How to Read an Unwritten Language (31 page)

One of the crew turns around, the beam of light on his helmet arcing back and forth until Richard is caught in its glare, crouched beside the track. “Hey, Richie, what're you doing, taking a piss?” Joey calls out. “Watch out for the third rail!”

It's an old joke they've all heard before, but this is the first time Richard has been included. Then Pete feigns annoyance and offers the usual response, “Hey, what're you warning him for? I thought you liked barbecue.”

The men laugh easily, in almost ritual fashion, and they continue on, but slower now, so Richard can catch up. This is the moment he's been hoping for. These men like him. They know he does good work and doesn't mind the odd hours or getting dirty. He's a regular guy, someone they wouldn't mind introducing to their friends, or a lonely cousin, maybe even a sister—

A dog barks in the distance and I'm surprised to find myself sitting in the dark of my own living room. I laugh quietly. My sister would be proud of me, now that I've imagined Richard offstage. It's just the sort of scene she might have created. The dog's yelps die away down the block and I still sit here, somehow lighter, feeling as released as Richard from that shell. Why couldn't this story be true, or true enough?

This is the sort of imagining that gave Laurie so much pleasure: rewriting the script, changing the possibilities for the people in her life. For all her troubles and anger, wouldn't she too, at least sometimes, try to bestow upon them a story more bearable to follow?

I want to think this of my sister, and I want to imagine her, imagine where she might be at this moment. She's lying in bed, I think. But she's awake, too. She's listening to something … someone. It's her latest man leaving her apartment—yet another lover disappointed in ways she knows he can't articulate. She stretches lazily on the twisted sheets, savoring how she'd changed the tone of her voice, the pattern of her gestures and facial expressions slightly every few minutes, so that this man—an ambitious member of the chorus who liked the idea of sleeping with one of the leads—felt so unsettled by her subtle shifting that even when he came inside her he suspected that she somehow eluded his grasp.

And of course she has, because now he's gone. She knows that he won't flirt with her again backstage tomorrow, at least not in a way that signals real desire, and this is the way she likes it—all intimacies brief and on her own terms. She doesn't have enough room inside her for a lover's slowly escalating demands, for someone else's need for an audience.

But there will be other nights, when a woman leaves, that Laurie lies in bed and regrets the quiet exit, wishes she hadn't so artfully feinted and parried. If only she'd taken a chance with this lover and stripped off her entire cast until she was down to a one-woman performance. This sleepy regret transforms into a dream that Laurie's had many times before. She's herself, an adult, yet holding hands with Mother on the roof of our old house. She looks down and the backyard is no backyard at all but the floor of a stage, all scuff marks and taped stage directions, and now the roof where she and Mother perch, precariously balanced, is the ledge of the theater's balcony. The audience below stares up at them expectantly and Laurie can't remember her lines or even her part—she's dizzy, unsure of her footing. This is always the moment when she wakes, and she can't help but feel lost those first few moments in the dark before she finally finds herself, alone in bed.

But this is too sad, not at all what I want for Laurie. Perhaps all her bizarre playacting had only been a show for my benefit: the Uncontrollable Sister dancing at the edge of the cliff. Even if she danced with well-practiced steps, she couldn't possibly maintain such a balance day in, day out, so why not imagine my sister in repose? She's at home with her feet up on the coffee table, a bowl of chips nestled in the crook of her arm, and she's absolutely herself, Laurie to the core. She picks up a book of short stories, a nice fat anthology, and dips in, lets herself become who she reads. And when she's done there's always something serviceable on the tube. She clicks on the remote control and lets herself wander about the set of a soap or sitcom, among the other characters. She has this little vice, equivalent to a nicotine fit, that keeps her company whenever she needs it.

This is better, I think, closer to the peace that Laurie needs, and I can try again another time, can't I? Because I'm eager to take on someone else, and an image comes to me of Father and Dan, crouching before a few sickly shrubs that need quick tending. They don't need to speak, they know so much about the nursery: if they were trees their branches would have long ago entangled, each dependent on the other for sharing shade and light. They're the Zombie Twins.

But this is Laurie's name for them, and how did she ever know what went on when they were alone? She was only imagining, as I am now, watching Father and Dan stand in the doorway, returning home after a hard day of pulling weeds and stacking sod, planning the orders for next season and forcing out smiles at short-tempered customers. The key's in the lock, and they enter.

They slap together their usual workmanlike dinner, and Father watches his son carefully. After an especially trying day, Dan sometimes slams a cabinet door shut, or grasps a steaming cup of coffee too roughly and splashes his drink on the tablecloth. Once, without any warning, Dan smashed his fist through a wall and Father had to drive him to the emergency room, calming him while they waited for the nurse to finally take down their names.

So when Dan curses at his steak knife when it doesn't slip smoothly through a thick lamb chop, Father waits until after dinner before saying offhandedly, “It's a nice night for a walk.”

Without another word, they leave the house and its shining porch light and set off on a long walk through one neighborhood after another, commenting on a patchy lawn or an unruly hedge along the way. Then they stop: a home with three days' worth of newspapers sprawled across the front stoop looks promising, though down the block is the shell of a house that's under construction, its wiring and plumbing unprotected for the night.

Dan chooses the half-built house and, filled with nostalgia for his old days of wreaking havoc on our block, he slips along the side of the construction site. Father lingers behind and leans against a streetlamp, his son's lookout.

I'm stunned as I imagine this, but I'm convinced that it could be true, that Father needs Dan so much he's willing to take part in such escapades. He has, after all, worked his way down to one lone family member, and perhaps this is all the intimacy he can manage. As he glances up and down the block, does Father admit to himself that he condones his son's spurts of rage because, except for toppling one frail triangle of bowling pins after another, he'd never, never give himself permission to do this on his own?

Dan eventually returns, grinning and empty-handed, though he's become a collector all the same—a collector of all the little vandalisms that Father helps him with. As they walk back home, Dan tells Father a story about a man who wanders in a dark, unfinished home, searching for something that might easily snap off, or loosen with enough tugging. He's become a storyteller too, and understanding that Father doesn't want to hear what really happened, Dan embellishes these forays into spy missions and narrow escapes.

And if you were sitting on a porch one of these nights, you might hear the full, appreciative laughter of an older man. When he'd finally come into view you'd see him walking side by side with a younger man clearly his son—the same short curly hair, the barrel chests—and you'd have to smile to yourself at this brief glimpse of a happy family.

I hear a car pass by outside—someone as restless as I am, perhaps a man returning from a long trip, so anxious to arrive home that he's driven through the night rather than stop at a motel. Now just a few blocks from his driveway, he's no longer tired. I wish him well as his car's engine fades in the distance, and I close my eyes and prepare to face the hardest ones of all for me to imagine: Kate, and my mother.

I begin with Kate, elusive Kate, and remember how, in our last days, she couldn't stop washing: taking two, even three showers a day, scrubbing her hands more times than I could count, rubbing lotion into her face and spraying herself with perfume. My poor, hunted wife must have been trying to lose her scent, to give me the slip in a cloud of artificial smells.

I imagine her now lying in a tub, hair tucked up at the back of her head like a pillow, the steaming water up to her collarbone. Her body shimmers under the water, it barely seems to belong to her, especially when she shakes her shoulders and sets off riplets and waves. She's floating above herself, listening to the subtle sounds of the house around her: the distant chug of the dishwasher in the kitchen; a soft sweep of the wind outside and a branch scraping gently at a screen window; the footsteps of someone walking down the hall outside the bathroom—who? A man, I think, a new husband who gratefully accepts her quiet ways and seeks the same harbor she does. He doesn't enter the study while she's drawing, and she knows he won't check on her in the bath as she's happily hovering above her new life.

Then she opens the drain and listens to the suck of escaping water, she stands and feels the soapy droplets on her skin already evaporating and tickling, and she giggles. Her husband's footsteps stop briefly, then continue—he's heard her laughter, and her happiness is enough for him, he doesn't need to know its source to be pleased himself.

She looks in the misted mirror and doesn't rub her hand over the steam; instead, she watches as she gently, slowly reappears to herself, a familiar face that not long ago had seemed frighteningly unfamiliar and lined with a premonition that something terrible was about to happen. She'd been right, she'd been wrong, for now she regards her divorce almost fondly, as a stepping-stone to this present contentment.

Kate breathes in the humid air. There's just a faint film hugging one corner of the mirror, and she turns a shoulder, a hip, modeling what she can see of her naked body. She's safe, her face settled into a calm I've never seen, and even though I feel on the verge of discovering one of Kate's secrets, I open my eyes and let her go, freeing her from any further, unwanted probing.

I blink, my eyes now so accustomed to the dark that the furniture in the living room has taken on dim outlines, familiar patient shapes that wait as my mother waits for me to imagine her. She must be amused by the daunting task I face.

She's dead, of course, yet I'm certain that she's ideally suited to the afterlife: every character she's ever assumed—however briefly—is mirrored within her transparent shape, a protean pulse shifting into whatever she wishes, braiding an infinity of improvisations that all began with a bit of a story over breakfast so long ago, a little butterfly wing of trouble, a dangerous flutter that couldn't stop once it started.

Who can ever say why a small flutter set off such a storm? But she needs no family now, for we're all within her, Dan and Laurie, Father, myself: fellow cast members and eternal audience. From time to time she tries on our intimate strangeness, seeking out the origin of every expression she can remember from our faces, even becoming all of us at once, for she is a virtuoso, she is version after version of all she's left behind, and she settles into our sadness and fear of her and then goes further, finding in us that time of contentment before she split into pieces.

The complex tussle of voices within my mother has become both a single voice and a marvelous harmony that echoes throughout the afterlife, a startling music in that unimaginable other world where we'll someday join her, twisting ourselves into competing possibilities of who we were and are and might be. But such a future is far off. Until then, I can always imagine another ending if I need to, something happy, or bittersweet, or whatever I wish.

For the moment I'll keep these acrobatics at bay. I need to return to Sylvia and I climb the stairs to the bedroom. Though I want to wake her and tell her all these stories, I let my wife sleep and lay my head beside her on the pillow. Sylvia stirs and I shift under the covers, attuned to the subtle movements of her sleep, and this gentle brushing of limbs is a slow dance I hope we'll always continue—two ecstatic wings, stirring our own turbulence, creating new stories together.

Then, suddenly, it's morning, the early light strangely soothing. I turn to see that Sylvia's awake too, her dark hair tangled about her forehead as she takes in my still sleepy face. Before I can speak she closes her eyes, a faint, mysterious twist to her lips. I imagine that bits of dream still drift within her reach, I imagine she manages to recall a scene of us matching each other's stride from a storm she hadn't predicted. She can feel the dread rising inside her as the downpour washes over us, lightning and echoing thunder on all sides. It passes as quickly as it came. The puddles hold our wavery reflections, and as we run we splash them into smaller puddles. Yet couldn't each tiny pool contain our shimmering together, our steps locked in rhythm as we hurry home?

Sylvia's body stirs, she stifles a yawn. Soon it will be time for me to speak, and I'll whisper, “Listen” in her ear. She'll open her eyes and see mine filled with words she's waited for, a story she can't predict. She'll shiver, whether in fear or relief I'm not certain, and when her hand searches under the blanket for mine, I still won't know what I'm about to say.

About the Author

Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collections 
The Art of the Knock
 and 
Interior Design
; a novel, 
How to Read an Unwritten Language
; and
The Moon, Come to Earth
, an expanded version of his series of
McSweeney's
dispatches from Lisbon. He is also the co-author (with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb) of two memoirs of Africa, 
Parallel Worlds
 (winner of the Victor Turner Prize), and
Braided Worlds
. His work has been reprinted in Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, and Portugal.