Secret Language (5 page)

He says nothing more, and the stutter of the Corvair’s ailing engine fills their silence. She pictures the generations of folders stacked up in Dr. Howe’s file closet and imagines what Joe must think of her.

At the mailbox they turn onto the gravel and roll to a stop in front of the trailer door. The living room light is on, and Connie has taken the ducks in.

“Well, thanks,” she tells him. “I had a wonderful time.”

She is sure she will never see him again.

“I’ve never met anybody like you,” he says, leaning over to kiss her warm on the mouth.

She draws away, watching him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I like you,” he says. “I mean we should go out again.”

They do go out again, and again, to Faith’s continual surprise. Every time she watches the red Corvair bump over the pitted drive, then turn down the road to Portland, she is sure it’s her last sight of Joseph Fuller Junior.

But he always comes back, and before long Faith and Joe are a couple. Sometimes they go out with his friends, who think it’s a howl that Joe Fuller picked a quiet girlfriend. They drive their cars around and sing along with the radio and drink beer and philosophize about life, the war, the meaning of music. Faith doesn’t say much and doesn’t drink any beer. They are all twenty-two, Joe’s age, and talk a lot about their futures. Faith is twenty and has never in her life thought about the future except what she doesn’t want it to be.

He takes her to his family for Sunday dinner. “Call me Phoebe,” his mother says. She is tall and wiry, with magnificent black and silver hair. His father, a shy, large man, smiles at her from the calm of his brown Naugahyde chair. Bald and brown-eyed, Joe Senior looks nothing like Joe, but his height and bulk mark him as his son’s father. He rises to enfold her one proffered hand in both of his. He has the biggest hands Faith has ever seen. They are warm, wide, ground smooth with calluses, dyed in places with machine oil. It is not just the breadth of his hands that she finds overwhelming; it is the breadth of his family, all the sons but Joe trailing tentacles of wives and children.

All the brothers are big, too: Will and Greg and Brian, broad and solid, real workers. Their wives are graceful and wise and talkative, all perfect, perfect. There are some babies, and some middle-sized children, and one or two who might even be in high school. Even the house is big, though Phoebe and Joe Senior and Joe are the only ones left. It’s filled with well-worn rugs, stray jackets, dense, permanent furniture that makes the furniture in the trailer look like a
bunch of sticks. Knickknacks and photographs litter every surface, Fullers smiling wherever she looks. On the mantle is a picture of the lost brother, Peter, not in uniform but in a gray sweatshirt, standing in front of a jeep.

“He let me drive his car once,” Joe says. “I was nine. Actually he drove, I just steered, sort of. It hooked me on cars for life.”

Faith laughs. They’d had to stop the Corvair on the drive over here. To put in oil, or take some out, or something. She moves closer into the shelter of his arm while the family bustles around them, noisy and intimidating, exactly the type of people who could begin bombarding her with questions at any moment. “He looks like you, Joe.”

Joe picks up the photograph. “You think so?” He seems pleased.

“He does. Especially the eyes.”

One of the sisters-in-law, Amy, breaks in to take Faith’s hand.

“You’re in Long Point?”

“Yes.”

“You live with your sister?”

“Yes.” She moves closer to Joe. Sarah, another sister-in-law, joins them.

“Faith lives with her older sister, isn’t that sweet?” Amy tells Sarah.

“It’s her younger sister,” Joe explains.

Will and Brian and Greg have drifted over now, with Maggie, Brian’s wife, and two of the smallest children. They’re all staring at her, smiling, except for the littlest boy, who looks suspicious.

“Younger?” Amy says, puzzled. “How much younger?”

“She’s in high school,” Faith says. “A senior.” She doesn’t add,
for the second time
. She feels suddenly protective not only of herself, but of her sister, too, and thinks of Connie back at the trailer, eating alone. She’d dearly like to be there herself.

“My goodness,” Amy says. “Mom, come here. Did you know Faith’s been fending for herself?”

Phoebe looks at Faith, then back at Amy. “She has an older sister.”

Faith is beginning to get nervous, for she has no way of knowing whether or not this is a normal conversation. Joe seems comfortable
enough as his older brothers and their wives explain to Phoebe that Faith is the older one, Faith is the one in charge. They have it all wrong—no one’s in charge—but she doesn’t dare say a word. She’s hoping the conversation will magically stop.

“Do you mean to tell me this child is on her
own
?” Phoebe says to Joe.

Joe gives Faith’s shoulder a squeeze. “For years,” he says. “She’s something.”

Her cheeks burning, Faith looks away from the horror on Phoebe’s face. She feels like a duck in a sparrow’s nest.

“How on earth did I get that wrong?” Phoebe says. Her feathery hands light on Faith’s cheeks. “You dear thing,” she says. “Welcome to the family.”

“Where’s your sister now?” Brian asks. He’s even bigger than Joe, but quieter.

“Um,” Faith stammers, “she’s home.”

Phoebe looks sternly at Joe. Abashed, he turns to Faith. “We should have invited her.”

“You certainly should have,” Phoebe says. She raps on the chair where Joe Senior sits, barely visible for the three children moving on his lap. “Are you hearing this, Joe? The thought of that poor child …”

Faith agrees to fetch Connie just to get out of the house. Joe starts up the car, which shimmies for a few blocks until it gets warmed up.

“They love you,” he says. “I knew they would.”

They’re on the Long Point-Portland road now, the trees flying by, bringing her closer to the quiet of the trailer. “Are they always this friendly?” she asks.

Joe laughs, tapping his knuckles on the dashboard. “This is nothing. This is
shy
. They don’t know what to make of you.”

Faith leans back, exhausted. When they arrive at the trailer, Connie is just coming out the door, followed by a skinny guy with a braid down his back. His jacket reads
PEACE
, but he looks anything but peaceful.

“That was quick,” Connie says. She’s wearing a peasant blouse and a cotton skirt that make her look like a girl in a shampoo commercial. The guy looks evil by comparison.

“My mother ordered us to come get you,” Joe says.

Connie frowns, not comprehending.

“For dinner,” Faith says. “Sunday dinner. They want you to come.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I warn you, they’re a noisy bunch,” Joe says. “I think Faith was a little taken aback.” He looks to her for confirmation and she smiles politely. She still feels short of breath from the Fullers’ suffocating welcome.

“Well …” Connie says. She glances at her boyfriend, or whatever he is. “Duane and I were going to go out for pizza.” But she continues to stand there, folding and unfolding her arms.

“You’re welcome to come, too,” Joe says to Duane.

Connie is chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. She seems to be trying to figure out how a sweet guy like Joe Fuller ever turned up on their doorstep. Faith is wondering the same thing.

Duane laughs. “Sunday dinner?” He purses his thin lips and looks at Connie. “I don’t do Sunday dinner.”

He heads toward his car, a GTO with flames painted on the doors. He’s parked it on the grass, the right front tire crushing one row of marigolds. Connie follows him to the car, then stops.

“You coming?” Duane says. Connie doesn’t answer. Duane gets in the car. “Later,” he says, and backs down the gravel drive.

Connie squints down the drive after him. “He’s a jerk anyway,” she says. She stoops to right the flowers. Faith helps her.

“Do you really want to come?” she whispers.

“Sure,” Connie says. “I’m curious, to tell you the truth.” She bears down on the marigolds, her long fingers twined around their stems, pushing them securely into the ground.

Faith imagines returning to the Fullers’ enormous house, to Joe’s swarming family. It might not be so bad with Connie there to absorb some of the shock. She pushes a marigold toward its roots, her fingers bone-white on the black ground. Next to hers, Connie’s fingers work and work. Their fingers are exactly the same, they could belong to the same hand. She remembers how pleased Joe was to resemble his brother.

“We’re missing the salad,” Joe says from the car.

Faith gets up and swishes her hands together. She moves toward the car, Connie just behind her. Her heart calms a little, even with the thought of more introductions and a new round of questions. She understands that Connie means to help her.

Faith is afraid of sex, but not of Joe. She’s afraid sex will hurt, so afraid that she tells him. He pulls her close and whispers, and they go slow, so slow it feels like dreaming, like the dreams she has had about Joe. It does not hurt; it feels like yellow butterflies scuttling through her body, even her fingers and toes, even her eyelashes. In the dark she is not afraid to hold him tight, wrap her legs all the way around. She is laughing, watching the ceiling, imagining a crowd of angels smiling down.

On the first day after they claim in her narrow bed to be in love, they go to a miniature golf course tucked behind some trees on the Long Point-Portland road. Faith laughs at the hulk of Joe among brightly painted windmills, neat blue pools. They are near real water, the green ocean, but the view is lost on her.

He watches her smallest movements, an audience unto himself, and it makes her feel conspicuous, a little foolish. He cheers when her ball skitters across the water and makes it through a lime-green tunnel; he teases her about the way she bears down on each shot, the mini club snugged into her hands. After she gets a hole in one, he grabs her by the waist and twirls her around: she is dizzy, mortified, the candy-colored landscape veering past her eyes.

When he puts her down her face goes scarlet. An elderly couple beams all over them; another couple, their own age, regard each other knowingly. It reminds her of the way Billy and Delle used to fawn over her and Connie in public, how Connie used to beg to go with them for exactly that reason, how it diminished her to beg.

Joe is standing close to her, waiting for her to laugh. She looks up at him. “I hate that,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She can see he is stricken. He tells her all the time that he’s in love with her and yet she can’t bear to believe it. She thinks of him every minute, seeks out his warm physical presence as if she had lived a lifetime underground, but she has no way of knowing that what she feels is love. About love she has no notions.

Her hands hang at her sides, defenseless. “I can’t help it,” she says. “I’m not very spontaneous.”

He gets used to her ways. They settle in. Her reserve becomes part of their shape together; he stops taking it personally.

Sunday dinners notwithstanding, they spend most of their time together at the trailer, which Joe says is nice and homey. They sit on the couch in front of a blank TV, listening to music on the stereo. Faith’s taste runs to soft guitars, women’s voices: Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, anything peaceful. Joe likes the Rolling Stones, so they compromise: odd nights are Faith’s pick, even nights Joe’s. When Connie is there she picks: Bob Dylan mostly; she likes songs with a lot of words. Her lips move, but, like Faith, she doesn’t sing. Joe sings them all, loud, unembarrassed by his ordinary voice.

Faith rides to work with Marion as she always has, but it is Joe who picks her up at the end of the day and drives her home. She wonders if this is like being married; her happiness is immense, monster-shaped, terrifying.

Connie is going out less, Faith notices; she might even be doing her homework. She seems to like staying in with Faith and Joe, where they listen to their music or play board games or cards. They don’t talk much, and Joe claims to have gotten used to it. One night he teaches them to play poker and they play seven nights running, the three of them gathered at the spindly, ill-lit table of the kitchenette, Connie beating the pants off them all, looking gleeful, like a little girl.

“So this is a quiet evening at home,” Joe says, shuffling the cards. “I always wondered.”

Faith smiles, believing she might after all have something to give him. A lesson about quiet, the wisdom in hesitation. He begins to read into her silence all kinds of magnificence, taking her every gesture and turning it, while she enters his imaginings willingly, filling herself with borrowed grace.

“Have you asked Connie to be your maid of honor?” Phoebe asks Faith. Faith blushes. She hasn’t even told Connie about the wedding.

Phoebe has done everything, thought of everything. Faith, who has never been to a wedding, follows her around like a feeble dog. Phoebe knows things without being told, and for this Faith is deeply grateful. Joe has enough friends and family to fill three church halls, yet Phoebe suggests a small wedding, right in the Fuller front room. She sits Faith down at the dining room table and asks her things: What are your favorite flowers? What songs? Will our family minister be all right? Who would you like to invite?

Except for Connie and Armand and Marion and Dr. Howe, Faith can’t think of anyone. She lost touch with her friend Marjory from high school, who moved back to Missouri. Faith doesn’t know how to tell Phoebe—how do you tell someone like Phoebe you have no friends? Phoebe, unblinking, says: “Well, I have an idea. What if your uncle Armand performed the ceremony?”

“He’s not my uncle,” Faith says, looking down. It feels like a personal failing.

Phoebe shakes her head, the black and silver hair moving. “Close enough. He’ll do a heck of a job.”

“But he’s a lawyer,” Faith says, another apology.

Phoebe waves it off. “In Maine the family dog can do a wedding.” She smiles, her bright lips parting over her teeth. “Don’t worry, you’ll really be married.”