Silent Kay

I walked into Yvonne’s dusky kitchen and found her stooped in meditation over her puzzle magazine. I was bloated and hungover from too much sleep and clumsily walked to her side, throwing a fright into her. “I’m going home today”, I said, my voice breaking its fast. “Ah no, a few more days. You’re not sick of us yet,” my sister croaked, her first sounds of the day. She pulled herself up, steadied, and headed for the kettle. “I’ve been sick of you for 46 years,” sitting down, allowing her to wait on me one more time. It had been two weeks since I’d moved in. Two weeks since I’d walked 40 blocks to her apartment in the blistering heat with weeping feet. Two weeks since Mr. Aungier told me Gilbert had fallen off the scaffolding. Two weeks since my son died. 

I rubbed Yvonne’s ancient, knobbled table and a lazy memory crept in. Me, pregnant with Gilbert, holding a long defrosted bag of peas to my chin. “Bang, right in the kisser,” Yvonne was repeating, regaling me with the story I had told her in her own cleansing words. The two of us knotted with laughter. Earlier that day, in our cramped first apartment, my husband and I had argued. Our first summer in America was so hot, the air melted like plastic. We couldn’t see ahead of us with the heat. I was five days overdue, knackered and quarrelsome. Whatever smart thing I’d said to him in the cramped, broiling kitchen, I don’t remember. But he cocked his fist and found my jaw. “Pow, right in the kisser”, Yvonne screeched later as we convulsed with laughter in her kitchen. I crossed my legs but still wet my knickers. Then wet them more with the baby coming and we redoubled with laughter. 

I was holding him within an hour. It was like holding a beating heart. Raw and pink and wet and tender and like something I shouldn’t have in my hands. My latest resurrection. Blessed mother. My husband cried upon meeting his son and made promises made of tinder. And I loved the love we all felt in that baking room, red raw stitches keeping me together. We couldn’t see ahead with the heat. Then he wet the baby’s head for three days straight.

It only took one bus back to my apartment from Yvonne’s these days. It used to take three. A young black lady dressed for an office job offered me her seat by the window and I scooted past the sunburnt man on the aisle who hadn’t. I pressed my head against the cool bumpy window and another ghost returned. My aching body returning from my aunty’s. 

I was 11 or 12. Battered from two blessed weeks with the nun. Dad had died and mam had taken to bed so Yvonne and I were sent off separately to relatives. I had been wriggling in bed with a pink pillow between my legs late one night, exploring myself. It felt religious. Religious like a flower, not religious like a church. When I opened my eyes she was smiling above me and, pow, right in the kisser. And the guts and elbows and armpits. When Yvonne asked about the bruising when we returned home, she pressed and pressed until I admitted what she’d caught me doing. She laughed and called me a harlot, then she told me that everyone does it, that lads do it all the time. And when I’m older I’ll enjoy it with them. I let them do it, but I never enjoyed it, the pain in my jaw would radiate from my clamped teeth. Yvonne would giddily whisper “stay away from yourself” whenever we were in the same room as my aunt after that. And I’d die with quiet laughter.  

The bus stopped a few doors down from my building. I prepared myself for a lash from the empty apartment as I walked past the better looking buildings. It used to haunt me when the two men were out, my family. My nerves would rattle my heart on empty nights. Mothering a child is easy. Heave volcanic vomit at me, scream with feverish night terrors, and I’d be calm and steady. Bounding around the house for gripe tonics and thermometers. My earthly purpose rising like mercury. But when it was two men in the house, two men out of the house, I’d be shook with the fear. Not for what they were doing, I knew what they were doing, but for what I was doing. Mercury descending. 

When I pushed open the warped front door, I wasn’t stung by a lash. I was hit by the scalpy smell of old warm air, like morning breath from a familiar stranger in your bed. But my heart was steady. Gilbert’s bedroom door was closed. That was good. I went to the small fridge to rid it of soured milk but paused. For who? What was the rush?

I sat in his armchair and rubbed the crease in a velvet cushion. Babies' knuckles are just little, single folds. They haven’t creped from use. I used to knead his knuckles like rosary beads and pray that he would become a good man, his own man. He was fifteen the first time he knocked me with them. Pow. He’d walked into the apartment while I was discussing a vacuum with an awkward door-to-door salesman. I couldn’t afford a vacuum. But, oh, the loneliness, the boredom. My husband hadn’t been home in a blessed week. Later my son held a wet cloth to my chin and explained why he did it. 

The windows gasped when I opened them and the door I’d left open slammed. The plaque-yellow curtains needed to be cleaned. The windows too. I’ll plant flower boxes. And pick them and lay them on their graves. They’ll have beautiful graves. I’ll use the money I make from ironing and knitting to buy a vacuum and I won’t have to knock the rugs out the windows. I’ll join the church bingo every single week. I’ll think of babies' soft knuckles. 

I went to bed early, the fan knelling notes I used to know. I closed my eyes. And I adjusted the pillow between my legs. And I explored myself. And it felt religious, like flowers.