How to Read an Unwritten Language (6 page)

“I suppose you were on the roof too, young man?” Mother replied airily, her triumph nearly at hand.

“No. But you lie all the time. You pretend you're not our mom.”

“What is the matter with you kids?” Mother said, standing, her back to the refrigerator.

Now Father stood and pinned us with a stern gaze. “It's time to apologize to your mother.”

Refusing to back down, Dan shook his head. “We won't. She tells lies all the time. Every day.”

“This little game you're playing isn't funny,” Mother said, striding toward him, her finger poking in the air. “Not one little bit!”

Dan didn't blink. “We don't want those other people, Mom.”

“We want you,” I added. “We want you back.”

“We do, we do,” Laurie croaked out, her voice raw from stifling sobs.

“I won't allow this!” Mother cried, fists raised and shaking. “I won't allow this!”

Father reached out and held her wrists. “Gladys,” he said in a surprisingly tiny voice, “what's going on?”

*

Dinner abandoned, our parents locked themselves in their bedroom, where they spoke in angry whispers, indecipherable even with my ear to the door. Dan and Laurie sat hunched before the television like defendants waiting for a jury to announce its deliberations, and I joined them. We stared with little pleasure at one show after another: comedy then car chases then comedy. When the news anchors casually offered us the world's latest disasters, Dan and Laurie lay on the rug, their eyes barely open. I turned off the TV. Harsh whispers still drifted from our parents' door—who could tell when they'd be done? I gently shook my sister and brother and led them up the stairs.

The next morning we found Father alone in the kitchen, preparing a breakfast of runny scrambled eggs, and toast with only the edges burnt. We ate without complaint, feeling guilty over our well-kept secrets, and we waited for him to ask us just what had been happening these past few months. Instead he stood by the sink, hot water pouring over last night's dirty dishes, and he stared at us as if our school portraits on the wall had suddenly come to life, as if there was far more to us than our minor daily disputes, our culinary prejudices, our unpredictable nighttime fears.

Father left the kitchen and returned to more hours with Mother in their room, so long that Laurie had time to break into Mother's makeup kit in the bathroom and smear her lips an awkward, off-centered red that I made her wash off. Then Dan began to fret. “It's our bowling day, when are we—”

“Oh, be quiet,” I said.

Perhaps Father heard us, for he appeared minutes later, strangely cheery. “Anybody ready for bowling?” he asked, adding, “And guess what? Your mother's coming too.”

At first we were silent. I couldn't imagine Mother would enjoy the bowling alley with its toppling pins and unruly din, but how could I explain this to my father?

“Does she really want to come?” I ventured.

He hesitated. “Of course she does,” he replied, trying to convince himself and us.

“Dad, I don't think—”

“Look, we could all do with a little healthy athletic activity,” he said, his voice defying contradiction. “Off you go to the car—we'll be right with you.”

We sat in the backseat for several long minutes, and when our parents finally appeared they walked down the front steps together with an offhand ease, Mother nodding agreeably to something Father whispered in her ear. She settled in the front seat and turned to gaze at us with affectionate indulgence, much like our old, familiar Mother. But as I stared out the window at the storefronts melting together as we sped by, I suspected the woman sitting in the front seat might be artfully impersonating our mother.

When we pushed open the bowling alley's glass doors, Mother winced at the clatter of pins. She entered bravely into the air-conditioned air, following after us to the main desk, where Father went through his ritual inspection of the bowling shoes. Mother held her pair up with two fingers, swinging them in unison. “What strange creatures,” she said, feigning astonishment. Then more pins smashed behind us and she closed her eyes.

We claimed our lane, laced up our shoes, and Mother accompanied us to the racks of bowling balls. Running her hand along the rows, now and then she'd turn a ball so that its three finger holes faced out, and she'd peer at the dark round eyes, the open mouth.

Mother returned to our lane empty-handed. “Nothing to your liking?” Father asked. “Want to borrow mine?”

“No thanks. I think I'll pass on the first game and contemplate my fashionable feet,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Oh, I'm just a little tired,” she replied, her smile set cheerily. “I'd better rest up for the second game.”

Mother didn't rest at all. She paced back and forth and back again as we took our turns, her face stiffening at the clash of pins. Father never looked back at her, determined not to condone her unsportsmanlike behavior, but Laurie's lips trembled at Mother's brittle mask, and I couldn't stop gnawing my fingernails.

Mother paused only once, after I'd clinched a spare. She stared at a last, lone pin that spun swiftly on its side; then she turned away as it was scooped up by the reset mechanism. Surely by now she understood that this entire game was target practice against what refused to stay down.

I decided I simply couldn't add to her misery: on my next turn I sped the ball at a sharp angle, directly into the gutter. Father restrained himself from offering advice, even when I repeated my mistake. But I offered Laurie a knowing glance and she caught on to my scheme and followed along. Then Dan joined in, simply for the love of mischief. Gutter ball after gutter ball confounded Father while Mother's face seemed to soften, and once again we were in her thrall.

“What's going on here?” he declared. “Wipe your hands before you bowl—what's on those fingers? Don't I always say absolutely no potato chips during the game? Where are you hiding them?”

“Sorry, Dad,” I sighed, feigning despair. “It's just—bad luck, I guess.”

We continued ignoring his complaints. Father threw three stunning strikes in a row as a rebuke to our miserable performance, yet still he seethed.

When Dan stopped at the line as he always did, preparing to push the ball, he so overtly aimed it toward the gutter that Father sputtered. The bowling ball slipped from Dan's hands and it crept down the lane, aiming straight for the pins.

“No!” Mother rushed past us, down the lane after the ball.

“Gladys, back here—get back!” Father called after her.

She caught up to the ball, her hands framing its curve. Kneeling, she cradled the ball in her lap and I knew what she saw: the deep-pitted eyes of its face, its silent, howling mouth.

The pins in the next lane erupted and Mother clutched at her head, the same way she'd held the bowling ball.

A few balls continued speeding down the lanes, their distant clatter echoing. Then the entire bowling alley was quiet, except for the churning hum of fallen pins being reset.

“Stop,” she said, her arms now stiff and palms up as if she were directing traffic. “It's … very important … that everyone …
stop.”

Laurie began to whimper, and Father called out wearily, “Gladys, that's enough.” She stared back at us without recognition—whatever she was about to do, we'd only be minor obstructions.

Three lanes down, a fat man laughed and shook his head in bemusement before reaching for his bowling ball. He lifted it before him and eyed the distant pins.

“No, you mustn't!” Mother cried.

The man shook his head again, took a few lumbering steps and released the ball. At the crash of flying pins Mother shook, as if her hidden selves shuddered within. Father ran down the lane, nearly slipping on its polished surface before he reached Mother. Her face immobile, and she offered no resistance as he led her away.

Somehow we managed to make our way through the confusion of a gathering crowd to the main desk. We returned our bowling shoes, filled with shame and misery, and the register rang and Father fumbled with his wallet as he kept a grip on Mother's arm. Laurie, Dan and I huddled in a tight circle of misery about them when we left the bowling alley, a misery that enveloped our car when Father drove from the parking lot.

Back home, our parents once again disappeared into their room for another mysterious conference that would last all day. At the click of the locked door, Dan fled from our house for the call of the neighborhood, and Laurie ran downstairs and threw herself on the couch, face pressed tightly into the pillows. Her body heaved with sobs.

I gently shook her shoulder. “Hey, Laurie, hey, it'll be all right,” I murmured, my voice utterly without conviction as I gazed out the living room window. The ominously darkening clouds tempted me to chase after Dan, but I was afraid to leave Laurie alone. When my sister was finally done with all that weeping that no parent came to comfort, she rose from the couch. Her pale face seemed emptied of tears forever.

Unable to bear the sight of that stricken look, I had to turn away. Remembering that I had a few fingernail slivers to add to my collection, I escaped to my room. As I approached those containers neatly spaced apart from each other on the shelves, a terrible thought ran through me: they were just a bunch of shreds and scraps and castoffs that added up to nothing, pieces of a puzzle that could never be put together. My throat constricted, for a moment I had trouble breathing, and then that thought disappeared, banished, surely, by my collection's soothing qualities. Yet when I slipped the slivers into the shot glass, it was without my usual twinge of pleasure.

I woke that night to thunder that echoed the afternoon's din of bowling pins. Please don't let it wake up Mom, I thought. Between those reverberating claps, a rhythmic banging kept up outside, an unnerving
slam, slam, slam
that seemed it might never end.

What could that be? I crossed the dark room and peered out through the windswept torrents lashing against my window, just able to make out our neighbors' porch, illuminated by a dim outside light. The screen door swung open from the wind and then its spring pulled it shut, opening and closing like a perpetual coming and going of invisible guests.

A brilliant shaft of lightning cast our own rain-streaked house into momentary relief, and I caught my breath at the sight of Mother standing at the hall window, staring down at that swinging door. Then it was night again. Had I imagined her? I stood and waited for another bolt, all the while listening to that awful, insistent banging, but when a shivering light again surged through the darkness, the hall window was empty.

*

Morning brought the distant, disembodied chatter of birds, and the sun streaking through the curtains. Our parents' door lay open, though the bedroom was empty, and we found no one downstairs. I looked out the window at the driveway—the car was gone, so perhaps Father had left for the Sunday paper. But where was Mother? We hurried out to the backyard and called her name, and received no answer.

Small branches littered the lawn, and a single wooden shingle dangled at an odd angle on the side of the house. The soaked grass felt spongy beneath my feet, and above drifted one lone cloud, a straggler from last night's storm.

I turned in a slow, tight circle as I took in the round lonely cloud, my head stretched back, and then I turned a little faster, enjoying the spinning. I spun more and more, creating a circle of sky as if I were that funnel of trees in the park, and I closed my eyes and imagined I could separate from my body and float away. Yet when I felt in danger of sweeping out of myself I stopped suddenly, opening my eyes to the world dashing dizzily around me: the neighbors' houses elongated into a circling, speeding train, my brother and sister squeezed into one blurry child, and that single cloud spun above like the point of a top.

Without speaking, Laurie began to twirl too, her arms extended. Even Dan joined in, and we twisted about the backyard, whirling until giddy from our dizzy steps. We stopped and let the world slow down and suddenly there was Mother, watching us from the edge of the lawn, her arms folded across her nightgown.

She took a few groggy steps forward and her lips moved oddly, silently. Then she managed to gurgle something, her words so slurred we couldn't understand her. Was this morning's character supposed to be some sort of derelict? We turned our backs on her, unwilling to enter into any new game, and we kept up our own, turning in circles before our swaying mother.

She shouted out words so undone by a thick tongue that we stopped our twirling. But she wasn't looking at us, her eyes were on that loose shingle on the wall.

She lurched past us and her hands scrabbled at the rough wooden square until she tugged it off. She flung it behind her, just over our heads, and it sliced into the hedge. Then Mother pulled off another shingle, and another, revealing an underlying layer of coarse black paper that her fingernails scratched at, and I couldn't tell if she was trying to tear our house apart or somehow work her way back into it.

Pieces of the house, like scattered tiles, littered the lawn, and we ducked as more shingles whirled in the air above us. Finally Dan grasped at Mother's arm and he tried to pull her away, but she shook him loose with an awkward shove, almost falling herself, her hair swinging wildly.

Swaying on woozy legs, she clutched at her stomach as if it, too, held something that must be torn away, and then something thick, and green, slipped from a corner of her mouth. Mother's face split wide open into a long, terrible moan, and her eyes filled with what I have always since believed was sorrow and regret.

She toppled over, and lay so still, staring straight at the sky, that we encircled her, unsure of what to expect. “Mom?” Laurie whispered. We knelt around her, waiting for any slurred answer, and we bent so low we saw ourselves contained in her unblinking eyes like a tiny, concave photograph. We were Mother's secret audience, caught together for one last long moment before we allowed ourselves to understand, before we split apart in terrible grief.