Vox(9)

“Jean!” The voice comes from behind me, followed by the slam of a door. “Jean!”

“Fuck off,” I say. “Or I’ll keep talking.” Suddenly, I don’t care anymore about the shock or the pain. If I can keep screaming through it, keep up my anger, drown the sensation with booze and words, would the electricity continue to flow? Would it lay me out?

Probably not. They won’t kill us for the same reason they won’t sanction abortions. We’ve turned into necessary evils, objects to be fucked and not heard.

Patrick is yelling now. “Jean! Babe, stop. Please stop.”

Another light goes on in the Kings’ house. A door squeaks open. Footsteps. “What the hell’s going on out there, McClellan? People are trying to sleep.” It’s the husband, of course. Evan. Olivia is still peeking through the blinds at my midnight show.

“Fuck you, Evan,” I say.

Evan announces he’s calling the cops, although not quite so politely as all that. Then the light in Olivia’s window goes dark.

I hear screaming—some my own—then Patrick is on me, wrestling me down to the moist grass, pleading and cajoling, and I can taste tears on his lips when he kisses me quiet. My first thought is whether they teach men these techniques, whether there were pamphlets handed over to husbands and sons and fathers and brothers on the days we became shackled by these shiny steel bracelets. Then I decide they couldn’t possibly care that much.

“Let me go.” I’m in the grass, nightgown stuck to me like a snakeskin. It’s then I realize I’m hissing.

It’s also then I realize the pulses are closer together.

Patrick grasps my left wrist, checks the number. “You’re out, Jean.”

I try to wriggle away from him, an act as empty of hope as my heart. The grass is bitter in my mouth, until I realize I’m chewing on a mouthful of dirt. I know what Patrick’s doing; I know he’s set on absorbing the shock with me.

So I stay silent and let him lead me back inside as the wail of sirens grows louder.

Patrick can talk to them. I don’t have any words left.





EIGHT




Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Sonia’s blank stare as I walk her through the rain to the bus stop is the worst reproach, my punishment for last night’s grappa-soaked tirade in the backyard. Certainly worse than Officers So-and-So lecturing me on my disturbance of the neighborhood peace.

This is the first time I haven’t told her I love her before sending her off to school. I blow a kiss, and immediately regret it when she raises a tiny hand to her lips and starts to blow one back.

The black eye of a camera stares at me from the bus door.

They’re everywhere now, the cameras. In supermarkets and schools, hair salons and restaurants, waiting to catch any gesture that might be seen as sign language, even the most rudimentary form of nonverbal communication.

Because, after all, none of the crap they’ve hit us with has anything to do with speaking.

I think it was a month after the wrist counters went on that it happened. In the produce section of Safeway, of all places. I didn’t know the women, but I’d seen them shopping before. Like all the new mothers in the neighborhood, they traveled in pairs or packs, running errands in sync, ready to lend a hand if one of the babies had a meltdown in the checkout aisle. These two, though, they were close-knit, tight. It was that tightness, I understand now, that was the problem.

You can take a lot away from a person—money, job, intellectual stimulation, whatever. You can take her words, even, without changing the essence of her.

Take away camaraderie, though, and we’re talking about something different.

I watched them, these women, taking turns to ogle each other’s baby, pointing at their hearts and temples in a silent pidgin. I watched them finger spell next to a pyramid of oranges, laughing when they fucked up one of the letters they probably hadn’t signed since the sixth grade when they passed messages about Kevin or Tommy or Carlo. I watched them stare in horror as three uniformed men approached, I watched the pyramid of oranges tumble when the women tried to resist, and I watched them being led out of the automatic doors, them and their baby girls, each of the four with a wide metal cuff on her wrist.

I haven’t inquired after them, of course. But I don’t have to. I’ve never seen those women or their babies since.

“Bye,” Sonia says, and hops onto the bus.

I walk back to the door, shake out the umbrella on the porch, and stand it to dry. The locked mailbox with its single slit of a mouth seems to grin at me. See what you’ve done, Jean?

Our postman’s truck stops at the corner and he gets out, swathed in one of those clear plastic raincoats the post office issues for inclement weather. He looks like he’s wearing a condom.

My friend Ann Marie and I used to laugh at the mailmen on rainy days, snickering at their shorts and silly pith helmets during summer, at their galoshes slurping through slush in the winter months. Mostly, we laughed at the plastic raincoats because they reminded us of the getups little old ladies wore. Still wear. Some things haven’t changed. Although we don’t have female postal workers anymore. I suppose that’s an enormous change.

“Morning, Mrs. McClellan,” he says, sloshing up the walk toward the house. “Lotsa mail today.”