The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

  “Yes, I heard. I was very sorry.”

  “He was so sick,” Nellie said. “It was a blessing, really. Tell me, how’s your father and mother? They haven’t been to see me since I can’t remember, and when they do come, it’s like they’re not even here. To tell you the truth,” she said, leaning toward Jerene confidentially, “I feel like I haven’t known them in years. Ever since they moved to Eastport, or wherever it was.” She looked Jerene sternly in the eye. “When was the last time I saw you? I wouldn’t have recognized you. That haircut you’ve got—is that the fashion in Africa?”

  “Yes.”

  On the television set a couple was kissing passionately. “My program,” Nellie said, and reached for her glasses. “Do you get the soap operas?”

  “No, I don’t watch much.”

  For a moment, their attention was focussed on the screen. “Just think,” a young, dark-haired man was saying to a pretty blond girl. “Only two more days and you’ll be my wife.”

  “It won’t happen,” Nellie said sullenly. “The mother’s out to stop it. Too bad. I get so worried when something bad’s about to happen. A woman down the hall, she wrote to the network and asked them to tell her if everything was going to turn out all right for Steve and Kitty, in case she died before she found out? They sent back a form letter. Now she’s worried all the time. But I say, it’s a way to stay alive, right? It’s something to live for.”

  Now the young couple were embracing again. A door blew open. Another young woman walked in, and the couple pulled apart.

  “The last time you saw me,” Jerene said, “I think it must have been my eighteenth birthday party. Remember? But what’s most special to me—I visited you in the laundromat. I remember you let me put the quarters in the machines and push the levers in myself.”

  “Oh, all the little girls liked that,” Nellie said. “Not me. It was a hard life. Not like the life you had, growing up in that big house with all those nice things. Look, there’s the mother. She is out to make trouble for everyone else. No joy herself, has to take everybody else’s away, I guess.”

  They watched the mother scheme for a few minutes. Then Jerene said, “Grandma? Do you think Daddy and Mommy will be visiting you soon?”

  Nellie turned and faced her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Could you bring them?”

  Jerene smiled. “We aren’t getting along too well these days,” she admitted.

  “That’s too bad,” Nellie said. But her eyes were veering toward the television and finally, after giving Jerene a knowing, mischievous grin, she gave herself up wholly to indulgence until a commercial came on.

  Now Nellie re-arranged herself in the armchair. “I’m grateful to have my program,” she said to Jerene. “I don’t have much of a life here anymore. But this—this is just like a life. It happens every day—except for the weekends. The weekends are hard, especially when they’ve had a big cliff-hanger on Friday. Usually I can tell when a big cliff-hanger’s coming up as early as Tuesday. You know they’re building up to something bad. The weekend that Jenny was on the operating table I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  When the program started again, Jerene said, “Grandma, I have to go now.”

  “Oh so soon? But you just came.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt your program,” Jerene continued. “Now that I know, I’ll come back to visit you at a more convenient time.”

  “Oh, I feel so rude,” Nellie said. “But my program is so important to me. Now tell me again—when are you going back to Africa?”

  “Not for a while.”

  There was a loud crashing noise. On the television a car swerved to avoid collision, and then the screen went dark and a phone was ringing—whether on the show or in the real world Jerene couldn’t tell. “Oh dear,” Nellie said. “What’s happened? Who was in that car?”

  “Goodbye,” Jerene said. But Nellie was lost in private anxiety and did not answer. Quietly Jerene moved out the door, leaving a vase of flowers and a box of candy on the bureau.

  Her eyes felt heavy as she rode down in the elevator, as if caked with scrapings from the yellow walls of the hallways. She thought she might throw up from the smell of the food, and ran toward the exit. But when she moved through the heavy glass doors and out onto the street, it was as if the wind blew the scrapings away, bruised her alive again.

  She did not think as she walked to the train station. She did not think as she changed trains at Jamaica, and changed trains again at Woodside. Indeed, only when she was under the familiar ground of Manhattan did she allow herself to remember the hidden fact, the tiny grain of knowledge. Maggie. Never in her life had she heard her mother called Maggie. It was a name from that dead time Jerene had never been allowed to talk about, that ugly origin which, when she brought it up, her mother shooed away like a fly: “Just be grateful for what you have,” she’d say, as if in scolding, and immediately insist on buying Jerene a dress. No joy herself, has to take everyone else’s away. Her mother was Margaret now. And when the ladies asked about her daughter, she invented a husband in Africa, and two beautiful grandchildren, Sam Jr. and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was Jerene’s middle name, and sometimes, when they were alone, Margaret had called her Elizabeth. Jerene had been her father’s idea, the name of his own grandmother, and she wondered if he had given it to her as a last offering to the pyre of his past, his part in a bargain that would guarantee her protection from everything the name meant.

  When she got home, Laura was waiting for her on the sofa in the kitchen, chewing gum, one stockinged leg curled under her buttocks. “There’s tea,” she said. “I’ve made some really wonderful cookies.”

  “Just tea,” Jerene said.

  She poured the tea herself and sat silently on the sofa.

  “What happened?” Laura said.

  “I saw her.”

  “Oh wow,” Laura said. “Was it okay?”

  Jerene smiled and touched her hair, which was of course such a popular style in Africa.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was okay.” She looked like she was about to cry. “Oh sweetheart, come here,” Laura said, and taking Jerene into her embrace, held her there, silent, while the afternoon drained away.

  In the dark of her Sunday afternoon living room, cool through closed curtains, Rose searched a giant atlas for a six-letter Indonesian island known for its dragon lizard: blank-blank-blank-O-blank-blank. So far she had found “Tidore” and “Misool,” both of which, once fit into the crossword puzzle, created more problems than they solved. But there were still many tiny islands to the north left to explore. She pressed on. She imagined herself a little cartoon captain maneuvering a crossword-patterned boat through a sea of words. She had finished the regular puzzle and was now doing the acrostic. Slowly, as she worked, a quotation was beginning to appear in the diagram, like a photograph emerging from darkroom fluids. Words that a moment ago made no sense were blossoming into comprehensibility, as when the G from GEORGE ELIOT transformed M—PI- into MAGPIE. At the end, she knew, she would be presented with a whole thing—a coherent quotation, the title and author of which could be found by lining up the first letters of all the answers to the clues—and it was this she longed for. The meshing of meanings, the knitting of one set of words into another: It all made sense as a curative principle. And she wondered, suddenly, if all copy editors, encyclopedists, cartographers, crossword puzzle editors, were people who had stumbled into their careers because they desperately needed to forget things all the time. “The vultures of the thinking world,” Owen had once called them, feeding on the leftovers of thought, on what remained after the great documents of history and science were pared down to reasonable size. As Rose was learning, such carrion was better than alcohol. This benign, useless activity literally tied up the brain; it blocked panic. In a burst of bitter energy, Rose thrust Thomas Mann and Timon of Athens into the fray. She fired out synonyms like bullets. But at the end her head ached horribly, as if her skull were a swollen, empty thing. The neatly com
pleted puzzle had absorbed all order; her life remained as it was.

  It was four o’clock. Owen, out somewhere, doing something, had invited a young teacher from Harte home for dinner. Thursday, at breakfast, he had said to her, “Rose, I forgot to tell you—I invited that young English teacher to dinner Sunday night, remember the one I told you about? He’s lonely, I think, and needs a home-cooked meal. Do you mind?” What could she have said? The invitation had already been extended. And anyway, she was in some ways grateful to Owen for inviting the teacher. The presence of a stranger, she knew, would let her off the hook with Philip. He could not give her those pleading looks across the table—looks she could not bear.

  She went to D’Agostino’s. The air-conditioning blew her hair and numbed her face. She pushed her cart down the bright aisle of vegetables, arranged in fancy wicker baskets to reflect the market’s new upscale image. As always, the place was full of women picking among the mounds of papayas and mangoes, their little babies’ legs sticking through the slats of the carts. As a little boy Philip had loved it when she rode him in her shopping cart, had kept begging her to do it as late as his sixth birthday, when he was far too big, and it would have embarrassed her to be seen pushing him. She had not been an indulgent mother, not like some women she knew. One day she simply said, “No, Philip, you’re too big, and that’s that.” He looked at her, dumbfounded at first, and dragged at her leg as she maneuvered the aisles of the supermarket, trying to kick him off. This very supermarket.

  But she was not going to think about Philip. She concentrated on pulling cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash from the bins, then turned the aisle, where a little girl was frantically trying to reconstruct a pyramid of toilet paper that she had accidentally toppled. “I said all of it,” her mother commanded. Nearby, stuck in a corner, a haggard-looking woman not much older than Rose droned, “Free sample of low-calorie cheese spread, have a free sample of low-calorie cheese spread.” She was wearing a stained hound’s-tooth dress made from some sort of shimmering material. Across from her, a younger black woman, a girl really, dressed in tight spandex pants, was demonstrating a new kind of quick-cooking bacon at a little frying-station while a group of women watched desultorily. Rose stopped and gazed for a moment as the girl inexpertly turned the red strips. She would have liked to join the women, would have liked to have been able to absorb herself in so innocent a thing as bacon-frying. But it was too late for that now. She moved on to the checkout stand, where an electronic eye automatically calculated the prices of her purchases.

  Having arranged for the groceries to be delivered, she went to Barnes & Noble. In the self-help section were many cozy books on self-assertion, how to put the zest back in your sex life, the Cinderella Complex. She looked through them feverishly. A couple of young women stood at the rack, absorbed in a book called Go For It. They were in their twenties, chewing gum; secretaries probably. They were genuinely interested in improving themselves. The sight of them made Rose feel fleetingly good, as she remembered the doldrums of her own life, those not-too-distant days when she too had had the luxury of worrying about whether she was going for it or was a victim of the Cinderella Complex. Those days had passed. What she needed now was a book telling her how to live in rubble.

  Once, about five, maybe seven years ago, she had had a cancer scare—a mysterious lump in her back which, as it turned out, was nothing, a knot of fat. Still, in those first, terror-stricken days, she found herself perpetually drawn on her lunch hour to the “Health” section at Dalton’s, where she flipped frantically through a book of symptoms, looking enviously at everything that was not a mysterious fatty lump embedded in the flesh of the back, covetous of fatigue, a sore throat, a mysterious exhaustion after meals. She would have embraced hypoglycemia if it meant she didn’t have cancer. And indeed, she didn’t have cancer, or hypoglycemia either. Thus she walked out of the doctor’s office breathy with joy, shaking, and felt that classic surge of appreciation for the smallest things—for a tree bending toward the sun in a patch of sidewalk grass, for a woman crossing the avenue with twins in a carriage. But not for long. Those moments of the most intense pleasure, those moments for which she felt nostalgia at the same instant she was living them—they were brief indeed. Soon the business of life caught up with her, caught her up. Years passed. It was as if she’d been asleep. She looked once again at the symptom book. And once again she remembered who it had been, walking through her door on a normal night, full of news, eager to wake her.

  Furtively, because she knew she was becoming addicted, she made her way to the aisle marked “Games and Puzzles.” On the bottom shelf were neatly stacked books of acrostics. She thumbed through the first one she picked up, opened it randomly. The clues included: “French anthropologist, author of Tristes Tropiques (2 wds.)” and “mull, think over, consider.” She thought: “Lévi-Strauss.” She thought: “ruminate.”

  It was a good start.

  Nearby, across the bookstore, the two girls were still entrenched in Go For It. Probably they worked for realty offices, read Cosmopolitan or Mademoiselle on their lunch hours, faithfully and honestly filled out the self-help questionnaires. She did not feel sorry for them. At that moment, she would have given anything to have their lives.

  She grabbed the book of acrostic puzzles, and hurried to the cash register to pay for it.

  Even though no one was home, the television was on to discourage burglars when Philip arrived at his parents’ apartment. Fred Flintstone floated in a sea of cooked rice that spilled out the windows and onto the lawn. He and Wilma had reversed roles for the day on a bet. It seemed eerie, to Philip, the way the program played cheerfully to the empty apartment, to the chairs and sofa perched in a circle around it. He watched Fred battle the rice until a commercial came on: An unhappy-looking man was trying frantically to light a birthday cake, but the candles kept sinking into the frosting like periscopes.

  Then there was a small commotion at the door, and Rose walked in, carrying the groceries the delivery boy had left with the doorman.

  “Hello, Mom,” Philip said.

  “Philip,” she said. “This is a surprise.” She kicked the door closed and, staggering under the weight of the groceries, moved toward the kitchen. “Let me help you with that,” Philip said. He took a bag from her arms and followed her through.

  “You’re earlier than I expected.”

  “Well,” Philip said, “I didn’t have much to do today, and I thought I might as well come early.”

  “That’s nice,” Rose said. She was putting vegetables in the refrigerator.

  “Can I help you put things away?”

  “Sure.”

  Dutifully he began to unpack the groceries—canned tomatoes, pasta, ground beef and veal. Seeing a cereal box, he was tempted to root through with his fist for the dusty paper envelope that contained the prize. He still longed for prizes. But the cereal was Familia—healthy stuff, no toys. Gone were the days of Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula.

  “You’re making spaghetti?”

  “Owen’s bringing home someone from work, a teacher he says needs a good home-cooked meal,” Rose said. “And there’s nothing more home-cooked in this house than spaghetti.”

  “True,” Philip said. “I’m glad. I’ve missed your spaghetti.”

  She was silent for a moment, as if distracted. “Well, I’m certainly happy to make it,” she said, getting down on her knees before the refrigerator to put away the meat.

  “Mom,” Philip said, “do you know this teacher Dad’s bringing home?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t met him, but your father’s talked about him a lot. He’s from the South—Georgia, I think. He coaches lacrosse. This is his first year.”

  “So Dad told me.”

  Rose stopped where she knelt. “He told you?”

  “Yes. When we had dinner together earlier in the week.”

  “You had dinner together this week?”

  “Yes,” Philip said. “Didn’t Dad
mention it to you?”

  “No. I guess he forgot. What night was it?”

  “Tuesday.”

  From where she sat, hunched, she hoisted herself up and walked back to the kitchen counter. The grocery bags were nearly empty.

  “You work fast,” she said.

  Philip shrugged. “I know where things go in this kitchen.”

  “Yes,” Rose said, “but how do you know things haven’t changed since you moved out? How do you know your father and I haven’t completely reorganized the kitchen?”

  “I don’t,” Philip said. “I just assumed—why are you asking me that?”

  Rose smiled tensely. “Just teasing,” she said. “Thanks for your help.”

  She began to arrange pots and pans and cutting boards for cooking, and Philip returned to the living room. Wilma Flintstone was giving a speech about how a woman’s proper place was really in the home. He watched for a few seconds, then switched off the set. Back in the kitchen, his mother was chopping garlic with a small paring knife.

  “It hurts me when you’re so cold to me,” he said.

  Rose paused in the midst of chopping, then resumed. “Cold to you?” she repeated.

  “I come home, I haven’t seen you for a while, you treat me like you’d rather I just jump out the window,” Philip said. “Come on, Mom. There’s no point in kidding around, or pretending what’s happening isn’t happening.”

  She stopped chopping. She put down the knife, moved across the kitchen, leaned her head into her hand. “Is that how I make you feel?”

  Philip didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Philip,” she said. “I’m having a hard time right now. You can’t expect me to be all sweetness and light and maternal warmth all the time. Sometimes your own life preoccupies you. Warmth can be more of an effort than you’re capable of.” She rubbed her fingers together, went to the sink and washed her hands. “You’re a grown-up now,” she said. “You can’t expect me to treat you like a child all the time or to pretend I’m feeling good when I’m not.”