Sign Languages (3 page)

There was Madelaine Woo at the office. Such power in the moon face. Like some brown full platter. All cheeks and such hair. Brilliant and coarse as the pony's.

She left the mirror and now she lay still in her warming bedroom. It is almost dark, she said to herself, and looked outside at the sugar-fine snow on branches.

She would not read anything on her bedside table; she didn't turn to the magazines or poems from newspapers her mother clipped and mailed. They were alike, so why think about her now? There's her picture, too, beyond my bare but hosed feet. Nice toes, he'd said. On a bus trip once, his fingers beginning there. You two are like twins, people said. And they were. Olive. Browns in eyes and hair. Once they'd changed roles at home for a whole weekend. Like that movie
Freaky Friday
, except there were no misadventures. She liked that word from one of her magazines. For her there never were. She knew she was only a bit too tall at five eleven. And a half, okay? A half. Not at all fat. Not thin, though. Not the anorexia of those hideous models.

We are just right, aren't we, she told the photographs as she flexed her toes.

And she turned on the bed when Ms. Bojangles leapt to the window ledge, meowed through the double glass. “Not now,” she said. I'm going to rest. And yet once turned on her side away from the darkening day, she smiled. Comfortable in her clothes, the skin perfect now from mare's butter and summer savory. Smiled because we're alike, Ms. Bojangles and me here in my warming room. Not curious, that's all silliness. But active, energetic. But now after work, she decided not to drive this Friday night to exercise, and not to feed the cat now or herself, though on the edge of sleep that flowed like an exotic liquor Todd offered or like semen or some full-page ad all colors and promise, she remembered her duties and answered them like she always had—who had taught her that?—with miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. Then, his house is in the village though.

Now there was a knock far away and she turned on her back and tried to listen for her own snore. That's what he'd joked. Like a bunkhouse. And she'd remembered movies. Old and distasteful men. Her grandparents dead long ago in a car wreck. She'd never seen them in photographs; oh, perhaps. But they were in their twenties and wearing fantastic clothes.

At the side door she said “Yes?” to the head made level with her waist by the three cement steps down to the carport. She pulled the thick robe around her, felt the chill on her ankles and up her calves.

“Hello, Nancy. Sorry…,” he said, and as he turned his face up into the light weakened by the filter of the screen door, she saw it was his unfamiliar face. The skin rough, raw on his left cheek, the one now turned north. The dark spots heightened by the cold. They looked at his hand on the doorknob. His other one at his collar, closing the material over white hairs like the snow-dusted grass near his feet. A large crumpled shopping bag sat on the bottom step.

“Sorry to bother you. I've left something in the shed. It's okay, I have a key.” He dug in his pocket and lifted it. Shook it as if they were both deaf. Or children. Though she, nodding, saw he wasn't. Go away, she thought. And nodded vigorously, the updraft all over her now and robbing her of a lot of work on knees and buttocks.

Someday she would buy her own house, she thinks, and closes him out. I am a realtor after all. They turn back-to-back and she won't bother to watch him walk down the hill to the shed. Because she doesn't now consider him at all. Mr. Warrant. Her landlord; this house's owner. And later, eating something ultralight and microwaved though she always agrees, one, she doesn't have to watch her weight and, two, they really don't do food justice, she despises him and this rented house. Todd says live in the country. There he has a house and two ferocious fighting cocks. Why not uptown? Madelaine Woo asks. Forget a car and parking hassles. But this was truly one of the best deals in the city. And though it was a small house, the location wasn't so bad. She had moved here four years ago from college and only occasionally considered moving.

Later, the TV off, all the house gone from toasty to chilly, the red eye of the electric blanket reflected off mother's faces, father's face, everyone at the office in exotic costumes as bears and pigs all in great fun. The day someone said you can get your pussy tightened on group insurance and they'd laughed though she'd wondered if it were all a joke. She awoke and considered Mr. Warrant. And got up and out of bed and walked past the snoring Ms. Bojangles.

Wrapped in bathrobe and leg warmers and mittens, she hurried across the frozen yard and fumbled the shed door unlocked. She had never been curious. In school she was polite and attentive and knew, though such things weren't important really, she only loved activities that brought her to the attention of people—a few, a hundred at pep rallies. I was always beautiful, she knew, taking the flashlight from her robe pocket. And that was only eight years ago, less than eight really. Her fuller hips and breasts filled the robe now as she didn't wonder, wasn't curious about her curiosity about Mr. Warrant. Though there in bed in the chill far warmer than this dark shed, she remembered that he hadn't lived here in years and years. Before she had rented there had been the Squires, then someone else. He'd told her once—and now she surprised herself by recalling it—how he only had this and one other rental house. What had he done for a living? she thought, hurrying the beam over her scant holdings—yard tools she had bought once and now let the black boy use in the spring and summer. But what would he have left and now needed? She stepped gingerly over rakes and cakes of mud, the smell all frigid oil and metal. Old, she thought, disgusted with greasy red shop towels and the yellowed refuse of newspapers someone had used for moving plates and vases. Maybe me, she thought. On a shelf at the back, the wind on her face through a knothole worrying her—she felt it on her drying lips; she envisioned spreading cracks, the deep furrows at too early an age—there was a box opened and empty. The gray duct tape having taken off layers of cardboard with it.

In the bathroom later, she looked at her face and decided on an emollient. And in bed she was as sure as she could be, having paid little attention to all that “out there,” as she referred to it when the cute little black boy showed up biweekly, the box was his and had once been sealed tightly. She felt very tired. I've taxed my brain tonight, she said. She wished for someone. She moved in bed feeling, seeing, their two bodies all muscle and motion. His tanned skin on hers. The long shiny tube slowly inside. All oil and cream, sex the smell of spermicide, redolent of hospital corridors.

A week later there had been more snow and it had fallen wet and thick. Then there was a northern blast. From the top of the world, they'd said on TV. She liked that phrase. And there was a new man at the office. He was young and lonely. His hair lay on his neck in gorgeous tight curls. She talked to him and so did the others. Madelaine Woo almost swallowed him whole once at lunch.

But now with the thought of him, his body all beribboned in her mind, she took the River Road ramp and the Mill City Road instead of going her usual way from near the stadium to the office. “Nancy…?” she said out loud and turned off the Cocteau Twins, the sound of it tiresome to her for the first time. She'd have to move on to another group.

Surely he's home, she said as she used her knowledge of the city, though there were never houses they handled over here past the cement plants. And, of course, heavy industries weren't their concern at all. As she glided past chained gates, she wondered how one sold those monsters. Old, blackened, rambling. No good lines, nothing clear and distinct. She imagined all the equipment inside and came away with only the vaguest outlines. Towering, greasy. She thought of the shed the other night and said the address where she mailed the rent checks. No ring to it. 718 Gilchrist Road. Mr. William Warrant. William. Bill. Billy. And she laughed and slowed to cross some train tracks.

There was nowhere to start really. He stood at the door, she, below, on the walk. She knew what he saw, his eyes all over her, his voice worried, disturbed. “Is there anything wrong at the house?” he asked. “No, nothing.” And may I come in and yes, of course.

She had little time to focus; they walked through darkened rooms: furniture heavy, covered with chenille bedspreads, their tiny tassels and balls touching a monochrome, thick shag. Oh Jesus, she considered trying to sell all this. Saw it as a buyer she had ushered inside would, though in that case, she would have known everything already. She always did her homework, that's what they all said.

His eyes were a milky blue. From disease? she wondered, pausing before putting the cup of strong coffee to her lips. This afternoon the liver spots against the pale skin like ink on parchment.

“What was in the box?” she asked. You are so honestly straightforward, they'd always said. Yes, that's me, she answered. She saw herself, felt her neck arch. Looked down her nose so theatrically, they laughed.

He poured more coffee. From somewhere in cabinets he handed down a package of cake donuts all powdery like cocaine. That she avoided. And now these offerings all dry and, she knew, long past the freshness date she attempted to locate.

“Why?” he asked. She shrugged. And he took it up all naturally. There were no looks, tones in his voice. No reluctance. No fear of the unknown. These she had painstakingly learned to recognize in buyers. Clients. People she served. My, you are good at this, the middle-aged men would say. And she knew that without these wives they would have said so young and attractive.

But not this old. Face sunk. Hands rough. He had been a foreman in one of those mills, she remembered, proud of her memory.

He told her about his wife. And how last week, “out of the blue,” he said, he'd remembered the collection of mugs. See, look, and rising slowly, he brought them down from somewhere in the vast cabinets made of pressed wood. She saw their weak magnet locks. They clicked shut, the sound of Ms. Bojangles's claws on linoleum. And before her he spread out an array of heavy graceless mugs from all fifty states. Where we traveled together, you know. Oh, not all fifty, of course. We cheated a little. His laugh raspy and short. “I'd forgotten them, left them.” And she'd loved them, too. And Nancy turned her listening away from the tone his voice took. It was outside her recognition. She nodded; she thought of them both living in this house. But she shook it out. A person simply can't picture most things. I'm all energy and light, she knew. No one ever said full of imagination. What good would that be? she asked herself. Know your strengths, everyone'd said.

But she listened some and drank too much bad coffee. Folger's, already ground. She tried thinking of it as espresso. Now that helped, made it better.

She had died ten years ago. Almost to the day last week. January 17. A Thursday. Almost to the day. “Ain't it something, Nancy?” He spoke her name and she was startled from her half reverie. Yes, you thought of the cups then. Lovely, she said, and touched the one from Texas, an oil derrick spouting oil.

From some deep back room he brought the picture of her at fifty. And there she was in her soft hands. Old, turning plump. The cheeks heavily powdered. The hair cropped close to her head. She remembered an awful, masculine picture of Gertrude Stein in some college textbook. All face and dikey. Women filling women's pussies.

But he talked on; she listened. She concentrated some. She focused herself. She decided, for some reason she wasn't at all curious about, to pay attention. And he told this and that. Someone dead in Korea. Illness. Travel. His wife did this, he said that.

All until it was dark early. You know how darkness comes on in January in the northeast. And she was too quickly ready to leave. Or not quick enough. Perhaps he was tired out, at the end, considering why all this had happened. Felt violated or foolish. She almost fled; he almost pushed her out and down the steps. They were terribly embarrassed. Full of civility and politeness of words and gestures. Agreed on the lateness, the cold, the need to drive carefully and quickly past the barren mills.

“Well, well,” she said. You are quite a surprising girl. Ms. Bojangles would be speechless. She'd tell Madelaine Woo. No, she'd tell the new man at lunch in the art gallery cafeteria on Friday before the De Chirico exhibit and, she hoped, just hours before she tied lovely ribbons around his penis.

But you know that's not what happened at all. And no one in the world would have guessed it. Except her father, the only person who intuited things about her, who had skimmed along just above the jungle canopy with the smell of electrical fire in his nostrils, his face averted from flashing lights, the lightness of descent lessened only by the dead man behind him. At that moment, before the sea-green trees proved unlike waves, as hard as jade, he remembered her eight-year-old back ramrod straight at the piano stool, angry but unrelenting, demanding the keys obey her. And only he knew about her, understood everything that would take place without him. It'll end bad, he said to himself. But at that moment in October of 1969, it is impossible to know his exact reference.

So in two days she was back at Mr. Warrant's. It was Monday afternoon; there had been more snow, a deeper, bone-level cold. She knocked, using her left hand, the other arm full of groceries. As she shopped she had said, he'll like this and maybe this. And soon she'd collected eighty dollars' worth of exotics: pickled quails' eggs, a rare Tuscan cheese, the greenest, most expensive olive oil in the city.

But there was little surprise on Mr. Warrant's face. He led her to the kitchen. She chatted about the terrible weather. He told about his bad knee. “Here, right here,” he said, and raised his pants leg. Without reservations. His shin discolored and hairless. As shiny as if he'd hot-waxed it. She looked away. Instead she cut onions into the olive oil, the expensive oil perfuming this room where they stood together. Until he sat and bent over a stack of crossword puzzle books.