Mother didn’t rest at all. She paced back and forth and back again as we took our turns, her face stiffening at the clash of pins. Father never looked back at her, determined not to condone her unsportsmanlike behavior, but Laurie’s lips trembled at Mother’s brittle mask, and I couldn’t stop gnawing my fingernails.
Mother paused only once, after I’d clinched a spare. She stared at a last, lone pin that spun swiftly on its side; then she turned away as it was scooped up by the reset mechanism. Surely by now she understood that this entire game was target practice against what refused to stay down.
I decided I simply couldn’t add to her misery: on my next turn I sped the ball at a sharp angle, directly into the gutter. Father restrained himself from offering advice, even when I repeated my mistake. But I offered Laurie a knowing glance and she caught on to my scheme and followed along. Then Dan joined in, simply for the love of mischief. Gutter ball after gutter ball confounded Father while Mother’s face seemed to soften, and once again we were in her thrall.
“What’s going on here?” he declared. “Wipe your hands before you bowl—what’s on those fingers? Don’t I always say absolutely no potato chips during the game? Where are you hiding them?”
“Sorry, Dad,” I sighed, feigning despair. “It’s just—bad luck, I guess.”
We continued ignoring his complaints. Father threw three stunning strikes in a row as a rebuke to our miserable performance, yet still he seethed.
When Dan stopped at the line as he always did, preparing to push the ball, he so overtly aimed it toward the gutter that Father sputtered. The bowling ball slipped from Dan’s hands and it crept down the lane, aiming straight for the pins.
“No!” Mother rushed past us, down the lane after the ball.
“Gladys, back here—get back!” Father called after her.
She caught up to the ball, her hands framing its curve. Kneeling, she cradled the ball in her lap and I knew what she saw: the deep-pitted eyes of its face, its silent, howling mouth.
The pins in the next lane erupted and Mother clutched at her head, the same way she’d held the bowling ball.
A few balls continued speeding down the lanes, their distant clatter echoing. Then the entire bowling alley was quiet, except for the churning hum of fallen pins being reset.
“Stop,” she said, her arms now stiff and palms up as if she were directing traffic. “It’s … very important … that everyone … stop.”
Laurie began to whimper, and Father called out wearily, “Gladys, that’s enough.” She stared back at us without recognition—whatever she was about to do, we’d only be minor obstructions.
Three lanes down, a fat man laughed and shook his head in bemusement before reaching for his bowling ball. He lifted it before him and eyed the distant pins.
“No, you mustn’t!” Mother cried.
The man shook his head again, took a few lumbering steps and released the ball. At the crash of flying pins Mother shook, as if her hidden selves shuddered within. Father ran down the lane, nearly slipping on its polished surface before he reached Mother. Her face immobile, and she offered no resistance as he led her away.
Somehow we managed to make our way through the confusion of a gathering crowd to the main desk. We returned our bowling shoes, filled with shame and misery, and the register rang and Father fumbled with his wallet as he kept a grip on Mother’s arm. Laurie, Dan and I huddled in a tight circle of misery about them when we left the bowling alley, a misery that enveloped our car when Father drove from the parking lot.
Back home, our parents once again disappeared into their room for another mysterious conference that would last all day. At the click of the locked door, Dan fled from our house for the call of the neighborhood, and Laurie ran downstairs and threw herself on the couch, face pressed tightly into the pillows. Her body heaved with sobs.
I gently shook her shoulder. “Hey, Laurie, hey, it’ll be all right,” I murmured, my voice utterly without conviction as I gazed out the living room window. The ominously darkening clouds tempted me to chase after Dan, but I was afraid to leave Laurie alone. When my sister was finally done with all that weeping that no parent came to comfort, she rose from the couch. Her pale face seemed emptied of tears forever.
Unable to bear the sight of that stricken look, I had to turn away. Remembering that I had a few fingernail slivers to add to my collection, I escaped to my room. As I approached those containers neatly spaced apart from each other on the shelves, a terrible thought ran through me: they were just a bunch of shreds and scraps and castoffs that added up to nothing, pieces of a puzzle that could never be put together. My throat constricted, for a moment I had trouble breathing, and then that thought disappeared, banished, surely, by my collection’s soothing qualities. Yet when I slipped the slivers into the shot glass, it was without my usual twinge of pleasure.
I woke that night to thunder that echoed the afternoon’s din of bowling pins. Please don’t let it wake up Mom, I thought. Between those reverberating claps, a rhythmic banging kept up outside, an unnerving slam, slam, slam that seemed it might never end.
What could that be? I crossed the dark room and peered out through the windswept torrents lashing against my window, just able to make out our neighbors’ porch, illuminated by a dim outside light. The screen door swung open from the wind and then its spring pulled it shut, opening and closing like a perpetual coming and going of invisible guests.
A brilliant shaft of lightning cast our own rain-streaked house into momentary relief, and I caught my breath at the sight of Mother standing at the hall window, staring down at that swinging door. Then it was night again. Had I imagined her? I stood and waited for another bolt, all the while listening to that awful, insistent banging, but when a shivering light again surged through the darkness, the hall window was empty.
*
Morning brought the distant, disembodied chatter of birds, and the sun streaking through the curtains. Our parents’ door lay open, though the bedroom was empty, and we found no one downstairs. I looked out the window at the driveway—the car was gone, so perhaps Father had left for the Sunday paper. But where was Mother? We hurried out to the backyard and called her name, and received no answer.
Small branches littered the lawn, and a single wooden shingle dangled at an odd angle on the side of the house. The soaked grass felt spongy beneath my feet, and above drifted one lone cloud, a straggler from last night’s storm.
I turned in a slow, tight circle as I took in the round lonely cloud, my head stretched back, and then I turned a little faster, enjoying the spinning. I spun more and more, creating a circle of sky as if I were that funnel of trees in the park, and I closed my eyes and imagined I could separate from my body and float away. Yet when I felt in danger of sweeping out of myself I stopped suddenly, opening my eyes to the world dashing dizzily around me: the neighbors’ houses elongated into a circling, speeding train, my brother and sister squeezed into one blurry child, and that single cloud spun above like the point of a top.
Without speaking, Laurie began to twirl too, her arms extended. Even Dan joined in, and we twisted about the backyard, whirling until giddy from our dizzy steps. We stopped and let the world slow down and suddenly there was Mother, watching us from the edge of the lawn, her arms folded across her nightgown.
She took a few groggy steps forward and her lips moved oddly, silently. Then she managed to gurgle something, her words so slurred we couldn’t understand her. Was this morning’s character supposed to be some sort of derelict? We turned our backs on her, unwilling to enter into any new game, and we kept up our own, turning in circles before our swaying mother.
She shouted out words so undone by a thick tongue that we stopped our twirling. But she wasn’t looking at us, her eyes were on that loose shingle on the wall.
She lurched past us and her hands scrabbled at the rough wooden square until she tugged it off. She flung it behind her, just over our heads, and it sliced into the hedge. Then Mo
ther pulled off another shingle, and another, revealing an underlying layer of coarse black paper that her fingernails scratched at, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying to tear our house apart or somehow work her way back into it.
Pieces of the house, like scattered tiles, littered the lawn, and we ducked as more shingles whirled in the air above us. Finally Dan grasped at Mother’s arm and he tried to pull her away, but she shook him loose with an awkward shove, almost falling herself, her hair swinging wildly.
Swaying on woozy legs, she clutched at her stomach as if it, too, held something that must be torn away, and then something thick, and green, slipped from a corner of her mouth. Mother’s face split wide open into a long, terrible moan, and her eyes filled with what I have always since believed was sorrow and regret.
She toppled over, and lay so still, staring straight at the sky, that we encircled her, unsure of what to expect. “Mom?” Laurie whispered. We knelt around her, waiting for any slurred answer, and we bent so low we saw ourselves contained in her unblinking eyes like a tiny, concave photograph. We were Mother’s secret audience, caught together for one last long moment before we allowed ourselves to understand, before we split apart in terrible grief.
PART TWO
The Butterfly Effect
“Excuse me?” the woman asked, her hair still undone, her face now stricken. “Why is that so sad?”
“It is sad, isn’t it?” I replied. Suppressing my relief at her reaction, I reached for the tape recorder and turned off the man’s misery in mid-sentence. Now I could leave it behind. “It was sitting here on the bench when I arrived,” I lied.
The woman made no comment, still affected by that voice, so I added, “I was curious about the tape inside. I wonder what language he’s speaking.”
“Not a clue,” she said, “I’m only a meteorologist.”
Again she waited and I did too, still not sure what she expected.
“You know, on TV—a weather lady?” She laughed. “I’m deeply hurt you don’t recognize me. I’m supposed to be a local personality. Though not for long.”
She’d given me an opening, and I took it. “Moving to a new job?”
“No. I’ll probably be fired.”
“But you were so good at—” I began, gesturing at the sky.
“That? A simple trick.” She paused, now looking through me, surprised, perhaps, at a decision rising within her. “Look … you’ve never seen my weather report, right?”
I nodded, and leaned back on the bench, a tiny retreat that I’d discovered sometimes encouraged people to speak more than they intended.
She sighed. “So. What the hell. Do you mind if I vent?”
“Sure,” I said, “feel free to—”
“This will only take a minute,” she cut in with a wry smile, and then glanced up and down the gravel path, reassuring herself that I would remain an audience of one. “I don’t believe in what I do any more. The odds aren’t high enough for getting the weather right—temperature, cloud cover, humidity, whatever—when a rainstorm can pop up in less than an hour. It’s depressing, I’m about as accurate as the horoscope. Check the other channels, listen to any radio station, call up the weather number. None of us predicts the same thing, even if the difference is only a matter of a couple of degrees.”
“But a little variation doesn’t seem—”
“This is supposed to be science, it’s supposed to be exact. Take the Five Day Forecast … if there’s anything I can guarantee, it’s that what I predict on Wednesday about the weekend weather will be different from what I predict on Thursday and Friday. Who checks, who cares, who really pays attention to the weather report? That’s not the point. I’m a practitioner of bad science.”
Two boys, probably brothers, sped down the path on bikes and she watched them pass. “Every day I review Weather Service reports, satellite photos, radar, and supercomputer programs. But any prediction can be undone by the flap of a wing. Ever hear of the Butterfly Effect?”
“I’m not sure. Is it—”
“A part of chaos theory. A computer can make a detailed forecast, but one minute later the tiniest atmospheric fluctuation sets off a chain reaction that knocks the weather off- kilter. All because some butterfly flapped its wings.”
I understood the concept well enough. Too many words I’d said, decisions I’d made, had opened unpredictable paths.
“And to think I used to love butterflies when I was a kid.” Sylvia shook her head. “Anyway, my doubts seem to be giving me away when I’m on the air—it’s getting harder to drum up commercial sponsors for my segment. Which reminds me, if I don’t hurry I’m going to be late for an appointment.”
She turned to leave, but first I’d give her something of me. “I think I know what you mean,” I said. “See the shadows of those leaves over there, by your feet? Those are sugar maple leaves. And those three lobes connected to the stem? They remind me of little temples, like pagodas. But watch when a breeze starts up, don’t they look more like the wings of birds or bats flying away?”
She looked from the shadows back to me, as if I’d suddenly appeared for the first time. “Nicely done,” she said almost to herself, and then continued on her way.
Our Phantom Limb
My brother and sister wouldn’t approach the coffin, but I forced myself to look inside. Nestled in a brittle cushion of brown hair, Mother’s puffy face had become another stranger. She seemed almost serene, as if she’d silenced those voices and finally escaped them. But she’d also escaped us.
I returned to the milling crowd of Father’s respectful employees, the few curious neighbors, and our handful of extended family. Dan, Laurie and I accepted what seemed like standard expressions of condolence with a simple nod or a mumbled thank you. We mingled among the guests, trying to avoid Father’s haggard face, his sleepwalking steps. Guilt and regret held us back. We’d kept Mother’s gallery of characters a secret from him for so long, how could he not resent us?
For weeks after the funeral, there were entire evenings when Father locked himself away in a dark room with terrible migraines, groaning from behind the door for aspirin. Once, as I struggled to find the bottle among hand towels, toilet paper and the sad remains of Mother’s makeup collection in the cluttered bathroom closet, he stumbled into the hallway.
His eyes covered by a damp cloth, his voice was a tight knot. “It hurts so bad I can’t see straight.”
My fingers fumbled past a box of band-aids, a bottle of cough syrup.
“Hurry. Everything … is stuttering,” he rasped, his large hands grasping his head. “Like a broken TV.”
Then I understood that some sort of Hold dial had gone loose inside him. I called to Dan and Laurie for help and they squeezed past Father to join my search. His mouth opened in horror at the sight of his three anxious children, and his shocked face has never left me. I can still imagine how we must have appeared, our image skittering before him like a family film gone wild.
*
Even on the best of days we confounded him—we wouldn’t stay in place, just as, day by day, our various toy collections slowly unfurled themselves across the floors of our rooms. Without warning, we’d shed our sadness and throw ourselves into desperate games of tag, for the thrill of outrunning grasping hands and chasing after fleeing figures just beyond our reach, and Father could only watch in numbed silence, unable to shout a warning before a lamp overturned.
Yet our racing leaps concealed this secret: Mother had become our phantom limb, and we each had separate, invisible limps. Laurie dipped anything at all into the sugar bowl, even cubes of cheese, trying to satisfy an insatiable urge, a sticky cosmetic sheen of sweetness covering her lips. Dan quite methodically made a mess of his toys, pummeling them to bits; or he took yet another reckless tour of the neighborhood, ringing doorbells and then running away, or “borrowing” a bicycle left on a front lawn. As for me, I took on family chores that Father could barely manage, so that in work I might lose myself. Supplant
ing an array of indifferent babysitters and domestic help, I washed and dried the dishes and set them in the pantry; I organized shopping lists; I picked up after my brother and sister, and in the evenings I made sure they took their baths and brushed their teeth. I read bedtime stories.
Father tried to do his best, however inadequate his best might have been. Now that school had begun again, he specialized in breakfasts, serving up long strips of crunchy bacon, cold glasses of orange juice, and syrupy waffles. But he still hadn’t learned what the various drawers in our bedrooms held, how to set the timers on the washing machine, or how to coax calories into picky eaters. And when it came to offering us patient attention, it was clear there were nuances he could not grasp. Merely having the name Father, I realized, didn’t always make a person a parent. Acting more like a parent would be just that for Father—acting, and then he might march down Mother’s dangerous path.
Yet there was no question that we were his responsibility: what family did we have left? Only one of our grandparents was still alive—Father’s mother, Nani. She lived in a rest home, hunched in a wheelchair, lost in a smock-like garment and long past the ability to speak. On our visits Father would sit beside her, stroking her withered arm as a substitute for words, while her eyes followed the movements of her grandchildren. I always tried to avoid that gaze. Ashamed of my unfairness, I still couldn’t help imagining Nani as the oldest thing in the universe, her eyes like those Black Holes I’d learned about in school, whose gravitational pull might draw us all in if we weren’t careful.
And then there was Aunt Myrna, Mother’s unmarried older sister. She’d rarely come to see us when our mother was alive, and now, perhaps shamed by her earlier neglect, she spent many long hours driving to and from her distant town to visit us on a Saturday or Sunday. Gone were our weekend trips to the bowling alley—none of us could bear the thought of that game, and if Father still played he did so alone, whenever Aunt Myrna hauled us off to a park or a mall.
How to Read an Unwritten Language Page 5