birthdays of her children. “There’s Peter,” she says, with a nod in his direction, and she names his birthday, his job, the names of her grandkids. “And then there’s that other one.” She waves her hand at the air.

The doctor treats all of this as a charming eccentricity.

“I can smell urine,” she says. “Urine and the stuff they use to clean urine.”

The doctor asks her to recite the alphabet backwards.

“Let me see you do it,” she says, when she stops at R.

His laughter is generous and patient.

Peter tries it in his own head. Z. Y. X. W.

“Once more?” he asks her.

“Complete foolishness,” she says. “Are you going to lock me up here?”

“Mom,” Peter says. “It’s not that kind of place.”

“You’re not going to put me in a home. You’ll need my signature for that.”

“This is actually not that uncommon,” the doctor says to Peter. “Let’s take a recess. I’ll be back in a bit and we can start at the beginning.” He turns and his voice softens. “Is that okay ma’am? I’m sorry that this is upsetting for you.”

“He reminds me of your father,” she says when the doctor is gone and she is flipping through a book she’s brought for the occasion. “That smile of his. It’s like he wants to fuck me.”
 
 
The crying was the worst thing he’d ever heard and he was prepared to do anything to make it stop: bounce it, say sweet words to it, put it under a pillow or drop it out the window, pray to God or maybe even the devil. He wondered vaguely what his parents would do if he just let it fall to the grassy edge just outside the kitchen window. They were on the back porch talking. Yelling really, although he couldn’t hear a word. Possibly he only remembers it as yelling. Maybe they were whispering in that way they used to whisper, through tight teeth, their faces close together with his mother’s hand on his father’s shoulder.

But the baby definitely cried and he bounced it and begged it. He gave it his thumb to bite. Its face squeezed and collapsed and turned red and still they did not come. He could see its pulsing flesh at the back of its throat when it screamed and he wondered if this was the foundation for something, if everything after would be built on this awful moment.

His brother appeared and said, “What the fuck?” He looked around the room and made a grab at his mother’s cigarettes, slid three out and put them in his jeans pocket. “Dad’s out there, huh? Did what’s-her-name kick him out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re having a serious talk.”

“I think it probably wet itself,” he said. “The little dude.”

“It’s raining harder,” Peter said.

“It’s sleet,” his brother said. “Coming off the mountain. You can hear it on the roof.”

They stood listening to it clatter on the tin through the wailing of the baby. He said, “It’s traveled all the way from the mountains.”

“Jesus,” his brother said. “I’m the one who should sound stoned. What’s the matter with you?”

Finally, his parents appeared, both of them soaking wet, his father running his hand through his hair. The baby was passed around along with some towels. They all sat down again. “So this is the situation,” his mother said. “Your father and this little one are going to sleep here tonight. The baby will sleep with me and your father with sleep on the couch. Then, in the morning, I’m going to go to work, you boys are going to go to school, and your father is going back to where he came from and have a good talk with his girlfriend. Isn’t that right, Tom?” she asked, and she looked at Peter’s father.

“All except the couch,” he said, and he laughed, but it was just a nervous titter, and he looked down at his hands.

And Peter thought that if he could just keep them all together like this, under the clattering tin roof, then everything would be okay. First tonight and then they’d figure out something tomorrow, some new reason to keep them all here and out of the rain. The sleet, he corrected himself.

This is what he’s thinking about as he moves through the letters in his head: the family around the table. The baby has found his way back to him. His father is drinking a beer. His mother is holding a spatula. That’s the picture he can’t shake. They are winding their way through the memory clinic. His mother is trying to find her way out past the numbered doors. “Mom,” he says. “Hold on.”

“I’m tired of waiting,” she says. “These doctors think your life is nothing. They want you to die here.”

They pass another doctor who gives them the once over, then past a place they might have been before. They are lost, lost in a memory clinic. He wants to throw up his hands and laugh and laugh. Finally, he’s there: the original doctor. “You wouldn’t believe how often this happens,” he says. “This place is a maze. Were you looking for the restroom? Down there and to the left.”

Behind him a young couple and an old man bent at the shoulders, talking to them, talking to himself. The couple are touching the old man, guiding him. On his face small bandages, one across his nose, another on his forehead.

“Right,” Peter says.

In the bathroom his voice is shaking. “Nobody is going to hurt you. The sooner we finish this the sooner we can go.”

“You need my signature to put me in the home,” she says, “and you’re not going to get it.”

“I’m not going to put you in the home,” he says, “and you know what? If I was going to lock you up I wouldn’t need your signature. You don’t know anything about it.”

“I won’t let you,” she says. “Your father won’t let you. Where is he? I want to talk to him.”

“I’m doing this for you,” he says. “Get back out there and behave yourself and answer those damned questions.”

“Oh please,” she says. “I know what you’re really mad about.”

The next morning he rose for breakfast to find his father at the stove and his mother at the table with the baby. She was feeding it bits of mushed carrots with her fingers and its face was smeared with orange. Both of them, his mother and father, were smiling and laughing and the room was full of heat and music. Outside more sleet. It had been sleeting all night and the truck was covered with a thin sheet of ice. He had never seen anything like this before, not in August, and he was a little afraid, but his parents didn’t seem to care at all. The table was already set, plates and forks and even knives and napkins. He wasn’t used to seeing knives and napkins.

“The first one is for you,” his dad said. “Well, the second one. I burned the first one. That one was for the trash can.”

His mother laughed at this, as if it was something she really found funny, and tweezered a glob of carrot into the baby’s greedy mouth.

“No church today,” his mother said, although they had not gone to church since the divorce two years before.

“I might not believe in much,” his father said. “I certainly don’t believe in the rule of law. But I do believe in God. And not the God in the Bible and not the God on TV.”

“This old horse,” his mother said, but she was still smiling, feeding the baby.

And Peter did remember talks like this. Rants, his mother called them. Sometimes about the church and sometimes about the government. Back at the old house his father had kept marijuana plants in the chicken coop with the dirty-feathered chickens. He kept a gun in a wooden box under his bed and talked about how the CIA had shot Kennedy. “You don’t remember it,” he’d say. “You were just a baby. But they slaughtered him right in his car just because he was making this country better for the working class. Right in the brain.”

But at that moment, as he made the second pancake, all of it seemed charming, a fairytale he had told them once, read to them from a big picture book.

“How’s it coming along?” his mother asked.

“Almost there,” his father said. “Maybe a little too far actually.”

He held up the black thing and Peter thought, you did that on purpose. You think it’s funny. But it was kind of funny. He found himself smiling too. The baby was funny and so was the pitiful black pancake. Even the weather was funny. You could see the ice pelting the porch.

“It’s not a day for driving,” his father said.

“Got that right,” his mother said.

His brother was hiding out upstairs doing his thing. The house was small enough that if everybody stopped talking, stopped moving, maybe they would have been able to hear him. Except, Peter realized, the tin roof was clattering with ice and it didn’t seem like it was going to stop. It was getting worse. “Third time’s the charm,” his father said.
 
 
They take the SkyTrain back across the city. He looks for the horse but it’s gone, although occasionally he spots a kid holding a balloon. It’s getting late and people seem to be walking home.

His mother is silent for the first time all day. She’s reading her novel and his legs are spread, hands on his knees, in a pose of concentration. Finally she speaks without looking up. “You wanted me to be dignified,” she says.

But he doesn’t answer. He’s sick of speaking to her. One of his sons has a severe learning disability. His daughter has night terrors. She doesn’t know a thing about them, doesn’t even think to ask.

“I just want to go back,” she says. “It’s my home. I know where my toothbrush is. I can find it in the dark.”

He keeps his mouth and arms stiff. He’s trying to pretend she’s not there. The results will come by phone, a more detailed report by mail.

“Do you remember that we’d have to cut the lawn?” she says. “I always thought that was the most foolish thing I could imagine. That a person would move all the way to Alaska and still have to cut their lawn. I don’t do it anymore. I just let it grow. Who cares? It’s wonderful. Let it all grow. That’s what I say.”

He does remember. His father pushing the gas mower back and forth and then later, when he was gone, his brother. When his brother left at seventeen then it was him. His mother would watch him from the back window. Was she proud or just making sure he was doing a good job? Across the field he could see the trailer park and the dumpster where they got rid of their trash, a small playground and cars up on blocks. He says, “It’s not like we were living in a timberland. We had a lawn so we cut it.”

“Timberland,” she says. “That’s funny,” and he realizes that she’s won. There’s no way to return to that invulnerable silence.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “How about this for a test? Do you remember when dad came that time, and he had the baby, and he stayed for almost a week? What was that all about?”

“Your father and I have a very complicated relationship,” she says.

“Yes,” he says, “but you didn’t answer me.”

“You’re remembering it wrong,” she says. “It was more than a month. What do you think of that smarty pants? I’m not denying anything. In fact, it’s worse than you remember. He stayed for more than a month and we were man and wife again. And what’s-her-name in Whitehorse, that idiot with the fetal alcohol syndrome, The Slow Girl is what I used to call her, she rang us up every night, and every night I told her that he’d be leaving the next morning. And she believed it. It’s like she had never been lied to before in her life. So trusting. Like a little kid really, but built like a linebacker.”

“I remember holding her baby,” he says.

“You grew up too fast,” she says. “That’s on me. But what could I do? I grew up too fast, too. Jesus, I was what, eighteen when I had your brother?” She smiles thinly. “Your father was something else.”

But he remembers another thing, something he refuses to tell her. He’s returned to his silence and found something more there: a strange kind of peace. The memory has returned to him as if it’s a thing he’s misplaced. Her voice has summoned it back through the corridors of his history and now here it is and it’s as sharp as the thumping noise of the train. Soon he’s going to check her bags, place her carefully on her plane, send her back to Fairbanks, but this thing will stay with him.

“Is Tom there?” the voice asked, soft and a little girlish, furtive. He knew immediately who it was. He held her child in his arms.

His mother was upstairs. So was his father. His brother, who knows where. He remembers the sleet clattering, coming down harder and harder, but that must be wrong. It couldn’t have sleeted that long. But it stretches through everything like the rail guiding the train car through the sky.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m not sure where he is.”

“Well,” she says. “Has he left?”

He stroked the baby’s head. He was getting good at it. He could make it sleep with a feathering touch, bring it back awake with a shifting of its weight to his other shoulder, watch it smile when he smiled, stare when he stared.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “You have to tell him I’m sorry. I’m not sure he’s getting my messages. There’s that woman.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“She calls me stupid but I’m not,” she said. “I’m smart. I can raise the boy. It’s not hers. I don’t even know if it’s his. Who are you? Are you his son, the one with the drugs?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s me.”

“Your life would be easier if you let God carry your load,” she said.

“I’m going to tell him,” he said. “I promise. You give me a message and I’m going to pass it along.”

“Then tell him I love him,” she said. “I do. I don’t say that to everybody. I love him and I love my little boy and he needs to come back here and be with us. And tell him he doesn’t have to compromise. He’ll know what I mean.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I can tell you have a good soul.”

But he never did. He took the baby into the other room and put it on the floor and watched TV. It made contented cooing sounds and its hand shook, making small grabs at the air, and his favorite show came on, the one his mother didn’t like him to watch because the characters were always knocking each other around. But he’d watch it anyway, and then the one after, and the one after that, until the burning toast smell filled the air and his eyes grew tired. The black-and-white figures poked and slapped but never actually hurt each other. No wounds or tears, no running away either, no saying enough is enough and simply exiting the room. He remembers turning up the sound because of the noise of the weather, the ice and metal, the rain and tin. In his mind it is there when he wakes up and when he goes to sleep, there when he steps outside and checks the sky. His brother has gone, but there is this other one, this small thing in his hands, and there is a small voice on the phone telling him please.
 
 
He imagines his mother moving through her house the way a blind person might. There is the couch. It’s been there for twenty-five years. There is the fridge. Her hand finds the handle. There is the nightstand and the alarm clock, the panel that slides back to reveal the circuit breakers, the closet where she keeps extra lightbulbs. He calls his father and tells her she is okay, she is safe, that he shouldn’t worry. It’s the first time he’s dialed his father’s number in years and years, but his father answers with a casual, “Hey, Peter.”

“You shouldn’t have let her get back on that plane,” his father says. “She’s not going to last through the winter up there.”

“Maybe,” Peter says. “Maybe that’s true.”

His wife is out with friends. The kids are doing homework at the kitchen table. He’s up on the second floor, trying to keep his voice down.

“Maybe,” his father says. “You’re always saying that. Maybe this. Maybe that. You should have told her, ‘You’re not getting on that plane.’”

His children are already moving past him. Their math problems are getting just out of reach. He really has to think hard to help. In a minute he’ll go downstairs and get a glass of water and then stand a polite distance from them, waiting for them to ask for help. Or not. He’s content to just watch. He’ll drink the water and start at Z again. He’s been doing this for the last couple of days and he hasn’t reached M. He says to his dad, “That woman you lived with for a while in Whitehorse. What was her name?”

“Oh her,” he says. “Yes. Shit.”

He waits. He can hear the kids talking about a movie downstairs. There are potato chips in a bowl on the table. He knows because he put them there before walking up here to have this conversation.

“You know what?” his father says. “This is going to sound crazy but it’s a blank. Leslie or something? Laura? Jesus, now I’m the one who’s the jerk, huh?”

That’s how it is. He expected that answer. How long has it been? His brother is gone, too. And the baby? He doesn’t remember its name either, although its warmth is still a living thing to him, a solace in that endless rain. “I’m still angry,” his father says. “Let’s not change the subject.”

“So yeah,” Peter says. “I let her on the plane. I pointed her in the right direction and I watched her go. She had a connection in Anchorage too.”

“Jesus,” his father says. “You were always such a good kid. What the hell happened to you?”