I wanted to tell him none of my girlfriends would expect me to listen to them talk for a half hour non-stop unless someone in their family had just died. For a moment
I didn’t know what to say. He looked boyish. He wanted to be forgiven. He held a credit card. He hoped he hadn’t talked too much.
You did, I said. But he wasn’t expecting me to say that.
But there’s this splinter of a thing, an echo that I keep hearing about not being listened to. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this.
My first memory is being wheeled by my mother along Southern Boulevard, another hot day in the Bronx. She was with her friends. Strollers weren’t popular as they are now. The baby carriage was black in color with a foldable top. I was lying on my back, when a band of light flickered across my eyes. I heard voices. They were laughing. I cried, but nothing happened, louder, wondering why they weren’t listening. Finally, the carriage was pushed into the shade. Crying brought results.
I reached school age, and mistrusted whatever I was supposed to learn there.
My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Burke had taught eons of school children, including my sisters. A bitter, mean woman who was known to punish insubordinate children by locking them in the clothing closet, she always wore a smock and tucked her hair into a net that drooped over her forehead. The milk she served during morning break was always sour.
She made me nervous. I felt sick every morning.
I found sanctuary in the vacant lot adjoining our apartment building. It was where I strained mica rocks into rusted cans and hid the results inside a wall that divided our block from the street below. I spent afternoons forging a pathway down a steep hill, holding on to the side of trees and rocks and sat on a granite rock inside my private Wonderland.
Chicory, clover and stray dogs. Those were my companions.
There were few children my age. My sisters were much older than I. Then there was my favorite doll, Judy, who self-destructed one afternoon into a pile of sawdust.
I was inconsolable. Judy and I went everywhere together. I tucked her inside my own baby carriage and made sure not to keep her in the sun. She was not fancy, her hair pressed in plastic brown waves and her eyes always open. Judy had one outfit, a plaid skirt. I examined her pink flesh and the V of her crotch. Admittedly, she was plain-looking. But there was something about the way she fit into my arms and how she smelled. I loved Judy, yet she died in my hands, sawdust from her head had trickled through my fingers.
My mother gave me a replacement doll wrapped in a cellophane box. This doll “talked,” had outfits, and was everything that Judy was not. But I had no relationship with this imposter. Judy was like myself, plain, constant, and frequently overlooked. It was impossible to pretend I liked her. I isolated her on the top shelf of my closet and didn’t open the box. Something had been lost. It was my first experience with death.
Silence and death hollow you out, a meditative darkness without stars.
I don’t need to be silent anymore. I want to speak my truth: how we need to listen, to move beyond news headlines, accusations and shootings and build relationships with each other realizing that we or I are not the only ones, how disease and death touches us all and sooner or later we
cry out.