Dead Languages

by David Shields

  MOTHER WAS WORKING now for two oddly complementary organizations: the California Council on Health Plan Alternatives, which lobbied for nationalized medicine, and the Stanford Medical Center, where she publicized the radiation lab. It might seem as if I’ve rearranged Mother’s résumé to underline the symbolism of something or other, but I haven’t. There was just some cell inside her that was screaming about sickness and survival.

  Hyperthermia—abnormally high body temperature—when used with radiation or chemotherapy is a promising new avenue for treatment of tumors.

  Kidney cancer may be killed by a new nonsurgical technique that shuts off its blood supply and starves it to death.

  The nursing profession continues to develop passive, conforming, neutral people at a point in its history when there is an urgent need for nurses who can think imaginatively and develop new solutions to increasingly complex problems.

  This was the order of sentence Mother was composing on her classic black Remington as July turned surprisingly warm in San Francisco, so when she cried, “Announcement! Announcement! Everyone around the hearth for a heart-to-heart,” who among us could have expected it would be anything more than another chance for her to discuss the Women’s Liberation movement in the context of a realignment of the family chores? She had a remarkable manner of entering rooms. I’ve never met anyone who so completely determined the mood of a particular space the way she affected every feeling that emerged from the floorboards, and I remember her walking into the living room four months before her fiftieth birthday. Whereas anybody else would have been carrying a handkerchief in one hand and a bottle of sleeping pills in the other, Mother was carrying gift-wrapped packages. Ten years before, she’d entered the hospital for a minor operation (nodule, nose) and upon her return brought me a transistor radio. I had loved that radio’s white earplug, black dial, black leather case beneath my pillow at night, and now here she was again—home from the doctor with three presents in her hands. She read her mail and mixed a large gin-and-tonic without any tonic while we unwrapped our presents: a jogging suit for Father; The Riverside Shakespeare for Beth, who, in her second year of graduate studies at Berkeley in British history and first year of residing with Michael, missed the dramaturgy of her recent past; and for me a text entitled Disfluency Dissolved, which belonged to the genre of self-help quackery—swing your left arm when talking to someone on your right side, swing your right arm when talking to someone on your left side—that Sandra despised.

  Father looked up from his sweat pants and said, “Honey, I assume these wonderful gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun.”

  Father, Beth, and I were sitting, quite literally, at Mother’s feet. Mother’s feet were resting on, of all things, the foot rest of the Good Chair. She fiddled with the FM dial of the hi-fi, pouring herself more Beefeater Gin and petting Bruin’s ancient, fat, but still glossy back. That dumb dog’s sole desire in life was to eliminate all itches. When, in her youth, we tried to get her to debauch a beagle from around the block, Bruin pranced away like a poodle with dancer’s attitude.

  “I suppose,” Father said, “these wonderful gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun.”

  “Do you like the book, Beth?” Mother asked. “Is that the right edition, the one you wanted, with the color pictures in front?”

  Beth was a grad student at Berkeley at a time when being a grad student at Berkeley made you answer: “Certainly there are going to be those who prefer the Signets, Mother, the individual paperback editions with those gorgeous Milton Glaser covers.”

  Beth didn’t mean to hurt Mother. Nor did I when I said Sandra wouldn’t let me even look at Disfluency Dissolved. Nor did Father when he said the jogging suit would fit fine after a couple of washings. The living room was almost totally dark now and for some reason Mother prohibited anyone from turning on the lights. She tilted the foot rest, threatening, or so it seemed, to kick it over but managing quite nicely to keep it on pointe. Drinking entirely too much gin, she petted Bruin so vigorously the animal finally flopped off her lap. KKHI-FM, as if by thematic prearrangement with Mother, was playing Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.”

  “I guess these gifts are in celebration of a perfect report card from Doctor Braun,” Father said.

  “Yes,” Mother said, “yes, I mean: no, nothing like that at all, no.” The Unfinished Symphony finished. Bruin tried to establish sympathetic eye contact with the other members of the family. Mother gulped a full glass of gin. “Actually,” Mother said (for the first time ever she had trouble talking, her voice cracked, she couldn’t enunciate), “I found a little lump in my breast, and the day after tomorrow we’re having it biopsied.” Here she found it necessary to lie. “It’s not going to be malignant. I’m going to be all right. None of you is to worry.” She laughed unconvincingly, too high, too abruptly aborted, to herself.

  I wasn’t there with Mother in the examination room when she made Doctor Braun feel one lump in her left breast and another along her lymph nodes, when she told him about the blood dripping from her nipple, when he kept saying, “I hope you’re wrong, I really do,” in response to her saying, “I’m sorry, I know, I just do, I know my body, so let’s go after this with everything you’ve got.” Still, I see the harsh white light of the overhead lamp, the crinkly paper stretched across the narrow table, the doctor’s little desk in the corner, the icy steel chairs, the silvery-glassy reflection off scissors and bottles, the tardy antiseptic of rubbing alcohol, Mother’s toes almost touching the cold floor—and I wonder why she didn’t tell us when she found out for certain that she had a year and a half to live. Me and Beth, at least, if not Father, since shortly after this he was back at Montbel. It was an extraordinarily misguided decision, to leave us guessing all along. She pretended to be so public and transparent, but she was certainly as secretive as the rest of us. The only person she told was Elaine Ellenboegen, who shared this information when she showed me Father’s letters.

  In the living room, when Mother said she was sure the tumor wasn’t malignant, I recalled stopping in Salt Lake City on the way home from Jackson Hole. We were admitted to an overpopulated auditorium when Father told the doorman we’d come “all the way from San Francisco to see the senator.” The rally was for Eugene McCarthy; it must have been 1967, I must have been eleven. Afterward we swam in or, actually, on Salt Lake. Mother, stretching out seductively in her ubiquitous black one-piece, called to Father: “What else is like this? What in all of life, Teddy, is such an uninterrupted lull?” We had dinner near the state capitol at a restaurant that featured a waterfall and served twelve courses including as many Italian ices as you could eat. Father ate more than he could eat and fell asleep the moment he lay down back at the motel room. Beth and I swam in the indoor pool while Mother sat in a wet chaise longue, somehow both reading the Congressional Quarterly and admiring us. Mother said it was time to towel off but first bought us bottles of orange Fanta and lit a cigarette. As we crossed the parking lot to the motel room, Beth warned Mother about the likely lethal effects of inhaling nicotine and tar. “It’s not the quantity of life,” Mother said, “it’s the quality of life.” Surely this was the most meaningless platitude she knew. She only wanted Beth to give back her matches. Somehow, though, there we were, the three of us walking across the parking lot, waiting for Mother to finish her cigarette. Clinging like gossamer to Mother’s banality was the sensation of something seized: the sun disappearing into the bottom of the soda bottle, the Great Salt Lake rushing into the indoor pool, Father dreaming he was a soldier in boot camp.

  Immediately upon absorbing the significance of Mother’s upcoming operation, Father yielded conscious control over the left side of his brain. By comparison, Beth said afterward, Lucky’s monologue toward the end of Godot was practically a model of decorum. Father kneeled like a begging Bruin, wailing and crying into Mother’s lap: “No no ’Nette please no O love dearheart No I life so O no love ’Nette I O
please dearheart no no.” Beth and I stared at each other with the worthless weight of our books in our hands, not knowing where to go till we surrounded Mother and started hugging either shoulder, calling her “Mom” for the first time in I don’t know how long. The one thing she couldn’t accept was sympathy for herself. Later, when she was really ill, she photocopied a statement that said: “I ask that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering even if they hasten the moment of death. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain.” All those ds. She stood, kicked over the foot rest, and said, “You’ll excuse me. I’m going to bed. Nighty night.” She was sloshed.

  Pressing his jogging suit in a bundle to his chest, Father followed after her, crawling across the carpet. Like so many of his other gestures—the way he kissed people or shook your hand, how he made a toast at a fundraiser—this struck me as an act. It was as if he were always portraying what he imagined might be laudatory. Even away from all the electrodes, he never impressed me as having a genuine core upon which to draw. He could get very flustered if anyone else in the room said they were seriously sick. That was his province.

  Mother dissuaded Beth and me from visiting her at the hospital, but Father virtually lived there. He was working now for the city as a housing inspector of slum dwellings and accountable to no one. When Mother came home, she looked basically the same as she had before. She never had much of a bust, so I could hardly tell the difference when she returned or when, a little later, a prosthesis was strapped to her shoulder.

  She missed little more than a month at the California Council on Health Plan Alternatives, where a big bill with Senator Kennedy’s backing awaited Mother’s hand to hammer it into final form. They took what amounts to a team picture the day she went back to work; looking recently at the photograph in the family album, I couldn’t distinguish her from all the other overworked health planners. I found and focused my little loupe. She might as well as have been me trying to say Ford. The veins in her neck were like two long fingers in the claw of a canary.

  MOTHER STOOD in the doorway between the kitchen and the den, pulling a white rope over and back a chin-up bar in order to regain strength in her left shoulder. I sat down in a chair and talked to her about stuttering: how much it had bothered me while growing up, how hard I was trying to improve my speech this summer, how much it defined who I was. If I had known she was dying, I wouldn’t have talked about stuttering with such solemnity, since it would have seemed so inconsequential. But I didn’t know she was dying and I wanted us to be like two injured veterans trading war stories. I can comprehend pain, Mom—tell me where it hurts.

  Five o’clock light came into the kitchen, making the yellow linoleum look liquid and the top of the round Formica table like a floating saucer. Mother was only a few feet away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the San Andreas Fault: on the den side of the door, a step down from the kitchen, in semidarkness, wearing bathrobe and slippers, grunting as she raised her shoulder a little higher with each effort.

  Between rope pulls, in response to my speech about speech, Mother said, “Do you know something, Jeremy?”

  “No, what, Mother?”

  “I hate to say it, but I think two years of college have turned you into a terrible bore,” she said, then started pulling on her rope again.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve always been a terrible bore.”

  I’m not dead, Mother, I’m only sleeping.

  She laughed a little, or maybe it was just a huff of exertion. She said, “You’ve lost your sense of humor, honey, and this family is known for its ability to laugh, its joie de vivre, if you will.”

  “Certainly I will,” I said, attempting to show her I hadn’t lost my sense of humor. There’s a difference, though, between a sense of humor and pointless word play. Mother kept pulling on her rope while I squirmed in the kitchen chair.

  “Your father used to be invited to the most exclusive parties in Beverly Hills to do his borscht belt routines. I’ve been known to turn out a witty column or two in my day. Even Beth, who used to be such a sourpuss, made a very funny card for my birthday, which you, incidentally, completely ignored. What’s happened to you, honey? You used to have such a great laugh.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “You used to write those wonderful satires about mirrors and parking lots and crowded lecture rooms for the high school paper. You used to rush home to tell me the latest joke you had heard. You used to love your father’s stories. Now you’re all dark and depressed, all sense and sensibility.”

  You can see what a leg up on the rest of us it gave Mother to be the only one who knew she was dying, since under the gaze of eternity all our little mishaps must have looked pretty comical. I stood and said, “That’s just not true.”

  Mother pedaled her feet in the air while yanking the rope around.

  “All s-s-summer,” I said and thought to myself abdominal tension, excessive air flow, forward moving speech, “all summer I’ve been writing a play about a clown. It promises to be very funny.”

  This was a total fabrication. I’d seen an off-Geary production of a one-act play of Chekhov’s called Swan-Song, which wasn’t funny but did concern a clown.

  Mother never lost a chance to demonstrate how little she knew about literature and said, “That doesn’t show a sense of humor. It doesn’t even show any originality. The Frown Behind the Clown is one of the most well-worn themes we have.”

  “Yes, I know, Mother, but this play of mine is actually very f-f-funny.”

  Why is this a stressful situation? I wondered. Don’t avoid feared words. Make changes in the five parameters, especially tension and timing.

  “What’s it about?” she asked. Mother always liked to know what something was about. She didn’t like poetry because it was rarely about anything.

  I said it was about a clown who was calling it quits. On his last night under the big top, unable to decide whether he loves the fat lady more than the thin man, he shoots them both, gives a very wise and witty monologue concerning the relationship between imagination and reality, then leaps from the trapeze to his own death.

  “Yes,” Mother said, back on her feet, rotating her left shoulder counterclockwise, “but what’s it about?”

  I wanted to say, “Good Christ, Mother, it’s about me!” but I could hear in my head a mechanical click that told me I’d stammer on “Mother”—virtually every stutterer I’ve met mentions something similar: a vague shadow blotting the view—so, instead of arguing, I pulled down the aluminum bar from which her rope dangled and threw the bar into the far corner of the den, where Bruin, thinking it was a bone, gnawed on it.

  “That,” I said, “that is fuh … fuh … fuh….” I couldn’t finish the word. I was trying to say “hilarious.”

  Sandra says I then experienced guilt, self-revulsion, communication-hate, people-hate, and melancholia. I suppose that about covers it. Every night for a week I sat alone in my room, reading Billy Budd aloud to myself and writing letters to Mother I neither mailed nor delivered. Finally I wrote a short story, as an apology, as an early elegy, and in one night.

  NOTES ON SUICIDE

  Prompted by no more compelling motive than having nowhere else to reside, I moved here three months ago and soon became aware that below me lived a woman who was quite as alone and secretive, as inaccessible, perhaps even (and my heart cheered at the possibility) as near to death as I have been all my life. And yet I never saw her.

  It was, I confess, the most inadmissible of all evidence upon which I spectacularly misjudged the woman downstairs. Her voice, echoing in the pipes and elevator shaft and settling in the attic in which I live, demanded my attention because she spoke, as a child or an old person does, to no one but herself. She talked back to the radio and television and extrapolated from the Bible, altering the tone and theme of her discourse as easily as she changed channels or turned pages. There seemed to be, neverth
eless, a hidden order, some obscure coherence to her monologues.

  Her mailbox did not have her name on it and its emptiness was never invaded by even the most insignificant piece of junk mail. Not that I received fierce love letters from exotic points, either, but at least my name was scrawled across the slip of paper taped to my mailbox. Occasionally I took the elevator, when it was empty, down to the first floor mailboxes, adhering to a strange and unfounded belief that communication—some unexpected epistle—would arise from nowhere, from nothing, from no one.

  In the early morning she often stomped around her apartment and banged her hands against the walls, sending slight vibrations upstairs, where I lay awake, listening to the sounds of her insomnia. She cursed and placed herself in the throes of what I took to be an elaborate ritual, laden with gestures and movement and meaning.

  Even more curious were her eating and cooking habits, which were disturbingly irregular. At noon I smelled meat cooking, and at midnight eggs frying. She was a pathetically ineffectual chef, burning most of what she cooked. The smell of heat and smoke crawled into my apartment. She broke cheap glasses and plates.

  I flattered myself, of course, to think that I, with my finely tuned sensitivities, was well suited to the task of decoding her bizarre behavior. It is true that at first I only sporadically jotted down my impressions of her and was not even especially aware that I was doing so. But in less than three weeks I was enthralled with the prospect of collecting all the details of her apparent disorder and listing them, cataloguing them, categorizing them and ordering them until I solved her puzzling existence.

  I realized—what a nervous moment that was!—that my character was of no use to me here, was in fact a hindrance. Perhaps, then, this was what so attracted me to the challenge: the healthy egotism on which I have survived all these years had to be discarded if I were to succeed in comprehending, not to mention getting acquainted with, this elusive woman. I did nothing else but keep lists of what she was doing or, rather, what I thought she was doing. With thin, sharpened, charcoal pencils, in my minute and uniform if illegible handwriting, I wrote endless columns of numbers and words. And still I did not understand her.