Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  She believes him, but can’t watch. Joe bends down to kiss the top of Chris’s yellow head. “Your mother’s nervous, pal,” he says, and Chris looks up, resigned. They stop their game and swing primly for her benefit. God knows what they do behind her back.

  They hear from Connie, regular but short notes, a few lines on a postcard. She has called four or five times in the last couple of years, but they don’t talk well on the phone. Once she came for a week’s visit, but without the habit of day-to-day living between them, the time was awkward, full of holes.

  Lately Connie has been talking about getting an apartment nearby, using Portland instead of Boston as her home base. Faith hopes so. Without Connie she feels more and more caught in the wrong life, as if she found the right door but tripped over the threshold. She doesn’t know anybody like herself; even her own children are mysteries.

  When both boys get old enough to play at danger, Joe insists that Faith experiment with them: two-wheelers, toboggans, hockey skates. “Go, Mom!” they yell down the street. It is her first ride on a bicycle, the sun beating a yellow melting puddle on the street, Joe chuffing beside her, his sneakers slapping the pavement like a metronome, anchoring the wild beating in her heart.

  “Keep pedaling!” Joe yells, and she does, furiously, knowing he has let go, and for a moment she knows what it is to be a child, hurtling into the sun.

  When she finds her feet again, the feeling is gone, her wits and suspicion of the world returned, and her husband, running toward her ruddy with triumph, looks like a stranger.

  “Yes! Yes!” he hollers, laughing, grabbing her hands and shaking them so hard as to send ripples up her arm. He says he loves her calm, yet he is always trying to move her.

  “Oh,” she says, catching her breath, laying one hand over her chest. “Oh boy.” Her children are running down the shallow hill of their street.

  “All right, Mom!” Chris hollers.

  “She did it, guys,” Joe says. He squeezes her hands hard. “It’s in your bones now, lady. Once you learn you don’t forget.”

  She falls against him. “Can you hear my heart?”

  “Yes,” he says, clutching her with one arm and steadying the bike with the other, his arms awkwardly spread. He manages to make even this look natural. She watches him watching her, trying to see what he sees. He’s enchanted by her monstrous need for him, not understanding the nature of this need, how it mutes her, how cold it has become, how separate it makes them.

  SIX

  Friday night, and Faith is alone. The boys are with Phoebe and Joe Senior for one of their weekends: they’ll go to the Fryeburg fair and eat until they get sick. Ben usually likes the ox pull, Chris the spotted pigs. This year it’s hard to tell what they’ll like, for they’re changing before her eyes. Chris is eleven, still a child in many ways, but already there are signs: he takes a shower every day; he likes salad.

  She waits for Joe but he doesn’t come home. The house is tomblike and sad, and she doesn’t know how to break the spell. She considers putting on a record but can’t think of anything she wants to hear.

  Joe calls, his voice strained. “I’ll be late,” he says.

  “Where are you?”

  “At the shop.” She waits, but he doesn’t say anything. Does he want her to tell him to come home? “So, I’ll be late,” he says again. He is warning her and doesn’t yet know it.

  “Okay,” she says. She sounds fine. She always sounds fine; it’s an old skill.

  She heads upstairs, each footfall like a slap against bare skin. She perches on the edge of their bed, careful not to wrinkle the rose-colored quilt, the wedding present from Phoebe in which they’d wrapped themselves on their wedding night twelve years ago.

  Twelve years. Faith tries to back her way through them, but the years arrive in a clump: a rush of love, a baby, another baby, work, family celebrations, a whirl of days. And Joe: his open arms, his endless gifts, his eternal competence. He could fix anything: his father’s machines, his friends’ cars, his sons’ bicycles and toy trucks and hurt feelings. He had visited his gifts on Faith, too, again and again, but whatever needed fixing had been too long broken.

  She must have turned away by inches, for the days refuse to separate in her head. Sitting here now she can’t imagine that they ever laughed together, or shared an inside joke, or reached for each other in the night. Yet she knows they did these things, these married things. How long ago? It has been a languid drifting, and here they are, washed up on different shores.

  She hears his truck pull up, the thump on the porch, the quick opening of the front door. These sounds are more familiar than anything else in her life. In a few minutes he stands before her, leaning against the door of their bedroom. She looks at her watch, amazed that she has sat here, in this one spot, for three hours.

  “Boys get off all right?” he asks.

  His face is taut, the corners of his mouth turned down. Though physically he fills up the doorway, he appears to be shrinking. This is what he must have looked like at thirteen, being told that his big brother was lying dead in a blackened rice paddy on the other side of the world.

  “I have something to tell you,” he says.

  She looks beyond him. “You slept with someone.” Her voice seems to be coming from someplace else in the room. He slips down, watching her, his back against the doorjamb, until he is sitting on the floor, looking up. He says nothing, struggling against the muscles in his face.

  She knows who it is, though he has mentioned her only once. Her name is Judy—the woman Joe Senior hired to do the taxes.

  He’s gasping for breath. “We were just friends.” Minutes tick by. “Oh, God. Faith, I don’t know how this happened.”

  Faith stands up. “I see.” She smoothes the quilt. It is faded where the sun has lain upon it for years of mornings. Turning to him, she sees his face buckle, hears the unseemly croak of a man’s crying.

  “Oh, Faith,” he says. “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.”

  “How long has it been?”

  He is crumpled by the door. Terrible sounds escape him, the echoey bottom of love.

  “Please move out of my way.” She feels like a bundle of twigs, snapped into pieces and tied back together.

  “Faith, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Please move.”

  He catches her by the leg as she tries to pass.

  “Stop it, Joe.”

  He holds her fast by the ankle.

  “Let me by.”

  “Talk to me!”

  She turns on him, her voice thick with shame. “Why? So you can ease your guilty conscience about fucking that woman?”

  For Faith, who doesn’t swear, these words are a shock, to her ears loud as an explosion. She glances around—at the flowery walls, the mirror, the shelf of porcelain birds, the glass-shaded lamps on either side of the bed—to make sure nothing has moved. Joe scrambles to his feet and grips her by the arms, his moist, scarlet face inches from hers, smelling of somebody else. She tries to shake him off but his hands tighten around her.

  “Talk to me, damn it!”

  “No.”

  He shakes her, once. “Yes!”

  “Stop it, Joe.” She’s crying now, hard, a scary loosening in her body.

  He sweeps her toward the bed, the room reeling around her. He pins her against the quilt, holds down her wrists, his face transformed, blue veins pumping under his damp skin.

  “You will talk to me, goddammit!” He screams at her, beads of spit raining down. She has no breath, no bearings, no sense that she might once have known him.

  “I slept with someone, for God’s sake!” He thumps her wrists against the bed. “And you have nothing”—thump!—“nothing”—thump!—“to say!”

  Except for the scratches escaping breathless from her throat, and the hot tears running into the hair at her temples, Faith has no sense of her own body, no sense of being there, pinned under her raging husband. She doesn’t struggle against
his raging; she only stares into his face, his pain like something she has come upon in the dark of a forest, frightening in its wildness, a ragged, bloody thing.

  Suddenly he comes to, as if startled from a bad dream. He releases her wrists in horror, tries to stroke the red marks away. He opens his mouth and closes it again. No words. He lets her up, backs away from her as if she were armed. She doesn’t feel armed; she feels bereft, resigned to what she is willing to lose.

  “Forgive me,” Joe says, staring at his hands. He covers his forehead and draws his hands back through his hair. Then he looks at her: “We’re not going to make it.”

  Faith knows this. She has always known.

  “Faith,” Joe says. “This woman, she isn’t—I don’t want her, Faith. I want you. She—likes to talk. She talks. A lot. Until tonight that’s all it was. We talked. That’s all. Until tonight.” He looks at her, pleading with her to say something. “Faith, it’s you I want. Let me in.”

  Where is “in”? She wipes her face with the flat of her hand, her skin feverish and sweaty, hot with shame. Burning with the thought of this charming other woman, this woman who can’t stop talking, Faith has to fight for breath, as if she’s being crushed under the weight of all the women she knows—Phoebe, the sisters-in-law, Marion, the mothers at the boys’ school—all of them armed with words, their pretty mouths moving.

  “Why did you choose me?” she whispers, not looking at him, not expecting an answer, for she knows he can no longer remember. She watches her hands grab the wedding quilt and claw at it, but it resists her; the stitching holds. She rips the quilt from the white sheets and flings it to the floor. “Is this what you want me to do?” She picks up a book from the nightstand and heaves it across the room, scattering the porcelain birds off their shelf. “Is this what you want? Is it?” Her voice is rising on its own; there is no connection between herself and the things she is doing.

  She clutches the quilt and tries to rip it again. Joe reaches for her and she shoves it against him. “Is this what you want?” She’s shrieking now, her pulse thundering in her ears, throbbing all the way out through her fingertips. Joe backs away. She picks up one of the lamps and yanks it from the outlet, holding it over her head. How does she tell him what she has known all along? There hasn’t been a day in their marriage that she didn’t expect this, exactly this, her worst fear come true. She had made it come true, by simply being Faith. She catches herself in the mirror, looking horribly like her mother, then hurls the lamp into her own reflection.

  In slow motion he blurs toward her and pulls her down. Daggers of lamp and mirror thud all around them on the carpet. After the echo of breaking glass fades from her head, she opens her eyes, and in perfect focus sees his giving up. He collapses on her, as he sometimes does after love; but this is not love, it is loss, and they are crying. “Who the hell are you?” He speaks into the hollow of her neck, his breath warm and rapid.

  She gives him no answer, for she has none. She rolls him off her and he lies blankly on their carpet, staring at the ceiling. She gets up, fetches the wastebasket near the door, and begins to pick up their ruined room. She drops each shard into the metal wastebasket, piece by piece. After a time Joe gets up, slowly, and joins her, dropping in pieces of his own, each one loud as a gunshot, sharp enough to make her wince.

  They spend the next hours in a helpless, remorseful silence, ensconced in different parts of what Faith still thinks of as Joe’s house. Just before dawn, when Joe slips into bed beside her, she turns to him. They look at each other in the grainy dark for a long time.

  “I don’t want her, Faith,” he whispers. “It isn’t love, it’s nothing like love.”

  “I know.” She lies still, listening to her heart. “But you’re right about us not making it.”

  “We’ll talk. We’ll get back to where we were.”

  “Oh, Joe. There’s nowhere to get back to. Don’t you see how little I ever gave you?”

  “But you did.”

  “Joe,” she whispers, “you made me up.” She’s crying softly now. “You imagined me.”

  “Faith—”

  She puts her fingers gently against his mouth. “Please. I can’t stand to hear my name.”

  She turns over, hugging herself, and he does not try to touch her. She remembers how she watched her own wedding from a place outside herself, how helpless she looked, how inadequate to the work of being happy. Tonight, turning away from him, she believes she feels the dust of what was once herself return: a fluttering inside, a gathering. It is an unpleasant but strangely welcome feeling: her old, frozen self, finally delivered from the terrible trouble of love.

  III

  RITUALS

  ONE

  It is cold comfort, these twice-monthly dinners at Faith’s. For having this house to come to, Connie is grateful, but there are conditions: it is a place to come to only if you call first; it fills a need only if you don’t need much.

  Before going in, she stands for a moment in Faith’s yard, looking at the house, its neat shutters, its tidy front porch. Bird feeders hang like ornaments among the trees. In the air, warm for April, Connie catches winter’s final waning. Faith’s preparations for spring are everywhere: flower boxes filled with soil; a rose trestle, newly painted, snugged against the end of the house; bits of string and yarn set out for the birds. Connie takes it all in with a sense of wonder; this annual act of hope is one of Faith’s many mysteries.

  Connie had moved back to Portland, into a one-bedroom condominium ringed by rhododendrons and unnaturally green grass, with a notion of setting down roots, and the proximity of Faith fed this notion. I live a few blocks from my sister, she pictured herself saying. Oh yes, we see each other every day. But it had not turned out this way. For one thing, Connie was never home. For another, their years apart had not made them any better suited to other people’s rituals, and she discovered how inept they were at spontaneous visits. They were no more separate than they had ever been, and no closer, so they stumbled into a ritual that did suit them, another of their silent pacts: Connie began coming here two Saturdays a month, at exactly five o’clock.

  She rings the bell. Joe and Chris appear at the door, on their way out, Ben and the dog behind them. Tucked under Joe’s arm is a ruffled catalog of auto parts.

  “Hey, Connie,” he says, and kisses her cheek. The boys give her a brief hug, then the three of them seem to wait for her to say something. She looks from one to the other, vaguely uncomfortable.

  “So, what do you think?” Chris says, finally.

  “About what?” Connie looks him over, for a new haircut, the start of a beard, a tattoo.

  “My car.” He points to the driveway, to a blue car parked right in front of hers. The car is exceptionally ugly, yet somehow she’d missed it.

  “Well,” she says. “It’s really something.”

  “Careful of your blood pressure, Connie,” Joe says.

  “No, really, it’s nice.” She frowns. “Isn’t it something like that car you used to have, Joe?”

  Chris places his hand on his father’s shoulder, standing up straight. He’s almost as tall as Joe, with Joe’s big build, but he has Faith’s fair hair—Connie’s too, she likes to think—and the Spaulding green eyes. “Very good, Aunt Connie,” he says. “What you see before you is a 1966 Corvair. A classic.”

  “Four on the floor,” Ben says. “We’re putting her back on the road.”

  “I’m putting her back on the road,” Chris says. “You’re not even old enough to get a license.”

  “So?” Ben says. He is short and stringy, with his father’s black hair and deep blue eyes. “I didn’t say it was my car.”

  Joe thumps cheerfully on the catalog. “It’s nobody’s car till we get it running.”

  To Connie, the Corvair looks hopeless. “Well,” she says. “Congratulations.”

  Chris and Joe start down the steps, but Ben lingers, waiting while she pets the dog, a sweet-tempered shepherd-retriever mutt.
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  “What’s new?” she asks Ben, running her hands over the dog’s golden pelt. She doesn’t want to go inside.

  “I’m playing shortstop.” He always offers her something. Chris is harder to talk to, his mind always somewhere else, his body in perpetual motion. Ben looks right into a person’s eyes, focused, purposeful. To Connie it seems he has made a virtue of the pensiveness he inherited from his mother.

  “Shortstop,” she says. “Baseball, right?”

  He laughs. He thinks she’s kidding.

  “How’s school? Almost out, huh?” She has always felt a little foolish talking to children.

  He smiles politely. “Yup.”

  “What grade will you be in?” She winces. As a child she hated this question: there were too many schools, too many grades.

  “Eighth,” he says patiently.

  “Eighth. I keep forgetting.”

  Ben runs one spidery hand through his hair. “I’m gonna go help those guys with the car, okay?” He chucks the dog on the head. “Come on, Sammy.”

  Then he, too, is gone, and the dog is gone, leaving her alone with the house, and her sister. She tightens her grip on her purse, on the letter inside it. The letter contains just the sort of thing they’re not good at.

  She finds Faith in the kitchen, laying silverware around five plates.

  “Sorry I’m early,” Connie says.

  Faith looks up. “Safe flight?”

  “We got stuck in London for a while but we still touched down on time.” She sits down. “How’s work?”

  “Fine. Marion’s out with the flu, so it’s pretty busy.”

  They have been having this conversation, more or less, ever since Connie first left this house to work for AtlanticAir. Connie considers how little her life has changed: she’s had the same schedule—Portland to Boston to London to Paris; Paris to London to Boston to Portland—for years now. Her final return is always on a Saturday, when her routine is the same: she waters her one plant, puts on some coffee, calls her friend Stewart in Boston if she can get him home. From time to time she also has a boyfriend to call. She straightens her already tidy apartment, then lies down for a nap. When she gets up she takes a shower, puts on her makeup, and heads out to pick up her mail and drive the few blocks to Faith’s.