“You can call me Margaret.” Then, peering at us quizzically, she asked, “And what are your names?”
We introduced ourselves, pleased with this new game.
“We’re hungry, Margaret,” Laurie announced again. “What’s for breakfast?”
“I told you dear, I’m not a cook. And since your mother isn’t here, you’ll have to fix your own breakfast.”
Disappointed, we stared at the cupboards and drawers as if we believed they might open themselves and offer us the necessary ingredients.
“Oh, I suppose you’ll need a little help,” Margaret said. She stood and opened one of the drawers. “Here, Dan,” she said to me, “take this spatula.”
“I’m Michael,” I corrected her, enjoying this pretended clumsiness at learning our names.
“Oh, that’s too serious a name for a boy your age. Take the spatula, Mike.”
Michael did sound serious. That’s why I liked it. But for the moment, I could see, I’d have to be Mike. I held the spatula and then flipped it jauntily in the air, as I thought a Mike might do.
“Now, what is it you’d like to eat?”
“Pancakes,” Laurie said, and I nodded. Pancakes were fine, though how could we possibly make them? Dan loitered by the kitchen doorway and stared out at the backyard, angry at Margaret for calling me Dan. He turned and faced her. “You are our mommy.”
“No dear, you’re mistaken, though we do look alike. But I certainly wouldn’t mind having a fine little boy like you. Wouldn’t you like to help and get the eggs from the fridge?”
For a moment Dan hesitated, then his stubborn face softened. He walked across the kitchen to the refrigerator and Margaret turned to Laurie. “Well, honey, what kind of flour do you want to use?”
“White.”
“Oh, whole wheat is better for you.”
We didn’t say anything. Mother had never used whole wheat flour before; we didn’t even know there was any in the house. Perhaps this woman before us was Margaret, and not Mother.
“I like white,” Laurie said.
“If you add a little whole wheat flour, it’ll taste better.”
Laurie didn’t reply, looking to me for support. I shrugged and flipped the spatula.
“How many eggs, Margaret?” Dan called out.
“Two will be enough, dear.” She turned again to Laurie. “Well?”
“I’d like white … with some whole wheat.”
Under Margaret’s directions, Dan cracked and beat the eggs, then mixed them with the milk. Laurie sifted the flour while I heated the pan and watched the butter bubble.
“Careful,” Margaret said, “don’t let it go brown.”
I lowered the heat. Dan and Laurie, miraculously cooperative, took turns pouring the batter onto the hot greased pan, and I flipped over each irregularly shaped cake. And so, in our mother’s absence, we had our first cooking lesson.
When the pancakes lay waiting on our plates, we passed around the maple syrup, one by one pouring it over our portions as if this were the most solemn act in the world. Taking small, cautious bites, we discovered that those pancakes actually tasted good. Margaret ate a bit too and praised our cooking. “If your mother were here she’d be so proud!”
We heard a car pull into the driveway. We sat still before our empty plates, listening to the car door slam and then the muffled rattling of keys. At the whoosh of the opening front door Margaret said, “Let’s put those plates away, Daddy’s home.”
We stared at her. Margaret was gone, and now Mother led us to the sink as Father entered the room, the heavy Sunday paper tight under his arm. He watched us lined up, handing the plates to Mother, our faces still sloppy with syrup, and he smiled, surely pleased by our industry, by this postcard of a happy family. Yet we said nothing about our private game, which from the very first seemed to exclude him.
Father pointed to me. “Hey guy, we have some shoveling to do.”
Wiping my face, I nodded and wished the futile wish that this was the last time in my life I’d ever have to dig paths through snow. Mother bent down to kiss me good-bye, and instead of trying to wriggle away I offered my cheek and held her. “Good-bye, Margaret,” I whispered. Then I quickly turned away, for I didn’t want to see her reaction. Something about this game unnerved me: was she Mother, pretending to be Margaret, or was she Margaret, pretending to be my mother?
*
Keeping to the sidewalk’s thin path through the latest deep snowfall, I walked home late from school, having lingered in the library for a social studies report on Brasília, a strange, monumental city surrounded by a rain forest that even in black-and-white photographs seemed to seethe with green life. Now, gazing up at the trees’ bare branches, I longed for leaves, for spring’s distant warmth.
A car horn rang out, and I turned to see Mother at the wheel, easing over to the curb behind me. She rolled down the window: Laurie and Dan sat scrunched together on the front seat beside her—a treat seldom offered—and, though she never wore such things, a blue scarf covered Mother’s unruly hair. She was someone else again. “Hey, kid, want a lift?”
“No thanks,” I replied, coolly regarding my brother and sister. “My mother told me never to ride with strangers.”
She laughed. “You’re a good kid. Toodle-loo!” Waving the tail of her scarf like a handkerchief, she drove off, and Dan and Laurie turned around in their seats and made foolish faces at me.
What’s your name? I almost called out, but the car had already slipped around the comer, disappearing behind a snowbank. Angry that I’d been left alone for being so safety-minded, I turned in the opposite direction and thromped through the deepest drifts I could find until icy chunks encrusted my pants. My shoes damp and socks thickened, I eventually found myself at the edge of a mall’s slush-stained parking lot, thoroughly chilled and farther from home than I’d planned on.
When I finally returned and peeled off my stiff clothes, I could hear the faint sounds of Mother in the kitchen, now herself again and preparing dinner. I sneezed, and Laurie and Dan ran up to let me know what I’d missed: a woman named Dot had driven them to a stationery store in a distant neighborhood, buying them comic books and all the candy they wanted. I nodded, noting without comment that they hadn’t saved me a single goodie. Worse, Mother hadn’t saved a thing for me either, but then she’d been Dot, hadn’t she, and I’d been merely a cautious stranger.
By evening a soupy congestion forced me to suck in raspy breaths, and Mother wrapped me under extra blankets in bed and hovered over me with a reassuringly familar fluster. The next morning she kept me home from school, offering me hot raspberry tea laced with honey, and I luxuriated in my fever and aching limbs as I listened to Laurie and Dan being hustled off to the bus stop.
When I woke from a sweaty nap she even served me my favorite meal—chicken broth and crackers, cheese wedges, and ginger ale—but after lunch she was almost businesslike when she held out a spoonful of thick and bitter medicine. She shook her head quizzically at whatever I said, until I realized she knew no English. I tried communicating in elaborate sign language, which delighted her, and just when I managed to wheedle out her new name, Rosario, the phone rang.
“Adios,” she said with a grin and what seemed to me to be the right accent, her drawn-out o so richly foreign.
She returned with the thermometer, speaking English and herself again, and the shocking thought occurred to me that my mother lived a secret life at home while we were away at school, improvising these characters to fit her changing moods.
*
As if the bare trees’ green buds sprouting into bright waving leaves were a surrounding inspiration, Mother flourished too, displaying surprise after surprise for the three of us: Marcie the policewoman, who always wore a long-sleeved blouse to hide her scar from a bullet wound; Tina, a dancer famous for her flying leaps, who huffed through stretching exercises in the afternoon, trying to coax us from the canned laughter of the reruns we watched on TV; Valerie the
photographer, who specialized in groupings of potatoes, onions, single-pint milk cartons, and reconstructed egg shells that she called Family Portraits. But Mother was never Gladys, the name Father called her.
Whenever he came home from work Mother returned to herself—our feigned innocence on that morning of the pancakes had set a pattern of secrecy—yet even though she sat on a chair at the dinner table or in front of the television, she managed to announce the reappearance of a character with the slightest change: whole histories were implied by any of a dozen slightly different nods or shrugs or shaded glances. A stifled yawn, its faint strain turning into a tiny, hard smile, and I knew Mother was now Susan, the woman who wouldn’t laugh, no matter what jokey histrionics Laurie, Dan, and I might perform; a bitter sigh and tight shake of her hair while washing the dishes and she became Melanie, the big-city reporter who’d seen it all; a single, knowing peek at the ceiling fan announced Tamara the Magnificent, a retired juggler who demonstrated her talents with invisible plates and balls, candlesticks and swords.
Often during breakfast I watched Mother’s hands cupped against the formica surface. Her fingers curling inward suggested the imminent release of another new character, and I honed my skill at identifying her thicket of selves. In this way I grew up bilingually—learning both the sometimes exasperating rules of English grammar at school and Mother’s impersonating gestures at home. My first language helped me make my way through the world; my second language helped me see through it.
*
With the return of spring Father kept every inch of our lawn mowed and trimmed. The owner of a nursery and landscaping business, he made sure the tidy green world around our house was an example for the neighbors, an advertisement for any present and future customers, and it was my burden, as the oldest child, to help him. Toiling under the sun, I admired the persistence of weeds and creepers for their ability to turn up in the most unlikely corners, and even as I tore them out I wished them well. But all that hard work was a kind of dream for Father, a dream no one else could really enter, and sometimes, as he laid mulch about a flower bed or raked up lawn clippings, he occasionally glanced my way without recognition.
One afternoon Mother came out to announce BLTs and lemonade and Father didn’t turn to acknowledge her. Bent over a hedge, he continued snipping away with his usual fervor. She surveyed the smooth green expanse, her eyes darting back and forth, her body eerily still, and I recalled that night when I first noticed how far apart my parents seemed from each other.
After lunch, Father packed us off to the local bowling alley, as he did every Saturday, giving Mother her weekly “rest,” as I once overheard them call it. On the way there, the radio news detailed a hurricane’s path through a chain of Caribbean islands, and I imagined uprooted palm trees swirling in the howling wind. When Father finally parked the car in the lot I looked out the window, surprised to see such a startlingly clear sky.
We all emptied out of the car and followed him into the bowling alley, where Top 40 music jangling from the lobby loudspeaker was punctuated by the silky growl of speeding balls and the clatter of falling pins. At the counter we faced the open shelves of shoes—with their forlorn laces and frayed tongues, they looked embarrassed by their familiarity with hundreds of different feet. Father checked the soles, the wear of each heel before ordering our shoes, and then, with the huge scoring sheet nestled lightly in the crook of his arm, he led us to our lane.
Head bent, he listed our names on the sheet and we huddled beside him, taking in the competing aromas of his hair tonic, his Clorets. Then we searched through those long racks of bowling balls lined up like a complement of bombs, the same kind that in cartoons would roll with a lit fuse into the lair of a hidden villain. Somewhere among them a bowling ball waited for the grip of my hand, and after much consideration I slipped my fingers into one with a blue streak circling it and approved of its round, easy weight.
As the youngest, Dan had the privilege of starting. Ignoring the finger holes, he hugged the huge ball against his chest and knelt down at the double line, carefully setting the ball on the polished surface. He aligned it with the distant pins, pushed, and the ball crept away, arriving at the center of the pins with almost no force and barely breaking through them. His next ball rolled down the same path and missed the remaining pins.
“Good try,” Father said, his voice holding back something less patient, but it wasn’t enough to ease Dan’s sulk.
Laurie was up next, and she swung her ball at such a sharp angle it careened dangerously close to the gutter, then curved away to the other edge of the lane. The ball just managed to clip a corner pin, sending it flying. On her second try the ball wobbled into the gutter’s polished groove.
She moped back to Father, and his hand encompassed her wrist, turning it back and forth experimentally. “You have to keep this straight,” he said. Laurie regarded her hand with curiosity, as if it might speak and explain why it wouldn’t obey her.
I studied the distant pins, willing my own wrist straight. I swung and released and watched the quivering pattern of the ball’s blue stripe repeating until it toppled nine pins.
For me, a disappointment, but Father said nothing and looked away at a ball coursing down another lane: I was too old for advice. When I smacked the last pin for a spare, Father’s reward was letting me draw the slash through the corner box of my frame. I bore down on the pencil, hoping for a long succession of thin X’s for the rest of my score.
After rubbing rosin on his hands, Father picked up his ball, took a few swift steps, and with a graceful backward arc of his arm shot it down the lane. Its dark surface flashed in the light, and Father stood so still, watching the distant wooden stutter of flailing pins. A strike. He stood there until the pins were reset and then he turned back to us, his lips tightly curved. But there was no real pleasure in Father’s smile. Instead I saw something fierce and not quite knowable.
As the game progressed I began to dread that hint of grimace in his grin, a mixture of suppressed anger and exasperation that appeared whether or not he bowled a strike. If Father didn’t really enjoy the game, then what attraction did it hold for him? Waiting my turn, I listened to a ball purling down the next lane, purring like the sound of a well-oiled mower, and I thought all those falling pins, in lane after lane, were a particularly exotic lawn, and their explosive clatter was the harsh music of some intimate battle. If this was a battle, then Father reenlisted us with every frame, for when the pins automatically set up again, another noxious overgrowth needed to be mown down.
Now my mother wasn’t the only person I saw with new eyes. In the days that followed, my father’s usual remoteness—which I’d so long taken for granted—grew increasingly uncomfortable. His silence seemed everywhere in the house, surrounding even the screech of a teapot, an alarm clock’s grating buzz, and I began to suspect why Mother’s varied identities squeezed themselves back inside her whenever around him. My parents were locked in some mysterious adult dispute, an argument perhaps far more serious than I was willing to believe. My ability to imagine this horrified me, but the vision I’d acquired wasn’t something I could turn off, like a flashlight. It was now a part of me, shining into places I’d never noticed before.
*
Mother’s characters continued chatting up entire breakfasts and whole afternoons—a string of women who were their own storybooks: Stella the usher who could recount the smallest details of movie after movie; Christie the bag lady, whose past privileged childhood overwhelmed the present in sudden bursts of memory.
One morning Mother remained unusually quiet, and after cleaning up the soggy little O’s of cereal Dan had spilled on the floor she sat back at the table, her thumb stroking a spoon’s concave smoothness. “I ever tell you the time I got lost in a department store?” she asked, in a husky voice that proclaimed the arrival of Danielle, the optometrist who gave us free eye exams.
“Nuh-uh,” Laurie managed, mouth full.
Dan pushed away
from the table, leaving his second bowl of cereal untouched. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Danielle barely noticed, and with a faraway look, as if savoring the story to come, she swept her hair back and curled it behind her ears. “I remember walking down an aisle of toys, staring at the rows of dolls while my mother browsed in the kitchen section next door. I knew she’d drag me along to the linen department pretty soon, so I pretended the beautiful dolls with their lovely smiles were asking me to stay.
“I could see my mother reaching out to touch a toaster so shiny it reflected her hand. I thought how cold it must feel, and I shivered and turned to a shelf lined with clear bags of marbles. One of them was filled with cat’s eyes, and they reminded me of those dolls’ eyes, you know? A bag of eyes that seemed to see something in me that I didn’t know was there … have you ever felt like that?”
Laurie looked down at her toast, but I shook my head yes. I felt that way almost all the time now.
“So you probably know how strange I felt at that moment,” Danielle said wistfully. “Anyway, whatever that something was, it made me want to touch the marbles, see what they felt like in my hand. The bag was tied shut with a red string, and by the time I undid the knot I realized that I’d forgotten about my mother. She’d moved out of sight, and then I called to her in such a tiny voice that I realized I really didn’t want her to hear me.
“Now that was a very interesting thought, one I suspected the marbles had somehow given me, and it made me want to touch them even more. But when I reached into the bag my hand slipped and the marbles rolled on the floor—so many little eyes trying to see me!
“I ran away before a saleslady could discover what I’d done, and I ran away from my mother, too—wherever she was—because I was sure she’d be angry.” When Danielle paused, I imagined those marbles spinning on our kitchen floor, the cat’s eyes catching a dizzy swirl of shelves and ceiling and counter and us.
“Well,” she continued, “I ran through the furniture department and then up the escalator two steps at a time. I kept rushing down aisles on the second floor—the department store was too big. The thought suddenly hit me that my mother might never find me, and I stopped. I stood in the middle of the perfume department. There were posters of women with shaded eyelids and streaks of blush and long lashes everywhere, and they looked so serious I felt sure they knew why I was there.
How to Read an Unwritten Language Page 2