How to Read an Unwritten Language (7 page)

“Excuse me?” the woman asked, her hair still undone, her face now stricken. “Why is that so sad?”

“It
is
sad, isn't it?” I replied. Suppressing my relief at her reaction, I reached for the tape recorder and turned off the man's misery in mid-sentence. Now I could leave it behind. “It was sitting here on the bench when I arrived,” I lied
.

The woman made no comment, still affected by that voice, so I added, “I was curious about the tape inside. I wonder what language he's speaking.”

“Not a clue,” she said, “I'm only a meteorologist.”

Again she waited and I did too, still not sure what she expected
.

“You know, on TV—a weather lady?” She laughed. “I'm deeply hurt you don't recognize me. I'm supposed to be a local personality. Though not for long.”

She'd given me an opening, and I took it. “Moving to a new job?”

“No. I'll probably be fired.”

“But you were so good at—” I began, gesturing at the sky
.

“That? A simple trick.” She paused, now looking through me, surprised, perhaps, at a decision rising within her. “Look … you've never seen my weather report, right?”

I nodded, and leaned back on the bench, a tiny retreat that I'd discovered sometimes encouraged people to speak more than they intended
.

She sighed. “So. What the hell. Do you mind if I vent?”

“Sure,” I said, “feel free to—”

“This will only take a minute,” she cut in with a wry smile, and then glanced up and down the gravel path, reassuring herself that I would remain an audience of one. “I don't believe in what I do any more. The odds aren't high enough for getting the weather right—temperature, cloud cover, humidity, whatever—when a rainstorm can pop up in less than an hour. It's depressing
,
I'm about as accurate as the horoscope. Check the other channels, listen to any radio station, call up the weather number. None of us predicts the same thing, even if the difference is only a matter of a couple of degrees.”

“But a little variation doesn't seem
—”

“This is supposed to be
science,
it's supposed to be
exact.
Take the Five Day Forecast … if there's anything I
can
guarantee, it's that what I predict on Wednesday about the weekend weather will be different from what I predict on Thursday and Friday. Who checks, who cares, who really pays attention to the weather report? That's not the point. I'm a practitioner of bad science.”

Two boys, probably brothers, sped down the path on bikes and she watched them pass. “Every day I review Weather Service reports, satellite photos, radar, and supercomputer programs
.
But any prediction can be undone by the flap of a wing. Ever hear of the Butterfly Effect?”

“I'm not sure. Is it
—”

“A part of chaos theory. A computer can make a detailed forecast, but one minute later the tiniest atmospheric fluctuation sets off a chain reaction that knocks the weather off- kilter. All because some butterfly flapped its wings.”

I understood the concept well enough. Too many words I'd said, decisions I'd made, had opened unpredictable paths
.

“And to think I used to love butterflies when I was a kid.” Sylvia shook her head. “Anyway, my doubts seem to be giving me away when I'm on the air
—
it's getting harder to drum up commercial sponsors for my segment. Which reminds me, if I don't hurry I'm going to be late for an appointment.”

She turned to leave, but first I'd give her something of me. “I think I know what you mean,” I said. “See the shadows of those leaves over there, by your feet? Those are sugar maple leaves. And those three lobes connected to the stem? They remind me of little temples, like pagodas. But watch when a breeze starts up, don't they look more like the wings of birds or bats flying away?”

She looked from the shadows back to me, as if I'd suddenly appeared for the first time. “Nicely done,” she said almost to herself, and then continued on her way
.

My brother and sister wouldn't approach the coffin, but I forced myself to look inside. Nestled in a brittle cushion of brown hair, Mother's puffy face had become another stranger. She seemed almost serene, as if she'd silenced those voices and finally escaped them. But she'd also escaped us.

I returned to the milling crowd of Father's respectful employees, the few curious neighbors, and our handful of extended family. Dan, Laurie and I accepted what seemed like standard expressions of condolence with a simple nod or a mumbled thank you. We mingled among the guests, trying to avoid Father's haggard face, his sleepwalking steps. Guilt and regret held us back. We'd kept Mother's gallery of characters a secret from him for so long, how could he not resent us?

For weeks after the funeral, there were entire evenings when Father locked himself away in a dark room with terrible migraines, groaning from behind the door for aspirin. Once, as I struggled to find the bottle among hand towels, toilet paper and the sad remains of Mother's makeup collection in the cluttered bathroom closet, he stumbled into the hallway.

His eyes covered by a damp cloth, his voice was a tight knot. “It hurts so bad I can't see straight.”

My fingers fumbled past a box of band-aids, a bottle of cough syrup.

“Hurry
. Everything … is stuttering,” he rasped, his large hands grasping his head. “Like a broken TV.”

Then I understood that some sort of Hold dial had gone loose inside him. I called to Dan and Laurie for help and they squeezed past Father to join my search. His mouth opened in horror at the sight of his three anxious children, and his shocked face has never left me. I can still imagine how we must have appeared, our image skittering before him like a family film gone wild.

*

Even on the best of days we confounded him—we wouldn't stay in place, just as, day by day, our various toy collections slowly unfurled themselves across the floors of our rooms. Without warning, we'd shed our sadness and throw ourselves into desperate games of tag, for the thrill of outrunning grasping hands and chasing after fleeing figures just beyond our reach, and Father could only watch in numbed silence, unable to shout a warning before a lamp overturned.

Yet our racing leaps concealed this secret: Mother had become our phantom limb, and we each had separate, invisible limps. Laurie dipped anything at all into the sugar bowl, even cubes of cheese, trying to satisfy an insatiable urge, a sticky cosmetic sheen of sweetness covering her lips. Dan quite methodically made a mess of his toys, pummeling them to bits; or he took yet another reckless tour of the neighborhood, ringing doorbells and then running away, or “borrowing” a bicycle left on a front lawn. As for me, I took on family chores that Father could barely manage, so that in work I might lose myself. Supplanting an array of indifferent babysitters and domestic help, I washed and dried the dishes and set them in the pantry; I organized shopping lists; I picked up after my brother and sister, and in the evenings I made sure they took their baths and brushed their teeth. I read bedtime stories.

Father tried to do his best, however inadequate his best might have been. Now that school had begun again, he specialized in breakfasts, serving up long strips of crunchy bacon, cold glasses of orange juice, and syrupy waffles. But he still hadn't learned what the various drawers in our bedrooms held, how to set the timers on the washing machine, or how to coax calories into picky eaters. And when it came to offering us patient attention, it was clear there were nuances he could not grasp. Merely having the name Father, I realized, didn't always make a person a parent. Acting more like a parent would be just that for Father—acting, and then he might march down Mother's dangerous path.

Yet there was no question that we were his responsibility: what family did we have left? Only one of our grandparents was still alive—Father's mother, Nani. She lived in a rest home, hunched in a wheelchair, lost in a smock-like garment and long past the ability to speak. On our visits Father would sit beside her, stroking her withered arm as a substitute for words, while her eyes followed the movements of her grandchildren. I always tried to avoid that gaze. Ashamed of my unfairness, I still couldn't help imagining Nani as the oldest thing in the universe, her eyes like those Black Holes I'd learned about in school, whose gravitational pull might draw us all in if we weren't careful.

And then there was Aunt Myrna, Mother's unmarried older sister. She'd rarely come to see us when our mother was alive, and now, perhaps shamed by her earlier neglect, she spent many long hours driving to and from her distant town to visit us on a Saturday or Sunday. Gone were our weekend trips to the bowling alley—none of us could bear the thought of that game, and if Father still played he did so alone, whenever Aunt Myrna hauled us off to a park or a mall.

These jaunts always included a visit to a cafeteria rife with overcooked vegetables and soggy fruit suspended in Jell-0 molds. I'd poke away at dark, pungent spinach on my plate and try to see where my mother's features fit in Myrna's round face and jutting chin, her reddish hair that just seemed to lie on her head. I could never do it, just as I was always on the verge of asking her any and all of the questions brimming inside me:
Does Laurie's voice remind you of Mom's when she was a little girl? Which one of us most reminds you of our mother? What was she like when you were young?

Instead I listened, along with Dan and Laurie, to Aunt Myrna's odd habit of quoting dialogue from her favorite television shows. Wiping at a puddle of Dan's spilled milk on the cafeteria table, she announced, “‘I could never do that—she's my best friend.'” If Laurie lingered too long at a drugstore's cosmetics counter, Myrna said, “‘Now Barney, calm down.'” And whenever she parked the car and we trooped out into another parking lot of another mall, our aunt loved to declare, “‘Why, there's a fortune in unmarked bills in this pillowcase.'”

Soon we followed her lead, spouting lines out of context whenever we could. “‘Not in my bathtub, you won't,'” Dan muttered as he struggled with his shoelaces, and once, when Aunt Myrna took us on a long drive in the country, Laurie woke from a nap, glanced out the window and announced sleepily, “‘Look, all the food's in French.'”

The repetition of these and other special phrases became invisible glue that seemed to hold us together. So during one cafeteria jaunt, right after Aunt Myrna graciously exempted us from candied yams, I finally found the courage to ask, “Did you and Mom ever play pretend games when you were little?”

Dan and Laurie stopped their clowning over the sugar packets, their sudden quiet an unspoken echoing of my question. Aunt Myrna held her teacup in midair and stared at the wisps of steam rising before her eyes, and I thought with relief and disappointment that somehow she hadn't heard me.

Then she replied in a surprisingly flat voice, “No, I don't recall anything like that.” She sipped her tea, she dabbed her lips. She regarded us as if we were contagious.

In the park Aunt Myrna settled on a weathered bench while Dan and Laurie careened from seesaw to jungle gym. I sat beside her moody silence and I realized the mistake of my question: I'd stirred up a fear that Mother's impulses lurked inside her too, waiting for escape. When my brother and sister chased each other around the sandbox, flinging arcs of sand in the air, Aunt Myrna simply looked away, and I somehow knew that she would leave us slowly, over many months of shortened visits and deferred or broken dates.

Before beginning the bedtime story for my brother and sister that night, I wondered how I could possibly soften Aunt Myrna's inevitable leave-taking, and I anxiously snapped the book open and shut until Laurie yawned and muttered, “The better to eat you with, my dear.” She extended her hand toward me, a restless hungry mouth.

I slipped the book behind me and answered with my own quotation: “You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!”

Catching on, Dan sang out with witchy glee, “I'll get you, my little pretty,” and he wrestled the book away.

We tossed phrases back and forth from a wealth of bedtime stories, transforming our evening ritual into a fractured tale that ranged from Mother Goose to Disney, Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson, Babar the Elephant and Marvel comics. Our stepwise narrative continued flirting with disaster until we wearily left off and went to bed.

We continued that convoluted story the next night, and the night after that, exploring the odd corners of books we thought we'd forgotten, and eventually, during a lull in the narrative, we came up with a game we called Name That Dwarf. If a teacher or friend or schoolyard bully were really one of the Seven Dwarfs, which one would he or she be? Our mournful principal Mr. Donners, famous for school assemblies alerting us to the dangers of current infectious diseases, we dubbed Happy. Miss Milbane's habit of crinkling her nose as she corrected homework assignments at her desk earned her the title Sneezy.

“What about the popcorn lady at the movies?” Laurie asked to our anticipatory laughter. “What about Tommy Vickers?”

“What about Dad?” Dan asked.

We fell silent at this deliciously forbidden thought.

“Bashful?” Laurie suggested.

“No—Grumpy!” Dan countered.

They both looked to me, the possible tie breaker.

“Sleepy,” I said without thinking, and Dan snorted with disgust. “Sleepy?” he said. “It's no fun playing if you don't even try.”

“I am trying,” I protested, but Dan turned away, suddenly concerned with the bits of lint that clung to the blankets.