I will always think of one afternoon in particular. My father and I were at the lunch counter in the drugstore, and the waitress asked us if everything was “lulu.” It was a word my mother had used often—“That’s lulu, Lily,” she would say when she thought I had done something good. My father froze and stared at me as if to ask if I’d heard it, too. His first look was one of shock, and then he stared back at the woman, searching her face while ordering his sandwich. I don’t recall the rest of lunch, only that when we got home, he sat in his chair and cried for a solid hour. I had never seen him cry and I wasn’t sure what to do, and so I went up to my room and waited until he called up and said it was time for dinner. I remember he cooked eggs that night, my egg cooked inside a hole he’d made in a piece of bread with a drinking glass; he also toasted the little circle of bread, off to the side, just as my mother always had done. The next day he was fine, and he never mentioned it again.
I told your dad that story early in our marriage, and the conversation led us to the decision that we needed a secret word. I had heard that the Houdinis had a secret word and that they promised whichever one died first would return to communicate with the other, and I told your dad that just because the Houdinis had failed to correspond after Harry died didn’t mean that we would fail. The plan is that one of us will appear on a bus or at a lunch counter in the body of someone young or foreign or living in a pasteboard box, and with that spoken word, we will recognize each other.
There was a time I read a lot of books about such connections and experiences with the spiritual realm and sought information wherever I could, my eye drawn to fortune-tellers and those who claimed that they could connect with the dead. I even went to a séance once and sat with a table of strangers. There was a sudden cold draft (I felt it), but it was also winter in Massachusetts.
I thought I heard a voice say, “Help me,” but I couldn’t have sworn to it. Besides, it was at a time when you children loved watching all those things on Shock Theater, and I remembered later how you both after watching “The Fly” said, “Help me, help me.” I never decided if my mind was playing a trick or if I’d really heard it. I was going through a really difficult time, and I also know that “Help me” would be a reasonable thing for anyone, living or dead, to say if feeling stuck. But I told your father later that it seems to me important if you are going to speak to someone from the other side, it would be good to have something original or unique to say, so that there’s no question or wondering about it all. We will know. We put a lot of thought into our word, and the time we spent doing so will always be some of my best time.
Our word is one I’ve never heard anyone else say.
We were in Florence when we chose it, and we were completely enthralled with the magic of the place, the ancient streets and buildings making us feel so hopeful and powerful in our artistic and intellectual pursuits. I was dreaming of opening my dance school and of the recitals I wanted to do—“Petrushka” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” adapted to make every child feel included and important. And your father talked about the book he wanted to write; he was studying burial practices, and all the myths and history of the ages, with particular interest in Paleolithic cave art, dating and researching when humans first paid attention to the care and ritual of the dead. He talked about things like art for the sake of art, or if those drawings were there to tell a story, to reveal something specific about the death of an individual, and then he would answer all of his own questions without me saying anything at all: Doesn’t all art communicate something? Isn’t that the purpose? And I just listened, his voice going back and forth with the rhythm of an oscillating fan, the distant hills and old buildings shimmering in sunlight. I listened. The Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens—had the two been able to communicate on any level at all?
“Oh, I hope so,” I said every now and then, or something like that, lit a cigarette, and poured us each a little more wine, the carafe between us nearly empty. “I really hope they all got along.”
I asked: Did our sweet Margot understand when I said I didn’t want to put her down but the vet said I had to? Has any child ever understood when a parent says, “This hurts me more than it hurts you”? Do people really believe what they say they believe? And I told about the experience my father and I had had at the drugstore.
That whole stretch of time in Florence has always felt removed from the rest of life; it was big and magical-feeling as we walked along, your father studying the cobblestones and every odd-shaped window, or anything etched above a doorway. I was completely transformed by the Foundling Hospital and those beautiful sculptures of swaddled infants there on a background of beautiful sky blue, like giant cameos.
I still have the notes I wrote so I would never forget the details of it all: all the names and places foreign to my tongue. It was one of those wonderful times when we spoke of two different things and yet we were able to take turns and listen and somehow complement each other. We marveled at all that remains to remind us of lost people and times, your father always noting what would have been constant—the light and length of the days, the seasons. I told how my mother once got her palm read, holding it out to me as if I could see all that had been foretold, and how I’ve always wished I had a photograph to go back and study.
My dad was on my mind a lot those days, there in the house on School Street, with too much time alone, so I sent a lot of postcards that arrived long after I had returned. While thinking of our word, I was reminded again of Houdini. As a young boy in 1908, my father had witnessed the great magician leaping from the Mass Avenue Bridge in shackles and locks; there was a long, silent waiting before he surfaced and swam from the river. It was a story my father liked to tell, a piece of history he had witnessed, and he spoke of the sad irony of how after all that Houdini had survived, he was felled by a sucker punch from some selfish fool who thought he could get his five minutes of fame. According to Houdini’s wife, they didn’t make contact after his death, and then on top of that, she was not allowed to be buried beside him, because she wasn’t Jewish, but I like to think that they did make contact and kept it private, stressing that such a connection is intimate and needs to be kept that way.
Your father and I spent days thinking about it, something rarely spoken that would connect us. Remember in elementary school how we had a secret word in case of an emergency and someone you didn’t know had to come get you? (Petrushka!) Thank goodness we never had to use it. But now, people need passwords just to live in this time we are in, everyone relying on old dogs and cats long dead and childhood streets and numbers, phone exchanges that belonged to people we once knew or loved, stores that no longer exist.
At the Foundling Hospital, I stared at that large wheel that rotates into the ancient building, and I tried to imagine how a mother would feel placing her newborn there and then in one half turn losing sight of her forever—almost always it was forever, though the hopeful ones pinned notes or little bits of jewelry, something sewn into the swaddling that the child might someday present as proof of heritage. It seems I stood there for a very long time, and it is one of those memories that comes to me so often. The light was so beautiful, like nothing I had ever seen, and as we walked through the building, I was aware of my hands pressing into the wood and stone of hallways and staircases, joining the prints of hundreds of years, the dust and oils of lives long over and yet still lingering there. You could feel them, hear them whisper.
And maybe that is how it all came to be—yes, I think so. I told your dad this feeling I had; I told him how sometimes I feel I am just on the verge of hearing something. “They whisper,” I said, and he said that that is what he would do in the future, come back and whisper in my ear. And then we began what has been a lifelong back-and-forth argument, because neither of us wants to be the one left behind.
“I want to go first.”
“No, I’m going first. Wait and see.”
We were about to head back out into the light, to drink wine and t
alk and laugh, and then to our tiny room to make love, our young limbs wrapped and entwined like supple vines, and then sleep and wake to start life all over again. We were already thinking of you both, even though we probably couldn’t have said so in the moment. But how could I not think of you when standing there in that ancient place, in front of a display of hundreds of tokens meant for the sake of remembering and reuniting, the thimbles and buttons and lockets and coins, tiny brass fish and hairpins and keys, all marked in ways that make them unique, all there to say, “I love you. I’ll be back. Please don’t forget me. I’ll be back.”
Shelley
There are so many things Shelley wishes she could say, things that fight to get on the tongue, only to be swallowed back down in the name of composure or decency or respect. As a child, it’s why she loved that book Go, Dog. Go! and why she has enjoyed reading it to her boys. “Do you like my hat?” one dog asks, and the other repeatedly says, “I do not!” instead of that polite girl thing so many were raised to do: Well, it’s a hat like I have never seen before, and What a hat that is! Oh my, that’s a hat, all right, and Aren’t you sweet to even think to ask my opinion. I am so flattered and honored that you thought of me. Nice girls = enablers. Now there are whole libraries of books about this.
Do you like my hat? Hell, no, it looks like shit!
Doesn’t she look just like a little doll?
Oh God, yes! A little voodoo doll, with rusty pins stuck all about the mouth.
These cases get to her this way, and she has to vent somewhere so she won’t screw up and accidentally shout out in the courtroom. She likes to take shorthand the old-fashioned way, with a piece of paper and a pencil, a method that requires her alert attention and doesn’t leave room for mistakes or for other thoughts to enter her mind, a problem she has had her whole life—sometimes several thoughts coming to her at one time, so that she consciously has to slow down, slow down, and she tells herself, Slow down, only she can’t afford to do that while at work, because just that little soothing repetition could cost her a very important sentence or admission or piece of evidence. It’s easy in a town without all the modern equipment to fall back on good old shorthand—stenotype or paper and pencil—and there is no one around here who comes close to her speed and accuracy on keyboard or longhand.
Her job is very stressful this way—demanding a level of vigilance almost as bad as having a newborn you’re worried about, and both of her sons’ births had filled her with anxiety. Jason, because she was all alone in the world, and Harvey, because of the defect. That’s what they said—“the defect”—like an airbag or floor mat, or something misshapen or dented on an assembly line, only she was Harvey’s assembly line, her birth canal his only way out, and so of course she feels responsible. Harvey’s birth had caused so much worry she thought she would never sleep again. It was a shock to see him and a shock to see the look on the young nurse’s face. It felt like blame, an accusation. What did you do?
This happens in court all the time, the accusation, the need to plead your innocence, even when in the back of your mind there are all those worries and fears that you might be guilty after all, that there might be bits of proof. She wasn’t an older mother, but she probably did have a drink or two before she knew she was pregnant with Harvey; they said it all happened in those early weeks, one in seven hundred, they said, and there you are, the upper lip not fully formed. “It’s such an easy repair these days,” the doctor had said. “One surgery might do it.” He spoke so gently she barely heard him, but she allowed herself to keep thinking, Easy, easy. It’s so easy. But Harvey doesn’t think it’s easy. If he did, he wouldn’t wear masks all the time, a whole series of battered Halloween masks, from an alien to a Ninja Turtle, and he wouldn’t wear those fake mustaches or hold his hands up to his face whenever he laughs to hide the thin scar there.
When Shelley lived in Atlanta and had to wear that steno mask, she couldn’t help but think of things like Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs or, and maybe even worse, that someone else had worn it, their breath trapped there. These days, it is hard enough to breathe about a lot of things, like this trial and Brent being long gone. She has to remind herself, because she has told Harvey “He’ll be back” so many times, it’s easy to believe it herself. But that isn’t true, and someday Harvey will need to know the truth, just not today, because he is driving her nuts, and what mother says that about her son? He is only six. Harvey is only six. Of course it is hard to concentrate on the trial and getting every detail just right. Paper and pencil are always best, always her first choice, but the keypad is also fine. Either way, her hand or fingers moving, letters shaping. Listen to the words, only the words. If she listens to the words, she can sometimes hit 300 words a minute; her average is 250. The world record is 360, so no one else around here can even come close to what she can do. That is what she has going for her; there are others who are good, but no one is better. She writes, I am the best. She writes, I can, I can, I can.
The cases around here are not your standard domestic brawl or robbery or occasional crime of passion. There are those, too, but that’s the easy stuff, all fluff compared to what she is usually taking in, the cases that cost her sleep at night and keep her looking over her shoulder at odd times. There were three heads in a freezer, right there in a normal avocado-green Kenmore—obviously old, given the color, but still running, which someone said later was certainly a fine recommendation for a Kenmore; terrible circumstances but a fine recommendation. The testimony revealed it to be a twenty-one-cubic-foot Kenmore top-freezer, even though the accused continued to call it “the Kelvinator” throughout his trial—“my momma’s Kelvinator”—leaving the whole court to feel like they’d gotten spun around in a time machine and spit out somewhere eighty years ago.
The use of freezers has unfortunately been a popular thing, especially for crimes committed in the heat of summer. It seems the involvement of mothers also comes up often: Momma owned the house, Momma owned the freezer, it was Momma herself there in the chest freezer out in that garage, her legs mixed in with those of deer and rabbits—a 12.8 cubic foot Frigidaire in white; there’s very little color choice in chest freezers, it seems, but Shelley did make a notation for herself, something to share with Brent, which she thought would be an interesting topic of conversation, if she ever talks to him again, that the use of freezers to hide crimes crossed all class lines. There were just as many Viking and KitchenAid freezers as there were Amana and Kenmore—murdering and freezing the body was not just a low-class crime, but it is why she had insisted they buy a Bosch refrigerator, much to Brent’s impatience and obvious irritation when she said she wanted that one because it was the one brand she had not heard about being used.
“There’s always a first,” he said, and for a moment she froze, right there in Lowe’s, Harvey and Jason still in her vision, sitting on a riding lawn mower. Jason was more than old enough for her to trust him with his little brother by then, which was a relief; Jason had been a boy she needed to tether to her, wrist to wrist, with what looked like a long telephone cord so she wouldn’t lose him in a crowd.
“Shelley.” Brent jiggled her arm. “That’s a joke.”
“I knew that,” she said, and made herself laugh. “I really did.” And she said how she was just keeping an eye on the kids; she was excited about a new refrigerator, and how Jason had told Harvey the one about is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it!
Now, they have an old refrigerator that came with the rental house, but the first thing she did was to put all the old school photos and recipes in the exact same place as when they lived with Brent in Georgia. Jason’s sixth-grade school picture, cowlick sticking straight up, a grin so big his eyes are closed. A picture of Jason holding Harvey, held in place with a magnet Jason had given her around that same time, which says chillin with my peeps, because he was begging her to buy him some little chicks like they’d seen under the heat lamps at Feed and Seed.
Refrigerators
are to keep your food from going bad and to hold family photos, not corpses. Bodies in freezers, many bodies in freezers over the course of her career, and there have also been bodies in the river, many bodies in the river, bodies in trash cans, bodies identified from half-decomposed tattoos, many spouses gone missing, falling down stairs, attacked by owls, dosed with arsenic by their concerned loved ones: she even read about all those things back then, Ted Bundy and what have you, and Brent always said it made him feel so much better about their—he said “their”—life to hear the stories she was reading and what she brought home from work; in fact sometimes they even laughed at the sheer horror of it all, but once she was alone again with just the kids, the terror returned and was magnified, the knowledge of how easily one human can choose to do away with another.
The latest case she has been recording is another disturbing one, and one that has the whole town focused and attentive, the least likely person accused of murder. Here’s this asshole of a man, a surgeon who lives in one of the biggest houses in town, probably has Viking and Wolf appliances, and drives whatever car you might drive if you wanted to spend a lot of money, and just because he was good at taking a scalpel to someone’s heart, he thought he had license to fuck anything that could fog a mirror, play head games on his wife, who since his incarceration had broken free of her dumpy-mama wardrobe and stepped back into the light of the living (part of his excuse for having affairs was that his wife had stopped taking an interest in her appearance). He sits there in his orange jumpsuit, obviously disgusted by the women who file up to testify, and not by choice, these women. Imagine getting subpoenaed into such a mess—you think you have a little secret with this prominent person in town, only to find out that not only did you screw a murderer but you are one of many, you are not so special after all. Shelley can’t help but wonder what the husbands think of these wives they’d trusted who fell under the spell of this person who is not even physically attractive. And certainly there is no personality or emotion to be found in his little superficial shell; he is like those locust shells that get left behind on the pine trees.
Hieroglyphics Page 7
