The Lake of Dead Languages (30 page)

“Yeah, but he told me not to leave this hotel without telling him where I could be reached.”

Mitchell nodded. “Why don’t you call and say you’re staying at the house.”

I thought I had misheard him in the weird acoustics of the Aquadome, but when I looked at him I thought I saw tears in his eyes. But then it might have been the way the air here stings your eyes.

“What are you saying, Mitch?”

He shrugged. “I never understood what went wrong, Janie. I never understood why you left. Was it that bad … living with me? I know I could be preoccupied.”

I looked down at Olivia paddling in the pale green water. With her purple and pink bathing suit and orange water wings she looks like one of those paper flowers they float in exotic cocktails. The truth was I didn’t understand completely why I left either.

“It wasn’t your fault, Mitch,” I said. Yes, he had been preoccupied, but hadn’t that been what I was looking for—someone who wouldn’t pay too much attention, someone who wouldn’t look at me too closely?

“Maybe it’s not too late for us.” He reached out across the space between us and laid a damp hand on my bare knee.

I felt an odd mixture of hope and nausea. I hoped that any look of queasiness was covered by the green tint that lay on everything around us, because it had occurred to me that I shouldn’t be too quick to turn down Mitch’s offer.

“I have to think it over, Mitch.”

“Of course, Janie, take all the time you need.”

T
IME IS SOMETHING
I
HAVE AN ABUNDANCE OF HERE AT THE
Aquadome, but when I try to attend to the question at hand my thoughts slither around like slippery fish in the green air. I try to go back, in my mind, to when I met Mitch and decided to marry him. I think that if I can remember loving him I can salvage some of that feeling now and it will be enough to build a new future on, the way a seed crystal teaches the other molecules to make ice. All I need is a seed, but I can’t really remember ever
deciding
anything. When I met Mitchell, a few years out of college working in the city, I was nearly drowning.

Take some time to think about what you really want to do.
That’s what Miss Buehl had told me that day at the train station. But I didn’t have to think about it. My path had already
been laid out for me the day I listened to Helen Chambers’s plan for Lucy.
I see her as a Vassar girl and then she’ll go to the city and work in some arts-related field—publishing, I think.
I had rejected, that day, Helen Chambers’s plan for me to go to the State Teacher’s College and teach Latin, and decided instead to do what she meant for Lucy.

I worked hard at Vassar and got reasonably good grades. My Latin professor urged me to apply to graduate school, but I was tired of treading the same pattern of paths that meandered around the pretty campus. Wouldn’t graduate school just be another set of paths around another campus? I felt something like Lucy’s impatience with the snowbound paths of Heart Lake and decided to do what I thought she would have done.

After graduation I moved to New York City and got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I shared an apartment with two other girls—both from good colleges—who worked at the same company. I wore the same kind of clothes as they did: short black skirts and silk blouses, a simple strand of graduated pearls. So what if my blouses were polyester instead of silk, my pearls paste instead of real? I stayed up late reading the manuscripts the company asked us to read on our own time. I packed my own lunch and walked to work because it was hard to make my share of the rent on the little money I made.

I turned down invitations to drinks and dinners after work because I couldn’t pay my way. Besides, I told myself, it was better to spend the evenings reading manuscripts while my roommates went out. Sometimes one of the boys—they still seemed like boys to me, in their sloppily ironed Oxford shirts and slim khaki pants—would ask me out, but I always declined. I told myself it was better not to get involved with anyone just yet. But really, it was the way they all reminded me of Matt, of what Matt might have become. I’d look at one of these nice, clean-cut boys in his prep-school tie and button-down shirt and think: Matt would be his age now, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

One day, when I was twenty-five, I was sitting in an editorial board meeting looking at a young man who worked in copy editing and always passed my desk on his way to the Xerox machine even though it wasn’t really on his way. As I looked at him a shaft of weak sunlight came in through the dirty, sixteenth-floor windows and touched his mousy brown hair, turning it a bright and shining red. I felt a chill move through me as if I had just swum through a cold current and the air around me seemed to shimmer. I was seized with an unreasoning panic that the next breath I took would choke me. I left the meeting and told my boss that I’d suddenly felt ill.

“A late night?” she asked, nodding with complicity. She, I knew, stayed out to all hours in the clubs and spent the morning hours nursing hangovers with V-8 juice and Tylenol. I hated to think she attributed my illness to the same cause, but it was easier to nod and agree to her sympathetic smile.

When it happened again, that same rush of cold followed by a fear that I couldn’t breathe—this time in a conference with an author and his agent, she was less sympathetic. When I emerged from the ladies’ room, still trembling and sweating, she asked if there was anything I wanted to tell her. What could I tell her? That I had begun to be afraid of drowning on dry land? That I could no longer go to movie theaters, supermarkets, subway stations, or any other place where I had once had that sensation of drowning for fear of it happening there again?

I quit the job. I took another job as a secretary at a temp agency. That way, I reasoned, if I had an attack in a particular setting I wouldn’t have to go back. My roommates had decided to move to a bigger apartment in Brooklyn. Since the subway was on my list of places I couldn’t go anymore, I moved into a women’s hotel near Gramercy Park. I could walk to most of the places the temp agency sent me. It was on one of those jobs, filling in for the receptionist at a building contractor’s office, that I met Mitchell. He was older than
I, his hair already thinning, his build a little thicker than a boy’s. When he asked me to lunch, I accepted. When I told him I liked to take the stairs instead of the elevator for the exercise he not only believed me, but he approved. He told me he admired what good shape I was in. It was true that I had gotten very thin, mostly because I had so little money to spend on food and I walked everywhere.

He was impressed that I had gone to a private girls’ school and Vassar, but he didn’t ask me many questions about either place. We mostly talked, on our dates, about his job and his plans for the future. He wanted to go out on his own—build houses in the suburbs. He said the city wasn’t a good place to raise children. He seemed to me, above all else, cautious and polite. When he asked me to marry him I didn’t ask myself if I loved him. I had assumed that my chances of loving anyone had vanished into the black water of Heart Lake the night Matt and Lucy drowned below the ice.

Those first years of my marriage to Mitchell were peaceful. He built us a house north of the city and I helped out in the office. Mitch did seem disappointed that I didn’t get pregnant right away, but when I did conceive I thought everything would be all right.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much I would love Olivia. When I first saw her, her body glistening with blood, I was overcome by violent shivering. The labor nurse explained that the convulsions were caused by my body’s inability to adjust to the change in mass. But to me it felt like something was breaking up inside of me, setting something free that had been frozen all these years. I wanted to hold her, but Mitch said I was shaking too hard to be trusted with her.

In an unguarded moment I had told Mitchell about my panic attacks. He had seemed, at first, unconcerned, but after Olivia was born he wanted me to see a psychiatrist to make sure I wouldn’t have an attack while I was watching Olivia. “You might drop her,” he said, “or hurt her during an episode.” He spoke as if I had epilepsy. The psychiatrist prescribed
an antianxiety drug that made my mouth dry and prevented me from breast-feeding Olivia. Still, Mitchell worried. He made me promise not to drive with Olivia. Our new house was in a housing development far from anything. I spent my days wheeling Olivia in her carriage around the winding streets that always seemed to dead-end in a cul-desac.

I thought, because he was so worried about me watching Olivia, he would come home right after work, but instead he stayed at the office later and later. After I got Olivia fed and bathed and put to bed I would go through my old books, which were stored in boxes in the basement. One night I took out my Wheelock’s Latin grammar and started at the beginning, memorizing the declensions and conjugations all over again. I was reciting the third declension to Olivia in her high chair one night when Mitchell came home unexpectedly early.

“What the hell are you teaching her, Jane, that mumbo-jumbo witchcraft you practiced in high school?”

I stared at him, pureed yellow squash dripping from the spoon I held out to Olivia. My journals, all of them except the fourth one which had disappeared, were in the same box in which I had found my Wheelock. I’d left the box, opened, in the basement.

Olivia, impatient for the proffered spoon, slammed her small fist on the high-chair tray. Startled, I dropped the spoon and Olivia began to cry.

Mitchell pulled her out of the high chair. “That’s OK, Livvie, Daddy’ll take care of you.”

I knew that in five minutes Mitchell would give her back to me to do the bath and bedtime, but in that instant I felt, as he intended, his power to take her from me. There were things in those journals that made me sound like an unfit mother. There were things in the psychiatrist’s files that made me sound insane. I didn’t know when Mitchell had started to hate me, but I suspected it was when he discovered I had
never loved him. And in a way, I couldn’t blame him. I had thought it was all right to marry someone I didn’t love, but what I hadn’t counted on was how it felt to share someone I loved with someone I didn’t.

And so I decided to make the first move. For the next few weeks, while I wheeled Olivia around the endless maze of suburban streets, my mind moved around in the same deadend circles, trying to find a way out. When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live? When I met you, you couldn’t even hold a secretarial job for more than a week.”

I knew he had me. If I went to work in the city I’d have to put Olivia in day care ten hours a day. A lot of Mitch’s business was off the books, which meant the child support he’d be obliged to pay me wouldn’t amount to more than a few hundred dollars a month. I had no family or friends to turn to. I read ads for jobs I could do from home, but anyone could see that I’d never make enough to support myself, let alone Olivia. I had no skills to speak of.

“For God’s sake, Jane, you majored in Latin,” Mitch was fond of saying to me. “How impractical can you get?”

One day, though, I read in the newspaper that Latin was making a comeback. I knew that Mitch would never pay for the classes I’d need to get certified to teach in the public schools, but maybe I could get a job in a private school. I’d already started relearning my Latin. Now I set myself a passage of Latin to memorize each night. I found it oddly soothing. As I picked away at case endings and declensions, alone at the kitchen table, the tangled words unraveled into flowing strands of lucid meaning.

When I had memorized most of Catullus and Ovid, I called Heart Lake and asked to whom should I write about a teaching position. The secretary told me that all hiring decisions were made by the dean, Celeste Buehl. I hung up the phone. I realized then that I had been lying to myself. I didn’t want a Latin teaching job at some private school. I wanted to
go back to Heart Lake. But how could I ask for a job from Celeste Buehl, who knew everything.

It wasn’t until Olivia was three and a half and I overheard Mitchell telling her, along with her bedtime story, that she should tell Daddy if Mommy ever acted funny, that I called Heart Lake again. I asked to speak to Dean Buehl. When the secretary asked who was calling I gave my maiden name, Jane Hudson, but I didn’t say I was an alumna.

“Jane Hudson, class of seventy-seven!” Dean Buehl sounded as if she were greeting a celebrity.

“Yes, Miss Buehl, I mean Dean Buehl, I didn’t know if you’d remember me.”

“Of course I remember you, Jane. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

When I told her that I was looking for a job teaching Latin the line went quiet and I steeled myself for the inevitable disappointment.

“You know we’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers.”

My heart sank. I hadn’t thought that by applying for the Latin position I was trying to take Helen Chambers’s place. How could I ever?

“But then,” she went on, “we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” It had taken me a moment to realize that by “old girl” she meant me. I vaguely heard her bemoaning my generation’s lack of interest in teaching. My attention came back when I heard her say that she couldn’t think of anyone better to take the place than one of Helen Chambers’s girls.

When I finally got off the phone, having arranged to come up to see the new preschool and the cottage where Olivia and I would live (“It’s the one I lived in when I taught science. It’s not much, but, as you might recall, it has a lovely view of the lake”), I felt so warm I felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. It wasn’t, I realized as that warm feeling stayed with me instead of fading over the next difficult months of arguing with Mitchell, just that I had been offered a job. It was
what Dean Buehl had called me.
One of Helen Chambers’s girls.
That was what my problem had been all these years. I had forgotten who I was. I had forgotten where I belonged.

N
OW
I
WONDER, AS
I
JOIN OLIVIA IN THE WARM GREEN
pool, how I could ever have thought that that was what I wanted.
One of Helen Chambers’s girls.
I had been lured by that old attraction, the old game that we had played—Lucy and Deirdre and me—to be like her. Look what had become of them. Deirdre and Lucy were dead. And me? I had taken Helen Chambers’s place at Heart Lake and one of my own students had died just as hers had. I have nothing to offer those girls. My place is here with Olivia. So what if I’m not in love with my husband? How many wives are?