A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  An Arab father living in low-rent housing with his wife and baby, is searched, beaten and robbed of personal treasures—photographs, a prayer rug, some jewelry—when he protests law-enforcement officers searching his bedroom for possible terrorists.

  A young black woman with a Muslim name is detained without cause at the airport in Indianapolis, denied food and drink and an opportunity to make a telephone call.

  An Israeli mother of five young children is stopped and questioned leaving a grocery store outside of Denver, Colorado, pushed into a police van and handcuffed because she meets a description of “terrorist suspect—woman, short, dark-skinned, black hair.”

  A Korean courier is arrested in a botched store-robbery attempt in which he is not involved but runs from the police. The arresting officer ignores the Miranda warnings and fails to inform the suspect of his rights.

  “He didn’t speak English, so how could I tell him his rights?” the policeman asked after the terrified courier died of an asthma attack brought on by fear.

  I tried to catch Steven’s attention, but he was focused beyond, looking out the window next to the driveway, no clue in his face to what he might be thinking.

  “Stop reading, Milo,” Faith said quietly, putting the food section of the paper on the table.

  “I want to know what happens,” Bernard said, suddenly attentive.

  “Why did you write that piece, Steven?” Faith asked, the color gone from her face. “You’ve attacked my job.”

  “It’s where you work, Aunt Faith, not what you do,” Steven said.

  “I work for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department,” she said. “It’s what I do.”

  And before anything more got said, I left the kitchen, taking my rare pallid bat in his toilet-paper bed to my room.

  2

  My bedroom was set up as a place of worship. Dried flowers and living plants and animal skeletons and perfectly intact insects were arranged on the tops of tables and bookcases and my bureau. I slipped the baby bat next to the skeleton of the spider monkey missing one back leg and lying on a pillow of Queen Anne’s lace.

  When we were small, tiny, doll-like Eva with her pale red hair had an altar to Our Mother of Somebody, maybe the Virgin—I can’t remember—but the altar was on a table in a corner of her room, with a white cloth and candles and a tiny white prayer book. The object of adoration was a small, round-faced woman with wide-set eyes, in love with Jesus, Eva had said. She was painted wood, her folded shawl bloodred, her dress sapphire blue. Beside her on the dusty shrine was a stack of dried white flowers tied with purple ribbon and a faded red plastic hibiscus. When Eva was in her bedroom, she kept the lights dim, the candles lit, incense burning—its sweet, erotic smell filling the sanctuary.

  On the floor beside the altar was a bench where she knelt to pray to Our Mother and to make her offerings, usually of money, which she’d take back when she needed it—sometimes a strand of her own hair or a single jewel she’d wrenched from a glittery, inexpensive bracelet.

  I was fascinated by the soft, holy quiet of Eva’s room, so I copied it, making a sanctuary for my dried insects and animal skeletons and bird feathers and snakeskins with a south window full of lush flora and fauna, a Garden of Eden.

  Long after Eva had given up on God, I kept my altar to the dead.

  When Lisha stormed into my bedroom in her tiny short skirt and skinny red top, I was examining the fanciful green legs of my praying mantis against the white sheets of my bed.

  “What happened after I left?” I asked.

  “Faith went to her room, and your parents argued, and Steven defended the piece, and your father said in his deepest Welsh accent, ‘Not to worry, my treasures, everything will be fine.’ ” She kicked off her shoes. “Exactly what you’d expect.”

  “Did Milo read the rest of the op-ed aloud?”

  “What he read while you were in the room was enough.” Lisha collapsed on the bed, her arms flung across her eyes. “I don’t know why Steven did that.”

  “You hadn’t read it before?”

  “He doesn’t show me anything he writes,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest, her eyes closed. “He must have known Faith would be furious. He’s not stupid.”

  “It wasn’t a personal attack on Faith,” I said, protective of Steven by instinct.

  “Don’t be naïve.” Lisha had a small, girlish voice, and when she was angry—and that year she was often angry with Steven—her voice trembled. “What Steven wrote is an attack on the Justice Department and Charles Whatever-His-Name-Is, the guy Faith works for. Face it, Claire. What he wrote was an attack.”

  “Faith and Charles Reed are friends,” I said, having no sense whatever of Faith’s relationship with Charles Reed, but a strong familial tendency to “sweep our troubles under the rug,” as my father liked to say. “Nothing’s going to happen because of an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.”

  “To Steven or to Faith?

  I didn’t reply. Perhaps I didn’t even believe my own convictions, but I knew that Lisha, a linear thinker with a suspicious nature, thought I was a foolish optimist and eventually would pay a price for it.

  “Be serious, Claire. Something will happen to Faith’s job.”

  “I think you’re wrong. Maybe you don’t realize how warm and easygoing Faith is. Everybody loves her.”

  Faith had come to Washington with Daniel Wendt, who was a sculptor. We had one of his pieces on the mantel in our living room—a slick, black abstraction that looked like a replica of the kidneys, titled Young Bird in First Flight #3.

  She was pregnant with Bernard, and Daniel Wendt was already ill when they arrived, so they married just months before he died. Afterward she went to work as an assistant to a young man clerking for a justice of the Supreme Court.

  The clerk was Charles Reed.

  I don’t know when Faith started to work in civil rights, but I do know she went to the Justice Department when I was in the sixth grade and had worked there through two administrations. When Charles Reed was appointed assistant attorney general for civil rights, he gave Faith a “plum job”—my mother’s description—with a large office and her own secretary.

  What I knew of Charles Reed came from Julia, whose judgments about people—and she always came to absolute, immutable judgments—were emotional. I had never met him. But Julia liked him because he’d had the romance to marry a concert pianist from Buenos Aires, who was killed in an automobile accident in Rock Creek Park when their only child, a son, was six. It was the kind of tragedy that won my mother’s heart.

  As far as I knew, Faith had an old-fashioned girl’s relationship with Charles Reed, loyal to her employer with no particular interest in politics. I assumed the extent of her involvement with the Justice Department was a paycheck. The subject of work never came up between us. Sex was my favorite conversation with Aunt Faith, and I think it was hers with me.

  But I could imagine that her soft presence in the cold, marble halls of the Justice Department must have been like spring. She was lovely in a warm, fleshy way, with a Latin’s capacity for intimacy, so it was no surprise to us that Charles Reed offered her a job in the administration and an office just down the hall from his own.

  Lisha crossed her legs on the bed, rubbing her eyes.

  “Steven’s in hot water, as your father would say.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The dean of the law school at GW told him to keep a low profile after some article he wrote was published in the law review, so something’s going on.”

  “He never told us that,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t tell you.” She threw up her hands. “Just in the last few months, he’s been entirely different, always distracted.”

  “He seems like Steven as usual to me.”

  “At least he still talks too much.” She took her hair out of a rubber band, combing it with her fingers. “Blah, blah, blah. So many opinions!”

  “That’s what I love a
bout him,” I said. “He’s fearless.”

  She shrugged, got up from the bed, patting my leg in a gesture maybe even of generosity.

  “Fearless is just another definition for foolish.”

  “Learn to shut up,” my mother would tell Steven. “Keep yourself a secret.”

  “You never shut up,” Steven argued.

  “At home I talk, but outside of this house I’m a closed drawer,” she replied.

  Our family drew strict boundaries around our lives. Except for the accident of fate that cost Bernard Wendt his left leg below the knee, we maintained the illusion of order, with rules of behavior, an accommodating point of view. “Live and let live,” my father would say. This was perhaps the way of a family like ours. We wanted to fit in, to seep like water into whatever group we happened to be with, defining ourselves as particular only at home.

  I could speak with any accent I heard, Spanish or French or Japanese. According to my mother, it was a matter of kindness to other people to adapt. A matter of assimilation, according to Steven.

  “I suppose you’re the one who saw the flag first this morning,” Lisha said, shaking out her ash blond hair. “Hard to miss.”

  “It was stretched across the porch when I left to pick up Julia.”

  “Well?” When Lisha was nervous, and she was often nervous, she attacked. “Didn’t you think there was something weird about the Justice Department’s flag lying on your front porch?” she snapped.

  “I thought it was probably a prank,” I said, folding my legs under me, leaning against the headboard.

  “And now what do you think, since Steven’s op-ed piece attacked the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department? And your poor aunt.”

  “But whoever put the flag on the porch last night wouldn’t have had a chance to read the op-ed piece until this morning,” I said. “People are just picking up their papers now.”

  “Whatever you think, that stupid flag was a warning,” she said.

  She raised her arms above her head, catching her reflection in the mirror.

  “But nevermind,” she said wearily. “I don’t know a thing about Steven’s private life.”

  “I thought that you were his private life?”

  A dark smile flitted across her face. “No, Claire. Steven has a real private life.”

  Steven had always had girlfriends, ever since I could remember, in seventh grade and eighth grade and ninth grade and on and on, and Lisha was like all of them, pretty, slight, fair, with a kind of weariness and patience and sorrow as if, either before Steven or as a result of knowing him, her capacity to imagine her life had collapsed. Most of the girlfriends lasted a year or so, but Lisha had been with Steven since his first year of law school, so I assumed they would inevitably marry, because that was what couples did in their twenties. Not that I didn’t like Lisha—she was “fine”—that’s what I told Bernard, who liked to hear about romance—and she wasn’t in my way with Steven.

  I leaned against a chair, my stomach sinking.

  “When you’re with someone, you know. Lately Steven’s absent even when we’re together. A lot of times, I haven’t a clue where he is, only that he’s not at home and he’s not at school.” She paced the room, her hands deep in the pockets of her short skirt. “He’s unpredictable. My father says he’s a loose canon who’s going to break my heart.”

  She picked up a tube of my lipstick from the dresser. Ruby Red and brand-new, a present from Julia, who was in the habit of supplying me with makeup, which I seldom used. “Yours?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay if I try it?”

  “You may be too blond for that color.”

  “Better on dark skin,” she agreed, checking the color in the mirror, wiping off her lips.

  I was dark, with olive skin and long hair, curly when the weather was damp, and eyes too black to see the pupils. Bone thin and very tall, with my father’s smile.

  My mother often told me I was beautiful, but I was not. My features were too irregular—a strong nose, full lips, bottom teeth a little crooked in the front. My hair would go gray before I was thirty, as my father’s had.

  Lisha stood at the door, leaning against it, her small lips drawn tight as if she’d suddenly remembered something unpleasant she had to do. “I want to ask you something.”

  In the shadows of my room, she looked exhausted, and I felt a rush of sympathy or generosity, even of affection, toward her.

  “Steven loves you. He’s told me,” I blurted, the words out of my mouth before I had a chance to retrieve them.

  “That’s not true, Claire,” Lisha said. “And it’s not the question I wanted to ask you.”

  Outside, the sky was beginning to clear, although it was still raining. Water spilled down the window in long strings, a faint rainbow visible above the trees. I sat very still on the end of my bed, weary, with a strange misgiving, watching the weather obscure the landscape beyond the glass.

  For a long time, I had lived on the surface. No intimation, no sense at all of what I could become, what life would require from a woman of my disposition when the skin was cut away. A vague anticipation was the sense I had, as if I were expecting a visitor.

  3

  When I came back into the kitchen, Steven was gone. Probably somewhere behind the hangar, fighting with Lisha.

  “Where did you hide the flag?” my mother asked, looking up from the dishes as I crossed the room.

  “I didn’t hide it,” I said.

  “Then Steven did.”

  My father was resting against the wall, reading the editorial page of the Washington Post, a habit he had, to read the paper in the kitchen but standing up, removing himself from the conversation at the breakfast table.

  “What flag?” Milo asked.

  Julia wiped her hands, wet from the dishes, on her skirt.

  “The Justice Department flag that was delivered to our front porch this morning as a gift to Steven.”

  “Could we not have this discussion now, Julia?” My father folded the newspaper and put it on the counter.

  “What discussion?” Milo asked, his long fingers fluttering in the air like birds. He had an affection for controversy, particularly familial. “And what do you mean that the Justice Department flag was delivered to our house. Who are we?”

  “Nobody, Milo,” my father said. “We are nobody.”

  “Well”—Milo raised his hand in a gesture of So?—“we must be somebody today.”

  Things happened quickly then. My father motioned to my mother, cast a look over Milo’s head and the two of them headed toward their bedroom. Faith must already have left for work, and Bernard, anxious about relationships with their inevitable possibility for conflict, picked up a blueberry muffin and limped toward the room he shared with Milo, leaving Milo and me at the kitchen table. “This family is crazy,” Milo said. “Something psychotic in the genes, not from the Welsh blood. So tell me about the flag.”

  I hoisted my book bag over my shoulder, glanced out the window that overlooks the garden and could see, even with the foggy weather, the outlines of Steven and Lisha leaning against his car. They seemed to be having an argument.

  “I don’t know about the flag,” I said.

  My parents were fighting when I knocked on their bedroom door, but Julia’s was the only voice I heard.

  When I put my ear against the door, my mother was speaking in her attenuated voice, punctuating each word to make a point.

  “The piece in this morning’s paper is going to be the end of our family as we know it.”

  My father was a genius at silence.

  “You know that, David, and I can’t for the life of me understand how you missed a flag the size of our front yard on the porch this morning.”

  She went on without a beat. “You must have been working in the hangar or been in the shower or in bed with a headache and didn’t know that Steven hid the flag and I had to find out about it from my sister.”

  She made a fun
ny bass sound in her throat. “My poor sister!”

  The door flew open just as I was about to knock again, and my mother was standing in a maroon half-slip, no bra, her wet hair in a towel, holding the oversize flag, which had been folded.

  “You knew it was in your closet and didn’t mention it to me in the car,” she said.

  “I didn’t know it was it was in my closet,” I replied.

  “Well, Faith found it in your closet when she was borrowing your gray sweater so you must have seen the flag when you left this morning to pick me up at the factory.”

  “I was the one who found it.” I sank down on the bed.

  Beyond us my father was creating a storm, gathering papers from his desk, putting them in his briefcase.

  “It’s a bad omen, that flag, announcing trouble for my son.”

  “The bad omen is the op-ed piece, Julia,” my father said. “Steven thinks it’s safe in this climate to say whatever comes across his mind, and so he does.”

  My father put on a sweater, then another, tossing the first one on the floor of his closet.

  “I suppose you’re saying I encourage him.”

  “Not necessarily you,” my father said carefully, never willing to tip the balance between them. “Both of us.”

  “So it’s my fault Steve wrote that op-ed for which my sister will never forgive me,” she said.

  “I said it’s our fault that he feels free to attack anyone he doesn’t agree with, including his aunt’s employer. Our fault, Julia. I’m not blaming you.”

  But my mother had been the one responsible.

  She and Steven used to sit at the kitchen table eating chocolate chip cookies and scones—this was years ago when he was in junior high—and I’d be at the table, too, listening and listening, a ghost of a child, never involved, never invited.