How to Read an Unwritten Language (3 page)

Whenever he came home from work Mother returned to herself—our feigned innocence on that morning of the pancakes had set a pattern of secrecy—yet even though she sat on a chair at the dinner table or in front of the television, she managed to announce the reappearance of a character with the slightest change: whole histories were implied by any of a dozen slightly different nods or shrugs or shaded glances. A stifled yawn, its faint strain turning into a tiny, hard smile, and I knew Mother was now Susan, the woman who wouldn't laugh, no matter what jokey histrionics Laurie, Dan, and I might perform; a bitter sigh and tight shake of her hair while washing the dishes and she became Melanie, the big-city reporter who'd seen it all; a single, knowing peek at the ceiling fan announced Tamara the Magnificent, a retired juggler who demonstrated her talents with invisible plates and balls, candlesticks and swords.

Often during breakfast I watched Mother's hands cupped against the formica surface. Her fingers curling inward suggested the imminent release of another new character, and I honed my skill at identifying her thicket of selves. In this way I grew up bilingually—learning both the sometimes exasperating rules of English grammar at school and Mother's impersonating gestures at home. My first language helped me make my way through the world; my second language helped me see through it.

*

With the return of spring Father kept every inch of our lawn mowed and trimmed. The owner of a nursery and landscaping business, he made sure the tidy green world around our house was an example for the neighbors, an advertisement for any present and future customers, and it was my burden, as the oldest child, to help him. Toiling under the sun, I admired the persistence of weeds and creepers for their ability to turn up in the most unlikely corners, and even as I tore them out I wished them well. But all that hard work was a kind of dream for Father, a dream no one else could really enter, and sometimes, as he laid mulch about a flower bed or raked up lawn clippings, he occasionally glanced my way without recognition.

One afternoon Mother came out to announce BLTs and lemonade and Father didn't turn to acknowledge her. Bent over a hedge, he continued snipping away with his usual fervor. She surveyed the smooth green expanse, her eyes darting back and forth, her body eerily still, and I recalled that night when I first noticed how far apart my parents seemed from each other.

After lunch, Father packed us off to the local bowling alley, as he did every Saturday, giving Mother her weekly “rest,” as I once overheard them call it. On the way there, the radio news detailed a hurricane's path through a chain of Caribbean islands, and I imagined uprooted palm trees swirling in the howling wind. When Father finally parked the car in the lot I looked out the window, surprised to see such a startlingly clear sky.

We all emptied out of the car and followed him into the bowling alley, where Top 40 music jangling from the lobby loudspeaker was punctuated by the silky growl of speeding balls and the clatter of falling pins. At the counter we faced the open shelves of shoes—with their forlorn laces and frayed tongues, they looked embarrassed by their familiarity with hundreds of different feet. Father checked the soles, the wear of each heel before ordering our shoes, and then, with the huge scoring sheet nestled lightly in the crook of his arm, he led us to our lane.

Head bent, he listed our names on the sheet and we huddled beside him, taking in the competing aromas of his hair tonic, his Clorets. Then we searched through those long racks of bowling balls lined up like a complement of bombs, the same kind that in cartoons would roll with a lit fuse into the lair of a hidden villain. Somewhere among them a bowling ball waited for the grip of my hand, and after much consideration I slipped my fingers into one with a blue streak circling it and approved of its round, easy weight.

As the youngest, Dan had the privilege of starting. Ignoring the finger holes, he hugged the huge ball against his chest and knelt down at the double line, carefully setting the ball on the polished surface. He aligned it with the distant pins, pushed, and the ball crept away, arriving at the center of the pins with almost no force and barely breaking through them. His next ball rolled down the same path and missed the remaining pins.

“Good try,” Father said, his voice holding back something less patient, but it wasn't enough to ease Dan's sulk.

Laurie was up next, and she swung her ball at such a sharp angle it careened dangerously close to the gutter, then curved away to the other edge of the lane. The ball just managed to clip a corner pin, sending it flying. On her second try the ball wobbled into the gutter's polished groove.

She moped back to Father, and his hand encompassed her wrist, turning it back and forth experimentally. “You have to keep this straight,” he said. Laurie regarded her hand with curiosity, as if it might speak and explain why it wouldn't obey her.

I studied the distant pins, willing my own wrist straight. I swung and released and watched the quivering pattern of the ball's blue stripe repeating until it toppled nine pins.

For me, a disappointment, but Father said nothing and looked away at a ball coursing down another lane: I was too old for advice. When I smacked the last pin for a spare, Father's reward was letting me draw the slash through the corner box of my frame. I bore down on the pencil, hoping for a long succession of thin X's for the rest of my score.

After rubbing rosin on his hands, Father picked up his ball, took a few swift steps, and with a graceful backward arc of his arm shot it down the lane. Its dark surface flashed in the light, and Father stood so still, watching the distant wooden stutter of flailing pins. A strike. He stood there until the pins were reset and then he turned back to us, his lips tightly curved. But there was no real pleasure in Father's smile. Instead I saw something fierce and not quite knowable.

As the game progressed I began to dread that hint of grimace in his grin, a mixture of suppressed anger and exasperation that appeared whether or not he bowled a strike. If Father didn't really enjoy the game, then what attraction did it hold for him? Waiting my turn, I listened to a ball purling down the next lane, purring like the sound of a well-oiled mower, and I thought all those falling pins, in lane after lane, were a particularly exotic lawn, and their explosive clatter was the harsh music of some intimate battle. If this was a battle, then Father reenlisted us with every frame, for when the pins automatically set up again, another noxious overgrowth needed to be mown down.

Now my mother wasn't the only person I saw with new eyes. In the days that followed, my father's usual remoteness—which I'd so long taken for granted—grew increasingly uncomfortable. His silence seemed everywhere in the house, surrounding even the screech of a teapot, an alarm clock's grating buzz, and I began to suspect why Mother's varied identities squeezed themselves back inside her whenever around him. My parents were locked in some mysterious adult dispute, an argument perhaps far more serious than I was willing to believe. My ability to imagine this horrified me, but the vision I'd acquired wasn't something I could turn off, like a flashlight. It was now a part of me, shining into places I'd never noticed before.

*

Mother's characters continued chatting up entire breakfasts and whole afternoons—a string of women who were their own storybooks: Stella the usher who could recount the smallest details of movie after movie; Christie the bag lady, whose past privileged childhood overwhelmed the present in sudden bursts of memory.

One morning Mother remained unusually quiet, and after cleaning up the soggy little O's of cereal Dan had spilled on the floor she sat back at the table, her thumb stroking a spoon's concave smoothness. “I ever tell you the time I got lost in a department store?” she asked, in a husky voice that proclaimed the arrival of Danielle, the optometrist who gave us free eye exams.

“Nuh-uh,” Laurie managed, mouth full.

Dan pushed away from the table, leaving his second bowl of cereal untouched. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Danielle barely noticed, and with a faraway look, as if savoring the story to come, she swept her hair back and curled it behind her ears. “I remember walking down an aisle of toys, staring at the rows of dolls while my mother browsed in the kitchen section next door. I knew she'd drag me along to the linen department pretty soon, so I pretended the beautiful dolls with their lovely smiles were asking me to stay.

“I could see my mother reaching out to touch a toaster so shiny it reflected her hand. I thought how cold it must feel, and I shivered and turned to a shelf lined with clear bags of marbles. One of them was filled with cat's eyes, and they reminded me of those dolls' eyes, you know? A bag of eyes that seemed to see something in me that I didn't know was there … have you ever felt like that?”

Laurie looked down at her toast, but I shook my head
yes
. I felt that way almost all the time now.

“So you probably know how strange I felt at that moment,” Danielle said wistfully. “Anyway, whatever that something was, it made me want to touch the marbles, see what they felt like in my hand. The bag was tied shut with a red string, and by the time I undid the knot I realized that I'd forgotten about my mother. She'd moved out of sight, and then I called to her in such a tiny voice that I realized I really didn't want her to hear me.

“Now that was a very interesting thought, one I suspected the marbles had somehow given me, and it made me want to touch them even more. But when I reached into the bag my hand slipped and the marbles rolled on the floor—so many little eyes trying to see me!

“I ran away before a saleslady could discover what I'd done, and I ran away from my mother, too—wherever she was—because I was sure she'd be angry.” When Danielle paused, I imagined those marbles spinning on our kitchen floor, the cat's eyes catching a dizzy swirl of shelves and ceiling and counter and us.

“Well,” she continued, “I ran through the furniture department and then up the escalator two steps at a time. I kept rushing down aisles on the second floor—the department store was too big. The thought suddenly hit me that my mother might never find me, and I stopped. I stood in the middle of the perfume department. There were posters of women with shaded eyelids and streaks of blush and long lashes everywhere, and they looked so serious I felt sure they knew why I was there.

“Then a saleslady behind one of the counters said, ‘Why so glum?' She looked a little like those women in the posters, and at first I almost believed she'd walked out of one of them. I started to back away, but she gave me such a friendly smile I had to stop.

“‘Not talking today?' she asked. I shook my head. If I didn't speak, then I wouldn't have to confess what I'd done.

“‘So, how about a little makeover?' she said. ‘It's a slow day, y'know.'

“I didn't know what she was talking about. ‘C'mere,' she said with a little wave, ‘I can make you look like a big girl in no time.'

“She pointed to a stool in front of the counter and I climbed up, and when she bent down we were almost the same height. Already I felt big. She brushed my cheeks and forehead with a sweet-smelling powder, and I crinkled my nose in pleasure and tried to hold in a sneeze.”

“She let me pick the color of eyeliner—the deepest, darkest blue. ‘Close your eyes,' she said. I felt a soft pencil against my eyelid, tugging a bit at my eye underneath. I thought of those marbles again and shifted in my seat, trying to imagine what my new face looked like. ‘Hold still,' the woman whispered, and worked on my other lid. Then I felt the tickle of a brush sweeping along my lashes, the pull of something over my eyebrows.”

Danielle paused to flip her hair behind her ears again, and she offered us a wan little smile. Laurie stared back, her hands clutching a napkin beside her forgotten breakfast.

“Well, then that saleslady said, ‘Now it's time to pick your lipstick.' She spoke so softly I almost didn't hear her, and just as quietly I said, ‘You pick.' My eyes were still closed, and I felt a cool stickiness rub against my lips—first the top, then the bottom, and I wished my lips were a mile long so she'd take forever. When the saleslady told me to press them together I did, two or three times. ‘Open your eyes,' she said, and there I was, just inches away in a mirror and with something like cat's eyes, so grown up I could walk right by my mother in the store and she wouldn't recognize me at all. Who am I now? I thought—”

“But your mother did find you, didn't she?” Laurie broke in.

“That's the funny thing,” Danielle said, escaping again into a dreamy look, “I can't remember …”

She had nothing more to say. I pushed away from the table, motioning to Laurie that we might be late for the bus, but she hesitated, not at all satisfied with Danielle's answer. Then I noticed Dan standing just outside the kitchen doorway, waiting for his absence to be noticed.

“C'mon, it's time to go,” I insisted. While I hurried my disappointed brother and sister out the door and down the steps, I couldn't stop imagining those spinning marbles. Were they somehow us, trying to catch a glimpse of who our mother really was, or were they the parts of Mother we'd recently discovered, casting strange and different gazes on us? I tore down the sidewalk, afraid of missing the bus, again afraid of seeing what I never dreamt I'd ever see.

Mother's characters now lodged inside me, inner voices that chattered away even during school hours, sometimes branching off into conflicting paths that confounded me.
There's no instrument panel that can't be mastered
, whispered Joanna, a test pilot, spurring me on as I struggled with algebraic equations in math class. Yet the numbers and letters blurred into smears on the lined paper when Maureen, the gossip columnist, spoke up and insisted,
Secrets? What are secrets? If I can't find out, I make it up
.