How to Read an Unwritten Language

by Philip Graham

  Though I had entered into the intensity of Father’s varied campaigns against mold and rot, weeds and insects and tree disease of all kinds, I hesitated spraying those worms: they’d made the bark into a kind of paper, and they themselves were squirming pens that wrote tales of their tiny blind lives.

  I sprayed them anyway, regarding their writhing deaths as the eradication of my own continuing secret: overwhelmed by that long ago, welcome moment of Father’s sympathetic touch when I’d confessed to him, I’d simply forgotten to report Bob’s larceny. Only the following morning, when I saw Bob puttering around in the greenhouse, a candy bar in his shirt pocket, did I realize I’d missed my chance.

  He continued his petty pilferage—a package of seeds one week, a can of soda another, engineering me into a guilty bystander whenever he could. Yet each time I thought of denouncing Bob I imagined my father’s disappointed face and the clipped rhythms of his sternest voice as he said, Why didn’t you tell me before? The excuses I endlessly rehearsed ate little trails inside me.

  *

  Dan’s latest angry antics overshadowed my own worries: he now fought almost every day at school, and once he was nearly expelled after shaking his fist at a teacher. For that crime Father threatened terrible, never-to-be-forgotten punishments that finally resulted in a simple month’s grounding. Dan kept to his room, rereading his great stack of comic books. Occasionally I kept him company, admiring his tough-guy spunk even if I also felt I had to reproach him for his latest trouble.

  “What am I supposed to do, Mike?” he asked. “If somebody wants to fight with me, I’m not going to disappoint him.”

  We returned to our separate comic books and the adventures of ordinary people who could suddenly change into creatures of power, bursting into flame without burning, twisting steel with no effort, flying without wings, or stretching their limbs like lariats. And these heroes fought such grotesque villains: half-metal mutants, or brutes covered with crater-like scabs, the deformities of their barely human faces exposing a frightening inner ugliness. Who did my brother silently cheer on as they wrestled with each other’s transformations? Perhaps both. Surrounding those titanic conflicts, bright balloons burst into jagged edges with the words KERBLAM! KABLOOM! FWEEEE-CRASH! SLAM! and POW! POW! POW! and Dan quietly mouthed the captions, lingering on each panel’s mayhem as if he were his own private target range.

  These battles quickly wearied me. I set my comic aside, and to the sound track of Dan’s hushed explosions I paged through a book of mazes. Searching out the most intricate puzzles, with my finger I followed a slow path through an insane tangle of industrial pipes or the weaving shadows on the face of a storm cloud. I could afford to be patient. These complexities, I knew, would provide an exit. Yet while tracing my way through an unpromising path of corn stubble, I heard Laurie call me. Once, then twice.

  “Coming,” I answered. My sister’s interest in drawing pictures had shifted to a teenager’s fascination with the nuances of makeup, and she liked to display her latest application of eyeliner and blush. I walked to her room, determined to feign interest and not mention—wasn’t she daring me to?—that her accumulation of faces reminded me of our mother.

  I opened the door to Laurie’s room and she turned from the vanity to face me. In startling contrast to her dark curly hair, harshly etched wrinkles radiated from her eyes and mouth and across her forehead.

  “What do you think?” she asked in a withered voice, but I could only stare at those lines re-creating her face.

  “I’m trying out for the grandmother in a play,” she said, still in character. “Do you think I have a chance?”

  “Only if you dye your hair gray,” I said, attempting a light tone.

  “Oh. Wait.” She reached into her bureau drawer and then pulled a scarf over her head. “Now what do you think?”

  I took a step back from the eerie sight of our reincarnated Nani, who’d died last year.

  “I think you’ll get the part.”

  My prediction came true. Laurie memorized her lines in a few hours, lounging on the sofa and speaking to invisible characters whose responses only she could hear as she clutched the script. In the following days she went further, attempting the voices of other characters, one by one. Standing by the door to her room, I could hear her murmuring disjunct bits of half dialogue, questions that received no answers, or answers that replied to no questions, and I imagined an old woman, head bent and weaving through the clutter of Laurie’s room, filled with the voices of a lifetime’s memories.

  *

  Father shifted in his seat beside me, so ill at ease in the auditorium’s competing murmurs and flapping of programs that I thought he might try to escape his own daughter’s opening night performance. But soon enough the lights darkened, the curtain rose, and there onstage sat a family at a dinner table: a foursome of high school kids pretending to be a mother, father, son and daughter. Behind them painted backdrops impersonated the walls of an apartment, with two windows offering views of a cramped city landscape. The actors picked at plastic food on their plates and raised empty forks to their mouths, they took great quaffs of nothing from tall glasses, and they projected loudly to the back rows a clumsy plot rundown of what had led to this opening scene.

  Already suppressing the urge to yawn, I told myself that sooner or later my sister was bound to make an entrance. Father seemed to have forgotten her entirely—he had eyes only for the window in a corner of the stage set: perhaps its painted panorama of skyscrapers offered a distraction from this poorly acted play.

  Laurie finally appeared, at the edge of a crowd milling outside an old-fashioned barbershop. While the rest of the cast plainly marked time, their lips mumbling through the motions of “Rutabaga, rutabaga,” Laurie’s character gazed out at the audience, a senile wandering over the darkened rows. The intensity of her eyes, somehow impossibly old, exerted a strange gravitational pull that reminded me so much of Nani. Father actually gasped. Then the barber finally stepped out to his storefront and Laurie turned away to join the crowd’s rising murmurs.

  For the remainder of the play, whenever Laurie appeared onstage Father averted his eyes, though she no longer looked our way. Instead she concentrated on her occasional lines, her ancient voice. By now I’d lost the thread of the plot, for Father’s brooding discomfort kept distracting me: he shifted in his seat, flicked his playbill.

  After the final curtain calls and applause Father insisted on a backstage visit. We joined the throng of beaming parents and well-wishers and made our way across stage. While the crew lowered the klieg lights with a great show of professionalism, cast members began to appear, their costumes slung over an arm, a shoulder. Laurie approached us through the hubbub, a moist towel in hand. One side of her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, the other side was still old.

  Father averted his gaze and once again took in the bustling activity. But when he finally turned to her his eyes were cold, his voice grim. “So this is why your grades have been going down?”

  Laurie’s divided face flinched, then quickly recovered. “Only a little, Daddy. I’m not Dan, you know.”

  At these words Father relented enough to actually offer grudging praise: “You spoke your lines … very well.”

  But he’d already done his damage, and Laurie returned to the rest of her makeup with that towel, scrubbing at her face as if she wanted to remove it.

  *

  Later that night I knocked on my sister’s door and waited for her barely audible “Come in.” Her eyes flickered with disappointment that I wasn’t Father. With one cheek still pink from her rough usage, she looked as if she’d been slapped.

  “Well, I thought you were terrific—”

  “You thought I was scary. So did Dad.”

  “No, not scary, really….” My voice trailed off at Laurie’s sad eyes.

  “It’s all right, Michael, you don’t have to worry. I washed off the makeup. I’m me again.”

  “Who said you weren’t you
?” I replied, afraid of where our words might take us.

  “Nobody said anything. Look, I’m not like Mom, I—”

  “I know you’re not—”

  “I just want to understand why.“

  I gaped at her—in our separate ways, weren’t we both trying to recover our parents? Laurie allowed herself an indulgent smile at my surprise. “Remember that Christmas play I was in, you know, the one with the doll?”

  I nodded.

  “I never told anybody about this, Michael. Can I tell you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I had a dream about Mom that night. I was with her in a department store, and we were standing in line, at the checkout counter. Mom was looking for something in her purse—I thought it was her wallet, but then she took out a slip of paper, like a really long fortune from a fortune cookie. It had words on it too, and I don’t know why, but I just knew that it told a story about one of her people. The second I thought this the paper just burst into flame. But it didn’t burn her fingers.”

  “Laurie,” I said, but my sister spoke rapidly, cutting off any interruption: “Mom lifted another slip of paper out of her purse and when I decided to grab it she had the creepiest smile on her face, like she knew what I was going to do. So I touched it and it lit up, but my fingers didn’t hurt, they only sort of tingled and then I…” Laurie held her hands out as if they gripped a strip of paper, and she mimed an incredulous reaction to whatever she silently read.

  The memory of this dream had become just another performance. She bowed to silent applause, then she laughed when I left the room.

  *

  While Laurie kept her grades up so Father couldn’t forbid her from acting in school plays, Dan discovered new opportunities for trouble in school and on the streets, and a quiet, sullen anger settled into the rooms of our house. Even I nurtured my own defiance of Father, I now suspected, for how could I have let Bob’s petty dishonesty continue unless each filched can of soda or packet of cheese crackers somehow gave me a secret satisfaction?

  The very possibility so disturbed me that, after much nervous deliberation, I spent one Saturday morning at work quietly tracking Bob. When I saw him making off for the snack machine during a break, I followed and caught him popping the door open with his makeshift key. Before he could hide the candy bar in his vest pocket I grabbed the door and held it open.

  “Put that back.”

  Bob stood back and sized me up, trying to gauge the hazards of this unexpected confrontation. “Well,” he said, his voice cautious, even a little weary, “sometimes a sweet tooth can get out of control, now can’t it?”

  “Back,” I repeated, blushing at the tremor in my voice.

  “It’s nothing I haven’t done before,” he replied. “You know that.”

  I said nothing. Bob sighed, then slipped the candy bar back into its metal slot in the machine.

  I closed the door, exhilarated by my victory. “Do it again, I’ll tell my dad.”

  “Tell him what? I never took anything that wasn’t mine, not even once. And your father wouldn’t like to think that anybody ever saw me do otherwise, would he?” Bob managed a weak laugh, his best show of bravado, and without a glance back at me he retreated to the nearest greenhouse.

  Father and Son

  Perhaps it was inevitable that my brother would bring his trouble-making home. Over the course of a few short months toothbrushes and favorite drinking cups vanished, mysterious stains began to appear on the carpets, two of the dining room chairs’ wicker seats suddenly developed frayed holes, an ugly scratch marred a kitchen cabinet. One day, returning home from my after-school hours at the nursery, I opened the door to my room and saw that my collection of discards had been swept from the shelves, and now a strange brew of styrofoam peanuts, buttons, tiny bones and dirty coins, glass shards, feathers and nail clippings was strewn across the floor. I’d long since lost interest in them, and so I decided to keep this latest example of Dan’s vandalism to myself. Yet when I emptied that mess into my wastebasket, the sound of those incompatible pieces jostling against each other filled me with a peculiar sadness.

  A week later the living room houseplants all died at once, an inexplicable mass suicide. Of course Father blamed this latest disaster on Dan, who stood before him and declared his innocence in nearly convincing, stuttering frustration. “I didn’t do it, why d-do you always blame me?“

  “Why do I always blame you?“ Father returned with mocking contempt. He swiveled his recliner away to face the wood paneling on the wall.

  “Why? W-why do you—”

  “That’s enough, son.”

  Again, Dan was nothing. Torment distorted his face, and he turned that face on me—on me, who hadn’t done anything—before rushing from the room and the house.

  Father’s chair rocked back and forth while I stood by the window and watched Dan’s unhappy figure striding down the block. He was surely off to seek revenge somewhere out in the neighborhood, revenge that would certainly invite further punishment. But couldn’t this cycle be broken? I had to bring him back. Without a word to Father—who rocked and rocked and thought whatever thoughts he locked inside himself—I slipped out of the house.

  My brother was already far off and walking a good imitation of a run, and I hurried to catch up, silently willing my brother to please cool down, please come back. Turning down one street, then another, Dan seemed to be following a well-worn path, each angry step habitual, and then I decided to follow, to see where he would lead me. I lagged behind, keeping a careful distance between us.

  At the edge of our town’s small business district Dan turned a sharp corner and when I reached the street he was gone, as if he’d been biding his time to lose me. Was he peering out through one of the shop windows, pleased with his little trick? No, I thought, he’d never once looked back: if my brother was inside one of these stores, he wasn’t thinking about me. I paused—maybe Dan came downtown to shoplift. If so, I needed to find him quickly. My eyes scanned the street for the most likely store.

  I tried the comic book shop and stalked the aisles, prepared to come upon Dan paging through a new adventure, surrounded by racks of superheroes and monsters. But he hadn’t sought refuge there and I hurried out, skipped a flower shop and the law office, then sped through the stationery store so swiftly the cashier seemed to suspect me of shoplifting.

  The toy store farther down the block was another likely candidate. Like some cartoon version of a detective, I edged along the storefronts: a deli, then the model train museum called Tomtown. Devised by a Tom somebody, this sprawling little world was one of our town’s few prides, though I hadn’t wandered in there for years. At the sound of a tiny train’s shrill whistle, I couldn’t help glancing inside.

  There was Dan, his back to me, and so preoccupied that I easily snuck in and stood a few feet behind him. Three sets of trains rolled with restless energy through a miniature downtown much like the one I’d been sneaking through: fast-food restaurants, clothes stores, mom-and-pop shops, a church and travel agency. Those tiny trains must have turned in the same circles and tracks for decades, past the carefully sculpted hills, an abandoned factory, a drive-in movie and a fairground’s tacky carnival. The thought of such relentless repetition made me queasy.

  Dan hadn’t moved or shifted his head once since I’d come in. Instead of following the trains, he was watching something in the miniature town, where nobody moved, no matter how pressing the business of those little plastic figures. A mother led her reluctant son to the barbershop, a drunkard hunched over in an alley, two kids peeked into a toy-store window, a dogcatcher reached out with his net for a mongrel, a hook and ladder crew hurried before a house engulfed by red-paper flames, and every action was locked in place. Which of these scenes held my brother’s attention?

  Then I noticed Tom himself standing quite still in a corner, an old, old man with alert, shifting eyes, enjoying us taking in his carefully constructed world. He began to shuffle down the aisle, re
ady to point out some little detail that we might have missed.

  But I didn’t want Dan to discover me so I stepped backward, trying to keep out of his line of sight. Then I was out the door and down the steps, hurrying across the street to Young Miss Fashions—somewhere my brother would surely never go—where I’d wait for him to leave.

  Unfortunately, the saleswoman seemed to think I had no business wandering in her shop. She dogged me down the aisles, interfering with my lookout on Tomtown’s entrance and I had to feign interest in the racks of blouses and skirts. “I’m looking for something for my girlfriend,” I offered as she hovered beside me, and she finally left me alone.

  I still had no idea how to even ask a girl out for a date and doubted I’d ever learn, yet I pretended the smooth, pleated skirt in my hands belonged to an actual girlfriend rather than someone I’d invented for the sake of a saleslady. Blushing at my ignorance of the secret world offered by this store, I stroked the shoulder pads of a blouse, lightly touched a skirt’s belt loop in an attempt to defeat my shyness. I discovered that skirt zippers were thin, almost delicate, and that blouse buttons buttoned on the wrong side—I flushed at the thought of my clumsy fingers ever undoing them. Then I saw Dan march down the street and out of sight.

  I didn’t follow. Instead, I returned to Tomtown and stood right where Dan had kept watch. Crouching slightly to reproduce his line of sight, I peered at the crowded downtown street of meticulously painted figures, searching for whatever had drawn my brother’s attention.

  I heard Tom’s steps behind me and then his hand was on my shoulder. He coughed lightly and said, “You know that boy who just left here?”