Talking
He shapes his mouth around the words as his mother says them, her words more like music than speech. Each one collapses on his tongue, flat and hard. He could listen to his mother’s voice for hours. Every Monday, she calls her sister while she does dishes and cleans their apartment and he pretends to play on the floor near her feet. He makes himself as small as possible so that she won’t shoo him away. He listens and gathers her words around him, repeating each in a whisper so that he will remember. Later, he will whisper them to his cars and his blocks and his stuffed elephant, trying to make his voice sound exactly like his mother’s.
Today, his mother and his aunt are talking about something he isn’t supposed to know about. Even though he can’t understand what his mother is saying, she lowers her voice as she speaks, her words quicker and stickier than usual. He knows that she is telling his aunt about how his father didn’t come home last night. It’s not unusual for his father to stay out late, to come home when the sky is black outside the window and his eyes are gritty with sleep. He usually hears him come in: slamming the front door, whisper-shouting his mother’s name, making his way around the furniture in the living room. He usually hears his father laughing and his mother telling him not to be so loud before she starts laughing with him.
The sounds of his father’s entrance help him sleep. But last night, there had been no late-night banging or laughing and the silence of their apartment had woken him up. Instead of his father, he had heard his mother crying through the thin wall between their bedrooms, small, stuttering noises that made him worry that she was sick. He had gotten out of his bed and knocked on her door, but she hadn’t heard him (or she had pretended not to hear him), and after he had returned to his room, there was only silence on the other side of the wall.
This morning, his mother’s eyes had been red and her cheeks puffy. She had let him watch two shows on TV that had then bled into three and then four while she sat at the kitchen table drinking cup of coffee after cup of coffee. She’d had the newspaper spread out in front of her, though she never turned the page. He kept waiting for her to notice that the TV was still on, that he hadn’t bothered to turn it off the way he usually did. He had asked for more milk, another waffle, apples cut into slices with no skin, and she had only nodded and placed each thing before him without really looking at him. He had wanted to ask her why his father hadn’t come home the night before, but he could tell that that was something he was not supposed to talk about.
When her cell phone rang at ten, his mother had snatched at it, shouting, “Hello!” into the receiver before she had even gotten it to her mouth. He could tell it was only his aunt when she immediately switched to Spanish, words gushing and gushing out of her mouth before she saw him watching and then lowered her voice into something small and liquidy. He kept hearing his father’s name, so guttural compared to the other words around it. Every time his mother said his name, her mouth bunched together, and her eyes looked watery, and he could tell that she was trying not to cry. She sniffed, placing the edge of her sleeve to her nose and the corners of her eyes. He knew that on the other end of the line, his aunt was saying all the things she always said about his dad: that he was unreliable, irresponsible, not good enough for his mother. He knew that those things always seemed to make his mother sadder, especially today. His mother talked and talked and he listened from the floor while he pretended to play with his cars, storing her words in his mouth for later.
