Dead Languages

by David Shields

  There’s no house on fire in my memory but, when Sandra insists that I must remember the origin of the disorder, I see a Pacific Palisades living room as the scene of the crime. Beth was away at a classical guitar lesson; Father, who had just returned from playing four sets of doubles at Rancho Park, was sprawled on the floor, bouncing a white tennis ball on the red Persian rug; Mother, who had to be in North Hollywood by noon to interview a screenwriter who’d been blacklisted and wanted to talk, was sitting in the Good Chair with her polished shoes on the stool and the puppy in her lap. The dog was named Bruin, in honor of Mother’s alma mater, but it should have been called CIA, since it looked like nothing so much as the black-coated specter in Mad’s “Spy vs. Spy.” This would have been an appropriate appellation, too, as its only desires in the world were to claw your bare ruined legs, curl up in Mother’s soul, and look at you lugubriously. It was wounded half a dozen years later when I got upset one afternoon about my inability to talk, even to a dog, and neglected to latch the back gate. Bruin ran right into the grillwork of a Mustang convertible.

  At the origin of the disorder, in the living room on Saturday morning, Bruin was still healthy and dreaming in Mother’s lap. Mother was sitting in the Good Chair, Father was bouncing a tennis ball on the Persian rug, and I was lying down on the couch. Yes, lying down on the couch, and I suspect the symbolism was intentional, since Mother said I should put a pillow behind my head and my arms at my side, just relax, close my eyes, and talk very slowly. I tried to do what Mother said, I honestly tried, but I was five years old, it was the month of May, and all that morning sun waxed the bay window with quasi-religious light, with reasons to live. It was obvious to me that outside the window was what is known as life, and inside the window was what is commonly referred to as death. I wanted very much to be outside and got up to go, but Father stood, guarding the front door, playing the patrolman for probably the first and last time in his life. Mother said if she could be a little late for her interview, “well, then, you can come right back here and lie down on the couch and listen to me for a few minutes, Buster.” My name wasn’t Buster. The dog’s name was Bruin or, to free-associating friends of Beth’s borrowing our house between marches throughout the sixties, Brewin’. The dog leapt off Mother’s lap, pranced across the Persian rug, and Father opened the door to let her go outside. Beth was strumming Segovia transcriptions and eating fancy cookies at a nice Italian lady’s house in Bel-Air.

  “Are you comfortable over there on the couch?” Mother asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you happy?” she asked.

  Surely she meant this as an inquiry into the general state of my spiritual life—what sort of reconciliation I’d arrived at between death and desire. Father sat upright and Mother raised her eyebrows when I said, “No, I’m not happy.” She thought she was onto something. She thought I was going to tell her what she wanted to hear.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because I’d rather be outside, playing,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” she said, nodding. She slumped back in the Good Chair. Father returned to his prone position on the floor.

  This wasn’t working out the way she wanted. She wasn’t establishing the empathy she was famous for establishing between herself and her subject. I guess I wasn’t giving a very good interview. Mother went into the den to call the screenwriter and say she’d be a little late, while Father went to take a shower because in twenty minutes he was supposed to pick up Beth at the nice Italian lady’s house in the hills. As he was walking out of the room he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Just relax, Jeremy. Don’t worry about what Mom is saying.” So then, of course, waiting for Mother to get off the phone, lying face down on the scratchy couch, I couldn’t do anything except worry. Mother had just given me a new watch to teach me responsibility and make me acutely aware of my own mortality. Studying its blue face, its white dial, I admired the ease with which the silver second hand made its rounds, the way it couldn’t stop moving if it wanted to.

  When Mother returned from the den, she pulled the stool next to the couch, pushed the hair off my forehead, and blew smoke in my face. She said this very softly and sympathetically, she said it while massaging my skull, but what she said was: “Do you realize, Jeremy, that sometimes you talk too fast? Sometimes you’re in just such a hurry to say something the words trip you up. Have you ever noticed that, honey? Sometimes you’ll want to say a word so fast you won’t be able to say it at all or you’ll say the first sound of the word over and over. I don’t want this to become a habit for you. There’s no need to be quite so anxious. People will wait to hear what you have to say.”

  “I don’t do that,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Talk too fast.”

  “Sometimes you do,” Mother said. “Not a lot or even often, but now and then you try to rush your words and you’ll stumble over one of them. Daddy has noticed it, I’ve noticed it, and Beth said she’s noticed it.”

  “Beth said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “She said yesterday the two of you were looking at the map of the United States in the World Book and, when you were racing to see who could name all the capital cities first, you had some difficulty saying ‘Philadelphia.’ ”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “She’s a liar.” Beth was a liar, but she was also the winner of the map game when Harrisburg, of all places, rather than Philadelphia, proved to be the capital of Pennsylvania.

  I listened to the shower running, to the expansion of the pipes. I watched Bruin press her black little nose to the window and beg to be let back in. I studied the threads in the couch. I computed the fantastic rate at which Mother was removing cigarettes from her pack. I did anything I could to miss what Mother was saying because the main theme of her monologue was: “I just want to show you how easily you can say ‘Philadelphia’ if you’ll concentrate on saying it very slowly and carefully. Come on now, Jeremy, say it with me: Fill-a-dell-fee-a. You can do it. I know you can. Show me you can do it. Say ‘Philadelphia’ for me, honey.”

  I tried. God knows I tried. But “Philadelphia” lay like dead weight on my chest, like helium in my head, neither light nor heavy, and yet with definite gravity to it: with downward pull. Sandra says the only way to lose a fear of certain words is to treat them as utterly random and insignificant collocations of sounds; this has the added advantage of echoing a lot of fancy Frog philosophy about how everything, being language, is babble. I tried to visualize “Philadelphia” as “Fill-a-dell-fee-a,” but all I could think was Philadelphia was too far away. It was clear across the country, the country was very wide, and I was too small, too weak, too afraid to make the trip. I was in the Palisades and Philadelphia was in Philadelphia. It was too far. It was definitely out of the question. It isn’t even the capital of Pennsylvania, I kept telling myself, trying to weaken the enemy, but Philadelphia was Constitution City, Locus of Brotherly Love, Metropolis for men who had large yellow farms and long white wigs. Teeth on lips forever, and all I could come up with was an infinitely extended, infinitely painful Fffffffff. That’s all. Only that. Fffffffff. Nothing more.

  “I don’t feel like saying that word right now,” I said.

  “What word?” Mother asked.

  “That word.”

  “What word?”

  “You know.”

  “Give it a try.”

  “No,” I said. “Not now. Maybe later. Not right now.”

  Mother shook her head in sadness and disgust. She withdrew to the den to call the screenwriter, canceling the interview, and came back carrying six boxes of flash cards. She waited until Father left to pick up Beth, then kicked off her shoes, cozied up next to me on the couch, and told me to lay my head in her lap. I did what she advised. For what seemed like forever, she flipped flash cards in front of my face. I was supposed to say what each picture depicted, which was a sympathetic gesture on her part since it was a game
we’d played before and I’d always enjoyed. She assumed it would restore confidence in my ability to communicate, but one by one the tangible things of the world vanished on me. I couldn’t say a chair was a chair, or an umbrella was an umbrella, or a zebra was a zebra. As Sandra likes to point out, what you can’t identify doesn’t exist; no stutterer can say his own name. Mother must have flipped four hundred flash cards, and not one card could I call. I wanted to do what Mother called “caption the picture,” but my mouth refused to open. The words weren’t there.

  Beth and Father returned sooner than I’d expected. When Beth walked in the back door humming the new notes she’d learned, the contrast—Beth the musician, Jeremy the mutation—was so striking I buried my head in Mother’s lap and burst into tears. It was a wonderful feeling to produce such loud and continuous sound after I’d been silent for so long. A truly excellent cry redistributes the bones of the body; with the cessation of sobbing, I felt more completely cleaned out than I’ve ever felt before or since. It’s a difficult emotion to explain, but it was as if the most complete emptiness had suddenly passed into purity. I thought the ugly language living in my soul had finally been killed. The future held in store only flashing phrases; perfect sentences; burning, noble words.

  Father was so embarrassed by my behavior he changed back into his tennis clothes and left to go bang a white ball against a green backboard. He was never very good at the game but terribly devoted to it, and I can remember hardly a day when he didn’t come back from the courts with a tin of balls in one hand, his Jack Kramer in the other, a sweaty smile on his face. Always attentive and eager to help, Beth stopped humming, marched straight into her room, closed the door, and played morose ballads for me on her guitar. She played well, though she always played well. She was a very gifted little girl. The dog had scooted inside when Father opened the back door on his way to Rancho Park; it was all over me now, scratching my neck and licking salt from the tears as they streamed down my face.

  “You can go outside and play now,” Mother said, sitting on the couch, handing me Kleenex, stroking my arm. “You still have some time to play before dinner, Jeremy. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. You know that, honey. I’m very sorry. Please don’t let anything I said bother you, because you’re going to be just fine. Most of the time you speak beautifully. Give me a smile, Jeremy. Don’t you want to go outside and play?”

  This was something of a first for me, to stay put rather than rush outdoors. When frolicking outside, it’s fairly common for most children to experience what might be termed the opposite of the pathetic fallacy: to feel, after a few hours of fun, that the dirt, the grass, the trees, the sun, the sky are simply a part of them, are buried deep inside their bodies. But I’d never felt that way before about a living room. The scratchy couch, the Persian rug, the Good Chair, the unsteady chandelier, all these supposedly inanimate objects suddenly took on a life of their own and started playing house in my heart. For anyone to feel like a living room is a minor disaster, but for a boy-child it’s the worst feeling in the world. The late afternoon sun dissolved into the artificial light of the overhead lamp. No, Mother, I didn’t want to go outside and play. All I really wanted to do was close the curtains, turn off the lights, put my head on a pillow, and ascend. No such luck. “Come help me take out the garbage,” Mother said, “and I’ll make whatever you want for dinner.”

  MAYBE I’M deluding myself when I say this scene was the inception of the problem, since it’s not as if from that time forward the only thing I’ve been aware of has been my disfluency. That’s simply not the case. But, until Mother mentioned it to me, I’d never heard those hesitations that are now habit. Apparently, other people had. It offended them, they felt compelled to tell Mother, and she felt compelled to tell me. Mother didn’t create the catch in my voice. She only heard that something was wrong and, like any good reporter, went straight to the source.

  Sandra says I must have become aware of the impropriety of my speech earlier than age four but have chosen not to remember it. She says the “traumatic nexus surrounding disfluency is invariably established no later than three and a half.” Maybe so. I couldn’t say. The tableau in the living room is the earliest trauma I can come up with. Sandra’s eyes light up and she gets giddy all over when I tell her, though, how solid middle class we Zorns were, because a disproportionate percentage of sputterers comes from the ambitious bourgeoisie, the rising gentry who, in the considered opinion of our finest historians, prompted the English Revolution. Mother would like to have covered the beheading of Charles I and Father would like to have fought at Philiphaugh, but I don’t think either one of them realized how unrevolutionary they were, how upwardly mobile, how extremely middle class. The filthy rich are so rich they hire a private tutor to instruct little Theodore in the elusive art of elocution; the filthy poor are so poor they don’t know where little Leroy is, let alone care how he communicates; but the filthy middle class are so middle class they call little Jeremy onto the couch and ask him why he talks so fast.

  “Look at the graph,” Sandra will say, pointing to some piece of paper on the wall. “Statistics don’t lie.” I suppose they don’t. They show most stammerers coming from families on the move, families that don’t have a fireplace but are seeking fame and fortune. The new chairs in the breakfast room, the well-swept patio, the maid on Friday, the stuttering son: these, apparently, are the true totems of creeping capitalism. The rich will always be rich, the poor will always be poor, but the middle class is always in motion, is always in a state of suspended transformation, is not necessarily tomorrow what it is today. All that social sliding throws some children into a tizzy and their confusion comes out in strangled articulation.

  The last thing I would want to do would be to ascribe this fascinating phenomenon to mere class conflict—titubation as the burden of the bourgeoisie—but I do want to acknowledge the cultural context of my disfluency. A voice from the burning bush commanded Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, but Moses was “slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” When the time came to inform the Israelites of God’s command, Moses’ brother, Aaron, “spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses.” I always imagine Moses standing in the desert, trimming the bush, and pleading: “C-c-come on, Aaron, why d-d-don’t you tell them?” From Moses on, Jews have worried about words.

  “Don’t you see?” Father would say. “Jews have always been in exile. We have had to be contemplative in order to survive.”

  “So they read books and looked for loopholes in the law,” I’d say.

  “Don’t be silly. Kafka, Proust, Freud, Marx, Einstein: all Jews in one way or another. You should be proud they are a part of you.”

  “I am,” I would say. “I really am.”

  But I’m not. I really am not. I’m tired of hearing that you can flee so many times before you start looking for more long-lasting shelter, that if you have been trampled by life you can triumph in language, that the only recourse to everything is to read and write yourself into existence. It’s no longer romantic to me, this Hebraic hunger for words. I hear the ceaseless clickety-clack of Mother’s typewriter at the beach; I see a photograph of Father hiking in the High Sierras with a biography of Alger Hiss sticking out of his hip pocket; I imagine Beth masturbating to the pictures in the middle of Modern Drama Review. I see, I hear, I imagine these things, and I’m depressed beyond despair.

  3

  SHORTLY AFTER Mother’s death I happened upon her desultory journal, and perhaps the two most passionately wrought entries concerned her father, whom we called Puppa. The first one was about how he, unlike the rest of us poor fallen fools, had “style.”

  Cleaning day—weekly battle with dust balls, cobwebs, grime. A day to be domestic. Wife and mother. Pick up laundry, gas car, replace bald tire, mail letter, deli for dinner, meet train. Maybe if I resist phone calls and errands of mercy, I can get it all done and not be crabby, put upon. Report on tire at dinner reminds me of car Puppa bough
t: four new first-line tires, filled up with gas, car wash. “Now it’s yours.” He had style. Bathed in the memory—soothing and delicious.

  I’ve seen a photograph of this automobile at the moment of its debut, with its doors swung wide open like wings. It appears boxlike and beautiful. Still, was it our fault Mother couldn’t maintain a stiff upper lip when it came to housework? Why, when she lost Puppa’s gold watch to an alligator at the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, did she have to behave as if time’s winged automobile had come to a screeching halt forever? Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday because it was Puppa’s favorite holiday. The highest compliment she ever paid me was that my values reminded her of Puppa’s values, whatever they were supposed to be.

  He once owned a junk shop on Pico Boulevard. Mother liked to insist he had been a very great man and a model of moral integrity because he never sold anything that, with a little tinkering, wouldn’t work reasonably well, and when the business was sinking he didn’t hesitate to sell the shop to a colored man at a time when it was very unfashionable indeed to do business with a colored man. The only thing she kept in her safety box at the Bank of America, downtown branch, was a ring put together out of Puppa’s tie pins. You would have thought it was sapphire plucked out of the sky by Adlai Stevenson in an excitation of wit.

  In Puppa’s presence, of course, I could hardly speak. For my failures of communication he had two principal cures: a cup of coffee with six spoonfuls of sugar because my body was deficient, he thought, in dextrose, and a tumbler of bourbon before dinner because I would stop “yammering,” as he called it, once I acknowledged I was a man and not a little boy. To the coffee I thrilled, but to the bourbon I had headaches. I wasn’t a man; I was a little boy. In the few years I knew Puppa he impressed me as having very unusual habits: when he shook hands he would extend an egregiously strong and prolonged grip, and when he walked down the street he’d stop and stoop over to examine a clod of dirt in a crack in the sidewalk, a discarded math assignment, a forty-five-dollar grocery bill, a trail of red ants, a very used postage stamp. When I heard that he’d died I ran downstairs to my basement bedroom and tried to cry, but all I thought, as Mother comforted me and told me Puppa had loved me most of all, was that I no longer had to shake his hand for half an hour, I no longer had to bend down with him and study candy wrappers, I no longer had to burn my tongue on his bourbon.