How to Read an Unwritten Language Read Free Page B

noting without comment that they hadn’t saved me a single goodie. Worse, Mother hadn’t saved a thing for me either, but then she’d been Dot, hadn’t she, and I’d been merely a cautious stranger.
    By evening a soupy congestion forced me to suck in raspy breaths, and Mother wrapped me under extra blankets in bed and hovered over me with a reassuringly familar fluster. The next morning she kept me home from school, offering me hot raspberry tea laced with honey, and I luxuriated in my fever and aching limbs as I listened to Laurie and Dan being hustled off to the bus stop.
    When I woke from a sweaty nap she even served me my favorite meal—chicken broth and crackers, cheese wedges, and ginger ale—but after lunch she was almost businesslike when she held out a spoonful of thick and bitter medicine. She shook her head quizzically at whatever I said, until I realized she knew no English. I tried communicating in elaborate sign language, which delighted her, and just when I managed to wheedle out her new name, Rosario, the phone rang.
    â€œAdios,” she said with a grin and what seemed to me to be the right accent, her drawn-out o so richly foreign.
    She returned with the thermometer, speaking English and herself again, and the shocking thought occurred to me that my mother lived a secret life at home while we were away at school, improvising these characters to fit her changing moods.
    *
    As if the bare trees’ green buds sprouting into bright waving leaves were a surrounding inspiration, Mother flourished too, displaying surprise after surprise for the three of us: Marcie the policewoman, who always wore a long-sleeved blouse to hide her scar from a bullet wound; Tina, a dancer famous for her flying leaps, who huffed through stretching exercises in the afternoon, trying to coax us from the canned laughter of the reruns we watched on TV; Valerie the photographer, who specialized in groupings of potatoes, onions, single-pint milk cartons, and reconstructed egg shells that she called Family Portraits. But Mother was never Gladys, the name Father called her.
    Whenever he came home from work Mother returned to herself—our feigned innocence on that morning of the pancakes had set a pattern of secrecy—yet even though she sat on a chair at the dinner table or in front of the television, she managed to announce the reappearance of a character with the slightest change: whole histories were implied by any of a dozen slightly different nods or shrugs or shaded glances. A stifled yawn, its faint strain turning into a tiny, hard smile, and I knew Mother was now Susan, the woman who wouldn’t laugh, no matter what jokey histrionics Laurie, Dan, and I might perform; a bitter sigh and tight shake of her hair while washing the dishes and she became Melanie, the big-city reporter who’d seen it all; a single, knowing peek at the ceiling fan announced Tamara the Magnificent, a retired juggler who demonstrated her talents with invisible plates and balls, candlesticks and swords.
    Often during breakfast I watched Mother’s hands cupped against the formica surface. Her fingers curling inward suggested the imminent release of another new character, and I honed my skill at identifying her thicket of selves. In this way I grew up bilingually—learning both the sometimes exasperating rules of English grammar at school and Mother’s impersonating gestures at home. My first language helped me make my way through the world; my second language helped me see through it.
    *
    With the return of spring Father kept every inch of our lawn mowed and trimmed. The owner of a nursery and landscaping business, he made sure the tidy green world around our house was an example for the neighbors, an advertisement for any present and future customers, and it was my burden, as the oldest child, to help him. Toiling under the sun, I admired the persistence of weeds and creepers for their ability to turn up