Secret Language (3 page)

Their voices are rising now, drunken and shrill. Why weren’t they notified sooner? Bloody hell, their poor, precious girl in the hands of strangers!

“She would have
bloody
bled to death if the chambermaid hadn’t found her,” says a voice that sounds like an angry nurse’s.

When Connie hears them all thundering down the hall, she shrinks from the bedside and grabs the red coat, clutching it so hard her fingernails hurt, repeating
eighty-five eighty-five eighty-five
as fervently as she can. She sinks to the chair and drops her head, crushing Faith’s red coat into the bend of her body.

After Connie has spent a lot of days in the classroom with the hamsters—a month, maybe, or a week, she simply can’t measure time—the play moves to New York.

It is a cool, starlit, energetic night, the marquee like a dozen tiny moons drizzling light on her head. She feels a little like a princess in her white dress, its lacy frill falling just below her knees. She’s dressed exactly like Faith, her hair winched into the same yellow braids. She can still feel the afterbite of Delle’s nails as she raked the hair back, complaining.

“Smile, honey,” somebody says. They have posed like this in every city in the country, it seems, but New York is different: the light, the air, the nervous click of spike heels on the sidewalk, the timbre of her parents’ voices—these things carry the dread and exhilaration of arrival. And something else—Delle’s prediction, smuggled in somehow with the joyful tones that rain down like confetti:
The play won’t last a week
. They’ll have to go back to Connecticut for a while, to a school Connie hates. Sundays Armand will come out from the city to take them to lunch and a long walk, with ice cream at the end; other than that, nothing will move. She and Faith will stare out the windows, or hang around in the weedy yard, while Billy and Delle drink brandy or rum in their musky bedroom, waiting for Garrett to call with another show.

For now, though, everyone is smiling, talking faster than squirrels, their faces clear in the circle of light. The women wear red lipstick, their dresses shimmer with color: red, pink, green, violet. Connie likes pink, but Delle makes them wear white, this way they
stand out, they make a fine picture. Billy looks handsome in his tuxedo, Delle beautiful, a fur thrown over her thin sequined dress.

The cameras sound a little like insects, their flashes far too bright. Connie stands perfectly still inside her prickly white dress, thinking of her posture, her mother’s hand on her neck, her father’s hand cupping her shoulder. “Smile!” someone calls, and again: “Smile!” She does. Behind her she hears the crack of Billy and Delle’s smiles, too.

Next to her Faith is a stiff, unyielding presence. She won’t smile, not until the last possible minute. Faith hates this, hates having all these people looking at them. Connie feels a stab of guilt, but she can’t help liking this, in fact she loves it. Though Billy and Delle’s hands on her are no warmer than claws she can make herself feel them as the hands of love. She imagines they do indeed make a fine picture, the four of them all dressed up and standing in front of the poster for Billy and Delle’s show. She smiles again. She smiles until her cheeks hurt, pretending it is like this all the time. This is opening night.

Faith harbors few wishes. What she wishes today, with unaccustomed passion, is to have a new school to go to. Instead this is Maine, again, the school Long Point High, where everybody knows your business. They know, for example, that Billy Spaulding died drunk in a car crash back in July, about four hours after the Long Point Summer Theater had closed its doors for the night. She can feel the sidelong stares of the other kids in the cafeteria, warm and thin and musing.

With her lunch tray balanced in one hand, she drags a chair to the reject table and sits with a couple of pock-faced boys from the marching band and a new girl, Marjory. They let her eat in merciful silence, the thrum of voices from surrounding tables a halo of space between her and the virulent world.

Faith doesn’t have to sit at the reject table; she’s pretty, for one thing, and she’s in College Prep. But the College Prep table comes with questions. In Long Point Billy and Delle are—were—celebrities; the kids grill her every chance they get, about actors and acting and Broadway and backstage, as if she should know a thing about it. Now that Billy’s dead it’s even worse. Sometimes she thinks everyone on earth was put there to ask questions she doesn’t know the answers to.

The new girl, Marjory, looks up from her shepherd’s pie. “Yucky food,” she says, lifting her roll, wet with string bean juice, as if to prove it.

Faith nods, smiling faintly. She’s already given up on this meal. Usually she can catch the food in time, keeping the portions inside
the tray dividers, but today the cafeteria lady slopped the food every which way; pale juices are draining into all the wrong pockets.

“In Missouri it’s just as bad,” Marjory says. “That’s where I’m from.”

Faith steals a look at Marjory’s books; for some reason all the General Course books are brown. Marjory’s notebooks are pink, though, with
Marjory loves Kevin
scrawled over the covers in a bold, happy hand.

Faith is an A student, a fact that her guidance counselor says is a shock considering her scholastic history. The words
scholastic history
sound like a disease. Connie’s in Commercial Course, passing her classes by just enough to keep the school from calling Delle in to discuss things.

“Are you from here?” Marjory asks.

“Yes,” Faith says, because it’s easier. She remembers living in Missouri once for a couple of months, on the tour for
Count Your Change
, and again, though not as long, during
Mister Mistake
.

“I saw you walking to school this morning,” Marjory says. “Was that your sister?”

Faith nods. At the far end of the cafeteria, under a bank of windows, Connie is sitting at the burnouts’ table with a bunch of boys, her face animated with some fib she’s telling, probably the one about sitting on Marlon Brando’s lap when she was five, or meeting James Dean. Her hair is long, parted straight down the middle. It’s naturally blonde but she dyes it blonder. At night she rolls it up with empty orange juice cans. She has to keep waving it out of her eyes in a way boys like; they show off for her, punching each other on the arm and laughing loud enough to get the eye from the assistant principal. Faith can hardly remember the time when Connie used to follow her around at new schools, afraid of peeing her pants. Her makeup—blue eye shadow and blue eyeliner and blue mascara that Faith can see all the way across the room—makes her look older than she is. She’s a freshman, only one grade behind Faith. Faith is sixteen, almost a year older than everybody else in her class because Billy and Delle put her in the wrong grade once in Connecticut. She will be nineteen years old when she graduates from high school, a humiliation she feels in advance.

“Maybe we could walk home together,” Marjory says.

Faith doesn’t say no, and finds Marjory waiting for her in the lobby at the end of the day. They walk down the long hill from the high school, Marjory chitchatting happily, not seeming to mind that Faith doesn’t say much. At the ball field, where the road divides, they stop.

“Which way do you go?” Marjory asks.

Faith points the way, ashamed. This road divides the town in more ways than one.

“I go the other way,” Marjory says, reaching below the plaid hem of her jumper to yank up her tights. In Long Point this year white tights are out, but Marjory has no way of knowing. “Why don’t you come to my house for a while?”

“I don’t think so,” Faith says. If she goes to Marjory’s house then wouldn’t Marjory expect to see the trailer sometime?

“My mother makes something sweet every day,” Marjory says. “Today’s blond brownies.”

Marjory must be lying. “I’ve got to get home,” Faith says. “But thanks.”

At the end of the gravel drive that leads up to the trailer, the mailbox glints on top of a splintery post. The flag is still up, the mail and newspaper sticking out the end of the box. Faith sinks at the shoulders; this is not a good sign.

Connie is already there, sitting on the bottom step, waiting. Behind her the dingy trailer hunkers like some sleepy monster: the frosted, slatted windows, designed for a hotter climate, look like half-closed eyes. It’s only September but already the yard has gone yellow, the result of a killing frost come early. A few marigolds linger along the edge of the step. Faith scans the trailer, the crooked trees, the last of the flowers she and Connie planted. The plastic ducks they found once at a rummage sale are set into a family unit on the grass.

“She’s on the floor,” Connie says. “She’s been writing to Garrett.”

Garrett quit being Billy and Delle’s agent years ago, when they got fired from
Silver Moon
, but now that Delle’s a widow she thinks he owes her something. She’s blown up too many bridges, Garrett
says; he couldn’t get her a job canning tuna. Every once in a while Delle writes him pages and pages of illegible rage.

Connie moves over enough to let Faith sit down.

“I picked up the mail,” Faith says. “Didn’t you see it?”

“It’s never for me.”

They wait for a few minutes, looking out at the soon-to-be-forsaken yard. The air snaps of winter; already dusk falls too early.

“There’s a letter from Armand,” Faith says. Armand’s letters, which come once a week, include a check for each of them. He says it’s money from Billy’s life insurance, but they don’t believe it, and neither one of them has ever told Delle. Delle thinks they buy their clothes from the piddly allowance she gives them.

“Why did you sit with the rejects today?” Connie says. “It’s embarrassing.”

“They’re not rejects.”

“Says you.”

“That new girl is nice.”

Connie smirks in a way that infuriates Faith. “If you like white tights.”

“She can’t help it if she’s from Missouri. Nobody asked her opinion to move here.”

Faith opens Armand’s note and hands Connie her check. She reads the note, which is handwritten on the stiff, beige stationery of his New York law office. It reads like most of his notes—did they need anything, how’s their mother, how’s school. She gives that over as well.

“I’ve heard some things about that guy you’ve been sitting with,” she says to Connie.

“Who?”

“That guy.”

“Danny?”

“You know which one.”

This is a lot of talking, for them.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Connie says.

Faith shrugs. “It’s your life.”

They sit a while longer. Finally Connie lets go the sigh of an old woman. “Should we go in?”

They go in. Faith hates this trailer more than any place she has ever lived. The Connecticut house seems blurry and far away, a place she might have seen from the window of a bus. When Billy and Delle left
Silver Moon
, banished to summer stock in Maine, they all lived in a candy-striped motel just outside of Long Point, the first time Faith and Connie had their own room to share on the road. Even with Connie in the next bed, Faith felt a blessed sense of privacy, for when Billy and Delle fought or ran lines, their voices were no more than an urgent hum on the other side of the wall. They stayed there for three years. In summer Billy and Delle delighted tourists with their faultless harmonies, their genteel dancing, their gift for comic timing. In winter they retreated to the Connecticut house for days or sometimes weeks at a time, vainly looking for a director still willing to work with them. For Faith, left behind with her sister in the striped motel, Maine became a steady landscape, something like a home. After Billy died, Delle sold the Connecticut house and bought this place—on purpose, she says, a message to all the flapjaws in town who thought Billy might have left her well provided for.

“You take her feet,” Faith says.

Delle is lying on her side in front of the couch. It looks as if she’s been chewing tobacco, but the dribble of brown is coffee brandy. A few petals of notepaper drift around her, scarred by outraged indentations from a pen that skips. Her clothes, a sweatshirt and a pair of stretch pants, are streaked with coffee-colored stains. She’s thin but puffy-looking, her hair mashed against one cheek.

“Up,” Faith says, prying her mother’s shoulders from the floor. Delle is mumbling something, her voice dark and petulant.

“Bastard ruined us,” she says, her words slurry and wet.

Faith meets Connie’s eyes, the same as her own, glazed from knowing exactly what’s coming.

“Bastard bastard,” Delle says. “ ‘Work ethic’ my ass, we
made
that show.” Now she’s laughing, an eerie, disconnected cackle. “Didn’t last long without us, now did it?” Her eyes roll, the amber irises set into an unhealthy yellow gleam.

Faith looks away.

“Two years we did that show. Hah! Eight days they lasted without us. Eight pissy little days.”

Her fists threaded through her mother’s armpits and clamped together over her chest, Faith bends her knees and lifts. She waits until Connie hefts Delle’s feet, then begins to back down the hall. Once or twice she has to pause as Connie, her blue makeup clinging to her face like an illness, struggles with her part of their mother’s trifling weight. Faith is stronger than her sister, has always been. To her, Delle is no heavier than a sack of dry laundry.