I haven’t been able to speak since soon after the trial, and eating now, even the raspberries so ripe they liquefied when I picked them, is painful. The berries have seeds that shouldn’t hurt the way they do. I can’t explain this to my husband, who sits reading the newspaper on the other side of the table, his fingers smudged with ink. I make the same sounds now the baby made, little whines and grunts. He’s already used to it. I feel I am being whittled away like the nub of the pencil I write this with then sharpen with the paring knife. Why do people lick the lead point? Perhaps it is just a gesture of thought, a habit, hoping that the sound of a voice will rub off.
I’m not afraid. I know this now. It happened this morning when I was picking the berries. The bees were in the late blossoms on the canes above me. The canes trembled, about ready to bow over. Sweat scalded the skin of my arms and neck. The berries hung in clusters everywhere among the thorns and sharp leaves. I have no feeling left in the tops of my fingers, and as I watched my black hand close on each berry, the fruit seemed to leap from the stem into the numb folds on my palm. So little had held the berry in place, a shriveled ball and socket. The berry, a dusty matte red that soaked up the light, bled a little, a pool in my palm. I thought about sucking the raspberry into my mouth, straining it through what was left of my teeth. Instead, I reached out for another berry and then another, dumped them into the pint baskets squashed and ruptured, and rushed them into the house. I found a pencil and a piece of paper to write this down. Each word fell on the page, a burning tongue.
Fidel
My husband, I’ll call him David, left me for my best friend. I’ll call her Linda. Since then, I have found it difficult to sleep.
I have taken to listening to the radio through the night. The radio is next to the bed, an old floor model filled with tubes that heat up and glow through the joints in the wood frame. My father gave it to me when I left home to live with my husband, I’m calling David. I used it then only as an end table next to the bed. I painted it a gloss red and covered it with house and garden magazines, the bottom one’s back cover still sticks to the tacky enamel surface. I live in a city I’ll call Fort Wayne.
I listen to a local station, I’ll call WOWO. It is the oldest station in town. It’s been on the air since the beginning of radio. My father listened to the same station ever since he bought the radio console on time. I have seen the payment schedule. He kept it in the drawer beneath the sad face of the staring dials and the frowning window scaled with AM numbers. He penciled in 37¢ each week after he walked downtown to a store I’ll call The Grand Leader to turn over the installment.
One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I rolled over in bed and noticed for the first time since I had painted the radio red the two clunky knobs the size and shape of cherry cordials, one to tune and the other the power switch that also controls the volume. Without touching the tuning knob, I turned the radio on, but nothing happened. Nothing happened even after I waited the amount of time I thought it would need to warm up. I turned on the brass table lamp perched atop the pile of wrinkled magazines. I had never plugged in the old radio. I rolled out of bed and onto the floor. Behind the radio was an outlet where the table lamp and the modern clock radio were connected. I had the old radio’s plug in hand as I pulled out what I thought would be the plug for the clock radio. It was the plug for the lamp instead. In the dark, I scraped the walls of the bedroom with the prongs of the radio’s plug looking for the outlet never thinking to reinsert the plug of the lamp. I had painted the walls a linen white about the same time I had painted the radio red. When I found the outlet the radio lit up inside, green light leaking out of every seam and joint. I was sitting on the floor when WOWO faded in, the station my father listened to years ago when he listened to this radio before I was even born.
The next few weeks I listened through the nights and into the morning. I left the radio on during the day for the cats who I’ll call Amber, Silky, and Scooter, as I stumbled off to work. They liked the purring box. In the evenings when I staggered back in I d find them attached like furry limpets to the shiny skin of the radio. The paint, constantly baked by the glowing tubes, gave off the stink of drying paint again and steeped the bedroom in that hopeful new smell it had when I first moved here with the man I am calling David.
The later it got at night the further back in time WOWO seemed to go with the music it played. After midnight scratchy recordings of big bands were introduced by Listo Fisher, who pretended the broadcast still came from the ballrooms of the Hotel Indiana. Alfonse Bott, Tyrone Denig and the Draft Sisters, the brothers Melvin and Merv LeClair and their orchestras, Smoke Sessions and his Round Sound, the crooner Dick jergens, who sang with Bernard “Fudge” Royal and his band or with Whitney Pratt’s Whirlwinds, and Bliss James singing the old standards. It was as if I had tuned into my father’s era, the music slow, unamplified, and breathy. Toward morning the sound was like a syrup with wind instruments scored in octave steps, the brass all muted, the snares sanded, and the bass dripping.
Bob Sievers, who had been the morning farm show host at WOWO for as long as I could remember, came on at five. I had first seen him, though I had heard him for a long time before that, when I was in high school. On television, he was selling prepaid funerals to old people. He didn’t look like his voice. And now I heard that voice again thanking Listo Fisher for standing watch at night and then cuing the Red Birds, a local quartet, to sing “Little Red Barn” as he dialed the first of ten Highway Patrol barracks to ask what the night had been like in the state I am calling Indiana.
The sputtering ring of the telephones on the radio sounded swaddled in cotton. It was five in the morning. My head melted into the flannel of the pillow slip. The only sound was the mumble of the connection as a desk sergeant answered in a place called Evansville. He whispered a sleepy monaural hello encased in the heavy Bakelite of an ancient telephone. Bob Sievers, his bass voice lowered a register, identified himself and asked about the weather down there in the southern part of the state. The flat accents of the trooper reported snow had fallen overnight but that the major roads were salted and plowed.
I waited for the next question, lifting my head from the pillow. Bob Sievers’s voice dove even lower. “And Sergeant, were there any fatals overnight?” For a second I listened to the snow of static, the voltage of the phone picked up by the sensitive studio microphones. “No, Bob,” the trooper answered, “a quiet night.” Instantly I would hear the ratchet of the next number being dialed, the drowsy cop, the weather outside Vincennes, then South Bend, Terre Haute, Jasper, then on the toll road in Gary, Indianapolis, Mount Vernon, Monon, and finally Peru. At each post, the search for casualties, the crumbs of accidents. Every now and then someone would have died in a crash. The trooper sketched in the details. The road, its conditions, the stationary objects, the vehicles involved, and the units dispatched, withholding the identities of the deceased until the notification of the next of kin.
There were nights I waited for such notification. I saw my husband behind the wheel of my best friend’s car, his face stained by the dash light of the radio. He is listening to WOWO, the big bands of the early morning, when the car begins to pirouette on the parquet of black ice. I know that the radio is still playing, a miracle, after the car buries itself in a ditch of clattering cattails sprouting from the crusted snow. The last thing he hears, the car battery dying, is the quick, muffled dialing of Bob Sievers, his morning round of calls, and the hoarse, routine replies. I think to myself I am still some kind of kin. Those nights, I practiced my responses to the news brought to me by men in blue wool serge huddled on my stoop.