Dead Languages (35 page)

WHILE A NURSE
babysat Mother and Father received his fifth of eight shock treatments, Beth and I played basketball at the appealingly low hoop a few blocks down the hill. It was Beth’s idea and she was extremely excited for some reason about shooting a few baskets, as we’d done when we were kids. She was wearing her inevitable black tennis shoes and blue jeans with a Giants cap. I didn’t tell her this was probably not proper attire for playing basketball; I let her wear what she wanted to wear. I tried not to interfere with her happiness and freedom. We ran a few laps around the playground to get loose, passing the ball back and forth. She wanted to play Around the World, a game at which she’d never beaten me, but she thought she could win now that I was out of practice. Getting in shape was part of her new regimen whereas I never recovered the speed and agility I possessed before I broke my leg and had pretty much abandoned athletics. In Around the World each person tries to travel from one end of the court to the other and back again. Beth adjusted the bill of her cap, rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and cuffs of her jeans, double-knotted the laces of her shoes, and in general concentrated upon the action with a seriousness and determination she once reserved only for absurdist drama in translation.

She knocked her knees together, held the ball with two hands, put some backspin on her shot, and followed through. She used the same techniques Father had once taught me, and hardly missed. On your first trip across the court you were allowed two attempts from any one position, but if you missed both you had to start over. This was what was happening to me while Beth, cautious but consistent, was moving around the world. She won when her last shot, a layup, hit the front rim, kissed the backboard, and fell straight through the net. When I tried to congratulate her she ran away from me, sat on a bench near the fence, and started crying. I didn’t ask what was wrong. I just sat next to her, bouncing the ball, brushing the dirt off her face, winding and unwinding her ponytail. Trivial victory often rings empty and releases a sadness so deep there’s no conceivable comfort. You just stare and smile and hope it vanishes, but there’s absolutely nothing you can say.

CHRISTMAS EVE
Mother was in such excruciating pain we had to carry her body above us like a virgin sacrifice to the bathroom…. “Tell her what you’ve always wanted to tell her,” Gretchen telephoned, knee-deep in Kübler-Ross…. Beth cheer-led epigrams: “So lett us choose life that wee and our posterity may live.” John Winthrop,
1630
… looking straight at me down at the other end of the bed with eyes as cold and gray and still in the sockets as old dimes caught in coin slots … the crown of her head nearly bald and what was left along the sides and in back falling out … wilted white rose petals caught beneath the bureau glass … grieving for the agony of not grieving, learning too well what Mother had taught me: how to take notes.

Father sat quietly in a dark corner of the Montbel game room, wearing plastic slippers and a robe. The game room was done in orange. Maybe that was the reason no one else was in it except me, Father, and Dr. Skolnick. Father’s face was empty of all emotion, brown and red like a burnt field. I looked into his eyes, I held his hand, I squeezed his thin arms, I slapped him across the knee. Abruptly he stood, ran in an insane circle, and said, “I’d walk all night on the shoulder of
101
to see Annette again.”

As if Father weren’t there, I turned to Dr. Skolnick and said, “I c-c-can’t trust him to behave properly. He might trip over an oxygen tank or spill some pills. He’d upset my mother. I c-c-can’t take him home.” I turned and walked away. The door shut on Father’s face. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.

That night Mother looked at me and said, “I’m all pickled up.” I’d never heard this phrase before, but it sounded old-fashioned and I assumed her mind was moving across memories of childhood in Steubenville, Ohio. She awoke only to be lifted onto the commode. She breathed faster and faster, in lunging convulsions, then slower and slower, in little kisses of air through the space in her teeth, then hardly at all.

Ethan put the logs and some newspapers in the fireplace and unfolded the screen to cover the hearth. He’d never been much good with matches—he couldn’t light a candle or a cigarette—but he quickly struck the match on the floor and flicked it into the fireplace and another and another until the paper burned and a log fell and the fire started. His mother wrapped a blanket around herself and sank down into the chair and blanket. All he could see of her was the wrinkled half-moon of her forehead and white hair, which gathered in a knot at her shoulder. She reached out her hands to receive the fire’s heat. The fire hissed and crackled, and smoke swirled up the chimney. The flame shapes danced and flickered and vanished and then recurred again. The fire was at once unchanged and completely transformed every second. The fire was like snow….

Beth and I watched a color cartoon in a shopping mall, and I laughed at everything. The odd, purplish night in the movie filled with hundreds of narrow, jazzy, yellow-orange blocks, which meant: Lady and the Tramp were in a very big city, and Lady was probably pretty scared. Beth said, “How can you laugh at this? It’s not in the least amusing.” I kept laughing. She said, “I don’t see how you can laugh like a goddamn hyena when Mom’s so sick.” I kept laughing like a goddamn hyena. She said, “I don’t see much love in your heart any more, Jeremy, do you? I don’t see any real concern.” I couldn’t help it. I kept laughing.

I pressed from the wrist to the elbow along both arms, trying to find it. Beth, still in her pajamas, couldn’t find it, either. We stood at the foot of Mother’s bed, squinting into the sun. The sun, white sheets, a gray strand of Mother’s hair; maybe now I’d be able to talk. While Beth drank red wine for breakfast, I jingled car keys and said, “I’m going to tell Dad.”

In unlaced business shoes on bare feet, in swimming trunks, a wool cap, and a Jewish Welfare Fund T-shirt, Father ran around the high school track adjacent to Montbel. I stood in the shade of sycamore trees, watching, then suddenly I was running alongside him, breathing hard. Even with his unlaced shoes, he was running as well as he ever had. I was in the outside lane, I hadn’t run around a track for years, and I had trouble keeping up with him. As we came into a straightaway, I grabbed his arm and said, “I have something to tell you.”

Father stopped and turned around. “Are we running the wrong way?” he asked.

“We’re going the right way,” I said. “But I have something very important to tell you. I have some very bad news.”

“They want me back at Montbel. Well, you can tell them I’m staying right here.”

“Listen to me. I have something very terrible to tell you. I want you to be prepared. I don’t want you running into the fence or banging your head against the water fountain. I came here to tell you Mother died early this morning.”

I don’t know how I said these words so calmly, but I must have felt the need for some rational force to offset Father. He didn’t respond unreasonably, though. He didn’t do anything. He just kept running right along.

“Do you hear me? Mother died. My mother. Your wife. Annette.
Kaput, capisce?”

I thought a little wordplay might wake him up—he always loved language games—but he kept bobbing his head up and down, he kept on kicking. The toe of my right shoe was starting to pinch. We came into the last bend of the backstretch, I wanted to stop and rest and get things straight, then Father stepped quite literally out of his shoes, leaning into the turn. The rest was a mad run. He sprinted the final hundred and fifty yards in world-record time with his swimming trunks falling off and his hands raised over his head. He was screaming: “Annette! Annette! Annette!”

By the time I caught up with him he was sitting in the stands, picking pebbles and tiny pieces of glass out of his feet, still screaming Mother’s name. It seemed to me he was saying, “A net! A net! A net!” The poor man wanted a net. I took him back to Montbel.

I examined every photograph of her as a little girl, every article she’d ever written, every letter ever written to her. I read back to front, right to left, like beginning with conclusions. I opened every desk and dresser drawer, looking … looking for what? Sentences I could criticize.

In her closet I came upon a pair of shiny new shoes still in the box. Beth can’t get those shoes out of her mind. At Mother’s desk, in her high style, I wrote her obituary.

No funeral, though. No nothing, despite my fantasy of standing before the mourners with my mouth open, trying to do the seemingly simple thing of saying one word and then another but, instead, getting escorted offstage by Gretchen to the compassionate acclaim of the crowd. Just a party, as Mother’s will specified, “to celebrate life rather than mourn death.” Some celebration. A folk guitarist upon whom Mother had always had a crush played poorly. Father wept in the den. She’d been carried out of the bedroom in a plastic bag. Her body was burned. The ashes were scattered at sea. Whenever I cross the Golden Gate Bridge, I think not of suicide, as Father does, but of Mother, swimming.

I analyzed rather than swooned over all the sincerely sincere condolences. I wanted to feel famous feelings but couldn’t get past difficulties in construction. “The last time I talked to your mother must have been the middle of December. She still sounded so extraordinarily plucky, although for the first time she had lost the lilt in her voice that she somehow managed each previous time that I’d called. What a brave and plucky woman she was.” “I hope these words will comfort you a little. Words were the tool your mother used so well. She was a fine craftsman in her profession. Perhaps more importantly, she was a fine human being.”
Perhaps?
I love that. Where did my family and their friends ever get the idea language could eclipse life?

I talk the way I talk, I write the way I write, I live the way I die because of Mother. Everything I’ve ever done I did to win her admiration. She always used to say, “You may not love me, but you must respect me.” We loved her from afar.

Father came home walking slowly. He no longer has any memory of the last few months, but he does have a real estate license. Ten days out of the hospital, he insisted upon serving as realtor for the sale of our house. He walked through the rooms, giving guided tours to families of four, saying, “This was where my beautiful wife slept with a smile, this was where she soaked in the tub for entire afternoons, this was where she cooked delicious dinners, this was where she wrote the finest articles in American journalism….”

In sixth grade everyone in Mrs. Gradinger’s homeroom had to build a balsa wood miniature of the family manse, which our mothers were supposed to be exhilarated by when they came for parent-teacher-student conferences. My replica was painted black and yellow, and featured bushes everywhere like broccoli. Although our actual house had an open-sided carport, I constructed a square, detached garage, without doors or windows or a very well applied roof. Mother greeted Mrs. Gradinger, looked at my model for the longest time, then looked at me for the longest time.

“Jeremy,” she said, “Jeremy, sweetheart, are you ever just going to come inside with everyone else and get warm?”

She touched his nose and cheeks, tousled his hair, kissed his forehead with dry lips. Ethan’s mother smelled like laundry mixed with buttermilk. She leaned forward and he held her in his arms but was afraid of hurting her with too hard a hug, so he set her back down against the pillow and let go, moving away.

DAVID SHIELDS’S
other books are
Remote, A Handbook for Drowning,
and
Heroes.
His stories and essays have appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vogue, Details,
the
Village Voice,
and
Utne Reader.
He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation award, a PEN/Revson Foundation fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in Seattle, where he is a professor of English at the University of Washington.