Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “I’m sorry you had to see that yesterday. With Steven.”

  She nods, as if she’s sorry she had to see it too.

  We walk to the bus together, as quiet as we’ve been on all the other days of the school year. I have words now, but no idea how to use them, no clue how to make my daughter’s life better, if only for a while.

  “No more scary dreams, right?”

  Sonia nods again. Of course, she wouldn’t have had any nightmares last night, not with the small dose of Sominex I stirred into her cocoa. Patrick still doesn’t know about that, and I’m not sure I’ll tell him.

  “Be good in school,” I say, and help her clamber up on the bus.

  Be good in school. What a crock of shit.

  I imagine my daughter sitting behind a desk, one of that kind that has the cubby under the seat where books and bright Hello Kitty pencil cases and, later, secret notes spelling Do you like Tommy? I think Tommy likes you! would hide. Formica-laminated writing surfaces where you scratched hearts and initials, or where you traced the carvings of some other boy or girl in some other year, wondering if BL ever married KT or if Mr. Pondergrass the algebra teacher really was a pig-monster with eye boogers. Black-and-white composition books, later thinner and bluer when the writing assignments shifted from “What I Did During Summer Vacation” to “Compare and Contrast Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth.” All those things, simple and ordinary, that we assumed we would never lose.

  What do they study now, our girls? A bit of addition and subtraction, telling time, making change. Counting, of course. They would learn counting first. All the way up to one hundred.

  When Sonia entered first grade this past fall, the school held an open house. Patrick and I went, along with the rest of the parents. I never saw the announcement that was sent to the fathers—or grandfathers, in the event one of the girls was a Heather with two mommies. Of course, there aren’t any two-mommy or two-daddy families anymore; the children of same-sex partnerships have all been moved to live with their closest male relative—an uncle, a grandfather, an older brother—until the biological parent remarries in the proper way. Funny, with all the talk before of conversion therapy and curing homosexuality, no one ever thought of the foolproof way of getting gays in line: take away their kids.

  I suspect attendance at the open house that night was mandatory, although Patrick didn’t say so, only urged me to go check out the facilities, which were supposed to be state-of-the-art.

  “State-of-the-art what?” I said, checking my counter before speaking.

  An hour later, we found out.

  There were still classrooms, complete with desks and projection screens. The bulletin boards were wallpapered with drawings: a family picnicking here, a man in a suit holding a briefcase there, a woman wearing a straw hat and planting a bed of purple flowers in another corner. Children on a school bus, girls playing with dolls, boys arranged in a baseball triangle. I didn’t see any books, but, of course, I hadn’t expected to.

  We didn’t spend much time in the classrooms before teachers, each one wearing a small blue P pin on his collar, marched us along the corridors for the tour.

  “Here’s the sewing room,” our group leader said, opening a set of double doors and motioning us inside. “Each girl—once she’s old enough to work the machines without pulling a Sleeping Beauty”—he laughed at his own joke—“will have her own digital Singer. Really amazing equipment, these.” He stroked one of the sewing machines as if it were a pet. “Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll have a peek at the kitchens before heading outside to the gardening area.”

  It was home ec on drugs, and not much more.

  I wave to Sonia as the bus pulls away from the curb. Today, she’ll be in a room with twenty-five other first graders, all girls. She’ll listen to stories, practice her numbers, help the older students in the kitchen as they cut cookies and knead dough and crimp pies. This is what school is now, and what school will be for some time. Maybe forever.

  Memory is a damnable faculty.

  I envy my only daughter; she has no recall of life before quotas or school days before the Pure Movement took off. It’s a struggle to remember the last time I saw a number greater than forty on her fragile wrist, except, of course, for two nights ago when I watched that number creep upward to one hundred. For the rest of us, for my former colleagues and students, for Lin, for the book club ladies and the woman who used to be my gynecologist and Mrs. Ray, who will never landscape another garden, memory is all we have.

  There’s no way I can win, but there’s a way I can feel like a winner.

  In the minute it takes to walk back across the street and climb the steps to our porch, I decide.

  Patrick has the television on, and Reverend Carl is holding a press conference. The White House room looks much the same as it always did, except there are no women, only a sea of dark suits and power ties. All of the reporters nod as they listen to Reverend Carl’s updates on Bobby Myers’ condition.

  “We have someone who can help,” Carl says.

  A chorus of “Who?” and “Where did you find him?” and “Wonderful news!” rips through the press hall. Patrick interrupts his watching and turns to me. “That’s you, babe. Back in business.”

  But I don’t want to be back in business, not for Bobby Myers’ sake or the president’s sake or the sake of any of the other men in that room.

  Reverend Carl does his usual double-handed press of the air in front of him, as if he’s deflating an air mattress. Or squashing some weaker object. “Now, everyone listen up. What we’re doing is a little unconventional, a little radical even, but I’m sure Dr. Jean McClellan is the right person for the job. As many of you know, her work on the reversal of”—he checks his notes to get the technical wording right—“fluent aphasia, also known as Wernicke’s aphasia, was groundbreaking. Of course, that work has been on temporary hold until we get things sorted out, but I want to say—”

  I switch the TV off. I don’t give a shit what Reverend Carl wants to say. I never will. “I won’t do it,” I tell Patrick. “So call Reverend Carl before you leave for work.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  I look at my wrist, clear of its electrical burn, clear of its silver-toned collar. “Tell him I said no.”

  “Jean. Please. You know what will happen if you don’t agree.”

  Maybe it’s the way he says this. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes, that tired, beaten-down-like-a-disobedient-puppy look. Maybe it’s the sour smell of milk and coffee on his breath when he speaks. It might be a combination of all three, but at this moment, in the house where we conceived four children, I realize I don’t love him anymore.

  I wonder if I ever did.

  EIGHTEEN

  This time, Reverend Carl comes to the house alone. His suit is the same expensive coal gray wool of yesterday, but double-breasted instead of single. I count the buttons on it: three on the right, three on the left, four on each sleeve. The sleeve buttons are the kind that overlap by a few millimeters, kissing buttons as my father called them when he had his haberdashery, the sign of a bespoke suit. Also, they’re real, working buttons, and Reverend Carl leaves each of the bottom ones undone. He wants the world to see what exquisite taste he has, I suppose.

  Lorenzo never showed off like this.

  Over coffee one afternoon—I think it was two winters ago while we were plowing through another roadblock on the Wernicke project—I accidentally brushed his jacket sleeve with my pen, leaving a small, but ugly, mark on the gray material.

  “Leave it,” he said.

  “Be right back.”

  I kept a bottle of hair spray in my office in those days. By “those days,” I mean the days after Lorenzo and I started working together. I hadn’t bothered before, usually content to let the dark curls that I inherited from my mother have their own unruly way. But that after
noon, I had a canister of Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine lurking in a drawer along with a nail file, a pick, and an emergency makeup kit. Just in case Lin called any surprise project meetings.

  The things we girls do.

  After I sprayed and dabbed at the ink mark, I ran a fingernail down the waterfall of four buttons. They clicked as I touched them. “Kissing buttons,” I said. “Haven’t seen those in a while.” My father had told me they work sleeve buttons that way only in Italy.

  And so, that’s how it happened. A stupid, offhand comment about a childhood memory, and Lorenzo’s foot kicked the door shut as his mouth found mine.

  That was a nice place to be, but now I’m back in my living room with Patrick and Reverend Carl and Carl’s sleeve buttons, the bottom one on each wrist undone.

  “We were hoping, Dr. McClellan, that you would—,” Reverend Carl starts. He’s staring longingly at my coffee mug.

  I don’t offer him a drink of his own, and I don’t let him finish. “Well, I won’t.”

  “We could up the pay.”

  Patrick’s eyes flash, first at Reverend Carl, then at me.

  “We’ll make do,” I say, and take another sip of coffee. I’ve grown used to defiance in small forms, like when I picked that bloodred counter for Sonia.

  There’s no desperation in his voice, no pleading, only a slight turning up at the corners of his mouth when he says, “What if I told you we had other incentives?”

  Now I imagine myself in a room somewhere, a dirty and barren place with sound-attenuated walls and no windows and with sweat-streaked, beady-eyed men who follow commands like “Take it up a notch” and “Give her a moment to think it over” and “Let’s start again.” It’s all I can do not to flinch, to hold a steady gaze. “Such as?”

  His smile broadens. “We could, for instance, increase your daughter’s quota. Let’s say to one hundred fifty? No. Two hundred.”

  “You can increase it to ten thousand, Reverend. She’s not talking as it is.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he says, but nothing in his tone indicates sorrow. This is what he wanted: docile women and girls. The older generations need to be controlled, but eventually, by the time Sonia has children of her own, Reverend Carl Corbin’s dream of Pure Women and Pure Men will be the way of the world. I hate him for this.

  “Anything else?” I say.

  Patrick shoots me a look but doesn’t speak.

  Reverend Carl only takes a slim metal box from his pocket. “Then I’ll have to put this back on.” The “this” he’s referring to is the narrow black band inside the box.

  “That’s not mine,” I say. “Mine is silver.”

  Another smile, but now Reverend Carl’s eyes join in. “A new model,” he says. “You’ll find it functions exactly as your former bracelet did, but this one has two additional features.”

  “What? A built-in miniature bullwhip?”

  “Jean!” Patrick says. I ignore him.

  “Nothing like that, Dr. McClellan. The first feature is a courtesy tracker.”

  “A what?”

  “We like to think of it as a gentle nudge, nothing more. Just keep things clean, and everything will function normally. No four-letter words, no blasphemy. If you slip up, that’s okay, but your quota reduces by ten for each infraction. You’ll get used to it.”

  I feel like Cartman in that South Park movie, the one where he gets a chip implanted in his head that shocks him every time he says “fuck,” which, because it’s South Park, is effectively all the time.

  “The second requires a bit more action on your part.” He taps the red button at the side of the band. “Once a day, at a time of your choosing, you will press this button and speak into the bracelet. There’s a microphone here.” He points to the other side, opposite the red button. “We’re hoping this practice will help get people—”

  “Women,” I interrupt.

  “Yes. Women. We’re hoping it will help put you in the mood, understand the fundamentals.”

  “How?”

  From his breast pocket he removes a folded sheet of paper and smooths it out. It’s a typed list. “You’ll read this, once a day, into the microphone. Press the red button twice before you start, and twice when you’ve finished. It won’t count against your quota.”

  “What won’t count?” My mouth has gone dry. I take another swallow of coffee, now cold.

  He hands me the sheet. “Why don’t you read it now while I train the device to your voice? We’ll kill two birds with one stone that way.”

  The first words I read are in bold blue type at the top of the page:

  I BELIEVE that man was created in the image and glory of God, and that woman is the glory of the man, for man was not made of woman, but woman was made from man.

  “I can’t read this,” I say.

  Reverend Carl checks his watch. “Dr. McClellan, I have a meeting downtown in an hour. If we can’t finish this, I’ll have to call someone who can.”

  I’m picturing Thomas of the dark suit and dark complexion and even darker eyes, the one who took my counter off yesterday morning. The man I saw once before, a year ago, when men first came for us.

  On the day I announced our team’s progress to a packed seminar room, two dozen uniformed men, their left arms banded with the presidential seal, midnight black weapons in their right hands, pushed through the crowd. My projector dimmed in the time it took me to catch a breath. Behind me, only ghosts of my formulas remained on the white scrim.

  It had begun, the terrible, unthinkable thing Patrick had warned me about only days earlier.

  They separated our crowd, sending the men away, lining the rest of us up and leading fifty students and faculty women, some tenured, some new, through empty hallways. Lin was the first to voice her resistance.

  Thomas was on her like a cougar after prey, that midnight black torture stick of his now pointing menacingly at Lin Kwan’s petite frame.

  I watched her fold and bend and collapse on herself, wordlessly, only the thread of a pained sigh, high-pitched and taut, coming from her lips. Five of us ran to the crumpled mass of woman on the tile floor, only to be beaten off. Those who lingered were also tased or stunned. Like misbehaving animals. Cows. Pets.

  None of this happened without a fight, is what I’m saying.

  “Dr. McClellan?” Reverend Carl has his phone out now, one long finger poised over the green Send button, ready to tap and summon a man who is short on charm and long on persuasive techniques.

  “Fine. I’ll read it,” I say, thinking I can speak these horrible words without letting them invade me.

  So I begin.

  By the time I’m halfway down the page, Patrick’s skin has blanched to a paste color. Reverend Carl nods each time I speak one of the beliefs or affirmations or declarations of intent into the black bracelet.

  “We are called as women to keep silence and to be under obedience. If we must learn, let us ask our husbands in the closeness of the home, for it is shameful that a woman question God-ordained male leadership.”

  Nod.

  “When we obey male leadership with humility and submission, we acknowledge that the head of every man is Christ, and that the head of every woman is the man.”

  Nod.

  “God’s plan for woman, whether married or single, is that she adorn herself with shamefacedness and sobriety, and that she exhibit modesty and femininity without fanciful or proud displays.”

  Nod.

  “I will seek to adorn myself inwardly, and to be pure, modest, and submissive. In this way, I will glorify man, thereby glorifying God.”

  Nod.

  “I will honor the sanctity of marriage, both mine and that of others, for God will judge adulterers with vengeance.”

  Nod.

  I hope Patrick interprets the break in my voice at th
is as a sign of discomfort.

  Reverend Carl nods once more, when I’m finished with the page, and taps the red button twice. “Well done, Mrs. McClellan.” There’s an emphasis on “Mrs.” “Patrick, will you do the honors?”

  Patrick shifts and sets his still-full coffee cup on the end table, spilling it. Then he takes the black thing from Reverend Carl’s hand, encircles my left wrist with it, and snaps it closed.

  So this is how I lose my voice for the second time. With a click that sounds like a bomb.

  NINETEEN

  I think I’ve developed superhuman hearing.

  This afternoon, as I wait for Sonia’s bus to snake along the lane toward our bungalow, I hear every sound. Not the sounds I used to hear: not the CNN reporters droning politics from the mini-television in the kitchen; not John, Paul, George, and Ringo telling me through the stereo speakers they want to hold my hand; not my own voice singing—badly, I’ll admit—along. I hear the wet slap of the dough as I knead it into submission, the deafening hum of the refrigerator, the high-frequency whine of Patrick’s computer through the locked door of his study. I hear my own heartbeat, steady, incessant.

  There’s the motor now, the Doppler effect amping up the frequency as the bus approaches. Already I have my three words planned for when Sonia arrives: Mommy loves you. More may be said later, but this is enough for now.

  I place the dough in a large glass bowl for its second rise and towel off the flour that’s stuck between my fingers. Should have taken off my ring, but I forgot. Then I force on a smile—not too wide, not too clownish; I don’t want it to look like a bad makeup job—and head for the door.

  Sonia leaps from the bus’s steps, waves to Mr. Benjamin before he drives off toward his next drop-off point, and covers the hundred feet between bus stop and porch like an adrenaline-charged feline. Normally steady and deliberate, she’s got a bounce in her this afternoon, a jitterbug type of anxiety. My girl is shiny with excitement as she leaps into my arms, the paper she’s holding grazing my left ear, her downy cheek sticky and sweet with a glaze of chocolate.