Mama was never terribly particular about the baby-sitter either. Any warm body old enough to carry me out in case of fire or use a telephone was considered good enough. I was often left shut up in my room, ignored or put to bed hours before I was supposed to be asleep. Many of the baby-sitters had girlfriends or boyfriends over. When I was only seven, I saw Nona Lester letting her boyfriend fondle her breasts and put his hand up her skirt. They seemed to think it was funny to have me as an audience.
Did all this cause me to be an elective mute?
I never talked about any of it. I kept it to myself, swallowed it down like some bad-tasting medicine and tried to keep it from ever coming back up. Some of it did, of course. Some of it rode in the nightmare train that rattled and rushed through my dreams making me toss and turn and wake in a sweat with a small cry.
Sometimes the cry brought Daddy, if he wasn't working at night. It never brought Mama.
No wonder I thought I hadn't even uttered a sound. What difference did any sound make?
Silence greeted me: I greeted it back with silence.
It was like staring someone down.
The darkness backed off. The train of nightmares came to a halt. I lowered my head to the pillow, took a deep breath and closed my eyes again.
Music entered, seeped into my mind from every available opening until my head was an auditorium in which a full orchestra played and I began to sing.
My voice transcended every ugly sound. I couldn't hear car horns, people screaming at each other or screaming in fear. I was traveling high above it all, floating on the notes.
Music gave words their souls.
What was the point in using them without it?
I used to wish real life was an opera or a musical like The Phantom of the Opera in which everyone sang when he or she spoke.
Mama would be the elective mute then.
Most unhappy and mean people would. They actually hated the sound of their own voices.
Not me.
&nbs
p; I just kept it special, kept it waiting in the wings, waiting for the music.
1 Mama's Plan
Whenever I was alone in our apartment, which was quite often, and if I was very quiet. I could hear the sounds of other families below and around us. They traveled through the thin walls and in or over the pipes. I could move my ear from the wall on one side of the room to the other or take myself to another room, preferably the bathroom or kitchen, and press my ear to the walls there and hear different noises-- what I thought of as the symphony of the Garden Apartments. It was almost like changing stations on a radio.
There were families who always seemed to be at war with each other, complaining, screaming, threatening in growls and shouts. There were those who spoke softly, enjoyed some laughter and even some singing. And there were often the sounds of someone crying, even sobbing, as if someone was walled in forever like in the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Of course. I could hear television sets and hip-hop music. There were at least a half-dozen white families in our project, but their music wasn't very different. and I often heard as much shouting and crying from them as well.
I didn't know any other person who paid as much attention to the symphony of the Garden Apartments as I did. They were too busy making their own noises to listen to anyone else's and rarely did an hour pass in their homes when silence wasn't broken. Silence, I learned early on, frightens people, or at least makes them feel very uncomfortable. The worst punishment imposed on my school friends seemed to be keeping them in detention, forcing them to be still and shutting them off from any communication. They squirmed, grimaced, put their heads down and waited as if spiders had been released inside them and were crawling up and down their stomachs and under their chests. When the bell that dismissed them finally rano, they would burst out like an explosion of confetti in every direction, each talking louder than the other, some even screaming so hard that veins strained and popped against the skin in their temples.
Mama wasn't any different. The moment she entered the apartment, she turned on the radio or clicked on the television set, crying, "Why is this place like a morgue?"
If she had done some drinking with a girlfriend, she would dance and laugh, calling to me to join her while she fixed dinner; if I didn't come or if I made a reluctant face, she would pounce on me and accuse me of being strange, which she blamed on my daddy and his side of the family.
"Never seen a name fit better than the name I gave you, girl," she would declare. "The only time I ever see a smile on your face is when you're singing in that church. You going to be a nun or something? Wake up. Shake your booty. You got a nice figure. honey. You're lucky, you don't take after your daddy in looks and be big boned like that Tania Gotchuck or somebody similar.
"You got my nose and mouth and you're getting my figure," she said with her hands on her hips, turning as if she were surrounded by mirrors.
Mama didn't need mirrors to look at herself though. She could spot her reflection in a glass on the table or a piece of silverware and suddenly fan her hair or touch her face and complain about aging too quickly. She wasn't. She was just anticipating it with such dread that the illusion of some tiny wrinkle forming or a single gray hair put hysteria into her eyes and panic in her voice.
"You wouldn't be so crazy nervous about yourself if we had another child," Daddy told her. "It would give you something more important to worry about."
He might as well have lit a firecracker in the middle of our living room, but for as long as I could remember. Daddy wanted to have more children. I know he wanted a son badly. However. Mama grumbled that giving birth to me had added a halfinch or so to her hips and another child would surely turn her into another one of those "walruses waddling around here with a trail of drippy-nosed brats they couldn't afford to have. Not me. I'm still young enough to turn a head or two."
"That's all that makes you happy. Lena," Daddy retorted. "Being the center of attention."