The Unspeakable Read Free

on an almost cellular level. But then again maybe some of my mother’s damage was her own. She freely admitted that from the age of fourteen until she left her parents’ house after college, she stopped speaking almost entirely when she was at home. In the outside world, she won piano competitions and twirled the baton, but inside the house she offered nothing more than an occasional mumble. I think the idea was that her mother was so unwilling to listen to her that she was no longer going to waste her breath.
    As a very young child I’d taken the requisite delight in my grandparents; they had candy dishes and cuckoo clocks, plus they lived far away and I saw them only once a year at the most. But as I grew older and my grandfather died and my mother lost what little buffer had once stood between her and her adversary, the more I came to see the pathology that swarmed around my grandmother like bees. She was a mean little girl in a sweet old woman’s body; she spoke about people behind their backs in ghastly ways, sometimes loudly just seconds after they’d left the room. She spoke in a permanent whine, sometimes practically in baby talk. My mother, whose life’s mission was to be regarded as serious and sophisticated, recoiled from this as though it were a physical assault. She often said she believed her mother had an “intellectual disability.” For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.
    We didn’t need to have my grandmother’s funeral right away, my mother said. It would require travel to Southern Illinois, a ragged, rural place out of which my grandmother had seldom set foot and from which my mother, despite having left at twenty-three, never felt she could totally escape. Like me, my brother lived in Los Angeles, though unlike me, it was hard for him to get away from work and no one expected him to just drop everything to attend his grandmother’s funeral. My father, though sort of in the picture in that he also lived in Manhattan and was still married to my mother, was not in any picture that would have required him to make this trip. My parents had been separated for nearly twenty years, beginning around the time my mother began to self-identify as a theater person and potential single person, though they’d never bothered to divorce. The rest of us, though, would go the following month, when my brother could request a few days off and after my mother was recovered from her surgery and had gotten in a round or two of chemotherapy. It would turn out to be the last trip she ever took. At the memorial service, she addressed the small crowd of mostly eighty- and ninety-somethings about how far she’d moved beyond Southern Illinois but how she still appreciated it as a good place to have grown up. This was entirely untrue, since as far back as I can remember she’d blamed a large portion of her troubles on her hometown as well as on her mother. Also untrue was the notion, which my mother had let grow in her hometown some years earlier and never bothered to tamp down, that she was single-handedly responsible for the career of a famous actor who had gone to the high school where she’d taught. In truth, the actor had dropped out before she began working there, but my brother and I nodded and went along with it.
    In our family, being good children did not have to do with table manners or doing well in school but with going along with my mother’s various ideas about herself and the rest of us. Mostly they amounted to white lies, little exaggerations that only made us look petty if we called her out on them so we usually didn’t. Or at least we didn’t anymore. There was a period of at least fifteen years, from approximately age eighteen to age thirty-four, when every interaction I had