Dead Languages (20 page)

Both Mother and Father urged me to escape from immobility into the wonderful world of literature, and Mother even went so far as to set up a kind of course for me in the
Bildungsroman.
Every afternoon, upon coming home from school, I would unbuckle my brace, lie on my bed doing leg exercises with the rope pulleys and ankle weights I still had from my basketball days, then read variations on the theme of my own childhood from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Henry Roth. It was a little late to begin reading seriously—I think Beth had read all the comedies by the time she was twelve; “All what comedies?” I once asked, and she said, “Tell me you’re kidding”—but at least I was finally reading with, to Mother’s elation, a certain compulsiveness and insatiability.

When I mumbled something about trying my own hand at this stuff, a brand-new electric typewriter magically materialized on the top step of the stairs to my room. My first story was about a boy who “puts toe to gleaming metal and leaps off the most beautiful bridge in the world.” My second story focused upon a boy—the same boy, I think, resurrected—who, while waiting for the traffic light to change, imagines the inner lives of the drivers in front, behind, and to either side of him, comes to comprehend the latent sexuality of automobiles, the vulnerability of pedestrians, and the symbolic force of the color red. My third effort was based upon the tragic misfortunes of a man Father had known when he was director of the Mission district poverty program. There was present in all three stories an opposition between the Individual and Society, as well as a kind of Gothic despair that I thought was probably pretty important to good writing, but you can’t write a
Bildungsroman
when you’re in the middle of your
Bildung,
and I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about other people to write well about them, so I gave up my first go at fabrication.

I remember one very long night I spent doing leg exercises on the rope pulley while Father—who not only had never become the Jerusalem correspondent for United Press International but also had to watch and make as if to cheer while Mother rose higher and higher in the field of feature journalism—explained that I. F. Stone was doing more practical good for the world than
Twelfth Night
ever did. Perhaps because
Twelfth Night
was Beth’s favorite comedy, I set out to prove Father right: I would navigate the nonfiction section.

Although newspapers are meant to be read very quickly and then thrown out, or used to start fires or line trash bins or wrap fish for the freezer, Mother had had the
Daily Bruin
for her tenure as editor,
1942
to
1945
, bound in green leather. I don’t know where those volumes are now—Beth is so very much the archivist she probably has them locked away in Puppa’s trunk slid beneath her four-poster bed in the Berkeley hills—but when I was a child I used to read back issues of the
Bruin
all the time. I have no idea what I was looking for, since it wasn’t like a yearbook in which there would have been black-and-white photographs of Mother at her more immature. It seemed to me like any other newspaper, only a little yellow around the edges, a little more directly irrelevant. Apparently, it was one of the very best college dailies in the country and, in any case, beyond comparison with the crosstown competition, which printed lead editorials in praise of the USC football team.

When FDR died, Mother put on the front page a picture of him puffing a cigarette through a nicotine filter. This wasn’t an appropriately glum photo for the president’s funeral, and she caught so much flak from the chancellor that she threatened to resign until the entire editorial staff delivered an eloquent letter of support. Every Thursday evening Arnie Logan (who later became Pat Brown’s, then Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, but who at the time was nothing more than sports editor of the
Daily Bruin)
conspired with the rest of the boys in Sports to write an article which, if you read it linearly, made almost no sense at all but which, if you read it backwards and skipped every other line, produced a rather risqué narrative. Every Thursday evening they’d try to sneak these naughty tales past Mother into the Friday edition. I think it would be unfair to say Mother ever had a particularly dirty mind. She was an amazingly precise proofreader, though, and she never let their lewd little stories get by her. I feel for Arnie and the boys. Growing up, I used to feel
like
Arnie and the boys, speaking backwards to rebel against Mother but never making it into her Friday edition, her heart of hearts. Mother was always the editor, I was always her little cub reporter turning in rough drafts, and she was always sending me back for one more rewrite.

I became, by default, editor-in-chief of the
London Journal,
which the principal thought was ghostwritten by Mother because I was so meek in person and so mean in print. Every other week I wrote what was called “A Satire,” but which was really an all-out assault upon myself, a sort of suicide note in the guise of covering student government. One night, while I was staying late to work on what I thought was a particularly wicked essay, Mother knocked on the door of the newspaper office, ostensibly to bring dinner but actually to determine whether I was doing justice to the name that meant so much in mass media. When I was a junior in high school, I hated everything but the sound of the door being closed from the inside, and there she was—on the other side of that door, peering through the glass window, tapping with her key ring, wanting in.

She was wearing her black leather boots (what Beth called “boots not made for walkin’”), her Pacific Ocean blue business dress, and a weird string of wooden beads. Perfume was apparent, as were lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge: Mother as Mature Model. In one hand she held her reporter’s notebook in which stenography recorded every word uttered at a press conference whose highlight was Mayor Alioto’s denial that he’d ever met his brother-in-law, and the other had a sack of food that she’d bought for me at an A&W Root Beer stand on her way home after Father told her I was still at school. While I inhaled hamburgers and french fries, Mother walked around the
Journal
office, studying the assignment sheet on the bulletin board; trying out the typewriter, which was missing plastic caps to vowel keys and had a jammed margin release; flipping through the photo file, dead black negatives of all twenty-seven candidates for student body president.

In the way that anyone human would have asked how you are doing, Mother asked, “What are you working on?”

“My column,” I said. Mother was not the most loyal fan of my column, but she did think every fifth or sixth effort scored some marvelous sociological points.

“How’s it going?” she asked, still flipping through the photo file.

“Fine. I just finished.”

“Are you happy with it?” For Mother this wasn’t a question so much as a direct challenge, since she was never happy, at least publicly, with her own work and assumed no one else would admit he derived any pleasure from his own expressions either.

“Very happy,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I liked the column a lot.

“It can’t stand any improvement?” she asked, tilting her head to the left. She leaned against my desk, watching me sweep crumbs onto the floor with a ruler.

“No, Mother.”

“That’s great. It must be very good. I’m eager to read it.”
And woe to you if I am at all disappointed.

“It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, pushing back my chair and locking my leg brace. I was still supposed to be using a cane, but I’d left it in my locker, so I limped across the room to throw my A&W garbage into the wastebasket. Mother followed. When I leaned against the wall to gather strength before making the return trip to my seat, she cornered me.

“Jeremy honey, can’t I take a little peek at it now?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

The fluorescent lights flickered like melodramatic special effects for a storm scene.

“It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, resting against her to get my balance, then limping back to my seat. “You’ll see it then.”

“Why won’t you let me see it now?” she asked, shoving some papers aside, sitting on the side of my desk, tapping her toes on a plastic chair.

I wouldn’t let her see it now because I remembered how thoroughly she took the fun out of the city championship by calling my article a “tissue of sportswriting platitudes.” I said: “Because I don’t want to hear your criticism until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“How silly. What kind of newspaperman are you?”

“I’m not a newspaperman. I’m a s-s-satirist.”

“I won’t criticize it, I promise. I’m just curious to see what you’ve been working on. I wrote three thousand words today on Joseph Alioto’s ancestry. You can look at that and laugh. Let me just look at your lead,” Mother said, descending to her most transparent strategy.

“It’s not a lead. It’s more of an overture,” I said. I’d just read
Swann’s Way
and really liked the word “overture.”

“Lead. Overture. Whatever. Let me take a look at it, for Chrissake.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No,” I said, squirming in my seat, banging the brace against the leg of the desk.

“Pretty please?”

“No.”

“Pretty pretty please, Jeremy honey?”

This could have gone on forever. Mother’s sweet sincerity was starting to get on my nerves, so I opened my desk drawer, took out my satire, and handed it to her. I figured the least I could do was let her look at my lead, if that was what she really wanted to do, although of course she read the lead, then the paragraph after the lead, then the paragraph after the paragraph after the lead, all the way to the column’s sad conclusion:

A  S A T I R E

Reflection in a One-Way Mirror

By Jeremy Zorn

I hobbled around the office, pretending to clean up, putting away scissors that didn’t cut and staplers that didn’t have staples, while she brandished her blue pencil—she actually carried an editor’s blue pencil at all times—and interrupted her reading of the article only twice: at the end of the third paragraph to ask if I wanted a ride home (“y-y-yes”) and at the end of the fifth paragraph to ask if there was an ashtray around anywhere (“n-n-no”). She commenced her attack upon my little column immediately after she finished reading it.

I guess now I can admit the irony is heavy-handed, the last few paragraphs are dominated by overwrought figures, the prose is repetitious in a coy, anachronistic sort of way, the basic idea is needlessly Manichaean, but at the time I thought it was killingly good, and when Mother lit into it I wanted to scream. She said one of these days I really must begin to take into account the objective world of reality.

She said I had better learn how to write a “straight news story” that “tumbled down cleanly,” if I ever wanted to amount to anything as a journalist.

She said there was editorializing and there was editorializing, but this was psychosis.

She said there might be a “decent four-inch filler of a factual story” buried somewhere in the satire and, if I wanted, she’d stay late “digging it out.”

I imagined a night of Mother and me sitting next to each other at a wobbly desk and giving the thing a much closer reading than it deserved. I asked her to stop smoking and told her I didn’t need a ride home: it was nice out, I wasn’t tired, I’d walk. She said if I couldn’t take constructive criticism I was a baby. With that, somehow, I fell apart. I clumped around the room in a crazy circle, yelling, “Get out, Mother, please get out,” and tearing up the satire, only to spend the rest of the night on the floor piecing it, then taping it together, although the next morning I decided not to print it, anyway. Not enough space.

That was the way Mother ran a newspaper. That was the kind of chaos she could create so quickly. It’s a wonder to me Arnie and the boys didn’t lock her up in the ladies’ lav until she promised to be less imperial, but she served her reign without a whisper of insurrection. On the Monday after commencement, which Puppa did not deem a signal enough event to attend, she started working as the editor of the “house organ” for the ACLU, which have always been interesting initials to me in that
ACLU
is an anagram of
UCLA,
as if wherever she went Mother, in contradistinction to her disfluent son, changed the language to suit her own needs.

I DIDN’T WITHDRAW
again into autism, but I was certainly down in the dumps when I trudged home for dessert. Mother’s attempt at encouragement was to say that, despite her serious reservations as to the
content
of “Reflection in a One-Way Mirror,” she thought I’d at least learned how to write a correct sentence. There was no reason I couldn’t speak one, as well—a neat inversion of the usual idea that only after mastering speech do we graduate to reading and writing. All I had to do was know what I was going to say before I said it, write it down, memorize it, and then, speaking only in perfect sentences, just … say it. In the abstract, the principle, like most abstract principles, functioned fine. Invariably, though, I’d pause halfway through the perfect sentence to consult the crumpled piece of paper in my pants pocket or, worse, encounter the sympathetic eyes of my listener, who hadn’t a clue why I’d been speaking in such stilted syntax and was now talking in such halting tones. I figured maybe only Mother was capable of kneading language.