The Lost Language of Cranes Read Free Page A

over sometimes to stand with his parents in their shell shock. His heart was elsewhere these days, across town, in love for the first time, and hardly had space left in it for grief. Still, sitting with his parents in the living room, he felt a sudden longing for his childhood, and he imagined he might say "goodnight," and turn, and discover his old room as it was, his homework laid out on the desk. Most of his life he had eaten his dinner here, done his homework, washed his hands, watched television and read his books, and gone to bed. Thinking of these things, tears came to his eyes, and he felt a gratifying lump rise in his throat.
    But what Rose and Owen felt, as they went to bed, was pain, pure and simple. It started in their stomachs, a hoarse growl, and rose to their heads and threatened to burst through their chests. There was nothing pleasurable about it. They didn't enjoy it. They wanted it gone. The selling of the apartment was the beginning of the end for them. It was the beginning of the beginning for Philip, who longed for something that would signal the irrevocable start of his adulthood. There was no part of his life he wanted to relive, and he was glad of it. He had no regrets except luxurious ones. He looked only forward, hungering for the future, while his parents, suddenly helpless in the face of change, looked back at all they had taken for granted. No matter what else might have happened, the neutral years, the years they remembered as painless, were over. At night they lay awake, far apart, each clinging to the extreme edge of the bed, and assumed the other to be sleeping. Cars passed outside, casting their shadows twelve stories high, and the shadows swept like swift birds over the carpet.
     

     
    M OST S UNDAYS Rose and Owen spent apart. It wasn't a rule, it just worked out that way. For the first year after he was back from college, there was another Sunday tradition, that Philip come over for dinner, but recently his visits had become irregular. He would call and say, "I just can't make it this week. But how about lunch, Mom?" Since they worked in the same part of town, lunch was a possibility for them.
    Rose had worked twenty years for T. S. Motherwell, a small literary publishing house. She had her cubicle neatly arranged. In the morning she would have some coffee with her friend Carole Schneebaum, then disappear behind the door to do her methodical readings. Every hour or ten pages (whichever came first) she'd get up, stretch, have some coffee. Elsewhere in the office people were panicking about poor sales and bad reviews, but none of this meant much to her. At lunch with Philip she listened to him talk about packaging and product marketing, but none of this meant much to her either. He worked for a company that churned out paperback romance novels. She wondered somewhat at his enthusiasm for the job, but Philip's life had a different scale than hers. "The computer training is invaluable," he explained. "Everything at the office is done on a computer monitor, Mom. Not a typewriter to be seen."
    Rose had a Royal which was thirty-five years old. It shouldn't have surprised her that the world had moved ahead of her, but it did. Philip lived on a dirty street in a part of town she had thought white people could not walk through. But no, he assured her, his once-devastated neighborhood was on the upswing now; it was nearly chic. The tiny apartment in which he lived was a jewel, even though it had only two rooms, and the tub was in the kitchen. One weekend when Owen was away at a conference he had invited her over for dinner, and to see the place. Rose didn't like the look of the street, the Puerto Rican teenagers with their radios slung over their shoulders, the stray kittens mewing on the sidewalk. There was graffiti on the buildings, empty rum bottles on the stoop. Inside, however, was exposed brick and mauve walls hung with framed posters. Philip had painted the outside of the tub bright