Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Lorraine got up, walked to the map, stood on a chair, stretched, pointed, and the class loved her.

  Friday of the next-to-last week we took them on a field trip to Water World, a zoo for fish. Parents’ permission slips had been sent home and returned with signatures that resembled children’s penmanship. The kids came dressed to kill: boys with pressed pants, white shirts, black button-down sweaters, and girls with lipstick—seven-year-old girls with lipstick—and skirts and bouncy blouses. Lorraine wore earrings, eye shadow, glossy white lipstick, and a taffeta dress to her ankles. All this for Water World; imagine if we had taken them to the theater. They stood in single file according to home room, pinned name tags to their clothes, and boarded the buses. The principal loaded his camera. Lorraine sat next to me and asked questions: “Will you open the window? Would you like some gum? Can you please push the seat back? How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you like me?”

  Her hip rested against my leg. Everyone on the bus was singing “Then Came You” and Lorraine sang softly, out of key, in my ear. She held my hand and squeezed tight as we walked across the parking lot to the turnstiles. We walked arm in arm, Lorraine and I, through an underground tunnel that was lined on both sides with tanks of dogfish, hammerhead sharks, skates, sawfish, deep-water spiny eels, flute mouths, sea horses, and at every tank Lorraine pressed her nose to the glass, said she was scared, asked me to hold her, asked me to read aloud the little blurb about each fish. I did my best. She purchased a Water World pennant for me. She gave me her lunch and stole extra milks for me. We went to the whale show and when that blue monster flopped onto its belly, splashing waves into the balcony, Lorraine buried her head in my chest to keep dry. At the end of the day, when we were counting heads, she hid so I’d find her. On the bus home she fell asleep with her head on my lap. She was seven and in heaven.

  Wednesday of the last week we held Open House. I stayed late after school, rearranging the room and tacking up student papers and drawings. I told the parents how well their children were progressing, how much I enjoyed working with them, how confident I was they wouldn’t have to stay back when school rolled around in the fall. I encouraged the parents to read to their children, to have their children read to them. We drank punch and coffee, ate stale sugar cookies. In the auditorium a slide show of the field trip was presented, at the conclusion of which the audience stood, applauding, some so happy they cried. An elegant black woman with hair high as the ceiling walked toward me and said, “Lorraine told me about you.”

  “You must be—”

  “I don’t like that color slide of Lorraine whispering in your ear. I don’t like that one bit, mister.”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “You keep your itchy paws away from her, you understand? You so much as touch her and your ass is glass.”

  “She’s seven years old.”

  “Glass, mister, do you hear me?”

  The principal’s final evaluation of me consisted of one sentence: “Should try to be more relaxed around students (has bad speech impediment).”

  22

  “HAVING ONE’S WAY isn’t always possible,” Beth explained last weekend while we were puttering around the family hearth, gathering goods. “Neither is it always preferable. You do have a tendency toward absolution. I mean absolutism. Whatever.” Until she became a disciple of Meher Baba—“Don’t worry, be happy”—the closest she ever came to religious conversion was when she was reading Cotton Mather sermons. The fondest memory I have is the two of us sitting together against her headboard reading the comics in early light. When we were little, if either of us was sick, we’d both stay home and take double baths; I’d splash her ponytail from behind, mercilessly. She was always seeking my hand and my hands were always deep in my pockets. I always seemed to be running away, away from Beth, who’d be playing her zither in an uncomfortable chair.

  She must have held out her chewably chubby little hand, and I must have blanched once too often because, following a Halloween on which I was Lucifer and she was a princess, our masks were permanently in place. I can only see her flat-footed in the back row of ballet class, overdressed at Renaissance Faires, trailing even Mother on Yosemite expeditions. We all stopped to feed a deer in Tuolumme Meadows and Bambi came this close to ripping open Beth’s stomach when the Oreos were gone. I often felt sorry for her; I at least had symptoms. Her sorrow swooned in her body, swelling it. We were forever arguing about something superficial—me wanting to read Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme liner notes the minute she started reading them, me saying she looked gargantuan perched in a miniature dollhouse (with tiny Tide and scaled-to-size Kleenex) Uncle Gil had given her. When I was a baby she set up camp outside my crib, offering her arm through the slats whenever I chanced to look up. I have pictures. This is exhibit AA. Examine the tangle of thorns.

  I’ve never understood my sister very well. She’s always been four years older and far away and fabulously intelligent. I wish I knew her. I’m not pretty any more, but I’m afraid she’s even less pretty. She has a large nose and long chin and apple cheeks and eyebrows that almost touch and she wears overalls and black high-tops. I don’t know if that’s much of a description. I suppose it isn’t. What did Michael see in her and she in him? He was the first man she’d ever kissed and, for all I know, maybe the last. Now her eternal suitor is Meher Baba. She has postcards of Meher Baba pasted up all over her place in Berkeley. “Mayor of what?” Father likes to say. Michael was just a shy guy recovering from divorce who needed someone with whom to discuss the plight of Revolutionary War pensioners.

  I thought a lot about Beth when I left for UCLA, since I came here precisely to escape the influence of such seminal thinkers as Beth and Mother. L.A.: city not of words but pretty pictures I could walk around in. From Father I’d inherited my definition of Los Angeles as a good place for forgetting the difficulty of the interior life up north, and why wouldn’t it be romantic arcadia for him? Here, in the first few years of their marriage, Mother used to call Father The Man. Although it’s difficult for me to imagine Mother ever having called him anything other than Your Father, I’ve always acknowledged that such an epithet must have been earned, for this was no mere nickname. It was a title of almost absolute authority: Mother tucked mash notes, red ink on creamy white stationery, into his suitcase whenever he traveled.

  Maybe the problem later on was that he just didn’t travel often enough or far enough. They frequently drove together to Sacramento and got lost, with Father bearing the brunt of blame for not being an expert cartographer or not remembering to ask for a funnel as well as a can of fuel…. A piece was missing from a frozen cake. Mother went around the table in that inimitable way of hers. We all denied doing it. “Well, I don’t care if you believe me because I know I didn’t do it,” Father said. “Well you should care because it means I don’t trust you,” Mother said…. After a gruesome argument, whose subject matter escapes me, Father had a dozen roses delivered to Mother, who garbage-disposaled them and dismissed the gesture as “schoolboy.” I was at the time a schoolboy, as I suppose I still am, and I yearned to understand what she meant. What she may have meant was that she always wore hats in photographs to cover her face while Father removed his glasses and really mugged, hungry for something on the other side of the flash. She was bitter that he was so handsome and helpless, so decidedly not a dream guy for a girl in distress….

  And yet, before I was born, Mother and Father and Beth had lived quite happily on Carnation Street in the Silver Lake district. I didn’t at all remember Carnation Street, since shortly afterward we moved to what was then still very much the middle-class outpost of the Palisades; while my fellow freshmen were attending orientation sessions, I drove around Silver Lake, imagining Carnation Street as a narrow one-way at the top of a hill, on which horses drew carriages and crushed petals of pink carnations, and Chinese lanterns swung boxed light. The house would be made of carnations, too, a wood frame packed solid with pink flowers. I go
t lost in an interesting Latino neighborhood in the middle of the night and there were no petals anywhere. I drove up and back the streets in the dark, looking for a porch light that ran burglar alarms in my heart.

  Beth, three years old and arms around Raggedy Ann, probably slept under a blanket of carnations while in the next room, on a sofa mattress of pink petals, The Man and, as Mother did not to my knowledge have a nickname, The Woman went at it for my sake. I’ve never been very good with numbers but I can figure out that it must have been the fall of ’55: Annette stepping out of the shower with her hair wrapped in a towel and Teddy smoking a pipe, which he puffed for a few years at the beginning of their marriage because Annette told him it made him look like Adlai Stevenson. (The resemblance was infinitesimal.) I can hear Annette turning out the lights and the bed of carnations bouncing up against the wall that separated their room from Beth’s. I can hear Mother thinking, at the most climactic moments, about work the next morning—what to wear, what to write—and attempting to coo, but her heart wasn’t in it. Their technique in 1955 couldn’t have been too sophisticated: a few quick kisses, the placing of pillows, a twitch in the thighs. Annette must have been unaware there was any possibility of pleasure in this for her, either. I see Father as too selfish, too much the athlete on the attack. Tall, thin, and bald, Teddy must have looked to Annette like the very instrument of his masculinity. Mother probably thought she heard Beth crying and got up to check while Father lit his pipe, a happy man. Did the sky open wide? Did the smog lift or freezing rain fall across Los Angeles? I doubt the house was even covered with carnations.

  Probably apocryphal but endlessly reiterated: Mother was in such pain that she didn’t stop to think what she was doing when Father, unable to find the emergency entrance to L.A. County Hospital, parked on the sidewalk, pulled her out of the back seat, and told her to hold the handrail. She slowly ascended the stairs, crying, until, at the top of the steps, as an extremely nice nurse was opening the door, she collapsed. Mother awoke and screamed for the next twelve hours, at the end of which she had a breech birth. The danger of a breech birth is that the head—in this case, my head—comes out last, which dramatically increases the possibility that the umbilical cord will get wrapped around the neck—in this case, my neck. Choking myself by clinging too long to Mother. I entered the world feet first, then remained in the hospital an extra week to get a little R&R in a warm incubator that Father guarded like a goalie whenever anyone came within striking distance. If I lay still for more than a few minutes, Father apparently pounded on the glass dome. I wasn’t dead, Father. I was only sleeping.

  Of course I mentioned Mother’s name five minutes into the first conversation I had with the Daily Bruin editorial board. Of course I scoured the archives, seeking the palest shadow of Mother’s legacy to us all. Of course the bound volumes didn’t go back beyond 1950. Of course the Front Page–like sweatshop in which Mother labored found no analogue in our new cold-type headquarters. Of course I was the only freshman ever allowed to write a cover story for the Daily Bruin’s weekly magazine before Thanksgiving vacation. Of course. Of course. Something called New Journalism—the idea was to show up at shipwrecks and free-associate from the sand on the shore—was still quite the rage at the time and I thought this might be an easy way to be imaginative without actually having to work up any extended empathy for anyone else. Since the Second World War the Southland Department of Oxygen Masks has pretended to be interested in building a monorail from San Diego to Bakersfield, so I evoked ticket-takers falling asleep in the caboose, teenage girls moving their lips as they read Mrs. Levine’s Sweet Savage Surrender, beach towns passed in the night, whereas the editor wanted the article to focus upon projections of passenger use, turbo engine theories, electrified track analyses, catalogues of delayed beginnings. I wrote the story the way he wanted it, which he splashed across page one with pictures and maps and which Mother said was “nothing less than a first-rate piece of investigative if slightly speculative journalism,” but it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I wanted somewhere in the world I was writing about for my own mind to dominate.

  My next assignment also concerned the future of an illusion: Southern California Edison’s desire to build a nuclear power plant in the Mojave Desert. In a longish, if to me very lovely, opening paragraph, I attempted to evoke the exact color of goldenrod in the natural light of the falling, February sun at quarter of four on an ex-Air Force base, and in the final, perhaps somewhat too apocalyptic paragraph I imagined all that gorgeous goldenrod melting down. When the magazine editor edited out these two—and only these two—paragraphs from what was otherwise a soporifically dull account of the debate, I called Mother around noon.

  “Where are you calling from?” Mother asked. As a little kid I so loved listening to Mother interrogate people on the phone that I purchased my own extension, and my only problem was remembering not to mention some tidbit I’d learned eavesdropping. I loved her voice: how interested it could sound. I knew she was at her desk in the den, cradling her phone between her ear and left shoulder while tamping a cigarette and flipping pages of the paper. She was working now for a think tank that studied governmental abuse of computer data banks and paid Mother an amazing amount of money to translate their sheets of statistics into cautionary articles.

  “My apartment,” I said. “Why?”

  “Don’t say anything controversial, Jeremy. I think my phone is tapped.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I wish I were. Ever since I started working for the institute, I hear a distant beeping noise every time I talk long distance.”

  “Have you talked to the phone company about it?”

  “Oh, honey, you are a freshman, aren’t you? The phone company is the government. The government is the phone company. Aren’t you aware yet of the interpenetration between bureaucracy and big business?”

  I held the original version of my article in one hand and sneered at the published copy on my kitchen table, waiting for an opportunity to read them aloud for Mother to compare. Finally I said, “Politics and tapped telephones aside, Mother, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. Your father and I miss you, but we’re doing fine. We’ve been playing a lot of tennis. How are you, honey?”

  “Oh, I’m okay, I guess.”

  The article fell out of my hand. I had to crouch down to pick it up and didn’t hear what Mother had said, so I just said, “Right.”

  “Jeremy?” Mother said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there any particular reason you’re calling in the middle of the day?”

  “The magazine came out today with my article about Southern Cal Edison and …”

  “Jeremy, remember: nothing politically controversial over the phone,” Mother whispered.

  “… they got rid of the only two paragraphs I cared about in the whole story. Can I read them to you and get your reaction?”

  “Sure, but make it quick because this is an expensive call and nothing political because I know this phone is bugged.”

  Her only comments were that I seemed to stutter so much worse when reading aloud—why was that?—and that she wouldn’t have had a moment’s hesitation taking a blue pencil to either paragraph.

  “Then, quite frankly, I wonder whether I want to do j-j-journalism any more if all it is is an anonymous arrangement of trivial facts. I want my writing to be a r-r-register of my—”

  “You’re still using too many big words, sweetheart, and you’re still stuttering miserably. If you don’t want to write journalism, don’t. If you want to r-r-register your sensational uniqueness, go ahead and register.”

  I slammed down the phone, rushed to my bedroom, and quickly composed an epic poem, solving my speech problem by turning the harsh habit of repeated sound into the excellent technique of transverse alliteration and finally wowing Mother by using language to rearrange the world. It wasn’t quite that simple, but I did say, “Then I w-w-will. I might just do that. Toodle-o
o to the telephone tappers.”

  I WAS ENROLLED in a 100-level Latin course in which math majors and pre-med students, boys with photographic memories but no interest in literature, nevertheless translated Plautus so perfectly that for the first time comedy actually seemed somewhat funny; read Latin aloud with such anapestic precision and grace that Terence—even Terence, that pedestrian pederast—sounded less like a grammar exercise and more like a Gregorian chant; and were appalled when they saw me carrying around, let alone consulting “trots” of the early Roman comedies. I could read Latin, but I couldn’t read Latin. I didn’t get the stresses right.

  My Latin sounded—in comparison to these mostly Catholic boys who’d been pronouncing things right since the third grade—like muttering Spanish, and in my mouth supposedly hilarious stichomythia inevitably had the word “lest” pinned to the middle of it. I thought I must be able to do better than this, come a little closer to staying even with the Aquinas contingent, and toward that end I entered Powell Library one early fall morning of my sophomore year and have no memory of leaving until the end of the quarter.

  I checked out every edition of Plautus and Terence, every translation of Plautus and Terence, every available issue of Arion and Studies in Latin and Greek. I checked out every Latin-English, English-Latin dictionary, including the monstrously outsized Oxford University Press version, which I robbed from the reference room. With these books I filled the shelves of a carrel in the stacks, on the west side, on the third floor. I placed sweaters and stuff on the neighboring carrels so no one could disturb me. I listed and studied declensions and vocabulary words on index cards, which I filed in a metal box; translated Terence word-by-word onto the blue lines of a binder; consulted dictionaries; whispered Plautus to myself.

  Sometimes I’d arrive at eight in the morning, leave at midnight, then arrive again at eight in the morning, then leave at midnight. Sometimes I’d do this for weeks. Sometimes I’d bring my toothbrush. Usually I’d fall asleep at six o’clock with my head on the desk and twilight on my back. Sometimes I’d masturbate in the men’s bathroom to picture books of Roman goddesses. Sometimes I’d attempt to masturbate in the men’s bathroom to picture books of Roman goddesses but for one reason or another—intellectual preoccupation to the point of bodily disinterest, the distracting smell of dope—fail. I became a fan of the angry graffiti in every stall, its admirable attempt to turn words to shit. I wouldn’t shower for days, weeks, and my hands would be so dirty that I blackened the books I read. I’d journey round and round the library in blue socks, buying coffee and Butterfingers bars at the canteen, falling in love with every painted hand holding every yellow Hi-Liter over every open page, parading up and down the back stairs of Powell, talking to no one in particular and myself only in Plautine Latin, yearning every night for the thump of all the lights going off as a warning that the library would be closing in fifteen minutes and then savoring for a second or two the isolated blindness, the thin window, the cool cement. Imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.