The Cure
I sit here, day after day, turning my life into language. Books by other writers line the walls, and on either side of me, on the desk, my own writing accumulates: unfinished articles, abandoned letters, the bony skeleton of a novel, beginnings without ends. The typewriter hums as I test words against each other, listening to their click, piling them up, a swaying tower of sentences, paragraphs, pages. The air of the room is thick and murky with words.
Beyond the glass, a gleam. Your golden hair lures me to the window and I see you, a solitary woman standing beside a sorrel mare. You are both so still, you are in another world. A world beyond words. More than glass shuts me out.
At the far end of the paddock the child, his hair a paler gold than yours, is walking, head down, hunting for some special weed or rock to add to his hoard of treasures.
He glances up and for a moment you are both frozen; caught in that moment as if to give me time to examine and describe you. Then he grins, the picture shifts and becomes life, and you are running, you catch him in your arms and raise him to the clear, blue, empty sky.
Behind me the typewriter growls: great, grey, mechanical beast. The one I tell all my secrets to, my only true friend. Waiting for my next failure, my latest attempt to pin you to the page.
Words are magic—I’ve always believed that. Things become real once they are said. But the magic no longer works for me. There is no spell I can say to make you hear me, to bring you back.
Words brought us together in the first place. We were two students in a library, reaching for the same book. Our hands touched and I jerked mine away, mortified that I hadn’t noticed, that I had thought myself alone.
You laughed and spoke, and your voice startled and warmed me like a shot of Southern Comfort. I heard only the drawl and the friendliness, and I asked where you were from.
‘I guess I’d better learn to talk right so everybody will quit asking me that first thing! I’m from Tennessee.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, why on earth? You ever been there?’
‘No, I mean–’ I felt like an idiot and longed to disappear. ‘I mean I’m sorry to be like everybody else and ask you that.’
You smiled and touched my hand, casually, knowingly, as if we were old friends or even sisters. ‘Of course you’re not like everybody else. You’re like me.’
I thought you had to be making fun of me. You were gorgeous and self-assured, the kind of girl everybody liked and boys flocked after, while girls like me stayed home, unnoticed, with their books. But you explained:
‘You’re a freshman, right? But you’re not at any of the orientation parties or mixers - you came straight to the library, first thing. Like me. And then went for the same book.’ You pressed it into my hands. ‘This is not on any of the assigned or suggested reading lists. And they won’t even let freshers take the basic linguistics course!’
‘I know.’
‘I know you know.’ You smiled. ‘I think we’re going to be friends.’
We were kindred spirits, self-determined intellectuals out of place at a party school. The book was Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. I can never think of Chomsky without smelling oranges, and remembering how you carried that fruit with you in your patchwork leather bag, where they bounced against the periwinkle blue cover of the paperback edition. The oranges were for health, to ward off the colds you expected to catch in our nasty northern winters; the Chomsky was for your soul. Oranges never cured anyone, and we both found the Chomsky book heavy going—the importance was symbolic.
Symbols were important, keys out of the material world into a higher realm of thought, ideas and language. Whenever I think of that first year of friendship what I imagine is our two voices, drifting like smoke into the sky. We talked constantly, when we weren’t writing or reading. We were intoxicated with ideas, and the new freedom we had to express them; mightily impressed by the sound of our own voices saying things we would never have dared in our mothers’ houses. Life without words was not life at all. Words were the basis and meaning of our friendship. Words brought us together and kept us close. But also, for two years, words kept us apart. Words were defence as well as discovery. I was afraid of silence. If the words ever ran out, if you ever looked into my eyes with nothing between us, you would see the truth. You would see that I loved you—and I was afraid that if you knew the truth you would be disgusted, and reject me, and I would have nothing. So I clung to the words which divided but also linked us.
You finally broke that chain, finally told me the truth and compelled the same from me—not with words, but with touch. You stroked my face with your fingertips; you pressed my gesticulating hand gently to your lips, silencing me. We came together slowly, solemnly; our bodies together began a long, easy conversation in which sensation was the only speech. Secret messages inscribed with tongue against flesh. I came to new understandings of you, the world, myself. I discovered new meanings in silence. You taught me that. But we didn’t have to give up words; we just added to them. We never had to make that fatal, absolute choice.
