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, 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. There it was, an almost-empty ice cavity for one.
Jake had asked me questions concerning lividity, stiffness, what signs there might be of how she had died, but I was done with that. I had now not only broken her nose but managed to mangle her body postmortem. There was no reason why I shouldn’t fulfill my childhood dreams.
“At what point did you give up?” I said out loud, my voice, as I said it, startling me. In the corner opposite was the metal cabinet, full of my father’s old suits. Tattersall; summer seersucker; flannel; dark, itchy wool tweed. I remembered the day I’d come down to fold the laundry several years ago, and opened up the cabinet. When I crawled inside, I was a child again, my upper body encased in his old suit coats. I had taken the tweed, with its suede elbow patches, and rubbed it along my cheek.
The cool air coming up from the meat freezer felt good against my face. I saw the amber bottles set on the windowsill above the washer to keep belly-crawling burglars out. I saw the purple glass bottles on the ledge of its mate.
I had never thought of how one cut up a body, only of the freedom to be had postsevering. The grisly reality of the sawing and the butchering had never preoccupied me. It was the instant flash, the twitched nose of Bewitched, the magic of going from having my mother to not having her that held me in its thrall. More than butchering her, if I could have chosen it, I would have changed her body from solid to liquid to gas. I wanted her to evaporate like water. Rising up out of my life and leaving everything else intact.
“If you aren’t careful,” my mother would say, “you’ll fall in.” At eleven, twelve, thirteen, I would be in the kitchen, leaning over, looking into the refrigerator for what I could eat. I perused the food with such care only when I thought it was safe. At other times I tried to act as if food didn’t matter to me, as if it were too much of a bother. “Oh! There! That’s food? Hmmm.” But with my head in the refrigerator, I was the perfect prey, and as she listed my flaws-the ballooning ass, the “near matronly” thighs, the swinging arms I’d eventually have, like “a dimpled flesh bat,” if I went on in my way-I would look at the tiny light in the refrigerator and wonder, Could I move in there? Could I hide behind the cottage-cheese container and the orange juice made from concentrate? It would be quiet inside the refrigerator once my mother closed the door. I could disappear in there.
I was staring into the meat freezer, at the millions of ice crystals built up along its sides and covering the two hams and lean patties in a shimmering mink of ice, and then I wasn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blue Pigeon Forge bowl.
“Mrs. Castle, will you take that downstairs?” I could hear my mother saying. “Maybe bring something else up.”
I walked over to the card table and picked up the bowl. Nearby, hanging from a hook on the wall, I found a heavy rusted pair of shearing scissors. I turned the bowl upside down on the table and brought the handle of the scissors down hard, like a hammer. The blue-glazed shards scuttled off the table and across the floor.
I could not cut my mother up, so I walked over to her body and bent down near her head. I hovered over her briefly, then unwrapped the blankets around her face. There were her eyes, staring up at me, milky and blue. With the scissors poised in my right hand, I dug out her silver braid and sheared it off at the root.
FIVE
While my mother lay on the floor only a few feet away, I opened the old brown refrigerator and sat on the bottom step of the stairs with its light shining on me.
I grabbed blindly at the metal tins, not looking at the age-old and carefully punched-out labels. I ripped off their worn lids and sent them crashing to the concrete floor like spinning cymbals. Then, and only then, when faced with the used and reused wax paper, did I slow down and lift that first layer lightly away from what lay beneath. Here were brandy balls from my Tennessee grandmother’s recipe. Or pecan meringues that smelled of dark-brown sugar. Baking together was something we did until the end, even though, for the sake of my figure and my mother’s health, I routinely had to cycle through the freezer and dispose of what we’d made, pretending to my mother that I was giving the contents of the tins to the neighbors whom she still confusedly remembered living in the area.
I held a meringue and crumbled it in my hand. I watched the light-tan dust and minced nuts fall to the ground. Always the admonition to use a plate, not to gobble like a turkey, to measure the heft and weight and imagine it applied to my waist.
The first time I had made myself sick as a child-purposely sick-was the year I turned eight. My weapon of choice was fudge. I had gone into the kitchen and methodically, like a soldier taking bullets in the gut, eaten a whole baking sheet of butterscotch fudge. I was ill for two days, and she was furious, but it had made my father laugh. He had come home and hung up his jacket on the coatrack inside the door; placed his hat, on which he often changed the small clipped feather that was tucked inside the band, on the front table; and turned toward the dining room.