Resonance
It’s his voice I remember. That’s odd, because I never remember songs or speeches. Audio slips away. It blurs in my memory, like layered audio tracks tuned wrong. I have a not-quite-photographic memory, though. Taking tests, I could often see the page and paragraph with the answer, but not read the words.
So it seems odd that it’s his voice I remember.
I thought I was tone deaf for years. I taught myself to read simple sheet music and pick it out on my stepdad’s piano, so I could sing Old King Wenceslas when Key Club went caroling. I lip-synced the rest—learning just one song took me a month.
My lack of musicianship is canonical in my family. My stepdad records his own music. When I was a teen he warned me, “You know, we can hear you sing in the shower.” At three, my son asked me to stop singing bedtime songs. Consensus: achieved.
I must be tone deaf to so offend listeners’ ears, and if I’m tone deaf, how can I remember the sounds, notes and cadence of his voice?
It turns out my deficit is subtler. I know when notes are off. I recognize patterns that change, but the notes won’t line up for me. Like baby ducks searching for their mother, they dart haphazardly. When we moved to a new synagogue, I was baffled that some weeks I couldn’t sing along to familiar prayers. Two years later, the cantor invited us to select favorites from among her collected international tunes for our son’s bar mitzvah. Oh.
So it seems odd to remember his voice.
Derek and I were buddies for years. Close enough that New Hubby and I enjoyed his hospitality (and several glasses of his personally bottled wine) on a visit to Canada, but not so close that life news wouldn’t wait for the next ride or gathering. I suppose it will have to, now. Derek was an enthusiastic, gregarious guy with fantastic stories who also knew how to look at you like he was really listening. When I found out he’d died, his voice flooded my mind, bringing with it another voice I’d forgotten I remembered.
I can’t recall the name of the boy from when I was 15, which seems odd. I should remember that. Last time he came to mind, I knew his name. I still remember his voice and his laugh, and the way his eyes watched me.
I was 15, and that boy and I only went out a few times. Eddie, maybe? It was the summer “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” played nonstop, but “Boys of Summer” is what reminds me of that season now.
One perfect summer. David’s laugh.
His name was David.
We went on three dates the summer I dropped a tray of steaks on the first day of my first real job, the weekend that motorcycles flood Laconia, NH. Those boisterous, rowdy bikers were kinder to a nervous, untrained server than the dad draped in steaks was, and why not? They’d dared fate, galloping steel monsters up twisting country roads with brothers they loved, before stopping to demand a pound of flesh. Savoring hunger, they didn’t mind waiting to be served by a bodacious 15 year-old girl of summer. Maybe that’s why I grew up to ride with Derek.
I’m trying to remember if David’s sister worked there, too. Is that how I met her?
Polaroid impressions dangle from threads stretched across the chasms in my memory. Momentary, yellowing impressions of random moments. Glimpses taken too close for context, or too far for the flash to illuminate them. David’s eyes I remember, up close and filling the frame, but not his nose. My memories are organized by visual cues: Syracuse, Laconia, Flagstaff, San Antonio, this dog, that house. The card catalog holds facts, too, but the shelving key is often smudged. I knew David’s sister when I was 15; she had shoulder-length blonde hair; she became a cop after he was murdered. There’s no voice, no eyes. I don’t even know what color her blonde hair was; the card just reads “blonde”.
David and I only went on a few dates. I liked him, but at 15, “like” barely registers and I worked long hours at Sizzler, saving money for the pony I loved. On our first date I wore the sweater my Aunt Sandy taught me to knit, more holes than stitches. That sweater would end its life in my ferret’s cage, as bedding. I don’t remember why I did that. David took me go-carting on our first date, watching me the way 16 year-old boys do when they’re trying hard to be gentlemen. I blushed the way 15 year-old girls being watched do, and licked my ice cream cone. I liked David, but I loved the way he looked at me.
I don’t remember our second date.
It was late afternoon on my last day of summer when David called. He’d been sick, but could I come say goodbye over dinner with his family? I told him I should spend my last evening in town with my grandma, but he sounded disappointed so I said I’d see if a quick dinner would be okay.
I only asked to make him happy, but then Grandma replied, with an audible sigh: “If that’s really how you want to spend your last night, do what you want. I won’t be here forever, you know.” Every joke about Jewish moms sitting alone in the dark brings back that cadence, but her voice is gone.
I told Grandma not to wait up.
We spent the night driving back roads in David’s enormous American car, stolen straight from Don Henley’s lyrics. His arm stretched across the back of the bench seat before he worked up the nerve to kiss me. I wasn’t such a good girl, but I liked that David treated me like one, so a kiss was all we’d ever have.
He offered to teach me to drive and we giggled when I backed his car into the boughs of some broad New England conifer on a dark, dirt road. That good American steel wasn’t even scratched.
He kissed me again.
There are two perfect dates in my memory, and that was one of them. It was nearly 3am when I snuck into the house, but I don’t remember my grandmother’s chiding. I just remember David’s voice, recently deepened, coaching me down that dark road.
The voices I retain are big, rich, male voices, saturated in delight.
It was three years before I returned to New Hampshire. Maybe I knew David’s sister through Brian, because that’s who told me she was a cop. Because of David. Hadn’t I heard? My grandmother’s face flashed old resentment at his name.
David was found face-up in the spring thaw, murdered by the New England mafia. Nobody ever told me how he got mixed up with them, and it would be years before I learned my grandfather had been, too. Who ever even heard of the New England mafia? It sounds absurd to me, like there should be a cheerful sound track and black sunglasses, but my grandpa fled them too.
David was just a boy I went on three dates with, but when I heard that Derek had died his voice flooded my mind, bringing David’s voice with it. I don’t know why some voices stick, but Jack says I mentioned Sean’s laugh when he died, and I can remember it now, his eyes crinkling affectionately.
My grandpa’s voice is gone. Why do I remember only some men’s voices, but women are tactile? I can still feel my ex-wife’s hand, missing fingers, but not her voice. I could call her now—make up some excuse about our daughter’s impending graduation plans—but I’d only forget it again.
Will I remember Jack’s voice? There’s no card catalog entry. Just a big bucket labelled “Jack,” with all the jumbled snapshots of our life, left to sort later. After 17 years, some have faded, uncatalogued. That time he pressed me up against the back of a pizza parlor in Olympia—was that our first kiss? I should ask him. Speeding down an Oregon road. The night before Alabama. A Tarantino scene of red beet juice sprayed across a white bathroom in Texas.
Rummaging among the snapshots I found this brief audio recording, too: his voice drawling “Darlin’” when he was courting me. It’s not his voice now. Not since the breathing tube in Alabama. Maybe that’s why I already catalogued it, but there it is, waiting to flood my mind someday, should I persist longer.
I didn’t know, until I looked.
My memory isn’t improving. I retrieve the wrong noun, or find a blank intersection where a mnemonic signpost should stand. Simple words sometimes look strange. Is this just 53? Is it peri-menopause, which I hear is worse than pregnancy brain? It might be something more; something that could steal my voice before I’ve learned to sing. Will it take Jack’s voice, too?
I remember the room I was in when Brian told me how David died. I see where he was sitting, but no chair lived in that corner. My grandmother sat in my uncle’s spot. The room must have been redecorated, but I remember how it was when I was 7, and they’re in the wrong places. I remember David’s voice flooding my mind, washing Brian’s away, and a flash of David’s eyes, watching me. They bulged a bit, as though his body knew where it was headed.
My grandma lived more than another decade but David was 19 when he died. I doubt I’d have remembered him if we hadn’t shared that last night. I certainly wouldn’t have asked Brian about him. I remember David because that was the night I learned that you can only guess—and hope.
He left no wife, no children. I may share responsibility for the memory of his voice with his sister and his parents, if they still live, but there is no one else to remember the way his eyes shone, guiding my clumsy attempts to stay in my lane, the year Meatloaf crooned from the dashboard.
Every so often I pull out David’s card and visit the shelf. I dust my memories off and check that the index card is crisp, but if Derek’s baritone hadn’t reminded me, David’s name might have been gone the next time I looked. Who else have I forgotten?
It was just a summer fling, Darlin’.