Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  FOUR

  When Faith and Connie come to clean out the trailer, they are accompanied by a flock of Fullers darting in and out like birds: Joe; his brothers, Will and Brian and Greg; the sisters-in-law, Sarah and Maggie and Amy; most of the nephews and the lone niece; Joe Senior; and Phoebe, in a strictly supervisory role. In all, nineteen people, two cars, four trucks. Far too many people, more than the trailer has ever seen. They cheerfully step out of each other’s way as they carry out the sofa, the kitchen table, the box of knickknacks, the lawn ducks, the TV, the beds. They talk a lot, a vigorous chittering all around Faith’s head.

  Without a word, Faith and Connie assign themselves to Delle’s room, which is suddenly Billy’s room too when they discover his clothes in the closet, bunched at the end of the rod. Faith grabs them in musky hunks and rolls them into the pile of Delle’s clothes. She drops the heap into a carton the size of a trash can which Phoebe has marked SALVATION ARMY—DO NOT LOAD. The room, long closed, smells of must, illness, secrets. Faith takes Delle’s things from the top of the dresser—a decorative marble box that was given to her by Helen Hayes; the framed glossy from Silver Moon; a pillbox of polished stone; a doily made by Grammy Spaulding—and places them on top of the mound of junk in Billy and Delle’s traveling trunk, a great gilded thing with a rounded top that looks like something from a pirate ship. Then Will and his oldest boy heft the emptied dresser, moving slow as bears in the narrow hall.

  “Do you mind if I take the doily?” Connie says.

  Faith looks at the doily, a delicate, lacy square, mottled with white shapes where Delle’s things lay untouched for years. “Go ahead.” Connie plucks the doily from the trunk, folds it daintily, and tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  Faith pushes the lid of the trunk and it groans shut with the finality of a closed coffin. Faith and Connie grab it by the handles, but it is far too heavy for them, so they drag it across the floor and all the way down the hall to the front door. As Faith backs out into the dazzling sunlight, a blur of faces and hands appears at her side, waiting to help. In the midst of this breathtaking abundance she is seized with a timorous gratitude—not for her new family, but for the sight of her sister at the other end of the trunk, for the knowledge that she will not have to bear alone the burden of ordinary love she has married into.

  She offers the last look and wanders through the small, stripped rooms. Her footsteps echo behind her, and then she hears another set of feet.

  “It looks like no one ever lived here,” Connie says. Faith nods, taking in the naked windows, the swept corners. She watches Connie run her hand over the bare kitchen counter. “It looks like we never lived here,” Connie says.

  Faith doesn’t answer. She looks around, for some sign of herself, her sister. On the back wall where the sofa used to be is a cruel scar that still shows through the white, white paint, where Delle once tried to gouge her name with a fork.

  “Let’s just go,” Faith says. But Connie stays put. Her eyes move over the cramped rooms inch by inch, as if she’s imagining what used to be there. Then she turns her back and marches outside, into the flurry of Joe’s family.

  Faith checks the rooms one last time. Finding nothing left, she shuts the trailer’s tinny door on what she hopes is her old life.

  If Joe minds being a threesome he doesn’t say. The arrangement suits Faith even better than she expected. When she arrives for Sunday dinner on Joe’s arm, the house swallows her instantly into the stampede of Joe’s family and the rituals of food, family stories, and tedious, off-key sing-alongs around the piano. But when Connie joins them, as she often does, the stampede slows to a purposeful walk, and the cloud of family presses on her less urgently, it seems, as if giving room to these two sisters and the shelf of silence they carry between them, their unarticulated sorrows.

  Connie has chosen the smallest bedroom in Faith and Joe’s house, at one end of the upstairs hall. At the other end Faith fusses over the bedroom she shares with Joe, papering the walls with tiny flowers. Joe Senior comes over to help her, lugging a utility table and oddly shaped instruments for hanging wallpaper. There is nothing the Fullers can’t do.

  Little by little the house fills with furniture—big, heavy things, gifts from Joe’s parents and brothers that are almost impossible to move. Their immutability thrills Faith, fills her with the notion that she has landed somewhere permanent. Though she thinks of it as Joe’s house—Joe is the one who checked it from top to bottom, Joe’s family furnished it, Joe’s humor and grace now fill it—she loves it already; she wants to die here.

  Connie’s new job, at New England Bonding & Casualty, makes for little conversation. She calls it New England Bondage & Slavery. After six months she’s still a file girl, running files from floor to floor, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She has plenty of friends, and plenty of plans: every week a brochure comes from a different airline.

  Faith is usually the first one home from work, and Connie arrives soon after. They cook something together from Phoebe’s store of recipes, working in silence, following Phoebe’s carefully printed directions. The recipes aren’t simple—Phoebe gives them a lot of credit—and there have been disasters. Joe comes in later, stopping at the sink to wash his hands in a mixture of dish soap and sugar that grinds away the grease from his father’s shop. Then he puts his hands on Faith’s cheeks, looking at her till she blushes, and kisses her long on the lips. His attentions still disarm her; every time he comes back to her at the end of the day, her heart registers a subtle surprise.

  “We sold a machine today,” he says. He’s beating cake batter in a huge bowl tucked under his arm like a football. Joe always makes dessert, evil, thick things that smolder under mounds of Redi-Whip, while Connie and Faith, dinner made, sit at the table and watch him. “I thought Dad was going to cry.”

  Faith smiles. Joe Senior keeps saying he’s going to retire and thinks every machine they ship out is his last.

  “Well,” Joe says. “That was my day. Did anybody else around here have a day?” They laugh. He goes through this every night; he tells them he feels like a stand-up comedian held captive by Trappist monks.

  Sometimes Connie goes out at night, with one of her boyfriends or a girl from work, leaving Faith and Joe together. But more often she stays in. Evenings in the new house are much like the evenings in the trailer, except for the husk of permanence that encases them: the immobile furniture, the thicket of hydrangea bushes hemming in the yard. They play cards at night, like old people. The family stops over not in bunches, but in manageable ones and twos. With Connie as an unwitting ally, Faith steeps her home in a comforting quiet, the only thing left in her life that is truly hers.

  The results are positive. Dr. Howe places a fatherly kiss on her cheek. “Go tell that nice husband of yours,” he says, but she doesn’t. She waits until the twelfth week, when, lying in bed, Joe runs his hand over the hard curve of her belly. His hand stops.

  “Faith?” His eyes are impossibly blue and tender. “Could you be pregnant?” She covers his hand, holding it against her stomach, until he yelps with joy, hoisting himself up on one elbow. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She simply laughs, relieved that he knows on his own. She doesn’t know what to do with life’s magical moments; she never expected these ordinary miracles. She couldn’t utter “I’m pregnant” any better than she had uttered “I do.”

  “Twelve weeks?” he says. He looks at her the way he does so often, as if he’s just figured out what he has on his hands. “You didn’t tell me for twelve weeks?”

  “I was embarrassed,” she whispers, pulling the covers over them. She feels safe in this bed, its rose-pink quilt shielding them from the world. “I didn’t want to turn it into a ceremony.”

  He shakes his head, smiling. She believes her lack of ceremony is what continues to draw him toward her; perhaps his choosing her was in part a respectful rebellion against his ceremonial family.

  She peels his hands from her belly
and brings them to her face, hands a heady mix of sweat and soap and sugar. “I love you, Joe.” These are words he likes, and he seems satisfied, fitting himself around her like a coat.

  In the morning he’s ready to call his mother and father, his brothers, his friends, the newspaper, the president.

  “Please let’s wait,” Faith tells him.

  “But Faith,” he says, grabbing her hands and dancing her around the bedroom, “we’re going to have a baaay-yay-beee!”

  She smiles. “I don’t think I’m ready for the brass band.” Surely the Fullers have some automatic program for First Baby news: a party, a blizzard of presents, special teas, advice handed down like heirlooms.

  He laughs. “Okay.”

  “Besides, I think we should tell Connie first.”

  “Great. Let’s tell her now.”

  “Right this minute?”

  “Faith,” Joe says, still dancing, “you have to learn how to move.” He waltzes her out of their room and down the hall.

  “Joe …”

  He bangs on Connie’s door. “Open up! Big news!” he calls.

  He flings the door open. Connie lifts her head, her hair a yellow tangle. “What’s going on?” Joe tugs at her covers. “Time to get up, time to make plans.”

  “Joe …” Faith says.

  Connie is looking at her, half smiling. She sits up.

  “Prepare yourself,” Joe says. “The news is amazing.”

  Connie’s eyes are barely open. “What are you talking about?”

  Joe raises his hand with a flourish and brings it down gently on Faith’s stomach. “Connie Spaulding, your sister is going to be a mother.”

  Faith tightens her robe and looks at the floor. She can feel herself separating from her sister, a slow ache. This rending confuses her, for haven’t they always been separate?

  “Wow,” Connie says. “You must be happy.” It comes out woodenly, as if she’s reading a greeting card out loud. Her eyes are wide open now, looking into the chasm that divides them. “A mother. I can’t believe it.”

  Joe doesn’t see it; he’s grinning like a child, looking into his imagined future. He doesn’t see Connie’s decision. But Faith sees it; Connie is going to leave. “You can still live with us,” she says softly.

  Connie nods. “Thanks.”

  How big is a heart? Faith wonders. The baby inside her is already carving out room. How can she hold all the things she never dared wish for?

  Connie’s eyes are resolute, fixed on the hard knot of Faith’s stomach. There’s room for you, Faith wants to say, but she is not at all sure.

  FIVE

  It is a spring-yellow day. The three of them stand in the yard, Faith big as a walrus, Joe waiting by the car to drive Connie to the airport. Faith claims to be ill, vague pregnancy complaints, but in fact she cannot bear the thought of watching her sister’s plane recede into a silver dot of sky.

  “This is it,” she says, her voice catching. She lifts her arms to Connie, takes one awkward step. Their goodbye is tearless, quick, a clumsy hug in which their cheeks accidentally bump together, hard. Faith retreats into the house before the car moves, confounded by physical pain.

  Before Faith has time to see it coming, before she can maneuver herself to the window to watch the red Corvair disappear down the street, Connie’s stunning absence rains down on her. Connie is gone, gone; this is Faith’s first day, ever, without her sister. In the empty hall she sits heavily on a deacon’s bench, a gift from Brian and Maggie. She spreads her palm out on her chest, drags it over her massive stomach. Filled though she is with this fidgety baby, she feels empty.

  When Joe returns, Faith is wild to see him, meeting him on the porch steps with her arms out. His face goes white. “Is it time?” he says. He’s looking at her stomach, guarding it.

  “Oh,” Faith says. “No, no. I’m just glad to see you.”

  “I waited till the plane took off.” He helps her into the house. “Look, you want to cry or something?”

  She smiles wanly. “No.”

  “You want to just sit here a while, maybe take a stroll down memory lane?”

  “What?”

  “You know, the good times you had together, stuff like that.”

  Faith shakes her head. The baby is thumping against her back. “I can’t think of any right now.” Why is her heart breaking?

  “It’s okay to be sad, sweetie,” Joe says. He coaxes her into his arms and holds her there. “I would be. I am, in fact.” Faith drops her head on his shoulder. She waits there until her sadness passes.

  With Connie gone, the house seems like an echo with walls. She fills it, for the first time, with the sound of her own voice. She begins to talk about the baby, the baby’s room, the baby’s name, the baby’s prospects. Joe’s face, always close to hers, is a sheen of love and longing. They seem to have a lot to say to each other; they have a wealth of good intentions, not for themselves but for their child, their future children. Faith is grateful for this common ground, for with Connie gone she is back to puzzling over Joe, his capacity for joy, his choosing her for a mate.

  The family churns around them, with plans and alternative plans and contingency plans for getting her to the hospital in case the baby comes early, or late, or in the morning, or at night. Faith freezes in their midst, continues to work for Dr. Howe just to get away from their overwhelming competence. When her time approaches and the phone rings every night for a progress report to be passed down the Fuller telephone chain, she is paralyzed, she might as well be looking for the bathroom in a new school or listening to sinister voices in a hotel hallway. She is the only person on earth who doesn’t know where things are.

  Chris is born exactly on time. When she sees her son, no bigger than an eggplant crooked into his father’s arms, she is felled by love, and by an insidious fear that her heart is indeed a finite thing that has run out of room in a day.

  He’s a noisy baby, with long, stringy hands that waggle out of his blanket. When she and Joe bear him home, they are greeted in the front yard by a band of Fullers who move toward her like a parade float, ponderous and colorful, unfurling a baby blue banner.

  “Here he is!” Joe says, leaving her side and working his family like a politician, pushing cheap cigars into his brothers’ pockets.

  Joe Senior peers into the blanket, then gives Faith a shy smile. “He’s a champ, all right.” Though Faith loves Phoebe, Joe Senior is her favorite Fuller, for, like her, he is a person of few words who prefers to watch the family dance from a chair pushed against the wall.

  “Come here, darling,” Phoebe says, and shepherds Faith over the steps and into her own house. “Oh, what a baby!” she squeals, lifting baby Chris out of Faith’s arms. “My goodness, Faith, he looks more like you than he did yesterday. Look at those eyes!”

  The baby’s eyes are already green. Faith almost feels she should apologize. The baby looks exactly like her.

  Joe is laughing, idiotic with delight, yet he’s tuned to her discomfort, her exhaustion. He swoops her into his arms, heading for the stairs. “New mothers need rest,” he announces. The sisters-in-law gather around baby Chris, whose hands are again poking out of his blanket. “Don’t drop him,” Joe calls. His happiness is palpable, dear as the skin on a peach. She closes her eyes and lets him carry her up, jostling against his chest.

  In the blessed quiet of their bedroom, he tucks her under their quilt and kisses her hard on the cheek.

  “You beautiful, beautiful thing,” he says. “Thank you for our little boy.”

  She smiles, her eyes closed, already drifting away from him. She will never catch up to his version of the world.

  Not until she is teetering on the very edge of sleep does she stop to wonder if anyone in the family machine has thought to call Connie. She would be on her Rome layover now, or perhaps Frankfurt. Faith can’t seem to remember what day it is.

  She surrenders, finally, to sleep, dimly aware of the good-natured noise below, hoping Connie
knows already that a new person has arrived in the world, a little boy, a blood relative.

  By the time Ben is born, over three years later, Faith knows how the family wheels turn. She gives in to the Fullers’ celebration and awe: Ben might as well be the first baby they have ever seen. They surge into her house and she does not retreat. She shows off baby Ben, puts on some coffee, listens to their endless talking, passes herself off as family—because Joe is watching. He believes he has finally made her into family, that he has taken her all the way in, but he has not. Giving in is not the same as giving.

  Even with Joe and her sons she becomes more and more a stranger: their world, too, is unfathomable, often alarming. She listens to Ben—a flourishing, black-haired Fuller—jabbering in his crib, making eerie, high-pitched squeaks that Joe reminds her are the sounds of joy. And Chris—she holds her breath many times, as his tiny grip tightens on the outside world. He runs through the house with his head pitched forward as if trying to ram himself into the nearest wall. The stakes increase with time: he falls from a bike, swings from a tree, rolls down the porch steps while trying to dance. His father is happy to contribute to the peril, twirling his son round and round into unbridled, hiccupping laughter. Even with the baby Joe shows no fear, dramatically jiggling Ben on his knee, singing to him in a loud, ecstatic voice. Faith prefers the quiet tasks: she reads Chris to sleep, takes Ben for long walks in the stroller, listens to Chris’s convoluted stories. She watches Joe with both sons—his crazy faces and slam-bang play—with a stupefied awe, convinced that the child he once was still exists, dancing just under his skin.

  “How can you just let him go like that?” she asks him.

  “Higher! Higher, Daddy!” Chris calls from the swing. Joe pushes him higher, pitching him into a scuff of clouds.

  “Joe,” Faith says. “That’s too high.”

  He stops for her sake, ignores the complaints from the boy on the slowing swing. “He’s big enough to hang on, Faith,” he tells her. “Kids love to go high.”