by Joanna Scott
Oh, Charlie. Charlie looks forward to a tempting meal. Wait, Charlie, I’ve got something for you, Charlie, soup, Charlie, steak, Charlie, strawberry oh...
His voice is so completely expressive that any word, any sound, is revealing. He could count from one to one thousand, and the audience would be mesmerized. Yes, I like to imagine this: Harold counting aloud, one, two, three, four, and so on. It would take three hours, and after Harold finished counting, he would remain silent for as long as ten minutes. He would just stand there in the spotlight, his body pressing against the empty space behind him, and then, at last, he would utter a single yip.
Yip.
If you’ve ever blown a gentle breath into the face of a dog and heard the animal gasp, then you’ll know how the audience would react when Harold yipped that final yip. Spot off, and my treasure would once again be hidden in darkness.
Brilliant, yes? I’m sure any skeptic would be quickly converted and would forget the hows and whys and wherewithals of Harold’s speech, for all that matters is the boy’s acrobatic voice and his admirable self-sufficiency.
Yadderyip. Yap yap yap.
I knew what I was hearing in the corridor in Bellevue: it was the sound of a solitary creature calling out to the world and expecting no answer, like that strange seabird I heard one night when I was a child. Alone in my buff-colored room with its red-leather-upholstered window seat—
Yip.
Yip.
Poor Charlie. Yip. Do you want soup, Charlie? Yip. Soup, Charlie?
Strange sounds—you’ll hear them in the dead of night, on any night, if you listen carefully.
Yip.
Just as I heard the seabird on that summer night when I was ten years old. Not gull, not tern or cormorant. An albatross? No. A great auk? No. A loon or grebe or piping plover? No, no, no. It was a sound I’d never heard before, and when I looked out my window to find the bird I saw nothing but the shrugging forms of boulders and the iron-colored water. I slept, finally, and awoke the next day to the news of my brother’s accidental death by drowning.
Yip.
For years I’d thought of that bird I never saw as a messenger announcing the passing of my older brother. Eventually I came to think of it as a coincidence—a strange sound in the middle of the night coinciding with my brother’s death.
Yip.
Yadderyip. Yadderyip.
Listen. Listen closely to the silence. There’s always something new to hear.
The silence bearing the meaning of the sound.
Yip.
Water sloshing against the pylons of our dock. A body sweeping up and back, up and back, curling around the wood like a hand, then letting go. Clenching, then letting go. I never saw this; I never saw my brother’s lifeless body at all. My parents did everything they could to protect me, short of keeping my brother’s death a secret.
The vague details surrounding my brother’s drowning led me to think of death not as the exquisite sleep described by my parents but as a terrible mystery, and so I made my theater terrible and mysterious, for art must show us what we fear most. In the corridor in Bellevue, young Harold had me remembering the night my brother died, and in the silence that followed our exchange I found myself wondering whether the sound I’d heard in my buff-colored room had really been a bird’s cry at all.
Yip.
It might not have been a bird. It might have been a boy yipping as he leaped from the end of the dock into the water. Leaped, not fell—such a sound is not born out of terror.
Yip.
A bird’s voice, or a boy’s? This much I know: Harold deserves to be heard by others.
Charlie looks forward to a tempting meal. Soup, Charlie. Yip. Steak, Charlie. Yip. Corn, Charlie. Strawberry short-Charlie-cake-Charlie. Poor Charlie.
My marvelous boy.
Do you want something to eat, Charlie? Charlie, are you there? Charlie? Charlie?
HAROLD HAS LEFT THE HOSPITAL and gone to live with his mother. I call her daily, I plead and reason and praise. Yesterday I went to meet her in person. They live in a tidy six-room brick Tudor out in Queens, just the two of them for the time being, until Mrs. Linder can place her son in an adequate “facility,” as she says. She is a thin woman, fiftyish, a widow, I presume, with hair bleached an unnatural yellow, and she was obviously none too pleased by my visit, though she did invite me in and offer me a cup of tea. I saw no sign of Harold, no evidence that the boy lived there at all. The house was as oppressively still as a museum after hours, with every piece of furniture looking as though it had been glued to the lime green carpet and the air devoid of any fragrance other than the light tannic scent of tea.
Mrs. Linder was out in the kitchen preparing the tea when I became aware of Harold’s presence in the house—the very walls seemed to wait tensely for something to happen, for me to leave, I supposed at first, and then I realized that the tension had nothing to do with me. The house was waiting for Harold to continue yipping. I had arrived during one of his lengthy intervals, and the stillness was of the boy’s making, defined by his voice and as integral to his performance as any sound he might utter.
His mother clearly does not understand him. She refers to Harold as her “poor little imbecile” and scolds me for wanting to exploit him. She did, however, give me this tape of Harold, apparently in hopes that it would satisfy me and I would leave them alone. But Harold does not want to be left alone—I knew as much while I sat in Mrs. Linder’s house listening to the silence, and I knew it again when I was leaving and glanced up from the front walk at the curtained windows on the second floor.
I called Mrs. Linder this morning, and I will visit her again tomorrow. Sooner or later she will have to give in, and I will finally be able to offer my public a theatrical experience unlike anything they’ve ever known. Imagine: the lights go down, the audience settles into an expectant hush, spot on, and after a long, clenched silence my magnificent little seabird comes back to life:
Yip.
Yip.
Yip.
EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY
Simple words have simple meanings. He can sing, “Everybody loves somebody,” and he knows what he means. When he exclaims to no one, “Life is good!” he knows what he’s feeling. The word good, though, spoken aloud, has a leaden sound. Happy is more fun to say, especially with the roof down and the speedometer’s needle hovering at sixty miles per hour. “I am happy.” The emotion doesn’t need explanation. But since his voice is sucked into the vacuum of the wind, he has to say it again: “I am happy!”
Bob is driving in his red MG south to Larchmont along a road that tumbles through the valley like one of the region’s sparkling brooks and then climbs up to a flat-topped mountain, up and up and then down again in a precipitous drop. On an icy winter day this would be a perilous journey. But today is a clear, breezy fall day, the Catskill slopes a patchwork of yellows and reds, the mountains capped with the greens of spruce and balsam at the higher altitudes, the air warmed by a week of Indian summer. Today is the kind of day when a man can open the soft-top of his convertible and finally begin to relax.
Bob is heading home from a client’s country house near Oneonta, where he’d been sent because of his notable powers of persuasion. Most of the negotiations had been conducted at a table in the deserted dining room. Strangely, though, the only food offered all day long was a single platter of cream cheese canapé. But the client generously kept refilling Bob’s glass with mimosas, and together they’d gone through four cigars. By the end of the meeting, the client was ready to sign on the dotted line of a contract worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Bob, the son of a school janitor, finds it difficult to understand why everyone isn’t rich. In his experience over the last decade, desired results have been eighty percent obtainable. Considering the stakes, one hundred percent effort equaling eighty percent return is a reliable formula for growth. The advertising firm where he is an employee has grown considerably in recent years, thanks in large
part to Bob’s influence. For months there have been rumors in the office that he will be rewarded with a significant promotion.
He enjoys the challenges of his work. In a fundamental way, he thrives on the suspense of a client’s resistance. Skepticism is the puzzle he sets out to solve. If he’s really as effective as his colleagues say, it’s only because he has honed his interpretive skills and can slowly tease out the interests hidden behind apparently impenetrable facades. Slowly, one cigar after another, he coaxes a client to tell him what the client wants to hear so he can say it back in his proposal.
When work is over, though, Bob likes to forget the complexities of business. Having applied himself to an assigned task with focused concentration, he rewards himself with a tremendous calm. On his own time, he prefers to see things as they are—all surface, integral and irreversible. Simple things to go with simple words.
Bob is happy to be on his way home, happy to be driving through the Catskill Mountains on a perfect autumn afternoon. Today his baby daughter is six months old, and his wife, Trudy, is baking a cake. He promised to be home by five thirty. If he doesn’t run into traffic near Larchmont, he could be home by five.
But when he passes a sign advertising an upcoming turkey roast at the local VFW post, he realizes how hungry he is. He’d eaten only a bowl of oatmeal for an early breakfast, he hadn’t been given a proper lunch back at his client’s house, and he has two hours of the journey ahead of him.
He drives for another twenty minutes before he passes a sign advertising a house specialty of chicken wings at a roadside tavern up ahead. He pulls into the parking lot, and as the front of the MG tilts over potholes and a thick dust rises around the wheels, Bob has the sensation that he’s falling, sinking through a cloud. He pushes his foot against the brake with unintentional force, jerking to a halt.
The stillness of the area suggests abandonment. He idles in neutral for a moment, wondering if the tavern is open. The windows are dark, and Bob’s MG is the only car in the lot other than a pickup truck parked at the back corner of the building, its dented rear bumper secured with rope.
He turns off the engine. Dry leaves tumble in the wind across the surface of the lot, crackling like ice under a stream of water. He waits for a long minute, vaguely hoping that someone will come out and greet him. Finally he decides to test the door of the tavern and is surprised at the ease with which it opens on creaky hinges into a paneled space cramped by the presence of an oversize, dusty bubblegum machine. After this decrepit foyer, the second door opens with a jingle of bells into a room that is unexpectedly elegant, with a long mahogany bar and tables draped in white linen.
He stops in the men’s room first, and when he emerges there is a woman standing behind the bar, wiping off the keys of the cash register with a rag. Bob remarks, “What a fine day!” as he takes a seat on a bar stool. The woman greets him with a shrug. The mound of her gray hair, fixed in a tall bun, wobbles with the motion of her shoulders. “It’s gonna rain tomorrow,” she says as she hands him the menu. “It’s gonna rain, and then it’s gonna sleet, and then it’s gonna snow. Now tell me what you want.”
Her odd way of soliciting an order unnerves Bob. “I don’t know,” he says. The woman replies, “Then you want wings and beer.” Amazingly, she’s right. Wings and beer—that’s exactly what he wants. “With a side of hot sauce,” he adds.
Her eyes flash with impatience. “We don’t have sauce,” she says.
“You don’t have sauce?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“You did, yes. Then how about ketchup?”
“We’re out of ketchup.”
“You’re out of ketchup?”
“You got a hearing problem?”
“I just, I can’t believe it!”
“Then maybe you’re not of the believing disposition.”
Bob decides to pity her. He knows from experience that pity is a fortifying emotion, especially when it’s directed at a stranger.
She sets his beer in front of him. He feels the weight of her stare as he sips the foam, but when he looks up she has already disappeared into the kitchen. He studies the bottles on the shelf behind the bar. After a few minutes, the woman reappears with the chicken wings.
He eats noisily, greedily. While he eats the woman tells him about what happens to disbelieving individuals. “First you stop believing what you hear. Then you stop believing what you see. When you stop believing what you feel, it’s over, you walk straight into the sizzling hot fires of hell.” He drops his napkin, and before he can reach down to retrieve it she slaps a stack of napkins on the counter beside his plate. “You burn in hell,” she says in emphasis. When he finishes his beer, she brings him another. “You burn, and you keep burning. You never stop burning.”
Bob gulps his second beer. “That so?” he says mildly.
“Course, I could be wrong,” she adds in a conciliatory tone as she hands him the check.
When he puts down his cash, she seems to forgive him all his sins. “That your car?” she asks.
“Sure is.”
“Nice car,” she says softly.
“Thanks.”
And that’s that. After paying his check and leaving a generous tip, Bob is back in his MG, gently pumping the gas pedal to encourage the reluctant engine, pressing it on through its usual opening sputters, picking up speed suddenly, tires spewing dust as he leaves the parking lot.
The stretch of road in front of him lies in a shadow cast by the mountain to the west, and though the sky above is still a bright blue there’s an evening chill in the air, filling Bob with a sweet, melancholy awareness of endings. Not only is the day ending, but the warmth of a late Indian summer is coming to an end as well. A glance at the road in the rearview mirror makes him wonder about the unknown that will fill the same space he’ll leave vacant. Someone else will take his place at the tavern. Someone else will hear about the costs of sin.
For no good reason, he pushes in the lighter to heat it. And though he tries to be prepared, the pop of the chrome knob startles him, prompting him to give a little jerk of surprise, a reaction that briefly distracts him from the road. Refocusing his attention, he sees about twenty yards ahead a doe emerging from the woods, high-stepping cautiously, as though along paving stones. At the sound of the approaching car the animal pauses, bending her tawny neck to look back behind her. Even the squawk of the horn doesn’t faze her. She just stands there, evidently counting on Bob to steer around her, so that’s what he starts to do, slowing, curving to the right to make an ample arc.
He’s late to see the speckled fawn bouncing out of a tangle of briars. He veers onto the shoulder to avoid hitting the fawn and then has to stop short over crunching gravel to let a second fawn pass in frightened leaps, the two babies racing across the road while their mother waits with a majestic stillness, her eyes locked with Bob’s, holding him in place. Only when the fawns have disappeared safely into the woods on the other side of the road does the doe rock forward and clatter after them.
With the road empty again, Bob puts the car in gear and drives at a more cautious speed, savoring the memory of the encounter. The regal aspect of the doe had seemed tinged with a knowingness, as though she had the ability to communicate with words but was too proud to speak. Why did she need words if she could stop time with a glance? Unlike the waitress in the tavern, the doe seemed to think speech an unnecessary effort, a waste of breath in a world where nothing should be wasted. Bob marvels at how wild animals have no difficulty matching effort with intention. To live only with natural light—maybe this is the source of their commanding manner. They can blend magically with dawn and dusk, rippling along the surface of half-light, always unfailingly accurate with their distrust.
Bob is deep in thought, preparing the story he will tell his wife about the deer, and at first he feels the uneven motion of the car as an inevitable thing. Instead of moving smoothly, the MG is bouncing like it had bounced over the potholes back in the par
king lot. But Bob doesn’t have to be told that he isn’t driving across the parking lot. He’s traveling along a smooth road, a road without potholes, yet still the seat is shaking on its tired old springs, and Bob has to grip the steering wheel to keep himself from bouncing out of the car.
He’s reluctant to stop along the side of the road here, in the middle of nowhere, so he keeps bouncing, trying to convince himself that he’s not ruining the rim of the tire that must already be flat. The fact is, the spare mounted in the trunk is flat, too. It’s been flat for months. He’s been meaning to have it repaired or replaced, but he hasn’t had the time.
The MG limps along in second gear. A black hardtop Mustang tailgates for a while, and as it speeds up and passes, the driver signals at Bob with a thrust of his fist. Bob ignores him and continues urging his car forward, the flat tire slapping the road with a steady rattling.
Miraculously, he reaches a gas station before the MG’s steel disc wheel falls off entirely. The garage doors are open, and when Bob turns off his car he hears the whir of a drill. After examining the flat front tire, he enters the garage with a loud greeting. The whirring ceases, and from behind the front end of a Buick a man emerges, his white face striped with wide smears of grease.
“Hiya,” he says, extending a hand almost too oily for Bob to grip.
“Can you fix a flat for me?” Bob asks, motioning to his car.
“You got a flat?”
“I have a tire flatter than...” He pauses, momentarily at a loss for words. “Flatter than a crepe,” he says emphatically.
The man echoes in bafflement, “A crap?”
“A French pancake, I mean.”
“You French?”