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Authors: Alice Sebold
Tags: Fiction
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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
[5 7 ]
Alice Sebold
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,
[58]
The Almost Moon
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.
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
[5 7 ]
Alice Sebold
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,
[58]
The Almost Moon
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.
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