How to Read an Unwritten Language

by Philip Graham

  These jaunts always included a visit to a cafeteria rife with overcooked vegetables and soggy fruit suspended in Jell-0 molds. I’d poke away at dark, pungent spinach on my plate and try to see where my mother’s features fit in Myrna’s round face and jutting chin, her reddish hair that just seemed to lie on her head. I could never do it, just as I was always on the verge of asking her any and all of the questions brimming inside me: Does Laurie’s voice remind you of Mom’s when she was a little girl? Which one of us most reminds you of our mother? What was she like when you were young?

  Instead I listened, along with Dan and Laurie, to Aunt Myrna’s odd habit of quoting dialogue from her favorite television shows. Wiping at a puddle of Dan’s spilled milk on the cafeteria table, she announced, “‘I could never do that—she’s my best friend.’” If Laurie lingered too long at a drugstore’s cosmetics counter, Myrna said, “‘Now Barney, calm down.’” And whenever she parked the car and we trooped out into another parking lot of another mall, our aunt loved to declare, “‘Why, there’s a fortune in unmarked bills in this pillowcase.’”

  Soon we followed her lead, spouting lines out of context whenever we could. “‘Not in my bathtub, you won’t,’” Dan muttered as he struggled with his shoelaces, and once, when Aunt Myrna took us on a long drive in the country, Laurie woke from a nap, glanced out the window and announced sleepily, “‘Look, all the food’s in French.’”

  The repetition of these and other special phrases became invisible glue that seemed to hold us together. So during one cafeteria jaunt, right after Aunt Myrna graciously exempted us from candied yams, I finally found the courage to ask, “Did you and Mom ever play pretend games when you were little?”

  Dan and Laurie stopped their clowning over the sugar packets, their sudden quiet an unspoken echoing of my question. Aunt Myrna held her teacup in midair and stared at the wisps of steam rising before her eyes, and I thought with relief and disappointment that somehow she hadn’t heard me.

  Then she replied in a surprisingly flat voice, “No, I don’t recall anything like that.” She sipped her tea, she dabbed her lips. She regarded us as if we were contagious.

  In the park Aunt Myrna settled on a weathered bench while Dan and Laurie careened from seesaw to jungle gym. I sat beside her moody silence and I realized the mistake of my question: I’d stirred up a fear that Mother’s impulses lurked inside her too, waiting for escape. When my brother and sister chased each other around the sandbox, flinging arcs of sand in the air, Aunt Myrna simply looked away, and I somehow knew that she would leave us slowly, over many months of shortened visits and deferred or broken dates.

  Before beginning the bedtime story for my brother and sister that night, I wondered how I could possibly soften Aunt Myrna’s inevitable leave-taking, and I anxiously snapped the book open and shut until Laurie yawned and muttered, “The better to eat you with, my dear.” She extended her hand toward me, a restless hungry mouth.

  I slipped the book behind me and answered with my own quotation: “You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”

  Catching on, Dan sang out with witchy glee, “I’ll get you, my little pretty,” and he wrestled the book away.

  We tossed phrases back and forth from a wealth of bedtime stories, transforming our evening ritual into a fractured tale that ranged from Mother Goose to Disney, Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson, Babar the Elephant and Marvel comics. Our stepwise narrative continued flirting with disaster until we wearily left off and went to bed.

  We continued that convoluted story the next night, and the night after that, exploring the odd corners of books we thought we’d forgotten, and eventually, during a lull in the narrative, we came up with a game we called Name That Dwarf. If a teacher or friend or schoolyard bully were really one of the Seven Dwarfs, which one would he or she be? Our mournful principal Mr. Donners, famous for school assemblies alerting us to the dangers of current infectious diseases, we dubbed Happy. Miss Milbane’s habit of crinkling her nose as she corrected homework assignments at her desk earned her the title Sneezy.

  “What about the popcorn lady at the movies?” Laurie asked to our anticipatory laughter. “What about Tommy Vickers?”

  “What about Dad?” Dan asked.

  We fell silent at this deliciously forbidden thought.

  “Bashful?” Laurie suggested.

  “No—Grumpy!” Dan countered.

  They both looked to me, the possible tie breaker.

  “Sleepy,” I said without thinking, and Dan snorted with disgust. “Sleepy?” he said. “It’s no fun playing if you don’t even try.”

  “I am trying,” I protested, but Dan turned away, suddenly concerned with the bits of lint that clung to the blankets.

  “You’re Dopey,” he murmured offhandedly.

  I refused to be provoked, refused to allow Dan’s tightly coiled emotions to release again. At school he pushed classmates off swings, threw his milk carton against the hamster cage, and he spent so much time on the principal’s bench that already, in October, there was talk of his repeating third grade. At home he probed the edge of Father’s patience, risking an enforced early bedtime or withheld dessert.

  Laurie sighed, disappointed that our new game had ended so abruptly. I said nothing, content to mull over the aptness of my choice: Dad was Sleepy, and I wanted him to wake up.

  Interrupting my thoughts, Laurie asked, “What about Mom?”

  “What about her?” I replied.

  “Which dwarf was she?”

  I shook my head. “Game’s over, Laurie.”

  “C’mon, guess.”

  Dan, his interest rekindled, abandoned the little ball of lint he’d begun and waited for my reply.

  “I don’t want to guess,” I said.

  “Because you don’t know. But I know.”

  “Well?” Dan asked.

  “She was all seven of—”

  “Nope,” he interrupted, eyes bright with challenge, “she was the Seven Hundred Dwarfs!”

  When Laurie giggled I decided to up the ante: “Seven thousand.”

  “Seven hundred thousand,” she added, and we continued this bittersweet, liberating disrespect to the edge of our mathematical abilities, yet still our addition and multiplication added up to less than one mother.

  *

  Schoolwork now afforded me an escape much like my household chores, and I plunged into the class assignments as if every correct answer bestowed a mysterious, healing grace. But I was hindered by my teacher, Mrs. Lawler. She always rushed through Today’s Lesson, leaving little time to consider the hurried facts we’d just been offered, facts which then threatened to simply vanish in the air.

  One morning I tried to keep up with a lesson about whales that, typically, brimmed with sociology, history, ecology, music, art and more. After a breathless few minutes devoted to What is Language, Mrs. Lawler set the needle down on a record album she’d brought from home, a recording of a symphony featuring whale songs. After a woozy rasp for a moment or two, violins and horns announced their alternating melodies above scratches and crackles. This was a record that had been played too often, suggesting a secret about my teacher I didn’t have time to consider, because a distant whale moan grew out of the speakers, joined by another moan, higher pitched, and then another, barely audible. More eerie voices entered at a stately pace, rising above the distortion of the record and so entrancing us that no one laughed when Joey, the class clown, slumped back in his seat and silently pursed his lips to the whale songs as if he were a dog howling at the moon.

  Those large creatures gliding deep under the water spoke to each other in strange, slow tones. They also spoke to me, and in the pauses between their plaintive moans they waited for my reply. I listened closely, just on the point of understanding, when an ugly amplified scrape cut through the room—Mrs. Lawler had wrenched the needle off the record.

  “Well, it’s getting late,” she said, turning on a slide projector. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll ne
ver get through today’s lesson.”

  I closed my eyes in an attempt to continue those whale songs inside me. But the breathless flutter of Mrs. Lawler’s voice, the hum of the projector’s fan and the metallic slap of each new slide clicking in defeated me, and I looked up at the screen. A large, simple building stood in the distance, with a long grassy roof supported by wooden pillars, and walls that rose only halfway up. Squinting at her notes, Mrs. Lawler said, “This is a Northwest Coast Indian shrine devoted to attracting whales.”

  I barely heard her. What I’d first thought were walls I now saw were people, standing stiffly shoulder-to-shoulder. Something about them seemed odd, but before I could really concentrate, my restless teacher clicked to the next slide.

  We were inside the shrine, and now came another surprise: those people were life-size wooden statues, their torsos stiff, their hands and feet stumps. Their openmouthed, flat faces seemed to be shouting out a warning at the approach of trespassers.

  “These are the wooden images of dead whale hunters,” Mrs. Lawler announced. “The Indians held ceremonies in this shrine, and they sang songs that they believed would cause whales”—she paused and turned a page—“to drift close to shore, where they could then be caught.”

  Now another slide filled the screen: a close-up of maybe half a dozen statues, their identical, plaintive expressions so much like the three-holed faces of bowling balls, so much like my mother’s own unhappy features that last terrible day. I blinked back tears at the thought, yet still I couldn’t look away from that wall of faces. And then I knew why: they could just as easily be Mother’s hidden characters. I longed to hear them sing out keening songs like the whales, songs filled with secrets that I would finally understand.

  I raised my hand and waved it wildly, trying to think up a question that would keep Mrs. Lawler from the next slide. She wasn’t looking my way, and even if she were, I knew she’d say her usual, “Let’s save our questions for later, okay?” I wouldn’t let her do that to me. I dropped my thick science textbook on the floor, for a nice, solid thump.

  As the class tittered I quietly dragged the book under my seat with my foot. Mrs. Lawler turned to us. “And who, may I ask, did that?”

  Of course no one gave me away. “I’m waiting,” Mrs. Lawler said. “We’ll just sit here in the dark until the smart aleck confesses.”

  I knew from previous class disturbances that only a minute or two would pass before Mrs. Lawler lost her patience and made the kind of threat that usually drew a confession. So I placed myself inside the shrine with the statues and I peered into their faces, I grasped the rough grain of their wooden shoulders and tried to draw out their voices.

  “I’m waiting,” Mrs. Lawler said, and still no song rose above the hum of the projector.

  “I’m waiting,” she repeated, and the weariness beneath the impatience in her voice belonged to someone I’d never noticed before: a teacher afraid of her students. That’s why she rushed through the class lessons, leaving us breathless or bored behind her. Mrs. Lawler fiddled with the record player, examined a button on the slide projector, trying her best to pretend indifference, but now I knew that she was most wary of us during these moments of classroom tension.

  I raised my hand. “I dropped the book, Mrs. Lawler.” Then I added something I thought she needed to hear: “I dropped it so you wouldn’t go to the next slide. I knew you were in a hurry, but I wanted to look at this one a little longer. It really interests me. I’m sorry.”

  Her open mouth echoed the statues on the screen, and then she let out the long breath of an exhausted runner. ‘And have you seen enough now?” she asked.

  I gave the statues one last regretful glance. They had no voices I could hear. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then let’s go on, shall we?” But she stood for a long silent moment before clicking on the next slide.

  *

  I stood at my bedroom window that afternoon as the sky darkened in the distance, the twilight spreading into a deep underwater blue. Then the whales’ haunting call-and-response rose up inside me, long, enticing songs flowed from the open mouths of those Indian statues. Yet however carefully I listened, their language remained elusive, and I pressed my forehead against the window, felt its cold seep into my skin until I heard Father announce from the kitchen that dinner was ready.

  It was the usual hushed affair, bowls passed politely among us as we spoke softly, filling Father’s silence with our reports of what we’d done in school: Laurie’s math problems, Dan’s recess.

  “We listened to whale songs today,” I offered.

  “Good,” Father said, nodding. “Good,” he repeated, and somehow the subject was closed. I returned to the slab of meat loaf on my plate, chafing at Father’s indifferent approval. It was the only intimacy he could give us, and it wasn’t enough.

  After the dishes were washed, Dan took off, despite the growing cold, for his evening wanderings up and down the block. Laurie and I spread out newspapers and sprawled on the living room floor with her art kit—our occasional quiet time together. Laurie preferred creating watercolor faces, filling in their primitive circles with pink cheeks and red lips and wild dark eyes, while I worked at my own awkwardly rendered scenes: a house floating on still, deep-blue water; clouds nestling inside the back of a station wagon; a flock of birds asleep on a couch.

  As usual, Father sat in a corner and hid behind his newspaper, and I could see from the headlines that it was filled with tales of woe far worse than what our family had lived through. Perhaps reading such stories gave him bitter comfort, but tonight I wanted to tempt him away from that wall holding off the rest of the house. With a few indirect suggestions I managed to lure my sister into painting something that I thought might appeal to Father—a garden. Across the page she spread outlines of fat-petaled flowers on spindly stems, squiggly ferns, and trees that looked like giant lollipops. When it was time to fill them all in, Laurie’s brush hesitated over the paint set’s tiny trays of blue, green, brown, orange, yellow.

  “Hey, Dad,” I called out, “you’re the expert on flowers. Laurie’s got a whole garden here—what colors should she use?”

  Without even a grunt of complaint, Father set the paper down and crouched beside us. “Well, green for the stem, of course. Here, honey.” He guided Laurie’s hand, and they filled in a few petals until she protested, “No, not all yellow, Daddy. I want blue and red too.”

  “Fine,” he said, drawing his hand back. “Paint away. You kids seem to be doing fine without me.” Then he stood and returned to his newspaper.

  Her face scrunched in disappointment, Laurie began smearing jagged brushstrokes of color across her picture, a rainbow gone amuck.

  “Wait,” I whispered, applying my brush, and I showed her how those flowers could be turned into flying saucers, their green stems an otherworldly exhaust.

  Father shook the paper as he turned a page, a ripple like a wave, and again those beckoning whale calls seemed to speak inside me, messages breaking against the silence they swam in. Father was the real wall, I realized, not his newspaper. Perhaps this was what Mother had hurled herself against, shattering into too many people. Yet I knew she wasn’t the only person who harbored others inside—even Mrs. Lawler hid something of herself from the class. So why should Father only be what he appeared to be? I had to somehow learn to read him, learn how to coax him out of himself.

  *

  I squirmed in my seat in the school auditorium, resigned to endure the annual holiday pageant, another nondenominational tribute to correct behavior for children. After a relentlessly cheery song sung in the ragged snippets of fifteen languages by the second grade chorus, our principal parked himself behind a podium and gave a nearly endless list of tips on how to avoid the flu. Then there was a long pause, punctuated by backstage scufflings. When the curtains opened again, we saw a stage set dominated by a long counter cluttered with toys.

  Sets of shelves borrowed from the school library held even more t
oys. Behind the counter stood the shopkeeper, a chubby boy with a ridiculously thick mustache that wiggled too much as he sang out, “Toys, toys, the joy of all children, oh, to be a kid again!”

  Across from him stood a tall girl whose long maroon dress, string of pearls and wide-brimmed hat indicated she was a grown-up. Beside her, sucking on a lollipop and tugging at her skirt, was a classmate in a sailor suit and undersized cap: her son. She picked out a dollhouse—a present, I supposed, for the little brat’s sister—and the shopkeeper carefully fit it into a cardboard box.

  “Oh my,” the mother said in an unconvincingly adult voice, “this package is much too heavy for me to carry by myself. Won’t you please help me take it to the car?” She patted her hair and wiggled her hips, which set the audience hooting, for we all understood that her flirting was a spur-of-the-moment, subversive gesture aimed at the teachers.

  The shopkeeper waited for the laughing to die down before he delivered his next line. “Why of course, madam, nothing is too good for my customers.”

  Then they trooped out, and for a moment the stage was strangely empty. I ignored the whispered joshing and exaggerated yawns around me, because Laurie entered through the half-opened stage door. Why hadn’t she told me she was in this skit?

  “Hello, is anyone here?” Laurie asked. She swept her hands to her heart and sighed loudly. “If only I had enough money to buy one of these lovely toys.”

  She tiptoed among the toy displays as if hundreds of us weren’t watching and waiting to see what she’d do. Laurie picked up a kaleidoscope and peered into it, then turned it toward the audience. She wasn’t supposed to see us, of course, though a few clowns waved at her. But Laurie could see us, or at least our multiplied, fragmented faces, and she slowly swung the kaleidoscope along the length of the dark hall.

  With a shudder, she placed the toy back on its shelf. Then she noticed the doll.

  It was the largest in the shop, a rag doll as big as a child, scrunched firmly on a rocker, its button-eyed face smiling contentedly. Its stuffed arms and legs, colored a bright pink, poked out from a crinkly dress. Laurie stood before the doll and she plucked at one of the frilly sleeves, stroked the thick yellow curls.