For the past eight years, always starting on August 12th, Ruth Young lost her voice.
Tag: literary
My father, who died when I was five, had a reputation as a great newspaperman. I never doubted that I could be one too. “It’s a matter of destiny,” my mother would say to me with her usual drama. I believed her, and that’s where my trouble began.
There’s a way young skin looks that no amount of plastic surgery can recapture. It has an unmarred translucence, as though the flesh were stretched under a fluorescent street-lamp. But I think it was the little red baseball cap he wore backward, like a catcher, that sent me off my feet. His name was Chris. He mowed our lawn.
When I imagined my funeral, this wasn’t what I had in mind.
For eight years I dreamed of fire.
A single drop of water changes the ocean.
“I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin’s-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn’t quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like. I need the hard metal clack, and I need those keys to sometimes catch so I can reach in and untangle them, turning my fingertips inky. Without slapping the return or turning the cylinder to release the paper with a sharp whip, without all that minor havoc, I feel I’ve paid no respect to the dead. What good is an obituary if it can be written so peaceably, so undisturbingly, in the dark of night?”
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
When Randi died, my family went haywire: one by one we shorted out. My father, a dignified cardiologist, took to drinking and belligerence. My mother’s mannered calm gave way to hysteria. I became pale and inept and forgot how to hold conversations.
The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old. One sentence and I’m lost. One sentence and I can hear his voice in my head, that butterscotch-syrup voice that made goose bumps rise on my arms when I was young, that turned all of my skin warm and alive with a sibilant S, the drawling vowels, its shocking fricatives. It always sounded like a whisper, the way he talked, the intimacy of it, the way the words seemed to go into your guts, your head, your heart. “Geez, Bob,” one of the guys would say, “you should have been a radio announcer. You should have done those voice-over things for commercials.” It was like a genie, wafting purple and smoky from the lamp, Bobby’s voice, or perfume when you took the glass stopper out of the bottle.
