How to Read an Unwritten Language (12 page)

“Never.
Never
. No
way
—”

“No—wait, Dan. He's different at work.”

“So?” he shouted, kicking through his collection.

“So, maybe—I don't know. Maybe you'll get along.”

Dan laughed bitterly, but he stopped his rampage.

“He pays attention at work,” I added, encouraged. “He has to, to teach you stuff.”

Dan's lips trembled, and he knelt to gather up his comics. “What makes you think he would?” he whispered.

*

I sat beside my brother in the backseat as Father drove us to work without comment, withholding the sort of advice he'd offered me on my first day. After parking he strode off alone without a glance back at us. Dan loitered by the car and pretended indifference, squinting at the reflected light of the greenhouses, while I struggled with my own sense of injury—Father was barely honoring the bargain we'd agreed to.

He'd left me with the job of introducing Dan to Bob. We set off across the grounds, and I found Bob behind the main building, overseeing the stacking of plastic bags of peat moss and ornamental wood chips. He'd kept away from me since the end of his thieving days, and if we ever found ourselves working together he restricted himself to deferential smiles, faintly tinged with resentment. Now he set down his clipboard as we approached, that familiar smirk on his face, and I decided I wouldn't play the fiction that Dan was just another employee.

“Bob, this is my brother Dan. He'll be working here too now.”

“I'm pleased to meet any relation of such a fine worker as Michael,” he said, shaking Dan's hand.

Turning to my brother, I tried to assume Father's crisp authority. “You'll work under Bob today. He's the man to listen to.”

Bob nodded with satisfaction. “That's what your father always says.”

Unimpressed, Dan said nothing, and while he waited for his first orders I left for my own chores.

All morning I resisted the impulse to check on my brother, wishing I could have kept him close to me this first day. Half expecting his temper to erupt, once or twice I stopped, listened for any hint of trouble, then returned to my work.

During lunch break Dan brooded through every bite of his sandwich while Bob went on and on: “Oh, it looks like he'll fit in, it looks like he'll fit in fine, just fine.”

When Bob snuck outside for a quick smoke, Dan muttered, “Jeez, what a creep. Wherever he is, he keeps staring at me. I think Dad said something to him.”

I shook my nearly empty soda can and listened to the harmless sizzle of its fizz. “I don't think they talk much. Don't worry—just do your work and you'll be fine.” I crumpled my lunch bag and tossed it at the trashcan, hoping to impress Dan. It bounced against the rim, somehow dropping in, and I offered my brother a triumphant grin. He stared at the ground. “Hey,” I said, “I have to check the sprinkler system. You want to come along?”

He groaned. “I can't. Bob said I gotta do some stuff with a bunch of seedlings.”

Maintaining the sprinklers involved too much tightening and loosening, then tightening and loosening again with a wrench that nourished blisters. The metallic groan of each tug echoed my discomfort and at one point echoed the distant shouting that carried across the nursery. It was Father's angry voice, then Dan's. Dropping the wrench, I tore through rows of potted juniper bushes, turned the corner past a tool shed and hurried toward the tight circle of my father, Dan and Bob.

“He—he did!” Dan cried out, his hands waving almost in supplication before Father's ominous stillness.

“Of course he did not.”

“He
did
,
“
Dan repeated, now turning to me. “Bob popped open the snack machine and just lifted a candy bar—”

“I never did such a thing,” Bob insisted. “Michael here has worked with me for three years now. He knows I'm not like that. Isn't that right, Michael?” He turned to me a cruel little smile that revealed how badly I'd misjudged him. Petty thievery had never been the point, after all.

Father mistook my hesitation as a reluctance to condemn my brother, and he took a sharp step toward him. “Liar!” he cried, now actually shaking with rage, and Dan flinched before him. They both hesitated an instant before the logic of what must follow, and before me was the scene my brother had stared at for months as if in preparation for this moment. I couldn't let it happen.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Dan's telling the truth. Bob … Bob's been filching stuff for years.”

“That won't work,” Father barked. “You're protecting your brother.”

“No! I've seen him do it too. Lots of times.”

“Aw, now—” Bob protested, but Father cut him off with a flick of his hand. “Why didn't you tell me before?” he asked me, his voice hushed, trembling.

“I, I, I didn't…” I stuttered, remembering with despair Father's hand resting on my shoulder, how in the spell of that long-awaited moment I'd forgotten to report Bob. “You, you see …” I tried again, but the only explanation I had was in a language my father didn't speak—the language of family, not business.

“Bob, you're fired,” Father announced without even bothering to glance at his shocked face. Instead, my father regarded me with the determined expression of an employer who is certain of what he must do. Yet there was regret, even tenderness in his voice—I'll always believe this, I have to believe this—when he said, softly, “And you're fired too.”

*

My father never again uttered a word about that afternoon. As for my brother, he sometimes offered me surreptitious, apologetic glances whenever he and Father discussed the nursery over dinner. I'd pretend to enjoy my meal, while Laurie gazed at a wall, silently rehearsing another school play.

“You think mulching is enough?” Dan might say, unable to hide his happiness. And why shouldn't he be happy? In an instant he'd changed from bad son to good, a transformation as radical as anything in those comic books he loved. And my transformation was just as complete: I'd become another false face, an unhappy surprise like Mother. I was even haunted by the thought that now Father suspected me of Dan's brief run of domestic terrorism, but I didn't dare deny something I hadn't been accused of, afraid any protest of innocence might instantly brand me guilty.

The debacle at the nursery attuned Father to other possible betrayals. Increasingly he confronted Laurie about the Theater Club at school—he knew where playacting could lead, and was more than ready to revoke a host of household privileges if she didn't “stop all this
pretending
.”

As if she'd been an understudy for Father's hurtful ways, Laurie matched him, insolence for every blustering threat, usually goading him into a theatrical bout of shouting. Then, with a smile of satisfaction, she'd walk away, and her bedroom door slammed so hard Father would step up his raging again, laying down the law to living room walls that wouldn't talk back, practicing his lines for the next confrontation.

Unwilling to jeopardize his overnight favor, Dan used the occasion of these disputes to find an errand outside the house. But I refused to repeat my mistake of silence and served as Laurie's ally, even if Father barely acknowledged my attempts. In the wake of one particularly bitter quarrel, when Father and Laurie had howled at each other in eerie harmony, I tried to calm him but he turned away with a dismissive wave of his hand, a farewell more cutting than any harsh words he might have said.

He left me alone in the living room. Longing for any hint of the last bit of tenderness I'd heard in his voice that day he fired me, I slumped onto the couch and stared at the furniture arrangements that hadn't changed in years. Yet Father's silence had changed: it now contained the refusal to forgive. Is this what Mother had hurled herself against? Even if this offered an explanation for my parents' troubles, how could I ever discover what Mother had done that Father wouldn't forgive? It was a story that would never be told.

I held my hands over my ears, as if this might stop my thoughts, and then I rose from the couch and walked to my sister's door. I knocked, a few quiet taps, but there was no answer. I entered anyway and found her sitting before the mirror, examining her flushed face. She spoke in a voice made husky from all that screaming. “I appreciate what you're trying to do, Michael, but don't waste your time. Your word doesn't mean a thing to Dad any more.”

She began working up her latest display of what eyeliner and blush could do, poking through her extensive makeup kit as if I weren't there, and I had to retort, “Whether he listens to me or not, you can't win, you know.”

“Oh? Just watch me,” she replied, so drawing out the dark tones of her ragged voice that I suspected she employed her arguments with Father for their hidden artistic opportunities. But Laurie had more parts to play than I could have predicted: when she was done with her elaborate application, she turned to me with a face that appeared absolutely plain, as free of makeup as one could imagine.

The following day my sister applied a similarly deceptive makeup: she set her face to Obedient Daughter and stopped arguing with Father. She even renounced her school's theater club, and this became her best role, one that established a false calm in our home. When Laurie waved good-bye with a demure flick of her hand and walked out the front door, she usually headed for her job at the local magic shop. There she gave makeup demonstrations and modeled wigs and costumes. Freed from scripted dialogue, she so effortlessly assumed the roles of an angel, witch, or vampire, even a pirate and a soldier of fortune, that her impromptu performances drew more than enough customers to constitute an audience.

I spent that final year at home waiting for my graduation and eventual escape to the state university. Yet sometimes I'd spend an early evening by my bedroom window, watching flocks of birds navigate elegant geometries above their chosen tree before roosting for the night. I wanted to join them, hoping that those supple, weaving formations offered a hint of how to alter my family's separate trajectories, which were taking us farther and farther from each other.

I flipped back and forth through the local news channels, looking for the butterfly woman, and then, after a well-groomed news anchor wrapped up a report on a community charity drive, the camera panned to a weather map and “staff meteorologist Sylvia Mathews.”

Dressed in a tailored suit, a microphone clipped to her lapel, she spoke the evening sponsor's motto with a slight stutter: “N-nothing's too tough for McDuff Hardware.” A computer-generated jet stream appeared on the screen behind her, a curving line of little flashing white arrows. Wagging a pointer at a cold front, she reeled off temperature highs and lows too quickly, as though afraid she might be contradicted. “We might see some strong activity here,” she announced
.

Yesterday she'd mentioned that hardly anyone paid attention to a weather report. Certainly I'd never appreciated the special effects: various states on the map changed color, depending on warmer or colder weather; cloud patterns lurched from west to east; and little icons—a smiling sun, a frowning raincloud—flashed off and on. Sylvia dwarfed it all, standing before the sweep of the globe, yet she was also just a tiny figure on the TV screen, stuck in a little box, stiff shouldered and awkwardly tapping her pointer
.

“There's only a slight chance of showers tomorrow,” she predicted, and the doubt in her voice made me imagine rain clouds, lightning, storms
.

The camera panned in for a close-up and I leaned in, my face inches from the screen. Tiny crackles of electricity rose from the surface, and for a moment her face matched mine
.

“C'mon,” I whispered, “relax a little.”

“May your weather always be happy,” she said, her forced smile signing off. The camera cut to a predictably burly sportscaster, who promised high school basketball scores right after the station break
.

“Chance of,” “might”—
those hedgings reminded me of the ambiguous language of the daily horoscope. I didn't know much about meteorology, but I'd learned something from those days when I'd been addicted to the stars' and planets' equivocal pronouncements. Interpretation was the point, not precision. Whether she liked it or not, Sylvia was more than a talking head in front of that overexcited weather map—she was the interpreter of a high tech oracle
.

“And that's it for tonight's news,” the anchor declared. While the credits rolled down the screen I looked up the station's number and reached for the phone, hoping I'd catch Sylvia before she left
.

The receptionist put me on hold and I fought a growing urge to hang up. What right did I have to call, anyway?

“Hello, who is this?” she asked, the question faintly laced with lingering hesitation from her weather roundup
.

“Hi, this is, um, Michael Kirby. The man you met in the park yesterday?”

“It's you. You called,” she said, in a flat voice hiding too much for me to read
.

“I watched your weather report. I think I might have an idea about this … dilemma of yours. Could we meet sometime, maybe talk?”

Through the receiver came the television crew's faraway chatter and I waited, unsure of her reply. We were strangers, after all. But I wanted to believe we'd already begun to seek out each other's strangeness
.

Filled with the exacting contortions of percentages, I hurried from my statistics class, once again questioning the wisdom of pursuing a degree in business even if it did offer the possibility of reconciliation with my father. Passing the quad—a mere corner of this vast campus that even now, in my second year, seemed to sprawl in every' direction—I decided to bask in one of the last warm days of autumn and stretch out on the grass. Here and there couples curled together on the lawn, a Frisbee toss was underway with someone's dog bounding after the whirling thing, and a few students with acoustic guitars slowly worked up some out-of-tune folk music nostalgia. Across from me stood one of the old oaks planted at the time of the university's founding—its thick branches stretched over the lawn, a canopy of leaves already tinged with purple and red.