How to Read an Unwritten Language (16 page)

Kate pulled away. “Something must be wrong,” she said, her face crumpling at the possibility of a new and gruesome tale.

“No. Not at all.” Unconvinced by my own words and afraid that Kate might draw me into her fears, I returned to the cans of corn and frozen orange juice, assorted fresh vegetables and the tub of butter cluttering the counter. “Look, let me put the rest of this stuff away. Why don't you try to relax, maybe hit the books? I'll cook.”

I cleared out the bags while Kate settled at the desk in the living room, her back to Laurie. As I worked up a sizzling concoction of chopped meat and onions, tomatoes and diced eggplant, I tried convincing myself that no emergency lurked behind my sister's sudden appearance. After all, wasn't it just like Laurie to make a dramatic entrance? Wasn't she happy, now that she was far from home and Father's strictures? I silently repeated these questions until they slowly became assertions, sturdy facts above dispute. Then, above the sweetly dissonant bubbling of dinner on the stove, I heard the murmur of Kate and Laurie's voices in the living room.

I stood in the doorway. Sitting side by side on the couch, together they turned their faces to me.
So, you're living with a girlfriend
, my sister's amused eyes said, while Kate's pleaded silently for rescue.

“You woke up just in time,” I announced. “Dinner is almost ready.”

We sat at the three place settings I'd squeezed on the tiny kitchen table and filled our plates. If my sister's visit had been spurred by trouble, there was little sign of it: she punctuated mouthfuls of my culinary offering with animated patter about her wild, nocturnal roommate, her decrepit dorm, the ratio of bars to churches in the nearby town and, most of all, the ins and outs of her college theater program.

“So in spite of everything, I got the lead, can you believe it? My first try. I guess there's just something about me that takes to dark little dramas. Anyway, there was more than one jealous thing in the cast who hoped I'd, I don't know, drop dead during rehearsals.” Laurie waved her fork like a flag and added airily, “But I'm alive to tell the tale, alive to report that the campus newspaper gave me a rave review.”

Except for the punctuation of a few appreciative comments I added little to the conversation, depressed that I'd never heard any of these stories before. My family was losing even the casual intimacy of shared history. Worse, Laurie's bright, anxious eyes didn't match her gleeful monologues, and I was sure Kate noticed this too: she waited for my sister to finally announce a tale of woe.

With the meal finished, we all helped clean up, getting in each other's awkward way. “Hey, how about a round of Scrabble?” I suggested, thinking that with each of us limited to whatever words seven letters might produce, we'd find ourselves on more equal conversational footing.

Kate and I did speak more, even if we commented mainly on the double and triple values of words and letters, bemoaned a dearth or abundance of consonants, or challenged the occasional suspicious spelling. Meanwhile Laurie rattled away, at one point reciting a monologue from her recent theatrical triumph. When we finally tallied up the spoils of our competing vocabularies, it was Kate who eked out a win.

Blushing a little, she accepted our congratulations, then murmured, “Excuse me,” and padded off to the bathroom. Once the door closed I scooted my chair closer to my sister. “Well, what do you think of Kate?”

Laurie flashed a too precisely casual smile. “Oh, she's nice.”

I sat back, hurt. “Just nice?”

Unfazed, Laurie arranged another polite smile. “And she's pretty—”

“I know how she looks.”

She sighed, then leaned over and whispered, “Well, she's just not onstage.”

“What do you mean?” I asked too loudly, ready to defend Kate's quiet ways, yet also, I vaguely understood, to bully down my own doubts.

“Just what I said,” Laurie returned. “She doesn't … project out to the audience. And if she's not where she is, then where is she?”

I said nothing, remembering how sometimes during lovemaking, when Kate's ecstatic eyes narrowed to slits, I wondered if she shut out more of the world than she took in.

“By the way, Michael, does she know about Mom?”

“Of course she does.”

Laurie raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“And nothing. We just don't talk about it much.”

“Oh.” Laurie paused and glanced about the room, stopping at Kate's drawings taped on the walls. She took them in for a few moments and then asked, her voice slightly dreamy, “Well, what
do
you talk about?”

I heard the distant whoosh of the toilet and said, “Let's leave this for later, okay?” I listened to the faint sounds of Kate washing her hands, I couldn't help thinking she was about to make an entrance with my sister and I a secret audience awaiting her performance. Just as the door opened, Laurie whispered in my ear, “So tell me this—which dwarf is she?”

Though annoyed at my sister for asking such a question, I nodded earnestly, pretending she'd confided something important, because Kate stood in the doorway. She lingered there, hesitant, afraid to interrupt a moment of family intimacy, and I loved her for this, loved her for being
present
and gracious and proving my sister wrong.

“It's okay, sweets,” I said, and when she sat beside me I hugged her with perhaps too much fervor.

“Michael?” she whispered, gently shrugging away.

“So, what do you do, Kate?” Laurie asked, clearly relishing our little struggle.

“You mean my major? Art.”

My sister leaned forward, projecting great interest, but I jumped in, gesturing at the sketches on the walls with a foolish flourish. “We collaborate on a daily strip in the school paper. Kate does the illustrations—”

“Those, really?” Laurie said. “They're so … beautiful.”

I fetched Kate's latest from a bookshelf and handed it to Laurie. “And I write the captions. I was trying to come up with something for this when you came in.”

My sister examined the mysterious cup as though it were some script she needed to memorize, and I tried to see it through her eyes: a shadowy face, perhaps, staring off at its own world?

Laurie looked up from the page and said, “If my lips touched this cup, they might never speak again.”

Kate quickly glanced at me, and I forced out a tiny laugh. “Funny, that sounds like one of my captions.”

“Well, we
are
brother and sister.”

Kate reached out for her drawing, offering no response to Laurie's interpretation. Instead she stretched and yawned. “Please, you guys, don't mind me, but I've got a nine o'clock class tomorrow. Anyway,” she added, turning to my sister, “let me get you settled on the couch before I go off.”

While she gathered bedding from the closet, waving away Laurie's offer of help, I watched Kate's nervous hospitality and wondered which dwarf was she? Her own, perhaps, one with a secret name still waiting to be discovered.

Kate kissed me, wished us good night and closed the bedroom door. I turned to my sister, now slumped in her chair. Was she already lost in whatever troubles she'd managed to briefly banish? I didn't want Kate to overhear them, so I tugged at Laurie's elbow. “Let's take a walk.”

She blinked at me without recognition for a moment, then recovered and grinned. “Sure, why not?”

I led us across the sprawling campus, waiting for Laurie to begin her unhappy tale. Instead, we walked without a word until she said, “Dad doesn't know you're living with her, does he?”

“No, but if he cared enough to ask about my life, I'd tell him. I really don't know if he'd be upset.”

“You're not sure what upsets dear Dad? How lucky for you.”

“So that's it,” I said, stopping short. “You had another fight? Why am I not surprised you still can't get along—”

Laurie frowned. “Oh, the only way Dad wants to get along is to be left alone, no complications. Why do you think it was so easy for him to fire you?”

I grimaced at those casually cruel words. Laurie stopped and answered her own question in a kinder tone: “Because you asked too much of him.”

“That's not why. I failed him—”

“Oh, have it your way, Michael.” She turned away, suddenly interested in a hedge that bordered the engineering building, and I couldn't stop myself from saying, “Then tell me this—why do Dan and Dad get along so well?”

Laurie laughed a bitter laugh that sounded too much like Mother's. “Those two. They'll murder each other one of these days, I'm sure of it.”

I reached out and held her arm. “Hey, no jokes—what are you saying?”

Laurie giggled at my anxious face. “Oh, not that kind of murder. Well, something worse, actually—no slit throats, but they're killing each other, just the same. The more Dan tries to be like Dad, the more Dad hardens that awful front of his that Dan's trying to imitate. Before you know it, they'll be the Zombie Twins.”

We continued across the quad and I couldn't speak, filled with the memory of Dan coming home from the nursery, shaking with frustration over some minor difficulty ordering spring bulbs. Father calmed him down with an insistent patience until they sat in a deepening shared silence on the living room couch. The Zombie Twins. Even though bringing my brother and father together had been disastrous for me, I'd never considered it might be so for them, too.

“Is that what you came to talk about?”

“Oh Michael, nothing so selfless—I'm here for me.”

We stood among a grove of trees leading to the observatory, their dark leaves rustling above us. “So tell me.”

My sister watched me so carefully I believed she knew how afraid I was of what she had to say. She shook her head and pulled back a step. “When my first semester's grades were sent home, Dad saw I was taking theater classes. So we've had our share of … telephone chats. It's bad enough that I'm still pretending, but he really can't stand it that I'm doing better in theater than anything else. Last night's call was just too much, Michael—he said if I take theater again my sophomore year he won't pay for school.”

“Laurie, you know why he's worried—”

“I don't care! When he says I have to drop theater, he's saying that what I care about doesn't matter, or worse, that
I
really don't matter.” She shuddered. “He's trying to erase me, rub me out! Just like he did Mom. Well, he'll never get another chance, not one more. I don't need a degree to wait on tables, and that's what I'll be doing until my big break. So why not quit school?”

“Now there's a wonderful solution. Come on, Laurie, that's nuts—”

“I have to be an actress, Michael. I just have to. Did you ever hear of St. Vitus' Dance?”

“No, what's that?”

“Ha—there's what a business major will get you. St. Vitus' Dance, dear brother, was a very weird epidemic in the Middle Ages.”

“So why don't you major in hist—”

“Let me finish. People started dancing like crazy, whole towns sometimes. They danced all day and night, bopped ‘til they dropped, and when they woke up they danced again. It was like a plague.”

I stopped walking and knelt down, filled with a ridiculous urge to tighten the laces of my shoes. “You seem perfectly normal to me. No tap dancing at the moment, that I can see.”

“Not here,” Laurie said, wiggling a foot. She pointed to her head. “In here.”

I held my sister, placed my ear against her hair. “Nope, I don't think so,” I said. “I can't hear a single dance step.”

She pushed me away. “C'mon, Michael, get real. It's
acting
I've got inside. And it goes way back, back to when we were kids and things were so crazy. I just hated it when Mom and Dad had those arguments alone in their room, working so hard to keep things quiet. They were playing out scenes we couldn't see—the most important ones, the ones that changed our lives.”

“So?” I managed.

Laurie eyed me coldly, then said, “If I'm not in a play, I make up my own. When anyone leaves a room or goes off for a walk, I can't help it, I want to know what they're doing—who they meet and what they say. Dialogue, speeches, scenes start pouring out inside me. I can't stop it.”

“C'mon, Laurie,” I said, unable to contain a tremor in my voice, “what are you talking about?”

“Dad's got it all wrong. He thinks that if I become an actress, I'll become like Mom. He's wrong. If I don't become an actress,
then
it's time to worry.”

“Look, don't you think—” I began in protest, but Laurie ran ahead and leapt in the air, her legs extended like a ballet dancer's. She twirled along the path, her dark skirt rippling, her arms sweeping away imaginary' branches.

“Hey, Laurie, come back,” I called, but instead her entire body shivered as she improvised steps to some frantic music I couldn't hear. A few students coming from the pub paused to stare at Laurie, and I hurried after her. “Will you
stop?”

She shook her head
no
, turning her reply into part of that impetuous dance, her body swirling around and around. Then, after a series of skittering steps, she dashed up a steep path behind one of the dorms. I followed, beset by an echo of my long-ago scramble up the roof after Mother, and then I realized I'd have to play along with Laurie's performance.

“Bravo!” I called out, clapping.

Laurie bowed briefly, but still she wouldn't stop and twirled away. So I huffed along after her, improvising a review: “Last night … across the campus of the state university … Laura Kirby, a young visiting artist, gave a stunning display of physical endurance … dancing all night before the smallest of audiences …”

She ran ahead of my praise, her arms waving in uncanny concert with her steps. I could have caught my sister and forced her to stop, but I was afraid to touch her, afraid she actually was host to something contagious.