Dead Languages (11 page)

“Mouth it?”

“Yes. Just move your lips. Don’t sing any of the songs, don’t say any of the words. Just mouth it, okay? I don’t want to hear any of you coming through on the news.”

I looked up. Mother was waving. Father was snapping pictures with his Nikon. They both seemed so much a part of the Christmas spirit that I didn’t want to ruin their night. Somehow I’d been appointed spokesman for the Last Tier Quintet. I said, “Okay, we’ll mouth it.”

I think the idea of hearing themselves on the eleven o’clock news threw dread fear into the hearts of the other four fellows. They didn’t seem to mind mouthing it and, as a show of solidarity, I went along with them. We opened our mouths wide, gestured meaningfully with our eyes, and shook our arms with baritonic temerity while singing in silence. The finale was Z’s solo on the beauty of the Christian night. She stood in the center of a floodlight, caroling into the camera. The boys and I in the back row, covered in darkness, mouthed the words right along with her. There’s something about overheard harmonies, songs sung over
there,
that lends them more weight than music played on your own headphones; the rapture of the soul in anguish, etc. Afterward, Z rushed up to me and said Channel
7
promised the concert, or at least part of her solo, would appear, if not tonight, sometime later this week. Then she introduced her parents, who made Mother and Father look like provincial street peddlers by comparison.

Z said, “Zuh conzert: it wuz—how zoo you zay—a zukzess! Wazn’t it, Jeremy? What iz zuh matter? Why iz zuh azelete zo zilent?”

I’ve never easily accepted my sweethearts’ successes—surely this is little more than an aversion to Mother’s lofty accomplishment in periodicals—and after that night I never felt the same about Christianity, either. I blamed my humiliating silence upon Christendom in general and Ghirardelli Square Christmas shoppers in particular. Chanukah was in its fifth night. Suddenly I was devout.

I’D PERENNIALLY LOVED
the candled incantation—
Baruch atoh Adonai Elohaynu melech ha’olom, asher kid’shawnu b’mitzvosawv v’tzivawnu l’hahdleek nair shel Chanukah
—because I didn’t know what it meant and it was pure, tribal sound. Now I wanted to know what it meant, what Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur meant, what was contained in the Talmud and the Torah. Now I had something like patience for Father’s explanation of how this night was different from all other nights; something other than contempt for Beth’s Hebrew Youth Group; something other than cynicism for Mother’s assertion that an aunt of hers on her mother’s side was related to Louis Brandeis. The dripping wax on the menorah, the spinning dreydl on the kitchen floor—these things that I had hated with all my heart I wanted to love. As dinner concluded, I announced that as a demonstration of my faith I was going to fast until the end of Chanukah.

Father was opening a present. He put down the package and said, “But you don’t fast on Chanukah. Chanukah is a celebration. You fast on Yom Kippur, Jeremy. That was in October.”

“And
you
never fast past noon,” Mother said.

“Yeah, Jeremy, by ten-thirty you’re already filching cookies from the cabinet,” Beth said. Beth would often use words like “filching.”

“I’m going to fast until the end of Chanukah,” I reiterated.

Father had opened his present and didn’t know what it was. It looked like a miniature guillotine.

“Don’t you know what it is?” Mother said, opening her own present and blowing smoke into the sacred air. “It’s a little device I got at Dubon’s that pumps up your balls when they go soft.”

Beth looked at Mother. Mother looked at Beth. Together they broke into a terrific fit of the giggles. Father held up the guillotine for closer inspection and looked like he was going to cry.

“Oh, don’t look so put upon, Teddy. Your
tennis
balls. It’ll pump up your Tretorns for you.”

Father brightened.

“Oh, how nice,” Mother said, gripping a little black gadget. “A battery charger for my tape recorder. Beth, did you think of this?”

Yes, she had. Beth had thought of this. Beth thought of everything. I’d thought of fasting. Friday night until Tuesday morning: it was a long time. I thought I could do it. While my family ripped gift paper and ate halvah, I’d swallow air.

The impulse of starvation is barely distinguishable from a yearning for death; I understand that now. I see my eleven-year-old self standing before a burning, bright mirror in the bathroom, my absurdly small hands pressed together around my absurdly small waist, my head aching with hunger, my feet stuck with sweat to the blue tile floor, my white crotch impatient for the production of pubic hair. I step into the shower, opening my mouth, letting the cold water gush until I gag, then climb into bed, lying on top of the sheets, shivering, reading and rereading a book called
Rabbit, Run
because it was about basketball, tearing off the top and bottom of each page and chewing gray paper until morning. Not until I started researching senior thesis possibilities did I realize the author of that book built such ornate syntax to retaliate against his own stutter.

For three consecutive nights I performed the same ceremony, but famine’s no fun, dying’s too arduous. Monday, on my way home from school, I bought a bag of groceries, snuck in the back entrance to my bedroom, and feasted on Muenster cheese, lean pastrami, pumpernickel bagels, Beer Nuts, no beer but a half-gallon of grapefruit juice, mint chip ice cream, Nilla-Vanilla Wafers, apples, oranges, bananas. A fraction of the food I left in the bag and deposited in a drawer underneath some sweaters, but the large majority of it I inhaled, then I collapsed and slept until Mother came downstairs and asked if I wouldn’t like to break bread with my family on this, the last night of Chanukah.

The room was dark. Mother stood behind me like some shadowy Eurydice. I rolled away from her and pretended still to sleep, but she turned on a light, pressed a damp rag to my forehead, again invited me upstairs to the banquet. “No,” I said, pushing the rag away from my face. “I’m not breaking my fast until tomorrow morning.”

“It’s not healthy. You’ll starve yourself to death. You’re skinny enough as it is. Besides, this is the last night of Chanukah and your father got you quite a nice present. Please come up and join us,” Mother said. She stomped one of her feet on the floorboards.

“No. Tomorrow night I’ll eat with you, but not tonight.”

“Please, Jeremy. For your father’s sake if not mine. He can’t wait to see the look on your face when you open your present.”

“He can keep the present. I j-j-just want to stay down here and read
Rabbit, Run.”

“Parts of that book are pure pornography. You shouldn’t be reading it, anyway. You should be upstairs with your family, opening presents, feeding your face, having a good time: being normal.”

Then something quite abnormal occurred. Mother was a reporter. She was trained to be on the lookout for abnormal occurrences. When a trail of red ants started to make its way up her leg she noticed it instantaneously. She let out a shriek. Brushing the ants off her skirt and felling them on the floor with the heel of her boot, she asked me what in the world ants were doing not only in my room but up and down her hose.

“Oh, you know, the cold. Ants like to come inside when it gets cold.”

“But
red
ants and so many of them?” Mother asked, following the ants from her foot to the floor, the floor to the door, the door back to the bureau, and the bureau to the bottom right drawer, in which green ice cream was dripping on gold sweaters, half-eaten apples were turning brown, and the red ants of San Francisco appeared to be holding their semiannual convention.

Mother was delighted. I swore I’d broken my fast only a few hours earlier, but she refused to believe I hadn’t been gorging myself the entire weekend: her little martyr wasn’t so stoical, after all. She hugged and kissed me, laughed a good deal, and cleaned the drawer. We walked hand-in-hand upstairs to the dining room, where Father sat atop a purple bicycle, pedaling in place. “Happy Chanukah,” he said. “A brand-new Schwinn, just for you. Look, Jeremy: it has three speeds, a bell, a basket in back, two reflectors, an air pump, and a chain lock.”

SOMETIMES
my childhood seems to me nothing more than an endless series of obsessions, overwrought attempts to get beyond a voice that bothered me and, like any saint in the grip of a metaphor, I desired either to vanish forever or to emerge triumphant. I never emerged triumphant. The nearest I got to vanishing forever was watching Robert Shields perform mime on Montgomery Street the day after I’d asked Z, at the Currier graduation dance, to let me have the last slow one for old times’ sake. Not meaning to be nasty or vindictive but only mocking my speech in the way I’d always mocked hers, she answered affirmatively in such absurd, abrupt, repetitive, broken rhythms that I told her she could go find someone else to dance with and ducked back into the dark crowd. This concomitance—falling in love with significant gestures twelve hours after listening to an immigrant make fun of my disfluency—bred my newest devotion. I decided to become mute. That was all there was to it. I would end the exchange. All summer I practiced sign language and, although no one in my family knew the first letter of the manual alphabet, I thought a perfect time to cease oral communication would be when we went on our annual hike in the High Sierras the first two weeks of August.

The High Sierras: mountains of such magic importance to my childhood as to be commensurate with aboriginal promises of beauty and peace; jagged pinnacles far, far away, but oh so close, so omnipresently in the mind; background to a poster of Beth’s that said
IN WILDERNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD
, which is not exactly a novel idea but which in its balanced incantation had a certain charm for me; subject of innumerable slide shows when Beth and I were too young to hike, and Mother and Father would return with color pictures of melting snow, rushing water, tents, cabins, silver drinking cups; site of Mother and Father’s tenth anniversary, on the last day of which Mother threw out her shoulder and pleaded with Father to pop it back in place for her, but he could not—he was simply incapable, he said, of causing her pain—so they had to walk all the way back to the ranger station, where a very nice and quite good-looking young forester was eager to oblige.

The summer I turned twelve, while they were shutting their suitcases and locking the windows of the house, I handed the members of my family three-by-five typewritten notes that said:

Beth thought I was kidding, Father said let’s get on the road before nightfall, and Mother asked whose permission I’d obtained to use her typewriter. On the drive north I was unable to entertain my family in the way I usually did, conflating billboard phrases into a mad rush of meaningless sound, and was forced to forfeit my turn when Beth decided all the punch of Twenty Questions was lost when it was played in pen. Other than that, though, I didn’t have any special problems during the journey. In restaurants I’d tap Beth on the shoulder, point to what I wanted, and she’d tell the waitress. At gas stations I let Father ask the attendant where the men’s room was, then followed him. In the car I stayed silent, concentrating on pastoral scenery.

Once we got on the trails, I just watched white water without identifying my feelings. I didn’t have to say the waterfall was strong or loud or blue or beautiful, the deer was fast or afraid or dangerous or female. I didn’t have to say the sun was hot, the trail was steep, the mountains were gorgeous, my backpack was heavy. In wilderness was the preservation of the word. When we stopped and spoke to other people on the trail, Mother would explain that I had a very hoarse voice from singing for six hours around a camp fire. At night I’d lie awake in my sleeping bag, look up at the moon and stars—enormous white ink blot on black paper, hundreds of sparkling asterisks—and think I’d at last arrived at the proper relation of man to his environment, probably solving my speaking problem as well.

But on the last day of this high-camp paradise—why is there always a
but
and why is it always on the last day?—I got it into my mind that I had to run the entire distance to the way station where our car was parked. I ran uphill, downhill, through streams, over rocks, faster than deer. I’d run until I was out of earshot, then jog in place until my family caught up, and listen to Mother say: “Don’t run, Jeremy. If you run, you won’t notice the trees or the animals or the falls. That’s what we’re here for: to feel one with the beauty of nature, not to set sprinting records.” I already felt one with the beauty of nature. I wanted to set sprinting records. I’d hold up a sign—
See you at the next bend—
then turn my back and be off.

Father finally had enough of this silence game and, in a cool glade right at the timberline, caught up with me. Bounding over the rocks, snorting and puffing, he looked like nothing so much as a mad goat. I sat in the dirt, carving
JJZ
into a boulder with my pocket knife. What a wordsmith. He took off his pack, sat down next to me, and patted my leg.

“Don’t you think you’ve done quite enough to make your mother and me miserable without running away from us on the last afternoon of our vacation?” Father asked.

I nodded.

“We’ve let you hand us notes for two weeks. Won’t you walk these last few miles with us?”

I shook my head.