Hieroglyphics Read online

  November 5, 1985

  A day as dark and dreary as I feel. A day where the bed beckons me to crawl back in and disappear, but I know that is the wrong answer. If the kids were coming home from high school, there would be no chance of that, but they are off in their own lives, so I have given in, sinking and sinking.

  I ask Frank how he can do what he is doing to me, and he responds with what I have done to him, as if the two are equal, as if one didn’t come before the other. And, yes, I may have had a drink or two too many at that faculty gathering. Guilty as charged. It was boring, for one thing, but more important (because I have withstood boring many times before) were those glances between them, that feeling I got that confirmed what I have been thinking for a while now. I only know that I was there in a crowded room and people seemed to ask how I was and then look over my shoulder as if searching for a better conversation. Just “How are you?” and before I could even formulate a thought, they were gone. And there I was, alone in a corner, surrounded by strangers as my husband expounded on the merits of something or other dead a million trillion years ago to eager listeners with no awareness of me. I did hear someone talking about the Ice Age or the Stone Age or some age when things were living that no longer are. “Who recalls the Sinclair dinosaur?” I called out. And that’s when I noticed that I had lost sight of Frank, and I panicked. I felt like a dinosaur myself, nearing extinction; my time was up, a newer and more interesting shape of life was already slipping into my footsteps.

  I remember crying. I remember crying and telling someone how my dad always went to Sinclair for gas and how he got out of the car and watched everything the man in his little cap did there under the hood of our old Pontiac, and I told about the night my mother died, and by then several people were listening, and they asked me to sit on the sofa and drink coffee. I remember suggesting that their department put up a sign that said dig this, and a couple of people thought that was funny, except this one man who raised his voice louder, so that everyone would listen to him explain whatever it was he was doing or had done or was going to do.

  Frank later told me that was the guest lecturer, there to talk about a recent discovery of a mammoth that had been written about in all the major papers. Apparently, I said, “That’s mammoth, all right, but can you do this?” And I proceeded to do an arabesque and a partial tour jeté, and that’s when we left.

  We left, and Frank’s young colleague was watching the whole time. I saw the glare. She looked at me with pure hatred, as if she wished me dead, and I wanted to tell her that there are worse things. There really are worse things. If I had had my wits, I might very well have said that I’d rather be dead than to be a selfish, self-centered liar. Even here, stone sober on this cold gray day, I do maintain that. And just writing it down, looking at it here in daylight, makes me feel better. I am sorry for the embarrassment I might have caused Frank. I truly am. But what is he sorry for? Didn’t we promise to be honest? Didn’t we agree about the damage that secrets can bring?

  Shelley

  Shelley has felt invisible for so much of her life, with bodies around but none capable of responding, like those dreams where no one can hear you. Hello? Anyone home? I’m bleeding. Yes, looks like I need to go the emergency room. Hello? Yoo-hoo! I just won the school spelling bee, going to the state championship. I’m falling apart here; can anyone hear me? The guidance counselor says I need to go to college. The guidance counselor says I am someone capable of success and an advanced degree.

  Brent had heard her, and he saw her, at least for a little while. He’d opened up his world and invited her in, and so what more could she do but come in and curl up near that promised fire of comfort. He even encouraged her to apply to college, but soon she recognized how foolish to really think magic could happen to someone like her. How does the fish feel when it grabs a shiny bit of lunch and finds itself hooked and dragged into a place it can’t breathe?

  Still, it was good in the beginning, and she was hopeful. She took a course at the community college and really sharpened her shorthand skills, discovering how easily it all came to her, as if this was her first language and she just never knew. But now, the tribe speaking her language, those quiet people tucked away in offices and courtrooms, are dying out, replaced by recording equipment, keyboards, and masks. Some might say it’s a dying language, but she thinks it’s an art like cursive; she and Brent often wrote things in cursive so Jason couldn’t read their love notes. Now it’s Harvey who studies the loops and swirls of things that come in the mail and asks her to read them. Harvey says her shorthand looks like a little bird got ink on its feet and did a dance.

  Shelley once met a woman whose first language was American Sign Language; the child of two deaf parents, this woman grew up watching her parents’ fingers—I love you, sweetie pie, beddy-bye time—those were the examples the woman had used, phrases that Shelley had later used with Jason and Harvey, so lovely and sweet and lyrical, that had never been called out to her.

  Sometimes Shelley traces things like I love you, sweetie pie and beddy-bye time on Harvey’s back as she waits for him to fall asleep. Sweetie pie. Sometimes in cursive and sometimes in print. So he can try and feel the letters, get the message.

  The first time Shelley ever saw Brent, he reminded her a little of Jason’s dad, though of course she never would have said that, and how strange to even figure out how to say it or why it was, one man white and one man dark, one man middle-aged and one man young. One beefy and one painfully thin. Still there was something in the eyes that pulled her in. It really came down to kindness in their eyes, at least in the beginning. No one ever wants to be compared, even though it seems people are often attracted to similarities—voices, gestures—some part responding to something, maybe something really old, the same way they say a baby hears things before it’s born.

  In childbirth class, she’d heard a woman say how beautiful it is to imagine all that the baby hears, that she had been giving her baby a steady diet of Mozart and traditional African folk music. Shelley just smiled at her and did not say what she was thinking, how she couldn’t stop thinking about all those babies who have to hear things like screams and threats and slams and shots before they ever even enter the world. She didn’t want to tell her that with Jason, she had listened to all of her old favorites like Nirvana and Mariah and Janet Jackson, even though what would have been wrong with that? The night that Harvey was conceived, Brent was playing Miles Davis. They hadn’t known each other long; they had met in a bar. “A nice bar,” she always added when Brent told that. He once said, “Who knew a one-night stand would stretch into years,” and then, when she didn’t say anything back, added that he was glad it had, shook her shoulder as if to say, A joke! That’s a joke! It took so long for him to say the second part that it didn’t feel good to hear, but by then there were good things to hear, things like Harvey in his little bouncy chair, his breath against her cheek, and the sounds of Jason’s Game Boy, something Brent took him to buy, an outing that had made her feel hopeful, even though it didn’t last.

  Still that kind of memory is such a good distraction, and these days, she is actively seeking distraction. The other day, Harvey’s camp teacher, Mr. Stone—“Call me Ned”—told her how Harvey has such a vivid imagination, and that he will do his best to help the little guy get through this difficult time. That’s what he said: “this difficult time.” And she said, yes, she knows that Harvey has a vivid imagination. The ghost stories, the Ninja Turtles, how the one named Michelangelo lived in his closet for years and they had to put a glass of milk in there for him every night. Oh, and that mini horse, Einstein. Harvey has built little trails and stables all over the yard for his toy horse.

  But Ned said that a lot of what Harvey was talking about was darker than that. “He’s been talking about that murder trial,” he said. “And he knows all the details. You work at the courthouse, right?”

  “Oh dear,” Shelley said. Such a stupid response, she thinks—as she conti
nues to think about it—especially since it felt like Ned was accusing her of telling Harvey things. “He must have heard me talking to his big brother, who used to tell him lots of scary things but has stopped now; he really has. We’re working on all that now. In fact, the Ninja Turtles are really good, and I try to keep him interested in them.”

  “He knows a lot, Mrs. . . . I’m sorry, is your last name the same as Harvey’s?”

  She nodded—she likes matching Harvey—but told him, since he told her to call him Ned, that he could call her Shelley.

  Twice, the teacher has called her to talk about Harvey, and camp only started a week ago. Twice, he has told her something she didn’t know—he knows the names of a lot of serial killers, for instance—and maybe didn’t want to know. Both times he has lingered as if he had more to say.

  “What?” she asked. “What?”

  “He’s a nice kid—really he is,” he said, but then there was that pause everyone recognizes, that pause like screwing the lid tight on something about to explode.

  “Why do you indulge him with all this bedtime routine?” Brent had asked when Harvey was three. “We have to help him grow up. You won’t always be there to hold his hand.” The worried expression on Brent’s face seemed more about her than about Harvey. The underlying message was about how she had raised Jason. Jason was spoiled. Jason was a mama’s boy. Jason needed to buck up. Jason needed to keep scary stories to himself.

  “Michelangelo gets thirsty in the middle of the night,” she said, and proceeded to put the milk in the closet, her chest tight with the anxiety of doing what was so hard for her to do, which was say what she really meant. But you have to defend your children. You do. Children without a defender don’t get shit. At the time, all she wanted was that milk inside of Harvey’s closet, the door left cracked just enough that he could see it, so she could get him to fall asleep.

  And about Einstein, the world’s smallest horse, Ned said when he called. Did she know Harvey had told all the kids that he was getting a miniature horse?

  No. No, she didn’t know that.

  Did she know that he’d promised a party for everyone in the class to come over and meet the horse? That he said his dad is bringing the horse when he comes back home from his hike in Alaska. And did she know Harvey leaves messages for the ghosts out in their yard, and sometimes leaves food out there?

  No, she didn’t know that either.

  Did she know he was in her closet that last night before his dad left? That in fact, one of the Ninja Turtles—he believes the one who says “Cowabunga” all the time, Michelangelo maybe—had slept in her closet?

  No, no, she didn’t know that. But he was only four then; how could he remember?

  And she didn’t know that he had memorized a lot of really disturbing facts about murders and keeps a list to share with kids who pick on him, that he had successfully scared the hell out of several of them, that the teacher had gotten phone calls from parents.

  No, no, she didn’t know.

  “So it’s just the two of you?” he said.

  She gets asked that a lot, it seems, and it bothers her. It happened in the grocery store when a man in army fatigues, maybe from Fort Bragg, asked her, and was he trying to meet her? Did he know something about her, or did they know someone in common? But Harvey was spinning a rack, spinning a rack, spinning a rack, and it was hard not to think about spinning, about time spinning and the way Jason’s dad had done his time in the Gulf War. She learned all of that the first night she met him. That was back when war first became something to watch on television, the first reality show starring a very young Wolf Blitzer; yes, there’s the war—bombs and lights, and they say people might be dying—and now a word from our sponsors—Show ’em your Crest best—and it’s a good time to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen to get something to drink before the war comes back on. That’s what she remembers people saying: “I’m gonna watch a little of the war before I go to bed.” Why didn’t anyone see something wrong with that? She was going to ask that man what he thought about that, but when she’d looked up, he was in the checkout line talking to someone else, a woman in exercise pants, with pink hair and a tattoo that said feelin groovy.

  “He has an older brother,” she told him now.

  “Harvey also mentions the Smile Train a lot,” Ned said, his voice lowered to a kind whisper.

  “Oh.”

  “He said he’s saving money for it.” He paused. “And a couple of times, he has talked about wishing his dad would come back or that he could go see him.”

  She waited, not responding

  “Any chance of that?”

  “I bet that might happen,” she said, even though she had no idea. Brent seemed to reject Harvey at the end, and he’d almost always been cool toward Jason. Sometimes, she caught him studying Jason’s handsome profile, his complexion. “What was your husband?” he’d asked.

  “A marine.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “A man,” she’d said.

  “I’m hopeful his dad will be in touch,” she told Ned, relieved to have the conversation end.

  Shelley has always been so hopeful, which is surprising, given her life; she is so hopeful, in fact, that a lot of people might think it’s stupid. Even now, she continues to believe and hope for things and possibilities that are impossible. Her ovaries have stopped working, there isn’t even a uterus in there, and yet a part of her still feels like she ovulates, still feels a surge of desire for a baby, her breasts tightening as if to let down for nourishment. It’s the same part of her that thinks Di and Dodi will drive out of the other end of that tunnel in Paris and then probably break up and go their separate ways, but will be the better for the time they were together, and also, the Challenger will see its mission to the end. In this dimension of the world, Christa McAuliffe comes home and is celebrated in New Hampshire, and lives with her husband and children to this very day. Shelley was Harvey’s age when that happened, and she was sitting in school, watching it all on television. The same teacher who later taught her cursive gasped and made them all get up and run out on the playground. “It blew up,” kids were saying. “They’re all dead.” And she squeezed her eyes as tight as she could and imagined a parachute opening.

  Perhaps this optimism is what sees her through. Her mind in childhood was fixed on the image of the house she wished she had, small and easily scrubbed, safe and comfortable and clean, and that’s what she thinks about when afraid. She thinks about that, and she imagines Di coming home from Paris and hugging her wonderful sons before they settle in for the night, and Christa McAuliffe floating safely back to Earth, with her family there to greet her, and all the kids in her classroom have their noses pressed to the school windows on Monday morning when she returns. They wave and hold up a banner with her name written there. Welcome Home, Mrs. McAuliffe!

  Lil

  March 14, 2009

  Newton

  All these years later, in spite of the difficult times we had, I can still remember the details around meeting your dad like it was yesterday. It was 1952, and I had never been to a more lackluster party, hosted by a woman I worked with at Filene’s, whose name I can’t even recall; we really had nothing in common except that we were both about 20 and we both worked there, she in hosiery and me in cosmetics. She was nice enough, bubbly and self-centered in that way I sometimes find annoying, always checking herself in the mirror, always asking for an opinion about her hair or skirt or shoes. Still, it was somewhere to go on a night I otherwise would have been sitting at home with my father, and so I went. I probably only remember it at all because I met your father there, and whenever we had awkward moments of silence in the beginning of our relationship, we often turned the conversation back to the details of that night.

  She lived in a tiny fourth-floor walk-up on Commonwealth, once the maid’s quarters for the larger space below, where her elderly aunt and uncle lived, and there were 12 of us squeezed into an array of uncomfor
table chairs. It was uncomfortable enough, but then she had a whole list of games for us to play, things like passing a Life Saver from person to person on toothpicks we were supposed to hold between our teeth; then it was passing an orange under the chin. Obviously, the whole point of her silly games (she insisted the circle be boy, girl, boy, girl) was physical closeness. I don’t remember her name, and yet I can see the small round table in the corner of that room so clearly, where there was a cut glass punch bowl with her mix of ginger ale and pineapple juice, and little wedding cookies and a vase with a single red rose. The window shade was raised, and I could see the trees lining Commonwealth, below, my eyes fixed there as I nuzzled an orange under the chin of a cousin of hers who worked packing fish and, in fact, continued talking about fish and fishing the whole while that we were up close and personal with an orange between us.

  “He was trying to hook you,” your father said later as we walked to catch our separate trains. By then, we were laughing about the awkwardness of the night, and before we knew it, we began talking about ourselves and our families.

  What were the odds? We were walking along, probably both thinking that we might never see each other again, and then I said something—I can’t tell you what, but it led to me telling about my mother and her untimely death, and then he told about his father, and it was like we couldn’t say or hear enough. We ended up going to get a cup of coffee and sat for over an hour, heavy white mugs in our hands, and he wrote my phone number on the inside of the matchbook on the table.

  Needless to say, I didn’t know at the time that he collected them and that as a young man, your father kept a lot of important phone numbers and information inside those little matchbooks. In fact, he still has a little book from the Lorraine Hotel, where he and his grandmother stayed when he first came to North Carolina as a boy. If you ever find it there on his dresser top, you will know those old dull matches have traveled many miles with him. And speaking of old dull matches, that’s us.