Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  5

  Liz first heard it in the middle of the night, a sound like rice pouring into a measuring cup, an infinite stream of rice pouring into an infinite cup. Hours later, it was still pouring, the first rain of the season: blurring the windows, blackening the wooden furniture on the patio.

  Grumpy because of his tennis game, Brody was hiding behind the newspaper, invisible except for his hands. There had been another bombing in Iraq, fifty-three people killed, but most of the front page was occupied by a human-interest photo of a dog leaping into the air on a beach. Liz recognized the dog as Rexy, a black Lab that had been the recipient of a canine liver-kidney transplant. He’d been in the news off and on, and now he seemed to be thriving, and the Bay Area was supposed to be cheered by this.

  Lauren sat at the table without eating. Liz had made French toast, and she watched as Lauren pushed hers around her plate, sliding it first to one side and then to the other, clearing a path in the powdered sugar. Her juice sat untouched, her sliced banana untasted. Liz was up and down, getting herself more coffee and then Joe another helping of bacon, and each time she returned to the table she checked Lauren’s plate for progress.

  “I’m not going to school today,” Lauren said.

  Brody lowered the paper and looked at Liz, and she thought: Don’t say anything. She turned to Lauren. “Are you coming down with something?”

  Lauren didn’t respond—she just stared straight ahead, into the space between Brody and Joe.

  “Do you feel OK?” Liz persisted.

  “I’m not going,” Lauren said. “I can’t.”

  Now Brody put the paper down. “What do you mean? School is required. There are truancy laws.”

  Annoyed, Liz stood and moved closer to Lauren. She held the back of her hand to Lauren’s forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

  “I can’t go,” Lauren said. Then suddenly she was on her feet, her chair toppling backward with a clatter. “OK?” she shouted. “I can’t!” She ran from the kitchen, and in a moment Liz heard her on the stairs.

  “What…” Brody began, but Liz ignored him and followed Lauren, then slowed so Lauren wouldn’t feel chased.

  Her door was ajar. She was facing away from it, sitting cross-legged on the floor at an angle that revealed the edge of her face, the thin white cord of her iPod trailing from her ear. Inside Liz, the impulse to advance fought the impulse to stay still, retreat. Let her be, give her some space. At last, she turned and headed downstairs again. In the kitchen she said to Brody, “She’s going to stay home for a while—she might go in later.”

  “Is she sick?”

  Liz looked at him. She held his gaze until she was sure he’d look away, but he didn’t. Those blue eyes watching her, so stubborn. At moments like this he reminded her of her father, how steely he could be. She remembered her father saying to John once: Don’t say you can’t. Say you don’t want to try, but never say you can’t.

  “It’s just one day,” Liz said to Brody, and he raised his eyebrows briefly but didn’t respond.

  When he and Joe were gone she climbed the stairs again. Now Lauren was on her bed, still attached to the iPod. Liz went and sat at her side. “Some days are hard,” she said, and Lauren lay still for a moment and then removed one earpiece.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Some days are hard.’”

  Lauren stared at the ceiling as if she felt nothing at all. Her face was so blank it could only mean she was exerting a great effort to make it blank. She put the earpiece back into place. She was somewhere Liz couldn’t see: she wasn’t in the music, but the music was part of how she got there.

  “I was going to go to yoga,” Liz said, “and then to say hi to Grandma and Grandpa, but I don’t have to.”

  Lauren moved the earpiece again. “What?”

  Liz repeated herself, and Lauren shrugged.

  Now Liz hesitated, unsure of her next move. Some days were hard; one of the great lessons of yoga was that awareness of yourself could be part of how you lived. Observing: the stretch in your hamstrings, the feelings of a hard day. “Sweetie,” she said. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “No,” Lauren exclaimed. Then she got up on her elbows and shouted, “Why can’t you fucking leave me alone?”

  And so Liz did: left her alone, and then left the house, dashing through the rain for her car.

  She started the engine but then stayed still, heart pounding. Why can’t you fucking leave me alone? The words pounded, too. The image of Lauren, Lauren’s voice: it all pounded.

  All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother. This had been her secret: through college, through her twenties. The secret wasn’t that she wanted kids; it was that she didn’t particularly want a career. It was the early eighties, every woman wanted a career; at least every woman who’d gone to Stanford, as she had. But not Liz. She held various jobs, but kids were going to be her career, Lauren and Joe were her career—her work, her life. Which meant she shouldn’t feel so entirely reamed now by what had just happened. She ought to be able to take this kind of stuff in stride.

  Rain poured over the car, and she backed out of the driveway and headed down the street. It was almost as dark as evening, and the cars she passed moved slowly, headlights on, wipers racing back and forth. She hit a huge puddle, and a sheet of water whooshed up behind her.

  The parking lot at Yoga Life was almost empty. Inside, the shop was quiet, its rolled mats and stretchy clothing and books on practice neatly arranged for the day. In the studio, Liz put her things in a cubby. Only eight other people, which was nice, though not so nice for Diane.

  Who was in the middle of the room, talking to someone Liz didn’t recognize. Diane’s short gray hair was newly cropped, and she wore a simple black unitard that hugged her long legs and revealed the muscles of her strong, square shoulders. She was like a goddess, Liz always thought. Or an Amazon. The names of certain yoga poses made so much sense, given Diane: warrior, hero. In her gentle way, Diane was both of these.

  Liz took a spot near the front. Until yoga, she’d thought of exercise as a way to make her body look better; now she understood about feeling better. And yet, she was very quiet about it. Diane talked sometimes about how yoga calmed the mind, and Liz thought it had calmed hers to the point where she no longer needed to say so much.

  But she was not calm today. She tried to stay with Diane, but she kept thinking about Lauren, seeing and hearing Lauren. “Your teenager will use whatever is available to upset you. She’ll use what you give her.” This was from a book called How to Be Your Teenager’s Best Friend and Other Follies of Parenting Adolescents. Liz had liked the title—she knew women who did that, tried to be one of the girls with their daughters, just another companion for shopping and gossip, and she knew it didn’t work—but the book itself was a disappointment, nothing but the usual draconian nonsense. Give orders, and expect full compliance. End of story. Chapter 2 was called “It’s All About Limits.” Which limits would the author say Liz was failing to set? You can’t talk to me that way? As far as Liz was concerned, she might as well say You can’t be unhappy.

  Lauren was unhappy.

  After yoga, Liz rolled up her mat and returned to the car. She thought of going straight home, but she’d told her parents to expect her, so she continued to Palo Alto, to the senior complex where they’d been living for the past six years. She still sometimes ached for the old house on Cowper Street, but they didn’t seem to miss it; they were too busy living their surprising new lives of foreign travel and bridge tournaments and choral singing—the kind of retirement you might read about in a brochure. Where, Liz sometimes wondered, had these gregarious people been hiding inside the reserved shapes of her reserved parents?

  The rain had slowed to a sprinkle, and when she entered the central courtyard she passed a uniformed worker sweeping puddled water toward a storm drain.

  “We finished the album,” her father announced at the front door, his reading glasses hang
ing from a cord around his neck. “It’s all ready for you to see.”

  A month earlier, he and her mother had taken a Penn alumni cruise up the Nile, but Liz had only seen a few snapshots. As she followed him in, she said a silent goodbye to the idea of a quick visit.

  “Perfect timing,” her mother said as she emerged from the tiny kitchen. “Did Dad tell you? We just finished the album.”

  They spent a few minutes talking, but it was clear to Liz that her parents needed her to look at the album now. It was happening, of course—they were becoming her children—but at times like this the transformation seemed sped up. And in fact, the first picture was one Liz had taken herself, of the two of them and their luggage standing on the curb at the airport, looking for all the world like Lauren and Joe on the first day of school, posing on the porch with their backpacks.

  She flipped through the pages. Standing in front of the Pyramids, or against the rail of the cruise ship, her parents looked older than they did in life, almost frail, but so game it was touching.

  “It’s all on the computer,” her father said. “If you want any copies, it’s a snap.”

  “Great,” Liz said.

  More photos, and she came to one of her mother fanning herself with a palm frond. Across the table, her mother leaned forward and peered at the photo, then turned to Liz’s father and said, “Remember how much water we drank that day?”

  “Listen to this, Liz,” he said. “If they served you an open bottle you had to send it back. That’s how contaminated the water was.”

  “Or how paranoid you were,” Liz joked, but neither of her parents smiled, and she felt bad.

  “Oh, honey,” her mother said. “After Mexico we just don’t take any chances.”

  Liz’s father disappeared into the kitchen, and Liz fought an impulse to look at her watch. She wondered what Lauren was doing. She’d almost snapped at Lauren, had certainly felt a kind of automatic urge to snap: to get into it with Lauren, yell, the kind of thing Lorelei had done to Sarabeth every day of her life. Often without even so small a provocation as Why can’t you fucking leave me alone? Liz remembered a day when she and Sarabeth were playing with glass animals at the top of the stairs, and Lorelei, passing them in her stocking feet, had somehow managed to step on a tiny elephant. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d shrieked at Sarabeth, as if the entire thing had happened according to Sarabeth’s design.

  Liz’s father emerged from the kitchen with a tray of drinks—a trio of tall aqua glasses accented by orange wedges.

  “Oh, good idea,” Liz’s mother said. “Wait’ll you try this, Liz, you’re going to love it.”

  Liz accepted one of the glasses. The drink was cold and dark and iceless, and it tasted like a fruit drink of some kind, but oddly strong and sour, or maybe strong and sweet-and-sour; Liz wasn’t sure. “What is it?” she said.

  “It’s a gaboo,” her parents replied in unison, and they both laughed.

  “The Russells invented it,” her mother explained. “You make tea and chill it, then you add fresh lemon juice and peach Torani and just a tiny bit of bitters and bar sugar.”

  Liz took another taste. Since when did her parents know about bar sugar? Her father was wearing an argyle vest! Yet even the aqua glasses were very contemporary, and she wondered what had happened to the tumblers they’d always had—what had happened to them.

  Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped, and through a torn place in the clouds she could see a pale, watery blue. On the other side of the sliding glass door there was a patio, but it was too small for much beyond a tiny metal table and two chairs. The big house on Cowper Street with its huge, tree-filled yard, its sunny kitchen, its rooms upon rooms—how could they not miss it? It was so much work, her mother had said blithely one day, as if the entire meaning of leaving were located in the extra time she had now. It had been a lot of work, of course, but Liz mourned it in a way that her parents seemed not to share. Perhaps it was a truth of life that the house you mourned was the one where you became yourself.

  At the end of the day, Brody stood below the baseline of a tennis court at the Peninsula Club, waiting for David Leventhal’s first serve. The courts were barely dry enough to play, but in Brody’s view barely dry enough was plenty dry enough; he didn’t let much get in the way of tennis. And yet, crouched and ready, he felt oddly delinquent, as if he were playing hooky from something. Why, when he played every Tuesday at exactly this time? Then he realized: it was the darkness. Daylight savings time had ended Sunday, and he and David were starting under lights for the first time in months.

  “Long,” he called of the first serve.

  On the opposite side of the court David grimaced and practiced his toss again: once, twice.

  The second serve was in, and Brody hit it down the line, a stretch for David’s backhand, but David was fast and he made it. No chance now, pal, Brody thought, and he charged the net and pounded the ball past David’s feet.

  “Nice,” David called.

  Brody moved to the ad court. He’d taken off his sweatshirt, but he wasn’t quite warm yet, and he danced a little from side to side.

  David slammed in a serve he couldn’t return. “Speaking of nice,” he called back.

  His shoulder hurt, but he tried to ignore it. The only thing to do was give it up for a time—give tennis up—and he wasn’t going to do that. Tennis was beautiful, it was so pure: the connection, over and over, with the ball. It was hit and hit again, your heart pumping blood—as if it were wellness itself—to the farthest reaches of your body. He had run for a while, but running was so boring. Tennis was the thing. Had been since he was thirteen. He could still remember his first few times playing, in junior high, how it just felt right, the racquet in his grip. Other guys he knew said the same of golf: the clubs just felt right. His first racquet, the sweat-curled leather wrap. Andrew Drayson, his best friend. They played and played, got better and better. In the space of three or four months they went from absolute beginners to the best in their grade, then their school. In high school they fought over and over again for the number one spot on the singles ladder. Every match was vastly different yet superbly recognizable. Every match, every set, every game.

  “Mackay,” David called after an especially long point. “My cardiologist thanks you for this.”

  “No problem,” Brody called back. “I’ll send you a bill.”

  Afterward they showered and dressed. David had a trial starting, and he’d head back to work now, drive through Taco Bell on the way. His wife liked to say that she was a double court widow. Brody and Liz had met them when both couples lived in the city. Very long ago now.

  “Kids?” David said as they packed up and left the locker room.

  “Fine,” Brody said. He thought of Lauren at the breakfast table, of Liz letting her skip school—he’d heard on the way to the club that she’d ended up staying home all day. He thought Liz could be too soft; she thought he could be too hard. But what good did it do, staying home from school? Hiding from your problems.

  “Yours?” he asked David.

  “Everyone’s doing great. I still can’t believe this is Caitlin’s last year home.”

  They’d reached the clubhouse door, and Brody held it for David and then followed after him. The night was black, enveloping. Through a stand of trees he could see, far below, part of a runway at SFO, marked by lights. He thought of misty nights in the city twenty years ago, the sound of a foghorn as he headed home from work. Liz waiting for him in the small apartment they shared.

  He waved to David and headed for his car. Stowing his bag in the trunk, he thought again of Lauren at breakfast: hair hanging by her face, shoulders rounded. And the sound of her chair falling backward, wood banging against wood. It almost scared him, how much he wanted her to snap out of it—whatever “it” was. This moodiness that took over.

  Through dinner he kept an eye on her. She was placid, and Liz had whispered, before the kids came into the kitchen, that she’d clea
ned out her closet during the afternoon, filling three garbage bags before she was finished—a good sign, Brody thought.

  After dinner the kids went upstairs to do homework, and he and Liz sat in front of the TV. There was a news report on, and they stared silently at the footage from Iraq: charred vehicles, cloth-draped bodies, bloody children.

  “Turn it off,” Liz said, and he pointed the remote at the screen and killed the picture.

  “I’m weak,” she said.

  “It’s upsetting.”

  “I feel like I should be able to watch.”

  “Honey.” He moved closer and put his arm around her, and after a moment she leaned into him. She smelled a little of shampoo, a little of the lasagne she’d served for dinner.

  She said, “I got started on the bench this afternoon.”

  He pulled away to look at her. “Yeah? How’s it going?”

  “It doesn’t really look like anything yet. I was priming it, and Lauren came in and said, ‘How sweet. You can put it outside at Christmastime and pretend it got snowed on.’”

  “She did?”

  “She was just kidding.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It was fine,” she said, patting his leg. “It was nothing.”

  He sat still for a moment, thinking there was more to say but also that he didn’t want to argue. He didn’t even know what the argument was. He reached for the remote and turned the TV on again. He surfed until he found Law and Order, or maybe one of its clones. He remembered David Leventhal once saying that the ABA was going to have to sue NBC for libel; litigation wasn’t nearly as interesting as the show made it out to be, but applications were up at law schools all over the country, and as a result the economics of the entire enterprise had been placed in peril.

  He lowered the volume and turned to Liz again. “Do anything else?”

  “Visited my parents. They can’t wait to show you their Egypt pictures.”