Dead Languages

by David Shields

  MOTHER WAS BORN in Steubenville, Ohio, a town whose only fame rests on the fact that it was a punchline to a joke in an episode of “Get Smart,” a television show I used to watch as a child and from which I would derive exquisite pleasure because whenever the Chief and Agent 86 had something secret to discuss they’d enter the cone of silence. They’d never be able to understand each other before the cone would rise. Steubenville sits on the shore of the Ohio River, and I suppose adorable little Annette swung over the rim of the river on a tire tied to a rope tied to a tree and ran barefoot in the woods in summer and skipped stones across the creek at night, but it would be preposterous to assert that Mother was ever anything resembling a river rat. I see her instead writing only one word—“Uneventful”—in her diary at the end of each day and reading mysteries under the covers with a flashlight until morning. I see her doing these things because Mother was never the storyteller Father was; she never liked to talk about her distant past.

  Girlhood strikes me as one of life’s more unfathomable mysteries, and I haven’t the faintest idea what Mother did when her family moved to Los Angeles in 1940. She wasn’t sitting in a malt shop wearing a tight pink sweater, waiting to make it big with Paramount, because she always had tiny breasts like wings. And she wasn’t falling in love with the star linebacker because, until her too-late twenties, until she met and married Father, she had a terrible time with pimples. I suppose she was busy hating her father, whom she thought she loved, and envying her brother, whom she thought she admired.

  Uncle Gilbert is now chief science counselor to the American ambassador to Japan, and when he was working for the Atomic Energy Commission he discovered something about the nature of entropy that won a Nobel Prize in physics for the chairman of the AEC, but when he was just a kid in L.A. he was content to wander around the junk shop, fixing whatever his father thought was irreparable. Gilbert transformed a dark corner of the garage into a lab, where he had an impressively low number of nuclear near-explosions, and every science class he took at Dorsey High he ended up teaching until, in his senior year, Puppa decided that Berty deserved to study at the very best college in the country, within a reasonable distance. On a full fellowship in physics, he went to the California Institute of Technology.

  Annette did not go to the California Institute of Technology. She went to UCLA. Any girl, if she is able to secure a parking space, can attend UCLA. And Annette wasn’t even plagued by this problem, since she was living at home and hitchhiking to school, something which very few other “Uclan co-eds” were doing. Something which even fewer of them were doing but which Annette was doing, with deep, unapproved pleasure, was smoking two packs of Kents a day through a filter, if indeed Kents were in circulation in 1942 and, if not, two packs a day of another equally strong brand through a filter. Something which no one, absolutely no one else in all of Westwood except Annette, was doing was being the managing editor of the Daily Bruin. She did very little all day other than call up the police station and correct proof sheets, then hitchhike home in the dark.

  Whenever she had a couple of hours to kill, she’d walk across campus to her studio in the basement of the Art Department, where a certain professor of Post-Impressionism would invariably stop by to speak very favorably of the work she was producing in clay. Nearly all professors of Post-Impressionism are sexual in the extreme; this nice man probably just wanted Mother to put down her piece of clay and kiss him unconscious. Mother avoided such implications, if she was even aware of them, and concentrated, instead, on her statue, which she took very seriously. Spending a couple of hours when the spirit moves you does very little to enhance the quality of a work of art. Upon graduation, Mother had created only one small sculpture, and even it wasn’t quite finished. The left foot had only four toes.

  Mother was proud of that piece of clay, despite its flaws. I think it was the only thing she ever made with her hands and she wanted other people to see it. When she married Father, she thought it should appear over the fireplace. Father agreed, though he thought it more properly displayed in the attic. When we moved north, she paid the Bekins moving man twenty dollars to wrap it carefully and hold it in his lap while he drove. Mother was disappointed, however, in how he handled a few plates and felt she had to file a protest with his employer: “Despite my repeated requests for the use of extreme care in handling and packing our fine set of imported china, these dishes were stacked together and wrapped only in coarse paper, unprotected by any kind of separating cushion. I was shocked to find this gross negligence, especially when such items as a plastic measuring cup were packed with more care than that accorded Limoges china.” She could certainly take the high road.

  She placed the sculpture in the middle of the mantel, the first thing guests saw upon entering. I’ve avoided describing the figure because it’s so difficult to describe without making it sound grotesque. It was sort of a tragic self-portrait in red clay: an adobe woman with eyes of lead and hair of rock, her head bent sadly and impossibly between her legs. Her left foot was still missing a toe, her mons Veneris was curiously box-shaped, her breasts had the appearance and texture of acorns. I don’t know whether this was the artist’s intended effect, or whether it’s in extremely bad taste to comment upon the private parts of your mother’s sculpture, but I was touching those acorn breasts, thrilling to their strange roughness, when Adobe Woman fell from the shelf.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Father, Beth, and I were trying to clean house before Mother returned from a weekend of interviewing state senators in Sacramento. Father was vacuuming the hall rug while Beth was mopping the kitchen floor and I was dusting the den furniture. We were all listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons turned up loud and playing over and over again on the hi-fi. We were all hard at work and happy and eager for Mother to return and compliment us on our cleaning. Then I picked up Mother’s sculpture in order to dust the mantelpiece. Above the sound of the Four Seasons, above the sound of the whining vacuum cleaner, Father and Beth could hear the crash.

  After turning off the music, Beth stood at the edge of the kitchen floor and her only comment was: “You’re dead, Jeremy. Now you’ve really had it.”

  Father shut off the vacuum cleaner and tried to piece the sculpture together, but it was hopeless. Adobe Woman had a crack down her spine, her right arm stopped at the shoulder, her feet were missing.

  “If I glue it together and put it back where it was, maybe Mom won’t notice the difference when she returns,” Father said. “I don’t want to upset her after a long weekend of hard work.”

  “Don’t even think of trying that,” Beth called from the kitchen.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “You know how disdainful Mom is of duplicity.”

  “Yeah, Dad, d-d-don’t piece it together. I’ll just tell her what I did when she gets home.”

  Mother was, above all else, a woman of moods. If she’d been escorted out of the San Francisco Press Club for wearing slacks or her editor in New York had tampered with her lead, dinner would be a long silent affair, the rest of the evening she’d try to find fault with us, and we’d stay out of her way. But when things broke right for her, when The Nation played her story on the inside front cover, or an important politician invited her to ask the first question at a press conference, she was capable, I think, of divine love. She would give back to us the blessings the world had bestowed upon her, and in her glory we could do no wrong. She’d gone to Sacramento with the intention of talking to a few senators, some assemblymen, and maybe a couple of lobbyists, but Arnie Logan, Mother’s former sports editor on the Daily Bruin and now Pat Brown’s press secretary, had arranged an exclusive interview for her with the governor, and on the way home she’d sold it as a free-lance feature to the Sunday supplement of the San Francisco Examiner.

  She wanted so much to share her triumph with us that she bought Father another book to add to his The Rosenbergs Were Not Guilty Library, she bought Beth a marionette, she bought me a box of cinnamon ginge
rbread men, and she bought herself a bottle of champagne. When she handed me my box of cinnamon gingerbread men, I handed her the broken pieces of Adobe Woman and said, “I’m sorry, M-M-Mom, I dropped your c-c-clay lady.”

  On that Sunday afternoon, I don’t think the death of her father would have seriously dampened her spirits. She was so giddy with success, so drunk with champagne, that she just looked at the pieces and laughed and tousled my hair and said, “That’s okay, Jeremy. Don’t worry about it. It was an ugly old thing, anyhow, don’t you think? I didn’t care much for it any more. Cheer up, hon, it was only a statue. All is forgiven if you’ll promise to be as honest with me about everything as you’ve been about this. Will you do that? From now on, if you do something I should know about, will you come tell me rather than make me find out for myself? Good. Now, may I have one of your gingerbread men? I’ve always liked best the kind with icing on the nose.”

  This was certainly a side of Mother I had seen little of until then. I wanted to show my gratitude by giving her the whole box of gingerbread men, but she said, “No, I’d rather get a dozen kisses from you later tonight.” When she came downstairs to tuck me in and kiss me sweet dreams, she still had on her perfume, her triangular earrings, her lipstick, her purple dress, her gold bracelet, her gold watch, her black high heels—all that evidence of having competed in the world and won—and looked so pretty I decided I must never lose her love.

  In order to make certain I hadn’t forgotten to tell her something she should know about, I took to telling her anything that could possibly be construed as bad behavior. For a while, this was a charming enough ritual—every night after dinner, Jeremy sitting on Mother’s lap and recounting all the little misdemeanors he’d committed—but very quickly I became fixated upon filling her with negative information. No offense was too trivial, no confession was too exhaustive. If while playing with friends I indulged them by speaking of Willie Mays as a “nigger,” or while walking the dog I pulled the leash so hard I made little Bruin choke, I couldn’t wait to rush home and tell Mother how dreadful I’d been. My after-dinner apology grew so lengthy Mother would lie down on the living room couch where, while she kept one ear on what I was saying, she’d watch Chet Huntley, dip oatmeal cookies in lemon tea, and read the Examiner. Before I finished my disclosures, she’d be sound asleep with oatmeal crumbs across her lips, and the paper—open to the Op-Ed page—at her feet.

  The only way to attenuate the atonement was to do no wrong. I set out to be perfect. I treated Bruin with respect. I called people only by their Christian names. I crossed the street at the stoplight, a mile away, on top of a hill. I gave blood. I didn’t listen to baseball games in bed. I emptied the trash twice a day and went out at night to hose it down. I burned comic books whose binding staples I determined to be inexactly aligned. I gave all my money to skinny girls in Africa. These devotions lasted for months, but they amounted to nothing because goodness gave way to spotlessness. I showered and showered and showered. I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared…. What money I didn’t spend on African girls I used to buy a small-scale vacuum cleaner. I dusted on top, in between, underneath, inside. After dusting, I’d vacuum. After vacuuming, I’d dust. I changed bed sheets every night. I changed clothes every hour. I wiped the towel rack until it broke. I scrubbed the sink until the splash of tap water felt like iron filth upon my marble white sculpture. My nightmare image was a National Geographic photograph of a parched lake bed cracked into an infinity of caked chaos. Last week, while we were packing up my parents’ ex-house, Gretchen called me “the boy in love with bare rooms.”

  Mother’s cover article for the National Federation of Nurses monthly magazine was called “From Tears to Triumph,” and its opening bars I could practically hum:

  The reactions of parents to the birth of a malformed infant involve a form of grief closely associated with the mourning process. Some mothers quickly see the birth defect as a realistic problem; others may continue to look at the child as proof of their own inadequacy—visible evidence of their own imperfection. Mothers usually react with strong feelings of hurt, guilt, and helpless resentment to a congenitally deformed child.

  “From Tears to Triumph” ended up winning for Mother the coveted Nightingale Award from the National Federation of Nurses and, if there is power here to the prose, it seemed to me to owe itself to the fact that it sounded as if she were writing about her son. For all I know, she just might have been, because this insane epistemological touching, this hypochondriacal perfectionism in which life appeared primarily as a problem, this sickness got sicker.

  The two impulses—the desire, on the one hand, to be morally impeccable and the need, on the other, to be squeaky clean—came into dramatic and rather ludicrous conflict one evening when I was taking a bath and a beetle crawled onto the hot water valve. I lived in the basement, beetles were always barging in, but I’d never before answered the question: was it more important to be virtuous (let the bug live) or keep the bathroom clean (squash the silly insect)? Suddenly it seemed like the only serious problem I’d ever contemplated. I got out of the bathtub and paced up and back on the blue tile, cleaning up after myself as I dripped, wondering whether I should kill the beetle or let it live. For half an hour that dichotomy was the one idea in my head. I sat down on the stool to get a different perspective on the situation. Then the beetle fell off the faucet and drowned.

  It’s difficult to be impeccable in the damaged universe. As hard as I tried to be moral and immaculate, I would have certain lapses and my environment would have others. Mother simply refused to listen to any more mea culpas—she said if I pestered her any more she was going to refer me to a child psychiatrist, who was paid to listen to such lunacy—so every night I sat up and wrote a list of all the infinitely important, infinitely unimportant things I’d done wrong during the day. The last item on the list would always be that I’d wasted electricity by staying up late to write the list, which sounds like one of Father’s jokes left behind on the Borscht belt but was, nevertheless, the degree to which my mind had wrapped in on itself. In the morning I’d leave the list in Mother’s purse or on the front seat of her Fiat before she left. After a while she wouldn’t even glance at it before throwing it out and we got so we didn’t have to talk about it. She knew I’d leave her a list, I knew she’d throw it away, and we both were happy. This went on for years and now it seems too close to psychosis to endure for more than a few minutes, but at the time Mother seemed to have arrived at a puzzled acceptance of it and I did, too. I thought I’d be observing beetles from the bathtub and writing notes at midnight forever. I forget how or when all this madness ended; God knows I can still get trapped in the interstices of the OED or the marginalia of some torn, blackened page I’ve rescued from the refuse. But before the initial disorder ceased, the lists—in the way that everything language touches it focuses and refines—made things worse.

  I became imbued with the notion that to carry dirt from one spot to another was to spread germs and endanger people’s lives. In the house, this was easy enough to avoid. If I removed my shoes on the back porch, then showered six or seven times and washed my hands every time I came in contact with something, I was in no danger of distributing any mud. Outdoors, especially on the playground at Currier, the mania got magnified. I’d be running merrily across the yard, step in a puddle, realize what I’d done, then run back and soak my feet until I felt the dirt had returned to its point of origin. I used to spend entire recesses digging my heel into a grease spot I suspected of being the repository of the black spot on my shoe.

  The climax of this campaign came when Charles flew up from Los Angeles for my ninth birthday, and Father took us to see Citizen Kane, which I didn’t understand, but Charles explained, “It’s about money. All great art is about money.” Charles is now employed by an association in Sacramento that has no address or phone because,
as Charles explains, the government monitors all union organization of service workers. Although this was the sixth time he’d seen the movie, Father said some of the visual effects were stunning. I couldn’t distinguish a visual effect from a subplot, but I thoroughly enjoyed the buttered popcorn, the icy Coke, the pink box of Bon Bons. As we left the theater and walked toward the car, everyone was content until I intuited a certain stickiness on the sole of my shoe. It was July, I hadn’t brought a sweater, but when I said, “I think I left my sweater on the s-s-seat, I’ll meet you back at the car,” they nodded and kept walking because Charles was never any more observant than Father was.

  Another showing of Citizen Kane was already on. I walked up and down the aisle in the dark till I found my little sled, I mean till I found my seat, which was occupied by a man with a monocle. He whispered to the girl next to him, young William Hearst looked at page proofs, and I rubbed my foot on the candy-coated floor until I felt I’d returned all the sweet viscidity to where it belonged.

  This was definitely a low point. But the dementia had its rewards. Racing around as much as I did to return soil to its source, I turned into a runner. My legs were tan, hairless, and beautiful. My legs were legacy. Classmates would boast about my legs to their friends at other schools, and Mother said a lot of girls would give their right arm to have legs like mine, which was a messy accumulation of anatomy, but I got the point, and Beth, with fat white thighs at thirteen, agreed. Once, in my bare feet, on grass, at Currier, I ran fifty yards in six seconds, which is unheard of for a nine-year-old white boy. Black boys would cross town to challenge me and return to Hunters Point saying they got a bad start, man. It wasn’t the races, though, or the timed sprints that mattered. What mattered was running alone when no one was watching, running up and down the hills of San Francisco into a sun that was setting the golden bridge on fire and that I wanted to burn me alive, running until there were no distinctions to be made any more between feet and legs and arms and hands, and my entire body was all only fluid movement forward, running until I felt I could run forever and let out my kick and never look back and no one could catch me.