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Growing Up in Silence
by Anel Viz
This is how my lover, John, describes his childhood. He uses it as an excuse for his constant chatter, when I complain he won’t let me get a word in edgewise. He claims to suffer from siopeilophobia. (Don’t look up the word. I tried, and couldn’t find it.) You must take what John says with a grain of salt, since he is prone to exaggerate, but I suppose it must have some basis in truth.
It’s something of a miracle that I ever learned to talk. I grew up in a silent household. My parents, locked in a loathing relationship, never addressed a word to each other. Instead they posted notes, which could show up anywhere around the house. They kept these notes as short and cryptic as possible, so that by the time the message contained in the original had been conveyed an entire mini-conversation in writing had often taken place: Fix it! (taped by my mother to a vase in the living room) Fix what? The leak. What leak? Bathroom sink. Downstairs? And so on. Not until I went to school did it dawn on me that speech was an art widely practiced within the family. I also learned to read, and discovered that the notes they’d been leaving for each other were seldom pleasant and never polite. I drew my own conclusions. I remember Mrs. Meany, our sadistic third grade teacher who made fun of us kids as an antidote to a boring classroom, jeering at me for writing “groan-up” on a spelling test. An honest mistake. If I understood the origin of the word differently, it was not without cause. I was a bright pupil. Once I’d started school, my parents began communicating through me, and I became the message-bearer of surly gods. My new role did not send me scurrying back and forth between them, for they would voice their messages in the other’s presence and they expected on the spot delivery. (They did not avoid one another’s company; they simply ignored it.) So ingrained was the practice, that if my father said, “Tell your mother I have to work late today,” I’d turn to her and say, “Dad’s working late today,” not “Dad says that he...” It never occurred to me to say, “You heard him.” I’d become a master of diplomacy long before I reached puberty. They did their best to keep up appearances. For example, my father might hand me an attractively wrapped box, my mother sitting not six feet away from him on the sofa, and say, “Give your mother her anniversary present.” I never learned what lay behind their animosity. There may not have been an initial disagreement or fight or infidelity. Perhaps they disliked each other from the start. Just as they did not avoid each other’s company, they did not cease to cohabit. That I was the only proof that their marriage had been consummated was pure coincidence, unless they also practiced family planning through pithy correspondence. One weekend morning over a late brunch my mother said, “Tell your father it was a false alarm.” “Dad, it was a false alarm.” “Is your mother trying to tell me she isn’t pregnant?” “So you’re not pregnant, Mom?” “You can let your father know he’s right for once.” “Mom isn’t pregnant.” So I was not to have a little brother or sister after all, born, like me, out of deadlock. I must have been about ten years old at the time. Clearly, they assumed that I knew where babies came from, though neither of them had ever spoken to me about sex, which was probably a good thing. Come to think of it, neither of them ever spoke to me about anything. I didn’t dare bring friends home. It spooked them. Rather, I spooked them. I didn’t mean to; it was automatic. I lost the first friend I ever introduced to my mother. Dad was at work. “So you’re John’s friend Robbie I’ve heard so much about,” she said to him. (To him!) “How about some milk and cookies?” “Mom wants to know if you’d like milk and cookies. She’s heard a lot about you.” Robbie looked at me as if I was out of my mind, but I couldn’t stop myself. He stayed less than an hour and by the time he left he was a good candidate for ten or more one-hour sessions with a pediatric psychotherapist. I heard he started having nightmares and wet the bed. I’m afraid my goodbye to him clinched it: “Mom says come again often.” He didn’t. That’s how I earned my reputation as a geek. Funny that we should associate the word with computers now. If my parents had had the option of email or text messaging, it might never have happened and I would have been spared that label. But I suppose I could have been called worse. And I was, after my hormones kicked in and I began to look longingly at some of the more well-developed boys at school. Fortunately, I’d become used to them treating me like a freak. “You’re not a freak,” I tell him, “but I do wish you’d shut up when we make love.”
© 2008 Anel Viz
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