Speaking in Tongues

Outside my bedroom window this morning was the sound of tiny bells jingling, or a belt gone bad in the engine—I couldn’t tell which—but suddenly I remembered the bird that awakened me most mornings back in that old house on the hill. Back when my life was tightly put together, like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There were three windows in that bedroom at the top of the stairs, and each morning I heard the call of a spirited bird, chirping the same message over and over. And there were days that I welcomed his message, and days that it pecked at the nerves below my skin. And while the message was the same—a whistled staccato—it was me who heard it differently, lying in bed each morning, the sun muscling its way past the blinds, past the black & white toile. Every morning that bird said the same thing to me, said the same thing to an indifferent world, and sometimes I understood him, and some days I did not.

Once there were many messages flashing on a muted black machine. We had climbed two flights of narrow stairs on a late August night. The messages came one after another, a caustic beep announcing the end of each one: how sorry they were to hear the news, how sorry they were about the killings. And he and I standing there, numb, forgetting even to turn on the lights. We listened and listened and listened. And then sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the dawn.

There is a message from Chris for several days on my phone. I am busy working, driving, cooking, reading, taking care of my son—and then I finally call her. When she answers, I hear the melancholy in her voice: this friend of 20 years. How we have laughed at the world, smug in our awareness, our belief that music can change certain things. And she is painting the living room of a lovely Craftsman, rolling milky gray over the walls while she cries. Is this all there is, Rachel? she says. Her voice catches. Just this? And I fumble around my tongue, knowing that she is both right and wrong, but then again I hold fast to my illusions, seeing them as the stepping stones along an uncertain path. I put one size-10 foot upon one and then the other, and most days this brings me joy. I imagine her rolling the paint over the walls, can smell the intensity of it, feel the flecks of paint on my arms. And I want to tell her that this, too, can bring joy, the simple act of moving that roller over a steady wall. But instead I tell her about the message I found in a fortune cookie long ago, which I keep in the back of my wallet: “When you row another person across the river, you get there yourself.” But Chris knows that I have grown tired of all this rowing, tired of the extra weight in my boat—and she scoffs at this with the gut laugh that I remember. Who are you kidding? she says—and we hang up.

When I call her back a week later, she doesn’t pick up. And I have left her three messages so far.

And on a cold night before leaving, the usual email with an unusual message. She says…what? That I have had opportunities that she has not—and knowing that, makes it hard for her sometimes. This is what she means, of course, but she types out something very different. Something that wounds, something that sneaks into all my unprotected places and stretches itself out. I close the laptop that night and turn out the light. Drown the message in darkness. This is the same woman who took me to a downtown hotel where they spoke in dizzying tongues, where they heard the message of God--while I heard only the echo of my own footsteps hurrying toward the door...

This morning, his email is there--a familiar name--and I am in no hurry. Two simple sentences, just twenty-four words, that say he wants to help in this terrible mess. And I can feel his goodness, his caring--and it makes me cry, makes me want to say thanks for those 24 words, but I do not know how. I type out the words and erase them with the backspace key because the message won't be bottled.

And I sit here tonight, on a winter evening. Beyond the window, there is only night time and raw branches. I check my cell phone, my email. They write in code, speak in tongues—this thing called language is so difficult sometimes... And I remember that man at his table on the street. He studied my open palm, traced one craggy finger along my storied creases, and said, You have an overwhelming desire to communicate… And I want to say many things on this cold January night; I want to send many messages. I want to say that I believe in words—even those I don’t want to hear, even those fleeting ones that I chase after in my own unruly mind. That I believe in love, even if I have lost it. In your forgiveness when you are ready. I believe in all manner of things—despite this cold night, despite the darkness and silence out there.…
***

I'm Telling

I confess that I fear aloneness—but not the kind you’re thinking of. I like the sound of my own breathing, of my own solid footsteps on these hardwood floors, the lively splash of water in the bathroom sink in the morning, the tick of the wall clock in the hallway at night. I like the hush of an empty house and the joy of bare feet on the coffee table and the slightly dusty smell of the book in my lap. Diet Coke spilled over ice into a glass, something salty while I read. When it gets dark outside, the first thing I do is close the blinds so no one can find me here....

I also like how my mind packs up and takes itself to different places when no one's around. I need only that space—where the world cannot see me; and even sometimes when they can, but when they are not paying attention. Often the hum of music acts as a runway, and I do not feel the lift-off, do not recognize the pulling away from a demanding ground. I go where I go unknowingly, yet willingly. But it has not always been like this. Many years ago I tried to train my mind to stay put—but it would not. And then she explained that it was a way to protect myself, and so I came to recognize this flight as a treasure, a gift…

And yet they feel sorry for me at times: Rachel alone over there—as I lie naked on the bed, listening to the silence of these walls, my hands cupped behind my head. I like the shape of my toes from this angle, the curve of my hips, and how my breasts respond to the cool air moving over my skin. Above me is a muted crack, just beneath the surface of the ceiling, and it runs the width of my room. As I study it, it reminds me of the schism of my two lives: one lived on the street, in the office, at a friend’s house; the other here in the silence of my empty house. And I do not fear either.

But I fear aloneness of another kind—the one that comes from being separated from history, from milk drawn from an old pail. I am energized by these many new faces, their eyes, their stories, and the different ways they try to reveal themselves—and hide from me. They want me to understand their essence, but only the shiny parts that they have Windexed, the parts that they have reconstructed and rehearsed. The scary stuff gets tucked into a back pocket, pressed to the bottom of a chaotic purse…

Yet there are times when I’m overcome by the desire to strip down and stand before you in my nakedness, palms open to your inspection. To show you first what scares me most—it’s as much a defense as anything—so you will put away your weapon. But when I stand there, plaintive, open, and my jokes flutter like lint into the carpet; and my tears for being hungry, for discovering my own humanity in a photograph, a painting, a poem, are something from which you turn away—to text, to lace a tired shoe—I feel my aloneness… Yesterday I heard the Muscle Shoals rhythm section on my iPod like a train coming on—and there were only strangers on either side of me, and I ached to have someone to turn to who would touch my arm, who would know why my skin tingled from that sound. It was Jeff who said listen, Rachel, all those years ago. Listen. And this young girl from a small town, moved alone to the city, listened... heard... felt... And he is dead these past many years, and I have kept walking.

And the scene in Tolstoy where the narrator switches to the artist’s perspective—and we both cringed, understanding that dark insecurity, that unbridled confidence, all in the time that it takes to open the door. But he is gone, too, the man who would understand that—who would cast a knowing look from across a crowded room when the air felt thick, felt full of the weight of so many stories, so many people working to be heard. I know what you’re thinking, Rachel, his look would say. And I knew that he did...

But there is no more of that.

This summer I will stand alone at night and listen to the rush of unseen waves along a craggy beach in North Truro. It will be windy and close to midnight, the moon like a quiet pearl in the sky. In the distance, the lonely call of the harbor lighthouse and a few scattered lights from P’town. I will feel around in the dark, trying to touch the shadows. And maybe I will even whisper to the wind how joyous and inconsequential the ocean makes me feel sometimes... This is of course what we used to say—and one time many years ago we made a fire on the beach, and I could see his steady profile, looking for things out there. Our lips were quiet that night because they didn’t need to move. And I heard him and he heard me...
***

Breath

She says that night that she is ready to be tossed in a box and put in the ground. This blonde haired lovely, this woman who has grown up alongside me. She sits on my couch with her reconstructed breasts, her tattooed nipples, her concentrator roaring over the strains of 70s music that the two of us have selected on the TV—that goliath machine giving her life, breath. Her quivering hand slaps at the length of hose, angling for more slack in the line, so she can move around a bit—and I see in that one quick movement that this would defeat me, being tethered like that, held down. But my lungs open and close like new, polished windows—me who has drawn smoke into their sponginess, and she has not. And her lungs are sealed shut, painted over by something unknown that picked her out of the wind and confiscated her breath--until she thought she would suffocate, she said, lying there undiagnosed in a sterile room in that Upstate town. She lay for two whole weeks, struggling for breath, while the nurse smiled, the doctor scribbled notes on a board at her feet, and the candy-striper asked if she wanted a treat. I can't breathe, she said. I really can't breathe...

That night she sips her wine on my couch and touches a trembling finger to a painful, teary eye. A side effect of some pills, and of course she knew it would attack her. We cover the eye with a $4.99 patch from the CVS, and it angers me to see her like this. Yet there is no one here to holler at, to threaten; no manager to page. Just the two of us on my couch on a winter night, and the din of her concentrator--and the empty package that the patch came in. I watch her, as each punch comes: she stands up, fists curled—this woman of the farm, born on the gentle side of things. This woman whose soul is a delicate thing--all cotton candy and grace—she stands stoic and strong as the punches keep coming and coming and coming. And what did I know, back then when we lived together in that town. I thought she was too quick to cry and asked so little of life. She stayed behind, listening to her own footsteps, waiting for love—while I boarded a bus that would take me to wide open places that I demanded all kinds of things from. And still, even tonight, she has hope that love will come, that it will come and find her because, after all, she cannot find it with one patched-over eye.

That night we drank wine and she could not see, and she said she hopes she won’t be blinded. Her doctor, when we called, was smug in his own steady breath, his own sober hand, and told her to use eye drops, hanging up the phone to turn back to his wife, to his ESPN. And my sister-in-law leaned her head back against my cotton twill couch cushion and struggled to open one ravaged eye to a doleful eyedrop from my steady hand. I stood over her, thinking how we had ridden all those waves from girlhood to the brink of middle age--and yet we never imagined this…

Tonight I am sitting on the same couch, and it’s quiet in here. She is back home, tethered, the roar of her concentrator something that has faded, for her, into the background, like the forgotten blush of new love, as the years go by and life is pumped into her nose one single pulse at a time. The transplant people tell her to keep her own lungs for as long as she can—as if there is any choice. Outside my living room windows tonight, a winter wind rages, rattling windows and banging against the summer things I forgot to take in from the patio. I listen, my bare feet propped on the coffee table, as the wind doubles back and launches itself in a chaotic dance that reminds me of the precariousness, the chaos, of life—of all of us getting knocked around one day at a time, breathing in and breathing out, until we are done.
***