Story: Calender

The calendar of my memory has days crossed out. This doesn’t mean that those days don’t exist anymore – it simply means that my mind’s eye, voluntarily or otherwise, usually glazes over them when it glances through the collected days of my life to date. But like the reticence that is only another form of self-aggrandizement, the muteness of those days, when eventually impossible to avoid, cries out in a silence that is louder than the competing noises of existence.

One of them began many years ago, in a night that seemed to live solely to divide the two days that birth and kill it. My mother sat behind her ironing table watching television, the parameters of her reality drawn in the sight of dramatic lives so very far removed from her own, and in the sound of her iron periodically clacking against its cradle as she replaced it again and again to free her hands for the starch canister. I sat behind my writing table, pen poised over paper, eyes looping over the same sentence, ears tuned to heroics and villainy that might yet be mine. And so one hour had passed, and another might, and yet another after it. But those latter hours never left the realm of possibility, because, at that very moment, the telephone rang.

I picked up the receiver, and it has always struck me that a voice so melodic could bring forth such bad tidings. She spoke in Mainland Chinese, but her ancestors must have been the Greek sirens of lore, because her words were musical notes that, while softened, had nonetheless lured my father to misfortune. She asked simply for my father, and when I told her he was not in at the moment, she said simply that I must be lying. Her voice never spiked to harshness in the minutes that followed, not even in her harmonic dismissal of my supposed lies an instant before the crack of sound that ended our verbal parrying.

My mother, of course, had not been deaf to my words, unlike her. Quietness had thickened into silence, but the force of her concentration upon the defenseless television set and the methodical ironing and folding that had sharpened to rigid precision shouted what she could not say. Invisible words pouring out of her crowded the air, and, battered by their formless yet incessant attacks, I saw it best to retreat to the safety of my room.

When I awoke later in the shattered tranquility of midnight, that initial wavering moment of lucidity betrayed me, reaching out beyond the circles of its comprehension and filling my mind with its retrospective clairvoyance. Even before I heard my father’s voice raised in guilty offence in the adjoining room, I could already see him: walking through the front door, facing my mother’s tight-lipped and immutable fury, divining in an instant that the game was up despite all of his efforts, telling her that this was something that should only be discussed when the children were sound asleep. And there clairvoyance drew its curtains, but what other scenarios could there have been? They must have sat there, weapons already at the ready, waiting only for the innocent, in this case my sister, to leave the battlefield and go into the sanctuary of dreams. And then she had, and so it had begun. Only now I had strayed into the paths of their collision, unbeknownst to them, and, by the creaking of my sister’s bed-frame, I was not alone.

What is there to say of those hours? Tears were shed, not only of disappointment but also of spite. Words such as ‘never’ and ‘always’ were uttered, lies the moment they left lips. Anger cooled into exasperation, and determination melted into weariness. I remember perfectly clearly only one detail, the last – my father, dialing his mistress’ number with my mother’s hands, telling this other woman in my mother’s voice that the affair was over. It seemed to me at that moment that the end of an affair should also at least bear with it the possible end of a marriage, but life is not a drama, and only a series of anticlimaxes followed – a brief silence, then the scuffles of tissues being stuffed into trash cans, then the click of switches being flicked, then, again – silence.

The next day we sat down to a dinner that my father had cooked. My father, my mother, my sister, and I, we were four persons seated at a table, each alone on our own side, separated not only by sharp edges but also by the walls we were building with each and every harmless question and answer. How was school? went one glass brick. Eat more vegetables, went another. Higher and higher the glass walls grew, and the more and more afraid we grew of nearing them, afraid of their being pushed, shattering and lacerating us, and afraid of pushing them, shattering and lacerating others. And so we sat tight and chattered, divided by a tangle of shared secrets, caught in the paradox of intentional forgetfulness, crossing out a day in our calendar that we can tear out, but which like a real calendar would make no difference.