Dead Languages (34 page)
In my daily speech log I was supposed to eschew all psychological speculation, all memories of emotion, all attitudes, and pay exclusive attention to empirical behavior. Doesn’t someone say somewhere that poetry isn’t the expression of, but an escape from, personality? In this one aspect, speech therapy wasn’t completely dissimilar to “The Idea of Order at Key West.” It offered the possibility of a real refuge from feeling.
The conversation occurred over the telephone. I was talking to Beth. We were talking about Meher Baba. It was a low-stress situation. Tension within normal limits occurred in my stomach. Airflow stopped once, when I couldn’t say “transcendental.” Tension increased before some feared words. I avoided most
F
s and
S
s. I forgot to voluntary stutter. I used simple sentences to respond to astonishingly simple ideas.
The conversation occurred in Rico’s Restaurant on Gayley. I was talking to Gretchen. We were talking about breaking up. It was a high-stress situation. Tension occurred in my head. The tension was within abnormal limits. Speech kept reversing on itself. Airflow often failed, especially when the ostentatiously gayley waiter attempted to eavesdrop on the conversation. Tension increased on most feared words. I avoided all
F
s and
S
s. I did six semi-voluntary, semi-involuntary stutters. I used circumlocuted sentences to express anguish.
Toward the end of November, while I was rereading the entry about my surprisingly poor performance speaking to a pack of trick-or-treaters, Western Union rapped on my apartment door and the cosmos collapsed. If my family is ever known for anything, it will be for its love of endless language, its feeling for words as the only food. Not even the telegram was flat. Even that was
written.
It was from Father, and it said: MOTHER IN HOSPITAL FOR BONE SCAN. CANCER HAS SPREAD TO SPINE, LUNGS, SKULL. ADRENAL GLANDS BEING REMOVED. COME HOME IMMEDIATELY. IS THERE NO END TO ALL THIS DARKNESS?
WEARING SANDALS
and shorts, apparently the proper uniform of enlightenment, Beth met me in Baggage, then drove me to Stanford Hospital, where Father was completing the
Chronicle
’s kindergartenesque crossword puzzle and Mother was asleep in a bed of gold bars. Oxygen was being pumped into her nostrils; some sugar solution, into her main vein. Her head was gray and her skin was splotchy and purple, like a grandmother’s. She was turned on her side, wrapped in a white sheet. Her left foot was caught between two bars. Chocolate melted in the setting sun.
When she was well Mother’s distinguishing feature was her incontestable authority and now here she was, snoring beneath the fluorescent lights, helpless as a hurt pup. Through her diction, dress, and attitude, Mother prided herself on being mistaken for Beth’s older sister; now, without even trying, she looked easily as old as Father.
When the nurse woke her up for a second to give her a sleeping pill, I said, “Hi, Mom. It’s Jeremy. Nice to see you. Go back to sleep if you’re tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Beth dog-eared a middle page of the book of Baba quotes she was reading and said, “She’s obviously very tired. Too many visitors wore her out. We should all go home and let her rest.” In the back seat of the car Beth meditated, while Father and I explored the topic of property, for he was now a real estate agent and unpersuasively preoccupied with lot space, the coherence of blocks, the abiding beauty of two and a half baths.
The things in my room were like speech clinic furniture. I couldn’t get my knees under the desk. I had to hunch to get my head under the shower faucet. The bed was a full foot shorter and narrow, narrow. I awoke at five a.m. to Father howling. Beth slept right through the noise; she must have incorporated it into the assemblage of her nightmare. I donned bathrobe and slippers and padded upstairs to find Father buck naked in the breakfast room, screwing in and unscrewing a low light bulb, shaking his head, and saying between screams: “Memory goes and I forget what the other thing is. Ha ha…. Reporter races into the city desk of the
Jerusalem Post,
shouting, ‘Hold the back page!’ … The food is terrible and such small portions! … Oh, oh, the Einstein joke—… ‘and from this he makes a living?’ You always loved that one, Jeremy…. ‘Why would an insignificant person like me carry such things and, besides, who can read?’ … Why do Ukrainians live so long? They eat oatmeal for eighty years. Ha ha. Okay, maybe that’s not one of the best…. How do you make a hormone? You know that one…. Oh, oh—
‘Still,
two slices of bread?’… Rabbi, dying: ‘Will somebody please say something about my humility?’ It doesn’t always get a laugh….”
Maybe it hit Father suddenly in the middle of the night. If so, I envy him. He got it all out in one lifetime of sorrow, whereas I’ve never had even a good long cry and have had to organize these sentences to try to experience some sort of major emotion. Father loved Mother. More than that, he needed her. He desperately needed her and when, for once, she needed him he collapsed on the breakfast room linoleum, announcing, “I need the juice again, Jeremy. I can’t stand it any more.”
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t impersonate the part of the good guardian. I didn’t argue or attempt to reason with him. I packed his bags and drove him to Montbel, which, ten miles east, was rather pretty: sycamore trees, parking spaces, teenage boys with bandages on their heads. Father’s room even had a view of a little river. He jumped from wall to wall like a jai alai player, altering his mood every minute—exuberant, bashful, distressed, disgusted, tormented, tickled, grave, bemused, scared, dead, delirious—and I didn’t know what to do, so I kept hugging him, saying he’d be all right. A nurse knocked and said I had to leave now.
“Well, goodbye, then, Dad. I have to go, but Dr. Skolnick will come see you in a second. You know how much you like him.”
“Skolnick?” he said. “Don’t know him. What’s he going to do, nick my skull? Get it, Jeremy?
Skolnick: nick my skull?”
I got it, Father, I got it, but didn’t dare laugh, since the nurse was still standing in the doorway.
The schizophrenic mind, in its depressive state, focuses upon form to the virtual exclusion of content.
“You remember Dr. Skolnick, don’t you, Dad? You saw him the last time you were here and the time before that, too, I think. He’s a good man. You liked him. You talked tennis together. You always ask for him.”
“Will he give me the juice?” Father asked, bouncing up and down on his bed. There was very little else in the room other than a bureau and that unbeatable view of the river.
Despite the nurse’s stagy protestations, I said, “Yes, of course he will. He’ll give you whatever you want.”
“I’m thirsty for the juice,” he said, making obscene sounds with his lips.
Dr. Skolnick entered the room, waving sphygmomanometer and stethoscope like party favors. More jai alai acrobatics from Father. I was told to leave and return tomorrow. I left, but halfway down the hall I could still hear Father weeping.
I drove from Montbel to Stanford, from Stanford back to Montbel, comparing my parents’ problems. Sometimes I was accompanied by Beth, whom I tried to talk back to the wonderful world of books while we ministered to the diseased and dying. The first day after Thanksgiving I gave Mother an oversize Kodacolor postcard of boats and birds and the beach going to amber in the Balboa sunset.
“It’s so beautiful,” Mother said, crying and placing the card in the most privileged position at the edge of her portable table. She further flouted her scary new serenity by laying across her lap a long, thin piece of wood that she was sanding into maybe a letter-opener for Gargantua. “There’s a certain logic and reason to it all that I find very comforting,” she lectured an incredulous Beth and Jeremy, “even a kind of purity to bringing out the best in the grain.”
I don’t know whether Mother thought she should recover her strength if Father was going to be weak again or whether, in some not-so-secret chamber of her heart, she was cheered by the news—I don’t know how to explain it other than to say she briefly rallied when she heard Father was at Montbel. She was encouraged to come home, where she lay quietly in a gray gown, listening to operatic radio, breathing borrowed oxygen, asking often for Father of all people. She rang a gold bell, which was tied to her wrist, whenever she needed one of us to feed her, wash her, push pills past her mouth, lift her onto the commode.
While I was getting ready to go back to school, Gretchen flew up one Sunday morning to visit before flying back with me to L.A. Beth was reading most of the major soliloquies to a sleepy Mother; somehow I got talked into giving Gretchen a guided tour of the basement.
Although it was adjacent to my bedroom, I hadn’t been down there for years. I hadn’t wanted to go crawling around in cesspools. The basement ran the length of the house, beginning with dull light and a water heater and ending with low beams, cracked cement, complete darkness. I guided Gretchen through the alcove where Beth and her friends had once held secret meetings of the Monkees’ club and where a sign still read MICKY LIVES. Maybe Micky lived, maybe he didn’t, but everything else was ruined: corroded thermoses and canteens and broken garden equipment, an abandoned workbench, busted boxes of dead language written by Mother and Father. Gretchen kept hitting her head on the low beams. I held her hand and exhibited suitcases without handles, wicker baskets without wicker, year after year of Puppa’s junk shop account books, and my leg brace. I probably would have stumbled over the brace if Gretchen hadn’t noticed its rusted steel, moldy leather, locked buckles, its knotted laces. I held it high and clanked it about a little like half a Halloween skeleton, tried to strap it to my leg to recall the past.
Gretchen, who was sitting on a box of old tax forms, said, “Don’t, Jeremy. Please. Really. Don’t do that. It’s positively ghoulish.”
“You’re right,” I said, folding up the brace and putting it away. “I’m sorry.”
“What is that thing, anyhow?”
“What thing?”
“That steel contraption that squeaks.”
“My old leg brace.”
“You mean you actually used to hobble around with that wrapped around your knee?” she asked.
I detected the small curve of a smile and wondered what, if anything, was so funny. “All junior year everyone thought I was crippled,” I said. “Not until the middle of senior year did I destroy their deepest hopes.”
Gretchen, giggling, said, “I never realized it was that bad.” Confronted with tragic facts, we occasionally laugh when we don’t know what else to do. “It sounds absolutely awful,” she continued, massaging my right leg as if it were still in traction. The massage led us from the basement to my bedroom, where I, as always, peaked too early and Gretchen, as always, didn’t peak at all.
The conversation occurred in the basement. I was talking to Gretchen. We were talking about my leg brace. It was a medium-stress situation. Tension occurred in my right leg. Tension was within normal limits. Speech kept moving forward. Airflow stopped at the basement door. It was very stuffy. Tension increased on feared words, but I didn’t avoid
S
or
F.
On the other hand, I didn’t voluntary stutter very much. A leg brace is only a leg brace until I remember the pause when I brought my feet together, swung the crutches from behind, and gathered myself to go nowhere. Stuttering is just excessive tension in the lower articulators until I see myself, at four, flipping flash cards on the living room couch. I haven’t been stuttering that much recently or, if I have, I haven’t noticed it because it hasn’t seemed that important. Me and Gretchen, Beth with her body, Father at Montbel, Mother on her deathbed. We’re all so afraid, Sandra. We’re all so alone.
Dear Jeremy,
The enclosed is one of the very few things I wrote for the
West Bay Sun
that’s worth a damn.
Love,
Dad
For the past three years I was the guardian and guru of this enlightened corner of tennis intelligence and incidentals. It has been a labor of profound and requited love. Now the time has come for others to take over. The January issue of the
West Bay Sun
will carry the byline of another member for “Net Set.” What I attempted to do in these monthly dispatches was to stimulate interest in tennis: for the novice as well as the NCTA-ranked player, for those of ample girth and feeble forehands as well as the mercurially swift thirty-year-olds with their
120
mph serves.
Employing my own distillation of drollery and hyperbole, I tried to de-emphasize the winning at all costs syndrome. My message, delivered subliminally at times, more pointedly at other times, was that tennis was the open sesame to a lifelong, wholesome recreational outlet; a wondrous way to have fun with your clothes
on,
with incalculable benefits to psyche and sinew; an endurable bridge to friendships on and off the court.
What was of overriding importance, I felt, was not merely reporting who won what major tournament, but the number of players who participated, especially the names of newcomers trying their wings and Wilson large-sized rackets for the first time. I don’t know how well or how often I got the message over, but the thrust of these columns—forgetting my paraphrastic penchant—was that no matter whether you won or lost a casual weekend mixed-doubles match or a major championship final the earth would continue to rotate on its axis around the sun; the stars would take their assigned places in the firmament; and lovers, strolling where the woodbine twineth, would plight their troths as they had since the dawn of time.
The gospel according to St. Theodore was that tennis is just a game. To be played for fun under the sun. The rest, the who-won-what-big-match, was secondary and commentary. The stuff of seared and yellowing newspaper—you, dear reader, will have trouble remembering the name of this ink-stained wretch who wrote the “Net Set” column for three years. And that is how it should be. Time marches on. The graves are filled with indispensable men and women. Even editors and columnists.
To those members of the club who stopped me occasionally to tell me how much they enjoyed a particular column of mine or a turn of phrase, my sincere gratitude. I shall miss—more than these chaste, inadequate words can convey—writing this column each month. I’ll be seeing you around West Bay soon, I hope, but not in the columns of the
Sun.
Dear Jeremy, December 16
I started doing it about six months ago sort of by accident and since then have gone through constant feelings of guilt, mostly centered around the idea that you should love someone else and not yourself. I’ve never failed to regret it right afterward, even while recognizing the imperiousness with which I felt I had to do it at the time. It varies from twice to several times a week. I always thought it would stop once I’d “gotten over” Michael and, while I do it less now, I haven’t stopped completely. Is it adolescent to be still doing it at my age? What do people do when they’re not involved with someone? Is it possible to suppress sexual tension? The reformation makes us turn not only inward but to those around us who can help.
Love,
Beth
Ethan couldn’t believe how sick his mother was. He’d read all the letters his sister had written, in purple ink to imply pain; on wide-ruled, blue-lined notebook paper to suggest innocence; and in infinitesimal illegibility to indicate a mind so involuted as to be incapable of registering anything other than its own agenda. He’d looked at the last photographs his father had taken of his mother: black-and-white snapshots of her sitting up in bed and trying to smile as an invisible wind blew white curtains around in the background. And he had listened to his mother’s voice vibrate over the phone, had heard it crack, had heard her hang up in mid-sentence. He hadn’t let any of the letters, photos, or phone calls touch him, though, hadn’t really let the catastrophe get conveyed. He’d been under the impression his mother was recovering but, standing now at the foot of her bed in cool morning light, wearing a little boy’s terry cloth bathrobe for which he was now rather too big, watching her sleep flat on her back on top of the sheets, Ethan couldn’t believe how sick she was. Through her diaphanous smock he saw blue bones….