How to Read an Unwritten Language

by Philip Graham

  “Then a saleslady behind one of the counters said, ‘Why so glum?’ She looked a little like those women in the posters, and at first I almost believed she’d walked out of one of them. I started to back away, but she gave me such a friendly smile I had to stop.

  “‘Not talking today?’ she asked. I shook my head. If I didn’t speak, then I wouldn’t have to confess what I’d done.

  “‘So, how about a little makeover?’ she said. ‘It’s a slow day, y’know.’

  “I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘C’mere,’ she said with a little wave, ‘I can make you look like a big girl in no time.’

  “She pointed to a stool in front of the counter and I climbed up, and when she bent down we were almost the same height. Already I felt big. She brushed my cheeks and forehead with a sweet-smelling powder, and I crinkled my nose in pleasure and tried to hold in a sneeze.”

  “She let me pick the color of eyeliner—the deepest, darkest blue. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. I felt a soft pencil against my eyelid, tugging a bit at my eye underneath. I thought of those marbles again and shifted in my seat, trying to imagine what my new face looked like. ‘Hold still,’ the woman whispered, and worked on my other lid. Then I felt the tickle of a brush sweeping along my lashes, the pull of something over my eyebrows.”

  Danielle paused to flip her hair behind her ears again, and she offered us a wan little smile. Laurie stared back, her hands clutching a napkin beside her forgotten breakfast.

  “Well, then that saleslady said, ‘Now it’s time to pick your lipstick.’ She spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear her, and just as quietly I said, ‘You pick.’ My eyes were still closed, and I felt a cool stickiness rub against my lips—first the top, then the bottom, and I wished my lips were a mile long so she’d take forever. When the saleslady told me to press them together I did, two or three times. ‘Open your eyes,’ she said, and there I was, just inches away in a mirror and with something like cat’s eyes, so grown up I could walk right by my mother in the store and she wouldn’t recognize me at all. Who am I now? I thought—”

  “But your mother did find you, didn’t she?” Laurie broke in.

  “That’s the funny thing,” Danielle said, escaping again into a dreamy look, “I can’t remember …”

  She had nothing more to say. I pushed away from the table, motioning to Laurie that we might be late for the bus, but she hesitated, not at all satisfied with Danielle’s answer. Then I noticed Dan standing just outside the kitchen doorway, waiting for his absence to be noticed.

  “C’mon, it’s time to go,” I insisted. While I hurried my disappointed brother and sister out the door and down the steps, I couldn’t stop imagining those spinning marbles. Were they somehow us, trying to catch a glimpse of who our mother really was, or were they the parts of Mother we’d recently discovered, casting strange and different gazes on us? I tore down the sidewalk, afraid of missing the bus, again afraid of seeing what I never dreamt I’d ever see.

  The Collector

  Mother’s characters now lodged inside me, inner voices that chattered away even during school hours, sometimes branching off into conflicting paths that confounded me. There’s no instrument panel that can’t be mastered, whispered Joanna, a test pilot, spurring me on as I struggled with algebraic equations in math class. Yet the numbers and letters blurred into smears on the lined paper when Maureen, the gossip columnist, spoke up and insisted, Secrets? What are secrets? If I can’t find out, I make it up.

  These voices so preoccupied me that everyone else at school became irrelevant background: the thick-glassed, stuttering teacher who rapped out chalky math problems on the board, the bully who patrolled the school entrance, even the new girl—all blond waves and piercing green eyes—who sat at the desk beside me. And what were those lyrics I sang during chorus practice? Only one moment, echoed over and over during those last weeks before summer vacation, stands out: passing Dan or Laurie in the halls as we were herded along in our separate classes, catching their faces, holding their eyes for a moment and knowing that they, too, were peopled with Mother’s cast of characters.

  *

  One afternoon as school let out, Laurie made her way toward me through the crowd of kids waiting for the bus. “Mom’s here,” she said, Dan in tow. Nearly breathless, she pointed out our dark blue station wagon idling at the edge of the parking lot.

  Mother caught our gaze and nodded in an odd, crisp fashion: a new character awaited us. Dan frowned—he’d grown less and less patient with Mother’s stories, and Laurie had to drag him by the hand, tempting him with visions of comic books and candy. Finally they raced for the prized front seat and this time I followed, determined not to lose out on any treats again.

  Laurie pulled ahead of Dan with a triumphant whoop, but all she won was a locked door.

  “In the back, in the back,” Mother said, waving us away from the front door. “What do you think this is, a private car or something?”

  She tapped her fingernails on the steering wheel as we quietly settled in the backseat. “Where to?” she asked.

  My brother and sister looked to me for an answer and I hesitated—where did I want to go?

  Mother turned and offered us a frown. “Well, don’t most kids go home after school? Or don’t you have a home?”

  “Of course we do,” I said.

  “And where’s home? Take all day if you like … the meter’s running, y’know.”

  His hand on the door, Dan shifted impatiently, perhaps contemplating escape, and I spoke up so he wouldn’t be left behind. “432 Porter Lane. Do you want directions?”

  She laughed. “I know this city like the back of my hand.”

  “City?” I asked, but she ignored my question and pulled out of the school parking lot. “What do you kids study in there, anyway? Reading, arithmetic, all that stuff?”

  “Uh-huh,” I replied. “And—”

  “Well, I’m sure you don’t get taught what you really need to know.”

  Dan leaned forward, suddenly interested. He hadn’t cared much for kindergarten or the first grade, and now thought even less of the second. “We don’t!”

  “Just like I thought. It seems to me that what you need to learn is the first and last lesson of life: Don’t never take nothing from nobody.”

  Dan nodded at this wisdom. Laurie and I said nothing.

  “Hey, you all deaf back there?”

  “No, we heard,” I said. “Don’t ever take anything from anybody.”

  “Good grammar, kid,” she said, eyeing me from the rearview mirror. “But it doesn’t matter how you say it, just remember it. You want to know my opinion? Kids shouldn’t go to school. They should all drive cabs.”

  “We’re too young to drive,” I said.

  She snorted. “Details, details. Bring down the age for a license, prop up the driver’s seat with a few pillows, and everything’s set, right?”

  “Right,” Dan replied.

  “Yeah, well you’re a smart kid, that’s for sure. So listen to this: drive a couple of days in a cab, and you’ll see the world. All kinds of people, all types. Some of them rough, too. But everyone can be handled, see? I remember when I picked up two guys, big beefy types, and when they got in the back I could smell that they were pickled …”

  Laurie giggled. “Pickled?”

  “Yeah, you know: snookered, drunk. I didn’t mind. Money’s money. But it turned out they were creeps—one of them said, ‘Hey, look at this knife we just bought.’ I looked in the rearview mirror and they were passing it back and forth, admiring the nasty-looking thing, and it was nasty looking, I’ll tell you that. I knew they were trying to scare me, so I just said, ‘Nice, where’d you buy it?’

  “‘We didn’t buy it, we stole it,’ the other creep said, with a laugh I didn’t like. Then he leaned forward and waved it near the side of my face and said, ‘And we’d really like to try it out.’”

  Laurie’s lips pressed together, so I said, “But here y
ou are now, so this story has a happy ending, right?”

  “You bet, that’s the whole point. I looked at that blade wiggling at me and I said, ‘Hey, that beauty looks a lot like a knife I got in my collection. Lemme take a look.’ So I held out my hand and—you won’t believe this—the dope gave it to me. Too much to drink, right? I slammed on the brakes and waved the knife at them. ‘Okay, assholes,’ I said. ‘This ride’s over. You pay full fare, and I expect a big tip.’”

  “They threw their money at me real fast, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “But then one of the dopes said, ‘What about our knife?’

  “‘You like me so much you gave it to me as a gift, remember?’ I waved it a little closer and they popped out my cab toot sweet. ‘Course, once they were safe they started calling me every name in the book. Tough guys. I drove off a little richer, with a nice souvenir.”

  Mother turned the corner, driving by the same stone church we’d passed just a few minutes ago, and I remembered Father once complaining about a cabdriver doing this to him in New York City—now our own mother was trying to cheat us, driving in circles around a block that wasn’t even ours.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but this isn’t the way to our home.”

  Her eyes in the rearview mirror caught me again. “Don’t you live on Carter Street?”

  “Porter Lane.”

  “Well, well. My mistake.”

  We drove on in silence the last few blocks, and when she stopped in front of our house, Mother said, “So there you go, kids—I get you home safely and teach you a valuable lesson you should never forget, right?”

  “We’re not paying full fare,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s on the house—I don’t usually drive such well- behaved kids around.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I opened the car door and we all scooted out. Mother kept the car idling. “Aren’t you coming too?” Laurie asked her.

  She didn’t even turn to look back at us. “I’m not a baby-sitter, little girl. I’ve got a job to do.”

  We stood on the sidewalk, stunned as the car drove away from us. “Asshole,” Dan shouted. He kicked at a rock and it bounced ineffectually a few feet. Only after the car disappeared in the distance, only after we couldn’t hear purr of its engine did we listlessly approach the front door.

  It was locked. Laurie’s lips quivered but I shushed her and steered everyone to the backyard. The arc of hedges and shade trees, the well-trimmed lawn and slightly rusted swing set in the corner looked as if it could belong to any family, even a happy one. Laurie grabbed the swing’s chains and I pushed her to giddy heights, while Dan sat cross-legged, pulling up tufts of grass, and we all waited for one of our parents to come home.

  *

  Now whenever Mother changed, Dan fled the house, and when he returned he refused to speak, even to eat, until she apologized by becoming herself again, by simply offering us her uneventful attention. As for me, I couldn’t help feeling that every one of Mother’s characters hid a story about her, and in the evenings Laurie and I tried to guess the motivations of the latest addition to our family.

  “Why did Daisy do that?” Laurie asked me while we sat together on the edge of my bed—earlier in the day Mother had been the brooding Daisy, who borrowed Dan’s crayons and drew over a few days’ worth of newspapers that hadn’t been thrown out yet by Father. Laurie thought they were just messy squiggles, but to me they looked like different kinds of furious weather: the multicolored tornadoes and dark red, brooding clouds were complicated storm patterns that ranged across the comics page and the TV listings.

  “Stupe, she’s an artist,” I said, surprised to hear myself echoing Mother’s cabdriver voice.

  “Oh,” Laurie said, grabbing an edge of the pillow and working it with her fingers. “So why didn’t she draw pictures?”

  “Because that’s not what artists do any more,” I said, recalling a field trip last year to the local university’s museum, when I’d found myself in a room filled with huge canvases that looked as if the artists had danced and twitched while they spread their brilliant colors.

  “Why not?”

  I regarded Laurie’s pained face in the dim light. This wasn’t the route I wanted our discussion to take. I ignored her question and offered another: “I wonder why Daisy became an artist?”

  “Because she can’t draw pictures?”

  “No,” I snorted, though I wasn’t certain of this either. “Maybe,” I said, remembering a bit of the museum guide’s lecture, “maybe she became an artist because she just had to.”

  “You mean, like going to the bathroom?” Laurie kicked her feet against the side of the bunk bed, an odd little laugh gurgling in her throat.

  “Very funny. No, I mean maybe when Daisy was a little girl she grew up in a place where there was a lot of … bad weather.”

  “When she was a little girl,” Laurie repeated, as if this were extraordinary information. “So why would bad weather make her an artist?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, uncertain of my logic, “if she saw things like hurricanes and ice storms, then maybe when she grew up that’s what she wanted to draw.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. You’d think she’d want to draw nice weather, right?”

  “Yeah,” Laurie replied, nodding with satisfaction that we finally agreed. Yet I tapped my heels against the sideboards of the bed, unsettled by the implications of my version of Daisy. If something in her childhood had led her to dash off so many shades of bad weather, then what would we do when we grew up?

  Dan appeared in the doorway, frowning his disapproval, and I glanced at the clock. Once again Mother had forgotten our bedtime, and once again Father hadn’t noticed. We formed a quiet, furtive line at the bathroom sink, as if we were guilty of something, and after our various teeth brushings and hand washings we put ourselves to bed.

  I lay miles away from sleep that night, lost in a crowd of Mother’s someone elses. Where was she among them? Would she ever let us find her again? Some hidden part of me struggled to open, and I pushed away the covers and paced in the dark, fueled by an anxiety I couldn’t name.

  The window offered an antidote: the comforting view of a quiet street. I reached out to hold this sight but instead touched glass, felt its faint chill. I pressed harder at the window. If something so solid could be so easy to see through, then why weren’t people the same way, open to any search, available to anyone’s curiosity? If this were possible, we could finally catch our mother. But then wouldn’t Mother also be able to discover, even with a single glance, my growing fear of her?

  I pulled my hands away from the window’s smooth touch. Suddenly cold, I clutched the open neck of my pajamas. A button dangling from the collar somehow oppressed me and I tugged at the thread, tugged at it again. Yet when the button snapped off I was filled with regret over this small loss. Still grasping the button, I returned to bed and rubbed at its distinct circle—so alone in my warm, sweaty palm—until I fell asleep.

  Mother slept late that morning, the bedroom door shut to us. While Laurie prepared breakfast, I hurried my way down the basement steps to the sewing machine, where Mother kept an ashtray filled with old buttons of varied colors and sizes. Fingering through these other victims of loose threads, I listened to their crisp clicks and decided they deserved a better home than this musty basement. I padded upstairs with the ashtray and set it on a shelf beside my model airplanes.

  The thought of those buttons—a little pool of circular waves—distracted me all through my day at school until finally, during social studies, I abandoned my textbook in exasperation and chewed a little arc of nail from my thumb. It peeled off smoothly and I stopped to examine it: one edge curved and stiff, the other ragged and surprisingly soft. I worried the rest of my nails until I had a tiny pile of crescents on my desk that could have been miniature white eyebrows, boomerangs, disembodied smiles or frowns. Why not collect these too? I slipped them in my pocket.

 
; Back home I took a shot glass from the pantry cabinet and this soon sat brimming with nail clippings, right beside the ashtray of buttons. Over the next few days I collected chicken and fish bones from dinner plates and crammed them into a Flintstones jelly jar: a potential dinosaur skeleton, they were the perfect background for Fred’s stenciled face smiling from the curved glass. If I fit them together then the most extraordinary creature might be revealed.

  My collection grew in the following weeks: a sandwich bag of stray feathers, gathered from the park; a long-stemmed glass half filled with paper clips; and an old bowling bag so stuffed with white styrofoam peanuts that it seemed a real bowling ball nestled inside the cracked imitation leather.

  When summer recess began I had to forgo gathering leftover chalk scraps from the classroom blackboard, but this was a minor setback. Already I had plans to scour back lots for stray bottle caps. I would have asked my increasingly restless brother for help—he knew the secret byways of our neighborhood far better than I—but he couldn’t stand the sight of my collection and its fussy arrangement. It was true that I had to place each container just right on the shelves, its own little pocket of order. Alone in my room, I could settle easily into the solace of things and stare at them for hours.

  *

  Arguing over whether to eat the cantaloupe or the grapefruit—all that was left in the kitchen that might make a breakfast—Dan and Laurie rolled them back and forth at each other across the table. A ripe scent, hinting at decay, filled the room. Mother stood by the sink, feigning indifference, though when she scratched at her elbow I realized she was Patricia, the woman who suffered violent fits of itching. Before I could hush Dan and Laurie, Patricia grabbed an unwashed glass. With one deft swing she broke it in half against the faucet and glass shards scattered across the counter.