Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

by Juliann Garey

  Tarzana, 1965. When I got to my parents’ house Pop was in front of the TV—where he’d been since my mother had died. He didn’t look up when I walked through the living room, and I didn’t say anything. Without her in it, the house itself felt like a coffin. I wanted to do what had to be done and get out. I felt what was becoming a familiar fermenting anxiety begin to roil around the worries I was normally able to handle with ease.

  I was acutely aware of the beating of my heart in my chest. I felt as if some giant hand had wrapped itself around my throat and squeezed until I was choking. Eventually I did what I’d been doing since my mother had suddenly stopped existing at the age of fifty-three, having expired in the stacks of the Tarzana Library without even making it to the hospital. I wrenched myself free, swallowed the fear, and did my best impression of an acceptable version of me.

  I found Hannah sitting in the back of my mother’s closet. The floor was littered with empty black plastic garbage bags, labels, and markers. She looked up at me with puffy, red-rimmed eyes and smiled.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Traffic.”

  Hannah looked up into the clothes hanging over her and tears began to fall. She threw her arms around my legs and buried her head in my knees.

  I stroked the back of her head. “I know. Well, I’m here now so let’s get this over with,” I said, smiling. “They’re just clothes, right?” She looked up and nodded halfheartedly. My heart was racing. I felt dizzy and nauseated. I smiled again.

  There wasn’t that much—dresses, pants, the same simple skirts and blouses my mother had worn to work year after year. It was mostly crap from Sears. The Salvation Army would get almost everything.

  I went to the shelves where Mom kept her sweaters neatly folded and began looking, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. I started tearing through them.

  “Greyson, stop it. What are you—?”

  Hannah, on her hands and knees, tried to collect the sweaters as fast as I threw them to the floor.

  “The blue one she wore on Thanksgiving … the blue cashmere sweater I—”

  “Relax.” Hannah shoved an armful of acrylic and wool at me, reached over the top of the shelves, and brought down a box.

  “She kept it hidden up there.”

  “Hidden.”

  Hannah hesitated. “Well, Pop always had kind of a thing about this—”

  “Stop. You know what, I don’t think I want to know.”

  I didn’t make much more working as a summer law clerk in San Francisco than I had working afternoons at the Chevron station when I was in high school. Ellen was basically supporting us by working as the executive secretary to the president of one of the fancy department stores in the city, and she got a thirty-percent discount, so we managed to bring my mother some little present every time we came to visit. A light-blue cashmere cardigan warranted a special trip down to L.A. Ellen said she’d never forget the look on my mother’s face when she first touched that sweater. What I remember, what will never cease to give me pleasure, is the look on my father’s face. It was a perfect mix of anger, humiliation, and the desperate attempt to hide both.

  I sat huddled in the corner and carefully lifted the lid off the box. The original tissue paper lay over the sweater. I was taking this home with me.

  Hannah laughed.

  “What?”

  “You look about as old as you were the night you hid in the closet and they couldn’t find you.”

  I was seven. They were coming home from a party. I don’t remember why but I thought it would be funny to play a trick on them and hide. I didn’t realize how scared they’d be. And when they were, I was afraid to come out. I wanted them to find me. But I was too afraid to come out myself. Afraid I would get in trouble. For hiding. I started to cry. I didn’t want to hide anymore. I was tired. And I could hear my mother crying. I think I finally made enough noise so that my father came to look in the closet. He was furious. But my mother just wanted to know why I had been hiding. I said I was afraid everyone would be mad if I came out.

  “You knew about that?” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Mom was so panicked when they couldn’t find you she practically tackled me in my sleep,” Hannah said.

  “I made her cry.” I felt a dull, empty ache.

  “Oh,” Hannah gasped, “She looked so beautiful that night.”

  Closed eyes brought shifting kaleidoscopic fragments—high heels standing in the closet doorway, full skirt silhouetted in the yellow light of their bedroom. A turned cheek, red lipstick, a smudge of black mascara.

  Hannah jumped up off the floor and quickly rifled through my mother’s clothes.

  “She wore this,” Hannah said, holding an outdated dark-blue taffeta dress against her. “I loved this dress. She made it herself. I remember going to Fairfax Fabrics with her to pick out the material.” Hannah held the dress tighter, then slowly lifted it to her face. Tears formed in her eyes and fell down her cheeks. As if it were a baby, she gently passed the dress to me.

  “Go on,” she whispered, “take it.” When it was safely in my arms, I buried my face in it. At first I smelled nothing, maybe a little mustiness. But with the second and the third and the fourth breath, my head began to spin. Because the folds of that faded piece of cloth were replete with the ghost of my mother’s special-occasion perfume. An alchemy of gardenias and orange blossoms, of dances and bright red lipstick, of holidays and all my mother’s best Saturday nights.

  For a split second, the anxiety receded and in its place there was just her.

  And then suddenly everything—every last shitty housecoat—seemed important. Nothing was disposable. And nothing was the same. Nothing was ever the same.

  The words roll around in my head. And eventually a red flag goes up. Nothing was the same. Is this where it happens? I think something bad happened. I think. I remember thinking: I’m guessing it was more than one thing. Who was it that said that? Who was that?

  The words roll around in my head. Crazy. “Crazy,” they call me. Sure I’m crazy, sure I’m crazy … Sure. I’m. Crazy …

  And that’s how it happens. Like a broken record, warped and scratched. Once I was music, now I am just noise.

  Palo Alto, 1965. By then it was happening every day. The panic spread out like a late-afternoon shadow. I became aware of a dull ache in my stomach, of a thick metallic taste in my mouth that made it hard for my throat to open and close, of the irregular thrumming of my heart.

  An air conditioner. A car with a flat tire. A refrigerator. A whirring. Usually soft at first, always low—almost guttural. Mechanical. It is safe to say the sound was mechanized. Safe to say. Relentless.

  I left the apartment, the library, the student union to get away from it. The sound only got louder. I walked downtown and seemed to head straight into it. I ran in the other direction, and it followed me. And got louder still. As if I’d made it mad. By then it had swallowed all the other sounds outside. I fought against the tide of cheerful students, and mothers slowed to the pace of their toddlers. Stupid and naïve, they shopped for dinner and passed out political flyers and listened to the Raiders play the Saints on their transistor radios. All I heard was the air-conditioner–flat-tire–refrigerator whirring. Were they deaf?

  I began to understand that the only way I could prevent the sound from swallowing every last synapse in my brain was to talk. To myself. Out loud. I had to scream to hear myself above the whirring. That’s when the people on the street stopped shopping for dinner and passing out flyers and listening to the game. And started staring at me. I stared back. They looked away. I took a step forward. A woman grabbed her child by the hand and yanked her out of my path. I had become a man who ate children.

  I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling.

  I didn’t know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home before it gave way. I felt one hot tear l
eak out of each eye and run down the sides of my face. If they hit the floor they’d dissolve the grout that held the tiles together. I tried to wipe away the tears but I couldn’t lift my arms, couldn’t move at all. Someone must have drugged me. Or poisoned my food. Someone who worked in the law school cafeteria? Someone from my study group? Could it have been Ellen?

  I became furious thinking that my wife could betray me like that. Furious and devastated. The grief was overwhelming and I began to sob. I could see my tears fall to the floor and begin to eat through the marble like acid. I heard the hissing and burning of rock turning to ash and I saw light coming through the spaces where gaps had opened up. If I didn’t get control, the whole thing was going to crumble and I was going to slip through one of those gaping holes and fall. And keep falling. There would be nothing and no one to catch me. I would die.

  That was exactly what Ellen wanted. Well, fuck her. I stopped crying. I forced myself to stop hyperventilating. I wasn’t going to give that bitch the satisfaction. I counted six long seconds for every inhalation, ten seconds for every exhalation. I was going to get control of this. I don’t know how long I lay there—breathing and counting, breathing and counting, carrying on a running conversation with myself in which I articulated and repeated every thought that entered my mind, every tiny action my body (of its own volition) performed. I was spinning. I was the plastic dial on a game board—rigid, whirling, dizzy, and finally, inevitably, broken. Pointing toward Ellen.

  I felt something drip on my forehead. And then on my nose. And on my chin. Drops of water were falling from the ceiling. Rain. It was raining from the bathroom ceiling. And the drops were burning holes in the bathroom floor. I was going to fall through the floor and die and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “Grey, are you home?”

  Thank God, Ellen was home.

  No, that was wrong. That was bad. She’d come home early to kill me. She was going to make me drink bleach. No, not bleach. That knife. She was going to skin me alive with the electric carving knife we’d gotten as a wedding gift. It made sense. She was the one who’d wanted it, who had insisted we register for it along with the china and silver and all the other crap, most of which no one bought us. We didn’t have any cereal bowls, but we did have an electric carving knife. And now she was going to use it to kill me. Suddenly I felt horribly nauseous, not just at Ellen’s betrayal, but at my own stupidity. She’d been planning this for over a year. Lying flat on my back, I nearly choked on the bile that rose up into my throat.

  “God, I’m sorry about the mess.”

  She was in the living room, just outside the door. She wasn’t alone.

  “He’s not usually such a slob.”

  “Don’t apologize. We’re painting—our place is a disaster.”

  It was Larry, our neighbor who lived upstairs with his boyfriend, Ian.

  “Help yourself. I’m going to go see if Grey’s taking a nap.”

  A minute later the door opened. Larry stood above me with a beer in his hand.

  “Oops. Ellen, I found him,” Larry sang over his shoulder. “Sorry, Grey, I didn’t know you were …”

  He stopped smiling and knelt down next to me.

  “Greyson, are you okay?”

  My mouth opened but nothing came out. Larry tossed a towel over my crotch.

  “Did you fall? Hit your head?”

  I managed a weak, airy “No.”

  “Ellen, I think we’ve got a problem.”

  “Don’t touch me!” I screamed at Ellen as soon as she appeared over Larry’s shoulder. Suddenly I was able to move and I scrambled backward, wedging myself between the toilet and the bathtub.

  “Greyson, what’s wrong?” She was pushing past Larry, moving toward me.

  I pleaded with him. “Get her away from me. She’s trying to kill me.”

  “What? Greyson, this isn’t funny.”

  “I said get the fuck away!”

  She reached out to touch me and I slammed the heel of my hand into her chest. She flew backward into Larry and lay on the floor breathless. Ellen lifted her head and looked at me with the stunned, confused eyes of an animal that had been stalked and cornered—like she was looking at a stranger, a predator.

  “Don’t. Touch. Me,” I growled. “I know what you did.”

  Larry helped her up, never taking his eyes off me.

  “Go call the doctor,” he said. “I’ll stay with him.”

  We didn’t have a doctor. Ellen and I were healthy twenty-year-old newlyweds. We didn’t get sick. Ellen went to student health for her birth control pills, so she called them. The physician in charge didn’t seem all that surprised. Stanford was a pressure cooker. It wasn’t uncommon for a couple of students to crack every semester. The previous year, a med student had dissected his own neck the night before his anatomy practical.

  I was doing my final year of college and my first year of law school at the same time. On top of that, my mother had just died. As far as the doctor was concerned, I was textbook. He told Ellen that I was suffering from sleep deprivation and academic burnout, that I needed to be sedated and brought in to the university hospital to rest for a few days, that he would send a nurse right away.

  Our apartment was small. I could hear Ellen hang up the phone and start to cry. It stopped me for a moment, hearing that—hearing my wife cry. I’d known her long enough to be able to recognize that this was the sound of her crying with her mouth closed, of her trying to contain and extinguish her sobs, of her trying not to cry. I knew this was the sound of Ellen crying out of pain, not out of anger or frustration. Because I knew what that sounded like too. What I heard sounded familiar. Intimately, painfully familiar. And very far away.

  “Ellen,” Larry called into the living room. “Not right now if you can help it.”

  “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “I know, sweetie,” he said, studying me, “but I think it might upset … the situation even more.”

  I heard her pull two tissues out of the box and blow her nose.

  “Okay, I’m fine,” she said.

  Ellen left my favorite jeans—a soft, faded pair of Levi’s I’d had since high school—and a Stanford Law School sweatshirt just outside the bathroom door and Larry tried to get me dressed. But I refused to put on any of my own clothes. I was convinced that Ellen had saturated them with something—rat poison, cyanide, battery acid, cholera, polio, smallpox, oven cleaner, the possibilities were endless—that would seep into my skin and kill me. I was naked, covered in sweat, and shaking. Larry was very patient.

  “Okay, Greyson, I … understand your concern—not that I agree, but I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. So let’s put our heads together and come up with a solution to this.”

  “W-w-why?” I asked, my teeth chattering.

  “Why? Because (a) you can’t spend the rest of your life in this bathroom and (b) you’re freezing your dick off.”

  I looked down at my dick. “Oh, okay.”

  “Good,” Larry said. “Now we’re on the same page. How about this … how about you wear my clothes?”

  I was six foot two, 180 pounds. Larry was five foot eight, 170 pounds.

  “Okay.”

  Larry stripped off his purple paisley bell-bottoms and canary-yellow guayabera. My hands were shaking, so he buttoned me into his shirt and zipped me into his pants. He patted me gently on the ass and sighed.

  “I’ve always thought Ellen was a lucky woman, Greyson, but I have to say, sweetheart, you’re making me reevaluate.”

  When the doorbell rang, I was fully, if absurdly, dressed. Larry was wearing nothing but his black bikini underwear and turquoise socks. It had taken the nurse two hours to get from student health to our apartment located less than a mile off campus. Then again, it had taken Larry almost that long to get me dressed. I’d been in the bathroom for nearly four hours.

  The nurse from student health had not come alone.

  “
Hi, hon,” she whined. “I’m Nurse Warren.” Her voice was brimming with insincere sympathy and trumped-up compassion.

  I looked at Larry, panicked. “Who’s here?”

  “Uh … just some friends.”

  “What friends? I don’t want to see anyone.”

  “And this young man is Mr. Terrell, my work-study student.”

  “Come in, I’m Greyson’s wife.”

  Mr. Terrell was Lester Terrell, a linebacker on the Stanford football team.

  I was confused. “Am I on the football team?”

  “No, sweetheart,” Larry said gently.

  “Then why—”

  “I’ll explain later. You mind?” he asked, picking up the pants I refused to wear.

  “Don’t!” I screamed.

  “Could you please hurry? He’s in the bathroom,” Ellen said from the living room.

  “It’s okay,” Larry said soothingly. “I’m … I’m willing to bet you Sunday brunch at the Bay Street Café that there’s nothing wrong with these clothes.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  Larry was struggling to close the buttons on my Levi’s.

  “Because I know Ellen loves you and would never hurt you.”

  He put my sweatshirt on and his hands disappeared into the dangling sleeves.

  “Bullshit!”

  “Could we get a little help in here?” Larry called over his shoulder.

  “Be right there, just as soon as Mrs. Todd fills out these forms.”

  Larry rolled his eyes. “You have got to be kidding me.” He turned, threw open the bathroom door and stormed into the living room. “Sweet-Mary-Mother-of-God! First it takes you over two hours to respond to an emergency—an emergency—and now you want her to waste more time filling out paperwork while you sit here with your thumb up your ass instead of doing something to help that boy?”

  It was very, very silent after that. Eventually Warren spoke up. “University policy,” she said flatly, no longer pretending to care. “Be sure to sign all three copies of the liability waiver.”