NOISE
“Her mind lives tidily, apart/From cold and noise and pain/ And bolts the door against her heart,/ Out wailing in the rain.”--Interior, by Dorothy Parker
Whether it’s all in your head or a jack hammer outside the window, noise is all pervasive. Listen up, as our writers turn their ears to this cacophonous world.
Out Of His Mind
Word Count 1472
When my husband of nearly forty years told me last summer that he had been having an affair for the last two years, all the noise went out of my head. Between my ears was utter silence. It was a miracle. It lasted only a few seconds, but silence was something I had not experienced in more than a decade. And it was more profound and strange than the idea of my husband fucking another woman.
Let me back up.
Bird Heard
Word Count 868
As we drove down the long driveway, my husband and I looked at each other excitedly. The wooded plot of five acres ringed with hydrangea bushes, a weeping cherry and boxwoods was stunning. The house itself, a manque cotswoldian pile was eccentric, but charming--a relief after the dozens of bland suburban colonials we had toured over the previous months. It was even priced below our price range, a balm to my cheapskate soul. “This looks great,” I enthused. Then we stepped out of the car.
“What’s that noise?” I asked.
“What noise?” the real estate agent asked, blinking dumbly, as brokers are wont to do. What termite rot? What ceiling leak? What tree growing through the ceiling?
The Horror of the Snorer
Word Count 760
Lately, my nights have taken on a surrealistic cast. Lost in my dreams, my consciousness reluctantly tugs me back to being awake. It begins with a beat, a persistent backdrop for the musical variations that lie ahead. Then comes the filigree, like a flute or violin solo, that adds a line of melody, and often, a third, more roughly edged motif, all of which eventually combine, intensifying like Ravel’s “Bolero,” growing louder, more powerful, finally reaching a crescendo until…I can’t take it anymore.
“Roll over,” I nudge my husband with a knee.
Squeeze Box
Word Count 980
My husband finds it both annoying and hilarious that during sex, I never make a sound. “You moan more audibly when I’m giving you a neck rub,” he complained as I grunt, groan and sigh in ecstasy when his fingers squeeze and dig into my trapezius muscles and latissimus dorsi. The truth is I trained myself early on to be silent during even great sex after my two-year exposure to a woman I’ll call Joanna, my next-door neighbor on Cornelia Street.
I moved into the apartment, a tiny studio, the summer of ‘77. I was not long out of grad school and another grad student I occasionally hooked up with helped find me a summer sublet around the corner on Jones; while I was living there and commuting on the subway to my boring publishing job, I saw an index card on a realtor’s window in the neighborhood advertising the Cornelia Street apartment.
Walking on Eggshells
Word Count 841
What he railed against: wet towels on the bathroom floor; books, pens, and papers left scattered on the dining-room table once our homework was done; the three of us sprawling on the floor in front of the tv after dinner; what he called ‘talking back’, which might simply be one of us asking a reasonable question about something he’d told us to do.
But doors slamming—that really drove him nuts.
We pushed car doors with our hips to muffle the sound of their closing. Cupboards in the kitchen could be treacherous; similarly, the fridge.
When the Casseroles Stop Coming
Word Count 647
The house got quieter after my mother died, but I didn’t.
No machines were humming in the background, and there was no dramatic final-day oxygen concentrator or rhythmic hospital beep. But there were soft, insistent alarms I used to set on my phone. One for Mom’s morning pills. One for her afternoon blood pressure medication. One for the eye drops she didn’t like but always took anyway. Those alarms haunted me after she passed. I heard them even when they weren’t going off—phantom echoes in a suddenly silent room.
I silenced them all eventually, but the noise stayed.
The One Who Hears Everything
Word Count 1720
In my house, NPR doesn’t whisper through the radio. The news doesn’t announce from the television. I don’t listen to Sanskrit chants while I do yoga, or mournful duduk melodies while I write about my Armenian family and the genocide they survived. There is no soundtrack to folding the laundry or cooking dinner. There are no earbuds inserted when I hike in the forest or stride on the treadmill.
I prefer silence.
I prefer the spin of my own thoughts.
What? Huh?
Word Count 772
I’m sitting in a soundproof booth, high quality headphones clamped over my ears, hearing absolutely nothing.
“Clever,” I thought. “They’re weaving in gaps of silence, so you can’t cheat.”
This hearing test required raising your hand each time you heard a chime, which varied in pitch and volume. I figured the evaluation included sections of utter quiet, thereby bagging patients who claimed to hear each tone.
It turned out, though, that those empty interludes weren’t an attempt to catch cheaters. I simply couldn’t hear a large range of the sounds.
I’d only made this appointment with this audiologist to humor my husband, Michael.
Years earlier, I’d insisted he have his hearing checked, peppering him with articles that documented the connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline, social isolation and depression.
The Swarm
Word Count 555
Some instinct told me to pack away my favorite of your things: the leather hat you wore almost daily, the blue sweater that made my heart leap when I turned to see how it illuminated your eyes. I placed them carefully into the boxes I’ve filled with my own belongings.
And then they descended, your daughters and their husbands. Like locusts stripping bare a field of wheat, they emptied your closets in a thrum of activity, carting your clothing to Goodwill; rifled medicine cabinets and desk drawers; and then packed your treasures – anything of value - into the U-Haul that would transport what was left of your life north.
Thwack, Thwack, Thwack
Word Count 1164
The apartment overlooked pristine tennis courts. Evergreens lined the court’s perimeter and on the other side of the fencing, white-flowered California lilacs dotted the slope of a hill. Touted as a “peaceful suburban living experience,” the complex did seem quiet—a rarity in San Diego.
Time was of the essence. Our landlady wanted Taloncrest Way back. We were the best tenants she’d had, and she was sorry to see us go, but her eighty-year-old mother needed somewhere peaceful to rest and recuperate after surgery.
And Taloncrest Way was peaceful. My husband and I had spent two years cocooned in spacious solitude. Nestled on the ridge of a canyon, our daily walks were spectacular. With coastal breezes and crimson-buffed sunsets, it was a jewel in the crown. The evening chorus of bullfrogs sounding from the bowels of the valley luxuriated our ears like a nighttime balm.
Looking for Mr. Good Enough
Word Count 2097
I don’t normally read self-help books on vacation. They tend to reveal what’s wrong with you, and who wants to end up sunbathing in a shame spiral? But I was alone at forty, at a beautiful adult-only resort in Mexico, on a vacation that had been intended for two. In order to avoid watching woozy couples slather suntan lotion on each other, I buried my nose in Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him, The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which promised answers as to why I still had not found lifelong partnership, and why I was reeling from another break-up — again.
Bye, Bye Barbie
Word Count 1438
The captain announces we’ll be landing shortly. Across the aisle, a woman stands up and pulls out a long black robe and headscarf from her carry-on bag. When she catches me staring, she smiles.
“Do you have a scarf?” She gestures at me. I nod. My dad brought me one the last time he visited. Now he’s offered me a home for a few months, some place my husband can’t find me. I’ve been travelling for twenty-four hours without sleep. First a ferry from my hometown of Victoria to Vancouver, then a flight to London, an eight-hour layover, and now this second flight to Riyadh.
The woman slips on her robe and drapes the scarf round her head, completely covering her hair.
MRI
Word Count 1068
My vision in one eye has grown cloudy at the center, as if I’m looking through a dirty window. An ophthalmologist suggests I have optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve. The term is familiar, but I can’t quite place it, so I pull out my cell phone. “...(O)ften associated with multiple sclerosis, and can be an early sign of the disease.”
Shock races through my body, as the puzzle pieces fall together. My father had been diagnosed with MS in his late 40s, roughly the same age that I am now. He too had gone to his ophthalmologist with early symptoms and learned that he had optic neuritis.