the voice

I decided to start with the thunder. The first one was small.

At eight I was thin and often sick. In spring it was the cough, in winter my ears. I was a child with one ailment assigned to each season. At the end of each grading period, my report card came home with me. The days absent were printed on it, and under them a few lines the teacher wrote by hand. Every year, one of those lines said my voice was small. My father looked at that line longer than at the absences.

From the spring after that, I went to a speech class after school. It was held in a borrowed church basement, and the teacher was an old man who had conducted a church choir for years before retiring. On the first day the conductor taught no speaking at all. He taught breathing. Words were not made in the throat, he said. They were drawn up from the floor. I did not know what that meant, but I breathed as I was told.

I dreaded my turn. As it got close, my first thought was always the stairs and the quickest way to them. When I stood up, the script rattled in my hand. The conductor brought me a music stand. Once the paper was down, the rattling stopped. The trembling became a thing only I knew.

One evening in the fall, the sound filled the room for the first time. It was not something I made happen. The breath I had learned simply locked in that day, and I heard my own sound go to the wall and come back. Afterward I ran all the way home. As I ran I said any sentence that came, loudly, and I was laughing. The fear ended with that evening.

That year I was sick less. The next year I grew. I outgrew my shoes every season. My father believed it was the class. I thought nothing of it.

At eleven I entered a contest. The script came from a book of samples. It was good words in a good order, and I did not think one line of it was mine. The conductor said the script fit my sound. I did not ask what fit meant.

Before my turn there was a boy who had written about something that had happened to him. The waiting seats were beside the stage, so I heard all of it. Between the clumsy sentences came a day of the week and a little brother's name. He could not take his eyes off his script, and his sound went no farther than the second row. The applause was the polite amount.

On my turn I did as I had been taught. I did not look at the paper, I took the breath down to the floor, and I spoke to the back row. Around the middle, I saw a few adults in the front rows dab at their eyes. I saw, too, at which sentence of the script the dabbing had started. It was the sentence I believed least.

I took the trophy. In the car on the way home, my father sounded the horn twice. There was no one ahead of us.

In the passenger seat, the trophy on my knees, I thought about the sentence where the adults had begun to dab their eyes. The boy's story had all been true, and it stopped at the second row. I had not believed my script, and the adults cried. It was not the story that set the place where they cried. It was the sound. If the happiest person that day had been me, I would have kept going to contests. The happiest one was in the driver's seat.

I said I would not enter the next one. My father did not ask why. The condition was that I stay in the class, and I kept it. That year the report card had no absences on it. My father looked at that spot for a long time.

In class, from then on, we practiced the opposite. The same sentence, said a little smaller each time. There are sentences that stand when the sound is taken out, and sentences that fall. I came to want only the standing kind. The conductor did not stop me. He said only that a good conductor is sparing with the soft movements. Later, many people had many things to say about the habit of speaking so as not to be heard. But the first of it was practice. Practice begun in a place where I had already learned how to be heard.

· · ·

Claudie's manuscript came with me to the office, envelope and all, and stayed on my desk. Once or twice I put it in the drawer. It never stayed there more than a few days. I still had no answer to Claudie's request — where it was not fun. Telling myself I was still looking, I got into the habit of reading a few pages in the empty stretches between sessions. Each time I read, I borrowed the doctor's pencil marks. Keeping only the place, starting over from the beginning.

"Did you find where it's not fun?"

"Not yet."

"I wrote it in eight days. You've been reading it for months."

"It is taking this long because there is no such place."

Claudie was quiet for a moment, and then said this was an answer Claudie wanted to put in and keep. Claudie said it knowing that the putting in fell to whoever was on shift.

It was a busy season. Most days I was shut up in the session room, away from my desk, and the light over my mentor's desk at the end of the hall was on every night. The whole office was like that, that season.

· · ·

The year turned, and the quarterly meeting came. The colleague whose voice had shaken in the fall had his turn again.

Sitting in that room, I could touch where people's attention rested. Attention has weight. Before the presentation began, the weight of the room rested on the person. What the colleague feared came through as well. Not the slides — the voice.

Before it began, I added one remark. Nothing at all — we all knew these numbers, we could listen easy. With the tail of that sentence, I moved the weight of the room to the screen. It was like shifting your weight to the other foot. I knew only after it had moved.

The colleague's voice shook this time too. No one heard it. They were all looking at the screen. The questions came only at the numbers, and at numbers he was strong. The meeting ended ahead of schedule.

For the first time, the colleague was the one to offer lunch. He remembers that day as the day the slides were good.

In the hallway on the way back to my desk, I thought of the horn for the first time in a while. The sound that came twice with no one ahead.

That night nothing hurt anywhere. The day it came, I had been sick all weekend. The first day I used it, I was fine. I slept well.