by T. C. Boyle
He pulled a U-turn in the parking lot and felt the Corvair’s engine rumbling behind him, and though he knew it was a flat-6, it felt like a locomotive. He flicked on the radio and found another rock station. Zeppelin. Gorgeous. The sky was full dark now, and the air had cooled. He could smell the thick, tangy air of the Gulf off to the west, and he pointed the Corvair northeast, headed back toward the Atlantic, only the thick floating peninsula of La Florida left to cross. He thought about pulling over at a pay phone to call Sherrill, then decided against it. There would be hell to pay when he got home. But the devil was in the back seat, keeping time to the music, and hell was a long way up the road.
JESS WALTER
Mr. Voice
FROM Tin House
MOTHER WAS A STUNNER.
She was so beautiful, men would stop midstep on the street to watch her walk by. When I was little, I’d see them out of the corner of my eye and turn, my hand still in hers. Sometimes I’d wonder if the ogling man was my father. But I don’t think the men ever saw me. And my mother didn’t notice them, or pretended not to notice, or had stopped noticing. She’d simply pull my hand toward the Crescent, or the Bon Marché, or the fountain at Newberry’s, wherever we were going then. “Come on, Tanya, no dawdling.”
This could have been my mother’s motto in 1974: no dawdling. I was nine then, and Mother thirty-one. She had four or five boyfriends at any given time—she eliminated them like murder suspects. We lived in a small apartment above a jewelry store where Mother worked as a “greeter.” I think the owner’s theory was that men wouldn’t dicker over carats with my tall, striking, miniskirted mother looking over their shoulders. She seemed to have a date whenever she wanted one, at least three or four a week. I knew them by profession: “I’m seeing the pilot tonight,” she would say amid a cloud of hair spray, or, with a dismissive roll of her eyes, “The lawyer’s taking me to Sea Galley.” Mother left me alone in the apartment when she went on these dates and I fed myself and put myself to bed. But she was always there when I woke in the morning, sometimes hurrying the pilot or the lawyer out the door. After one of the men spent the night, I’d wonder if he might stick around for a while, but the next night he was gone and in his place came a fireman or an accountant.
Then, one day, Mother stopped dating entirely. She announced that she was marrying one of the men—a guy she’d been out with only three times by my count—“Mr. Voice.” He was a short, intense man with buggy eyes and graying hair that he wore long and mod, framed by two bushy gray sideburns and a thinning swoop across his big forehead.
“You’re marrying him?” I was confused. Mother always said that one day my father would return, that what they had was “different than other people,” that these other boyfriends were just “placeholders” until he came back. I didn’t remember my father, and she didn’t talk about him much—where he lived or who he was—but she’d get this faraway look and say things about him like “We’ll always be together” and “He’ll come back.” Until then, she was just biding her time—or so I thought—until Mr. Voice came along.
“What about my father?” I asked. We were packing up the apartment into grocery-store boxes.
“Your father?” She smiled gently. “Your father’s got nothing to do with it. This is about making a house, and a family for us.” Wait. She was doing this for me? I didn’t want her to make a family for us; I wanted to wait for my father.
She set down the dishes she was packing and pushed the hair out of my eyes, bent down close. “Listen to me, Tanya. You’re a very pretty girl. You’re going to be a beautiful woman. This is something you won’t understand for a while, but your looks are like a bank account. You can save up your whole life for something, but at some point, you’ll have to spend the money. Do you understand?”
It was the only time I ever heard Mother talk about her looks this way. Something about it made me sick. I said I understood. But I didn’t.
Or maybe I did.
Mr. Voice was fifty then, almost twenty years older than my mother. Although his name was Claude Almond, everyone knew him—and I mean, everyone knew him—as Mr. Voice. This was the name on his business cards, the name in the phone book, the name on the big sign outside the studio he owned, the name people greeted him with on the street, mimicking his basso profundo: Hey, Mr. Voice. By the summer of ’74, when my mother married him, Claude was on every radio station on the dial, on TV commercials, at civic events, hosting variety shows. Mr. Voice narrated our daily life in Spokane, Washington.
Looking for AM/FM-deluxe-turntable-8-track-stereo-speaker sound with psychedelic lights that rock to the music? Come to Wall of Sound Waterbed on East Sprague, next to the Two Swabbies—
Starlight Stairway is presented once again this week, in vivid color, by Boyle Fuel—if you need coal or oil—call Boyle—
This weekend, at Spokane Raceway Park, we’ve got the West’s best funny cars—Kettleson’s Mad-Dog Dodge Dart, Kipp’s Killer-Cuda, and the Burns’ Aqua Velva Wheelie Truck. Your ears are gonna bleeeed—
That was Mr. Voice.
I remember their wedding more clearly than I remember either of my own: Mother wore a light-purple minidress, and she put me in a dress that matched it—in hindsight, perhaps not something a nine-year-old should wear. “I think people can see my underwear,” I said.
“At least you’re wearing some,” she said, tugging at her own skirt. Our long brown hair was fixed the same too, smooth as liquid behind headbands high on our heads, bangs shiny and combed straight. I got to wear lipstick for the first time: a shiny lacquered coat of pink that made my lips look like two candles. I was Mother’s only bridesmaid. Claude had four children from his first marriage, but only his youngest son, Brian, who was seventeen, stood with him, in a brown tux that matched his father’s. He had these sleepy brown eyes behind big black-framed glasses and a shock of bushy hair that looked like a wave about to crash.
They were married at the end of the 1974 world’s fair in Spokane—such was Claude’s celebrity that the TV stations covered it and there was a picture in The Spokesman-Review: “Local Radio Host Married at Expo.” The wedding was in a little outdoor theater-in-the-round on Canada Island, and a judge friend of Claude’s performed the ceremony.
While we waited for the bride to emerge, Claude stood smoking a pipe in his brown tux and ruffled white shirt. He was talking to a couple of businessmen in gray suits when he saw me, walked over, and looked down at me with those buggy eyes of his—“Listen, Tanya, I know this came fast for you. I just want you to know, I’m not trying to replace anyone. You don’t have to call me Dad. You can call me Claude if you want. Or Mr. Voice.”
This was the first real conversation we’d ever had and it was confusing—that omnipresent radio voice telling me I didn’t have to call him Dad. Then Claude kissed the top of my head and returned to the men in suits.
Behind me, someone spoke, mimicking Claude’s thundering rumble. “Listen, whatever your name is.” I turned. It was Claude’s son, Brian, doing what must have been a practiced impersonation of his father. “You can call me Dipshit if you want. Or Dickhead Douchebag.” Then he rolled his eyes.
Mom and Claude had written their own vows, New Age gibberish about being “mate and muse” to each other and “sharing soul and sinew,” not until death do them part, but “as long as we grow and glow.”
The judge pronounced them man and wife; they shared an uncomfortably long kiss and then walked down the aisle, to applause. I tugged at my skirt and followed with my new stepbrother, who gracefully offered his arm. I took it. Brian pursed his lips and covered his mouth. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I always puke at weddings.”
Claude had a big, sprawling new rancher on the back end of Spokane’s old-money South Hill, with an open floor plan and a built-in hi-fi system tied to intercoms in every room. He loved that intercom system. You could hear every word spoken in that thin-walled house, but Claude still insisted on using the intercoms. I’d be reading, or
playing dolls, and there would be a hiss of static, and then: “Tanya, have you finished your language arts? . . . Tanya, Wild Kingdom is on . . . Tanya, dinner’s ready, London broil.” We ate in a mauve kitchen overlooking a shag-carpeted sunken living room. On the other end was a hallway with three bedrooms lining it: Mom and Claude’s, mine, and, every other weekend, Brian’s.
In the A-frame center of the house, the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling—contributing to the open feel of the house, and to some of the worst memories of my childhood. Such was the combination of Claude’s vocal power and 1970s home construction that I could hear every sordid thing that happened in the master bedroom the first year of their marriage. Claude’s voice must have been key to their foreplay, because he narrated their sex life the way he did weekend stock-car races.
“Dance those ripe tomatoes over here . . . Ooh, let’s get it on, baby . . . Mm, yeah, Mr. Voice digs his little hippie girl . . .”
Claude apparently liked to role-play too, because sometimes I’d hear bits and pieces of various bedroom dramas. Like pirate-and-wench: “Prepare to be boarded, m’lady.” Or stern British headmaster: “Someone has bean a bloody bad girl.” He’d play Tom Jones or Robert Goulet records—miming them, I think—and then pretend Mother was a groupie: “Hello, pretty lady. How’d you like the concert tonight?”
I never heard my mother’s voice during these sex games, and based on how quickly Claude emerged from their bedroom in his too-short silk robe afterward, the sex itself was less involved than Claude’s narration leading up to it. Sometimes I hid under a pillow to block the actual words, but there was no hiding from the rumble of his voice in that house.
Mr. Voice was everywhere then; in my tenth year I couldn’t escape him telling me there was “strawberry shortcake for whoever cleans their plate,” or that I should “git on down to Appliance Round Up for the rodeo of savings,” or that my mother “put the head in ‘head cheerleader.’”
One night they were playing some kind of Egyptian pharaoh game—“Take it all off, slave girl”—when my door flew open. This was Claude’s custodial weekend and in the doorway was my stepbrother Brian, looking crazed.
Without a word, he took me by the hand, pulled me into his bedroom, and sat me on the floor in front of his stereo. “Listen,” he said, “any time I’m not here and that shit starts up, just come in my room, OK?” Then he put his black stereo headphones on my ears and cranked the music: “Wooden Ships” by Crosby, Stills & Nash.
I closed my eyes and played with the springy cord while I listened. Halfway through the song, two things happened: “Wooden Ships” became, in my mind, the story of Brian and me—Go, take your sister then, by the hand—and I fell in love with my stepbrother.
I opened my eyes. Brian was sitting on his bed, cross-legged, filling some kind of little pipe with brownish-green mulch that I intuited must be marijuana. I took the headphones off. Immediately, I could hear Claude’s voice, more distant than it had been in my room, but still sonorous and rich. “Pluck a grape from my mouth, slave girl!”
“Honestly, it’s not the sex,” Brian said, still working on his pipe. “It’s the acting that offends me.”
Then he looked up at me and cocked his head, smiled a bit. “You really do look like her,” he said.
Back then, I would sometimes stare at my face in the mirror and think of Mother—did I really look like her? Would my father recognize me if he saw me? Would I have fifty boyfriends and then cash out my looks like a bank account? What made someone beautiful, anyway? Mother and I had two eyes, eyebrows, a nose, a mouth—just like anyone. Beautiful? I felt chubby and had a spray of freckles across my nose. Would I get tall like her? Would the spots on my face go away? Would her face become mine? And what did it even mean, beautiful?
But that day, I was never so happy to be told that I looked like her. I put the headphones back on, smiled, and closed my eyes to listen to the song—And it’s a fair wind blowin’ warm—I smelled pot smoke for the first time that afternoon, as Claude finished with his slave girl.
Not long after it started, no more than a year, the sex part seemed to end for Mother and Claude, or at least the overacting before the sex ended. I wondered if my mother had just had enough. Or maybe Brian had said something to them about the thin walls.
Having been married twice myself in the forty years since that time, I now know that a marriage can just settle into a domestic swamp too, and maybe that’s what happened with Mother and Mr. Voice. Still, I can’t recall a happier, more peaceful time than the second year of my mother’s marriage to Claude. Unlike our old routine in the apartment downtown, she was around every day when I got home from school and every night when I went to bed. She quit her jewelry store job and embraced the domestic life, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry; she even dressed like a mother, her skirts moving down her thighs almost to her knees. One day I got dressed for school and asked what had happened to the jumper I was wearing. It was strangely stiff. “Oh, I ironed it,” Mother said.
Ironing. Who knew?
Claude seemed happy too, or at least busy. He had just started a brand-new business—“Mr. Voice is going national!”—in which he read and recorded books: Bible stories and thrillers, mostly for long-haul truck drivers. “Every new semi truck has a cassette tape player,” he said. “And they all want stories.”
Claude worked with a partner named Lowell, a lawyer whose job it was to secure the rights to the books. I loved Claude’s new job because it meant I no longer heard him on the radio or TV all the time. He was not Mr. Voice anymore, but my stepfather, helping with my homework and pulling the last of my loose teeth. I don’t know if it was the new business, but Claude seemed to age ten years in the year he developed Mr. Voice’s Stories on Cassette—his swoop of hair disappeared completely; what was left was long and gray on the sides and in back. With the round glasses he’d begun wearing, Claude looked like a sick Benjamin Franklin. He and my mother began to look more like father and daughter than husband and wife.
That year, Brian spent more time at the house too, which I liked a great deal. He’d started out being pretty cool to Mother, but she was nothing if not persistent and nothing if not charming and she instituted a campaign to get him to like her, complimenting his clothes and his hair and making his favorite food, tacos, at least once a week. She called him “Bri-guy,” and ruffled his hair at the dinner table. Brian played guitar in a little two-man band with a high school buddy, a drummer named Clay, and Mother encouraged them to set up a practice space in the garage. Clay was tall and dark-haired, with an intense stare, and something about the attention that Mother showed him made me a little uncomfortable. “Well, if it isn’t Clay,” she’d gush, or “You get handsomer every time I see you, Clay.”
That spring Mother set up guitar lessons for Brian with a guy she knew named Allen, who was the guitarist in a big local band called Treason. I remembered Allen as one of the men she’d dated during her “No dawdling” phase—one of the murder suspects, as I used to think of them—a greasy guy with long blond hair who would come pick up Mother on a motorcycle and take her to some downtown club called Washboard Willie’s.
But he must’ve been a great guitar teacher because Brian really improved. I loved it when Brian got more serious about the guitar. I’d sit on the floor of his bedroom while he played the beginning of “Stairway to Heaven” or the intro to “Layla.” Brian’s voice was, ironically, thin and reedy, but I still held my breath when he sang, and sometimes he’d sneak my name in there, in the chorus to the Allman Brothers’ “Melissa.” But back home he’ll always run / To sweet Tanya . . .
One day, I was in my room doing homework when I heard Mother and Brian come in the door from guitar lessons. I hopped off my bed and ran toward the hall just as the door slammed. Brian stomped past me and threw his guitar in his bedroom closet. Mother went into the kitchen and lit a cigarette. I lingered outside Brian’s door, waiting to hear him play whatever song he’d worked on that day
with Allen but he just sat on his bed and opened a book. He said he was done with the guitar.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because guitar is for assholes,” he said, looking up from his book and glancing past me, toward the kitchen.
“What about Clay?” I asked. “What about the band?”
“There is no band!” he snapped. I backed out of his room.
That night at dinner Brian wouldn’t acknowledge Mother and she seemed nervous around him. They both stared at their plates while Claude rambled on about the story he’d taped that day—some Western novel about a sheriff who shoots an outlaw and ends up caring for the dead man’s horse. Claude was clueless about whatever was going on in the house that night. Meanwhile, I was furious with Mother. Something had clearly happened, and I sensed it had something to do with her. If she drove Brian away, I would never forgive her.
The next afternoon, while I was at school, Mother searched Brian’s room, found his marijuana pipe, and confronted Claude with it when he got home from work. From my room, I could hear them arguing. “I won’t have this in my house,” she said. “What if he’s smoking it around Tanya?”
“I’ll talk to him,” Claude said. “It’s a confusing time for young people.”
“Confusing?” Mother scoffed. “Your son is a druggie and all you can say is that it’s confusing? I don’t want him around Tanya. That’s final.”
“Linda, be reasonable.”
They went back and forth like this. I walked down to Brian’s room, ran my hand over his guitar, put on “Wooden Ships,” and settled under his headphones.
Sometimes your life changes in big, dramatic ways, as though you’ve been cast in a play you don’t remember auditioning for. Moments have the power of important scenes: being paraded in a tiny purple dress at a wedding, someone putting headphones on you and playing a rock song. But other scenes seem to occur offstage; it’s as if you just awake one morning and understand that a certain thing is now something else.