How to Read an Unwritten Language (10 page)

“Oh, I bet the girls, they just love you,” he chuckled, fueling my silent misery. He'd intuited a sore spot: a few girls at school had noticed me, but my damnable shyness always held them off. I forced myself to take a bite of the sandwich, the cheese and mustard sour in my mouth. I set it aside.

“Hey,” Bob said, “I told you I won't say a word. You can bet on it.”

At the end of lunch break we wandered over to the employee snack machines. Bob looked about and saw no one in sight. “I've got a secret for you, too,” he said, and pulled from his shirt pocket a curiously twisted paper clip. He slipped it into the tiny circular lock on the side and the door popped open. Grabbing two candy bars, he clicked the door shut with a deft elbow.

Wagging a finger, he said, “Don't tell a soul.” He unwrapped one of the bars, offered me the other. “How's about a nice dessert?”

“No,” I muttered.

Bob rubbed at his stubbled chin as if contemplating my seemingly unusual reaction. “Suit yourself.”

*

Bob ambled by to check on my progress with new racks of seedlings that afternoon, and before leaving he crinkled the candy wrappers in his pocket, a grating music meant to remind me of the pact he'd offered. Ignoring the seedlings, I made my way back to those destroyed leaves. They had revealed a different Bob to me, someone who gave off his own hint of ruin. And now this person held a secret over me.

I decided to confess. Across the lot Father was working his way down the rows of baby trees, inspecting the firmness of their burlap sacks. I waved, and he actually waved back. Emboldened, I motioned for him to come over.

With every step of my father's approach, I worried what revealing my mistake might now reveal of him. When he finally stood beside me I could only point to the crinkly leaves. He bent down and pressed one between his fingers. “What happened here?”

“I, I sprayed the wrong stuff on it.”

Father crumpled the leaf. His face betrayed nothing.

“Guess I didn't know what I was, you know, doing. I should have ask—”

He sighed. “Follow me.”

We walked past the flowerbeds to the main storeroom, where Father unlocked the door and flipped on a light. He pointed to a short bench in a corner. “Sit over there.”

Afraid to ask why he'd brought me here, I waited while my father rummaged through a pile of papers. Then he sat down beside me with a chart of spraying applications, and he carefully taught me how to read the color-coded bars so I wouldn't make a similar mistake again. “See here?” he said. “Just match up the greens or blues and your troubles are over.”

I managed to offer a handful of grateful Uh-huhs as he spoke, doing my best to follow the various correspondences he pointed out. Finally done dispensing advice, Father paused a moment, then rested his hand lightly on my shoulder. I almost eased into that absolving touch but restrained myself: this moment might turn into one of those special privileges he'd mentioned, and I wanted to obey him.

*

Over the next two years Father took me along on his end-of-the-day rounds. He taught me how to ease back a curl of birch bark in search of a feathery white mold; how flowers with similar needs should be grouped together when designing gardens; and why I should plant along curves and not straight lines, always considering the effects of sunlight. I pinched back marigolds and nicotianas to generate more blooms; I wiped my scissors with rubbing alcohol to avoid spreading plant diseases when cutting stems; I learned how to push a willow twig deep enough into the ground in autumn so that it would grow as a new tree in spring, its bright red shoots flaming like flowers.

The nursery offered a world of hidden pleasures I now had eyes to see. The crevices of chestnut tree bark—spiral swirls rising around the trunk like a tornado funnel to a cloudy crest of leaves—reminded me somehow of my father's tightly wound formality; at the base of certain spruce trunks hungry tree worms ate along the surface of the bark, elegant squiggles that looked like some foreign alphabet. “Worm words,” Father called them, with what I thought was a false brusqueness, for he sometimes paused longer than was necessary to examine those strange marks.

Though I had entered into the intensity of Father's varied campaigns against mold and rot, weeds and insects and tree disease of all kinds, I hesitated spraying those worms: they'd made the bark into a kind of paper, and they themselves were squirming pens that wrote tales of their tiny blind lives.

I sprayed them anyway, regarding their writhing deaths as the eradication of my own continuing secret: overwhelmed by that long ago, welcome moment of Father's sympathetic touch when I'd confessed to him, I'd simply forgotten to report Bob's larceny. Only the following morning, when I saw Bob puttering around in the greenhouse, a candy bar in his shirt pocket, did I realize I'd missed my chance.

He continued his petty pilferage—a package of seeds one week, a can of soda another, engineering me into a guilty bystander whenever he could. Yet each time I thought of denouncing Bob I imagined my father's disappointed face and the clipped rhythms of his sternest voice as he said,
Why didn't you tell me before?
The excuses I endlessly rehearsed ate little trails inside me.

*

Dan's latest angry antics overshadowed my own worries: he now fought almost every day at school, and once he was nearly expelled after shaking his fist at a teacher. For that crime Father threatened terrible, never-to-be-forgotten punishments that finally resulted in a simple month's grounding. Dan kept to his room, rereading his great stack of comic books. Occasionally I kept him company, admiring his tough-guy spunk even if I also felt I had to reproach him for his latest trouble.

“What am I supposed to do, Mike?” he asked. “If somebody wants to fight with me, I'm not going to disappoint him.”

We returned to our separate comic books and the adventures of ordinary people who could suddenly change into creatures of power, bursting into flame without burning, twisting steel with no effort, flying without wings, or stretching their limbs like lariats. And these heroes fought such grotesque villains: half-metal mutants, or brutes covered with crater-like scabs, the deformities of their barely human faces exposing a frightening inner ugliness. Who did my brother silently cheer on as they wrestled with each other's transformations? Perhaps both. Surrounding those titanic conflicts, bright balloons burst into jagged edges with the words KERBLAM! KABLOOM! FWEEEE-CRASH! SLAM! and POW! POW! POW! and Dan quietly mouthed the captions, lingering on each panel's mayhem as if he were his own private target range.

These battles quickly wearied me. I set my comic aside, and to the sound track of Dan's hushed explosions I paged through a book of mazes. Searching out the most intricate puzzles, with my finger I followed a slow path through an insane tangle of industrial pipes or the weaving shadows on the face of a storm cloud. I could afford to be patient. These complexities, I knew, would provide an exit. Yet while tracing my way through an unpromising path of corn stubble, I heard Laurie call me. Once, then twice.

“Coming,” I answered. My sister's interest in drawing pictures had shifted to a teenager's fascination with the nuances of makeup, and she liked to display her latest application of eyeliner and blush. I walked to her room, determined to feign interest and not mention—wasn't she daring me to?—that her accumulation of faces reminded me of our mother.

I opened the door to Laurie's room and she turned from the vanity to face me. In startling contrast to her dark curly hair, harshly etched wrinkles radiated from her eyes and mouth and across her forehead.

“What do you think?” she asked in a withered voice, but I could only stare at those lines re-creating her face.

“I'm trying out for the grandmother in a play,” she said, still in character. “Do you think I have a chance?”

“Only if you dye your hair gray,” I said, attempting a light tone.

“Oh. Wait.” She reached into her bureau drawer and then pulled a scarf over her head. “Now what do you think?”

I took a step back from the eerie sight of our reincarnated Nani, who'd died last year.

“I think you'll get the part.”

My prediction came true. Laurie memorized her lines in a few hours, lounging on the sofa and speaking to invisible characters whose responses only she could hear as she clutched the script. In the following days she went further, attempting the voices of other characters, one by one. Standing by the door to her room, I could hear her murmuring disjunct bits of half dialogue, questions that received no answers, or answers that replied to no questions, and I imagined an old woman, head bent and weaving through the clutter of Laurie's room, filled with the voices of a lifetime's memories.

*

Father shifted in his seat beside me, so ill at ease in the auditorium's competing murmurs and flapping of programs that I thought he might try to escape his own daughter's opening night performance. But soon enough the lights darkened, the curtain rose, and there onstage sat a family at a dinner table: a foursome of high school kids pretending to be a mother, father, son and daughter. Behind them painted backdrops impersonated the walls of an apartment, with two windows offering views of a cramped city landscape. The actors picked at plastic food on their plates and raised empty forks to their mouths, they took great quaffs of nothing from tall glasses, and they projected loudly to the back rows a clumsy plot rundown of what had led to this opening scene.

Already suppressing the urge to yawn, I told myself that sooner or later my sister was bound to make an entrance. Father seemed to have forgotten her entirely—he had eyes only for the window in a corner of the stage set: perhaps its painted panorama of skyscrapers offered a distraction from this poorly acted play.

Laurie finally appeared, at the edge of a crowd milling outside an old-fashioned barbershop. While the rest of the cast plainly marked time, their lips mumbling through the motions of “Rutabaga, rutabaga,” Laurie's character gazed out at the audience, a senile wandering over the darkened rows. The intensity of her eyes, somehow impossibly old, exerted a strange gravitational pull that reminded me so much of Nani. Father actually gasped. Then the barber finally stepped out to his storefront and Laurie turned away to join the crowd's rising murmurs.

For the remainder of the play, whenever Laurie appeared onstage Father averted his eyes, though she no longer looked our way. Instead she concentrated on her occasional lines, her ancient voice. By now I'd lost the thread of the plot, for Father's brooding discomfort kept distracting me: he shifted in his seat, flicked his playbill.

After the final curtain calls and applause Father insisted on a backstage visit. We joined the throng of beaming parents and well-wishers and made our way across stage. While the crew lowered the klieg lights with a great show of professionalism, cast members began to appear, their costumes slung over an arm, a shoulder. Laurie approached us through the hubbub, a moist towel in hand. One side of her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, the other side was still old.

Father averted his gaze and once again took in the bustling activity. But when he finally turned to her his eyes were cold, his voice grim. “So this is why your grades have been going down?”

Laurie's divided face flinched, then quickly recovered. “Only a little, Daddy. I'm not Dan, you know.”

At these words Father relented enough to actually offer grudging praise: “You spoke your lines … very well.”

But he'd already done his damage, and Laurie returned to the rest of her makeup with that towel, scrubbing at her face as if she wanted to remove it.

*

Later that night I knocked on my sister's door and waited for her barely audible “Come in.” Her eyes flickered with disappointment that I wasn't Father. With one cheek still pink from her rough usage, she looked as if she'd been slapped.

“Well,
I
thought you were terrific—”

“You thought I was scary. So did Dad.”

“No, not scary, really….” My voice trailed off at Laurie's sad eyes.

“It's all right, Michael, you don't have to worry. I washed off the makeup. I'm me again.”

“Who said you weren't you?” I replied, afraid of where our words might take us.

“Nobody said anything. Look, I'm not like Mom, I—”

“I know you're not—”

“I just want to understand why.
“

I gaped at her—in our separate ways, weren't we both trying to recover our parents? Laurie allowed herself an indulgent smile at my surprise. “Remember that Christmas play I was in, you know, the one with the doll?”

I nodded.

“I never told anybody about this, Michael. Can I tell you?”

“Sure.”

“I had a dream about Mom that night. I was with her in a department store, and we were standing in line, at the checkout counter. Mom was looking for something in her purse—I thought it was her wallet, but then she took out a slip of paper, like a really long fortune from a fortune cookie. It had words on it too, and I don't know why, but I just knew that it told a story about one of her people. The second I thought this the paper just burst into flame. But it didn't burn her fingers.”

“Laurie,” I said, but my sister spoke rapidly, cutting off any interruption: “Mom lifted another slip of paper out of her purse and when I decided to grab it she had the creepiest smile on her face, like she knew what I was going to do. So I touched it and it lit up, but my fingers didn't hurt, they only sort of tingled and then I…” Laurie held her hands out as if they gripped a strip of paper, and she mimed an incredulous reaction to whatever she silently read.

The memory of this dream had become just another performance. She bowed to silent applause, then she laughed when I left the room.