Secret Language (2 page)

Billy filches a pitch pipe from his pocket, blows one note, and they begin to sing. They sing two verses and a chorus, then break to perform a complicated two-step, counting softly as the imaginary orchestra plays. Connie thinks she can hear it. The song picks up again, then fades off the ends of their voices, the harmony lingering.

Connie doesn’t clap until Faith does. Billy and Delle bow deeply, showing the hard gleam of their teeth. For an instant Connie is flattered by this extravagance, but she senses their looking beyond, sees their eyes sweep past her and her sister into the imaginary second balcony.

“You balled up that same line, Delle,” Billy says. Connie hears the huff of the couch as Faith drops back against it. Billy and Delle are nervous and high-strung because the tour is going badly. They are the same way, only more, when a tour goes well.

“Well, listen to you,” Delle says. “You haven’t had a new line in three weeks.” Connie watches her mother’s neck redden, blushing up into her cheekbones. She is beautiful.

“Don’t start, Delle.”

“How many times can they rewrite this part?” Delle says. “My God, Garrett can pick some losers. What does he care, he gets his cut.” She gathers up the script in a messy heap and shakes it at him. “You think the Lunts would take a dog like this? You think Helen Hayes would look once at this thing?”

“So Garrett’s a bastard.” Billy ticks the edge of Delle’s script with his thumb. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Delle sighs theatrically, her chest heaving with the effort. “We won’t last a week in New York.”

Billy smiles the thin smile that means trouble. “Not unless you get top billing, Countess?”

Delle holds up her finger as if it could shoot a bullet. “Don’t give me that. Don’t you give me that.”

Connie is invisible, silent on the sofa, next to her invisible sister. Her parents begin to fire words back and forth. Their voices pick up, their faces pulse blood, the words they use sound whipped and snapped and dirty.

A flutter of paper explodes from Delle’s hands, and now they’re screaming at each other amidst a tornado of pages. Connie freezes. The speed with which these storms start and stop always shocks her. She thinks her parents might have some secret mechanical parts, so that when they talk of pushing each other’s buttons they mean real buttons.

Faith is on the floor, gathering the spilled script one page at a
time. Connie slips off the sofa and crouches next to her, imitating her precise movements. At the toe of her mother’s white pumps, cold, black, typed lines of dialogue stare up at her, their composure marred by smeared crossouts and writeovers in different colors of ink. She takes the sheets between her hands and taps them against the clammy carpet, listening hard.

Everything goes quiet, except for another burst of steam from the radiators. Delle is at the window, seething, her jaw tilted out toward the street; but her carriage, the subtle turn of her shoulder, shows her to be fully tuned, wholly there. She’s wearing a navy blue dress with a boat neck and fitted waist and tapered skirt. Her ears are dotted by white button earrings. Billy goes to her, his stride effortless, as if the horrible air weighed nothing at all. They murmur to each other, then kiss deeply, for an embarrassingly long time. He touches her shoulder near the neck and she lists into his hand, a tableau they’re known for on the stage.

Finished, they cross to the sofa, where Connie sits with Faith, the rescued script between them in a stack so even it might have been run through a paper cutter.

“We’re going to the Stardust for a bite,” Billy says. Connie’s cheek is warm where he holds it.

“Can’t we come, Billy?” she asks. She is hoping so hard it feels like a little animal in her stomach.

“It’s a bar,” Delle says. “They don’t allow children.” She smiles hugely, as if to make up for not inviting them. Her hair is chestnut red, piled up on her head. Her mouth is also red, but deeper, bloodier.

Billy runs a hand over his forehead. “Jesus, I have to get out of this heat. It feels like goddamned Cuba in here.”

“We’ll be quiet,” Connie says. She turns to Faith. “Won’t we, Faith?” She can almost hear the turn in Faith’s stomach. Faith hates to beg.

Faith moves to the window and sits on the wide, low sill. She isn’t going to help.

“Please, Billy,” Connie whines. “Please please please pleeease.” She contorts her face, tucks her fists up under her chin. Though it never gets her anywhere she does this almost every single time.

“Don’t whine, Connie, for God’s sake,” Billy says. “It makes your face look ugly.”

Delle slips into the white and navy topper that goes with the dress. She stops in mid-sleeve, frowning. “We’ve got to get them into a school,” she says, as if she’s just now thought of it. She looks toward the window. “Remind me tomorrow, Faith.”

Connie trails her to the door, still begging, but it’s no use.

“Back soon,” Billy says. He stops at the mirror to pat his hair close to the sides of his head, then they’re gone.

Connie turns to Faith, forgetting that Faith is disgusted with her. “Is my face ugly?” she asks.

“How should I know?” Faith says darkly. She’s still looking out the window.

“He always says that.”

“Then don’t listen.”

Connie never understands Faith’s directions. How do you not listen? “He never says it to you,” she says.

“I don’t beg.”

Connie moves to the window next to Faith to watch for Billy and Delle on the street below. They’re always easy to spot, and there they are, Billy’s bright yellow hair appearing like a streetlamp on the sidewalk.

“Do you wish you were that lady downstairs, Faith?” Connie asks. “That lollipop lady?”

“No.”

“She’s not very pretty.”

Faith doesn’t answer.

“She has that romantic husband.”

Faith doesn’t answer.

“Are you going to get married someday, Faith?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Faith sighs. “First you have to find somebody who wants to marry you, that’s why not.”

“Oh.” Connie hadn’t thought of that. “Do you think somebody will want to marry me?”

“If you stop asking a million questions about everything.”

“Are you sure?”

Faith gets up and pulls the drape hard, hiding the grimy city. “Your face isn’t ugly,” she says.

“He said it was.”

Faith points to the mirror next to the door. “Look for yourself.”

Connie does. To her surprise her face looks just the way it did the last time she looked in a mirror. It looks a lot like Faith’s.

“See?” Faith says.

“See what?”

“How pretty your face is.” She has moved to the sofa and picked up a book. “No matter what he says.”

Faith is reading now, their conversation is over. Connie wanders around the room, flips the TV on and turns the dial, but nothing good is on. She returns to the window, opens the drape, and looks out at the big, sad city. She’d like to ask Faith how you’re supposed to know if somebody is lying, but Faith is done talking, Connie can tell. It’s getting dark, and the evening will be long, and Billy and Delle won’t come back soon even though they said they would. In the wavy reflection of the window she can see Faith hunched over her book, a world away, solid and focused. She runs her hand over her face, over her nose and mouth, and decides not to believe Billy, to believe Faith instead.

Connie’s first day at the school in Columbus, or Cleveland, is her fifth, maybe sixth, first day this year. It’s way past Christmas and the kids are too far friends to let Connie in, even a little. But the teacher is nice, the nicest one so far.

A girl approaches Connie out of the den of coats in the coatroom. “What’s your lucky number?” she asks. She has shiny, pinkish skin and fuzzy hair buckled with a pink barrette. All the other girls have pink barrettes, too, Connie notices. Everyone except her: her head feels big and bald. In every school it’s something different. Last time it was shoes with straps; the time before that, cigar-wrapper rings and saying
Oh right
.

“What’s your lucky number?” the girl repeats. She waits, her eyes round and judging.

“Eighty-five,” Connie says, knowing she’s wrong, way wrong, but it’s the only number that comes to her.

The girl wrinkles her forehead. “What kind of lucky number is that? Eighty-five? That’s not lucky.”

“Yes it is,” Connie says. “It’s the luckiest number there is.”

The girl’s expression disintegrates like a punctured balloon, and Connie’s life takes a little turn. This is her first victory.

“Not only that,” she says, “it’s the same lucky number as Kathy on ‘Father Knows Best.’ ”

By this time two other girls are watching, their pink barrettes beaming back at the heavy overhead lights. The fuzzy-hair girl’s eyes narrow, mean blue slits. She’s the leader. “How do you know that?”

Connie gives her hair a shake. “I live in a hotel.”

The fuzzy-hair girl withdraws, the others inch nearer.

If Faith were here she would be angry, but Faith is back at the hotel, faking sick on the fold-out couch in the too-hot room, faking a fever so she doesn’t have to do another first day. At first Connie was frightened to be coming here alone, but now she’s glad. She can say anything she wants. Faith would tell her not to say where they live, not to say anything about Billy and Delle. When other kids ask Faith what her father is, she says a fireman. It’s the only lie she ever tells; usually she just won’t answer.

At science time the teacher brings a small cage to the front of the room. “Let’s see how our friends are today,” she says. “Connie, these little creatures belong to our class.”

“We’re raising them,” the fuzzy-hair girl says, as if to say
We saw them first
.

The teacher places the cage on Connie’s desk and lets her peer through the wires. Two taffy-colored hamsters sit at opposite ends of the cage, each peeping out from a fortress of wood chips. Their beady eyes are trained on her and their faces quiver. For some reason they make Connie think of her and Faith.

“Are they girls?” she asks the teacher.

The fuzzy-hair girl laughs, then everybody else.

The teacher smiles. “One’s a girl, one’s a boy. We’re waiting for them to have babies.”

Mortified by the laughter, Connie doesn’t hear much else. She watches the hamsters in their metal cage and thinks of them poised there, forever and ever, banking the wood chips against themselves.

At lunchtime a tall woman comes in to speak to the teacher. Connie knows they’re speaking about her, that once again she’s in the wrong grade, the wrong group; something is wrong.

The tall woman—the principal—beckons with her long nail. “Come with me, honey,” she says, smiling too hard, leading Connie into the hall. A dozen pink barrettes move at the same time.

The hall is tall and dark, the principal tall and dark, the world tall and dark.

The principal bends down. “Is Faith Spaulding your sister, honey?”

Connie shakes her head yes. Whatever the principal says Connie will believe. No matter how bad it is, she will believe it.

“Are you living at the Grandview?”

Connie shakes her head yes, her eyes smarting.

“Do you happen to know where your mom and dad are today, honey?”

Connie shakes her head no.

“Well.” She places a hand soft on Connie’s shoulder. Connie falls instantly in love with the face that goes with the hand. “Faith had a little accident today and had to go to the hospital, but she’s just fine, you don’t need to worry one bit.” Her voice is low and reassuring. “Would you like me to take you to see her?”

Connie shakes her head yes, her voice nothing but a heap of feathers.

On the way to the hospital Connie continues to shake her head no as the principal asks in her rosy voice, Maybe they went to visit a friend? Maybe you have an uncle or aunt in town? Maybe they went out for lunch somewhere, do you know where they go out for lunch?

The hospital is too bright, too steely, too white. The long, polished corridor is quiet but desperate; it’s like the wasps buzzing underneath their nest in the field across from the Connecticut house, a distant, dangerous teeming. With the principal Connie walks down this corridor until they get to a door near a counter where
nurses pad back and forth on hard rubber soles. “Wait just a minute, honey,” the principal says, and goes over to speak to one of the nurses.

In the corridor is a chair. One chair all by itself, and Connie sits in it. She doesn’t care if it is wrong to sit in this chair, this chair is hers now, her lucky chair, she claims it. The wasps sound a little thicker now, and cutting through their dull whine comes a whimper—just one, in the buzzy quiet—that she recognizes as Faith’s.

The bed on which Faith lies stretched out, face up, her hands clasped loosely over her stomach, is made of steel, its sheets white, almost fluorescent, almost hard to look at. On a chair by the window lies her coat, the red one, its arms opened up. It’s hard to believe a girl once moved in it.

Faith stares at the ceiling. Her eyes are green and heavily flecked, like Connie’s, her eyelashes still. Her chin is extravagantly bandaged, starting just under the lip. Connie watches, horrified, convinced she is staring at the face of death. She moves to the bedside so that if her sister is alive she will know someone is there.

The green eyes slide over, the face does not move. The front of Faith’s blouse is blood-spattered, dried into puckers.

“Fell in tub,” Faith says, barely moving her mouth. At least that’s what it sounds like. “Hit faucet bad.”

Connie can’t talk—her voice seems to have permanently left her. Her own chin begins to tingle; she imagines her wet foot slipping and her hands flying out, then the cold smack of the faucet and the horrid warmth of drawn blood. She knows how ashamed Faith is to be here, to have strangers looking at her.

From the hall outside comes a shriek, and behind it a low and jumpy carping. Connie recognizes these sounds as Billy and Delle, and watches Faith’s eyes slide back, fix themselves again on the ceiling.

“Take me to her, take me to my baby!” Delle commands. And Billy: “We demand to see the doctor! Where in bloody hell is the doctor?” They sound like the count and countess: imperious, peevish, and English. Connie knows exactly what they look like: Delle’s red mouth drawn tight in judgment, Billy’s squared shoulders.