The Voiceover Artist (7 page)

“M— M— Mom,” Simon said.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Th— this is m— myoo— music.”

The commercial was
not
music. It was chattering nonsense. But I buried this opinion deep inside me, alongside the very next thought I'd had:
If there is any music in this, Simon, it's a kind of music you'll never make.

 

•••

 

AFTER SIMON GAVE
 up on the clarinet, I focused my energy on something I could control. My boys would never be equal in every way that mattered, but I could do everything in my power to show them they were equal in my love.

For example: if, at dinner on Monday, I asked Simon about his day before asking Connor about his own, I made sure to ask Connor the same question first on Tuesday evening. If I read a book to Connor, I'd listen to the radio with Simon for the same number of minutes I'd spent reading. Chores were doled out in pairs—one for Simon, one for Connor—and if one boy's chore proved easier than the other's, he was made to help his brother finish his job.

“You start together,” I'd say, “and you end together.”

All of this came naturally because I loved my boys equally. But even my demonstrations of equal love would join speech therapy and clarinet lessons on my list of failures.

Connor's fifth birthday was August
 
25
th, two weeks after Simon's seventh. That night, when the cake plates and empty milk glasses had been cleared away, I sat the boys down at the kitchen table to show them two receipts. The first was for the gift we'd just given to Connor, a year's subscription to
 
TV Guide
. The second was for the Matchbox cars Simon had received as his present—what do you get the boy who already has all he wants in a radio older than he is?

I pointed to the total on each thin, wrinkled piece of paper.

“Do you see these numbers?”

Connor and Simon knelt in their chairs and leaned in for a closer look.

“Connor's birthday gift cost fifteen dollars and thirty-two cents,” I said. “Simon's birthday gift, including tax, cost fifteen dollars and thirty-four cents.”

The boys looked up at me, seeming confused about what to make of the numbers.

“I want you to see that, although your gifts are different, your father and I spent the same on each of you for your birthdays. Neither gift was more expensive than the other.”

That was good enough for Connor. “Okay!” he said, sliding off his chair. “Can I go watch TV now, Mommy?”

“Yes, you may,” I said.

Having made my point, I went back to the sink, picked up the gray sponge, and dipped my hands into the dishwater, which was now lukewarm. It was another minute or so before I saw that Simon was still at the table, staring at the receipts.

“What's the matter, honey?” I asked.

Simon glanced in my direction without meeting my eye.

I dried my hands on the towel hanging over the oven-door handle and sat next to Simon, leaning forward until my head was on the same level as his. “Tell me.”

With his eyes still on the receipts, Simon licked his lips. “W— w— w— we're n— not th— the same.”

“Who isn't the same?”

“M— me and Connor.”

I tilted my head and smiled. “Honey,” I said over a laugh, “everyone is different from everyone else. And the ways that you and Connor are different don't matter to me.”

It was this afterthought of a phrase—“to me”—that betrayed the truth about the differences between Simon and Connor, a truth that Simon seemed to confirm for himself as he stared right through me. The ways in which Simon and Connor were different would matter very much. They mattered already. And my attempt to minimize the truth had only proven to Simon that his mother's love—impartial though it was—had no power to change it.

 

•••

 

Through it all,
 I tried to show Simon that he was loveable, even with his stutter. Part of the way I showed this was by trying to love Simon's father.

Frank responded by refusing the little courtesies I paid him in front of Simon, from the cream I offered to pour in his coffee to the kisses I tried to plant on his cheek before he left for work. And when he and I were alone, he ignored me. In short, Frank proved to me that his gut feeling had been right all along: he didn't deserve my love. Even so, I kept trying to love Frank. I refused to let Simon believe that inheriting his father's stutter meant that Simon, too, was unworthy of love and incapable of loving as he should.

I might have been able to do without Frank's love if he'd loved Simon as well as I wanted him to. But their shared stutter came between them. Frank saw too much of himself in Simon. When he stuttered, Simon could not help but hold up a mirror to his father. Because he had never really liked himself, Frank could not love Simon enough. He couldn't even see Simon's boyish adoration for the blessing it was.

Frank courted Connor's love in a way he had never courted mine. Connor was still four when I first understood how Frank saw him: as his belated chance to win over the fast-talking boys who'd teased Frank when we were at Leyton Elementary and Leyton High, boys who were now the kings and court jesters of the union hall and the bar in town and the break room at the Caterpillar plant. While I plotted to find speech therapy for Simon, Frank refashioned himself from a quiet, hard-working loner into a sitcom stereotype. He made a throne of his easy chair and sat Connor alongside him, drinking beer and barking his disapproval at the televised mistakes of men who were ten times the ballplayer he'd ever been. Frank made himself worthy of Connor's love, in his own mind, by ensuring that the man Connor loved was hardly recognizable, to himself or anyone else, as the Frank we knew. As his father transformed before his eyes, Simon was made to feel his love was not enough. And because I had known Frank as the wounded, vulnerable stutterer he was, my love was discounted even as it died.

 

•••

 

THE OCTOBER AFTER
 he turned seven, Simon went completely silent.

At first, I thought he might still have been recovering from a sore throat that had kept him out of school the past Friday. By Wednesday of the following week, I supposed that Simon was just tired of hearing his stuttered sentences finished by his little brother. But Wednesday night, at dinner, I noticed Simon staring across our Formica table at his father with wet, wide-open eyes. His food was untouched, but the muscles of Simon's jaw were flexed in front of his ears. Frank fixed his eyes on his plate, which he guarded with his elbows as if someone might try to stab his half-eaten slice of meatloaf and run off with it. While asking Connor various questions about his day at school, I glanced at Frank several more times. He never met Simon's glare.

I knew then that something had happened between Simon and his father, but I didn't know what, and I didn't believe that asking either Frank or Simon about it would do anyone any good. So I waited and listened. And Simon stayed silent.

On Thursday, I got a call from Simon's teacher, Ms. Wells.

“I'm sorry to bother you at work,” she said, without sounding the least bit sorry.

Speaking to Ms. Wells, who was probably ten years older than me, I had to fight the feeling that I was seven again and speaking to my own teacher.

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “Is anything wrong?”

“I'm calling about Simon,” Ms. Wells said. “He hasn't been speaking all week.”

“Well,” I said, sighing, “I appreciate you telling me. Simon hasn't said a word at home, either.”

“He hasn't,” she said.

“No.”

“Is he ill?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“Well, Mrs. Davies, as you surely know, dealing with Simon's stutter requires patience from me and his classmates, and my patience is running out. This silence amounts to insubordination. It is disrupting my classroom.”

My mouth hung open until I felt the heat rising in my face. “I'm sure this has been very hard for you.”

“It has, yes,” Ms. Wells said. “And I'm concerned for Simon, of course.”

“Oh, your concern for Simon is coming through loud and clear.”

“Well,” she said, clipping the word. “I've said what I called to say.”

“All right, then.”

I wallowed in my irritation with that silly, self-important witch for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, though, I worried only for Simon.

We sat down, the four of us, to a dinner of fish sticks and mashed potatoes. While Connor jabbered away about his playground adventures, Simon baited Frank with his eyes, and Frank ignored the baiting, looking only at Connor.

When the boys had gone to bed, I walked over to the television and turned the volume all the way down.

Reclining in his chair, the balls of his feet aimed up at me, Frank said, “W— w— w— what i— is it?”

His four attempts at “what” reminded me that Frank was smashed—his stutter got worse when he drank—but I couldn't wait for him to sober up.

“Simon isn't speaking,” I said.

I'd been wondering if Frank would pretend not to notice
—
he didn't. But he tried dismissing my concern with a wave of his hand.

When he got uncomfortable with my standing there, staring at him, demanding an explanation, Frank said, “I— I— I— d— did the s— same th— th— thing w— when I was a kid. He— he— he'll s— s— snap out of it.”

“The last time I remember hearing him speak was Friday night,” I said.

Frank shrugged and brought a beer can to his lips.

“What happened?”

He put his beer down and pulled the wooden handle on the right side of his recliner, bringing the footrest down. “W— w— what do you m— mean w— w— what happened?”

“What happened on Saturday? When I put him to bed Friday night, Simon was speaking. When I got home from taking Connor to the doctor, Simon wouldn't say a word. And he's staring daggers at you!”

“He bet— bet— better not be,” Frank said, shifting in his chair.

“What
 
happened
 
on Saturday, Francis?”

“N— nothing!” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Nothing happened. N— now tur— turn up the v— v— volume and g— get out the way.”

He stared past me to whatever was happening on the part of the screen I'd failed to block. I stalked off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind me and leaving the television's volume where it was. If he was content to let Simon stay silent, Frank could turn up the TV himself.

Clumsy with outrage, I struggled out of my clothes and caught my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. I pushed a strand of my thick, wavy hair out of my face. The bags beneath my eyes were dark, and deep wrinkles slashed across the skin of my long neck.

A ballerina's neck,
 
Frank used to call it.

To hell with Frank.

I didn't need anyone to give me the particulars. It was enough to know that Simon remained silent because of something his father had done or failed to do.

 

•••

 

SIMON'S SILENCE WENT 
up like a wall between us. His nods, headshakes and gestures could not create the closeness I felt when Simon had risked speaking to me, and I'd made good on his risk by listening with my eyes and ears until he had finished. Even as Connor wowed me with his knack for the speed and rhythms of adult speech, I found myself wishing for a chance to sit next to Simon on his bed and show him, just by listening patiently as he started and restarted his words, that there was nothing he couldn't tell me. But Simon would not say anything to me or anyone else.

Every day or two, I'd try to draw him out. Once, when he was listening to his radio in the early evening, I knocked on his door and said, “Dinner is ready.”

Simon nodded and gave me a flat, close-mouthed smile.

“Would you like something to drink?”

He nodded again.

“What would you like?”

I knew the answer was Sprite. Simon always picked Sprite if given a choice. But Simon wouldn't say the word. So he shrugged.

“You don't know what you want to drink?” I asked.

He raised his shoulders again, even higher, and let them fall.

“Why don't you tell me what you want to drink, and I'll pour it for you?”

I turned toward the kitchen, trying to suggest with body language that the Sprite was as good as poured if Simon would only say what he wanted.

Simon looked at me. He seemed to be asking me, with his eyes, to let him be. But I wouldn't.

“It's no trouble,” I said.