The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott




“if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go”

—FRANK O’HARA, “Morning”





Our parents liked to say that the first time Jackson and I met, we concentrated our focus so intently, grew so still, that they worried our little bodies might have forgotten we’d exited our watery beginnings, neglected the duty to breathe in and out. On the floor of the living room we turned our still-soft skin toward each other and blinked before demonstrating our talents in gripping and releasing: my five fingers around his chubby wrist, then his in embrace of mine. They say that the cat, our relative equal in size but a fascinating stranger in composition, strolled up to sniff the crowns of our heads, our full cheeks, but we offered him no attention. My mother and father and Julia, sitting on the couch, all happy with disbelief at the way their endlessly curious infants had quickly adopted such content with a tiny corner of the universe.

The next part of the story, the one that would echo for decades afterward: Julia moved to scoop Jackson from the floor. I left my quiet behind and howled with such force that the cat, still skirting the carpet, panicked and ran. My mother came to me and attempted comfort; my father, at the door with Julia, shrugged and offered a comment about the volatile nature of young love. They laughed, of course, and agreed to bring us together again very soon. Jackson did not cry, but squirmed from Julia’s restraint and tried to get a clearer vision of me. My wailing gained confidence and rhythm. I refused, even, the draw of my mother’s breast, as if I knew that she would not be my family much longer, that I would find that elsewhere.

That night my parents broke their oath to leave me in the crib, no matter how upset, and brought me into their bed. They wondered at me where I lay between them, linked their fingers over the heaving abdomen they’d created together, sang me folk songs about low roads and high roads, told me the word for each part of my body, whispered secrets about the ocean and the brain and the patterns of the earth until I finally calmed enough to listen.





Jackson has one green eye and one brown, though each is dotted with bits of the other color, as if hesitant to vehemently commit. He has a mole on his left hip (noncancerous, last time he checked) and half a BB bullet permanently lodged in his right shoulder blade (I put it there). His cheeks are wide and globular, as if they were hiding apples for later consumption, and give him the appearance of someone instantly trustworthy and kind. He is uncircumcised, but his foreskin is unusually taut and so this isn’t obvious. The hair on his chest issues forth in small tight curls, and halfway across the spirals change their direction. He pronounces “often” with a harsh “t.” When he picks up the phone he goes, “ ’Lo?!” in mock surprise to be hearing a voice from the magic box in his hand. He is a master with chopsticks. He is endlessly polite to the men at corner stores, taxi drivers, weary all-night-diner waitresses. He once dove into the polluted river in our hometown to retrieve a necklace of my mother’s after the well-used clasp broke, and contracted a rash that lasted two weeks (he wasn’t embarrassed). He talks in his sleep, among other things. He has a tattoo of my name on his chest that he insisted on during the throes of a melodramatic fugue (which is rare for his character) when we were seventeen. A mutual friend in a motel room (where his brother James worked the front desk) administered the ink at four a.m. with a questionable needle. He is incredibly gifted with children, though he always refused to discuss the possibility of having any. He is left-handed and secretly proud of the fact, the implication of genius. He once rode a shopping cart down one of the steepest hills in our city just for the hell of it; in addition to the half BB pellet, there is a bit of gravel, resulting from the inevitable crash at the bottom, that is also permanently part of his body. He is not traditionally handsome but most are tricked into thinking so. There are many items of clothing he has owned for more than ten years and still wears. His second toe is longer than his big toe. He goes through phases of intense love, then hatred for Indian food (it gives him explosive diarrhea). He is endearingly cranky in the mornings but inherently an early riser, and he gives up coffee every six months, swearing this time it’s for good. He likes to wear a mustache, but only when accompanied by a beard. If you go to a museum with him, he will unfailingly wander off by himself. He is a talented drinker but rarely seems drunk. He is a library of facts about the ocean. His body temperature is always one to two degrees higher than the average 98.6 and so sleeping with him feels like being in an intimate position with a furnace. He has a way of narrowing his eyes when he is annoyed or suspicious, and a way of ridiculing someone without their noticing until it’s too late. He absolutely spurns astrology; his handwriting has a way of changing to suit the occasion. He can roll his r’s quite well and, if he chooses to, speaks pretty decent Spanish. He whistles while he urinates. He always carries a knife and uses it (in handy versus violent ways) every chance he gets.

He cries infrequently, and when he does it is silent with a great deal of shoulder shaking. He does his best thinking in the ten minutes after a visit to a planetarium. He can curl his tongue into a U and also a “clover,” and is a talented eyebrow raiser. There is a spot with a half-inch circumference below his left jaw where hair does not grow; he has bizarre theories about why. Most of the time he has illicit fireworks purchased in Chinatown on his person. He adores Burnese mountain dogs and lights up at a sighting of one.

I use the present tense here, but it is possible that Jackson actually has given up coffee, that he has covered the tattoo of my name with something else, that he cries openly in front of this new woman. It has been a year, two months, and six days since we spoke. It has been four months since, in a moment of loneliness that came not late at night but early on a sunny morning, I called him and left a message he didn’t return. The last of his belongings and mementos of Us sit in a box in the back of my bedroom closet; though I resist the urge to take it down and finger the black-and-white photo booth strips, the silly tin science-fiction lunch box I bought him that he loved fiercely, the only remaining piece of art he made in his sleep, I know the objects so well that I’m not sure what difference it actually makes.





Officially, I’m Ida, though Jackson has called me I as long as I can remember. The symbolism is sickening. Even in the worst of it, even in phases where I spoke almost exclusively in monosyllables and guttural sounds and sat around lost in the worn flannel shirt he left behind, I would never bring this up to anyone: and he calls me I. Like I. As in myself.

In a particularly memorable home video, shot by my father who poured his monomania exclusively into filmic evidence of our childhood for a full year before quitting pretty much entirely, Jackson and I are sitting in a sun-faded kiddie pool in my front yard, aged three and a half or four. There’s something in my hands Jackson wants but can’t have—the camera zooms and focuses—it’s a set of brightly colored rubber rings—and he looks right at the camera, at my father, at justice, and cries: I want it but I has it!

Cut to: Valentine’s Day. We are at the kitchen table, our fingers covered in glue and the filth it’s attracted, and my father has not taken pains to maintain any level of organization so that bow-tie pasta and bits of stained doily and construction paper and crayons are everywhere. Somewhere in the background you can hear Julia walking a rambunctious James around the house; she is singing “Baby Beluga” full force and he wholeheartedly despite not knowing all the words; my father tries to point the camera toward the sound but it can’t be framed and he switches it back to us.

“What,” he says, “is Valentine’s Day for?”

I ham for the camera and flirt and wiggle: “Loooove,” I say.

“And who do you love, honey,” says my father, but before I can reply Jackson butts in, his sticky fingers spread wide, grabs my face and plants that series of wet kisses only young children can, and I shriek and giggle.

“I love I!” yells Jackson. “I LOVE I.”

Cut to: a celebration ceremony at our kindergarten (the last substantial bit of video for a number of years). We have of course convinced the teachers to let us stand next to each other during the part of the “performance” where the class gets up to sing the alphabet. To his credit, my father covers all four rows of children, with the same historian penchant for accuracy and entirety I’ve inherited, before settling on the two of us. The many weak voices lilt and strain, and when it gets to “f,” you can see our faces widen and bodies tense.

“E, f, g”—Jackson and I look at each other—“h,” and then we positively explode as we scream our initials—“I J”—so much so that neither of us has energy for “k”; we’ve been holding our breath in our ambitious bodies for those two syllables the whole time, and we both sort of slump and stumble, and the shy boy in the tie next to us frowns at how we’re embarrassing him.

The majority of our lives we were an exhausting display that others looked on, confused and ashamed to be watching. I, at least, was happy to bear witness. But even one letter changes a meaning entirely; no matter their proximity, different points of an alphabet refuse to be represented as the same: there’s no guarantee that someone standing at precisely the same longitude and latitude as you will remember the view the same way, no promise that one person’s memory of a moment or a month will parallel yours, retain the same value, shape the years of living that follow.





The walls of James and Jackson’s bedroom were covered with butcher paper that came in reams wider than it was tall. The paper was spliced together with the Scotch tape their mother kept in the drawer under the telephone, which also held a few photos not worthy of a place on the wall or even the refrigerator, and their father’s hammer, which every day acquired rust while we fought off robbers and sunsets.

The sun’s obstinate warmth lingered in the asphalt and sidewalk long into the evening while we dreamed. The sun came in through the window every morning at six thirty and offered life to the opposite wall, which displayed an incomplete and frenzied rendering of a circus. In the morning gregarious with childish enthusiasm, the paper circus shifted into a human drama; with the late-afternoon light, the characters became more determined to speak and live intricate, shadowed lives.

That summer, James and Jackson ate their dinners with admirable speed, stamina, and a teeth-baring spirit of anticipated adventure. The forkfuls were violently shoved between their two rows of teeth, and the boys took marked pleasure in the scraping noise the utensils produced. They paused, generally in harmony, only at thirty-second intervals, to gulp down bright-colored juice out of bright-colored cups that their mother set out for them. Sometimes dinner was followed by a ride on their bright-colored bicycles, but mostly, just as fiercely as it began, the meal would end—Jackson’s fork would drop, then James’s, and the brothers would look up, expectant, to where their mother sat. Her consent was generally wordless: a quiet smile or a flick of hands upward that meant Go.

Jackson designated the five to ten minutes after dinner as a period for solemn thought to be followed by discussion. Jackson, at eight, knew himself to be older, wiser, and the obvious leader of a project that would surely outlast them. Despite any planning efforts on the part of his older brother, James almost always deviated from the strategy. Jackson understood space and logic, but were it not for James, the pumpkin-orange tiger on the tight wire would never have tottered there haphazardly. The circus performers would never have varied ghastly and comically in height and girth.

Several times their mother put the circus project on hold and the tiger stood still, the half magicians gruesome beneath the trapeze. Julia suffered migraines that twisted and writhed in her head, and she often became agitated by the arguing that swelled in volume from the boys’ bedroom. The source of the tension was, without fail, a matter of creative differences (e.g., Jackson did not find the oversized tiger on the tightrope as believable or triumphant as the crown on the top of its head declared it to be). Upon Jackson’s expression of disdain for James’s artistic endeavors, the younger brother would defend himself violently. There were, he insisted, many reasons for a tiger king.

While we absorbed the paradise of indoor imaginations many afternoons, we valued the wide expanse of our block as well; out there was a wildness the three of us found and cultivated. Overgrown blackberry bushes reached to us through other people’s fences, and even after our lips and teeth and tongues were stained purple, the smell lingered and called to us at night while we tossed and turned in the slow heat, while we dreamed of vengeance in the water balloon fights of tomorrow. The brothers had both inherited their father’s penchant for sleep talking. Like their father, they spoke not in the stumbling tongues of so many sleep talkers but in full words and careful syllables, giving reason and rhyme to fantastical worlds and images. Unlike their father, though, Jackson and James had partners in their sleep talk. Only myself, the tiger king, the three-quarters-finished clown with crooked purple arms, and the beta fish, who swam the same circles in the same tank (which was situated exactly between the brothers’ beds on an end table), were aware of the conversations that took place in the middle of the night, threading strings between the dreamworlds of the brothers. I shared the secret with them, slept with my head almost directly beneath the fish tank, often still in my bright blue bathing suit, with my dark red widow’s peak connected, by another invisible thread, to the tip of Jackson’s nose.

During the day, I made up for my sex and too-thin stature with calluses thicker than all of the boys’. The balls of my feet were agile and quick; they responded effortlessly to impossibly sharp-angled turns in games of tag and never complained of the heat or the oak roots that reached up through the sidewalk of Madrone Street to remind us of beginnings. I made up for my sex with curse words my father had not meant to teach me, but at night I kept watch of Jackson’s chest, monitoring its homogenized ups and downs; the first part of loving anyone is to make sure they’re breathing. And so it went that I was the first to witness Jackson and James speaking to each other in the semaphores of deep sleep. Their mother had not noticed; Julia didn’t notice a lot of things.

On the last evening of June in that particular circus summer, I sat at the head of Jackson’s bed, my legs crossed like a brave Indian warrior, counting his breaths, waiting for an anomaly, sometimes daring to run my index finger over the slight curve of his lips.

Jackson slept like a content old man then, with a slight smile on his face, as if remembering a few sweet picnics and two well-raised children, but I was always scared of him waking. I almost jumped the first time he spoke, before realizing everything was the same.

“In the blond one, where seas go,” Jackson said.

My position as guardsman was not found out. The fish still swam their circles, discussing bubbles and miniature ceramic castles; James, on the other bed, still lay with one bootied foot outside the covers, but thirty seconds later he began to speak.

“Dragon time … is your time,” said some secret part of James.

And Jackson, after three to five moments: “Sea time?”

And James, whose sleeping head now faced his brother’s bed:

“Yesbutwith the trains.”

“… with the trains

and the fish man.”

“but the fishandthe bridge,

and the …”

“Ghost radio!” exclaimed James, and that was that.

I barely got to sleep that night, twisting and turning under the odd-smelling guest blanket, trying to make sense of the strange conversation I’d just witnessed. Ghosts: I knew plenty about those, having made a lifelong practice of reaching for my mother, standing in the room where she took her last breaths and whispering benign details about my day into the coffee cup my father said was her favorite. And then, with my father’s gift of walkie-talkies the prior Christmas, into those. There was the radio part, but it had never occurred to me that the link might exist underwater until I heard the disembodied words that floated across the boys’ bedroom. A bridge, of course. Of course you’d have to reach a bridge to get there. To get to her.





My father’s scissors were rusted and unwieldy, heavy like useful things just aren’t anymore, and carved shakily into the left blade was the word COPYBOY.

He was born to the editor of a small town’s newspaper in the South in 1941 and began writing for the Courier as a freshman in high school. When he was sixteen, he was caught skinny-dipping in the community pool, and his punishment was to write the article detailing the event in the crime log. He was unmerciful; he used the word “lascivious”; his father, the editor, was proud.

My father met my mother at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she began freelancing and eventually established herself as a fixture. She was tall and everything about her was long; the vertical-striped black-and-white pants she wore frequently that spring further contributed to the impression of a woman who went on forever in every direction. This hint of forever, not just in the length of limbs but also in other dimensions, was probably what initially attracted him. He had hit forty without realizing it: instead of measuring by years, he’d counted his life by the love affairs he’d had in Europe, the red convertible he’d wrapped around an olive tree in Spain, the antiwar riots on college campuses that he’d been lucky enough to witness and report on, the year he’d spent in Hawaii and the volcano he’d watched erupting from his window. Whether there was panic inside him before he met her, or it was meeting her that spawned it, he knew my mother was to be his last conquest; he was confident she was enough to witness for the rest of his life.

She didn’t give in at first. She had met many men with bright smiles who tried to equalize her with nicknames, who respected her work but more so respected the vision of her balancing two phones against her cheekbones in a busy newsroom, the way her fingers moved on a keyboard, the top button of her white linen dress that she wouldn’t notice had come undone.

He called her “champ” and “scoop,” made efforts to be well-informed of her story assignments. He stopped by her desk with coffee, which she smiled and drank, but when he offered his help—I know a guy who such-and-such down at the so-and-so who could really—she was curt and unreceptive.

After four months of working there, she finally agreed to have a drink with him and some other guys from the paper in celebration of the triumphant finish of a particularly rough deadline. He made the mistake of guessing her drink—surely a woman looking like her wanted something that suggested it tinkled and didn’t stain—she snorted. What then, Scoop, he joked, scotch? She accepted, and my father and the two other reporters watched in silence while she took the full brown body in her mouth in one swallow. As my father tells it, that sealed the deal then and there.

It was another month before my mother agreed to go out with just him. My father felt, for the first time in his life, unsure of his approach with a woman. She seemed unaffected by the traces of his drawl that so many females adored (the way he, for example, still called his days “Sundee,” “Mondee,” etc.), the pointed dress shoes he kept polished but not gleaming, the well fitting corduroy blazers with leather patches on the elbows, the ever-present pencil placed jauntily on his ear and through his thick wheat-brown hair, the perfectly delivered wink. Maybe the third time he asked her out and flashed his famous perfect smile, she had replied: What? I’m supposed to congratulate you on your big old teeth? (But the way she said it, he insists, was somehow not derisive. It was even, almost, pleasant.)

It was Friday. They were to go for dinner after work. My father was unusually transfixed by the glow of the Xerox machine, spilled coffee in the break room and took extra time to clean it up, returned to his station and made all the calls he should have, and still there were hours left in the workday. Usually, from a diagonal across the newsroom, he could see a sliver of her desk from his, but today there was some obnoxious cat figurine or mug that blocked it. When it was finally six, he crossed the newsroom. The people remaining were typing frantically; the cartoonist had his curly head down, bits of eraser flying violently off his station with quick brushes of the stubby, ink-stained hand.

His heart sank when he reached her desk. She was still enmeshed. Surrounding her were yellow legal pads in various states of distress, clippings from their paper and others, a bit of lettuce and near it some crumpled wax paper, a stack of books, different makes of pens all showing signs of being savagely chewed on. Her glance up to him was a vague assimilation of an apology. He took off his blazer, took out something to read from the leather satchel he carried under one arm, and found a chair to sit on. He realized he had not eaten since eight that morning and made every effort not to look up at the row of clocks displaying the different times in Tokyo, London, New York.

At ten after seven he filled with joy as she began to stack things and put them away in the metal desk’s drawers, wrapped a light silk scarf around her neck, put the last of a packet of crackers in her mouth and threw away their plastic wrapping along with the lettuce and the wax paper. She mouthed something to herself as she inventoried the contents of her oversized purse, she pulled the ball chain of the iconic green-cased lamp, she stood and beamed at him briefly.

She walked ahead of him to the elevator; she beat him at pressing the button that would bring them to the lobby and out of the building. He was to follow her in his car to a restaurant she knew. She was a terrible driver, and he watched as she failed to signal, changed lanes without reason, drove too close to people, honked at red lights. Her slender wrist emerged and withdrew from the driver’s side window when she flicked her cigarette.

She had chosen a soul-food place with a wooden front porch and chairs that rocked and strings of heavy white bulbs that crisscrossed over the tables. She insisted on sitting outside, though the night was certainly not warm and nothing like the wet, dense Southern heat that the restaurant’s ambiance implied so heavy-handedly and that my father knew and my mother didn’t. She talked and listened with a rare balance and got gravy all over her face. When my father proffered his neatly folded handkerchief, she seemed touched by a gesture so old-fashioned, and took it gladly.

What was said? These are the details my father strains more to recall. She told him about her life and he told her his. Her father was a lawyer; her father was a drunk; she had found her brilliant older sister dead by her own brilliant hands when she was seventeen. Before college she lived in Yosemite for a while, cleaning cabins, swimming naked, taking and posing for photographs that later would go into an album titled THE FUN CLUB.

By the end of the meal they were both sufficiently drunk, she hooting and clapping her hand over her mouth as if in shock, he cackling and telling stories with his hands, using forks and knives as props. He insisted on driving her home and laughed at the way she stuck her head out the window like a dog, happy to feel air on her booze-warm face. He thought her somehow more beautiful red nosed and slightly sloppy. To his amazement, she invited him in.


After a nasty incident in which my father made the mistake of sowing one last wild oat with a secretary from the floor below who called him “dear,” my mother did not return his desperate answering machine messages, did not look at him in the break room, and certainly did not express thanks for the books and flowers he left at her house. But for reasons my father can’t supply, she finally gave in and then it seemed they were together for better or worse. As beautiful as she was, as hungry as she was, my mother had reached a point similar to my father’s at which she looked around and realized she’d had enough fun. After only four months, they leased an apartment together. She committed herself to domestic life, cooking terrible dinners, painting flea-market purchases yellows and blues, adding art to the walls of the absurdly long Victorian hallway to make it seem less like the brothel it once was. They bought a Siamese cat who was pretty thoroughly unpleasant to be around and made a habit of clinging to the walls and hissing, who is still alive somehow, and whom my father has always insisted he loves.

When she became pregnant six months later, my father, who figured he had missed the paternal boat, was ecstatic. He took many photographs of her belly growing rounder in the bathtub, on the plastic chaise longues set up on the roof of their apartment. In these pictures she looks both happy and thirsty, pretending not to smile; the city behind her winks in the sunlight, as if in on the joke.

Like so many parents, mine wanted to create for me the life they never had and began scouting for a quieter place to plant themselves. Having just inherited a neat sum of money from the death my grandfather, they were able to finance the small house in the small town bisected by a river of the San Francisco Bay where I would live and my mother would die.