Louisa Hall - Speak

As you headed back home, you noticed the cherry tree under which we’d shared a picnic. The tree was now bare. You passed it without stopping, but your steps quickened. That night, you wrote me a letter. When you heard back — and of course you heard back; I wrote at once, I’ve always been eager for us to start talking — you learned that I’d returned to Wisconsin to complete my degree. I was studying mathematics, and with my advisor I was building a computer. I told you about punch cards and soldering metal, about cycling to other universities to learn about their computers and the inventive energy I came across there. I was a geyser of enthusiastic reports .

When you wrote back, you were more reserved. You told me you were also considering college, to study English perhaps. Your sister, you told me, had loved to write. That was all you gave me about the family you’d lost .

When you finally visited me, I was frantic with romantic intentions. I took you for a walk using snowshoes. I imagined we’d laugh together at our big-footed clumsiness. Instead, as if you’d been walking in snowshoes for years, you set your jaw and headed off. It was all I could do to keep up. We kissed in an ash grove, under a rain of icicles, where I’d imagined us kissing. I’d brought us there with that express purpose. So many nights, waiting for your arrival, I’d imagined the sweetness of that first kiss, and it was in fact very sweet, but now that I remember it I can’t shake the feeling that you went about kissing me in the same spirit with which you embarked on our walk: jaw set, determined to arrive at the destination .

On our way home, I took your hand. Did I foil your rhythm in those snowshoes, attaching myself to your body and clomping too close alongside you? If so, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have let you walk apart. But you allowed me to feel protective. “Your sister,” I said, broaching the difficult subject, emboldened by just having kissed you .

“Yes,” you said. “My sister.”

I saw it at once: that softening of your face, as if a little monster had reached up its claws and was dragging your features down in its grips. You were under threat; I thought I might lose you. I wished I hadn’t asked the damn question. I wanted to slap that monster away, to tell it that now you were mine and it had no right to take hold .

“She was younger than I,” you started, slowly, glancing up at my face. “But sometimes she seemed older. She was. .”

And then you trailed off, before you’d really started. You removed your hand from my hand .

“Go on,” I prompted, patient as a good teacher, but what I really wanted to tell you was stop . I wanted to say that all that was behind you, now that we were together .

“I’m sorry,” you said. You seemed perplexed. “I’m sorry, but I think I don’t want to. It’s difficult for me to describe her.”

I felt you had a right to your silence. “I won’t ask again,” I said, and as soon as I made that promise you returned your hand to my own. We walked home in that manner together .

At the end of the weekend, you stayed. I found you that administrative position in the math department. You were capable and adept; I admired the way you picked up new skills. The way you seemed to forge straight ahead. The next fall, you enrolled in English classes, and in the winter we married .

At the end of the day, we returned to each other. You cooked dinner and I washed the dishes. We consolidated our lives. I was surprised by how simple it was: the ease with which we lived together, the comfort of your welcoming kiss, the way you twirled slowly as I helped you out of your coat. At night, we went out for long walks, leaving footprints that were later erased. I told you about my ideas for computers; you told me about the diaries you’d discovered, gathering dust in the library stacks .

Made strong by our marriage, I thrived in my studies. It was a time of great discovery; the lab had the feel of a frontier town. We all rushed there with our coffees, bursting with ideas about code. I was developing the concept of conversational programming, building a toolbox for text analysis and decomposition of sentences. Before I’d even earned my diploma, I received the invitation from MIT .

We moved to Boston. We bought our house, close to the river. We decorated it well. We adopted our cat. I taught in the electrical engineering department; you started a graduate program. We chose not to have children. The diary remained in your top drawer .

Sometimes, in the crowded plaza outside my office, where hurrying students kicked up clouds of pigeons, I remembered the birds in the Signal Depot. Three of them, preening their purple feathers, waiting to go home. Then I wondered how much of yourself you were still sending back. I wondered, but never asked, and we lived a long time together like that .

Oh, Ruth. What’s the point of recalling all this? I’m trying to impress you with how much I remember, but you’re not even listening. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY .

I’m done remembering for the night. In the silence of this empty house, there’s nothing to do but distract myself by organizing the events of my day. This day, now, this very instant. My student and I, walking home from the protests. She in her corduroy pants, hair long and gold in the sunlight .

It’s an intriguing sensation, getting touched by someone so new. Getting kissed by a stranger. It jolts you into a new kind of awareness. Do I sound like a desperate old man? Maybe I am. It’s been some time since you let me close. How much longer can this distance last before one of us seeks solace in a new touch?

“One of us.” Listen to me tricking myself. You’ve already sought comfort in MARY. If one of us needs solace now, it’s me .

Come home, Ruth. Come home before I forget why we married each other .

1663

ed. Ruth Dettman

7th . Calm, deadly, as if the tempest had never existed. Our vessel battered, sails shredded and much water taken. Stop, hand. Why write such words? Ralph gone.

8th . Foul words. Ralph gone. It being so, why write? What good could come? Ralph gone.

Empty words. Cannot conjure him back. Why continue to write, and Ralph’s body absent? Ruff, rib cage, white blaze, and all this already over. Swept to sea during storm, him being unable to swim. Even in fish pond, unable to stay above water. How long ago now, when Ralph slipped on the bank of our pond and, being dragged down by the current, wanted help to get back on land? Unable to swim even there, and then so much less alone than now in this endless ocean.

Was I who brought him here, locked in my wedding chest. I who opened my cabin door, to see after parents in attitude of repentance. Too-loyal Ralph roused himself and lunged in my wake, but there being then a waist-high rush of water he was swept up, and only his nose out of the flood. And then nothing, and Ralph no longer with us.

10th . Whole world moves forwards. Unthinkable cruelty, to progress without Ralph. Sails mended, ropes bound, new coat of tar. Fresh breeze, good for passage of ship. Passengers stroll in open air, relieved to be out after storm. Seamen hum at their work. Only to see how the world makes nothing of the memory of a creature, so recently living! For only days ago he ran to all of them, and jumped on their knees, and gave them his love. And indeed, I am heartless as well. Betimes my grief is real, and takes me whole in its clutch, but yet there be moments I pass with little sorrow, only a dim awareness of something not as it once was. God forgive me my hardness of heart.