Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  Connie’s first day at the school in Columbus, or Cleveland, is her fifth, maybe sixth, first day this year. It’s way past Christmas and the kids are too far friends to let Connie in, even a little. But the teacher is nice, the nicest one so far.

  A girl approaches Connie out of the den of coats in the coatroom. “What’s your lucky number?” she asks. She has shiny, pinkish skin and fuzzy hair buckled with a pink barrette. All the other girls have pink barrettes, too, Connie notices. Everyone except her: her head feels big and bald. In every school it’s something different. Last time it was shoes with straps; the time before that, cigar-wrapper rings and saying Oh right.

  “What’s your lucky number?” the girl repeats. She waits, her eyes round and judging.

  “Eighty-five,” Connie says, knowing she’s wrong, way wrong, but it’s the only number that comes to her.

  The girl wrinkles her forehead. “What kind of lucky number is that? Eighty-five? That’s not lucky.”

  “Yes it is,” Connie says. “It’s the luckiest number there is.”

  The girl’s expression disintegrates like a punctured balloon, and Connie’s life takes a little turn. This is her first victory.

  “Not only that,” she says, “it’s the same lucky number as Kathy on ‘Father Knows Best.’ ”

  By this time two other girls are watching, their pink barrettes beaming back at the heavy overhead lights. The fuzzy-hair girl’s eyes narrow, mean blue slits. She’s the leader. “How do you know that?”

  Connie gives her hair a shake. “I live in a hotel.”

  The fuzzy-hair girl withdraws, the others inch nearer.

  If Faith were here she would be angry, but Faith is back at the hotel, faking sick on the fold-out couch in the too-hot room, faking a fever so she doesn’t have to do another first day. At first Connie was frightened to be coming here alone, but now she’s glad. She can say anything she wants. Faith would tell her not to say where they live, not to say anything about Billy and Delle. When other kids ask Faith what her father is, she says a fireman. It’s the only lie she ever tells; usually she just won’t answer.

  At science time the teacher brings a small cage to the front of the room. “Let’s see how our friends are today,” she says. “Connie, these little creatures belong to our class.”

  “We’re raising them,” the fuzzy-hair girl says, as if to say We saw them first.

  The teacher places the cage on Connie’s desk and lets her peer through the wires. Two taffy-colored hamsters sit at opposite ends of the cage, each peeping out from a fortress of wood chips. Their beady eyes are trained on her and their faces quiver. For some reason they make Connie think of her and Faith.

  “Are they girls?” she asks the teacher.

  The fuzzy-hair girl laughs, then everybody else.

  The teacher smiles. “One’s a girl, one’s a boy. We’re waiting for them to have babies.”

  Mortified by the laughter, Connie doesn’t hear much else. She watches the hamsters in their metal cage and thinks of them poised there, forever and ever, banking the wood chips against themselves.

  At lunchtime a tall woman comes in to speak to the teacher. Connie knows they’re speaking about her, that once again she’s in the wrong grade, the wrong group; something is wrong.

  The tall woman—the principal—beckons with her long nail. “Come with me, honey,” she says, smiling too hard, leading Connie into the hall. A dozen pink barrettes move at the same time.

  The hall is tall and dark, the principal tall and dark, the world tall and dark.

  The principal bends down. “Is Faith Spaulding your sister, honey?”

  Connie shakes her head yes. Whatever the principal says Connie will believe. No matter how bad it is, she will believe it.

  “Are you living at the Grandview?”

  Connie shakes her head yes, her eyes smarting.

  “Do you happen to know where your mom and dad are today, honey?”

  Connie shakes her head no.

  “Well.” She places a hand soft on Connie’s shoulder. Connie falls instantly in love with the face that goes with the hand. “Faith had a little accident today and had to go to the hospital, but she’s just fine, you don’t need to worry one bit.” Her voice is low and reassuring. “Would you like me to take you to see her?”

  Connie shakes her head yes, her voice nothing but a heap of feathers.

  On the way to the hospital Connie continues to shake her head no as the principal asks in her rosy voice, Maybe they went to visit a friend? Maybe you have an uncle or aunt in town? Maybe they went out for lunch somewhere, do you know where they go out for lunch?

  The hospital is too bright, too steely, too white. The long, polished corridor is quiet but desperate; it’s like the wasps buzzing underneath their nest in the field across from the Connecticut house, a distant, dangerous teeming. With the principal Connie walks down this corridor until they get to a door near a counter where nurses pad back and forth on hard rubber soles. “Wait just a minute, honey,” the principal says, and goes over to speak to one of the nurses.

  In the corridor is a chair. One chair all by itself, and Connie sits in it. She doesn’t care if it is wrong to sit in this chair, this chair is hers now, her lucky chair, she claims it. The wasps sound a little thicker now, and cutting through their dull whine comes a whimper—just one, in the buzzy quiet—that she recognizes as Faith’s.

  The bed on which Faith lies stretched out, face up, her hands clasped loosely over her stomach, is made of steel, its sheets white, almost fluorescent, almost hard to look at. On a chair by the window lies her coat, the red one, its arms opened up. It’s hard to believe a girl once moved in it.

  Faith stares at the ceiling. Her eyes are green and heavily flecked, like Connie’s, her eyelashes still. Her chin is extravagantly bandaged, starting just under the lip. Connie watches, horrified, convinced she is staring at the face of death. She moves to the bedside so that if her sister is alive she will know someone is there.

  The green eyes slide over, the face does not move. The front of Faith’s blouse is blood-spattered, dried into puckers.

  “Fell in tub,” Faith says, barely moving her mouth. At least that’s what it sounds like. “Hit faucet bad.”

  Connie can’t talk—her voice seems to have permanently left her. Her own chin begins to tingle; she imagines her wet foot slipping and her hands flying out, then the cold smack of the faucet and the horrid warmth of drawn blood. She knows how ashamed Faith is to be here, to have strangers looking at her.

  From the hall outside comes a shriek, and behind it a low and jumpy carping. Connie recognizes these sounds as Billy and Delle, and watches Faith’s eyes slide back, fix themselves again on the ceiling.

  “Take me to her, take me to my baby!” Delle commands. And Billy: “We demand to see the doctor! Where in bloody hell is the doctor?” They sound like the count and countess: imperious, peevish, and English. Connie knows exactly what they look like: Delle’s red mouth drawn tight in judgment, Billy’s squared shoulders.

  Their voices are rising now, drunken and shrill. Why weren’t they notified sooner? Bloody hell, their poor, precious girl in the hands of strangers!

  “She would have bloody bled to death if the chambermaid hadn’t found her,” says a voice that sounds like an angry nurse’s.

  When Connie hears them all thundering down the hall, she shrinks from the bedside and grabs the red coat, clutching it so hard her fingernails hurt, repeating eighty-five eighty-five eighty-five as fervently as she can. She sinks to the chair and drops her head, crushing Faith’s red coat into the bend of her body.

  After Connie has spent a lot of days in the classroom with the hamsters—a month, maybe, or a week, she simply can’t measure time—the play moves to New York.

  It is a cool, starlit, energetic night, the marquee like a dozen tiny moons drizzling light on her head. She feels a little like a princess in her white dress, its lacy frill falling just below her knees. She’s dress
ed exactly like Faith, her hair winched into the same yellow braids. She can still feel the afterbite of Delle’s nails as she raked the hair back, complaining.

  “Smile, honey,” somebody says. They have posed like this in every city in the country, it seems, but New York is different: the light, the air, the nervous click of spike heels on the sidewalk, the timbre of her parents’ voices—these things carry the dread and exhilaration of arrival. And something else—Delle’s prediction, smuggled in somehow with the joyful tones that rain down like confetti: The play won’t last a week. They’ll have to go back to Connecticut for a while, to a school Connie hates. Sundays Armand will come out from the city to take them to lunch and a long walk, with ice cream at the end; other than that, nothing will move. She and Faith will stare out the windows, or hang around in the weedy yard, while Billy and Delle drink brandy or rum in their musky bedroom, waiting for Garrett to call with another show.

  For now, though, everyone is smiling, talking faster than squirrels, their faces clear in the circle of light. The women wear red lipstick, their dresses shimmer with color: red, pink, green, violet. Connie likes pink, but Delle makes them wear white, this way they stand out, they make a fine picture. Billy looks handsome in his tuxedo, Delle beautiful, a fur thrown over her thin sequined dress.

  The cameras sound a little like insects, their flashes far too bright. Connie stands perfectly still inside her prickly white dress, thinking of her posture, her mother’s hand on her neck, her father’s hand cupping her shoulder. “Smile!” someone calls, and again: “Smile!” She does. Behind her she hears the crack of Billy and Delle’s smiles, too.

  Next to her Faith is a stiff, unyielding presence. She won’t smile, not until the last possible minute. Faith hates this, hates having all these people looking at them. Connie feels a stab of guilt, but she can’t help liking this, in fact she loves it. Though Billy and Delle’s hands on her are no warmer than claws she can make herself feel them as the hands of love. She imagines they do indeed make a fine picture, the four of them all dressed up and standing in front of the poster for Billy and Delle’s show. She smiles again. She smiles until her cheeks hurt, pretending it is like this all the time. This is opening night.

  II

  FAITH

  ONE

  Faith harbors few wishes. What she wishes today, with unaccustomed passion, is to have a new school to go to. Instead this is Maine, again, the school Long Point High, where everybody knows your business. They know, for example, that Billy Spaulding died drunk in a car crash back in July, about four hours after the Long Point Summer Theater had closed its doors for the night. She can feel the sidelong stares of the other kids in the cafeteria, warm and thin and musing.

  With her lunch tray balanced in one hand, she drags a chair to the reject table and sits with a couple of pock-faced boys from the marching band and a new girl, Marjory. They let her eat in merciful silence, the thrum of voices from surrounding tables a halo of space between her and the virulent world.

  Faith doesn’t have to sit at the reject table; she’s pretty, for one thing, and she’s in College Prep. But the College Prep table comes with questions. In Long Point Billy and Delle are—were—celebrities; the kids grill her every chance they get, about actors and acting and Broadway and backstage, as if she should know a thing about it. Now that Billy’s dead it’s even worse. Sometimes she thinks everyone on earth was put there to ask questions she doesn’t know the answers to.

  The new girl, Marjory, looks up from her shepherd’s pie. “Yucky food,” she says, lifting her roll, wet with string bean juice, as if to prove it.

  Faith nods, smiling faintly. She’s already given up on this meal. Usually she can catch the food in time, keeping the portions inside the tray dividers, but today the cafeteria lady slopped the food every which way; pale juices are draining into all the wrong pockets.

  “In Missouri it’s just as bad,” Marjory says. “That’s where I’m from.”

  Faith steals a look at Marjory’s books; for some reason all the General Course books are brown. Marjory’s notebooks are pink, though, with Marjory loves Kevin scrawled over the covers in a bold, happy hand.

  Faith is an A student, a fact that her guidance counselor says is a shock considering her scholastic history. The words scholastic history sound like a disease. Connie’s in Commercial Course, passing her classes by just enough to keep the school from calling Delle in to discuss things.

  “Are you from here?” Marjory asks.

  “Yes,” Faith says, because it’s easier. She remembers living in Missouri once for a couple of months, on the tour for Count Your Change, and again, though not as long, during Mister Mistake.

  “I saw you walking to school this morning,” Marjory says. “Was that your sister?”

  Faith nods. At the far end of the cafeteria, under a bank of windows, Connie is sitting at the burnouts’ table with a bunch of boys, her face animated with some fib she’s telling, probably the one about sitting on Marlon Brando’s lap when she was five, or meeting James Dean. Her hair is long, parted straight down the middle. It’s naturally blonde but she dyes it blonder. At night she rolls it up with empty orange juice cans. She has to keep waving it out of her eyes in a way boys like; they show off for her, punching each other on the arm and laughing loud enough to get the eye from the assistant principal. Faith can hardly remember the time when Connie used to follow her around at new schools, afraid of peeing her pants. Her makeup—blue eye shadow and blue eyeliner and blue mascara that Faith can see all the way across the room—makes her look older than she is. She’s a freshman, only one grade behind Faith. Faith is sixteen, almost a year older than everybody else in her class because Billy and Delle put her in the wrong grade once in Connecticut. She will be nineteen years old when she graduates from high school, a humiliation she feels in advance.

  “Maybe we could walk home together,” Marjory says.

  Faith doesn’t say no, and finds Marjory waiting for her in the lobby at the end of the day. They walk down the long hill from the high school, Marjory chitchatting happily, not seeming to mind that Faith doesn’t say much. At the ball field, where the road divides, they stop.

  “Which way do you go?” Marjory asks.

  Faith points the way, ashamed. This road divides the town in more ways than one.

  “I go the other way,” Marjory says, reaching below the plaid hem of her jumper to yank up her tights. In Long Point this year white tights are out, but Marjory has no way of knowing. “Why don’t you come to my house for a while?”

  “I don’t think so,” Faith says. If she goes to Marjory’s house then wouldn’t Marjory expect to see the trailer sometime?

  “My mother makes something sweet every day,” Marjory says. “Today’s blond brownies.”

  Marjory must be lying. “I’ve got to get home,” Faith says. “But thanks.”

  At the end of the gravel drive that leads up to the trailer, the mailbox glints on top of a splintery post. The flag is still up, the mail and newspaper sticking out the end of the box. Faith sinks at the shoulders; this is not a good sign.

  Connie is already there, sitting on the bottom step, waiting. Behind her the dingy trailer hunkers like some sleepy monster: the frosted, slatted windows, designed for a hotter climate, look like half-closed eyes. It’s only September but already the yard has gone yellow, the result of a killing frost come early. A few marigolds linger along the edge of the step. Faith scans the trailer, the crooked trees, the last of the flowers she and Connie planted. The plastic ducks they found once at a rummage sale are set into a family unit on the grass.

  “She’s on the floor,” Connie says. “She’s been writing to Garrett.”

  Garrett quit being Billy and Delle’s agent years ago, when they got fired from Silver Moon, but now that Delle’s a widow she thinks he owes her something. She’s blown up too many bridges, Garrett says; he couldn’t get her a job canning tuna. Every once in a while Delle writes him pages and pages of illegib
le rage.

  Connie moves over enough to let Faith sit down.

  “I picked up the mail,” Faith says. “Didn’t you see it?”

  “It’s never for me.”

  They wait for a few minutes, looking out at the soon-to-be-forsaken yard. The air snaps of winter; already dusk falls too early.

  “There’s a letter from Armand,” Faith says. Armand’s letters, which come once a week, include a check for each of them. He says it’s money from Billy’s life insurance, but they don’t believe it, and neither one of them has ever told Delle. Delle thinks they buy their clothes from the piddly allowance she gives them.

  “Why did you sit with the rejects today?” Connie says. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “They’re not rejects.”

  “Says you.”

  “That new girl is nice.”

  Connie smirks in a way that infuriates Faith. “If you like white tights.”

  “She can’t help it if she’s from Missouri. Nobody asked her opinion to move here.”

  Faith opens Armand’s note and hands Connie her check. She reads the note, which is handwritten on the stiff, beige stationery of his New York law office. It reads like most of his notes—did they need anything, how’s their mother, how’s school. She gives that over as well.

  “I’ve heard some things about that guy you’ve been sitting with,” she says to Connie.

  “Who?”

  “That guy.”

  “Danny?”

  “You know which one.”

  This is a lot of talking, for them.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Connie says.

  Faith shrugs. “It’s your life.”

  They sit a while longer. Finally Connie lets go the sigh of an old woman. “Should we go in?”

  They go in. Faith hates this trailer more than any place she has ever lived. The Connecticut house seems blurry and far away, a place she might have seen from the window of a bus. When Billy and Delle left Silver Moon, banished to summer stock in Maine, they all lived in a candy-striped motel just outside of Long Point, the first time Faith and Connie had their own room to share on the road. Even with Connie in the next bed, Faith felt a blessed sense of privacy, for when Billy and Delle fought or ran lines, their voices were no more than an urgent hum on the other side of the wall. They stayed there for three years. In summer Billy and Delle delighted tourists with their faultless harmonies, their genteel dancing, their gift for comic timing. In winter they retreated to the Connecticut house for days or sometimes weeks at a time, vainly looking for a director still willing to work with them. For Faith, left behind with her sister in the striped motel, Maine became a steady landscape, something like a home. After Billy died, Delle sold the Connecticut house and bought this place—on purpose, she says, a message to all the flapjaws in town who thought Billy might have left her well provided for.