Virtual Silence Read online

  Ida threw her hands out. “Well, no sense crying over spilt milk, is there? Besides, I figure he’s feeling bad enough without me telling him, ‘I told you so’. You know how he is; he holds everything in. He’s had a lot on his mind lately, pressure at work, I suppose. He’s ripe for one of his anxiety attacks. If he had one here, in front of everyone, he’d be devastated. I think the yoga will help him.”

  Dad narrowed his eyes into slits, scrutinizing her. Ida responded to his look with an abrupt laugh. “We’ve changed the subject,” she cried. “You were going to tell us about your book.”

  Dad stuck a cigarette into his mouth and took a stick that was protruding from the fire and used the burning end to light it. He exhaled slowly, with his eyes on the house. “I can’t really tell you much about the book because I’m not completely sure where I’m going with it yet, but I can tell you the story on which it’s based.”

  He went on to tell us the entire story then, Sharon, which was fascinating. Basically, it’s about Anne Bonny, the woman who married and sailed with the infamous Calico Jack and who was his equal in the atrocities she committed. Dad related many of their adventures, but the one that interests him most, the one that he is focusing on in his book, concerns Anne Bonny’s attraction to a sailor whose ship she and Calico Jack captured and who was given the choice of walking the plank or joining the crew. This sailor, who went by the name of M. Read, opted for the latter, and Bonny, who was used to having things her way, set out to seduce him. You can imagine how surprised she was when M. Read was forced to reveal that he was a she! Having been compelled by her parents to dress like a boy in her youth, so that she would appear to be the proper sex to receive her grandmother’s inheritance, she had grown accustomed to boys’ ways, and when her husband died some years later, she dressed as a male again and escaped to the sea.

  As I was curious to see what Dad was doing with this material, when he was done talking about it I dug my pad out of my bag and wrote, Why don’t you get me some chapters to look at?

  He held my note over the fire to read it. “Now?” he asked. “You can’t read by firelight.”

  I reached into my shoulder bag and removed my headband flashlight. I put it on my head and turned it on. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the light and I quickly turned it off again. “Okay,” he said, but he still didn’t move.

  Just then the door opened and Goliath appeared. “Why don’t we bring the party indoors?” she called.

  So we went inside, Sharon, and Dad gave me his manuscript and I brought it into the bedroom, which is where I am now. But for a time I was too busy listening to the adults in the living room to concentrate on reading.

  As soon as Dad and Ida settled in, Goliath suggested that they blow out the lanterns and talk in the dark. At first they just talked about how absolute the dark was, how isolated we were. In spite of the fact that my “companion” is here in my bag at my side, their talk succeeded in frightening me. Then they began to talk about pirates. Ida kept asking why the pirates always seemed to take such delight in their atrocities. “Because the victim is contemptible,” Dad said, which got me thinking about all sorts of things which I’d hoped to be able to put out of my mind.

  Then Charles asked what I was doing, and when Dad said that I was off reading the manuscript, Charles began to talk about that. “I think you should really play up Bonny’s attraction to Read,” he said, slurring a little as a result of all the wine he’d drunk. “Let the reader really feel her obsession. She can’t sleep nights. She tosses and turns and gets out of her berth, or whatever it was she would have been sleeping in, and wanders around on the deck wondering how she, being married to the jealous Calico Jack, is going to work this thing out, knowing that she must have Read one way or the other, no matter what the consequences, and unable to think as far ahead as the consequences, just so caught up in the obsession itself that she can’t drive her mind to think of anything else. The obsession is the most intriguing part of the story, Ed. If Read makes her confession too soon, before Bonny’s obsession has really been fully established, you lose your hook.”

  He went on in this vein for some time, and when he was through, Goliath laughed. “You sound like a man obsessed,” she hooted. Then she began to talk about dancing, her own obsession. Her voice seemed to come from different places, and I suspect that she was gliding around the room as she spoke. Finally, Ida announced that she was going to bed and asked Charles if he was coming along. No, he said, he wasn’t tired. But a moment later Goliath said that she was going to bed, and then Charles said that he might as well go too. Dad is the only one who is still up, sitting in the dark all by himself.

  I finished reading the first chapter of his manuscript just before I began this letter. In it he describes Anne Bonny’s initial reaction to M. Read. Read keeps apart from the others and Anne finds her far too sullen for her tastes. Still, she is intrigued by Read’s looks, which, Dad writes, are “unbearably fragile for a boy on the brink of manhood.” The obsession that Charles suggested is not present at all at this point.

  But what I am intrigued with, Sharon, are Anne’s looks. Dad describes her as being fine-boned, but also broad-shouldered and of remarkable height. And where the true version, as he related it to Ida and me earlier, states that her eyes were blue and her hair black, Dad’s Anne has greenish eyes that twinkle when she laughs and reddish hair. He says, in fact, that there is a “manishness” about her, as if she were the “embodiment of both sexes.”

  My very words, Sharon! (See yesterday’s letter.) Do you see what he’s doing? He’s using Goliath as a model for his Anne Bonny!

  I am so confused, Sharon. On the one hand, as far as his relationship with Mom is concerned, this is very good news indeed. On the other, I find this incredibly distasteful. My own father, a criminal of sorts. When an artist hires a model, there is no discrepancy about the role she will play.

  Is this the sort of thing that passes for love among adults these days? One person using the other? And how will Goliath feel if and when she reads the manuscript? Surely she’ll recognize herself in it; she’ll think he believes she’s evil. And Sharon, she is anything but. When I think of how sweetly she comforted Ida … And can you imagine what virtue she must be endowed with to have bothered to take goofy, drunk Charles (who lost our boat, for God’s sake!) into the house to help him relax with yoga?

  I’m tired, Sharon. I’m going to end here and go to sleep. If nothing more occurs, then this will be the last you will hear from me until we stranded souls find our way home again. Otherwise, I’ll write again tomorrow.

  Love,

  G.J.

  15

  12-25

  Dear Frankie,

  Forgive me for writing to you again. I know that you are busy amusing Surge and that hearing from me will only serve to remind you of our awkward farewell and the fact that my return (and thus Surge’s departure), by the time you receive this, should be imminent. But the fact is, I may not return. If this letter reaches you at all, it may be months from now, when some summer visitor discovers our remains and my letters among them.

  You see, Frankie, we are stranded on this deserted island. Charles Newet let our boat get away. We only have enough food for a few days. It is probable that we will starve to death.

  Because I see my own death looming before me, and because too of recent events concerning the adults I am with (the details of which I will not bore you with at this time), I feel that I must let you know my true feelings for once and for all.

  I love you, Frankie. But you are on a seesaw; you could go either way. I saw the look in your eye when you watched that murder movie at my house. And I’ve seen the look in your eye when you play with Surge. You’ve got two distinct sides, Frankie. Only the love of a woman like me can insure that you abandon one and develop the other to its full potential.

  Oh, I know these words sound harsh. It’s not your fault in the first place. You’re male, so already the odds are against you.
Did you know that ninety percent of all crimes throughout history were committed by men? I suppose it started back in the days when men were hunters and gatherers and women had to stay close to camp to keep an eye on the children. Naturally, your sex had to be aggressive, and genetic memory, apparently, has kept you that way, even though we live in times in which such aggression is no longer necessary. Wars can be won with buttons nowadays, and if more women were in places of leadership instead of men, they might be done away with altogether, replaced with feminine warfare, which is to say negotiation and compromise.

  And if it were only that you were male, you might still be able to defeat this thing, at its core at least, and emerge, as the majority do, with only an inflated ego and a propensity toward domination. But your father abused you emotionally, and physically too from what I gather. You’ve grown up motherless, in poverty, and with no self-esteem. It’s only natural that you would look at the tough man in that awful movie and say to yourself, I want to be like that; if I were like that no one could do me any harm.

  Let us save you, Frankie, Surge and I. If you keep saving your money, you should have enough by September to get that car you want so badly. Let’s go away together then. We can start a new life, in Boston, if that suits you. I’ve applied to a few colleges there. We can live in an apartment off campus. You can finish high school and then I’ll help you to get into a college yourself. We’ll both work. The way you were that day in the mountains—so at ease—keeps coming back to me. The way you are with Surge … You could be a veterinarian, Frankie. Or an environmentalist. You could be any one of a hundred things. Let me be the mother who was taken from you. Let me be the sister you never had. Let me be your friend, your lover, your muse. I’ll never use you, Frankie. I’ll never hurt you.

  And if the worst happens and I don’t come back, then keep this letter with you always. Read it when you feel yourself drifting. Remember that there was once a girl who loved you and who offered to spend her life looking after yours.

  Love,

  G.J.

  16

  12-26

  Dear Sharon,

  I’ve done something awful. I hardly know how to begin to tell you about it. Once you’ve heard, you will surely want to add this letter to your other documents, but I beg you to resist the temptation. Burn it, Sharon, the moment you’ve read it.

  In my own defense I can only say that I have not been myself—a complication that you of all people are bound to understand. I don’t just mean since the day of the killings. As I explained in my two previous letters, for better or worse I fashioned a new skin for myself when I was forced to abandon the old one. And I was comfortable in it, more or less, until today.

  Furthermore, I hardly slept at all last night. While the adults were up and about, it was easy enough to imagine that we would be rescued. But after I had finished your letter and then one other, and everyone, including Dad, had gone to bed, I began to feel certain that no one would come to rescue us, that we would die here, from starvation—or worse, by the hands of some pirates who may descend on the island in numbers too large for me to even consider holding them off with my acquisition, the nature of which there is no longer any sense in keeping from you. I have a gun, Sharon. And today I used it.

  Ida awakened me very early, before the sun had quite risen. She must have had the same kind of night that I did because her little round face was full of misgiving and her eyes, which are generally bright, were dull. “I think we should go to the beach now,” she whispered, “to see whether there are any boats about.”

  I reached into my bag, found my pad and pen, and wrote, Should we go to the sound side or the ocean?

  She considered my question over the paper cup of orange juice which she had brought into my room with her. Finally she said, “We should probably awaken the others. Then some of us can go to the sound and the others to the ocean. We’ll have to take matches and gather driftwood, then make a fire and pray it can be seen at some distance.”

  I followed her into the kitchen where we found Goliath rummaging through the cooler. She retrieved the remains of the chocolate cake, put it on the counter, and began to break off pieces with her fingers. She was dressed only in a T-shirt and black cotton panties. “I’m going to wake up Charles and Ed,” Ida announced. “I think we should get out right away to look for boats.”

  Goliath shrugged and stuck a chocolate-coated finger into her mouth. Ida went to knock on Dad’s door. “Right there,” I heard him say in a gruff, startled, sleep voice.

  Rousing Charles was not as easy. Ida stood at the door and explained about the watches in detail. I was still in the kitchen, so I couldn’t hear his response, but it must have been negative because then Ida went into the room and closed the door behind her and a muffled argument ensued. In the meantime, Dad came in, rubbing his eyes with his fists. When he saw Goliath in her underwear, he coughed uneasily. Goliath only turned her back to him and continued to pick at the cake.

  Charles came in with his arms crossed over his chest and a sour expression. He took a good long look at Goliath’s backside. Meanwhile, Ida got down on the floor and used one of our cartons to draw a map of the island, as best she remembered it from our nautical charts, which had gone the way of our vessel. Some parts of the island, she said, were too dense with foliage to be gotten through, but about a mile to the north there was a break through which a few of us could gain access to the beach. The others, she thought, should go to the sound, not to the place where we had come in, but to a place west of it where there was a point extending out for some ways.

  “I’ll take the ocean,” Goliath said, her back still to us. “The sound’s too smelly.”

  “Good,” Ida said. “Ginny and I will go with you and the men can go to the sound.”

  “Wait a minute,” Charles said. “Maybe I want to go to the ocean.”

  “Oh, Charles, be gracious for once,” Ida snapped.

  So the three of us took half of the sandwiches that Ida had prepared before waking me and walked to the ocean. We gathered broken branches along the way and had the makings of a good fire by the time we arrived. We prepared it, but Ida thought it best to wait to light it until we actually saw something.

  We saw nothing, Sharon. The beach was quite beautiful, but I was in no mood to appreciate it and am certainly in no mood to attempt to describe it now. Goliath, however, was so thoroughly impressed that she left Ida and me sitting on the sand and went off to gather shells in the plastic bag that we had brought along to collect our trash. We watched her go, her legs long in her cut-off jeans and her gait as jaunty as a child’s. When she had almost disappeared from view, Ida turned toward me and said, “He did sound like a man obsessed.”

  I don’t think she was actually speaking to me. I think she was speaking to herself and just happened to turn her head in my direction at that moment. Yet, she looked so tragic sitting there in her pale pink sweatsuit with her arms wrapped tightly around her chubby knees that I decided a response was called for and placed my fingers gently on her forearm. She looked at me, her features scrunched up miserably. “I want to go home,” she whined.

  I nodded sympathetically and then we both turned our gazes to the horizon. In fact, we were so preoccupied with the hazy wavering line where we hoped to see a vessel appear that we failed to notice what was going on in the foreground. A returning Goliath informed us. “Look,” she cried. “Dolphins!”

  There were several of them, and it was a curious thing, in view of the rising tensions, to see them churning through the waves so playfully. My inability to appreciate them (there was a time when I would have gone out after them) only further depressed me. Goliath, who had been running, was breathless. “Aren’t they magnificent?” she exclaimed. She put down her bag of shells, spread her arms, and twirled, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. Then she plopped down next to Ida and put an arm around her. Ida scrutinized her. “He did sound like a man obsessed,” she declared.

  Goliath seemed con
fused for a moment. Then she got it. “Oh, that. I was only kidding him.”

  “No, but you were right,” said Ida, a stream of tears running down her glossy round cheeks. “I know Charles. He’s a very linear thinker. Very logical. He’s not creative. He’s not one to talk about abstract concepts. The way he went on and on about how Ed should make his pirate woman obsessed, the way he groped for the words to express the extent of the emotion he thought Ed should endow her with.… well, that’s so un-Charles-like.

  “He said that Ed should make her unable to sleep, that he should make her toss and turn and wander about the decks. That’s just what Charles does lately. I wake up in the middle of the night all the time and find that he’s not in bed. It’s occurred to me before, during these last months since we started having problems, that he might be having an affair. Everyone I suggested that to said I was crazy, that Charles would never do that to me. Now I know I was right.”

  “Did you tell Charles you thought that?” Goliath asked.

  “Yes, I mentioned it a few times. He got very angry with me and said I had a suspicious mind. I thought he must be right and hated myself for having such a flaw. But now that I know that he really is … involved … with someone, it’s a relief. You see, I’m not crazy after all.”

  “Oh, poor Ida,” Goliath whispered, pulling her closer.

  “I don’t want to be like this,” Ida sobbed. She bent her head and buried her face in her knees. “I don’t want to be this weepy woman, this mushroom. I just want everything to be the way it was.”

  “There, there,” Goliath cooed. “It’ll all work out.” Then she bent forward, so that she could see me. Mushroom? she mouthed.

  I shrugged. Goliath smiled and I smiled back at her.

  “I told him that once,” Ida went on. “I told him that my well-being hinged on his love, and do you know what he said?”