Virtual Silence Read online

  “Not one word. But I saw her from the bus on the way home. She was with her mother. She was probably driving her to the therapist again. I miss her so much, Ginny. I miss us so much. What are we going to do?”

  “If you hear from her, let me know,” I said. “I can’t really talk now. We’ve got company over.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “I understand.” There was no indignation in her tone; I believed she did understand.

  I did my homework at a snail’s pace, for my attention span had dwindled to about two minutes. After that, even if I kept my eyes glued to the page in front of me, I stopped seeing the words and saw instead the images—Herman Gardener helping me to my feet, his hand lifting as if to cover his face, Bev’s eyes scrutinizing me over her menu, the waitress waiting for my response, her back, her blouse, her pad and pen, his bobbing head, his slumping wife, Terri’s legs, Bev’s legs, Bev’s chair, Bev dead.

  These images did not come and go the way you might expect. Rather, they were always there, had been since the day of their inception, though some of the time I was able to function over them—the way you attend to other matters while the TV is on without losing full awareness of it. Sometimes it was only the images, and that was not so bad. Other times the questions followed—everything from Why Bev? to What is the significance of Thomas Rockwell failing to punch out his time card? A blind spot, his former employer had said. And the thing about the questions was that there were no answers for any of them. In fact, they only generated more questions. I had always envied Sharon and Terri the ability to live so thoroughly in their minds. Be careful of what you ask for, right? I lived in mine now. It was a torture chamber from which there was no escape, a little black room with a solitary window from which I could see out but not squeeze through. “I can’t talk to him about it,” I heard Ida Newet saying in the kitchen. “I’ve tried. He’s says I’m imagining. He says I’m nagging. I feel … I feel … so unloved.”

  “How about some wine?” Mom suggested.

  “I can’t,” Ida said. “He’ll want to know why I was gone so long.”

  “So let him wonder,” Mom said.

  I finished my homework and got my trampoline out from under the bed and began to jump. Thomas Rockwell wasn’t the only crazed individual in recent times who had gone into a public place to take some lives before he took his own. I had read somewhere in a magazine that violence is cyclical. The last period of unfathomable violence in America had occurred in the 1920s. The one before that was the period about which my father was writing. Another coincidence?

  The women were laughing in the kitchen. Apparently the wine was doing them some good. “It’s my damn bladder,” I heard my mother say. “Don’t laugh! How do you think it looks at work? There I was, on my way over to the copier … and I knew he was watching … and suddenly I stop walking and sort of squeeze my legs together, sneeze, and go back about my business! Ida, I have to carry extra panties in my bag when I have a cold!”

  Ida Newet howled. “Well, at least it’s not as blatant as mine,” she said. “What do you think my kids think when they’re telling me their long-winded stories and suddenly I reach into my bag and pull out my inhaler and stick it up my nose?”

  I laughed aloud, for the first time in weeks. I had seen Ida Newet do that once. It gave me a moment’s comfort to think that these two middle-aged women could joke about their ailments. I tried to think if I had ever heard men do the same thing. I jumped off my trampoline and kicked the door closed and jumped back on again. No, my father had a bad back and Charles was prone to anxiety attacks, but I had never heard them discuss it together, much less laugh about it. I wondered if this male deficiency was linked to their potential for violence. I wished with all my heart that I could call Sharon—not the new Sharon but the old one, the one I had served, loved, and amused all my life—and ask her. Violent crimes were infrequent where we lived, compared to those that occurred in other places. Yet every time I opened the newspaper, I found more evidence that violence was everywhere, all-prevailing. A woman just a few years older than me had run out into the street naked to avoid being raped the other night. An eleven-year-old girl had watched her mother’s boyfriend try to get her head into a noose. A boy a year younger than me had slain his father and his father’s girlfriend, disposed of the bodies, and then invited his friends over for a party. When the reporters interviewed his friends, they said he was a good kid, helpful and patient. Had there been some telltale sign, some blind spot his friends had missed because they were too preoccupied with their own lives? Or had he really been a good kid all along, right up until that moment when he made the decision?

  I jumped off the trampoline, grabbed the TV remote control from my night table, and resumed jumping. Before the killings, I would have clicked until I came to a love story, a rock concert, or, knowing that Sharon would probably be watching it, PBS. Now I had no interest in any of them.

  It took only a few seconds until I found a slasher film. A terrified-looking woman, who might have been blind, was feeling her way down a hallway when a door opened behind her, revealing, at first, only a shadow. Then a man with a knife held high over his head stepped out of the shadow. Unlike the description of Thomas Rockwell that I had had from Sharon and Terri, this guy looked utterly calm. If there was supposed to be pain there, the actor was incapable of portraying it.

  I clicked again, until I had MTV. A heavy metal band was playing, its lead singer screeching demonically, while a woman in a torn blouse crouched against a brick wall, hugging her shoulders and looking from side to side anxiously. I clicked once more and found a dark-haired girl crouched in the corner of a stairwell with her knees up to her chest, almost like the woman I had just seen. The child was holding her hands on her ears. Two men could be heard shouting, and the louder they got, the more the child’s face contorted. Then a door slammed, and a man, presumably one of the shouters, appeared in the frame. “Come on,” he said, gently, so that I thought at first he must be okay. Then I realized that the child still seemed terrified, and when he repeated his command, it was more of a growl than anything else.

  Were these, I wondered, the types of shows that Rocky had watched? Was this the source from which he had got his courage?

  I turned the volume to mute and jumped and listened to the muffled laughter coming from the kitchen. Then I put away the trampoline and turned on my computer. When I was happy with the letter, I printed it and left my room.

  Mom and Ida Newet were standing at the door, Ida with her hand on the knob. Her ivory skin had turned pink, just like the Zinfandel they had been drinking. “Oh, it was great to see you again!” she said to me. When she hugged me, it was with a good deal more gusto than she had upon her arrival.

  “Well,” Mom said after she had gone. “I hope she makes sit home okay.”

  “Mom, I won’t be talking anymore for a while,” I said.

  “Thank God she doesn’t hab ver’ far tuh go.”

  “And I’ll need you to make several copies of this letter for me.”

  She took it from my hand, widening her eyes three or four times to get them to focus. “To who mit mi’ concern,” she read aloud.

  She must have heard how she sounded because she read the rest to herself—more than once if the time she took was any indication. Then she put the letter on the table, where we both stared at it for some moments. “Yer not goin’ to to … to talk anymore?” she asked softly.

  It seemed as good a time as any to start, so I pointed to “temporarily” in the second paragraph of my letter. She looked at me. She was so woozy she had to grab the back of the chair to keep her balance. “How many c-copies dyuh want?”

  I held up my hands and spread my fingers. “Ten?” she asked. I made fists and then spread them again. “Tuh-wenty, th-thirty, f-forty, fi-fifty,” she counted. I made an X with my pointers and then held them apart. She nodded. “Fi-fifty times two. One hunred copies,” she said. “I got it. I’ll do it. After all, I trus’ ye
r judgment.”

  5

  Ida Newet became a regular at our house, as did the Zinfandel my mother stocked for her visits. Sometimes she would come right from work, and then she and Mom would share the same glass, like sisters, I thought, before Ida hurried home to cook for Charles and my mother ran off to her evening activities. Other times, when Charles had to work late and Mom had a free night, the two would shop or take in a movie, and then Ida would come back for a couple of glasses before she went home. Most of the time they talked about Charles, or the twins, who were both away at different colleges in Boston. Other times they talked about me. “I think it’s okay,” I heard Mom say one night. “I trust her judgment. I really do. I think her silence is a sign that she’s angry, that she’s outraged. As well she should be. She was a victim too. Everyone who was in the diner that day was. The shooting was random. I think she’s searching for the right voice to communicate that.”

  Mom’s words of wisdom must have meant something to Ida personally, because one Saturday morning in late October when Mom was on the phone with her, I heard Mom say, “You what? You found your voice? What do you mean?”

  I tiptoed to my door to hear better, but when I peeked out, I saw Mom coming down the hall. I emerged so as not to appear to have been eavesdropping. “Ida’s on the phone,” Mom said. “She wants to know if we want to picnic with her today up on the mountain.”

  The invitation was not an aberration. Ever since I’d stopped talking, Mom and Ida always tried to include me in their excursions, all of which I declined. It was not that they wanted my company as much as it was that they wished to offset the invitations they believed I no longer received from Sharon and Terri. But I was not quite the outcast they imagined. To the contrary, once I had distributed my letters at school and given their recipients a day or two to digest them, I took my place in the cafeteria with the very same group of kids I had been sitting among since the middle of the year before—which is to say, Bev’s friends. I listened to all of their conversations—few of which had to do with Bev anymore—and if I had some input, I wrote it on the pad I always carried now and slid it down the table to the person for whom my remark was intended. Sure, there were some rolled eyes, some crusty comments, but for the most part, my acquaintances indulged me. When a party or some other social event was planned, I was invited along with everyone else—whether out of pity, or for Bev’s sake, or because now that I was sufficiently flawed I was more genuinely liked, I really couldn’t say—even after it became clear that I wouldn’t accept. See, it wasn’t that I craved company—you don’t when you live in your mind. But the alternative to sitting with them was to sit with Terri, who knew what was in my mind and might have wanted to talk about it. My mother and Ida Newet, however, didn’t know about my invitations because no one ever called me on the phone. You can communicate with a non-talker in person, but you can’t telephone her.

  I nodded affirmatively and saw a flicker of surprise flash in Mom’s eyes. She went back down the hall. “Yes, she’ll come too,” she said too cheerfully to be sincere.

  Except for school, where I now felt reasonably safe, I hadn’t been out in public since the killings. The familiarity of the landscape nearly made me gasp. I stayed low in my seat in Mom’s Yugo and kept an eye out for hostile faces in the few cars we passed on our way up the mountain. Surge, whose company I had insisted on, was in the back seat, which was barely big enough to contain him.

  Ida was standing beside her Four-Runner when we pulled into the lot. As soon as she saw us, she began to bob up and down on her little feet and to flutter her hand in the air. Sitting on her hood was one of those huge, old-fashioned straw picnic baskets with hinges in the middle of the wooden cover. A loaf of Italian bread was protruding from one end.

  “What a day!” Ida cried as we got out. “Look at the sky! Look at the valley! Look at the trees!”

  We looked up, down, and ahead, as directed. Then, as if she thought I might be deaf as well as dumb, Ida stepped right in front of me. “I have a special place,” she said breathlessly. “It’s back a ways. There won’t be many people there, if any. But I wanted to ask you first. Do you think you’d be more comfortable with other picnickers around?”

  Frankly, neither had much appeal. I had come along only because the thought of driving down to Herman Gardener’s house in Ridgewood, New Jersey, was becoming increasingly more frightening as time went by. Before I could attempt it, I would have to get used to getting out locally. I threw out my hands as if to say, “Whatever.” Ida caught one on the decline and gave it a little squeeze. Then she took up her basket and signaled for us to follow.

  We might have been three of the seven dwarves, hi-hoing our way along the forest path. Happy hummed and swung her basket. Grumpy, who wasn’t much for the outdoors, turned her head from side to side, recoiling from the foliage where it protruded and running down a list of all the people she knew with Lyme disease. I suppose I was Dopey, because as soon as the analogy occurred to me, I began to wonder in earnest when we would encounter our antagonist.

  But we encountered no one, and by the time we had arrived in the birch forest, I was enjoying the scenery and the crisp air almost as much as Ida was. The trees were all young, slender, healthy, and about the same height—which is to say dwarfish, like Mom and Ida and me. Their leaves flickered in the breeze like gold coins. We found a small clearing, and Ida set about spreading out the contents of her basket on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth she had brought. She cut off the crusty ends of the bread and fed them to Surge. Then she divided the rest of the loaf into three sections.

  She had thought of everything. In addition to a wide variety of cold cuts, she had potato salad, macaroni salad, and cole slaw in Tupperware containers. There was mustard, mayonnaise, Italian dressing, and dill pickles and chips, as well as apples, pears, and cupcakes for dessert. “You’ve got more here than we have in our whole kitchen at home,” Mom said sadly. “No wonder he’s the way he is. You’re too good to him. Take it from me, it doesn’t pay.”

  “Him” was Charles. They spoke of him so often that it was no longer necessary to say his name. But they seldom spoke of him in front of me, which was probably why they both glanced at me just then.

  I put my sandwich together hurriedly and turned aside, so that my back was to them. I rolled my head around on my shoulders, so that it would seem that my interest was in the scenery. They spoke for some moments about work, Mom’s and Ida’s, and then Ida described the dress that she had decided to wear to some function that she would be attending with Charles. Then, no longer able to restrain herself, Mom said, “So, tell me. What’s this about your voice?”

  Ida chose her words carefully. “Well, Jane, I got to thinking about some of the things you’ve said recently, and I decided that you were right. Each of us has to have a way of saying how we feel about ourselves. And sometimes words aren’t enough. You talk and talk and talk, and nobody listens anyway.” She stopped to see whether I would turn around. I didn’t. “Well,” she went on. Then she sighed abruptly. “Well, look.”

  There was a moment of silence, so that at first I thought they might be using hand-signals. Then Mom exclaimed, “Oh my God!” and Ida tapped me on the shoulder.

  When I turned, she was twisting her head away from me and holding her thin hair up on one side of her head. “I love it!” Mom cried. “I think it’s great. I absolutely love it!”

  I couldn’t see anything. Mom discerned that I was puzzled and told me to come closer. And there, in the little clearing between the back of her ear and her hairline was a red tattooed heart with a fancy gold “I” in its center.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” Mom reiterated. “I love it, I just love it.” But it was me that Ida was watching for a response. I took my little notebook from my pocket and wrote, Why the “I”? Or is it supposed to be a “one”?

  “It’s an I,” Ida said. We blinked at each other. “An I for Ida. It’s perfect, you see, because no one will ever k
now it’s there unless I show it to them.” She laughed. “Or unless I stand on my head. But I know it’s there.”

  “It must have hurt like hell,” Mom interrupted.

  “Oh, yeah, it did. I had such a headache when I left. And I had to sit holding my ear bent over so that the woman could work on it. All I could think of was, what if my ear stays like this?”

  I still don’t understand, I scribbled, pushing my pad between their faces.

  Ida spread her fingers out and her mouth opened as if she were groping for the words. “Well, Ginny, it’s like this,” she said finally. “I haven’t been feeling too good about myself lately.” She glanced at Mom. “With the twins gone off to college and all … It’s kind of lonely. Separation anxiety or something, I guess. It’s hard to explain. It’s just that I’ve been thinking of myself as this little, fat, useless, middle-aged woman—”

  “Oh, come on, Ida. You’re not fat or useless,” Mom interrupted again.

  This time Ida’s eyes didn’t stray. She was rolling now, saying this as much for her own benefit as for mine.

  “—but your mother and I have had some talks,” she continued, her fingers fluttering. “And I’ve come to realize that I’m more than this little, fat, useless, middle-aged woman. There are things about myself that I like. Lots of things—though I forget that sometimes. So I got the tattoo.” She looked upward, at a hawk that was circling overhead. “I got the tattoo so that I would remember to love myself.” And then, without any warning, she burst into tears.

  I liked Ida Newet’s tattoo, when all was said and done. Or rather, I liked the idea that she had changed something about her outward appearance in the hope that it would generate some change within. The weird kids at school, the ones who had blue hair, mohawks, or earrings in their noses, I had always thought of as show-offs, but now I saw that they were only trying to do the same thing as Ida, to muster up a voice that was more than a voice—although Ida’s was a whisper by comparison. I stood half the night in front of the mirror playing with my hair, pushing it up over my head and trying to see what it would look like spiked. I pulled it back, to see how I would look with it shaved, and then got out some of Mom’s scarves to see how I looked in different colors. I tried to imagine going over to Dad’s with a flamingo pink crew cut. Would he smile his noncommittal smile then, I wondered?