Dead Letters(71)

“Do you want some company, Mom?”

“What? No, I don’t need anything,” she says casually, even shrugging. “I was just going to watch something on TV.” My mother has never really sought out my attention or time, so I’m confused about whether or not this is an overture.

“Um, do you…mind if I join you?”

“It’s entirely up to you.”

I consider, then decide, meh, fuck it. I crawl onto the other side of the bed and reach for the laptop there, which is synced to the big-screen TV across from us. But when I go to open Netflix in the browser, Nadine seems to be logged out of her account.

“Any chance you know the password to this, Mom?” I ask, already pessimistic.

She looks stricken, but to my surprise, she answers me. “Zinfandel three eight one five,” she says confidently, and my eyebrows shoot up. All right. Though when I type that password in, it doesn’t work.

“Try again, Mom.”

She doesn’t answer this time, just stares straight ahead. I sigh. The Netflix account is registered to Zelda, so I request a new password and log in to her email from the laptop. Her password has been “ZeeN0tZed” for as long as I can remember, and it still is. My fingers fumble on the unfamiliar keyboard—I’ve grown so accustomed to AZERTY.

When I log in for the link, there’s a fresh email from Zelda waiting in her inbox. I glance at Mom, but I’m really not concerned about her seeing it, even though the computer screen is mirrored on the big screen across the room. I open the email.


To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Quack Quack

June 25, 2016 @ 8:45 PM

https://www.youtube.com/?watch?v=f-V1aCjgzlg



That’s it. Just the link. With another quick look at my mother, I click on it. It takes me to a YouTube video of Sesame Street’s “Letter Q.” I push play and watch as a bunch of cheery, racially diverse kids toss out words that start with Q. Ernie plays a joke on Bert. Kermit and Grover draw the letter in orange across the screen. Nadine watches alertly, her eyes wide.

“This mean anything to you, Mom?”

She shakes her head.

I’m not surprised. Even if she wasn’t deteriorating from the inside out, it’s unlikely that she’d remember an incident from when we were in kindergarten. The letter would mean nothing to her, because she never came to see us there. Our kindergarten class was a pretty laid-back public school experience. A big chunk of the year was to be dedicated to the alphabet and mastering this crucial sequence. We soon learned that our kindergarten teacher had a very special, secret relationship to someone really, really important.

—

“Okay, everybody,” said Ms. Prescott, a pretty young blonde, during the second week of school. “This is a really big secret, and it’s super important that you don’t tell kids in other classrooms about this, because it would make them feel bad. But. Guess who I know?” A chorus of hushed and reverent “Who?”s greeted this question, and a couple of hands even went up, as though there might actually be a right answer to this ridiculous query. “One of my close friends is someone named…” She walked over to a closet in the corner of the classroom, ducked inside, and then bounced back out, exclaiming, “Elmo!”

This piece of information was greeted with near hysteria in our classroom, where it was obvious that everyone watched Sesame Street. Elmo was as close to a celebrity as it got for rural five-year-olds, and excited whispers circulated around the oval of squirmy kids when this announcement came. We could not believe our good luck.

In retrospect, I wonder at the injunction to secrecy. It didn’t strike us as weird, at the time, but maybe that’s because childhood is filled with so many of these strange entreaties against transparency. “Don’t tell your mother.” “Promise you won’t show Mom and Dad.” “Becky definitely can’t find out, okay?”

We soon learned that Elmo’s role in our classroom was to appear every Monday morning with the “weekly letter.” Apparently, he would spend all week chasing around the next week’s letter, and late on Sunday night, he would finally catch it and trap it in the closet at our classroom, waiting to be liberated by Ms. Prescott on Monday morning.

But. There was a catch. She needed help to bring out the letters, drag them out into the sunny space of our classroom. The implication was that the letters didn’t want to be seen, known, unveiled. It took the conjoined efforts of at least three people to midwife them into the class: Elmo, Ms. Prescott, and a classroom parent. This meant that every week, one of our parents would show up to help Ms. Prescott introduce that Monday’s letter. Meaning that one of our parents would eventually come to our classroom! Our circle was abuzz with excitement.

Letters were assigned randomly, so that no one became jealous or possessive. For example, it would have made sense to assign me A, for Ava. But our class also had an Adam and an Anthony, and they could just as plausibly have laid claim to that primary chunk of our alphabet. Zelda and I were assigned one letter because there were twenty-seven students in the class. Any guesses what letter that was?

Marlon, of course, was the one who brought us to school early one Monday morning in spring, as our kindergarten year was winding down. He wore a wild Hawaiian shirt and mismatched plaid trousers and a bizarre hat with earflaps, exactly the sort of clothes that appeal to five-year-olds. Marlon always knows his audience, and he arrived fully prepared to charm.