Sign Languages Read online

  She shook her head, but her eye didn’t leave his face.

  “What is it?”

  “I think something really bad is going to happen to us.”

  Henry didn’t move. He knew exactly what he should do and say but he didn’t move or speak. Then he knelt, his hands on her hands. “What do you think it is? Is it about the trip? Or later… in Texas? Is it my job? Or Mommie or David? What is it, Maggie?” He clenched her hands and shook them. He thought maybe she knew because she was a child. He had never been superstitious before but now he was filled with it. He squeezed her hands harder and they stared at one another.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “It’s just this feeling I’ve had. Something terrible is going to happen to all of us.”

  She began to cry and pulled out of his weakened grasp. “I want my mother!” she shouted and flung herself to the other side of the bed.

  Henry went to the bathroom and wet a hand towel. He wiped his face, but the cold water was lukewarm. He looked at himself without turning on the mirror light. He had never felt more exhausted.

  He calmed Maggie by wiping her face and neck and chest. The crying and hours of travel caused her to drop off to sleep once he held her in his lap, his aching back against the flimsy headboard.

  It was after one in the morning when he switched off the light and lay in his own bed. But he slept erratically. Though he turned the thermostat up, the fan continued to blow frigid air. Frequently he got up and made sure Maggie was covered.

  Minutes before the six o’clock wake-up call, he sat up in bed. In the dream just now he had felt his large hands on the child’s. But somehow that wasn’t what he’d pictured. Or this part had come earlier. He had been coming up some stairs and, as he stepped onto the landing, he saw an old woman on a wooden bench waiting outside a frosted glass door. She was dressed in dark colors, long out of fashion, a flat hat on her head, her face turned away from him. Her bluish hair spilled from around her hat; she tapped anxiously on the back of the bench.

  He was sure it was Maggie, and he knew, if it were true, he had been dead for a very long time. That if he were remembered at all it was there somewhere behind her graceful finger’s rhythmic tapping.

  Maggie sang under her breath as she took a bath and then dressed and carefully folded her clothes back into her suitcase. Henry raked his stuff into his overnight bag and left her in order to pay the bill. Outside, the sun lay like a huge deformed yolk on the tree line across the interstate. The humidity was almost unbearable; his earlier shower seemed useless.

  By seven they had repacked the pickup and Henry had inspected the wilting plants. He checked the oil and dripped some from the dipstick onto his fresh khakis. “Dammit to hell.”

  “Shame on you, naughty boy.” Maggie spoke to him for the first time since waking, but he didn’t look over the motor at her. She turned away and sat in the opened door and began singing to Mr. Pete, the ragged, lanky monkey that had once been David’s.

  Chuck’s Best Steak House was busy, filled with city employees and state road crews jostling one another, smoking early cigarettes that choked Henry as they sat.

  “Wow! Look at that buffet.” Maggie turned on her knees in the booth and waved her hands.

  Henry reached out and took her left arm and pulled her across the table, almost tipping the glasses of ice water. “What’s this?” The tan back of her arm was mottled; the bruise almost encircled her wrist, more vivid on the pale underside. Look what I’ve done, he thought. Look at this. Immediately he lightened his grip, his hand barely touching her forearm.

  “Oh, I fell off Brother’s bicycle. Remember? It was the last day of school, I think.” She shrugged and smiled at him. “Let’s eat.”

  “But not so much. Not like yesterday, okay?”

  Maggie turned and sat down hard on the vinyl. “It was fun.”

  Henry opened his menu. The photographs were too bright and sharp. Brilliant yellow eggs. Crimson rashers of bacon. “I think that’s what made you unhappy last night… all that food… candy, hamburgers, chips, Cokes… your mother wouldn’t like it.” He closed the menu. “We’ll have some cereal, okay?”

  Maggie rubbed her arm. “Food didn’t cause it. It wasn’t my stomach.”

  “Listen, nothing’s going to happen to us. It was all that food and riding in the pickup all day and the heat.” He reached for her hands, but they darted under the table.

  He took up his iced water. The outside of it was slippery from condensation. “You don’t know what it is, now do you?” He bent his head and looked into her dark blue eyes that held his own. “No, of course you don’t. Because it was just the travel and the upcoming move.” Henry nodded. “Nothing’ll happen. I’m your daddy and I solemnly declare that.” He heard his own voice and he lowered it, made it gruff like a cartoon character, a cartoon bear, and her eyes shifted to his lips and then she laughed and squirmed in her seat.

  They ordered and ate their cereal and halved a sausage patty. He drank the rest of her milk and wiped his mouth.

  “I’m sorry…” Henry said as he dipped the edge of his napkin in the cold water and removed flecks of cereal from her chin. “I’m sorry about last night.” But Maggie was twisting with energy and fussing with the monkey. “Let’s get going, Mr. Pete. Grandmommie is waiting with open arms. She’s got a candle burning in the window, Mr. Pete.”

  They settled themselves in the pickup. Henry drove over the overpass and turned onto the access ramp. He tried keeping his thoughts on the traffic as he accelerated to seventy. The sun was behind them, and he hoped they’d reach Dallas before it arched overhead and turned the road to pewter and addled his brain. Right now he pictured his father in a meticulous dress uniform, as lanky as Mr. Pete. He would have some trouble coming down the front steps, but he had once walked at Stilwell’s side right out of Burma.

  EMOLLIENTS

  Her chapped hands, dipped in the lavatory, turned the water pink. “Jesus,” she said, and held them there as she looked at herself in the unlighted mirror. Pushing her nose close to the cool glass, she turned her head. Where has the wind harmed me? she asked, and looked at lips, temples, cheeks. I am beautiful, she said with her eyes at their reflection.

  And she is telling the truth.

  But just in case, she applied a half-dozen oils and lotions. The consistency of Todd’s semen, she thought. Warming it on her fingertips, she glistened eyelids and chin. She perused her olive face. I’m half Indian, she told them all at work and before in college and on down to when she had found out. On your mother’s side, her mother had said. Because her father was pale, always twenty-eight, and in uniform in the photograph on the chest of drawers in the pink light of her girl’s room. And now here, on the other side of this very wall.

  She saw, as she rubbed her warming dark skin, the pores healthy and small-grained like the finest paper at work where she was immensely popular. The men took her to lunch, the women did too, or she treated them. There were no hard feelings; they were all the same age. Everyone in the office was. And so were the clients she opened up houses for or office fronts in strip malls.

  She closed her brown eyes but remembered them and saw herself seeing Todd’s body on her sheets, his smooth penis encircled by a pink ribbon she’d tied there. Happy Birthday to us all, they’d said earlier at the party. We’re all twenty-six. Marvin Waters was thirty-three and owns us all, they’d laughed. Old Marvin, the old sport. Himself thin and muscular—that exciting combination. And opening her eyes, going to lie down for a moment, her face covered with herbs in some fantastic decoction of mint and chervil and gelatin from sheep’s feet and glacier water, she saw Marvin’s penis too. Thicker like the pony’s she’d once seen. That before nine and therefore with her handsome but pale father before he failed to float to safety in Laos.

  There was Madelaine Woo at the office. Such power in the moon face. Like some brown full platter. All cheeks and such hair. Brilliant and coarse as the pony’s.

  She left t
he mirror and now she lay still in her warming bedroom. It is almost dark, she said to herself, and looked outside at the sugar-fine snow on branches.

  She would not read anything on her bedside table; she didn’t turn to the magazines or poems from newspapers her mother clipped and mailed. They were alike, so why think about her now? There’s her picture, too, beyond my bare but hosed feet. Nice toes, he’d said. On a bus trip once, his fingers beginning there. You two are like twins, people said. And they were. Olive. Browns in eyes and hair. Once they’d changed roles at home for a whole weekend. Like that movie Freaky Friday, except there were no misadventures. She liked that word from one of her magazines. For her there never were. She knew she was only a bit too tall at five eleven. And a half, okay? A half. Not at all fat. Not thin, though. Not the anorexia of those hideous models.

  We are just right, aren’t we, she told the photographs as she flexed her toes.

  And she turned on the bed when Ms. Bojangles leapt to the window ledge, meowed through the double glass. “Not now,” she said. I’m going to rest. And yet once turned on her side away from the darkening day, she smiled. Comfortable in her clothes, the skin perfect now from mare’s butter and summer savory. Smiled because we’re alike, Ms. Bojangles and me here in my warming room. Not curious, that’s all silliness. But active, energetic. But now after work, she decided not to drive this Friday night to exercise, and not to feed the cat now or herself, though on the edge of sleep that flowed like an exotic liquor Todd offered or like semen or some full-page ad all colors and promise, she remembered her duties and answered them like she always had—who had taught her that?—with miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. Then, his house is in the village though.

  Now there was a knock far away and she turned on her back and tried to listen for her own snore. That’s what he’d joked. Like a bunkhouse. And she’d remembered movies. Old and distasteful men. Her grandparents dead long ago in a car wreck. She’d never seen them in photographs; oh, perhaps. But they were in their twenties and wearing fantastic clothes.

  At the side door she said “Yes?” to the head made level with her waist by the three cement steps down to the carport. She pulled the thick robe around her, felt the chill on her ankles and up her calves.

  “Hello, Nancy. Sorry…,” he said, and as he turned his face up into the light weakened by the filter of the screen door, she saw it was his unfamiliar face. The skin rough, raw on his left cheek, the one now turned north. The dark spots heightened by the cold. They looked at his hand on the doorknob. His other one at his collar, closing the material over white hairs like the snow-dusted grass near his feet. A large crumpled shopping bag sat on the bottom step.

  “Sorry to bother you. I’ve left something in the shed. It’s okay, I have a key.” He dug in his pocket and lifted it. Shook it as if they were both deaf. Or children. Though she, nodding, saw he wasn’t. Go away, she thought. And nodded vigorously, the updraft all over her now and robbing her of a lot of work on knees and buttocks.

  Someday she would buy her own house, she thinks, and closes him out. I am a realtor after all. They turn back-to-back and she won’t bother to watch him walk down the hill to the shed. Because she doesn’t now consider him at all. Mr. Warrant. Her landlord; this house’s owner. And later, eating something ultralight and microwaved though she always agrees, one, she doesn’t have to watch her weight and, two, they really don’t do food justice, she despises him and this rented house. Todd says live in the country. There he has a house and two ferocious fighting cocks. Why not uptown? Madelaine Woo asks. Forget a car and parking hassles. But this was truly one of the best deals in the city. And though it was a small house, the location wasn’t so bad. She had moved here four years ago from college and only occasionally considered moving.

  Later, the TV off, all the house gone from toasty to chilly, the red eye of the electric blanket reflected off mother’s faces, father’s face, everyone at the office in exotic costumes as bears and pigs all in great fun. The day someone said you can get your pussy tightened on group insurance and they’d laughed though she’d wondered if it were all a joke. She awoke and considered Mr. Warrant. And got up and out of bed and walked past the snoring Ms. Bojangles.

  Wrapped in bathrobe and leg warmers and mittens, she hurried across the frozen yard and fumbled the shed door unlocked. She had never been curious. In school she was polite and attentive and knew, though such things weren’t important really, she only loved activities that brought her to the attention of people—a few, a hundred at pep rallies. I was always beautiful, she knew, taking the flashlight from her robe pocket. And that was only eight years ago, less than eight really. Her fuller hips and breasts filled the robe now as she didn’t wonder, wasn’t curious about her curiosity about Mr. Warrant. Though there in bed in the chill far warmer than this dark shed, she remembered that he hadn’t lived here in years and years. Before she had rented there had been the Squires, then someone else. He’d told her once—and now she surprised herself by recalling it—how he only had this and one other rental house. What had he done for a living? she thought, hurrying the beam over her scant holdings—yard tools she had bought once and now let the black boy use in the spring and summer. But what would he have left and now needed? She stepped gingerly over rakes and cakes of mud, the smell all frigid oil and metal. Old, she thought, disgusted with greasy red shop towels and the yellowed refuse of newspapers someone had used for moving plates and vases. Maybe me, she thought. On a shelf at the back, the wind on her face through a knothole worrying her—she felt it on her drying lips; she envisioned spreading cracks, the deep furrows at too early an age—there was a box opened and empty. The gray duct tape having taken off layers of cardboard with it.

  In the bathroom later, she looked at her face and decided on an emollient. And in bed she was as sure as she could be, having paid little attention to all that “out there,” as she referred to it when the cute little black boy showed up biweekly, the box was his and had once been sealed tightly. She felt very tired. I’ve taxed my brain tonight, she said. She wished for someone. She moved in bed feeling, seeing, their two bodies all muscle and motion. His tanned skin on hers. The long shiny tube slowly inside. All oil and cream, sex the smell of spermicide, redolent of hospital corridors.

  A week later there had been more snow and it had fallen wet and thick. Then there was a northern blast. From the top of the world, they’d said on TV. She liked that phrase. And there was a new man at the office. He was young and lonely. His hair lay on his neck in gorgeous tight curls. She talked to him and so did the others. Madelaine Woo almost swallowed him whole once at lunch.

  But now with the thought of him, his body all beribboned in her mind, she took the River Road ramp and the Mill City Road instead of going her usual way from near the stadium to the office. “Nancy…?” she said out loud and turned off the Cocteau Twins, the sound of it tiresome to her for the first time. She’d have to move on to another group.

  Surely he’s home, she said as she used her knowledge of the city, though there were never houses they handled over here past the cement plants. And, of course, heavy industries weren’t their concern at all. As she glided past chained gates, she wondered how one sold those monsters. Old, blackened, rambling. No good lines, nothing clear and distinct. She imagined all the equipment inside and came away with only the vaguest outlines. Towering, greasy. She thought of the shed the other night and said the address where she mailed the rent checks. No ring to it. 718 Gilchrist Road. Mr. William Warrant. William. Bill. Billy. And she laughed and slowed to cross some train tracks.

  There was nowhere to start really. He stood at the door, she, below, on the walk. She knew what he saw, his eyes all over her, his voice worried, disturbed. “Is there anything wrong at the house?” he asked. “No, nothing.” And may I come in and yes, of course.

  She had little time to focus; they walked through darkened rooms: furniture heavy, covered with chenille bedspreads, their tiny tas
sels and balls touching a monochrome, thick shag. Oh Jesus, she considered trying to sell all this. Saw it as a buyer she had ushered inside would, though in that case, she would have known everything already. She always did her homework, that’s what they all said.

  His eyes were a milky blue. From disease? she wondered, pausing before putting the cup of strong coffee to her lips. This afternoon the liver spots against the pale skin like ink on parchment.

  “What was in the box?” she asked. You are so honestly straightforward, they’d always said. Yes, that’s me, she answered. She saw herself, felt her neck arch. Looked down her nose so theatrically, they laughed.

  He poured more coffee. From somewhere in cabinets he handed down a package of cake donuts all powdery like cocaine. That she avoided. And now these offerings all dry and, she knew, long past the freshness date she attempted to locate.

  “Why?” he asked. She shrugged. And he took it up all naturally. There were no looks, tones in his voice. No reluctance. No fear of the unknown. These she had painstakingly learned to recognize in buyers. Clients. People she served. My, you are good at this, the middle-aged men would say. And she knew that without these wives they would have said so young and attractive.

  But not this old. Face sunk. Hands rough. He had been a foreman in one of those mills, she remembered, proud of her memory.

  He told her about his wife. And how last week, “out of the blue,” he said, he’d remembered the collection of mugs. See, look, and rising slowly, he brought them down from somewhere in the vast cabinets made of pressed wood. She saw their weak magnet locks. They clicked shut, the sound of Ms. Bojangles’s claws on linoleum. And before her he spread out an array of heavy graceless mugs from all fifty states. Where we traveled together, you know. Oh, not all fifty, of course. We cheated a little. His laugh raspy and short. “I’d forgotten them, left them.” And she’d loved them, too. And Nancy turned her listening away from the tone his voice took. It was outside her recognition. She nodded; she thought of them both living in this house. But she shook it out. A person simply can’t picture most things. I’m all energy and light, she knew. No one ever said full of imagination. What good would that be? she asked herself. Know your strengths, everyone’d said.