Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Gretchen, who was sitting on a box of old tax forms, said, “Don’t, Jeremy. Please. Really. Don’t do that. It’s positively ghoulish.”

  “You’re right,” I said, folding up the brace and putting it away. “I’m sorry.”

  “What is that thing, anyhow?”

  “What thing?”

  “That steel contraption that squeaks.”

  “My old leg brace.”

  “You mean you actually used to hobble around with that wrapped around your knee?” she asked.

  I detected the small curve of a smile and wondered what, if anything, was so funny. “All junior year everyone thought I was crippled,” I said. “Not until the middle of senior year did I destroy their deepest hopes.”

  Gretchen, giggling, said, “I never realized it was that bad.” Confronted with tragic facts, we occasionally laugh when we don’t know what else to do. “It sounds absolutely awful,” she continued, massaging my right leg as if it were still in traction. The massage led us from the basement to my bedroom, where I, as always, peaked too early and Gretchen, as always, didn’t peak at all.

  31

  The conversation occurred in the basement. I was talking to Gretchen. We were talking about my leg brace. It was a medium-stress situation. Tension occurred in my right leg. Tension was within normal limits. Speech kept moving forward. Airflow stopped at the basement door. It was very stuffy. Tension increased on feared words, but I didn’t avoid S or F. On the other hand, I didn’t voluntary stutter very much. A leg brace is only a leg brace until I remember the pause when I brought my feet together, swung the crutches from behind, and gathered myself to go nowhere. Stuttering is just excessive tension in the lower articulators until I see myself, at four, flipping flash cards on the living room couch. I haven’t been stuttering that much recently or, if I have, I haven’t noticed it because it hasn’t seemed that important. Me and Gretchen, Beth with her body, Father at Montbel, Mother on her deathbed. We’re all so afraid, Sandra. We’re all so alone.

  Dear Jeremy,

  The enclosed is one of the very few things I wrote for the West Bay Sun that’s worth a damn.

  Love,

  Dad

  For the past three years I was the guardian and guru of this enlightened corner of tennis intelligence and incidentals. It has been a labor of profound and requited love. Now the time has come for others to take over. The January issue of the West Bay Sun will carry the byline of another member for “Net Set.” What I attempted to do in these monthly dispatches was to stimulate interest in tennis: for the novice as well as the NCTA-ranked player, for those of ample girth and feeble forehands as well as the mercurially swift thirty-year-olds with their 120 mph serves.

  Employing my own distillation of drollery and hyperbole, I tried to de-emphasize the winning at all costs syndrome. My message, delivered subliminally at times, more pointedly at other times, was that tennis was the open sesame to a lifelong, wholesome recreational outlet; a wondrous way to have fun with your clothes on, with incalculable benefits to psyche and sinew; an endurable bridge to friendships on and off the court.

  What was of overriding importance, I felt, was not merely reporting who won what major tournament, but the number of players who participated, especially the names of newcomers trying their wings and Wilson large-sized rackets for the first time. I don’t know how well or how often I got the message over, but the thrust of these columns—forgetting my paraphrastic penchant—was that no matter whether you won or lost a casual weekend mixed-doubles match or a major championship final the earth would continue to rotate on its axis around the sun; the stars would take their assigned places in the firmament; and lovers, strolling where the woodbine twineth, would plight their troths as they had since the dawn of time.

  The gospel according to St. Theodore was that tennis is just a game. To be played for fun under the sun. The rest, the who-won-what-big-match, was secondary and commentary. The stuff of seared and yellowing newspaper—you, dear reader, will have trouble remembering the name of this ink-stained wretch who wrote the “Net Set” column for three years. And that is how it should be. Time marches on. The graves are filled with indispensable men and women. Even editors and columnists.

  To those members of the club who stopped me occasionally to tell me how much they enjoyed a particular column of mine or a turn of phrase, my sincere gratitude. I shall miss—more than these chaste, inadequate words can convey—writing this column each month. I’ll be seeing you around West Bay soon, I hope, but not in the columns of the Sun.

  Dear Jeremy, December 16

  I started doing it about six months ago sort of by accident and since then have gone through constant feelings of guilt, mostly centered around the idea that you should love someone else and not yourself. I’ve never failed to regret it right afterward, even while recognizing the imperiousness with which I felt I had to do it at the time. It varies from twice to several times a week. I always thought it would stop once I’d “gotten over” Michael and, while I do it less now, I haven’t stopped completely. Is it adolescent to be still doing it at my age? What do people do when they’re not involved with someone? Is it possible to suppress sexual tension? The reformation makes us turn not only inward but to those around us who can help.

  Love,

  Beth

  Ethan couldn’t believe how sick his mother was. He’d read all the letters his sister had written, in purple ink to imply pain; on wide-ruled, blue-lined notebook paper to suggest innocence; and in infinitesimal illegibility to indicate a mind so involuted as to be incapable of registering anything other than its own agenda. He’d looked at the last photographs his father had taken of his mother: black-and-white snapshots of her sitting up in bed and trying to smile as an invisible wind blew white curtains around in the background. And he had listened to his mother’s voice vibrate over the phone, had heard it crack, had heard her hang up in mid-sentence. He hadn’t let any of the letters, photos, or phone calls touch him, though, hadn’t really let the catastrophe get conveyed. He’d been under the impression his mother was recovering but, standing now at the foot of her bed in cool morning light, wearing a little boy’s terry cloth bathrobe for which he was now rather too big, watching her sleep flat on her back on top of the sheets, Ethan couldn’t believe how sick she was. Through her diaphanous smock he saw blue bones….

  32

  WHILE A NURSE babysat Mother and Father received his fifth of eight shock treatments, Beth and I played basketball at the appealingly low hoop a few blocks down the hill. It was Beth’s idea and she was extremely excited for some reason about shooting a few baskets, as we’d done when we were kids. She was wearing her inevitable black tennis shoes and blue jeans with a Giants cap. I didn’t tell her this was probably not proper attire for playing basketball; I let her wear what she wanted to wear. I tried not to interfere with her happiness and freedom. We ran a few laps around the playground to get loose, passing the ball back and forth. She wanted to play Around the World, a game at which she’d never beaten me, but she thought she could win now that I was out of practice. Getting in shape was part of her new regimen whereas I never recovered the speed and agility I possessed before I broke my leg and had pretty much abandoned athletics. In Around the World each person tries to travel from one end of the court to the other and back again. Beth adjusted the bill of her cap, rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and cuffs of her jeans, double-knotted the laces of her shoes, and in general concentrated upon the action with a seriousness and determination she once reserved only for absurdist drama in translation.

  She knocked her knees together, held the ball with two hands, put some backspin on her shot, and followed through. She used the same techniques Father had once taught me, and hardly missed. On your first trip across the court you were allowed two attempts from any one position, but if you missed both you had to start over. This was what was happening to me while Beth, cautious but consistent, was moving around the world. She won when her last sh
ot, a layup, hit the front rim, kissed the backboard, and fell straight through the net. When I tried to congratulate her she ran away from me, sat on a bench near the fence, and started crying. I didn’t ask what was wrong. I just sat next to her, bouncing the ball, brushing the dirt off her face, winding and unwinding her ponytail. Trivial victory often rings empty and releases a sadness so deep there’s no conceivable comfort. You just stare and smile and hope it vanishes, but there’s absolutely nothing you can say.

  CHRISTMAS EVE Mother was in such excruciating pain we had to carry her body above us like a virgin sacrifice to the bathroom…. “Tell her what you’ve always wanted to tell her,” Gretchen telephoned, knee-deep in Kübler-Ross…. Beth cheer-led epigrams: “So lett us choose life that wee and our posterity may live.” John Winthrop, 1630 … looking straight at me down at the other end of the bed with eyes as cold and gray and still in the sockets as old dimes caught in coin slots … the crown of her head nearly bald and what was left along the sides and in back falling out … wilted white rose petals caught beneath the bureau glass … grieving for the agony of not grieving, learning too well what Mother had taught me: how to take notes.

  Father sat quietly in a dark corner of the Montbel game room, wearing plastic slippers and a robe. The game room was done in orange. Maybe that was the reason no one else was in it except me, Father, and Dr. Skolnick. Father’s face was empty of all emotion, brown and red like a burnt field. I looked into his eyes, I held his hand, I squeezed his thin arms, I slapped him across the knee. Abruptly he stood, ran in an insane circle, and said, “I’d walk all night on the shoulder of 101 to see Annette again.”

  As if Father weren’t there, I turned to Dr. Skolnick and said, “I c-c-can’t trust him to behave properly. He might trip over an oxygen tank or spill some pills. He’d upset my mother. I c-c-can’t take him home.” I turned and walked away. The door shut on Father’s face. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  That night Mother looked at me and said, “I’m all pickled up.” I’d never heard this phrase before, but it sounded old-fashioned and I assumed her mind was moving across memories of childhood in Steubenville, Ohio. She awoke only to be lifted onto the commode. She breathed faster and faster, in lunging convulsions, then slower and slower, in little kisses of air through the space in her teeth, then hardly at all.

  Ethan put the logs and some newspapers in the fireplace and unfolded the screen to cover the hearth. He’d never been much good with matches—he couldn’t light a candle or a cigarette—but he quickly struck the match on the floor and flicked it into the fireplace and another and another until the paper burned and a log fell and the fire started. His mother wrapped a blanket around herself and sank down into the chair and blanket. All he could see of her was the wrinkled half-moon of her forehead and white hair, which gathered in a knot at her shoulder. She reached out her hands to receive the fire’s heat. The fire hissed and crackled, and smoke swirled up the chimney. The flame shapes danced and flickered and vanished and then recurred again. The fire was at once unchanged and completely transformed every second. The fire was like snow….

  Beth and I watched a color cartoon in a shopping mall, and I laughed at everything. The odd, purplish night in the movie filled with hundreds of narrow, jazzy, yellow-orange blocks, which meant: Lady and the Tramp were in a very big city, and Lady was probably pretty scared. Beth said, “How can you laugh at this? It’s not in the least amusing.” I kept laughing. She said, “I don’t see how you can laugh like a goddamn hyena when Mom’s so sick.” I kept laughing like a goddamn hyena. She said, “I don’t see much love in your heart any more, Jeremy, do you? I don’t see any real concern.” I couldn’t help it. I kept laughing.

  I pressed from the wrist to the elbow along both arms, trying to find it. Beth, still in her pajamas, couldn’t find it, either. We stood at the foot of Mother’s bed, squinting into the sun. The sun, white sheets, a gray strand of Mother’s hair; maybe now I’d be able to talk. While Beth drank red wine for breakfast, I jingled car keys and said, “I’m going to tell Dad.”

  In unlaced business shoes on bare feet, in swimming trunks, a wool cap, and a Jewish Welfare Fund T-shirt, Father ran around the high school track adjacent to Montbel. I stood in the shade of sycamore trees, watching, then suddenly I was running alongside him, breathing hard. Even with his unlaced shoes, he was running as well as he ever had. I was in the outside lane, I hadn’t run around a track for years, and I had trouble keeping up with him. As we came into a straightaway, I grabbed his arm and said, “I have something to tell you.”

  Father stopped and turned around. “Are we running the wrong way?” he asked.

  “We’re going the right way,” I said. “But I have something very important to tell you. I have some very bad news.”

  “They want me back at Montbel. Well, you can tell them I’m staying right here.”

  “Listen to me. I have something very terrible to tell you. I want you to be prepared. I don’t want you running into the fence or banging your head against the water fountain. I came here to tell you Mother died early this morning.”

  I don’t know how I said these words so calmly, but I must have felt the need for some rational force to offset Father. He didn’t respond unreasonably, though. He didn’t do anything. He just kept running right along.

  “Do you hear me? Mother died. My mother. Your wife. Annette. Kaput, capisce?”

  I thought a little wordplay might wake him up—he always loved language games—but he kept bobbing his head up and down, he kept on kicking. The toe of my right shoe was starting to pinch. We came into the last bend of the backstretch, I wanted to stop and rest and get things straight, then Father stepped quite literally out of his shoes, leaning into the turn. The rest was a mad run. He sprinted the final hundred and fifty yards in world-record time with his swimming trunks falling off and his hands raised over his head. He was screaming: “Annette! Annette! Annette!”

  By the time I caught up with him he was sitting in the stands, picking pebbles and tiny pieces of glass out of his feet, still screaming Mother’s name. It seemed to me he was saying, “A net! A net! A net!” The poor man wanted a net. I took him back to Montbel.

  I examined every photograph of her as a little girl, every article she’d ever written, every letter ever written to her. I read back to front, right to left, like beginning with conclusions. I opened every desk and dresser drawer, looking … looking for what? Sentences I could criticize.

  She made the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs, but it sounded on ears deafened by fear and evil.

  Seductively dressed in nondenominational, nonpolitical, nonprofit colors, Spiritual Mobilization and its donors thereby enjoy tax exemption; it is not surprising that the décolletage has attracted patrons from both sides of the street.

  Winding up a four-year investigation of Communism in the film industry, the House Committee on Un-American Activities departed from Hollywood in the manner of carefree picnickers who, having enjoyed the sunshine and the flowers, feel no concern about the mess they leave behind.

  In her closet I came upon a pair of shiny new shoes still in the box. Beth can’t get those shoes out of her mind. At Mother’s desk, in her high style, I wrote her obituary.

  No funeral, though. No nothing, despite my fantasy of standing before the mourners with my mouth open, trying to do the seemingly simple thing of saying one word and then another but, instead, getting escorted offstage by Gretchen to the compassionate acclaim of the crowd. Just a party, as Mother’s will specified, “to celebrate life rather than mourn death.” Some celebration. A folk guitarist upon whom Mother had always had a crush played poorly. Father wept in the den. She’d been carried out of the bedroom in a plastic bag. Her body was burned. The ashes were scattered at sea. Whenever I cross the Golden Gate Bridge, I think not of suicide, as Father does, but of Mother, swimming.

  I analyzed rather than swooned over all the sincerely sincere condolences. I wanted to feel
famous feelings but couldn’t get past difficulties in construction. “The last time I talked to your mother must have been the middle of December. She still sounded so extraordinarily plucky, although for the first time she had lost the lilt in her voice that she somehow managed each previous time that I’d called. What a brave and plucky woman she was.” “I hope these words will comfort you a little. Words were the tool your mother used so well. She was a fine craftsman in her profession. Perhaps more importantly, she was a fine human being.” Perhaps? I love that. Where did my family and their friends ever get the idea language could eclipse life?

  I talk the way I talk, I write the way I write, I live the way I die because of Mother. Everything I’ve ever done I did to win her admiration. She always used to say, “You may not love me, but you must respect me.” We loved her from afar.

  Father came home walking slowly. He no longer has any memory of the last few months, but he does have a real estate license. Ten days out of the hospital, he insisted upon serving as realtor for the sale of our house. He walked through the rooms, giving guided tours to families of four, saying, “This was where my beautiful wife slept with a smile, this was where she soaked in the tub for entire afternoons, this was where she cooked delicious dinners, this was where she wrote the finest articles in American journalism….”