Mialise Carney
On Muteness
You are rarely forced to speak as a child because your mother likes you like that. Polite, trembling homeschoolers. Children are meant to be seen, not heard, she reminds you and your siblings when you’re out in public and quickly it morphs into, Children are not meant to be seen or heard, jokingly, but sometimes you imagine what it would be like to tuck yourself up so small that you could scuttle across the carpet like a silverfish and nobody would have to know. You’re only required to speak on several occasions like at the superintendent’s office or Christmas Eve at your uncle’s house where you have to prove to people you don’t know that you are one, socialized, and two, hyperintelligent when you are seven, toothless, and clearly neither of those.
*
Silence is currency in your house. You wake early before your family and practice: how to settle silverware so it doesn’t clink, how to stop the microwave before the final beep, how to unstick the fridge’s rubber with your fingernail so she doesn’t hear it give, which stairs to skip so she doesn’t hear the floorboards croak beneath your bird-weight. You will never win with the bedroom door, it whines like a fox in heat. Your mother likes it like that, she says, So I always know where you are.
*
There’s a hand around your throat, and it’s squeezing. Everywhere you are, there are eyes wide, glistening like marbles. If you look closely, you can see through the black centers to the little machines ticking away inside. The room expands and contracts like a lung, but they’re waiting for you to deposit, cleanly, the correct response. There’s always a right and wrong answer, but you’ve lost your place—you’ve fallen from the rusted track, and you do not know what they’re expecting. The eyes blink out of unison, grow wider and wetter—bodies rustle closer. A second ticks, and your skin flushes with sweat. The observer repeats the question, the phantom hand squeezes a little tighter, and you glitch—across the vibrant canvas of your consciousness, a splash of thick white paint, images, feelings, time, and words dissolve into an emptiness so complete that, later, you will be surprised that you return from it.
*
At the bright kitchen table, your mother folds dish towels, her worn hands smoothing the creases. Your older sister has made a spectacle of your family; she has started telling stories to her friends on the swim team. Elopement, abandoned children, deaths and fake names, runaways, institutionalizations—what all good stories are made of. At night after practice, you’d hid behind the rusty whale-blue lockers and listened to her tell it, heard how she could make all her friends squeal with shock and laughter.
You watch your mother’s fingers and expect her to be angry, but she is not—the youngest of two marriages and seven children, she has been an observer rather than a participant in most of her family’s conflicts. These embarrassments are not hers to be afraid of.
Still, she provides you a clear warning, You shouldn’t talk about this family outside of the house. You watch her fold and fold, hide the holes, the strays, the stains. She says it’s not good to share your dirty laundry, but you wonder, what does she fear you will air out?
*
The first time you speak, you’re freshly eleven and have been on the swim team for over a year. You’re treading water beneath the dark, hot dome of the pool, giddy for some reason—you can feel it bubbling up into your nose. The assistant coach asks a question, and for once you know this one. Before you can think about the consequences and the eyes, before the phantom hand snatches your eager tongue, you shout the answer—Undulations! This is the head coach’s favorite word, describing how your messy kid bodies move through the water, how sleek you can become if you just try hard enough, and you love it, the way it tastes like waves in your mouth.
The word hangs, static in the air. The eyes turn to you, and you’re bobbing in the deep end, your mouth filling up with dry chlorine. Was that you? the assistant coach says, pointing. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard your voice.
You feel every microbe in the water trying to climb into your ears, your eyes, and your nose. The assistant coach claps, and the older kids you want to impress so much but can’t because you are too small, too shy, and too slow, sit above you on the edge of the pool and stare, and you feel enormous and heavy like if you stopped moving your arms and legs you would sink to the white concrete bottom of the pool and keep going until you hit the hot molten center of the earth.
*
Your mother tells you stories about her life all the time, but this one is different, it’s a parable. There once was a shy girl named T. who rarely spoke, who just held drinks at parties and smiled and dated only louder, older men. T. didn’t mind it that way, being easy and likeable, listening from dimly lit corners, until one day she was at a party and overheard a friend conducting a crowd. The friend pressed her foot into the floor like a staff and declared to her observant listeners, I don’t like shy people. They’re creepy, they never have anything interesting to say. And T., as if struck by lightning, epiphanied. That was how her friends saw her, a stony inconvenience. That was why her life had been aimless. She had allowed shyness to steer her like a cold bit.
T.’s life mission—don’t be quiet. Be loud, be known. Be likable, be valuable.
Don’t be shy, your mother morals, watching you in the rearview mirror. Nobody likes quiet people.
*
Interlude
why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why are you so quiet you’re just so quiet why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why are you so quiet you’re just so quiet why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why are you so quiet you’re just so quiet why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why are you so quiet you’re just so quiet why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why are you so quiet you’re just so quiet why are you so quiet you’re the quietest person I’ve ever met nobody likes quiet people why
*
Google: why can i talk sometimes but not others
NHS: “Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder where a person is unable to speak in certain social situations, such as with classmates at school or to relatives they do not see very often.”
Google: what is selective mutism
Wikipedia: “Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder in which a person who is otherwise capable of speech becomes unable to speak when exposed to specific situations… People with selective mutism stay silent even when the consequences of their silence include shame, social ostracism, or punishment.”
Google: what is social ostracism
APA: “We evolved in social groups. And, like other social animals, from apes to bees, our survival depends upon being included and accepted. Groups use ostracism to weed out unproductive or disruptive members so members are acutely sensitive to detecting ostracism so they can salvage their social standing if they need to.”
Google: what is a productive member of society
Quora: “A productive member of society is one who contributes to their surrounding community/nation instead of acting as a parasite.”
Google: how to know if you’re a parasite
Westchester Health: “10 Signs You May Have a Parasite.”
Google: how to get rid of selective mutism
NIH: “Most children with selective mutism outgrow the disorder spontaneously, while individuals with social phobia do not outgrow the disorder.”
Google: what is social phobia
NIMH: “Social phobia is an intense, persistent fear of being watched and judged by others.”
*
At the superintendent’s office, you and your two siblings are lined up by age and height for your interrogation. You’re homeschooled, so once a year you have to go into the brick building across town where your mother says all the kids are held like prisoners. In the car, she reminds you of the consequences of failure. Your father and I will go to jail, she says. You’ll end up in foster care with a nasty mom who will never hug you or take you to McDonald’s. Do you know how awful that will be, for your poor mum to go to jail?
Sometimes it feels awful, sometimes you would love to find out what it’s like to be in that building, with all those real kids tucked away inside.
You stand before the superintendent’s oaken desk and feel the whole beige office vibrate in your throat. Your younger sibling goes first, precocious and sweet, they pass the test easily. Then it’s your turn. The superintendent turns her magnified eyes to you and asks, And what have you been learning about this week?
You’re unschooled, but the superintendent doesn’t know that, so your mother had you pick out an answer from a textbook page the night before and memorize it. You push beyond the phantom hand, repeat your memorized passage about loss and war, tingle hot with embarrassment at the way your voice quakes. But when you finish, she smiles, says good, and pride blossoms like a spore in your gut.
But she doesn’t move on. What did you learn about last week, the week before that?
You can see it in her eyes that she knows. A glinting triumph, the slight upturn of her lip and there you are, exposed for what you really are—dirty, dumb, homeschooler. Because of course there was no learning last week, of course you don’t know what came before that.
The whiteness slides over your consciousness, so blank you split into every moving part, red and fleshy, limbs tingling, your throat a rusted trapdoor too heavy to unstick. Until later, you will not remember words or how to form them, how to pull them from the goop in your stomach and string them sweetly into sentences, into little lies or hard truths.
The clock above the superintendent’s head ticks its first second and you dissolve like a drop of rain into a dark, cool lake. You don’t know then that you will tread this void your whole life. You will hang your existence on the hook of expectation in every eye, in the questions you will never know how to answer.
And always in the periphery, your mother—still and staring, eyes bright as the moon, watching, watching, waiting for you to open your mouth and speak.
*
Interlude
answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me why can’t you just say something speak up look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you answer me
*
At the end of fifteen, your left retina explodes into a migraine of color: dizzying mangos, tumbling navy blues, stagnant algae greens. You have just traversed the silent years, the years spent waiting for life to start. To prove that she has done a good job, that she has homeschooled you, your mother is putting you into college. This has been the end point your whole life. Once you’re in college, you’re not my problem anymore. Then I’m free, she says, and you want to free her as much as yourself, so you try.
You have not done much schooling since you were twelve, so when you sit in an SAT prep class, you watch the instructor plot geometry and wonder if you can still remember how to divide. The colors blossom, pulse across the graphing paper and, for a moment, you are relieved from the black-and-white taunts of the lines and the numbers that you cannot wrestle into place because you never learned their function.
When the doctor can’t find any evidence of miswiring, he tells your mother you are lying. That’s how teenage girls are, they do it for attention, he says as he leaves the room. Your eyes are blown-out from the dilation, and you float beside the colors beyond your body.
At first, your mother is offended by his brusqueness. But on the car ride home, she says, You better not start pulling that shit with me. You understand “that shit” alludes to your cousin, five years older than you who developed an eating disorder, dropped out of Catholic school, and attempted to run away, all by the age of sixteen.
You apologize and simmer in embarrassment. What you learn: your experiences are not real unless they can be perceived by others. Your discomfort is a product of your imagination. You should not speak and expect to be understood.
*
At sixteen you get your first job at a grocery store, and it’s easier than you thought. For the first few months, you keep your head down and bag—the faster you are, the more people want you around them. The more people want to claim you as theirs. The more people want you, the more shifts you work, and then you’re rarely at home with your mother who watches everything you do. It’s nice work because you don’t need to say much, there are rules for every interaction—I’m good, how are you? Have a nice day/night/weekend/holiday. I can go check the price. Let me get my manager. Once you learn all your lines, you rarely deviate because when you do, you dissolve. One time you get flustered in a blizzard rush and greet a man cheerily with, Have a nice night! You still remember his eyes, so blue almost white, and how they startled behind his glasses. How he laughed.
*
When you work up to the service desk, you sit in a box on two broken milk crates and in between cashing lottery tickets and being sexually harassed by lonely, old men, your coworker D. talks to you. The phantom hand holds you quiet, but you laugh and grin and flush so hard your heart beats in your face and you get so dizzy with the attention, you’re relieved when he gets called away. You’re rattled by his confidence and his humor, as fast and sharp as your mother’s, you’re afraid you’ll trip over it. It rarely happens, but one night in a strange unconscious moment, you slip past a threshold, sneak around the phantom hand that guards you, and the real you emerges in a sarcastic joke about a coworker. The way D. looks at you, it’s like you opened your mouth and a whole new person fell out.
I didn’t think you were funny, he texts you later.
Why not?
You’re the quietest person I’ve ever met.
It feels good in a painful way, like too-cold water or touch. Finally, your epiphany—if this is how they see you, this must be who you are.
*
In college, you choose communication as your minor. Your father laughs and tells you it’s a waste of money because you already know how to communicate. Your parents do not understand to which extent this is untrue, that you rarely speak in class or at work and if anyone tries to talk to you, you misstep off the space-time continuum into a blank and buzzing other place, hot and before-thunderstorm humid. But you like that, the secrecy of it. The power in which parts of you go unknown.
The minor teaches you about media, newswriting, and marketing, all topics you have little interest in, but what you love is presenting. Three times a semester, you must give a presentation, five minutes, ten minutes, twenty. You love the planning, the PowerPoint slides decorated, the colors and the control, the appeal to a yawning audience in the back of a dark room, the soft murmur or laugh of feedback—when you do well, you soar.
The night before, you write and rewrite the notecards, shuffle the words around in your throat like neon aquarium gravel, so sharp and expectant, no surprises here, no trying to gauge how much the other person understands you and searching for that dim flicker in the space between their eyes that tells you when you’ve misjudged their expectations. You’re so prepared, you’ve practiced and practiced and practiced.
When you present, you barely look up from the cards, but you play, intone, make gestures, smile all at the exact moments you’ve noted on your cards. If you look up, at all those sleepy sophomore eyes following you, you sizzle, forget where you are, who you are, and what it is you’re supposed to be doing. When you conclude and sit in your seat, you’re giddy and electric, flushed a plum-red and satisfied. Look how sleek you can become if you just try.
With every B you receive, your professor writes, Next time, you would do so much better if you lost the cards and looked us in the eyes.
*
Two weeks before your college graduation, your mother reproaches you. She has read your seventy-page honors thesis, an essay collection on homeschooling, an awkward attempt to say everything you’ve felt about homeschooling but couldn’t say, about the social isolation, the educational abandonment, the struggle for autonomy. When you hand her the stack of still-warm paper and say, I don’t want to hear it, she doesn’t understand what you mean. She thinks you’ve written a love letter and you know it will hurt her but you’ve never been so proud; you feel almost real, like you’ve carved a tiny spot in the floor of existence for yourself to stand in. You have found a loophole. How to speak without ever opening your mouth.
She cries for days and threatens to call a lawyer and turns the family away from you. Weeks later, she speaks to you again, in the car, on a hot drive from somewhere, rattling angrily down the same route where she said, Don’t pull that shit with me, five years earlier, and you think about how you got there, how little of the choices you make are your own.
You are not allowed to write about me or my family or my life. You don’t know me, you don’t know anything. You are immature, entitled, and stupid. None of it happened like that. You made it up.
You understand this time what she means when she says my family that you are no longer a part of it, that by examining your braided lives, you have severed yourself at the root. The phantom hand which you quieted so completely through writing returns thickly, holds you silent in your seat. You breathe through your nose, blink into the sun, accept your mother’s honesty because you want to be a good daughter, a kind person, you understand what it feels like to have nothing, for what little you call your own to disappoint you.
*
Interlude
you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own you don’t like people you’re antisocial you’re arrogant you’re an introvert you’re a bitch you’re not interested you like being on your own that’s not true that’s not true that’s not me!
*
What you think about most often after, when you move across coasts and no longer speak with her, are not her words but your own. I don’t want to hear it. How easily you shift into this role, how little you do to resist this silence.