Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “I think what happened is this, babe. I think you were going so fast, the device couldn’t keep up.” There were tears in his eyes now. “I’ll go talk to someone about it tomorrow morning. I promise. Christ, I’m so sorry.”

  It took only a second’s worth of imagination to see my little girl blasted from her chair, no idea why she was hurting, to turn my bowels into liquid fire. So I went about it the Pavlovian way, focusing on the reward, as if I were training a dog, all for the greater good, I thought at the time.

  Now, in the middle of this odd nonconversation at our dinner table, I realize I needn’t have bothered.

  Sonia’s tears have started, falling into her plate of untouched meat loaf and potatoes like fat raindrops.

  “Did something bad happen at school today?”

  A single nod. Up once, down once, like an exaggeration. I can fish out of her whatever secret she’s holding.

  “All right, baby girl. There, there.” I’m stroking her curls, trying to get some calm into her while all I want to do is scream. “Did someone say something to you?”

  The tiniest of moans escapes her lips.

  “One of the other girls?”

  Now her head moves right, then left, under my hand. So not one of the students.

  “Teacher?” I catch her eye—just a flicker from me to Steven. And I know. “Steven, your turn to clean up, okay?” I say.

  He gives me the Look.

  “Please,” I say.

  I don’t expect it to work, but a softness comes into my son’s eyes, and he picks up the plates, careful not to stack them before they’re rinsed. He makes this little bow, an insignificant thing, but I can’t help seeing Reverend Carl Corbin and the way he swept out his hand this afternoon, offering me a place to sit down in my very own living room.

  Offering, I think, and words tumble around in my head like Scrabble tiles. Officious. Official. Offensive. Off. Off with her fucking head.

  The twins join Steven’s cleanup parade without too much objection, and Sonia and I are left at the table.

  “You all right, darling?” I say. Then I place a hand to her forehead. A moment ago, my girl was sweating like a gin and tonic forgotten on a porch in July; now she’s settled down a bit. Not sweating, but far from a cool cucumber.

  This is the worst of all of it. This, right now, watching Sonia track Steven, watching her grow more calm with every step he takes toward the kitchen. It’s the worst, because now I know what Sonia is really afraid of.

  I don’t speak, only cock my head toward the place where Steven is rinsing bits of ground beef and potato off plates, humming some old tune.

  And she nods.

  Steven was eleven when his only sister arrived—almost old enough to be a father himself, if only in the biological sense. He had a way with her, kept her distracted and happy, changed the crappy diapers without more than a “Hey, Mom, this is some crappy nappy!” Few tweens learn baby sign language, but my eldest son was one of them. By barely older than a year, Sonia had the signs for her entire world down: eat, drink, sleep, dolly, and—her all-time favorite—go poo. Steven dubbed this particular gesture, often accompanied by the spoken words, a translation of some primitive language, a system so arcane that no one, not even Dr. Jean McClellan, would be able to piece it together.

  He launched into a tune so grotesquely bastardized I didn’t know what to think. Patrick nearly spilled his morning coffee at the sound of Steven singing.

  There were the Police and their doo-doo-doo-da-da-da—or however it goes; there was that Lou Reed piece about how the “colored girls” sing “do-do-do”—ultra-racist now, but it was Lou Reed and he could get away with all kinds of shit back then; there were those Motown bands and those white people who wanted to sound like they were a Motown band and there was every other songwriter in the modern world who stumbled over a lyric and ended up filling the space with something that rhymed with the kiddie word for defecation. And, finally, there was my own son crooning along to the entire musical canon from Brahms to Beyoncé, replacing each and every word with “poo.”

  The memories make the present doubly hard, but, finally, I say it.

  “Did Steven come to your school today?”

  A nod.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  No. She does not.

  “Story, then?” I say.

  I let her go off to her bedroom, my lackluster reminder to brush her teeth following her from the dining table, down the hall, to the bathroom she has for herself now that the twins are of that age when separate peeing quarters become important. Patrick’s door doesn’t so much as squeak on its hinges when Sonia runs by it.

  I take everything out on Steven. Maybe this isn’t the best parenting tactic, but I’m furious.

  “What happened at Sonia’s school today, Steven?” I say after sending Sam and Leo off to the TV room. They’re eager to go, mostly because, without their older brother, they get a few minutes alone with the remote.

  Steven shrugs but doesn’t turn from the sink.

  “I’d like an answer, kiddo,” I say, and I press his shoulder, forcing him to turn.

  It’s only now that I see the small pin on his collar, about a pinkie’s worth wide. Inside the silver circle, on a white field, is the single letter P in bright blue. I’ve seen this before.

  The first time, it was on television during that ridiculous segment where three Bible-thumping women in twinsets tore Jackie Juarez to shreds. Not a week later, I saw it decorating one of Olivia King’s church dresses when she knocked on my door asking if I had an egg to spare.

  It’s supposed to be a symbol of solidarity, I guess, this quiet blue P worn by both men and women now. Olivia’s daughter, Julia, has one, and sometimes I’ve seen it when I’ve been at the grocery store or at the dry cleaners picking up Patrick’s shirts. I ran into Dr. Claudia, my former gynecologist, in the post office, and even she had one, although I suspected her husband had more to do with Claudia’s choice of accessories than she herself did. I know the P stands for “Pure”—Pure Man, Pure Woman, Pure Child.

  What I don’t know is why my own son is wearing this pin.

  “When did you start this?” I say, fingering his collar.

  Steven brushes my hand off as if it’s an annoying fly and returns to rinsing plates and loading the dishwasher. “Got it the other day. No big deal.”

  “Got it? As in, what? It fell from the sky? You found it in a storm drain?”

  No answer.

  “You don’t just get these, Steven.”

  He shoulders past me, pours himself a glass of milk from the fridge, and downs it. “Of course you don’t just get them, Mom. You have to earn them.”

  “I see. And how does that happen?”

  Another glass of milk disappears down Steven’s gullet.

  “Save some for cereal tomorrow,” I say. “You’re not the only human in this house.”

  “Maybe you should go out and get another carton, then. It’s your job, right?”

  My hand flies with a will of its own, makes contact; and a bright palm print blooms on the right side of Steven’s face.

  He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t raise his own hand, doesn’t react at all, except to say, “Nice, Mom. Real nice. One day, that’s gonna be a crime.”

  “You little shit.”

  He’s smug now, which makes everything worse. “I’ll tell you how I earned the pin. I got recruited. Recruited, Mom. They needed volunteers from the boys’ school to make the rounds to the girls’ schools and explain a few things. I accepted. And for the past three days, I’ve been going out in the field and demonstrating how the bracelets work. Look.” He pushes up one sleeve and brandishes the burn mark around his wrist. “We go in pairs, and we take turns. All so girls like Sonia know what will happen.” As if to defy me once more, he drains his glass of
milk and licks his lips. “By the way, I wouldn’t encourage her to pick the sign language back up.”

  “Why the hell not?” I’m still trying to absorb the fact that my son has purposefully shocked himself “so girls like Sonia know what will happen.”

  “Mom. Honestly. You of all people should get it.” His voice has taken on the timbre of someone much older, someone tired of explaining how things are. “Signing defeats the purpose of what we’re trying to do here.”

  Of course it does.

  “Look, I can’t tell you the details, but there are people researching the new—you know—devices. They’ll be more like gloves. Really, that’s all I should say.” He straightens, smiling. “Except that I’ve volunteered to beta test them.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s called leadership, Mom. And it’s what Pure Men do.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I say the first thing that comes to mind. “You goddamned bastard.”

  Steven shrugs. “Whatevs.” Then he stalks out of the kitchen, leaving the glass on the counter next to a note saying Buy milk.

  Sam and Leo are in the kitchen doorway, staring at me, so I don’t dare cry.

  SIXTEEN

  After I read Sonia her bedtime story and lie next to her, waiting for the steady breathing that tells me she’s asleep, I go to my bedroom. Our bedroom. Tonight, I have it all to myself because Patrick is still in his study, even though it’s approaching midnight. Rarely does he stay up so late.

  Tonight, I think about men.

  When I put the twins to bed, Steven was in the TV room, eating ice cream and watching part of a series of talks by Reverend Carl, who I now believe might be my son’s hero. The two of them make a pair, both so steadfast in their ideas of reversion to a former time, an age when men were men and women were women and glory glory fucking hallelujah, things were so much easier back when we all knew our places. I can’t hate Steven because he believes in something so wrong, even if I hate what he believes.

  Other men, though, are different.

  Not long after Sonia’s fifth birthday, after we were fitted with the counters, I phoned my doctor at home, ready with a precisely worded set of questions, a pidgin of sorts. I pared the phrases down, eliminating copulas and modifiers, getting to the meat as quickly as possible. The recorder would pick up every word, even a whisper.

  Who knows what I expected from her, what my doctor of more than ten years could tell me? Maybe I wanted a partner in silence. Maybe I only wanted to hear how pissed off she was.

  Dr. Claudia answered, listened; and a low moan escaped before her husband came on the line.

  “Whose fault do you think it was?” he said.

  I stood in my kitchen, wanting to explain, careful not to, while he told me we’d marched one too many times, written one too many letters, screamed one too many words.

  “You women. You need to be taught a lesson,” he said, and hung up.

  I didn’t call her again to ask how they had silenced her, whether they had stormed into her practice or whether they had invaded her kitchen, if they had loaded her into a van along with her daughters and spelled out the future inside a dim gray room before fixing shiny wristbands on each of them and sending them home to cook and clean and be supportive Pure Women. To learn our lesson.

  Dr. Claudia would never have put on that collar pin, not without a fight, but I know she’s still wearing it. Probably, her daughters are, too, like Julia King next door. I knew Julia when she wore cutoff jeans and halter tops, when she raced her bike down the street with an MP3 player on full volume, singing along to the Dixie Chicks, when she caught me in the garden and told me another story about how weird her mother was acting, rolling her eyes at the ridiculousness of all that Pure crap. When her father caught her talking to me—I guess it was about a year and a half ago, now—he took Julia by the arm and shuttled her through the screen back door.

  I still remember what her crying sounded like when Evan beat her.

  Patrick’s study door squeaks open, and his footsteps move down the hall, away from our bedroom, toward the kitchen. I could go to him, pour us a stiff drink, and tell him what happened with Steven after dinner. I should go; I know it.

  But I won’t.

  Patrick is the third type of man. He’s not a believer and he’s not a woman-hating asshole; he’s just weak. And I’d rather think about men who aren’t.

  So tonight, when Patrick finally comes to bed, even after he apologizes, I decide to dream of Lorenzo again.

  I never know what brings it on, what makes me imagine it’s his arm, and not my husband’s, curled around my waist during the night. I haven’t spoken to Lorenzo since my last day at the university. Well, and that one other time, afterward, which didn’t involve an abundance of vocalization.

  I wriggle out from the heavy appendage encircling me. It’s too much like ownership, that gesture; too possessive. Also, the smoothness of Patrick’s skin, his soft doctor’s hand and fine hair, they’re all getting in the way of my memories, blotting them out.

  Lorenzo may have returned to Italy by now. I’m not sure. It’s been two months since I followed my heart and libido and went with him. Two months since I risked everything for an afternoon tumble.

  Not tumble, Jean—love, I remind myself.

  It was his plan, all along, to go back to what we called the Boot, once the visiting professorship had run its course. He missed the cooking and the sea, oranges and peaches fattened on rich volcanic soil until they grew as big as the sun. And his language. Our language.

  Patrick stirs beside me, and I slip out of bed. In the kitchen, I get out the old macchinetta from a cupboard, press espresso grounds into its tiny perforated cup, and fill the bottom container with water before putting it on a low flame. It’s nearly five o’clock, and I won’t be sleeping anymore.

  Was it the coffee that started things on their trajectory? Or was it the Italian? All of a sudden, I feel cold and warm at the same time.

  He kept a hot plate in his office, one of those single-burner electric jobs you find in efficiency apartments and cheap motels. Tucked between it and his semantics texts was a tin of coffee, real coffee, not the ground-up dust they stocked the faculty kitchen with. We’d met to review the progress on lexical recall in my patients with anomia. For some reason, the anomics had me stumped; their inability to conjure up the names of the most common objects while knowing exactly how to describe them had set my research back to ground zero. If I couldn’t produce a positive report by the end of the month, I’d be saying goodbye to funding and sayonara to tenure.

  Lorenzo set the coffee to percolate, and we walked through the latest brain scans. There, among MRIs and EEGs and Italian coffee, it began.

  The first thing I noticed was his hand as it poured thick black espresso into a demitasse. His skin was dark, had none of the scrubbed pinkness of Patrick’s hand. One of his nails was chipped, and there were calluses on the tips of his fingers, which were long and thin.

  “You play the guitar?” I asked.

  “Mandolin,” he said. “And some guitar.”

  “My father played the mandolin. My mother would sing along; we all would. Nothing great, just the usual folk songs. ‘Torna a Surriento,’ ‘Core ’ngrato,’ things like that.”

  He laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “An American family singing ‘Core ’ngrato.’”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “What makes you think I’m American?” Only I didn’t say it that way. I said it in Italian.

  We met like that, in his office, where the hot plate and the little coffee maker were. Once I’d put the anomia project to bed, thus securing my somewhat unstable future for another semester, we still met.

  “I brought you a bit of Italy,” he said one day, not long after he’d returned from visiting family over spring break. Our speech ha
d migrated from half English, half Italian to full-throttle Neapolitan, and Lorenzo’s office became an oasis of continentalisms: caffè, music, the crunchy baked taralli cookies he brought in on Mondays after slaving all weekend over his grandmother’s recipe.

  He pushed a newspaper-wrapped object across the desk.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Some music for you, Gianna. Open it.”

  I did. Inside the paper was a wooden box, inlaid and polished, a five-petaled rose motif around the border. It didn’t look much like music until Lorenzo reached over and pushed up the cover with a finger.

  I still remember that, how he lifted the hinged top with such care, like a bridegroom sliding a lace skirt above his new wife’s knee, preparing to hook his finger into her garter. A lascivious action made tender by the gentleness.

  That was the first time I imagined Lorenzo’s hand on my bare skin, an ordinary Monday in his book-cluttered office with the music box tinkling out “Torna a Surriento” and the espresso maker bubbling its thick, sweet coffee.

  Lorenzo isn’t a believer or a hater or a coward. He’s in his own category, tucked inside a dark and pleasant corner of my mind.

  SEVENTEEN

  Steven is the first to wake up and is out of the house before either Patrick or I start our morning routines. The twins, in a rare feat of self-sufficiency—if not color coordination—have dressed themselves and now pour the last of the milk into bowls laden with multicolored, teeth-rotting puffs of sugar. Leo has his sweater on inside out, and Sam fixes it. Neither of them says much over his cereal.

  “What happened last night was only an argument,” I say.

  “It’s strange when you talk, Mom,” Leo says.

  I suppose it would be, after a year.

  By the time Patrick comes in, looking as if he’s had less sleep than he has, the twins are on their way to the bus stop, and I’m dressing Sonia, sliding one thin arm at a time into her Windbreaker. My hand lingers on her red bracelet, and she tugs her wrist away, her small hand slipping from my grasp.