Unwhisperable

Our house not only magnified sound, but translated it, added a spin to it, juiced it up for effect. Call it a storey-teller. This had much to do with the resonance of hardwood, the layout, and malicious acoustics. So you had Father cracking leftover Christmas walnuts in the kitchen and me upstairs hearing him crack open skulls—leftovers from some war other than the annual tinselly one. How could it not catch my attention, this bone-crunching and splintering racket, left lobe collapsing into right—logic veering recklessly into creativity—nut meats exposed? Precisely the sort of thing I was after: booty from the interior.

However, descent into the kitchen would only bring disappointment. When had it ever brought anything else? Except toast. A man standing with his gut pressed lightly into the aluminum edge of the counter, wearing new, airmail blue, still-creased from the package Christmas boxers, chewing contemplatively as he stares out of a window as unrevealing as a night-black stamp, before him an absurdly high mound of walnut shells, irreparably broken, while the house remains intact, but groans and creaks and carries on from the effort.

I couldn’t go down to check anyway, as my curiosity was reputedly in remission.

Having spent a tad too much time looking for trouble, and succeeding in the quest, the household authorities had strongly advised a hobby. Which is why I was spending this precious, yet too-slowly dissolving evening of my life rustling through a five-and-dime store package of stamps, a starter philately set, trying to work up… what? Enthusiasm? Far too much to hope for. Likewise tepid interest, or mildly asphyxiating boredom. The diversion at hand appeared only to be diverting me into a mood disorder, dragging my robust personality over the borderline. Basically, my efforts were concentrated on not slitting my wrists and bleeding all over the Queen’s face or on any other worldly postage-worthy icon. What I really wanted was to read the letters onto which these paper scraps had once been affixed. I would have liked that very much, regardless of the quality of the contents. I wanted news of the world, the inner world of who thought what, and who did what to whom, and how much it hurt, and what happened then.

Not that I needed letters generally. Walls had ears, and ours had ears as big as laundry chutes. Confidential information whispered in an upstairs room reliably resulted in a dump of dirty laundry at your feet. I may not have collected much dirt from the clandestine goings-on in Malaysia or Hong Kong, but I had acquired a respectable heap of the local product. I offer here some samples from my varied collection.

My Aunt Faith. You’d never guess to look at her that she, rigid of mind and body, had an outward bound uterus whenever she sneezed. How she coaxed it back into place had yet to be disclosed, as this is not the sort of slippage a woman wants to discuss with anyone, including herself. Theoretically, and if only out of self-interest, knowledge of the infirmities of others should make us more sympathetic, but in Aunt Faith’s case, I was all for presenting her with bouquets of ragweed or gift bags bulging with particulate matter. In my view, her tongue, and possibly her soul, needed that pessary far more. Beyond the subject of her restless maternal organ, she was not shy about confiding to anyone who would listen the details of her recent near-death and out-of-body experience.

Two months back, she slipped on the stairs at her place and down she went. On the way, she not only saw the Lord, but He caught her essential self in His arms, while they both watched her material self roll like a log to the bottom. Thereafter she claimed Him to be, not only The Saviour, but her personal saviour.

(The Lord, I’d begun to notice, no longer operated as much by stealth as He had once done. Not only that but He had enlisted an expanding and highly annoying PR team. Get this, I buy a bag of wax lips from Park’s Variety and Mrs. Park, a grown woman, tells me about being so exhausted the night before that she barely got her prayers said before falling asleep. I care? Sly proselytizing, that’s all.)

(Good chance Mrs. Park has a disease more degenerative than religion that’s making her tired. I’ll enquire, delicately, tease her hidden ailment out, although physical failings aren’t my main area of interest.)

Faith’s fall was said to be my cousin Nile’s fault. He’d left an empty on the top step, or at least didn’t claim otherwise, didn’t try to shift the blame onto his dad. Nile didn’t give a shit, not then or at an age usually described as tender. Made of tough stuff, he’d entered the world as hardtack, Teflon-coated, and no wonder, his mother apparently indestructible. She came to at the bottom of the stairs, reborn, and with a bonus set of saucepan-sized bruises on her rear. The Lord’s thumb prints.

According to my Auntie Viv, Faith herself was as drunk as a lord at the time (the only lord in attendance) and being too blotto to break any bones, she bounced, rubberized, the entire way down. She’d likely left the empty on the step in the first place, letting Nile take the blame, plus a crack on the head. He didn’t care. If his mother had died in the fall, whether he cared or not would have been his to know. But, seeing as Faith got reborn out of the deal, the crack on the head was probably more for show. They smacked each other around on a regular basis, there being a kind of dumb-show vocabulary to it.

Faith’s story has its moments (quick ones), but Viv’s no fool. She knows what she’s talking about, being a drinker herself, although not a secret one. Viv had too much obvious fun for that, and in any event was a socialist when it came to classified information. She believed in sharing the wealth. Anyhow, if that’s all there was to it, if booze had become Faith’s private vice and inspirational source, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Some hushed-up transgressions in town were of a similar order—commonplace, garden-variety, low-wattage sins. The only embarrassment occasioned by their discovery would derive from their inferior quality; the only way of keeping their inherently dull power intact would be to keep mum. Low interest being better than none.

“Mrs. Park has a problem with her head,” I confided to Auntie Viv, curious to see how this might play. “Not anything serious, I don’t think.” Sometimes one has to be proactive, even with the truth.

“You don’t say.”

Having been shortchanged on more than one occasion at Park’s, Viv must have felt she had proof enough. The story went around and came back as a sizable malignant tumour. My community is nothing if not caring.

Viv had the right idea. Secrets can be corrosive. Better out than in. If Mrs. Park hadn’t been so dutifully repressing her anger under a thick blanket of prayer laid down night after night, she wouldn’t have gotten so sick in the first place. When soon afterward I stopped by Park’s for some jawbreakers, it gratified me to hear her suppressing her anger a whole lot less, and for that I should be commended.

I had to wonder if her husband beats her, too? Looks the type.

Some people do harm themselves over the most piddling of unforgettable misdeeds. Guilt or regret can whet to an eviscerating sharpness, indiscretions, or stupid mistakes or impulsive, uncharacteristic behaviours. Like our principal, Mr. Morris, swiping a lipstick (Cherries in the Snow) out of Batty Pock’s purse after she excused herself (diarrhea) during an interview about what her son did with that dog. (The things that go on!) Or like Gloria Kay telling her elderly dad after he wet himself that he made her, “sick sick sick.” Experiencing a bout of PMS at the time, and having that very day drained the old man’s bank account, Gloria never entirely forgave herself for misspeaking. (His black eye came later.)

And, getting back to the subject of tumours, I know without a doubt that some people carried dead weights within them that slowed their stride, but quickened their hearts unhealthily with the burden. Jane Miller’s furtive abortion; Francine Smith’s drug problem; Tommy Lean’s sneak affair with his wife’s sister that led to divorce and remarriage with the sister and an empty church on one side at the wedding, plus the very same devil of a mother-in-law and a festering load of misery because the second sister turned out to be more maritally chilly than the first. You’d think a dentist wouldn’t be so hasty. (For fact-checking, their phone numbers are all in the book.)

Before he croaked, rashly and unexpectedly, I used to visit Grandfather Young in the old age home, a harshly lit institution softened for its residents by their deteriorating eyesight and their withdrawal from expectation. Here, it was almost too easy, like picking windfalls after a storm. The storm being in this case the final blast of life itself loosening and unravelling the bindings of propriety and discretion. Perversities, intolerances, cruelties—the residents let fly long-held tidbits. The aged divulged seasoned secrets without batting an eye, and whether some did so knowingly under the forgiving shelter of dementia, I, for one, was not about to smoke them out.

Grandfather Young, a soft-spoken man, generous and personable, had more liberal views than most of his contemporaries, and I’d never heard him denigrate others for any reason. So imagine my surprise when I entered his room one day and heard, “Get out of here you black bastard!” This he addressed to the West Indian doctor who had kindly stopped by at the request of a vacationing (gambling, not golfing) Doc McIvor.

The man didn’t linger, but took the hit in a manly enough way. God knows, he must have been used to it, although in town racist remarks were usually delivered more thoughtfully. Had Grandfather picked it up out of the air, all those old brains leaking malice, or was some long buried rot beginning to surface? Or was he simply having some nasty fun?

“You’re a bastard,” he said.

“Your mother’s a tramp.”

“Okay, that’s it, Grandad. I’m out of here.”

“Don’t go, Hero.”

“Don’t be mean, then.”

“You still diddling that cousin of yours?”

“I’m only a kid! Jesus.”

There had been some hanky-panky, true, but that was my business.

“Girls. All whores.”

“That’s it, I’m leaving. See you around.” I stood to go.

“Wait, wait. You want to hear what Osbert Kay’s been saying about his daughter, don’t you?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I resumed my seat, primly. “But listen Grandad, you better watch what you say. You know, in that doctor’s black bag there are needles.”

For the record, Nile and I had this game that had been going on for some time, innocent enough. He’d undress me, slowly, slowly, then when stripped clean, he’d run his hands all over me, up and down, legs and feet, back and neck, chest and belly, not an inch of my bod exempt. Talk about sensitive material! But that’s all there was to it, not like that business he got up to with some of the older girls. The whole deal friendly and harmless, a familiarity among the related, a feel-good family event. Unfortunately, my house had treachery built into its framework. Try to have some kind of fun behind closed doors and sure enough one of those doors would pop open at the exactly the wrong moment. With one’s mother standing on the threshold, aghast.

I wish she would, for there was something, something not right. When my parents were out, I cruised through the house searching for it, busy little fingers unlocking and opening and prying loose. You’d think the place would cooperate, but squeaking cupboards do not translate. What I found in the medicine cabinet only told me that among us we suffered from headaches, constipation, colds, gingivitis (who wanted to go to a dentist who’d screwed his wife’s sister?), cuts, warts, indigestion, car sickness (guess who?), depression, watery eyes, insomnia, and hemorrhoids. Commonplace afflictions. But I knew that a more grievous one, an affliction that caused uncommon pain had been secreted somewhere in the house. Like a lost key, it was unreachable for having fallen through a crack invisible to me.

When people smile at you with pity, or smirk with the pleasurable pressure on their lips that withholding knowledge about you causes, you understand that it’s an open secret. Everyone knows but you, so they’re making some nominal effort to protect you—while letting you know it—but mostly they’re keeping themselves entertained. I don’t think this thing involves my father, or not directly. He may have hurt a man who cheated him once, and I don’t know how badly, but that really is a family secret, scabbed over and untouched, not picked at by anyone, including me.

That leaves my mother. She could whip up a batch of shame faster than most mothers can make a cake. What had she been up to now? Lips were sealed (mostly with other lips, but that’s another story). Including Auntie Viv’s, which did not bode well. She fobbed me off with a questionable cliché, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you, eh.” Plus a glass of doctored O.J. that had a real kick to it. An aid to Viv saying, “Forget it, Hero.”

“What’s up?” I asked Nile, a generation older than me and packed solid with knowing.

“Let’s play our game and see.”

“Not allowed, remember.”

“All the better.”

“People are thinking things about me. Tell me.”

“Poor baby.” Before undoing the top button of my shirt, he picked up a strand of my black hair and rolled it between his fingers, as if assessing its worth. “Who’s your daddy?”

Here I thought this a trifling question. Impish, if formulaic. No response required. Seems I was wrong.

You see, for all my searching, the answer wasn’t in the house after all. It was in me. Philately turns out to be the appropriate punishment for my curiosity because I myself bear a stamp. My mother, clever woman, had concealed it in a place I’d never think to look. But I did. This, a covert operation performed without anaesthesia. I had to reach in and claw it out. Had to bloody my hand digging into my own heart.