Language Arts (13 page)

Now her viewpoint shifts and she is standing in her own skin, looking down at her bare, thick-calved legs (at least she remembered to borrow Father's razor and shave) and her newly polished but ugly shoes (no remedy for this).

The photographer—pudgy and freckle-faced—calls out,
Say cheese, Giorgia!
And she replies,
Romano, formaggio, Asiago, Parmesan!
It is a standing joke among them and they all laugh.

The camera clicks.

Once. Twice. Thrice.

She would have liked one more photo of her wedding day: she and her bridegroom kissing, or walking down the aisle, or at the rectory table, signing the banns—and she would have had one too, except at that moment, the chapel door bursts open, blasting them with a gust of cold, wet air (
when did it start to rain?
) and revealing a silhouetted figure backlit at the sanctuary entrance.

An unexpected guest, a presence so startling and compelling that Giorgia loses all awareness of her bridegroom, the best man, and the photographer.
Girl or boy?
Giorgia wonders.
Bridesmaid or ring bearer?

Indeterminable at the moment, but apparently and in either case born in a barn and not dressed at all as one should be to enter the house of God: an odd style of dungarees, threadbare in places and yet unpatched; a man's shirt, unpressed and too large, with tails untucked and sleeves rolled up; and heavy Dutch-boy-like shoes that—
who would have believed it possible?
—are even uglier than Giorgia's.

The gender question is resolved soon after, for not even an excess of rumpled fabric can obscure the undignified jiggling of two ungirdled breasts.

No bridesmaid then, and definitely not one of Giorgia's sisters; none of them would dress for church in such a manner—dungarees, a man's shirt, and no brassiere!

Worst of all, the girl's head is uncovered.

But then—slowly slipping back into an awareness of her own physical body—Giorgia realizes with shame that she is bareheaded as well. Her vanity over the marcel curls made her forget!

Giorgia locates the picnic basket she stashed beneath the altar (they packed a lunch to have after the ceremony), hurriedly plucks up a large cloth napkin, and flings it atop her head. It lands askew and off center, forming a floppy awning that substantially narrows Giorgia's peripheral vision. As she whirls about to face the Intruder—attempting to project a theatrical combination of distinction and haughty disdain—the napkin slips farther, so that one corner droops over Giorgia's left eye. She immediately feels a fool, deservedly ridiculous for attempting such pretensions. Hardly the desired impression. And yet, at least she has made an
effort.

As the woman continues to walk down the aisle (
she does not even take the time to genuflect!
), the soldiers begin to back away, receding into the storm, for the rain is now torrential.

Giorgia calls out to them—
“Tornate qui!”
—and then she notices something, a puzzling alteration to this story, “The Sunflower Bride,” a story she has enacted in one form or another many times and that has always been under her control:

The Intruder is now wearing the camera.

Did the groomsman give it to her? Why would he do such a thing?

Looking beyond her, Giorgia sees that the soldiers have gone, without a word of goodbye. The chapel door is closed. She is alone and face to face with this person, this
trespasser,
who has ruined everything—not a woman, after all, but a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, around the same age as Giorgia herself.

The girl's absurd masculine attire (
she even wears that stolen camera on a strap across her chest like a man!
) cannot obscure a delicacy, a feminine essence that Giorgia lacks and, furthermore, could never attain were she to swath herself in miles of ribbons and flounces.

Giorgia begins to pace. She mutters,
“Io sono la sposina.”
Then she turns to the Intruder and makes a shooing motion.
“Non dovreste essere qui. Voi andate, io resto!”

The girl asks a question, using words that Giorgia does not recognize. Not that it matters; Giorgia has no intention of interacting with her in
any
language.

Giorgia draws the napkin lower so that it covers her face. She carefully realigns its position so that one corner falls over the exact center of her sternum and then pins it there with her right extended index finger; it presses firmly through her flesh to her breastbone and is angled precisely toward her heart.

Steal my picture
now
if you want,
Giorgia thinks.
Crook, heathen, killjoy.

And the girl does; Giorgia hears a faint click.

Giorgia remains like this, a statue, no longer caring how foolish she appears, ignoring the girl, who has started to murmur in that incomprehensible language. Her voice, not unpleasant, is still an irritant—such presumptuousness.

Eventually, the murmuring ceases, the girl stops taking pictures, and there is the decrescendo of slow-moving footsteps in retreat.

Giorgia peeks out from under her napkin/veil. The Intruder has departed.

At last! She is alone again in the sanctuary. Hungry, too, and tired from so much standing. Her feet feel bloated, sweaty, too ample, as if they are balls of dough that have risen inside her shoes.

After sitting down on the altar steps and freeing her feet—
what a relief it is!
—Giorgia wiggles her warm, yeasty toes. How good it is now to feel the cool, rain-washed air against the skin of her soles.

She pulls another napkin from the picnic basket and smoothes it across her lap. She extracts a panettone from the picnic basket, remembers to loosen her cinched-in belt before she eats.

My bridal feast,
she thinks, happily.

She is just about to take a bite when another person barges into the chapel: that woman, the one Giorgia foolishly believed to be a mother or a new novitiate. She too is bareheaded. What is the world coming to?

Come along now, Giorgia. You know you can't be in here by yourself. Come back and join the others. It's lunchtime.

“Naturalmente, è ora di pranzo! Che male c'è a starsene un po' da soli? Lasciatemi in pace! Questa è la casa di Dio!”

Giorgia folds her arms across her chest, ducks her head, and applies the force of her will toward making her body as heavy as possible.

Oh, Giorgia. I wish you didn't make me do this . . .

The woman calls out to someone beyond Giorgia's field of view, and he appears; Giorgia might be inclined to like him, his fallen state notwithstanding, were it not for his loyalty to that witch of a jailer.

She steels herself for a battle. Just let them try to banish her from God's house. She is no match for a fallen angel; she knows she will lose. But she can still put up a fight like a man.

•♦•

A sudden commotion in the church basement makes Cody look up: one of the people in the not-Cody group is being carried through the room where they are eating lunch; a big man—as big as Big Mal—holds her as if she were a baby. She isn't a baby, but she's very small. She is struggling and shrieking in a language Cody hasn't heard before.

He watches for a while. Then he looks away, stuffs a handful of rice crackers into his mouth, and starts chewing. The sound is loud enough to block out the sound of that tiny woman's screams until she is gone.

Charles was in his office, grading. An assignment that he gave to all of his students near the start of the year—Seven Postcards—had come due. He'd been at it for hours, ever since he got home from school, stopping just long enough to make a sandwich. It was getting late.

Feeling restless, he pushed himself away from the desk, rubbed his eyes, twisted from side to side in his desk chair, and pondered the options:

He could put off finishing until the weekend.

He could brew another pot of coffee and soldier on.

Or, he could take a break and resume his archaeological efforts in the crawlspace.

Part of the problem: he was distracted. His eyes kept straying to the answering machine, where a pinprick of red blinked at him, incessantly, accusingly. There were two messages. Both required a response.

Message one:

Hello, my name is Mike Bernauer, I'm a reporter with the
Seattle Times,
doing a follow-up article about a piece that appeared back in 1963.
I'm calling to find out if you're the Charles Marlow who attended the Nellie Goodhue School that year and . . .

Message two:

Charles. Stop avoiding me. Call me back. Tonight. I'll be up.

Charles thought of himself as being
in
his office, even though there was, in fact, no door. It wasn't even a room, really, but an efficient at-home workspace wedged into a triangle-shaped niche next to the stairs. It had been created in the first couple of years following Cody's diagnosis, after Alison felt it necessary to repurpose the upstairs bedroom that used to serve as Charles's office.

She'd found the design in an issue of that magazine Martha Stewart published—Charles could never remember the name but thought of it as
Martha!
—and then, voilà: she'd unveiled this marvel of organization.

It was touching, really, her heroic effort to solve a wrenching domestic problem, a deprivation counterbalanced by a gift. That was Ali all over.

The earliest structural alterations to the house—Charles's under-the-stairs office and the mold-mitigation remodel—were necessary at the time, and both turned out well. However, there was an unintended result: the bifurcation of their family—Ali and Cody retreated upstairs to the playroom, Charles and Emmy to the crawlspace, and from that point on, the divide between them continued to grow.

Charles pitied the poor house sometimes. Built in the 1930s, exemplary of an architectural style known as
storybook,
it retained its charming, eccentric exterior: exaggerated peaked roofline, intentionally off-kilter brickwork, small in scale but expansive in whimsy. True, Charles had let the yard go a little, the herb and vegetable garden completely, but overall it looked pretty much the same as it had when they'd moved in as newlyweds, the large down payment a wedding present from his in-laws.

It was the house's interior that told the real story, whimsy's opposite, a former war zone showing evidence of battles, vandalism, lootings: scarred parquet floors, pockmarked walls, chipped archways, boarded-up fireplace, architectural details—wall sconces, ceramic tiles, and plastered porticoes—severely damaged or excised altogether, changes wrought either directly by Cody or in the interest of keeping him safe.

Alison was always asking Charles how he could bear to keep living there, why he didn't sell. She wouldn't mind. He could get a nice two-bedroom condo like hers; there were so many new ones on the market right now, LEED-certified, and several were even within a few blocks, so he could stay connected to the neighborhood, the café, the video store, all of his routines, if that was the issue.

It wasn't.

She didn't understand.

For Charles, the house was perfect.

•♦•

“He's different when he's with us, you know,” Alison's mother was saying. “I've never seen him have one of those meltdowns you and Alison talk about.”

“That's good,” Charles said. “I'm glad.” He found it hard to imagine his genteel, diminutive mother-in-law in Cody's presence when he was shrieking like a cornered possum or smearing feces on every available surface.

“Fussy, yes. The occasional tantrum. But a meltdown? No. Never.”

It was a Sunday evening in August, still light outside, about a week after their consultation with Dr. Gayathri. Alison's parents, Victor and Eulalie Forché, were being given a pre-dinner tour of the house exterior. A light wind was moving in from the southwest.

Victor and Alison led the way; Charles and Eulalie sauntered along a few paces behind. Some unspoken protocol mandated this arrangement, that a precise distance be maintained between them.

Energetically, they were already miles apart, Victor and Alison exuding edginess and exigency, a pair of generals about to lead a battalion to the front lines. Eulalie, in stark contrast, was relaxed and gracious, as if
she
were the one hosting this gathering and they were strolling through the formal grounds of the Forché estate in the Highlands.

Cody was in one of his clingy moods, demanding that his mother carry him, so Alison was having a hard time keeping up with her father's brisk pace; Victor, in turn, seemed either oblivious of or indifferent to her difficulties. He squinted at the house as if perusing a legal brief naming him as chief defendant.

“It might be because of the space, you know?” Eulalie wafted one of her manicured hands in a series of vague, looping gestures. “The size of the rooms, the ceiling height . . .” The vestiges of Kentucky roots were still evident in her languid delivery; a person could practically recline on those airy, musical vowels and feathery consonants. “This is a dear, sweet little house, don't get me wrong, and it's been perfectly adequate for the two of you, but now that you've finally started a family, it is awfully confining. And this teeny yard . . . Where do you run him?”

“At the park.”

“Not too far, is it?”

“No, just a few blocks.”

“That's good, because little boys, you know, they need a
lot
of room.” Eulalie gazed up at the house and sighed. “Are you sure you want to stay? You wouldn't rather look for a new place?”

“Alison thinks it would be too upsetting for Cody if we moved.”

“Ah, well, we know all about Alison's determination, don't we?” Eulalie took Charles's arm, gave it a gentle squeeze, and leaned into him in a playful, teasing way.