Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  Halfway home, still breathless and hot (although having thankfully regained the full use of his legs), Charles realized with a sinking heart that he’d forgotten the newspaper. The most cherished part of his morning ritual was making a start on the daily crossword puzzle and then bringing it home to Emmy.

  Today he’d grappled unsuccessfully with a four-part quote by Albert Einstein, getting only as far as

  ACROSS

  1 I N I D E C _

  57 G O _ S A Y F

  DOWN

  5 R _ I _ G

  38 O _ Y U S

  But even the most obvious answers eluded him—retire for “quit the rat race,” avenge for “retaliate,” hedges for “suburban barricades”—so he was never able to finish without her help.

  Signare

  How many times over the course of a life do you think a person writes his or her name?

  It’s probably an unanswerable question—unless we’re considering someone like Cody; during the brief period my brother was capable of making those four letters, I’m guessing he managed it fewer than a dozen times.

  My father, Charles, however: fifty-nine years old, reared at a time when cursive was a required element of an elementary-school curriculum, someone who, as a child (for reasons of his own), took great pains to develop that expression of identity known as the signature—from the Latin signare, “to sign, to seal”—and for whom writing by hand is still a common practice, as he insists on conducting his personal correspondence via pen and ink (he’s been writing to me since I was a baby), paying by check for groceries and dry cleaning, and eschewing the convenience of online banking … surely he has penned his name thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times.

  Consider now the fact that every time my father writes his signature, he is reminded of a distant era that he wishes he could forget—all because his surname happens to end with a w.

  To explain: the Palmer Method of handwriting, in which my father was rigorously schooled, requires that the letters t, w, and g be written differently when they occur in a terminal position.

  For years, he considered making a small alteration by adding a final, silent e. Such things are done. He did some investigating and was surprised to discover that the process of legally changing one’s name is fairly simple; it takes only a few weeks.

  But in the end he realized that, in this situation, a silent e would be anything but silent.

  Besides, it would make his name look like a placard of pretension or irony: Harbour View Pointe. Sweet Thyme Tea Shoppe. Ye Olde Charles Marlowe.

  One cannot crowd out pain with pomposity. One can’t obliterate memory with artifice.

  The first time he wrote the word father in a fresh context—on a hospital release form, on an occasion of great joy—he was, of course, legally required to write his signature as well.

  In that moment, he realized that even in the light of a new, much-yearned-for identity—

  —he was still obliged to authenticate himself with that old sign. It wasn’t fair.

  On that occasion, my father tried to alter his signature—just a little—by changing the way he inscribed that terminally positioned w:

  Three years later, when hospital protocol again mandated that he write the word father—under very different circumstances, on an occasion of great sorrow

  —he realized that escape was impossible. He might be able to change his signature, but he would never be able to alter the invisible seal of a condemned life.

  Natal Charts

  Dear Emmy,

  It’s a relief to know that you’ve safely arrived at JFK and are on your way into the city. I’ve been thinking and worrying about you (I know, I know, but it’s a father’s prerogative) ever since I put you on the redeye.

  When I got home, the house was already too silent. Not in an overtly discernible way obviously—although there’s surely an instrument sensitive enough to register the reduction in decibel level resulting from one fewer set of inhales and exhales. You’ve always been a quiet dreamer, never a snorer or a chatterer, although you sometimes laugh in your sleep, have done since you were a baby, and I have to say that’s a trait that speaks volumes about you.

  I stretched out on the living-room sofa and tried to fall asleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I pictured you winging your way across the country buckled into an aged Boeing 747 that, somewhere over Kansas, was beset by unexpected turbulence. This created a “thunderous silence”—a phrase I use in my ninth-grade Language Arts class as an example of oxymoron, along with Shakespeare’s “ravenous lamb” and “beautiful tyrant”—as well as a palpable heaviness in the region of my solar plexus. I felt like one of Salem’s accused, being bullied into self-incrimination by the laying on of stones.

  I confess: there was a moment when I thought I was experiencing cardiac arrest.

  Instead of dialing 911, I called your mother, who in her wisdom advised me that I was probably having a panic attack and should take a few deep breaths and ingest two of those nonaddicting homeopathic sleep-aid tablets she buys for me, allowing them to dissolve, slowly, under my tongue.

  “You can’t chew them, Charles,” she reminded me. “They’re not Tums. They won’t be completely effective unless they mix with the enzymes in your saliva and are ingested sublingually.” I heard her stifle a yawn; ever polite, your mother, even when roused from a sound sleep in the wee small hours by her hypochondriac ex-husband. “Just think of them as under-the-tongue Communion wafers, okay?” Between you and me, I’ve not had the heart to tell her that although the tablets do indeed induce sleep, they often incite very disturbing dreams. I’ll choose insomnia over nightmares any time.

  I breathed deeply. I brewed some chamomile tea—another one of your mother’s suggestions—and am drinking it now as I write this, sitting outside on the front steps. It’s a beautiful night, really, unusually clear; even against the bleached background of an artificially lit city sky, the constellations are asserting themselves in a rare, vivid way.

  I’m reminded of a girlfriend I had in college (the only other serious girlfriend I had besides your mom) who was a great devotee of astrology. Her name, appropriately, was Ursula, from the Latin ursus, meaning “bear,” the name given to the greater and smaller star formations also known as the Big and Little Dippers.

  While the rest of our crowd worked part-time jobs flipping burgers at Dick’s, parking cars at Canlis, or shelving books at Suzzallo, Ursula earned an impressive under-the-table, tax-free income from the comfort of her dorm room by reading fellow students’ natal charts.

  Her clientele—a fifty-fifty coed mix—came to her with questions like, Which fraternity should I pledge? Should I change my major from premed to business? Is this a good time to lose my virginity? Is it pointless to try and make my 7:00 a.m. class when Mercury goes retrograde?

  While Ursula and I were dating, she tried to convince me that human lives are profoundly influenced by planetary and lunar movements, that it is the stars that are responsible for those periods when one is unaccountably bombarded with riches or woes, joys or disasters, or those times when every attempt at forward motion is thwarted, or when one has stopped evolving and is stuck, indecisive, in stasis. She used to caution me that moving through life without this celestial awareness was like driving cross-country at night on an unfinished interstate highway, one lacking lane lines, reflectors, and signage. True, one could navigate such a road, but at great peril.

  I have to say, I found it all fairly ludicrous, and—with a combination of condescension and cynicism (apparently byproducts of the Virgo-rising element in my natal chart)—I eventually shut down her sweet, earnest attempts to convert me. It’s no wonder she broke up with me.

  I thought about trying to find her after you were born, to ask if she’d do your chart; Cody’s too. Your mother would have had a fit, but I did find myself curious. I suppose I could try again. It’s easier to locate the long-lost than it used to be.

  Dear Emmy, Emerson Faith Marlo
w.

  I want to say to you: Please try not to worry. This separation will be difficult, for all of us. I know you’re scared about being away from home for the first time. And you’ll be missed, of course you will. But I wouldn’t have nudged you out of the nest if I didn’t think you were ready. It’s time for you to start living your own stories, guided by whatever navigational instruments you choose.

  Charles’s writing hand stalled. He stared at it, dramatically backlit by the front-porch light, a close-up in some atmospheric art-house film.

  A marvel of evolution, really, the human hand in deft possession of a writing implement, in this case a rare edition Montegrappa Italia produced in the 1970s and now valued, Charles guessed, at several thousand dollars. The pen had been given to Charles by his ex-wife on an occasion of no little significance: the very night they met. It would be given to Emmy in four years’ time, upon her college graduation. Cody had no need for pens.

  Glancing once more at the sky—lightening now, its stars losing their gloss and reconfigured—Charles drank the last sips of cooled tea and headed inside.

  What to do? Four thirty Seattle time; seven thirty in Manhattan. Charles felt vaguely dismayed to realize that he’d be thinking in two time zones until Emmy came home for Thanksgiving.

  The sensible choice would be to try to get some sleep, so he rinsed out his mug, turned off the kitchen light, headed to bed, and waited for the soporific effects of Celestial Seasonings to kick in. He even took the homeopathics, five of them, for good measure.

  He continued to imagine Emmy, settling into her dorm room, meeting her roommate, resident adviser, and fellow freshmen. He hoped she wasn’t feeling overwhelmed or out of place. He hoped she’d heed his advice: Find one person, just one to begin with, someone on the fringes, someone who’s hanging back, a fellow introvert, or maybe another girl who’s far from home. Introduce yourself. Ask her name. Find out where she’s from. That’s it, honey. That’s all you have to do.

  As he closed his eyes and began to drift off, he tried to locate a feeling of deliciousness from having nowhere to go and nothing to do on this Labor Day weekend, the official end of summer. But in truth, the novelty of summer vacation had long since worn thin, and now Charles found himself looking forward more than ever to the start of the school year, the ringing of the alarm clock, paperwork, accountability, regularly scheduled human contact, welcoming into the fold a new group of goofy, amorphous sixth-graders, sending forth another twelfth-grade class of self-assured young adults …

  Mrs. Braxton stood in front of the blackboard, wearing a nun’s wimple. Her arms were draped with long white strips of fabric (could they be bandages?) and she was teaching a lesson about some aspect of Palmer penmanship, but the sound was on mute. There was a mummy propped up in the corner, completely encased, slumbering, larvalike. Mrs. Braxton called Charles to the front of the room. His assignment was to unwrap the mummy; this action was in some way pertinent to the lesson topic. Charles approached the mummy; it was his height, freestanding, unsupported by a coffin. How was it able to remain upright? Charles tried to find a place to begin, a cut edge he could pry up, but the material enclosing the mummy was solid, like a cast. There were words written on it, clues to a puzzle he needed to solve, but he couldn’t make them out. Mrs. Braxton sighed with exasperation; couldn’t Charles see what he needed to do? Someone had bound her arms to a pair of yardsticks; she flew across the room and began whacking and sawing at the mummy, and then, in a weak, plaintive voice, whatever was inside began calling Charles’s name: “Char-Lee! Char-Lee Mar-Low!”

  He awoke—his heart skittering, his breath a series of convulsive gasps—to the sound of a garage door lumbering open. A radio station was blasting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” a song Charles could expect to hear several times before the day was out and to which he knew all the lyrics; he attempted to slow his breath by singing along: It goes on and on and on and on … It was almost entirely thanks to his next-door neighbors’ listening habits that Charles was familiar with the greatest hits from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s and thus able to fake a cultural connection with his peer group.

  Eight thirty? How could he have slept so late? He needed to get up, head downstairs, start his day.

  As he waited for the coffee to brew, Charles gazed out the kitchen window, a view dominated by the neighbors’ garage and driveway. Gil Bjornson, a retired career Marine, and his thirty-five-year-old computer-game-designer son, Erik, spent most weekends together; this morning they were already at work on their latest acquisition: a 1959 baby-blue Austin-Healey bug-eyed Sprite suffering from metastatic rust and leather rot and looking hopelessly ruined to Charles, but then he was neither skilled nor passionate when it came to automotive restoration.

  It was nice, though, watching the two of them. Charles noted the intuitive interplay of their movements, the way they found words when words were needed but fell into a purposeful easy silence when conversation was superfluous.

  Drinking the last of the orange juice, barely more than a splash, he became aware again of the peculiar energetic absence in the house, the cessation of that gentle, ruffling molecular motion that always trailed in Emmy’s wake. Not only would nights be quieter, he realized, but he wouldn’t be hearing her come and go throughout the day, experiencing the awareness one has when there’s another resident in a house, whether one actually sees that resident or not.

  Oh, he should have known this was coming, this tidal wave of longing and loss. Alison would have had this day planned months in advance, a universally momentous one for parents, the day after a youngest child heads off to college. She’d be having lunch with one of her friends or going on a day trip with that fellow she was dating, Mark or Doug or Dave (Charles could never remember his name, but he had a PhD in psychology, taught aikido, and made a living doing something that involved power tools).

  Yes, that definitely sounded in character for Ali, distracting herself with scenery.

  Not that Charles’s ex-wife was a cold person. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she was every bit as aggrieved by Emmy’s exodus as he was. However, Alison was also intensely pragmatic and would consider this kind of solitary emotional indulgence a waste of time and energy.

  If you’re going to feel sad, Charles could imagine her saying, you might as well feel sad while you’re driving to the Lavender Festival in Sequim, or even just grocery shopping. Do something, Charles, some one little thing that will get you out of the house and give you the chance to belong to something besides the noise in your head. Don’t hibernate. When you hibernate, you wallow.

  It was then that Charles noted the capacious wine rack, each diamond-shaped cubby occupied by a dust-covered bottle, the wine rack and its contents being one of many shared possessions Ali left behind when she’d moved out more than ten years ago, a relic from a distant era in their married lives.

  It suddenly occurred to him: he no longer entertained. He didn’t concoct wine-based marinades. How the hell was he supposed to get rid of this stuff unless he started drinking it himself?

  He reached into the wine rack at random and ended up with a 1992 Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, surely expensive; something someone must have brought to a party, years ago, before the divorce anyway, and never opened. Charles uncorked the bottle, filled his juice glass—the wine was a deep garnet red—and took a sip.

  It was surprisingly soothing: mild, luxuriant, plush. He finished the first glass and poured another.

  This was unorthodox behavior, to be sure—even a bit dodgy. Nevertheless, Charles felt justified; after all, it wasn’t every day one became a dues-paying member of the Empty Nester Club, and under such special, heart-sore circumstances, he figured he was entitled to a bit of conduct unbecoming.

  Besides—Alison’s advice to do something notwithstanding—it wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go. It was Saturday. No need to operate any machinery heavier than a Mr. Coffee. With the exception of orange juice, the larder was stocked. His cl
othes were back from the dry cleaner’s. The DVD player was still loaded with the digitally remastered copy of The Best Years of Our Lives that he and Emmy had watched the other night as part of their recent Teresa Wright film festival and that he wouldn’t mind seeing again.

  Charles finished his second glass of wine, poured a third, and checked on Gil and Erik; they were standing side by side, holding coffee mugs and staring meditatively into the depths of the Austin-Healey’s corroded innards, a father and son at ease in companionable silence. To imagine himself and Cody sharing such a moment was to imagine nothing less than a miracle.

  Why not? Charles thought suddenly. Why not amp up this indulgent wallowing, this willful hibernation by visiting the old father-daughter clubhouse, the multipurpose site of countless tea parties, story times, and beauty-parlor makeovers (at least until Emmy was too old for such things); the game-and-puzzle room; the meeting place of the After-School Homework Society.

  During the many years when Charles was banished from the optimistically christened playroom upstairs—where Alison and a revolving cadre of specialists never played but rather worked with Cody on various strategies, therapies, evaluations, modalities, et cetera—he and Emmy appropriated another room in the house as theirs, the one farthest away from these sad, officious doings: the crawlspace.

  Charles grabbed the wine bottle and made his way (somewhat unsteadily) to the laundry room, where a door not much taller or wider than a kitchen cupboard had been artfully cut into one wallpapered wall; a casual observer wouldn’t even notice it was there.

  Feeling giddy from the wine and the out-of-character recklessness of it all (what would Emmy think of her stodgy father, thoroughly squiffed on a Saturday morning and headed all by himself to their secret hideaway?), Charles got down on his hands and knees, yanked the door open by its cunningly camouflaged knob, and (how else?) crawled inside.

  •♦•

  “Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Penicillium, Stachybotrys, or—possibly—Chaetomium strumarium.”