Dead Languages (25 page)

The dining room was dark except for candles on a white tablecloth with white roses. I assumed the maid had prepared the delicious dinner—brown rice and fruit salad, beef stroganoff, asparagus, honeydew—because Mrs. Levine looked like she hadn’t lifted a finger, except to type up mood and character, since she was in college.

“So, Jeremy,” Dr. Levine kept at me, “so what do you see yourself becoming?”

“Becoming, sir?”

Barbie kicked me with her buckled white shoes.

Dr. Levine dabbed more butter on his rice and said, “Yes, Jeremy. Becoming. Don’t young men want to become anything any more? Your mother is a fine journalist. Your father is—still? Am I right?—director of the poverty program. I’m an ear-nose-and-throat man, as is Barbie’s older brother. What profession do you want to enter, Jeremy?”

“I see what you mean,” I said, stalling, pouring myself and Barbie more milk. “I think—I think I w-w-want to become a writer, sir.”

“Call me Lew.”

“I think I w-w-want to become a writer, Lew.”

“Really? What kind of writer?”

“A real writer.”

“What does that mean?”

“Honey, you know what Jeremy means,” Mrs. Levine teased her husband. “There’s no more noble calling than good work with words.”

“Fill me in, Jeremy,” Dr. Levine said. “Explain it to the cultural ignoramus. What’s a real writer? And why do you want to become one?”

I wanted to become a writer because it struck me as my last opportunity to cease being the victim of language. However, I didn’t think such an unhappy insight was appropriate dinner table discussion—it was the very kind of
faux pas
Mother had coached me against committing—so I said, “Well, my mother is, as you know, a journalist and my father used to be a reporter and he reads a lot of books and tells funny stories and writes good letters. I want to be like them but different.”

“Good,” Mrs. Levine said, clapping her well-preserved if highly lotioned hands over her head. “More power to you. Very good.”

“Different?” Dr. Levine said.

“Not be a journalist. Make stuff up, I guess. I don’t know yet.”

Dr. Levine didn’t much like either of my ideas—that children could surpass their parents or that words might be used in an unusual way—and he shifted the topic to his strong impression that Barbie was going to follow his footsteps into medicine.

“Maybe, Dad” Barbie said. “I said that last year. But that was before I met Jeremy.”

“What?” Dr. Levine said with such violence that he blew out the candle at his end, and we sat in semidarkness until Mrs. Levine—the very embodiment of the creative principle—relit the wick.

“I’ve so enjoyed working with Jeremy on the
Journal
that I think maybe—I’m just thinking about it, so don’t get mad, Dad—I’d like to become a writer as well, maybe a magazine writer like Jeremy’s mom. You should read some of her articles in
The Nation,
Dad. They’re really good.”

Dr. Levine did not want to read Mother’s articles in
The Nation.
He didn’t care if they were really good. He swirled his finger in his coffee cup saucer and refused to touch his eclair, which Mrs. Levine offered me and which I, never sated, saw no reason to reject. That upset him even more and he said, “Come on, Helen, we’re going to a movie,” which Dr. and Mrs. Levine always did whenever Dr. Levine was irate. Apologizing to Barbie and me for her husband’s behavior and telling us to let the maid clear and wash the dishes, Mrs. Levine followed Dr. Levine out the back door, the sharp slam of which caused Barbie to exclaim: “Do you realize they won’t be back for at least two hours?”

Well, yes, I said: the drive to the theater, the feature film, the drive back. Two hours. Easily.

“In most things you are, as Dad said I said, a ‘perfect genius,’ but in some things”—she started tickling—“you’re so
stupid
.”

Barbie’s room was what her mother called “classic anal-retentive.” For all my impulses in this direction, by the time I was seventeen my room had receded from view as the repository of any portion of my selfhood. Shirts and shoes fell like maps and mice all over my carpet while Barbie’s room was a series of right angles, everything tucked and fitted in girls’ colors. Every book was shelved the same way, nothing floated on the thick red sea of the rug, her electric typewriter was shrouded. There wasn’t anywhere to relax. Her mother was always urging her to throw a slumber party. This, I suppose, was it.

We lay on her bed with all its pillows and panda bears, brushing the hair out of each other’s eyes and slowly removing each other’s clothes. When you get older you undress yourself, but the first time and for a while thereafter you undress each other. It takes a lot longer, but it’s really much nicer.

“Ear-nose-and-throat?” I said, taking off her watch. “You were really once going to—”

“Damn straight,” she said, employing the vernacular to suggest this wasn’t her house on Nob Hill—she had lived. She kissed my ears, my belly button, the soles of my feet.

… with the lights off because we were still only seventeen, with the air conditioner on so the maid couldn’t hear, with blankets and pillows on the floor and pretzels and soda in bed, with both male and female contraceptives to correspond to our feeling that the future didn’t exist. My bad leg tightened up and she misinterpreted my scream. She herself did not scream. She patted my head. It was over much too soon. The sensation was unsensational. The experience was disappointing. We repeated the disappointing experience and—if memory serves—repeated it again, looking, I would imagine, for increasingly profound revelations about ourselves and each other and finding, instead, only the regressive frustration that exists at the core of any act of communication. I thought her parents would be returning soon. I told her I loved her, gathered my clothes, and tiptoed out the room, looking for light.

The maid was partial to police dramas or shows, at any rate, that featured flashy gun play. Whenever a criminal tiptoed into view, she’d rub the Levines’ butterscotch candies like rosary beads and imprecate: “Bad man, bad man, bad man.” Never one to sidestep a chance to crucify myself mercilessly, I scooted through the dark living room around midnight and heard her address an assailant peeking in a patio door, which I took as the simple truth from someone who knew.

FATHER WAS—STILL?
am I right?—the director of the poverty program and hired me as a teacher’s aide in a Hunters Point summer school for black children who’d been bussed uptown during the school year, failed their courses, and now had to attend this remedial session in their own neighborhood. The second-grade teacher I was assigned to assist called in sick the first day; boys stood on top of desks, pushing one another off, and girls gathered in a circle, flashing pocket mirrors and combing their hair. One little boy was hanging out the window, another was climbing in: they collided. Kids were eating crayons, spitting water, wrestling. I removed my coat and said, “I’m in charge here.” Louder I said, “My name is Mr. Zorn. Jeremy Zorn. I’m teaching this class.”

“You what?”

“I’m teaching this class.”

“The fuck you are.”

“Shut you mouth, white boy.”

“Big nosed motherfucker.”

“I-I-I’m teaching this class and would appreciate your undivided—”

“You what?”

“I’d—”

“Get out of my face, jewboy.”

“Faggot.”

I called roll and nobody answered except a little girl with crooked teeth and her coat still on named Lorraine Warren, who raised her hand, said she was here, walked to the front of the room, picked up a yardstick from the chalkboard tray, and smashed it against the desk in front of her. “The man said he was in charge here,” she said. Silence obtained.

The second Monday of the six-week session the teacher called in sick again and I said, “Close the windows. Stop running. Stop wrestling. Stop drinking. Stop eating. Stop talking. Shut your dirty little mouths and sit down in your seats. Give me your attention because I’m in charge of this classroom.” I unrolled a map of the world. “Do all of you know what this is?”

“Atlas.”

A little boy who squinted and needed glasses but couldn’t afford them explained that it was an encyclopedia. Lorraine said it was a map.

I said, “Yes.”

They said, “Shut your face, girl.”

They said, “Kissass.”

They said, “Niggergirl.”

They
sang
words.

Lorraine wriggled in her seat and zipped up her coat. It was the middle of summer and she was cold.

“What does the blue mean?” I asked.

“Blue means crayon.”

“Blue means paint.”

“No, sucker, means air. Blue means blue sky.”

I asked Lorraine what the blue meant.

“Don’t know.”

I asked her again.

“Don’t know.”

“The blue means water,” I said. “Ocean. The Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. Is the world flat or round?”

“Flat.”

“Flat as J.J.’s sister.”

“The world is round,” I said.

“Get off.”

“White man’s crazy.”

“Do you know where your ancestors came from? Can you point on the map to where they came from?”

“They come from uptown.”

“They dead.”

“Have you heard of A-A-Africa? Do you know where it is? Can someone come up and point to A-A-Africa?”

A girl with ankle bracelets walked to the map and pointed to Paris.

“Do you know what country you live in? What state? Do you know what city? Do you know where you are?” The bell rang and I said, “Nobody’s leaving until someone comes to the map and points to what city we’re living in.”

Lorraine got up, walked to the map, stood on a chair, stretched, pointed, and the class loved her.

Friday of the next-to-last week we took them on a field trip to Water World, a zoo for fish. Parents’ permission slips had been sent home and returned with signatures that resembled children’s penmanship. The kids came dressed to kill: boys with pressed pants, white shirts, black button-down sweaters, and girls with lipstick—seven-year-old girls with lipstick—and skirts and bouncy blouses. Lorraine wore earrings, eye shadow, glossy white lipstick, and a taffeta dress to her ankles. All this for Water World; imagine if we had taken them to the theater. They stood in single file according to home room, pinned name tags to their clothes, and boarded the buses. The principal loaded his camera. Lorraine sat next to me and asked questions: “Will you open the window? Would you like some gum? Can you please push the seat back? How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you like me?”

Her hip rested against my leg. Everyone on the bus was singing “Then Came You” and Lorraine sang softly, out of key, in my ear. She held my hand and squeezed tight as we walked across the parking lot to the turnstiles. We walked arm in arm, Lorraine and I, through an underground tunnel that was lined on both sides with tanks of dogfish, hammerhead sharks, skates, sawfish, deep-water spiny eels, flute mouths, sea horses, and at every tank Lorraine pressed her nose to the glass, said she was scared, asked me to hold her, asked me to read aloud the little blurb about each fish. I did my best. She purchased a Water World pennant for me. She gave me her lunch and stole extra milks for me. We went to the whale show and when that blue monster flopped onto its belly, splashing waves into the balcony, Lorraine buried her head in my chest to keep dry. At the end of the day, when we were counting heads, she hid so I’d find her. On the bus home she fell asleep with her head on my lap. She was seven and in heaven.

Wednesday of the last week we held Open House. I stayed late after school, rearranging the room and tacking up student papers and drawings. I told the parents how well their children were progressing, how much I enjoyed working with them, how confident I was they wouldn’t have to stay back when school rolled around in the fall. I encouraged the parents to read to their children, to have their children read to them. We drank punch and coffee, ate stale sugar cookies. In the auditorium a slide show of the field trip was presented, at the conclusion of which the audience stood, applauding, some so happy they cried. An elegant black woman with hair high as the ceiling walked toward me and said, “Lorraine told me about you.”

“You must be—”

“I don’t like that color slide of Lorraine whispering in your ear. I don’t like that one bit, mister.”

“I was sleeping.”

“You keep your itchy paws away from her, you understand? You so much as touch her and your ass is glass.”

“She’s seven years old.”

“Glass, mister, do you hear me?”

The principal’s final evaluation of me consisted of one sentence: “Should try to be more relaxed around students (has bad speech impediment).”

“
HAVING ONE’S WAY
isn’t always possible,” Beth explained last weekend while we were puttering around the family hearth, gathering goods. “Neither is it always preferable. You do have a tendency toward absolution. I mean absolutism. Whatever.” Until she became a disciple of Meher Baba—“Don’t worry, be happy”—the closest she ever came to religious conversion was when she was reading Cotton Mather sermons. The fondest memory I have is the two of us sitting together against her headboard reading the comics in early light. When we were little, if either of us was sick, we’d both stay home and take double baths; I’d splash her ponytail from behind, mercilessly. She was always seeking my hand and my hands were always deep in my pockets. I always seemed to be running away, away from Beth, who’d be playing her zither in an uncomfortable chair.

She must have held out her chewably chubby little hand, and I must have blanched once too often because, following a Halloween on which I was Lucifer and she was a princess, our masks were permanently in place. I can only see her flat-footed in the back row of ballet class, overdressed at Renaissance Faires, trailing even Mother on Yosemite expeditions. We all stopped to feed a deer in Tuolumme Meadows and Bambi came this close to ripping open Beth’s stomach when the Oreos were gone. I often felt sorry for her; I at least had symptoms. Her sorrow swooned in her body, swelling it. We were forever arguing about something superficial—me wanting to read
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
liner notes the minute she started reading them, me saying she looked gargantuan perched in a miniature dollhouse (with tiny Tide and scaled-to-size Kleenex) Uncle Gil had given her. When I was a baby she set up camp outside my crib, offering her arm through the slats whenever I chanced to look up. I have pictures. This is exhibit AA. Examine the tangle of thorns.