The Voice Store

Jackie went into The Voice Store, stood at the long counter for a moment, and then rang the little, domed, silver bell.  The clerk walked out of the back room looking sleepy or maybe drunk, she couldn't be sure just by looking at him, and she wondered if a man who worked in a Voice Store could try on different voices on different days depending on his mood.  Maybe one day he would be in a surly mood and try on a gravelly Bette Davis voice and, on other days, if his dreams were good dreams, he would maybe take a Humphrey Bogart or a Clark Gable voice.  Jackie couldn't help but stare at the big man with his belly rocking over his belt, and his hair thin and gray. 

"Can I help you, Ma’am?"

Disappointing, really, thought Jackie, a truly disappointing voice for a man who worked in a Voice Store and maybe even owned the place, she didn't know.  He didn't even have on a nametag, one of those little chips of hard sound that maybe say George, or Loretta, or Swifty.  She sighed.

 "I need a new voice.  This one is old and out of words.  It just turned thirty-eight.  Years old.  I guess a change would be good, you know, it's time . . . . "  Fascinating, the way her sentences continually drifted off into a soundless nothing.

"What have you got in mind, lady?  Anything special?"

"I’m not sure, exactly."

"Maybe you just want a rebuild on your current voice?  It's cheaper."

"No thanks, no rebuilds, please.  This one works fine, it simply has nothing more to say."

"You sure about that?"

Jackie was growing frustrated with the shopkeeper.  What did he mean, am I sure of that?  "Of course I'm sure.  You see, I used to teach workshops and a few weeks ago I was standing in front of forty or more people, all waiting to hear my voice when it hit me.  I had nothing more to say.”  Jackie leaned over the counter and lowered her voice.  She wished her hair was long again and sweeping the countertop for effect, but she had cut it short long ago.  “You see, they all wanted me to say life is easy, change is easy, magic happens.  You know, the usual workshop fare.  And I said what they wanted to hear, but that is when it really hit me.  My words were flat, tired, used up.”  Jackie realized she was rambling and he was nodding but not really hearing.  “Well, never mind all that.”  She stood straight again.  “Anyway, I need a new voice, that’s all, mister.”

Ah, that was it, thought Jackie.  His was a “Mister” voice, a generic brand easily installed into a wide variety of male voice boxes.  A nice, safe model, really, reliable for the most mundane levels of conversation at least, if perhaps a bit dull.   She relaxed, her purse and arms dangling like lazy pets at her side.  "So, how do I go about finding a new voice?" 

This is going to be difficult, thought Jackie.  The man pushed a small catalogue toward her.
"Here, take a look through this.  Kind of gives you an idea.  We have lots of voices--good, strong voices for people with causes, straight-arrow voices for hitting the mark.  Salespeople like that one."  He chuckled at his own wit.  "Or we have nice sweet voices--the little women usually go for those."  He leaned forward and eyed her closely.  "Probably not for you just yet.  Oh yes, we also have a newly developed line of New Age voices starting on page twenty-six."  Jackie shook her head when she saw his eyebrows arch into question marks. 

“No New Age, please, and no old sixties.  Lord, I am tired of fat syllables that say nothing." 

The man nodded and stared at her while she browsed the little catalogue.  She felt like a cat at the end of her nine lives or, in this case, her nine voices.  She’d used them all, the drug-induced, marriage-induced, motherhood-induced voices, the voice of the lost child inside, not to mention the great depression (personal, of course).  But every single voice had gone as thin as spring ice on a lake.  Yes, this was going to be tricky.  "Can I take the catalogue home with me?  I'd like to study it a bit before deciding.  Such a big decision, you realize..."  Once again her voice trailed off, the sentence drifting to nothing.

"Oh sure, lady, I understand.  Take it home.  Go ahead."  He grinned and Jackie thought she detected a look of relief on his face as he turned and walked into the back room of the store and left her staring at an empty doorway.  She wondered if he often had to deal with customers as undecided as she was. 

Well, damn, it was a big decision.  It was particularly difficult because she couldn't put into words what the new voice should sound like.  If she could do that, put it into words, then she certainly wouldn't need the Voice Store, or the man's helpful little catalogue.  In fact, if she could put it into words, she would already have a new voice.  It made her head ache, trying to think it through.  She stuffed the catalogue into her dangling purse and left.

Jackie walked slowly toward home, letting the warm spring air wash her face in breezes and green smells, and she flipped her fingers along the chain link fences until they grew warm and numb.  So many fences, she thought.  For keeping in or keeping out?  That was always the question.  

A voice.  A strong, new voice, thought Jackie.  But sweet.  Be nice if it could sing.  Last week, while puttering around the office, she suddenly heard the most amazing voice singing.  She checked the radio.  It was off.  Finally, she peeked out the front door and there, across the street, a gardener down on his knees, was knuckle-deep in damp spring soil, and singing with the sweetest tenor she’d ever heard.  She couldn't resist the voice and wandered across the black pavement like a forest creature responding to Pan's pipe. 

"You're singing."  Jackie had said simply.

The man paused, looked up and said, "Yep."

"How come?"

"Because it feels good."

He turned back to the soil, reentered his song, and ignored Jackie.  She stared at him for another moment and listened, imagining his voice rising up from the earth like mist or moisture, and something like fear settled into her stomach.  

Maybe that was it, thought Jackie now, on her way back from the Voice Store.  Maybe she needed a voice with few words.  Or no words.  What good are they anyway?   Was her voice was giving up because of the words themselves, so many words, so little meaning?  In fact, silence itself had become like a voice lately, as full and rich as the gardener’s tenor.  Maybe her voice was tired of talk and questions and more talk.  Maybe it wasn’t that she was trying to figure out what thirty-eight means, but that she held some belief that it should mean something. 

Jackie was still pondering her voiceless state when she arrived home and then, without thought, she snatched purse and car keys back off the kitchen table, left the house.  She drove into the mountains, turned off the road, got out of the car and walked.  Her mind dared not form a single word as her feet made crunching sounds that rose up off the ground like sound dust to join the wind sound whistling through the stick man trees (too early for pale green leaf buds).  Gravel and wind formed unseen sentences, punctuated with bird sounds, the warbling comma, the clucking period.  A forest language!

It was more than she could bear.  Jackie stripped off her shirt and bra and stood top-naked feel the forest language like a breezy Braille on her face, on her breasts, on her back.  The wind lifted individual hairs off her brow and slid down the back of her neck like a lover until she shivered, or quivered really, and part of her strained to remember.

She stretched out on a dry, green place.  Tall grasses fringed the blue-sky opening like lace.  Even the earth seemed to pulse its own beat along her backbone.  Her inner voice was silent but the sky seemed smiling and whispering, like an old friend she had known long ago.  How long ago?  Thirty years?  Had she ever really been eight-years-old-once-upon-a-time, a girl in love with this language of high sky and wind in the trees and grasses blowing in syllables only a child can hear?  Was she child still?  Perhaps? 

The new voice and language recorded itself like magnetic tape in her mind and confused her powerfully.   Later, she had images, dreams in daylight, of a little girl still hiding and seeking in the trees, on the fields, eye to eye with berry bushes.  She felt if she drove there, to the edge of the world, to the edge of time, the grinning girl-child would be there still playing in fields and forests with abandon and pleasure eternally.

That’s what was stealing her voice, Jackie thought, leaking the words off one by one.  It was her, the little sprite, the girl diva, living still on the edge of the woods.  She caught glimpses of the girl dancing with gods in a sunny meadow but, as soon as she turned her head to catch her, the images flickered out like candles in the wind in the most exasperating way. 

She tried to tell her friend Mary over coffee.   “Did you ever think that even though these bodies are getting older, a little thicker, that maybe the girls are still wherever we happened to leave them?  Like maybe they are real and trying to reach through time to tell us something?” 

Mary stared out the window and then back at the coffee cup and her slim fingers traced the rippled edge of the orange plastic placemat nervously.  “Gee, Jackie, I’m not sure what you mean.” 

The voice had failed her once more.  Jackie tried calling her mother.

“Hi Mom.  Guess what.  I’ve been thinking about God.”  Somehow Jackie thought her mother would be pleased.  Her mother didn’t know that God was a word Jackie used whenever she needed to condense all experience and sensation into a can, like soup. 

“You’ve been thinking about God?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“What’s wrong, Jackie?  Is something the matter?  I always said that . . . . ”

Her mother’s voice drifted off until Jackie heard it no more.  She still can’t believe that her voice is not my voice. 

Jackie hung up the telephone and sat down.  Silence was all around her, broken only by her memory of that other language, of wind blowing in trees, of worms burrowing, of spiders weaving, of a girl laughing and dancing with Gods in a green meadow.    She listened more carefully now.

In the end, Jackie decided there was no reason to pay good money for silence.  She tossed out the silly catalogue from the Voice Store and decided her voice would be whatever it was going to be.  Or it would be nothing. 

Strangely, as the voice disappeared, her words going into nothingness, they seemed to gather a strength and an energy in their demise . . .  and she heard  only . . .

Be still and know that I am God

    Be still and know that I am

      Be still and know

         Be still
            Be.