How to Read an Unwritten Language (17 page)

What was left for me to do? “Look,” I finally asked, “do you want my advice?”

Laurie stopped, her skirt swaying about her legs. Chest heaving, she gasped, “Quick … thinking … big brother. Why … do you think I… came here?”

We sat together on the steps to the library, and Laurie's gulps of air echoed my own inner breathlessness. Why was she asking me, and what should I possibly say? A terrible fear took hold of me: all my past good intentions had only brought on disasters—finally exposing Mother's cast of characters, bringing Dan to the nursery. “I don't know,” I began hesitantly, “I'm afraid you might become like Mom.”

“Mom made up her own stories. That's what I don't want to do. I want to memorize scripts, move where the director points me. That'll keep me safe.”

“Great. You want to follow orders.”

“No, Michael, no. I'll be acting. And I'll be accountable—to the audience, the other actors, even the stagehands.
I
won't leave anybody behind. Can't you see that?”

She spoke so fervently that I wanted to believe that this was what she needed. But when I tried to speak no words came out, and I heard Laurie's own words from long ago, calling up to Mother on the roof:
Come down, please, please
.

I had to speak. I turned to my sister and almost flinched at the sight of her expectant eyes. “You have to consider, consider how Mom got swallowed up. I'm really worried about you, Laurie, worried that you're making a mistake.”

“That's your advice?”

I nodded.

Her mouth curled to an oddly satisfied pout. “Well, I'll think about it.” She stood, smoothed out her skirt. “Can we go back now?”

We retraced our path across campus in silence. My sister had asked for my support and thought I hadn't given it. With each step I reconsidered my words, wondered if I should reverse them. I sighed, walked on—perhaps I'd see more clearly by tomorrow morning.

When we approached the apartment, Laurie pointed to a battered import. “Here's my car.” She opened the door and slipped behind the steering wheel. “Time to go.”

“Hey, wha—”

“I got my nap, Michael. And I got your advice. Now I'm going to drive back.”

“Laurie—”

She offered a farewell wave and drove off in her rusting hulk, the sorry remains of the muffler sputtering into the night air. When her car disappeared in the distance, I concentrated on that faint mechanical grumbling, idiotically hoping to hear it all the miles she'd be driving. But quickly enough it faded into the background purr of traffic.

I turned away from my apartment and returned to campus. If Laurie was imagining me in a scene without her now, she might be surprised to discover that I liked to wander past the university greenhouses. I sometimes stopped and peered inside at a vibrant world of leaves and tendrils, wishing myself inside and breathing in the warm damp air, my hands moist with loamy soil.

One of the greenhouses tonight was brightly lit, a glass beacon that drew me, and already from a distance I could see the tropical palms and orchids, the thick stands of bamboo that seemed to shine from within. A shadow passed overhead and I looked up at a streak of wings lit by the greenhouse. What sort of bird would be out so late?

With another glance at the creature's swooping, I recognized the shivering wings of a bat. It hovered in the night air, switching to a swift dive, and then the bat rose up, floating briefly before plunging down again. I stood and watched its quirky arcs and spirals until I finally realized they were a kind of hungry skywriting: this creature preyed on whatever flying insects were drawn to the light of the greenhouse. I turned away from the acrobatic display—so unpredictable and yet so inevitable—and walked off at a quick pace until I was almost running by the time I reached home.

Kate was already asleep, her body bathed by the gray glow of a half-moon shining through the bedroom window. I undressed and curled beside her, listening to the steady rise and fall of her breath. I touched her eyelids lightly with my finger. Her lashes trembled—she was dreaming. I imagined the moist inner walls of those lids were another kind of sketchpad, where Kate created scene after scene, a star on a stage of her own making.

I was the one offstage. Perhaps I could join her. Leaning over, I kissed Kate on the ear, a few strands of her hair tickling my lips, and her hand swept up, sleepily shooing away this disturbance. I kissed her again, on the border of fine down at her temple, then her warm cheek. My legs slid against hers until our toes touched, the first steps of a slow motion twining of limbs. Kate murmured at this budding pleasure, and however distant I might be from the intricacies of her dream, I was approaching, surely approaching.

A postcard's gaudy colors showed through the slits of our apartment mailbox, and though I should have been rushing off to an economics lecture, I stopped and pulled out a view of a cityscape with an impressive backdrop of mountains. I turned it over to read my first news of Laurie since she'd quit school months ago: “I'm absolutely flourishing with a bit part here and there, and waiting—on tables, and for my big break.”

No return address. I sighed and slipped the card into my backpack. My sister had done the opposite of what I'd advised, yet I couldn't help envying her brave escape, even if her refuge was a bit part or some measly two line walk-on. All the hard work I poured into my lackluster slate of business courses gave me nothing in return, except the sort of grades my father would be proud of, if only he'd notice.

When I arrived in class the professor was already striding back and forth across the lecture hall's stage, flaunting his usual agenda. I flipped open my notebook and jotted down his opinions, knowing they were more important than his charts and fact sheets. Then he paused to pass out a few copies of what he labeled “a sterling example of overregulation”: a government booklet on consumer safety that listed thousands of accidents involving ordinary household objects.

His narrow, well tailored frame entirely still under the glow of fluorescent lights, the professor asked, “What good could such a pamphlet possibly do for the economy?” He paused as if waiting for a reply, but no one spoke up. We all knew this question was rhetorical.

“None at all,” he resumed with a satisfied chuckle. “Unless one considers the increase on insurance policy premiums across the country a salubrious effect.”

One of the booklets finally came my way, and I paged through the suspect report idly at first, then with more care. I read of eight thousand accidents a year caused by tie racks, and that dishwashers, toothpicks, and household scissors were responsible for the same number. Improbably enough, twice as many accidents were caused by vacuum cleaners. Even more by waste baskets. The list went on and on. Yet these mishaps weren't minor: the safety commission came by its figures from the records of hospital emergency wards across the country.

Frustrated that the booklet included no details of these mysterious accidents, I found myself imagining a light bulb shattering into slivers while being unscrewed; an electric blanket shorting out in the middle of someone's peaceful dream; a teakettle melting onto the stove after its whistle failed. Whether insurance premiums rose or not, what could be wrong with protecting people from such domestic betrayals?

“Hey buddy,” the fellow closest to me said, “you gonna keep that? Pass it over.”

“It's yours,” I muttered, tossing it but sorry to see it go. I returned to my notebook, trying to follow the lecture but unable to shake the thought of a toaster shorting into flames; or one of Kate's drawings loosening from the wall, then drifting to the floor and the path of an unsuspecting foot.

After class I hurried back to the apartment and tugged gently at Kate's pictures, making sure each was firmly taped. As I made my way along her gallery, the shadings of the sketches themselves hinted at hidden trouble. The sheen she'd given a leather couch might be seething with fury; that glistening drinking glass could easily be delicate enough to crack in one's hand, given a little pressure; and her close detail of a water fountain suggested something clinical, ominous: its gray metallic curves offered a space where a face could effectively, forcefully be fit.

Unwilling to take in another picture I sat, unnerved that such possibilities might be in Kate's work. They
were
self-portraits, after all, and what of the childhood she wouldn't tell me about—couldn't at least some secret memories have found their way into these unsettling details? I wished Kate were beside me, assuring me that what I now saw wasn't actually there.

As if she'd somehow heard me, there she stood framed in the doorway, keys in hand, taking in my pallid face with one of her sideways glances that I always loved: Kate trying me on at a different angle. Then she said, “Michael?” in such a tiny, concerned voice that my name sounded tentative, a word that didn't necessarily fit me.

“Oh, I'm just a little tired,” I replied, afraid to voice my fears. With a troubled look, Kate kissed me lightly on the forehead. Then she set down her books and made her way to the kitchen, humming a quiet melody meant to dispel my dark mood. Ashamed that I hadn't spoken, I looked up at Kate's drawings again—she'd always let me give words to what she couldn't. Perhaps if I tested the limits of what we might express together, then Kate would finally reveal more of her past.

That evening she offered me her new drawing—an ordinary paring knife, the beautiful convolutions of its wooden handle's grain a twisted world unto itself. But the gleam of its sharp edge appeared almost deliberately menacing, and my caption let the blade murmur,
Stare out that kitchen window; forget you're using me
.

Kate accepted these words without complaint, but her silence only urged me on. The next week, when she presented me with a sketch of a can of hairspray, I could imagine it spreading a mist over waves of hair, encrusting what was wild into place. Instead I let that can whisper
Set me down by the radiator, please
. I searched Kate's face as she read my caption, but caught nothing more than a slight quivering of her eyelids. So the following week I pushed further and made a shining paper clip croon,
Come here, baby, swallow me
.

“Oh, Michael,” she murmured. Kate's questioning eyes met mine, and I said nothing, hoping to draw more from her, hoping she'd come out of herself to a new and more intimate level, the same way she had at her parents' home. She set her drawing aside on the table and turned away.

The next evening, during our preparations for a quick meal, Kate washed the rice while I took on the job of chopping the vegetables. But I couldn't find any knife whose blade wasn't hopelessly blunt.

I said nothing and struggled away with a butter knife, thinking about that paring knife Kate had recently drawn and that I'd so darkly captioned. Where had it disappeared to? Yet instead of searching for the knife after dinner, on a hunch I checked my desk drawer and discovered that my little box of paper clips was gone. I explored further, through all the other drawers, the bookshelves, even piles of paper, then in the other rooms. There wasn't a single stray clip anywhere in the apartment. I hadn't expected to find any: Kate must have removed the things whose hidden danger had been broached.

My recent captions had affected her more than I'd suspected. I stretched out on our ratty couch with budding remorse. Didn't my words reveal as much about me as her? Those captions had become my own kind of domestic betrayal—I'd unfairly tried to provoke confessions from someone I loved.

Kate's next drawing was the gentlest of rebukes: a cotton ball's white haze. I resisted the impulse to find a secret threat in this most innocuous of objects, and instead presented her with a caption that was an apology:
If only I were weightless, I'd float to whoever needed me
.

*

The candle on our table cast flickers of orange light across Kate's face as we sat together in a spaghetti shop. Waiting for our meal to arrive, we indulged in our little game of sharing a single glass of white wine, alternating sip after sip. Whenever a trace of wine seeped onto my tongue with a warming tingle, I savored it even more, knowing that when Kate lifted the glass to her lips she'd enjoy the same sensation.

Approaching the bottom of the glass, we took smaller sips, hoping to let the game linger, each trying to allow the other the last drop. With only a tiny cone of wine swirling at the bottom, I tilted the glass for a faint touch, leaving just enough for Kate.

“Yours,” I said.

With an appreciative nod she emptied the glass, then examined its surface, cloudy from our lips, our fingerprints. If she was planning a sketch I already had a caption:
How many more lips will I meet?

Our eggplant parmesan finally arrived, steaming and gooey with cheese. We ate and spoke of our classes, of a rock concert coming to the local amphitheater, of the glories of Indian summer in this otherwise chilly autumn, and we avoided any talk of what awaited us at the end of next semester—graduation. I knew Kate wanted to someday exhibit her work, but we rarely spoke of this, or my plans, and perhaps our shyness hid a far more tender subject. What would
we
do, together, once school was done?

Before long we were quiet, with nothing and everything left to say. Wouldn't one of us ever begin? Kate cut her meal into careful squares, her mouth deftly taking in each neat piece, and the sight filled me with so much love and somehow sadness that I found myself saying, “You know, we've never talked, or talked much, about graduation, I mean, what are you, are you still …”

Kate paused, fork in hand, her eyes alert to the territory I'd just opened. “The art world awaits,” she said with a laugh, protecting her ambition by making light of it. “In the meantime, some dull dull commercial illustration job should see me through. I guess I should start sending out my resumé,” she added. “What about you?”