Secret Language Read online

  “You take her feet,” Faith says.

  Delle is lying on her side in front of the couch. It looks as if she’s been chewing tobacco, but the dribble of brown is coffee brandy. A few petals of notepaper drift around her, scarred by outraged indentations from a pen that skips. Her clothes, a sweatshirt and a pair of stretch pants, are streaked with coffee-colored stains. She’s thin but puffy-looking, her hair mashed against one cheek.

  “Up,” Faith says, prying her mother’s shoulders from the floor. Delle is mumbling something, her voice dark and petulant.

  “Bastard ruined us,” she says, her words slurry and wet.

  Faith meets Connie’s eyes, the same as her own, glazed from knowing exactly what’s coming.

  “Bastard bastard,” Delle says. “ ‘Work ethic’ my ass, we made that show.” Now she’s laughing, an eerie, disconnected cackle. “Didn’t last long without us, now did it?” Her eyes roll, the amber irises set into an unhealthy yellow gleam.

  Faith looks away.

  “Two years we did that show. Hah! Eight days they lasted without us. Eight pissy little days.”

  Her fists threaded through her mother’s armpits and clamped together over her chest, Faith bends her knees and lifts. She waits until Connie hefts Delle’s feet, then begins to back down the hall. Once or twice she has to pause as Connie, her blue makeup clinging to her face like an illness, struggles with her part of their mother’s trifling weight. Faith is stronger than her sister, has always been. To her, Delle is no heavier than a sack of dry laundry.

  They bring Delle into her bedroom and lower her to the bed. Faith pulls a clean nightgown from the laundry basket while Connie swabs Delle’s face with a washcloth. “Oww,” Delle mutters as Faith works the stained sweatshirt over her head. Delle starts to whimper—small, self-pitying whinnies. Faith ignores her, as she always does, flashing Connie a look of complicity. Then Delle gets serious. Her cries become gummy and harsh, thick with phlegm; they permeate the fetid air of this bedroom, until Faith can hardly breathe. “Stop it, Delle,” she hears Connie say. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  Delle stops. Faith pulls off her mother’s shoes, socks, pants. A soft bruise wells on Delle’s hip where she has fallen. Her belly is veiny and a little swollen, though her legs, taut from years of dancing, would still be pretty if she shaved them. Her hands are dry, with starry cracks over the knuckles. It no longer embarrasses Faith to see her mother’s body. She regards it shamelessly, reminding herself to never look this way. Her mother is no longer beautiful.

  “Get the bucket,” Faith tells Connie, but Connie has it already and places it next to the bed.

  Faith shimmies the nightgown down over her mother’s head and shoulders, guides her arms through the sleeves, reaches underneath her to shake it down under her bottom. She snaps on a lamp so Delle won’t scream when she wakes. As she adjusts the lampshade away from Delle’s eyes, the light shivers onto the framed photograph of Billy and Delle in Silver Moon.

  Faith closes the door and follows Connie into the trailer’s tiny kitchenette. They eat at the same time every day. They get up at the same time, too, even on weekends. No matter what Delle is doing, these rituals do not change. It’s something they’ve never discussed, just one of their silent pacts, like not telling Delle about the checks from Armand.

  Connie rummages in the cupboard and extracts a box of macaroni. “You want this?” she says.

  “Okay.” Faith runs some water in a pot and sets it on the stove.

  “I’ll be out tonight,” Connie says. Her hair looks greenish under the kitchen light from whatever she’s been putting in it.

  “You don’t have to lighten your hair,” Faith says. “You’re blonde enough.”

  Connie shrugs. “You can’t be blonde enough.”

  Faith watches the pot boil. Connie used to be nothing but questions, and now she is nothing but answers. “Are you going out alone?”

  “Nope.”

  “With Danny?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Will you ask him to pick you up at the road?”

  Connie looks up.

  Faith’s eyes slide toward Delle’s room. “The motorcycle might wake her up.”

  Connie goes to the phone while Faith drops half a box of macaroni into the pot. The water settles down, then foams up. She hears Connie murmur a few words into the phone, then hang up and open the fridge.

  “You want Pepsi or 7-Up?” Connie says.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Danny’s not coming.” Connie gets two glasses down from the cupboard and pours two 7-Ups.

  “Why not?”

  “I’d rather stay in, that’s all.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Connie sits at the table and shakes her hair, green light zigzagging through it. “I’m sick of him anyway.”

  “Why?” Faith really wants to know. She’s only gone out with one boy: Thomas, from her English class. But not for long; his way of not being shy was to ask a million questions.

  Connie sighs. “Danny’s just like every other guy I know. Stupid and pushy.” She stops to help Faith pour the macaroni into a colander. “Besides, I think he’s getting sick of me, too, if you want the truth. Rule number one: Dump them before they dump you.”

  It shames Faith to be getting this kind of advice from her younger sister, but she listens to every word, not knowing the first thing about boys. Or anything else, if you got right down to it. So she listens, seizing the opportunity. Usually they eat in silence, Connie twisting the ends of her hair, Faith reading a book.

  “That new girl Marjory has a boyfriend back in Missouri,” Faith says. “He sends her a card every day.”

  “It’s easy to be in love if you don’t have to talk to each other,” Connie says, mashing the macaroni with butter in a way that makes Faith sick.

  “She says her bedroom is pink. Pink carpet, pink everything. She has a bunch of posters of the Beatles, especially Paul.”

  “John’s the best one,” Connie says. “He’s the talent.”

  “She says her mother bakes her a sweet every day.”

  Connie pauses, a forkful of smashed macaroni caught in midair. “She’s lying.”

  Faith nods. “That’s what I thought.”

  “She probably just wishes that.”

  “Probably.”

  A deep moan floats down the hall. Faith puts down her fork. “Delle’s awake.”

  Connie stares straight ahead as if she hasn’t heard. She gets up and puts her half-eaten meal in the sink. Faith does the same, then follows Connie out the door into the chill of the early evening. They sit on the ground, their knees drawn up, looking out at the marigolds, the lawn ducks, the grass.

  “The flowers are still pretty,” Faith says.

  “They are.”

  From inside the trailer comes the muffled thump of Delle falling out of bed and scrambling to get up. Faith hugs herself against the chilly air, waiting for the first star of the evening.

  TWO

  When Faith meets Joseph Fuller Junior, she is out of high school, a working girl, and for the first time her life feels like a real life. Even the trailer seems like a place where real people live: she and Connie have painted the walls the whitest white they could find, and replaced the mishmash that hung there—black-and-whites of Billy and Delle in their plays—with peaceful dime-store paintings of rivers and streams. Tabletops no longer suffocate under magazines and popcorn bags and sticky bottles, dishes no longer fester in the sink. After Delle died, they packed her things into her room and shut the door.

  Armand paid off the mortgage on the trailer, and still pays the monthly bills: the heat, the lights, the telephone; he also pays for Faith to take a medical secretary course at night, in Portland, and will pay for Connie to go away to become a stewardess, which she swears to do the second the Long Point High School diploma crosses her palm. First she must repeat her senior year.

  Faith isn’t sure where all this money is coming fro
m. Armand says Delle saved more than he thought. Faith draws some comfort from this knowledge, as if her mother—who in the space of two years dried up on the couch like a vegetable peeling—is more fluid in death, has learned, under the pale, rangy grass of her grave, how to give a gift.

  The first thing she notices about Joseph Fuller Junior is his eyes, a blue so dark they seem another color altogether. Except for his eyes, and black, black hair, he is colorless, his face drained of blood. He has mononucleosis, and is here to see Dr. Howe. Even sick he’s good-looking.

  “Ooh,” says Dr. Howe’s nurse, Marion, just under her breath. “Go for it.” A few years older than Faith, and married, Marion always has plenty to say.

  As usual, Faith has no idea what she means. How do you go for it? Not the way Connie does, going out to drive-ins with guitar players or guys just back from Vietnam. Faith doesn’t like any of the things Connie does, they have less to say to each other than ever, and yet they live contented in the trailer, cleaning it before it gets dirty, taking the lawn ducks in at night so they won’t get ruined. They are inseparable, and separate, like parallel lines, defined by the distance between them. Still, the thought of a year from now, with Connie gone, chokes Faith a little. She doesn’t think she knows how to live without her.

  “I’ve got an appointment,” Joseph Fuller says. He leans against the counter as if he were too weak to hold himself up. Faith will later discover this as a habit of his, leaning into people.

  “Name?” Faith asks, feeling the flush on her cheeks.

  “Joseph Fuller, Junior.” He leans clear across the counter on his elbows—his long, shiny hair falling forward over his collar—and taps his name in the appointment book. “Right there. Three-fifteen.”

  Faith straightens up, hoping to get him to do the same. “New patient?” she asks officiously. Her duties in this office so far are slight and she tries to make the most of them.

  “Nah,” he says. “There must be a file on me somewhere. My family’s been coming here for a thousand years.”

  “Oh?” Faith looks down at the appointment book as if checking for something, but in fact her mind is backtracking through the day, all the way to this morning when she pulled the files. There is no file for Joseph Fuller Junior, she is sure. Dr. Howe is kind to her and she hates to do things wrong.

  “One moment, please,” Faith says, then turns on her heel and steps into the file closet, trying to appear brisk. She thumbs once again through the F’s: Fuller, Joseph, Sr.; Fuller, Phoebe; Fuller, Gregory; Fuller, Brian; Fuller, William; Fuller, Peter (deceased). After another inch or so of Fuller files—wives and children—there it is: Fuller, Joseph, Jr. It’s so thin she missed it. She plucks it from the stack and opens it. Normal childhood diseases, inoculations, and a broken ankle playing basketball when he was ten. Last visit, age fifteen.

  “You’ll have to fill out one of these,” she tells him when she gets back to the front desk. He’s still leaning. She snaps a history form to a clipboard and hands him a pen. “Dr. Howe requires new information if it’s been over six years.”

  He grins at her. “It’s only been seven.”

  “It’s required.”

  Instead of sitting down, he dawdles at the counter, then stays to fill out the sheet. He is lean but very big and takes up a lot of space. Faith stands there, not quite knowing how to ask him to move, keenly aware of Marion’s amused eyes on her.

  “You might be more comfortable sitting down,” Faith suggests.

  He hunches over the sheet, and his shiny hair moves. Faith gets a whiff of some new herbal shampoo, the same one Connie’s been using. His hands are large, nicked, black under the nails—a boy who does real work.

  “You live around here?” he asks, not looking up from the sheet, which he completes at a maddeningly slow pace.

  “Long Point,” she says. She wishes the phone would ring. She’s very good on the phone.

  “What’s that, a twenty-minute drive?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Close enough.” He smiles grandly and finally sits down.

  He comes in once a week after that for a spot test, waiting for the go-ahead to get back to work. He looks healthy enough now, Faith thinks, but his parents won’t let him work till he’s officially cured.

  “You know how parents get about stuff like that,” he says, leaning.

  “Yeah,” Faith agrees, though she doesn’t know. She has no idea.

  “So. Whereabouts on Long Point are you?”

  “Just outside town.”

  “With your folks?”

  “My sister. We have a trailer.”

  “Huh,” he says. “I’ve been looking for an apartment. I love my folks but they’re driving me nuts.”

  Faith tries to smile knowingly. “I bet.”

  They talk for five or ten minutes each time he comes in. He’s been to college; his brother Peter was killed in Vietnam; he works as a machinist in his father’s shop with the remaining brothers, all older, married, with three or four kids apiece. Faith tries to envision the whole family, spreading like tree roots; as far as she can gather, Joseph Junior fits in like the right color button sewn on with the wrong color thread. They must all love him very much.

  On the day his spot test reads negative he comes out of the examining room smiling. She smiles back, pleased that she knows why he’s so happy. He fills up the tiny hall in a way that makes her want to laugh out loud.

  “Will you go out with me?” he asks her.

  She says yes.

  Joe is the first boy Faith has ever gone out with who is not shy, also the first with whom she has a good time. She’s fascinated by the way he walks and moves: to Faith, who secretly believes that some of her internal organs are misplaced—some notable but not life-threatening alteration she was born with—Joe moves as if he knows exactly where everything is. She finds him so cheerful and easy to be near that her skewed parts seem to be listing toward their proper places.

  He says something to tease her, something about how much ice cream she can put away. She laughs and knocks him on the arm, feeling—happily—like an ordinary girl. She let a boy put his hand under her bra once, at the end of senior year, and once she made out in the back seat of a car. But she has never before knocked a boy on the arm in play.

  On the ride back to Long Point he tells her all about his friends, his family. He seems to be surrounded by people who love him. The car is a falling-apart red Corvair with a broken heater, and when it stalls on a hill he has to get out twice to investigate the engine. Faith stays in the front seat, looking out, dusk failing into dark by seconds.

  When it’s her turn to talk, she tells the truth: her parents were actors, she says, and now they’re dead.

  “My father died first,” she says, watching Joe’s profile change with the lights from oncoming cars. “And then a couple of years later, my mother.”

  “How?” His eyebrows are heavy and dark where he furrows them.

  “Um, they both drank quite a bit. My father crashed his car, and my mother overdosed on alcohol.”

  “You and your sister stayed here by yourselves?”

  “Our lawyer wanted us to come to New York to live with him, but we hate New York.”

  “You have your own lawyer?”

  “He’s more like a friend, really.” A pleasant thought dawns on her. “I guess he’s always looked out for us.”

  For a while neither of them speaks. The road unrolls in front of them, the beam of Joe’s headlights flickering over the jagged shadow of pine trees that rises over each hill.

  “That must have been weird, being left alone,” Joe says finally.

  “Not really,” she tells him. “We were used to it.”

  “Huh.” His frown returns.

  She tells him a little bit about her life.

  “You hear stuff like that about actors,” he says.

  Faith shakes her head. “It has nothing to do with being actors. It was just them.” This is a revelation to her
, for she herself has blamed the theater from time to time. “My parents were never very, well, mature.” The word, mature, is meager, a pinprick of a word, compared to all she means it to describe.

  He says nothing more, and the stutter of the Corvair’s ailing engine fills their silence. She pictures the generations of folders stacked up in Dr. Howe’s file closet and imagines what Joe must think of her.

  At the mailbox they turn onto the gravel and roll to a stop in front of the trailer door. The living room light is on, and Connie has taken the ducks in.

  “Well, thanks,” she tells him. “I had a wonderful time.”

  She is sure she will never see him again.

  “I’ve never met anybody like you,” he says, leaning over to kiss her warm on the mouth.

  She draws away, watching him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I like you,” he says. “I mean we should go out again.”

  They do go out again, and again, to Faith’s continual surprise. Every time she watches the red Corvair bump over the pitted drive, then turn down the road to Portland, she is sure it’s her last sight of Joseph Fuller Junior.