The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  “Clichéd, I know,” Frank says, from the couch. “But it was the most I could do last minute.”

  I open one of the cards. “Sorry” it reads. So does the next one. And the next.

  “She didn’t even see them, though.” He scratches his head. “Ordered them last night, express, but she left before they got here.”

  “How much did you spend on all this?” I say, as May giggles.

  “Not as much as I deserve.”

  She tugs his sleeve, pointing at the screen. They must have reconciled, somehow. Before them, Sylvester resuscitates a wheezing Porky Pig.

  There are more flowers in the kitchen, resting on stools, the table, and even—precariously—the radio. Frank must have blown at least three hundred dollars. I transfer the radio bouquet to the countertop and set a pot of water on high heat, my stomach roiled by the mismatched fragrances. Outside, the road has been plowed, the lawns and roofs gleaming with snow. The sky is a furious blue.

  I wake my phone and touch Prue’s name. She answers right away.

  “I’m at the lab,” she says. Our car is still outside, so she must have walked. She adds, “Had to tie a few things up.”

  The thickness in her voice tells me that she has been waiting for my call. We rarely fight, and when we do, we never go to sleep without resolving things. I am usually the first to capitulate.

  “May seems okay,” I say, stalling.

  She sighs. “I tried the number for my dad’s old psychiatrist, but she didn’t pick up. I don’t know if he’s even seeing her anymore.”

  I take a breath, about to tell her about the flowers, and then exhale. If anything, they should have come from me.

  She says, “He seemed okay this morning.”

  We’ll get past this, her tone says. The water twitches in the pot. As she starts to speak again, I rehearse this evening’s reunion in my mind. She will have spent the day out, nursing her grievances, and when she returns I will have handled dinner. We will both be especially mild with one another, mutually intent on inserting a buffer of time and care between ourselves and our recriminations.

  “. . . guess an aquatic zoo is off the table after yesterday,” she concludes. “Hello?”

  “I’m here.” I drop an egg into the pot, setting the timer to seven minutes. “Look, P . . .” I lean against the counter. “Let me handle things today. I’ll get them out of the house, somehow. We’ll bring back food.”

  There is a scuffling in the background, and then a voice I cannot place.

  “P?” I say.

  “Yes, I heard you. That sounds fine.”

  “I’m sorry about last night.”

  She doesn’t answer. She is in no mood to rehash things now, her silence implies, but I repeat myself anyhow, adding, “I’d had a lot to drink.”

  Another stillness. I check the phone, only to find it has run out of battery. My voice echoes in my ears—foreign, somehow—belonging to the version of myself I am to her. I plug the phone back in, waiting the requisite few minutes for it to revive itself. When I call back, she doesn’t pick up.

  “What do you say we get you a haircut?” I suggest, sliding onto the couch beside May and Frank. He is paging through a copy of The Nation he must have brought from home.

  May ignores me, riveted to the screen, where a fleet of mice—armed with machetes—are marching toward a sleeping cat.

  “I don’t think the aquarium’s open today,” I lie. “But there are plenty of other things we can—”

  “What?” She turns to me, incredulous, as the mice attack. “But you said. I promised Maurice.”

  Her stuffed penguin, she means. He is nestled on her lap, bedecked in the sweater Frank sewed him last Christmas. May is wearing her favorite red overalls which, I realize, with a sinking heart, she must have put on specially for the outing. Her battered notebook protrudes from the front pocket.

  “You said,” she repeats. At the note of panic in her voice Frank looks up.

  “What is it, bug?” He peers over his reading glasses.

  “The aquarium’s closed,” she says, her voice rising, as the animated cat pleads for mercy.

  “Not closed, necessarily,” I break in. “Just—”

  “It’s Saturday,” Frank interrupts. “What kind of balderdash is that?”

  “The aquarium.” I catch his eye, asking, silently, Can you handle this?

  The egg timer beeps from the kitchen. As May whispers some reassurance into the place where the penguin’s ear would be, Frank reaches out and pats my hand.

  “We’ll storm it, if necessary,” he says, returning to his magazine. “Hear that, Maurice?”

  * * *

  —

  THE AQUARIUM is a twenty-minute drive from our house, on the site of a former sardine cannery. A winged structure with an aluminum façade, it overlooks the southern stretch of Narragansett Bay, and hosts a snorkeling camp May attended last summer. Since we moved here it has tripled in size, transforming a formerly barren plaza into a bustling promenade.

  The radio predicted hail, so despite the confident blue sky I armed us with three umbrellas, including a windproof, steel number Prue bought after losing one of mine. Frank—still unsteady on his twisted knee—elects to use it as a cane, swinging it affably through the fluted glass archway.

  The place is crowded for the season. Babysitters in galoshes float up the central escalator, while bovine fathers linger at the popcorn stand. “Share the Wonder,” a poster commands, pointing the way toward an exhibit on cephalopods. A fiberglass orca hangs from the ceiling, its belly dull with fingerprints. Beneath it is a large, magenta jungle gym, shaped like an anemone. May bolts for it while I join the ticket line, shoving Maurice into Frank’s arms.

  “This place is a joke,” he says when I return.

  I glance sharply at May, who is skipping back toward us, and then back at him. He grunts, fixing the adhesive ticket to his shirt.

  As we mount the escalator, however, I cannot help but see his point. The place feels tawdrier than I remember, more like a theme park—with its loud decor and cheerless employees—than a conservation initiative.

  On the landing a blond man intercepts us, pushing a mobile stand.

  “Fancy an audio guide?” he says.

  Frank refuses, but I rent one for May. The man briefs me, jauntily, on the numeric keypad. He has a gelled coiffure and an Australian accent.

  “Rockhoppers are getting peckish.” He grins. “Don’t miss their feeding. Twenty minutes from now, across from Open Sea.”

  “That means you,” May whispers to Maurice. She beams at the man, then says, with adult grace, “Thank you, sir.”

  We enter the mouth of the main exhibit, a tunnel lined with towering photographs and mirrors warped to resemble waves. A black-and-white anemone looms at the other end, its tentacles so intricate that it takes me a moment to realize they are painted, a hoax of chiaroscuro. Two men and a child rear up before us, the older man amplified by a pucker in the glass, the other telescoped. Only when the child points ahead, in time with May, do I recognize us.

  “Sandy shore!” she exclaims. “Our counselors took us here!”

  She drags us toward a touching tank affixed to the far wall. Children swarm around it, dunking their hands into the shallow water. As May elbows her way between them a girl raises her dripping hands, brandishing a sea cucumber. She aims it at the boy beside her, glancing furtively at the attendant as she squeezes the creature, which emits a plume of clear liquid. The boy shrieks. I turn to Frank, expecting a scowl, but he is taking in the neighboring exhibit, which features shoreline birds. An egret is poised behind the glass, scratching its cheek with one long toe. Its curated beach stretches about five yards, lengthened by a painted river. An artificial creek undulates between the boulders, extending almost seamlessly into the image.

  Two small
birds—plovers, according to the supplementary text—emerge from behind the farthest boulder. One of them cocks its speckled head, facing us, as the other nudges a pebble with its beak. The egret paces the length of the glass, each step like an umbrella closing.

  “Are you all right?” I murmur.

  “Fine,” Frank says. His eyes are bloodshot. Between the car debacle and ordering all those flowers, he can’t have slept much.

  “You let me know if you’d rather meet us in the gift shop, okay?” I say.

  Instead of replying he jabs a button on my audio guide, and a silvery voice peals through it: “Welcome to the Rhode Island Aquarium. Home to some of the world’s most unforgettable marine life. Radiant reptiles. Cunning crustaceans. Flashy fish. Whoever you are, we have something for you. Thank you for choosing . . .”

  Frank says, “Goddamn tentacles are tangled.”

  He gestures at a tank across the room, featuring a cluster of striped pink jellyfish, some of them intertwined.

  “They’re probably mating, or something,” I say, turning off the machine.

  “Place doesn’t strike me as a turn-on.” He sniffs, then wipes his nose with his sleeve. He is wearing one of his habitual outfits: a dark blue flannel shirt tucked into corduroys. Before we left, I had taken the liberty of removing the pens from his breast pocket. The move seemed priggish in retrospect, given his display of contrition this morning. But that seems to be flagging now.

  “Let’s just get to the penguins, okay, Frank?” I say. “Then we’ll be out of here.”

  Keeping one eye on him, I turn back toward the touching tank, laying a hand on May’s shoulder.

  “Sweetie? Let’s move on. We don’t want to miss . . .”

  The girl who turns to face me is not May. She has a fragile, Irish face, and her bright red overalls are velvet, rather than stained denim. There is a mollusk in her hand.

  “Sorry.” I step back.

  “Ow!” she shrieks. What I took for a snail is a hermit crab, and it has pinched her. She drops it on the ground, prompting a squeal of horror from the boy beside her. I catch it as it skitters between my ankles, then plop it back into the water.

  “May?” I call out, my mouth dry.

  A stroller wheel rolls over my foot. Had she wandered back to the entry tunnel? No. The only people over there are a squat, elderly man and a teenage couple. Around me, the noises of the crowd resound with fresh barbarity. “We don’t know for sure why mobula rays leap,” a young man says, addressing a throng of children in green shirts, “but some scientists think they find it fun.” A lone ray sweeps across the glass behind him, wings listing. From the mouth of the next exhibit comes another dark-haired girl who is not May.

  “Wait here,” I tell Frank, and circle the touching tank, calling, and then shouting May’s name.

  A few adults glance my way, alarmed. Family units glide past. The young man has finished his speech; the green-shirted children are turning toward me as one. With savage clarity, I see it: the intercom announcement, the troubled strangers, the return to the car without May.

  “Excuse me,” I say to the attendant stationed at the touching tank. “Have you . . .” I swallow, trying to moisten my parched throat. “Have you seen a girl with dark brown hair and glasses, seven years old?”

  “Just a moment.” She turns toward a child whose features might as well be blank. “Keep your hand flat, that’s right. . . .”

  With outrageous care, she lays a glistening starfish across his palm.

  “Ma’am, please.” I touch her arm. “I need your help.”

  And then they are upon me. May is chattering, yanking me toward the next exhibit, while Frank stares down into the tank.

  “Where have you been?” I say, flooded with calm and jubilant indignation.

  “It’s the chameleon fish!” she exclaims. “Maurice found it. Come on!”

  I catch her free hand as she skips ahead, unwilling to lose physical contact. The next exhibit is considerably darker, crowned by a neon sign that reads “Magicians of the Deep.” The progression comes back to me, vaguely, from a visit years ago. Here is the exhibit on cephalopods, followed by the penguin habitat.

  “Where was she?” I ask Frank, but he doesn’t answer. He whisks his forefingers over his eyebrows, then bends to inspect a paper nautilus. Around us, bioluminescent squid shimmer in the walls.

  May pulls me toward a cubic tank, which appears to host nothing but seaweed. It convulses, obeying some hidden current, and then the fronds part to reveal an orange mass with the texture of scrambled eggs. To its left, mounted above a touchscreen, moon jellies throb in synchrony.

  “A movie!” May says. She prods the screen to life.

  “The cuttlefish is nature’s hypnotist,” says a jocular, male voice. “Check out its powers of camouflage, which make this critter an expert at wooing mates.”

  A coral reef appears, patrolled by schools of minnows. All at once, a patch of it resolves into a purplish shape. The creature dips its narrow snout, ruffles its fins. Then the rocks and minnows reassert themselves.

  “There he is,” May whispers to Maurice, indicating the tank before us.

  The same purplish body drifts across the sand. When it turns its leathered face in our direction, I feel as though I am gazing across millennia of evolutionary change.

  For perhaps the first time, as I am meeting—or failing to meet—its gibbous eyes, I feel the lunacy of Darwin’s vision. The animal might as well be extraterrestrial. That we could share an ancestor, however protozoan, strikes me as so preposterous that I laugh.

  Frank has caught up to us. He murmurs, “Are you getting this?”

  His eyes glitter. They dart to the tank of moon jellies, then to the next exhibit, where bands of light—refracted through a tank so huge I can make out only part of it, from here—are rippling across the floor.

  “Getting what, Frank?”

  “They’re . . . ,” he trails off, distracted by the cuttlefish. His eyes widen. With a shaking hand, he grabs my wrist.

  “What is it, Frank?” I say, as May babbles to Maurice. “What’s going on?”

  Frank presses his finger to his lips. Then he raises it in the air, as I have seen him do outside, to test the direction of the wind.

  A male voice booms from the loudspeaker: “Good afternoon, folks. Just a friendly reminder that our penguin feeding will begin in fi-i-ve”—his voice dips—“minutes! Head on over to the Flipper Zone to see our rockhoppers chow down.”

  May scurries toward the next room. I start to pull Frank toward her, but he drops my wrist. He is still staring at the cuttlefish.

  I reach for him, but he steps back. Then he says, in a strange, clear voice, “No, it’s not your fault.”

  My chest tightens. A boy on a leash toddles past us, wailing, his mother in tow.

  “Come on!” May calls from the threshold. Then she scampers out of sight.

  I seize Frank’s elbow and haul him after her.

  “It’s ours,” he mumbles. “We did this.”

  He is talking to the fish, no doubt. Idiocy, to take him here. Swearing under my breath, I spot May up ahead, standing on her tiptoes to see over the crowd. The penguin tank rises before her.

  Sunlight pours through it. After the dimness of the last room I have to squint as we approach the staggered cliff, encircled by smudged glass. The penguins are standing side by side on a lower ledge. I can just make out their strong, pinched faces, their plumed eyebrows. Most of them are honking, fins raised, like bickering commissars. For creatures going nowhere they move with enviable purpose.

  “We’ve gotta go, sweetie,” I say, when we reach her.

  May stares at me in disbelief.

  “Grandpa’s not feeling well.”

  “But they’re about to eat!”

  A uniformed woman has appeared on the
cliff, carrying a bullhorn and green bucket. The people around us push forward, jockeying for a better view, as the penguins bluster off their ledge.

  “Pipe down a second,” Frank calls out—to the penguins, I realize, with horror. As he lifts his finger again I step between him and May, trawling my mind for a plan.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you something even better later,” she says to Maurice, lifting him over her head for a better view.

  “My god,” Frank says, staring over my shoulder at the adjacent exhibit. “It can’t be. They can’t have . . .”

  I turn to find a slice of ocean, girded by a pane of glass so tall I have to step back to take it in. “Welcome to Open Sea,” reads an overhanging poster. Vast, green structures sway behind it, interposed by flashing schools of herring. Before us, two hammerhead sharks glide in tandem. One of their mouths hangs open, revealing an arsenal of pointed teeth.

  Frank strides toward them, nearly tripping over a stroller. To my relief, the exhibit is more or less deserted, eclipsed by the penguin feeding. Perhaps he’ll take it in without bothering anyone. But no—he is flagging down an employee now, who approaches him cheerfully. I aim for them, grabbing May’s hand.

  “Hey.” May strains against me.

  “I’m sorry, honey, but we have to stay with Grandpa.”

  “They’re not done yet,” she whines, stumbling after me.

  “Let’s go get him. He can’t miss this!”

  Frank is gesticulating to the attendant, dwarfed by the kelp forest. Against its majesty his gestures look skittish, puerile. For a moment I allow myself to imagine him as someone else’s charge, a stranger whom, in some other—equally plausible—life, I never would have met.

  “. . . only hold the white sharks for a few months,” the attendant says, as we approach. “And then we release them.”

  Whatever Frank says next prompts her to stifle a grin. She can’t be much older than twenty, but there is an air of authority about her. Her hair is plaited in sleek cornrows.