How to Read an Unwritten Language (22 page)

“Too late for you,” Laurie glowered, her erotic glow now cooling to a cruel smile. “His will leaves everything to me.
You
,” she hissed to the detective, “arrest the guilty party, clear away the bodies, and leave my house.”

The stage erupted in conflicting, angry voices, and within minutes, after every remaining plot complication had been tidily disposed of, all the characters—both the survivors and the resurrected—stood at the edge of the stage and bowed again and again as they received our applause. But even from my distant seat, Laurie's smile betrayed little pleasure at the evening's success.

I made my way backstage and almost immediately saw her conferring with a stagehand—an unfriendly exchange, certainly, from the way her hand cut the air into brisk little slices. I was able to approach without Laurie noticing. Close up, she appeared even less like my sister than when I'd sat in the audience—her dark-lined eyes and heavily powdered face were a caricature designed to reach the farthest seats. And then she turned that foreign face to me.

“Michael?” She puckered her lips and whistled two long notes of surprise. Quickly recovering, she announced to the stagehand in a singsong voice, “My brother—once he was lost, but now is found.”

The man nodded, unimpressed, and Laurie waved good-bye to him. “Well, David, I release you—for the moment.”

He strode off with a shake of his head, and my sister and I attempted an awkward embrace—tentative prelude, perhaps, to confessions and apologies that might lead to reconciliation.

“Now I'm annoyed I wasn't picked tonight—my ending's the best. But tonight, apparently, I failed to connect with my audience.” Her face twisted in mock anguish. “If I'd known you were here, I would have tried to look as suspicious as possible.”

Some cast members had already disguised themselves in street clothes and were on their way out. Laurie pulled me along toward the butler—now a middle-aged man in jeans—who regarded her with barely veiled impatience as she introduced me with the mannerisms of a southern belle.

With each new introduction Laurie added or shed accents: first a naive little schoolgirl, then some hardened dame, then a shy woman who could barely manage the words of greeting. Who's next indeed. Where was Laurie in this shifting landscape? Her relish for this backstage performance clearly wasn't shared by her fellow cast members. Ignoring her patter, each one searched my face intently for something more than family resemblance: perhaps some clue to my sister's behavior?

Finally she took my arm in hers, declaring, “To the dressing room.”

“Well, everyone seems quite friendly,” I said, embarrassed that I had nothing more to offer than this dishonest chitchat.

She shook her head and confided, sotto voce, “Ah, but I've gone through them all. There's not much that interests me in this bunch any more.”

Opening the door to the now deserted dressing room, Laurie gestured to the many chairs facing a long mirror bordered with tucked-in photos, handwritten notes and review clippings. She sat down before her section of mirror—bare of any memorabilia—and said with a flourish, “Here you are, Michael: my few square inches of stardom's real estate.”

Laurie dabbed at her made-up face with a cotton ball. “So, what are you here for?” she asked, finally offering me a voice without practiced inflections.

Uncertain whether to trust this opening, I said, “Well, I was in town, so I decided to catch—”

“C'mon, Michael, I know that what I do makes your skin crawl,” she said, now imitating Mother's taxicab bravado. She dipped her fingers into a jar of facial cream, rubbed some onto her cheeks, and asked in a chipper voice, “Or have you had a change of heart?”

“Look, I enjoyed the show, Laurie.”

She had nothing to say to this. After a few moments she asked, “So, how've you been all these years?”

“Fine. Business has never been better, actually, despite a weakness in the economy …” and I continued to speak in a tone I never used with my clients, chatting up the latest policies, the different levels of deductibles. Laurie kept scrubbing away and seemed not to notice my insurance agent performance. When she was done with her face, she stood and without a word deftly slipped the straps of her teddy off her shoulders. It fell to her waist, exposing her breasts. If you're going to pretend we're not brother and sister, she seemed to say, nonchalantly tugging the sleek fabric down to her hips, then let's see how far this will go.

I turned away and listened to the rustling of her clothes. Tacked onto a bulletin board was a list of Dressing Room Do's and Don't's, beginning with “Private property is just that, even if it's not locked up.” I read them one by one until, quickly glancing over at Laurie, I saw her neatly fitted into jeans and a blouse, combing her hair.

She turned to me, all innocence. “My mind must have wandered. Were you saying something?”

“Nothing worth repeating,” I replied, and Laurie laughed with full-throated pleasure.

Still wary, I hesitated, then said, “I came here to, well, to talk. We have a lot to talk about.”

Laurie nodded, willing to accept this without a smart remark, her scrubbed face now her own. “So, let's talk. Here's something I've always wanted to tell you. Remember when we were kids and we'd draw pictures together?”

I nodded. I could see Laurie kneeling beside me, her fingers smeared with the colors of her paint kit, her eyes sometimes far away before adding another brushstroke to her tablet.

“You know how I liked drawing faces? I'll tell you why. After bedtime I'd lie awake and make up stories about the people I drew.”

“Stories? I never knew you did that.”

Laurie laughed. “Well, I never told you. I gave them their own lives and then I tried them on, pretending each character was me, just like Mom had done. Actually, I liked those stories better than anything we ever drew. But then—do you remember this?—you convinced me to try drawing other things, and I realized I could make up stories about being a flower, a train, a lion, or anything else in the world. Mom only became other people, but I could do her one better, I could become anything. That's when I first realized I wanted to act.”

My sister's revelations were laced with so many bitter ironies that at first I couldn't speak. “So,” I finally said, “I'm the one who got you started?”

The self-reproach in my voice wasn't lost on Laurie. She turned her cold gaze away from me and followed the long line of the mirror, the empty chairs of her fellow actors. “Oh, you've been my inspiration in so many ways, Michael. That night I visited you at college, remember? Why was I there, anyway? Well, for your advice, so I could do the exact opposite of whatever you said. I had that low an opinion of your track record.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What I mean is, you were such a screw-up, if you'd encouraged me to be an actress I would've stayed in school.”

“Oh, get off it. You would've become an actress no matter what I said.”

“You're right,” she said, head tilted archly, her voice brightening with the need to convince. “And you know why? Because I like doing this, it makes my life snappy, playing all these different characters. Safety in numbers, I always say. And I don't have any husband or kids to fuck up.”

“You make living alone sound so attractive.”

“Who's alone? Every cast is one big happy family.”

“Like this one? I thought you were already bored with them all.”

I'd exposed the imperfect surface of her artifice. “You think I'm not happy?” she asked, face hardened to a grimacing mask. “You think I'm not happy?”

“I don't know,” I said, my voice barely a murmur. “Are you?”

She picked up a prop from the table, an ink bottle, and pulled off its glass cap. “Of course you don't know! When have
you
ever known about
anything
, Mister
In-the-Dark
.”

I flinched, hands up to protect myself, but Laurie spun away and shook the open bottle at the mirror again and again, covering my reflection with a dark blotch.

Facing me again, she said, “Here's something else you never knew. I'm the one who broke all those things in the house. All the things Dan got blamed for.”

“What—you?”

“Me. I did it to spite Dad for ignoring us all the time, the stupid shit. But when Dan got blamed and I saw the way Dad got to him, I was too afraid to admit it was me. Now that made me angry, really angry, so I kept it up. I wanted to see how far it would go, even though I was sure that sooner or later the bastard would catch me. When you got Dan that job, you got me off the hook. But then Dad cooked your goose, didn't he?”

Laurie sobbed into her hands, her shoulders trembling as she squeezed out, “Oh god, oh god—I'm sorry, I'm, I'm sorry, Michael, I really am.”

“Laurie, please,” I began, turning her toward me.

Her face dry, her eyes carefully appraised my shock at her performance. Had her entire story been an impromptu script, a star vehicle designed to torment me? I pulled away to leave, then heard her voice, now feigning concern, ask, “By the way, how are you and Kate?”

She'd been softening me up for the kill, but it was long past the time that I'd offer this woman any more grist for her soap opera mill—instead, I'd display my own performance skills. Hadn't I practiced my own face of patience with Kate for so many months now? I turned, my eyes filled with gratitude that Laurie had finally broached a topic that brought me happiness, and I easily said the words I knew would foil her: “Kate and I are fine, really fine.”

Wandering among the trickle of browsers through a yard sale's unpromising array of cluttered card tables, I paused to watch two young girls leaping and tumbling on a mattress their father had just bought.

“C'mon, kids, stop,” he complained halfheartedly, proudly watching their manic twirls and twists in the air.

Turning from their welcome diversion for a moment, I picked up a small, battered tape recorder and noticed a cassette inside. This little surprise intrigued me, and I pressed the
Play
button. Immediately a man's voice mumbled something too low for me to make out. I turned up the volume. He spoke slowly in a strange, foreign language, his voice strained, hesitant.

A middle-aged woman, her summer shorts tight against the bulge of her hips, hurried over and fiddled with the control buttons. “My god, I didn't know
this
was in there.” She turned it off, and when she muttered, “Hoo boy, I can't believe I tried to get rid of it this way,” I knew this was something I wanted.

“Is that a language tape?”

She laughed strangely. “Oh no, far from it.”

“Can I buy it?”

She pointed at the tape recorder. “Uh, sure. Isn't there a price marked on it?”

“Yes,” I said softly, “but I'd like the cassette too.”

“You want the …” Her eyes searched my face in a way I'd long grown accustomed to these past few months: a questioning look that seemed to imagine I was an answer. “You know what's on that tape?”

“I'd like to know.”

“Suicide songs. Yeah, that's right,” she said to my startled face. “Unhappy lovers sing them before they—”

“But he's not singing.”

“He's trying not to.”

“Why?”

She glanced around at the idle bargain hunters in her backyard, then examined my face again. “I'm sorry … look, just how interested in this are you?”

“Very. Please, tell me whatever you'd like.”

She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. “Well, I'll need a beer first. It's so hot today.
Joey
,” she called out to a man standing by the garage, “could you take over the cash box?”

He nodded, and the woman stepped up the stairs to the back door and waved me along. “C'mon in. By the way, my name is Jill Harnick.”

I shook her hand. “Michael Kirbv. Pleased to meet you.”

We sat at the kitchen table. Jill took a sip from her bottle, preparing herself for whatever she had to say. Her finger scratched at the edge of the label and I avoided the impulse to make small talk.

“Well,” she finally began, “this goes back over ten years, back to when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. In the Philippines. I taught English in a small town, on one of the more remote islands. One of the teachers at the school was a Filipino man who spoke English beautifully. Agustin.”

Jill paused and set her bottle down almost absentmindedly, and I imagined she could hear his words again on that cassette. “Agustin had been born in the area but he was educated in Manila,” she continued. “Because Manila was like another world to the people in town, he was a bit of an outsider, and I suppose that's why we became friends. Sometimes after school we'd sit on my veranda and talk teaching strategy and more than once he invited me over for dinner with his family. His wife was very sweet, and a little wary of me, even though my friendship with Agustin was extremely formal, polite.

“One afternoon, when I was in the second year of my tour, he came to my veranda upset. It was later than usual—most people were at home eating dinner. He told me that a young woman, someone he barely knew, had fallen in love with him. But he was married, and in the local culture of that island, adultery is simply … well, unthinkable. So this girl was wandering the streets hopelessly at night, singing traditional songs that celebrated love. But they were actually a warm-up to suicide.”

Jill pulled back from her chair and walked to the screen window. “Joey, how are you doing with change, need any more?”

“Got more than enough,” I heard him call back, but she lingered there at the window, as if she didn't want to believe him. She returned to the table, avoiding my eyes. “I'm sorry, where was I, anyway? Yeah—when Agustin told me this, I remembered hearing a very eerie song a few nights before—a faraway voice that kept me up half the night—and I knew that was her.