How to Read an Unwritten Language

by Philip Graham

  At the sound of my voice Mrs. Martin came out of the kitchen and asked me to help set the table. Trying to hide my reluctance, I joined her with a hearty, “Of course.” Then I extended my living room monologue, loud enough so it would carry back to Kate, and commented on the tastefully arranged bowls and serving plates, the lovely blue-rimmed dishes, the impressively ancient silverware. Mrs. Martin moved from chair to chair beside me, hemming and hmming in vague disapproval until we completed the table’s careful symmetries.

  The carving of the turkey was a funereal event, Kate’s father silently slicing soft white slabs of meat and setting them in even layers on a serving dish. Then the various bowls were passed back and forth with great solemnity and still Kate said nothing. Spooning cranberries onto my plate, and by now crazy with the urge to keep talking, I announced, “Oh, Cape Cod Bells, the most popular type of cranberries.”

  Recalling that experimental corner of my father’s nursery, I embarked on a disquisition on how the cranberry bush grows in sandy soil that has to be drained before the flowering season. Having given up on me as unacceptably chatty, Kate’s parents answered with nods. Kate merely passed the bowl of stuffing yet still I rattled away.

  “But what does a cranberry bush look like, exactly?” Kate interrupted, finally joining in, accepting the escape I offered. She faced me, her eyes clear and curious.

  “Well, it has small evergreen leaves,” I replied happily. “They’re pale underneath, if I remember correctly, and their edges roll back a bit.”

  Kate had heard enough of my nursery days appreciate my former skills, and now she lifted a forkful of sweet potato to her lips and asked, “What do the branches look like?”

  “Um, they’re thin, and connected to a woody stem that’s kind of like a creeper. It stays low to the ground.”

  “And the flower, Michael? Is there such a thing as a cranberry flower?” she asked, eyes narrowing with pleasure, because of course she knew there must be a flower and that I’d be able to describe it.

  “It’s light pink, only about a half inch or so across, I think—”

  “So tiny.”

  “Yes, tiny—”

  “What do the petals look like?”

  “Well, they’re … narrow. But they open out nicely.”

  By now released from the spell of her parents, Kate’s eyes had almost closed, my words the model for what she limned within herself. Imagining from what strange angle she’d shadow in that flower, I tried to inspire her inner sketching: “Those little petals curl up in the wind, like … arms reaching out.”

  “And the stamens? What do they look like?”

  Kate’s parents took in our words with a raising of eyebrows that, in this household, was equivalent to assaulting pots with wooden spoons. My Kate ignored them, and we continued our invisible, collaborative illustration.

  *

  On my lap lay a drawing of a coffee mug so enveloped in darkness it seemed to be melting. The cup’s shadowy edges also suggested a woman’s profile—wasn’t that a cheek, an ear, a wave of dark hair? Perhaps I was wrong. The more I stared, the more it switched from shadows to something like a face and then back again, a frustrating ambiguity that reminded me of that Thanksgiving months ago when I wasn’t sure at first whose side Kate was on. Even now, though we were living together and content beyond what I’d ever hoped for, sometimes Kate’s eyes confounded me as I looked at her across the room or over a spread of pillows—were they blue with gray highlights, or gray with the brightest blue shining through?

  Concentrating on Kate’s drawing again, I tried to imagine something hot inside the cup—cappuccino, herbal tea, tangy broth—that would help me guess my way into a caption. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Kate had effectively moved in since January, but those weren’t her distinctive soft steps that stopped outside the door to my apartment, or any friend’s that I could recall. With an unhappy lurch in my stomach, I wondered if one of her parents had finally decided to discover our secret.

  The knock on the door was familiar—light, yet insistent. Before I could place its signature the door opened. There stood my sister in a dark rumpled skirt, her bright red blouse only half tucked in, her gaunt face forcing out a smile.

  “Well, hello, Michael,” she said in a small hoarse voice, and then she stepped inside.

  Her sudden appearance so surprised me I could only produce a feeble “Laurie?”

  She kissed me on the cheek and then collapsed on the couch, kicking her shoes off. “Oh, I want to hear something else—how about, ‘Good Lord, dear sister, you look as if you’ve driven across three state lines without a wink of sleep.”

  “You have?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Laurie plumped up a couch pillow. “Wake me up in time for dinner?” she whispered, almost instantly slipping into sleep, a curl of hair easing over her cheek as her breathing steadied and slowed.

  I hadn’t seen my sister, had barely spoken to her since she’d gone off to college last fall, so why had she come here, so obviously in some kind of trouble? I almost shook her shoulders to wake her up, but her calm face reminded me of our darkest days with Mother, when I sometimes checked on my brother and sister at night, always startled at how sleep appeared to wipe the worry from their faces.

  Laurie’s profile, pressed against a dark pillow, eerily suggested that border of shadows on Kate’s cup. I returned to my quiet struggle with the drawing. It was a woman’s face, I decided. Or at least that’s what I saw now, and my caption would have to make a reader see it too. I feel like my head is filled with hot coffee was a possibility. Occasionally I glanced at Laurie as she shifted an arm or leg in her sleep, hoping for inspiration, and then Kate returned, huffing through the door with two brimming bags of groceries.

  Her smile dissolved at the sight of a young woman asleep on the couch. “Who’s that?”

  “Laurie.”

  She stared without a sign of recognition and I had to add, “My sister.”

  “Your sister?” Her voice rose. “Why didn’t you tell me she was—”

  “Kate,” I whispered, “I didn’t know. She just appeared.”

  “Why is she here?”

  “I don’t know that either. She came in and fell asleep like that,” I said, snapping my fingers. “We’ll have to wait until she wakes up.”

  Kate nodded, her mouth a grim line, and I could see that my sister’s sudden appearance conjured up what few stories I’d told of my family—and the specter of those I hadn’t. Shifting the bags in her arms, Kate left for the kitchen.

  I followed and helped her unpack the groceries. With growing frustration, Kate couldn’t seem to remember where to put the cans of soup, the cookies, the brown rice. “The cereal, where’s the cereal shelf?” she groused, waving a box of cornflakes.

  “Hey, calm down.” I touched Kate’s arm lightly, lingering on the sweaty crook of her elbow. She turned and held me, and over her shoulder I saw Laurie stirring on the couch. “My sister needs some rest,” I whispered into Kate’s ear. “She drove a long way to get here.”

  Kate pulled away. “Something must be wrong,” she said, her face crumpling at the possibility of a new and gruesome tale.

  “No. Not at all.” Unconvinced by my own words and afraid that Kate might draw me into her fears, I returned to the cans of corn and frozen orange juice, assorted fresh vegetables and the tub of butter cluttering the counter. “Look, let me put the rest of this stuff away. Why don’t you try to relax, maybe hit the books? I’ll cook.”

  I cleared out the bags while Kate settled at the desk in the living room, her back to Laurie. As I worked up a sizzling concoction of chopped meat and onions, tomatoes and diced eggplant, I tried convincing myself that no emergency lurked behind my sister’s sudden appearance. After all, wasn’t it just like Laurie to make a dramatic entrance? Wasn’t she happy, now that she was far from home and Father’s strictures? I silently repeated these questions until they slowly became assertions, sturdy facts above dispute. Then, ab
ove the sweetly dissonant bubbling of dinner on the stove, I heard the murmur of Kate and Laurie’s voices in the living room.

  I stood in the doorway. Sitting side by side on the couch, together they turned their faces to me. So, you’re living with a girlfriend, my sister’s amused eyes said, while Kate’s pleaded silently for rescue.

  “You woke up just in time,” I announced. “Dinner is almost ready.”

  We sat at the three place settings I’d squeezed on the tiny kitchen table and filled our plates. If my sister’s visit had been spurred by trouble, there was little sign of it: she punctuated mouthfuls of my culinary offering with animated patter about her wild, nocturnal roommate, her decrepit dorm, the ratio of bars to churches in the nearby town and, most of all, the ins and outs of her college theater program.

  “So in spite of everything, I got the lead, can you believe it? My first try. I guess there’s just something about me that takes to dark little dramas. Anyway, there was more than one jealous thing in the cast who hoped I’d, I don’t know, drop dead during rehearsals.” Laurie waved her fork like a flag and added airily, “But I’m alive to tell the tale, alive to report that the campus newspaper gave me a rave review.”

  Except for the punctuation of a few appreciative comments I added little to the conversation, depressed that I’d never heard any of these stories before. My family was losing even the casual intimacy of shared history. Worse, Laurie’s bright, anxious eyes didn’t match her gleeful monologues, and I was sure Kate noticed this too: she waited for my sister to finally announce a tale of woe.

  With the meal finished, we all helped clean up, getting in each other’s awkward way. “Hey, how about a round of Scrabble?” I suggested, thinking that with each of us limited to whatever words seven letters might produce, we’d find ourselves on more equal conversational footing.

  Kate and I did speak more, even if we commented mainly on the double and triple values of words and letters, bemoaned a dearth or abundance of consonants, or challenged the occasional suspicious spelling. Meanwhile Laurie rattled away, at one point reciting a monologue from her recent theatrical triumph. When we finally tallied up the spoils of our competing vocabularies, it was Kate who eked out a win.

  Blushing a little, she accepted our congratulations, then murmured, “Excuse me,” and padded off to the bathroom. Once the door closed I scooted my chair closer to my sister. “Well, what do you think of Kate?”

  Laurie flashed a too precisely casual smile. “Oh, she’s nice.”

  I sat back, hurt. “Just nice?”

  Unfazed, Laurie arranged another polite smile. “And she’s pretty—”

  “I know how she looks.”

  She sighed, then leaned over and whispered, “Well, she’s just not onstage.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked too loudly, ready to defend Kate’s quiet ways, yet also, I vaguely understood, to bully down my own doubts.

  “Just what I said,” Laurie returned. “She doesn’t … project out to the audience. And if she’s not where she is, then where is she?”

  I said nothing, remembering how sometimes during lovemaking, when Kate’s ecstatic eyes narrowed to slits, I wondered if she shut out more of the world than she took in.

  “By the way, Michael, does she know about Mom?”

  “Of course she does.”

  Laurie raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “And nothing. We just don’t talk about it much.”

  “Oh.” Laurie paused and glanced about the room, stopping at Kate’s drawings taped on the walls. She took them in for a few moments and then asked, her voice slightly dreamy, “Well, what do you talk about?”

  I heard the distant whoosh of the toilet and said, “Let’s leave this for later, okay?” I listened to the faint sounds of Kate washing her hands, I couldn’t help thinking she was about to make an entrance with my sister and I a secret audience awaiting her performance. Just as the door opened, Laurie whispered in my ear, “So tell me this—which dwarf is she?”

  Though annoyed at my sister for asking such a question, I nodded earnestly, pretending she’d confided something important, because Kate stood in the doorway. She lingered there, hesitant, afraid to interrupt a moment of family intimacy, and I loved her for this, loved her for being present and gracious and proving my sister wrong.

  “It’s okay, sweets,” I said, and when she sat beside me I hugged her with perhaps too much fervor.

  “Michael?” she whispered, gently shrugging away.

  “So, what do you do, Kate?” Laurie asked, clearly relishing our little struggle.

  “You mean my major? Art.”

  My sister leaned forward, projecting great interest, but I jumped in, gesturing at the sketches on the walls with a foolish flourish. “We collaborate on a daily strip in the school paper. Kate does the illustrations—”

  “Those, really?” Laurie said. “They’re so … beautiful.”

  I fetched Kate’s latest from a bookshelf and handed it to Laurie. “And I write the captions. I was trying to come up with something for this when you came in.”

  My sister examined the mysterious cup as though it were some script she needed to memorize, and I tried to see it through her eyes: a shadowy face, perhaps, staring off at its own world?

  Laurie looked up from the page and said, “If my lips touched this cup, they might never speak again.”

  Kate quickly glanced at me, and I forced out a tiny laugh. “Funny, that sounds like one of my captions.”

  “Well, we are brother and sister.”

  Kate reached out for her drawing, offering no response to Laurie’s interpretation. Instead she stretched and yawned. “Please, you guys, don’t mind me, but I’ve got a nine o’clock class tomorrow. Anyway,” she added, turning to my sister, “let me get you settled on the couch before I go off.”

  While she gathered bedding from the closet, waving away Laurie’s offer of help, I watched Kate’s nervous hospitality and wondered which dwarf was she? Her own, perhaps, one with a secret name still waiting to be discovered.

  Kate kissed me, wished us good night and closed the bedroom door. I turned to my sister, now slumped in her chair. Was she already lost in whatever troubles she’d managed to briefly banish? I didn’t want Kate to overhear them, so I tugged at Laurie’s elbow. “Let’s take a walk.”

  She blinked at me without recognition for a moment, then recovered and grinned. “Sure, why not?”

  I led us across the sprawling campus, waiting for Laurie to begin her unhappy tale. Instead, we walked without a word until she said, “Dad doesn’t know you’re living with her, does he?”

  “No, but if he cared enough to ask about my life, I’d tell him. I really don’t know if he’d be upset.”

  “You’re not sure what upsets dear Dad? How lucky for you.”

  “So that’s it,” I said, stopping short. “You had another fight? Why am I not surprised you still can’t get along—”

  Laurie frowned. “Oh, the only way Dad wants to get along is to be left alone, no complications. Why do you think it was so easy for him to fire you?”

  I grimaced at those casually cruel words. Laurie stopped and answered her own question in a kinder tone: “Because you asked too much of him.”

  “That’s not why. I failed him—”

  “Oh, have it your way, Michael.” She turned away, suddenly interested in a hedge that bordered the engineering building, and I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Then tell me this—why do Dan and Dad get along so well?”

  Laurie laughed a bitter laugh that sounded too much like Mother’s. “Those two. They’ll murder each other one of these days, I’m sure of it.”

  I reached out and held her arm. “Hey, no jokes—what are you saying?”

  Laurie giggled at my anxious face. “Oh, not that kind of murder. Well, something worse, actually—no slit throats, but they’re killing each other, just the same. The more Dan tries to be like Dad, the more Dad hardens that awful front of his
that Dan’s trying to imitate. Before you know it, they’ll be the Zombie Twins.”

  We continued across the quad and I couldn’t speak, filled with the memory of Dan coming home from the nursery, shaking with frustration over some minor difficulty ordering spring bulbs. Father calmed him down with an insistent patience until they sat in a deepening shared silence on the living room couch. The Zombie Twins. Even though bringing my brother and father together had been disastrous for me, I’d never considered it might be so for them, too.

  “Is that what you came to talk about?”

  “Oh Michael, nothing so selfless—I’m here for me.”

  We stood among a grove of trees leading to the observatory, their dark leaves rustling above us. “So tell me.”

  My sister watched me so carefully I believed she knew how afraid I was of what she had to say. She shook her head and pulled back a step. “When my first semester’s grades were sent home, Dad saw I was taking theater classes. So we’ve had our share of … telephone chats. It’s bad enough that I’m still pretending, but he really can’t stand it that I’m doing better in theater than anything else. Last night’s call was just too much, Michael—he said if I take theater again my sophomore year he won’t pay for school.”

  “Laurie, you know why he’s worried—”

  “I don’t care! When he says I have to drop theater, he’s saying that what I care about doesn’t matter, or worse, that I really don’t matter.” She shuddered. “He’s trying to erase me, rub me out! Just like he did Mom. Well, he’ll never get another chance, not one more. I don’t need a degree to wait on tables, and that’s what I’ll be doing until my big break. So why not quit school?”

  “Now there’s a wonderful solution. Come on, Laurie, that’s nuts—”