Secret Language (25 page)

On the first day, they had concocted a bathroom routine that would cause the least embarrassment. Connie decided that once she was sitting she could, with effort, tend to herself and with her elbow reach the flush handle behind her. Faith would then return, lift her sister, pull up her underwear and help her stand—as she does now, squaring Connie under the arms as if they were about to have a dance. After a lifetime of not touching, there is suddenly nothing that doesn’t require the laying on of hands. Faith knows the knobby wings of Connie’s shoulder blades, the tender flesh of her upper arms, the pickets of her ribs, and the hard pucks of vertebrae stacked the length of her back. She knows the disappearing bruises on her face, the dwindling weight, the dry nails, the tiny slits in her earlobes that used to hold small, shiny earrings.

“Would you like me to wash your hair?”

Relief spreads over Connie’s face, a buttery glow. “Nancy offered, but I’m so sick of strangers with their hands all over me.”

Faith sizes up the tub, the sink. “We’ll figure this out.” She helps Connie sit on the floor at the side of the tub. Between Connie’s neck and the rim of the tub Faith places a folded towel. “That’s how they do it at the hairdresser’s.” She fishes a basin out from under the sink and fills it with warm water. “Tilt your head back,” she says, then pours the water over Connie’s hair, baptism-style, starting at the forehead.

“Ahh,” Connie says.

As Faith’s hands work around the hard ridges of her sister’s scalp, she is visited by a dim remembrance, not of a time or place, but a
motion
, as if she had washed her sister’s hair a thousand times. Perhaps it’s the memory of her own hair, her own head, so like Connie’s in texture and shape.

Faith sits back on her haunches, toweling Connie’s wet head. “It feels good,” Connie says. “Thanks.” She pauses. “If I were in Paris my next stop would be the
bidet
.”

Faith pauses. “I could give you a bath.” Connie looks at the tub, her foot, her arms. “We can do it,” Faith says.

They do. Faith helps Connie off with her clothes and sits her on the edge of the tub. After removing her own shoes and socks and rolling up her slacks, she steps into the water herself, locks her elbows under Connie’s armpits, and slides her carefully backwards until Connie is sitting crossways in the tub, her feet dangling over the side, her back against the tiled wall, her arms uplifted, safe from the water. “Oh,” Connie says. “Thank you. You can’t imagine how good this feels.”

Faith soaps a washcloth and begins to wash her sister, careful to avoid the casts. She washes her face, her neck, her back, gently, for there are tender spots, still, all over. She works her way down, looking discreetly away.

They say nothing to each other, do not look at each other, yet Faith’s hands are sure, they do what they must, they are taking care in a way that seems to have nothing to do with her. Her fingers tingle with lost sensations: the soap-slicked surface of Delle’s thrashing body; the peachy wet contours of her baby boys’ scalps; the magnificent ridges of her new husband’s back, hot soap bubbling between her hands and his skin. She has not felt or remembered these things since they happened, and recalls them now only as a curious drumming in her fingertips. Her hands drift easily over the bony contours of her sister’s body, as if she had repeated these motions every day of her life, as if they were embedded deep in her muscle memory, as if she had an intimate acquaintance with the tender machinations of care.

The cards came first by the bunch, then by the handful, and now two days have gone by without a word from anyone but Stewart. She lies in bed, sits up, looks out the window, listens to the radio, but there is no escaping. She’s stuck with her own company. Sometimes she presses her casts to her ears, hoping to hear the bones curing.

Because she can’t bear to remember the crash or the people in it, because she can’t bear the idea of moving ever again through a cabin full of unsuspecting faces, her thoughts careen far back, before her flying days. When Faith stops in to check on her, feed her, help her into the bathroom, Faith could be seven, or nine, or fourteen, the two of them fending for themselves again, defining a weird, wordless domesticity in the midst of chaos.

They are circling, circling, holding. It is all they have ever done.

When the present does show itself, it is defined by the walls of Faith’s house, Faith’s life. Connie watches her from the window, planted like a snowman in her yard, flanked by burlap-covered shrubs and flower beds, offering seeds to her restive birds. Where does it come from, this careful tending, this affection for the natural world?

Faith’s care is something she did not expect, and yet every detail of it, every slip and hollow of its generous landscape, is familiar as a face. Faith’s cool fingers, as she smoothes down the lotion Connie has crudely dolloped onto her own face, are fingers Connie knows. Her dainty tugs, as she coddles the clothing on and off Connie’s body, feel practiced and reassuring. And though Connie sometimes
yearns to tear herself from her own body, to beat down the front door of her own apartment to be sure it is still there, when she’s being ministered to by Faith there is no place else, no other time or inclination, there is simply a tending that she submits to.

But the other times. Alone with Nancy and the dog in the doldrums of a winter day, unwilling to ask for anything, give anything. She has thought of firing Nancy, of taking her chances waiting alone with the dog for the house to fill up, first with Ben home from school, then Faith home from work, then, later, Joe, with the wheel-less Chris in tow from basketball practice; but she needs something besides her own confinement to arm herself against, and so she arms herself against Nancy, secretly enjoying the collusion this rebellion fosters between her and Faith.

Faith’s care of her is larger than she expected. Joe’s family marches in and out, by ones and twos, in predictable shifts throughout the week for short check-ins, like a platoon on maneuvers. Joe Senior, shy and rattled, has come once. Phoebe comes every day. She brings nail polish, magazines, sympathy. Connie remembers her amazement at the first glimpse of Joe’s family, at a Sunday dinner so long ago. Their health and benevolence had been curiously forbidding then, but now, in her diminished state, she welcomes them. Joe’s brothers, with their heavy shoulders and dark voices, arrive at the door of her room behind their wives, and Connie tells them she’s better, and she is, for seeing them there, for these brief appearances that seem designed to show her simply that they exist.

Under the surface of all this care, two things fester.

One, Isadora has not called. Connie slides a little lower into the covers, listening to the quiet house, hoping that the phone will ring and it will be Isadora, out of breath and full of news. Faith placed a call to San Francisco on Connie’s first day here, and Isadora had chattered about the show, the show, the show, a sprightly monologue. Since then, Connie has envisioned her baby sister singing in some rehearsal hall by day, riding the trolley with her leading man by night, telling him about her big sister, the one who survived a plane crash, the one who scared her half to death—to death!—by steeping herself in a twelve-day coma. But Isadora has not called.

Two, she wants a drink. Her insides feel scratched and burned.
At first she blamed this feeling on the crash, on thoughts of the crash, but in truth she remembers none of it. She remembers this feeling, though, and the swampiness inside her head, from the other times she stopped drinking just to make sure she could.

Because she wants a drink so badly, because she has so much time on her hands to consider
how
badly, she has thought of sending Ben—her newest friend—in a search through Faith’s cupboards. This scheme, which she has very nearly carried out, shames her.

“Do you need anything?” Nancy asks, appearing at the door. Connie feels like the prized spectator in a box seat, watching a play in the hall, the same characters appearing and reappearing. Nancy is straight and starched as always, in the same costume right down to the white running shoes.

“No, thank you.” Actually Connie wants urgently to pee, but the thought of Nancy’s skeletal fingers peeling down the lace hem of her panties gives her a shudder. She’ll wait for Faith. She’ll hold out. She’ll almost enjoy her discomfort, her stubbornness, for it will give her something to dwell on, a way to measure the rest of the afternoon. It’s better than dwelling on her shriveling life.

She thinks of herself now as a thin pink shell. Her years of motion—the swirl of plane trips and colleagues and passers-by and lovers and, more lately, the brand-new sister—seem nothing more than a storm which had happened around her while her only true existence had lain the whole time in its motionless eye. Without the accouterments of her profession, her life came down to long talks with Stewart and twice-monthly dinners with Faith.

During her last days in the hospital, she’d had too much time to think. She knows now why they call it a “battery” of tests, for she had indeed felt battered. And the news was good. “I’m happy to report you’ve come through this as a reasonable facsimile of yourself,” the doctor joked. She remembers the effort of smiling. “I was hoping I’d come through as a reasonable facsimile of someone else.” She was only flirting a little, but now she wonders if the weakened speak the truth.

“I don’t know why you’re paying me,” Nancy sighs. “You could train your sister’s dog to pull your bedspread down.” She glares accusingly
at Sammy, who slumbers near the doorway, then she turns, exiting into the wings of the house.

Ben is home, late. Connie knows it even before the dog does, a certain shifting in the timbers of the house. She has lain so long in its shelter she could be part of it, a floorboard or stair tread, and knows its inhabitants the way the house must—their footfalls and handprints, how the door opens, hard or soft.

The dog lifts his head, rises from his late-afternoon torpor, and trots out. She hears his nails scrabbling on the stairs, the door opening (hard), the cheerful punctuations of Ben’s voice.

He comes to her with a stack of coffee-table books, huge, colorful, one-subject tomes: wildflowers, birds, houses, and, inexplicably, a book on the first computers. “I got these from school,” he tells her. A flame of self-consciousness rises red on his cheeks. “I wasn’t sure about the birds.” He opens one on her lap. “See? It won’t fold up on you like those other books.”

She laughs. “Ben, you’re a genius.” She looks at the books, at his own awkward tending, and puzzles over what he had assumed would interest her. He’s over an hour later than usual; he must have taken a long time deciding. She taps her casts together and lifts a page with the tips of her fingers, gingerly turning over the leaf. “It works.”

He runs his hand over his forehead the way his father does. She looks at the turned page, a photograph and description of a black-poll warbler. These are books he would have gotten for his mother. “Thanks, Ben.”

He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I can’t stay with you, Aunt Connie, I’ve got to get over to Rick’s house.” He thrusts his hands into his pockets and looks at her. “We’re starting a band.”

Connie grins. “Well, well. Another Spaulding in show biz.”

“Don’t tell Mom, okay?”

“I won’t.”

Thus confided in, she watches him go, then elbows the oversized, inappropriate book to one side and hobbles herself out of bed. She hops to the window, propped by her hip against the wall, to watch him trundle down the street with his guitar case swinging from one
hand; the dog, tail similarly swaying, wends after him. Already the afternoon is waning, its wintry light low and gleamy on the drifts.

Back in bed she wrestles the book into her lap and, page by page, looks at the birds. She tries to see what Faith sees: their furlike feathers, perhaps, or their stripes and colors. She forgets her confinement, her stripped life, and concentrates on this gift from her nephew, liking it for his sake. She forgets that Nancy is in the house, forgets to count how long before Faith comes, forgets her full bladder. Her nephew’s silly secret has left a sweet stain, and she regrets every moment of his life she so purposefully missed.

She took the boys for an afternoon once, an outing she’d offered in a fit of longing. The boys were just children then, and the sight of them together—dark and light, big and small—had filled her with the most inexplicable yearning. Joe had seized upon her offer, Joe the family man, the man of many relatives, and had foisted them on her that very day. She took them back to her apartment and recognized all at once her foolishness. She didn’t know the first thing about children, for she herself had never been a child.

They rescued her, after a fashion. After an awkward hour in which the boys sauntered around the apartment, investigating her things, Chris engineered a complicated game of cops and robbers, thrusting Connie into the role of a helpless maiden who’d been tangled somehow in a bank robbery. She was never clear on whether she was a cop or a robber, but she dutifully repeated the lines the boys granted her as they walked her through this game with the plodding patience of caretakers with the afflicted. First you do this, Aunt Connie; then you do that. She hid behind her sofa as instructed; when they pretended to rescue or arrest her—she couldn’t tell which—she squeaked
oh, oh
in a woeful monotone, catching the tolerant pity in her nephews’ faces. The afternoon was a deep embarrassment, for it was she who played the child, the children playing wizened elders with all the answers.

Ben’s small confidence has somehow restored her from that day.

By the time Faith comes home, helps her into the bathroom, brings a snack on a plate, Connie is restless again.

“Has Isadora called?” she asks.

The question makes Faith look tired. Her hair is gathered into a
clip at the back of her neck, leaving her face vulnerable to its expressions. She sits on the edge of the bed. As she reaches to cut an apple into pieces, her sleeve rides up on her arm, revealing a small wrist with a sharp button of a wristbone. Connie wonders if to other people she and Faith look frail: though they are tall, like Isadora they are slender and small-boned.