Secret Language (6 page)

The thought of Armand, who has known her since she was born,
performing her wedding, reminds Faith of greeting cards, camera commercials, the ending of a good movie. She is painfully happy.

Phoebe taps Faith twice on the hand. “Another brainstorm! Since Armand’s doing the wedding, why don’t we just keep the whole thing inside the family?” She slaps her palms together. “That’s just the ticket: family only. Won’t that be fun?”

Faith nods, unable to speak. She leaves her hands on the table for Phoebe to touch again.

For six days Faith has been wondering how to say it, how to ask. Because she tries to find exactly the right time, every moment seems important: passing each other in the skinny hall on the way in or out of the bathroom, pouring cereal into shallow bowls before Faith leaves for work, Connie for school. She’s hoping for one of life’s indelible moments—lately she is filled with hope—but she doesn’t expect to recognize one even if it comes.

“I’m getting married,” she murmurs one morning as Connie starts out the door.

Connie turns; her blonde eyebrows go up. “Wow.”

“You want to be my maid of honor? Phoebe said she’d buy you a dress.”

Connie shifts on her flat red shoes, the frayed hem of her jeans brushing the cotton strap. A month from the end of her second senior year, she looks poised for flight. She glances around the trailer, at the white walls, the clean tabletops, the new scatter rugs.

“Where are you guys going to live?” she asks. Her eyes, made up in the palest green, seem furtive, scared.

“In a house,” Faith says. “It’s in Portland, and the man says we can rent as long as we want, till we have a down payment.” She feels terribly sad, watching Connie’s high-boned face, remembering herself as a nineteen-year-old senior.

Connie is half in, half out of the trailer, not moving. “Oh.”

“You can live with us if you want. I mean, if you don’t go to stewardess school right off.” Connie has been working at Long Point Variety all year and hasn’t mentioned stewardess school once. “It’s a nice house,” Faith says. “It has an upstairs.”

“Does it have a yard?”

“Yes.”

“A fence?”

Faith thinks. “I don’t remember.”

“How many rooms?”

“More than you can imagine.” Faith looks away. “Enough for all of us.”

Connie lingers at the door; Faith has no idea what she’s thinking. It occurs to her that moving into her first real home with a new husband would be easier if Connie came along. At times Faith is enchanted with the idea of marrying Joe—she dreams of a home with windows thrown open, a big dog asleep on the porch—but at other times she feels like a foundling left on a mountainside to die.

“I suppose we could sell this place,” Connie says, looking around.

“Do you want to?”

Connie makes a sound between a cough and a laugh. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Faith can’t think of any reason, but the idea is troubling. “So, will you?” she says.

“Will I what? Live with you or be the maid of honor?”

Faith shrugs. “Both.”

“Okay,” Connie says, and is gone from the door.

Faith stands in the archway of the Fuller front room, the family assembled, their eyes on her. Connie stands just ahead of her, dressed in pink silk, her arms held close to her sides. Faith might as well be looking at herself, a column of stone set into the watery motion of Joe’s family. The satin of Faith’s ivory dress brushes her cold skin all the way down to her ankles. She holds the flowers a few inches from her middle, half expecting them to explode.

The front room burgeons with peonies from Phoebe’s garden, grand bursts of white and pink. One of Joe’s sisters-in-law is playing something momentous on the family piano, a monstrous thing, resoundingly stolid under the considerable weight of framed photographs of various stages of boys.

Faith looks at nothing but the pink, lacy hem in front of her as Connie leads the way in a graduation-style march to the mantel, where Armand stands, round as a preacher, on the scuffed brick.
Heat bears down on her from all sides but she cannot warm herself. She’s gone cold with the fear of love and the knowledge of her un-belonging, so cold she can barely stand, and so she removes herself from this joyful gathering, steps secretly away from them all while her chilled body stays.

She watches Joe slip the ring over her knuckle. She watches herself murmur “I do,” all the faces tensing forward because they cannot hear her.

She will remember this moment many, many times. Remembering, she will believe that if she had only been able to warm herself, if she had only stayed inside her body as she pledged forever and true, she might have learned to live with a man like Joe, a man who loved her.

When Faith and Connie come to clean out the trailer, they are accompanied by a flock of Fullers darting in and out like birds: Joe; his brothers, Will and Brian and Greg; the sisters-in-law, Sarah and Maggie and Amy; most of the nephews and the lone niece; Joe Senior; and Phoebe, in a strictly supervisory role. In all, nineteen people, two cars, four trucks. Far too many people, more than the trailer has ever seen. They cheerfully step out of each other’s way as they carry out the sofa, the kitchen table, the box of knickknacks, the lawn ducks, the TV, the beds. They talk a lot, a vigorous chittering all around Faith’s head.

Without a word, Faith and Connie assign themselves to Delle’s room, which is suddenly Billy’s room too when they discover his clothes in the closet, bunched at the end of the rod. Faith grabs them in musky hunks and rolls them into the pile of Delle’s clothes. She drops the heap into a carton the size of a trash can which Phoebe has marked
SALVATION ARMY—DO NOT LOAD
. The room, long closed, smells of must, illness, secrets. Faith takes Delle’s things from the top of the dresser—a decorative marble box that was given to her by Helen Hayes; the framed glossy from
Silver Moon
; a pillbox of polished stone; a doily made by Grammy Spaulding—and places them on top of the mound of junk in Billy and Delle’s traveling trunk, a great gilded thing with a rounded top that looks like something from a pirate ship. Then Will and his oldest boy heft the emptied dresser, moving slow as bears in the narrow hall.

“Do you mind if I take the doily?” Connie says.

Faith looks at the doily, a delicate, lacy square, mottled with
white shapes where Delle’s things lay untouched for years. “Go ahead.” Connie plucks the doily from the trunk, folds it daintily, and tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans.

Faith pushes the lid of the trunk and it groans shut with the finality of a closed coffin. Faith and Connie grab it by the handles, but it is far too heavy for them, so they drag it across the floor and all the way down the hall to the front door. As Faith backs out into the dazzling sunlight, a blur of faces and hands appears at her side, waiting to help. In the midst of this breathtaking abundance she is seized with a timorous gratitude—not for her new family, but for the sight of her sister at the other end of the trunk, for the knowledge that she will not have to bear alone the burden of ordinary love she has married into.

She offers the last look and wanders through the small, stripped rooms. Her footsteps echo behind her, and then she hears another set of feet.

“It looks like no one ever lived here,” Connie says. Faith nods, taking in the naked windows, the swept corners. She watches Connie run her hand over the bare kitchen counter. “It looks like
we
never lived here,” Connie says.

Faith doesn’t answer. She looks around, for some sign of herself, her sister. On the back wall where the sofa used to be is a cruel scar that still shows through the white, white paint, where Delle once tried to gouge her name with a fork.

“Let’s just go,” Faith says. But Connie stays put. Her eyes move over the cramped rooms inch by inch, as if she’s imagining what used to be there. Then she turns her back and marches outside, into the flurry of Joe’s family.

Faith checks the rooms one last time. Finding nothing left, she shuts the trailer’s tinny door on what she hopes is her old life.

If Joe minds being a threesome he doesn’t say. The arrangement suits Faith even better than she expected. When she arrives for Sunday dinner on Joe’s arm, the house swallows her instantly into the stampede of Joe’s family and the rituals of food, family stories, and tedious, off-key sing-alongs around the piano. But when Connie joins them, as she often does, the stampede slows to a purposeful
walk, and the cloud of family presses on her less urgently, it seems, as if giving room to these two sisters and the shelf of silence they carry between them, their unarticulated sorrows.

Connie has chosen the smallest bedroom in Faith and Joe’s house, at one end of the upstairs hall. At the other end Faith fusses over the bedroom she shares with Joe, papering the walls with tiny flowers. Joe Senior comes over to help her, lugging a utility table and oddly shaped instruments for hanging wallpaper. There is nothing the Fullers can’t do.

Little by little the house fills with furniture—big, heavy things, gifts from Joe’s parents and brothers that are almost impossible to move. Their immutability thrills Faith, fills her with the notion that she has landed somewhere permanent. Though she thinks of it as Joe’s house—Joe is the one who checked it from top to bottom, Joe’s family furnished it, Joe’s humor and grace now fill it—she loves it already; she wants to die here.

Connie’s new job, at New England Bonding & Casualty, makes for little conversation. She calls it New England Bondage & Slavery. After six months she’s still a file girl, running files from floor to floor, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She has plenty of friends, and plenty of plans: every week a brochure comes from a different airline.

Faith is usually the first one home from work, and Connie arrives soon after. They cook something together from Phoebe’s store of recipes, working in silence, following Phoebe’s carefully printed directions. The recipes aren’t simple—Phoebe gives them a lot of credit—and there have been disasters. Joe comes in later, stopping at the sink to wash his hands in a mixture of dish soap and sugar that grinds away the grease from his father’s shop. Then he puts his hands on Faith’s cheeks, looking at her till she blushes, and kisses her long on the lips. His attentions still disarm her; every time he comes back to her at the end of the day, her heart registers a subtle surprise.

“We sold a machine today,” he says. He’s beating cake batter in a huge bowl tucked under his arm like a football. Joe always makes dessert, evil, thick things that smolder under mounds of Redi-Whip,
while Connie and Faith, dinner made, sit at the table and watch him. “I thought Dad was going to cry.”

Faith smiles. Joe Senior keeps saying he’s going to retire and thinks every machine they ship out is his last.

“Well,” Joe says. “That was
my
day. Did anybody else around here have a day?” They laugh. He goes through this every night; he tells them he feels like a stand-up comedian held captive by Trappist monks.

Sometimes Connie goes out at night, with one of her boyfriends or a girl from work, leaving Faith and Joe together. But more often she stays in. Evenings in the new house are much like the evenings in the trailer, except for the husk of permanence that encases them: the immobile furniture, the thicket of hydrangea bushes hemming in the yard. They play cards at night, like old people. The family stops over not in bunches, but in manageable ones and twos. With Connie as an unwitting ally, Faith steeps her home in a comforting quiet, the only thing left in her life that is truly hers.

The results are positive. Dr. Howe places a fatherly kiss on her cheek. “Go tell that nice husband of yours,” he says, but she doesn’t. She waits until the twelfth week, when, lying in bed, Joe runs his hand over the hard curve of her belly. His hand stops.

“Faith?” His eyes are impossibly blue and tender. “Could you be pregnant?” She covers his hand, holding it against her stomach, until he yelps with joy, hoisting himself up on one elbow. “Why didn’t you
tell
me?”

She simply laughs, relieved that he knows on his own. She doesn’t know what to do with life’s magical moments; she never expected these ordinary miracles. She couldn’t utter “I’m pregnant” any better than she had uttered “I do.”

“Twelve weeks?” he says. He looks at her the way he does so often, as if he’s just figured out what he has on his hands. “You didn’t tell me for twelve weeks?”

“I was embarrassed,” she whispers, pulling the covers over them. She feels safe in this bed, its rose-pink quilt shielding them from the world. “I didn’t want to turn it into a ceremony.”

He shakes his head, smiling. She believes her lack of ceremony is
what continues to draw him toward her; perhaps his choosing her was in part a respectful rebellion against his ceremonial family.

She peels his hands from her belly and brings them to her face, hands a heady mix of sweat and soap and sugar. “I love you, Joe.” These are words he likes, and he seems satisfied, fitting himself around her like a coat.

In the morning he’s ready to call his mother and father, his brothers, his friends, the newspaper, the president.

“Please let’s wait,” Faith tells him.

“But Faith,” he says, grabbing her hands and dancing her around the bedroom, “we’re going to have a baaay-yay-beee!”

She smiles. “I don’t think I’m ready for the brass band.” Surely the Fullers have some automatic program for First Baby news: a party, a blizzard of presents, special teas, advice handed down like heirlooms.

He laughs. “Okay.”

“Besides, I think we should tell Connie first.”

“Great. Let’s tell her now.”

“Right this minute?”

“Faith,” Joe says, still dancing, “you have to learn how to
move
.” He waltzes her out of their room and down the hall.

“Joe …”

He bangs on Connie’s door. “Open up! Big news!” he calls.

He flings the door open. Connie lifts her head, her hair a yellow tangle. “What’s going on?” Joe tugs at her covers. “Time to get up, time to make plans.”

“Joe …” Faith says.