Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  One contained the earliest evidence of Emmy’s existence, its inventory inscribed in painstaking detail in the ledger of his memory: an ultrasound photograph with the technician’s crude drawing of a word bubble coming out of Emmy’s already-formed mouth (Hi, Daddy!); a Post-it note the same technician handed him on the sly with the words It’s a girl! (Charles had been eager to know the gender of their second child, but Alison preferred to be surprised); congratulatory cards scrawled with exuberant addenda: We couldn’t be happier for you! Wishing you and your little one every blessing! We can’t wait to meet your perfect new baby! (it was clear in retrospect that all the exclamatory excess was in direct proportion to Alison and Charles’s fears—although they were in perfect, complicit, and unspoken denial about that at the time); a scrapbook of photos from the baby shower.

  Another box contained Emmy’s baby things: the layette (gender-neutral, in yellow, green, and white); the silver rattle; an assortment of soft cuddly things, wild creatures tamed by their plush exteriors and beribboned necks; the wind-up crib mobile playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and setting a small flock of bluebirds in slow circular motion; the set of Beatrix Potter books, sized for a child’s hands …

  And there was at least one more treasure chest of sentimental savings down here as well, boxed relics documenting Emmy’s journey from toddlerhood through high school: the handmade birthday/Valentine’s Day/Father’s Day/get-well cards; the letters from camp; the school projects … (Had Cody provided him with these kinds of treasures while he was growing up, Charles would have felt just as sentimental about them and saved every scrap.)

  Where to begin? How would he be able to find Emmy’s boxes in this mess?

  Intending to pour a refill, Charles reached for the wine but discovered he’d left his juice glass upstairs. He considered drinking directly from the bottle, but that was just too scandalous, too dipsomaniacal. Besides, with the low ceiling, he wouldn’t be able to tip up the bottle without risking spillage.

  The problem solved itself as soon as he spotted Emmy’s miniature china tea set—he’d forgotten about that!—stored in its original packaging, sitting in plain sight on top of a larger cardboard box in the farthest darkened corner, opposite where he was crouched. Charles crawled toward it, sliding the bottle along the floor with him, shoving aside the boxes in his way, creating a narrow but traversable path.

  The tea set was packaged with a clear lid, so its components—teapot, creamer, sugar, saucers, and teacups—were in full view, nestled into molded plastic niches. Who gave this to us? Charles wondered. It was real china, from what he could tell, hand-painted with orange and yellow flowers, in pristine condition. He could picture Emmy sitting down here playing hostess to him and her favorite stuffed animals, serving up imaginary refreshments in the style of a Jane Austen heroine.

  Would you care for a cucumber sandwich, Mr. Charles?

  Yes, indeed, Miss Emerson. Thank you ever so much.

  With care, Charles extracted one of the cups, filled it with wine—a little more than a thimbleful—and drank it down.

  He might as well commence his archaeological dig here, by exploring the contents of the box nearest the one upon which Emmy’s tea set was resting. The moment he began easing open the flaps, he knew exactly what he’d found.

  There is no smell in the world like old magazines.

  On the very top was the August 10, 1962, issue of Life magazine: a jaunty Janet Leigh on the cover, proudly buxom in a lemon-yellow sleeveless dress and wearing on her head a towering stack of red fezzes, eleven of them, their tassels swinging wildly, impossibly, illogically, so that one had to conclude that they were being animated not by the pedestrian mechanism of an out-of-frame wind machine but by Ms. Leigh’s breezy insouciance. Next to Janet, a headline read THE FULL STORY OF THE DRUG THALIDOMIDE: THE 5,000 DEFORMED BABIES, THE MORAL QUESTIONS OF ABORTION …

  The box contained several other issues as well, their covers featuring photos of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, John Glenn …

  This smell, old Life, Charles thought. How does one describe it?

  This was exactly the kind of exercise he gave his creative-writing students, so it was only fair that he attempt it himself.

  He refilled the teacup, closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and spoke: “A dense, gluey, chemical musk that comes on strong but soon dissipates, growing elusive, trailing in its wake the faint aroma of a de-ivoried piano key in a Sunday-school classroom.”

  That was terrible. Heavy-handed. Verbose. Self-consciously clever. Resoundingly average. He’d give himself a solid C.

  Was de-ivoried even a word? And yet, how else would one describe it—bald, scalped, denuded? None of those quite got it somehow …

  Charles lifted the magazine out of the box and set it on the floor. Too late to stop now, he thought, so he began to inventory the rest:

  Fourth-grade report cards

  A framed certificate of merit for Palmer penmanship bearing his name

  Cursive-writing workbooks, most filled to capacity

  Yellowed copies of a Seattle Times article from 1963 entitled “Fourth-Graders Predict the Future”

  A stack of red-and-blue-lined newsprint, hole-punched and held together, just barely, by three still shiny butterfly brass brads. The front cover was a sheet of faded, dog-eared, orange construction paper bearing the block printing of his much younger self:

  FLIPPER BOY by Charles Marlow

  Room 104

  Mrs. Braxton

  Also in the box were several remaindered copies of this opus printed in grape-pop purple on slick white paper and emitting another distinctive smell, that high-inducing chemical blend known as mimeograph ink, the clearest evidence of a far-distant, toxic childhood. Astonishing. Someone had taken the time and trouble not only to transcribe Charles’s words into typewritten form but to make mimeographed copies.

  Who? The Nellie Goodhue secretary? Mrs. Braxton?

  Why on earth had his mother saved this stuff? Did she think Charles would want it? To him, it was criminal evidence.

  Fourth grade was a landmark year, the one in which Charles experienced his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame as well as the fall that inevitably follows such a sudden, unearned ascent.

  It was the year he’d started wearing a crucifix, mastered the Palmer Method of penmanship, and become obsessed with doomsday scenarios—especially those resulting from pharmaceutical disasters.

  It was the year he became a fan of sci-fi/horror movies and began collecting the names of film stars with the same fervency that his better-adjusted contemporaries collected baseball cards and merit badges.

  It was the year his best friend moved to Minnesota. The year his parents’ marriage went to hell.

  Mainly, though, it was the year he met Dana McGucken.

  Charles picked up the magazine and began thumbing through it.

  The coffee table in his childhood house was two-tiered, glass on top with a lower shelf shaped like a shallow tray. Each week, when a new issue of Life arrived, his mother relegated the old Life to the tray below. She spritzed the glass top with Windex, wiped it until it was free of fingerprints and the circles left by coffee cups and martini glasses, and then, with precision, placed the new Life in its designated position: intriguingly off-kilter, so that its edges did not align with those of the table.

  For a while, the cast-off issues of Life remained on display in the tray below. They were stacked neatly, in three side-by-side piles, their covers continuing to change, and then at some point they went into the garbage can.

  By contrast, Playboy magazines were harder to access; they were secreted in the garage in a footlocker that bore Charles’s father’s initials (GDM) and on occasion was left unlocked. Playboys were interesting in a puzzling way—although the photos of women’s breasts were a revelation, making Charles understand why his mother always spoke in such self-derogatory tones about being flat as a pancake. The centerfold feature was intriguing from an engineering sta
ndpoint, but Charles’s curiosity was piqued mainly by a man named Hugh Hefner (in his mind, the first name was pronounced “hug”); he was always wearing a bathrobe and seemed to be married to a lot of women dressed as rabbits. Charles was puzzled as to why Playboy warranted such out-of-the-way, secretive placement. The cartoons weren’t even funny. Nonetheless, Playboy exerted enough of an influence on his imagination to inform certain sections of “Flipper Boy”—although not to nearly the same extent as Life.

  Janet Leigh’s oddly contrived chapeau—its whimsy clearly intended to provoke delight—had filled Charles with a terrible trepidation for the state of her immortal soul. He interpreted the image as a grave insult; more than that, as a sin—for surely that tower of hats was meant to mimic, or perhaps even mock, the papal headdress.

  Whoever she was, Janet Leigh looked like a nice enough lady. Maybe she didn’t know she was being used as Satan’s pinup girl.

  Now, seeing the photo anew, and at a slightly narcotized remove, thanks to the wine, Charles was able to rouse himself from these morbid reminiscences just a little, enough to recognize that Janet Leigh and the eleven red fezzes resonated differently, reminding him of one of his children’s favorite stories: Caps for Sale. It must be boxed up somewhere down here as well, along with Cody’s and Emmy’s other books.

  Caps for Sale was the tale of a solitary peddler who wore his merchandise—an assortment of red, blue, gray, and black caps—balanced in a tall stack atop his head.

  Caps! he proclaimed as he wandered the empty countryside calling out to an unseen clientele. Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!

  Hours passed. The peddler found no takers for his wares and, growing weary, decided to lie down under a large tree and have a nap. When he awoke, he discovered that his caps had been filched by a band of mischievous monkeys who taunted him from the lofty sanctuary of the tallest branches.

  You monkeys, you! the peddler cried. Give me back my caps!

  And they did, eventually, once he learned how to trick them.

  Cody loved that story. Charles used to read it to him over and over in a variety of ham-handed accents—Russian, German, Scots, Yiddish—and it always made him laugh.

  Charles reached for the wine, but the Tears of Christ were all gone. Just as well.

  Deciding to take a cue from the country peddler, he lay down on the floor and closed his eyes. The crawlspace was very quiet.

  Caps for sale! an old voice echoed from a great distance.

  It was Charles’s voice, he realized, the voice of himself as a young father, lulling himself to sleep as if he were his own child.

  Fifty cents a cap …

  Enigmatology

  The facility known as Madonna’s Home is located in North Seattle and situated on a deep, narrow lot. There are many places like it, with more and more of them springing up every day, for the need is great. Some of these facilities have large, noticeable signage that clearly identifies their function; this one does not. Most first-time visitors get lost on the way; even people who have visited on numerous occasions find it difficult to locate.

  Its overall appearance is indeterminate. It seems somehow adrift, transient. Whereas navigating to most destinations is a mindless process (one need only announce SCHOOL or HOME or DRY CLEANER’S or GROCERY STORE to the brain, and the autopilot function is engaged), getting to Madonna’s Home requires a sustained exertion of consciousness and will. It is never quite where one remembers.

  Consisting of two colorless, architecturally bland structures—one street-side, shadowed by an aged Douglas fir and a weeping birch, the other shoved to the back of the lot at a distance of about a hundred feet—the site offers few overt clues as to its purpose.

  In the middle of the grassy expanse separating the buildings is a courtyard with a concrete patio. Rain mixed with city grime pools in the recesses of plastic chairs and umbrella-topped tables; wooden picnic tables are covered with amorphous patches of bilious-green moss.

  There is no apparent interest in projecting what real estate agents refer to as street appeal. The prospect of hospitality within is called into doubt by two kinds of fences: protecting the front of the property is a battalion of black, wrought-iron bars with spiked finials; on the other three sides, wide cedar planks form a ten-foot-tall privacy screen.

  Globular silver doorknobs extrude from the front gate entrance at a peculiar height, and a complicated system of chains, steel rings, lockboxes, keypads, and bolts gives rise to several questions, all worrisome:

  Is this place a frequent target of thieves? The urban compound of a religious cult? The domicile of a conspiracy theorist?

  Abutting single-family residences (small, mostly shabby-looking prefabricated post–WWII houses) on the north and commercially zoned apartment complexes and businesses on the south, Madonna’s Home perfectly exemplifies the ideal marriage of form and function: a temporary, aggressively secured storage facility for people who are neither here nor there.

  Only when standing on the sidewalk outside the iron fence is one able to read a small metal placard affixed to the gate: CAUTION! VISITORS PLEASE TAKE NOTE: THIS IS A RESIDENCE FOR PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA AND THEREFORE THE GATE MUST BE LOCKED AT ALL TIMES.

  Inside the facility is ample evidence of elder-proofing (the bookend to childproofing), various kinds of safeguards with specific names that are relatively new arrivals in the lexicon of dementia care: kill switches on the stoves to prevent residents from starting fires; traveler’s locks on windows, doors, cabinets, and closets, intended to keep patients from venturing into unsafe areas like stairwells or simply to direct them to where they are expected to go. Outlets are fitted with tamper-resistant electrical receptacles. Walls are decorated with faux windows, posters that simulate real views into worlds to which residents no longer have access.

  Nonetheless, there remain doors that cannot be secured, forms of travel that cannot be restricted, conduits that are yet unhindered. There is still some recourse for these souls, trapped as they are in what Shakespeare called “second childishness and mere oblivion.”

  For within the mind, of course, travelers are free—movement continues, unencumbered; views remain panoramic; all destinations are possible. We can tell ourselves whatever stories we choose.

  In the back seat of a van that has just pulled up to the curb is one such teller of tales, Sister Giorgia Maria Fiducia D’Amati. The van driver and the front-seat passenger, unaccustomed to city driving and befuddled by the absence of signage, consult a Seattle street map to make sure that this is indeed where their appointment is to take place.

  Which story will Giorgia tell today? Will it be a variation on one of the old ones? “A Love Like Salt”? “The Sunflower Bride”? “Life Among the Changelings”? Or will it be—at long last!—a new story, one of reunion, with her family, her students, her son?

  She does not yet know. She can only wait in silence and stillness until the details become clearer and the characters begin to appear.

  •♦•

  Gaaaaah, Cody says to whatever might be listening, his voice little more than a whisper. Gaaaaaah …

  On the other side of his eyelids, light.

  On the other side of his closed bedroom door, sounds:

  The soft, measured shufflings of slippered not-Cody feet; the muffled suction-y sound of the refrigerator door as it opens and then the pillowy thump when it shuts; quiet low-pitched not-Cody voices; the first gurglings of the machine that makes the hot black drink, the thick rich smell getting stronger until the machine sputters to a stop.

  There are things that happen here the same way every day, so he knows—

  Soon, someone will come.

  He stays very still, like a small creature in the underbrush: a rabbit.

  But not Foolish Rabbit, the one in Animal Tales from Around the World, Foolish Rabbit who cries out Eagle! Eagle! I am so afraid of you! Do not eat me! so loudly that he gives his hiding place away and Eagle comes at once and eats him.

  No;
Cody is Wise Rabbit, who stays still and silent and hides until it is safe to come out, and who never gets eaten.

  He squints his eyelids apart, slowly, as if they are unoiled doors that might squeak if opened too abruptly or carelessly.

  Likewise, he has a trick of keeping his eyes unfocused at first, so that everything is indistinct, shapeless, colors without definition.

  He needs to make sure that everything is as it should be, that his room is exactly the way it was before he went to sleep. He looks around and sees:

  First, the blurred colors of his bedspread—blue, yellow, brown, red, white.

  Next, on the table by his bed—the hazy shape of his cowboy lamp, still turned on; his picture book, closed.

  Then, curtains—blue.

  Finally, walls—mostly white, but with a fuzzy patch of color across from him, and now he slowly brings his vision into focus to look at the picture of wild ponies. The ponies are purple. Behind them are orange and gold and lavender mountains and a sky full of stars and a big round moon like the o in his name.

  No people. Just ponies.

  Like the real ponies he visits some days.

  Is today one of those days?

  There are footsteps approaching his door. Not the footsteps of his mother (who is often the first person to say Good morning, Cody) or his father (who is never the first person to say Good morning, Cody); they are the footsteps of one of the others.

  Cody closes his eyes again, tight, as he hears his door being opened.

  Good morning, Cody!

  He knows this voice, this person: Esther.

  No playing possum now, mister. I know you’re awake in there!

  Once again, he opens his eyes the tiniest bit, ever so slowly allowing the outside world in, the not-Cody world.

  His door is wide open. Esther stands there, a dark shape against the brightness of the big room beyond.

  Well, hello there, big brown eyes. How we doin’ so far?

  Her shape changes as she turns and tapes a sheet of paper to his door—

  Oh boy, a new day, a new chance for Cody to earn lots of stickers …