Voice
A., who’s five, tells me, “The thing I like most about most people is their voice.” He says this in response to my asking him whether he liked this week’s substitute teacher. She has a nice voice, he says, so he did.
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We need to get through the final hour of pre-bedtime meltdown, so we push the idea of a movie on the kids. A. saw my scrolling through Instagram earlier, where there was a reel of Sherri Stoner serving as the live-action model for Ariel in The Little Mermaid. He wants to watch the movie, so we do, but he gets scared—especially when Ursula steals Ariel’s voice.
“How will she talk?” A. asks. “What’s she going to do?”
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E.’s two-year-old voice is in that stage of formation where he’s slurring into articulation. The way he says “minute” sounds like a chirping Marlon Brando childishly extending a flat i. His vowels peak with meaning. It is impossible, in this phase, not to love every utterance, its tender capture of adult attention. Even when it’s a demand, as it often is.
How strange it is to hear a human voice you seeded emerge day by day, folding in syntax, molding loose sounds into semantic carriers like lost change rolled countably for the bank. You fall in love with this voice, which evolves every day and will continue to forever. How it’s a whine and a cry and then, one day, a word you know. Later, someday, it will break, maybe into something closer to my own.
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A. didn’t speak, not more than “no” and “yeah,” until after three. He still managed to be so communicative with just keening desire or rejection. Life was yes/no questions, presenting a ballot initiative for every potential need so A. could answer with a tone of assent or displeasure.
When his voice fully emerged, it came almost all at once, bound with grammar and stretching with a scholar’s vocabulary. It didn’t grow; it leaped into existence. A. so quickly cut into any quiet with the sharpness of a katana. Nothing escapes him. You learn to watch what you say so as not to deal with the repercussions of his asking “why?” to all things. Why is it Saturday? Why does the TV work? Why is the story not real? Why did you say goodbye when I asked you to say goodbye?
Why can’t Ariel speak? How can she exist without her voice? I don’t know how A. could handle the thought after all he’s built from the edges of silence. So tell him, with th’ occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited.
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There’s a fairly new album with a bunch of indie rock elders on it (Matt Sweeney, Stephen Malkmus, Emmett Kelly, Jim White). Their punny band and album is The Hard Quartet, and its best song is “Rio’s Song,” which 28 seconds into it has a vocal turn (“who could blame you?”) that closely echoes the vocal turn 34 seconds into Big Star’s “Thirteen” (“I’ll take you”). I can barely handle the resonance, the chest-balloon feeling it brings. That little pattern, a cascade of six notes, captures the joyful hesitance of trying to connect as a person to another person, a speaker who wants to be heard and hopes to be understood. It’s no wonder it needs to hold second-person address in its grasp. I don’t care whether the echo was knowingly done; I’d almost prefer not.
Another new song. This one featuring Auliʻi Cravalho for Moana 2, the upcoming Disney sequel to A.’s favorite movie. And in that song, “Belong,” which we’ve already been forced to listen to over and over again, there’s a little eight-note turn 24 seconds in (“suddenly, nothing feels”) that brings my mind to something very surprising: a similar turn 41 seconds into Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” (“let it be, you will see”). I would not have thought any aspect of Avril Lavigne remained in my brain. I recall downloading a video of “Sk8er Boi” from KaZaA for my younger sister at some point.
Still, the movement of a voice is immediate, a hook into some psychic location. All four songs move in me. The resonance is as recurrent between two songs I’d never seek out as the one between those I’d choose to repeat. The world can’t help but rhyme through you.
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During the pandemic and in the depths of endless bedtimes, not being able to leave A.’s side even after he fell asleep, I fell into new kinds of phone habits. Seeing live music, which had for so long been a staple of life, was no longer possible. Maybe because of that, I started to watch videos of old performances. It began with bands on late-night shows, then into regular concert videos. YouTube started serving me clips from shows like The Voice and Britain’s Got Talent.
One night I’m just staring into the phone and I’m served up a video of a youngish woman singing a cover of Billie Eilish’s Barbie theme, “What Was I Made For.” It’s for an American Idol audition, I guess (I have never watched an episode American Idol), in front of Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, and an aw-shucks country guy who turns out to be someone I’ve heard of named Luke Bryan. The woman adds flat thirds and a shattering glissando and a high note that breaks perfectly with the rush of an h sound in front, as the wind might shift over a too-tall mountain, which is precisely the relation of self to personhood the song itself seems to me to throttle. Her name is Abi Carter, and I watch the video over and over to hear her voice. She cries at the end. I look her up and she won the season, though I’m not certain what that means for her or for the chance of anyone hearing her voice that raw ever again.
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Our house has been sick for what feels like forever, including during the week of the disaster election. I have endless phlegm in my throat, can’t speak, am sucking on lozenges just to grate out bedtime stories and songs when the kids need to sleep.
The election happens and I can’t speak. A. at bedtime is asking me to tell the story of the day again, and I can’t speak. My voice has left me. “Mo’, mo’” says E. as he wants me to rub his back in his crib. I can’t speak, but without anything to say, speechless in the sink of chaos, I simply put my hand down and do what I can.