Lungs Full of Noise

Quiet Camp

4 4 Quiet Camp We arrive on a westerly wind, our lungs inflated with speech. Our mothers said this would happen if we didn’t learn to quiet our tongues. Our tongues couldn’t be stopped, so up we went. Up and up. Until we knocked the chandeliers with our heads and scraped the ceiling with our feet. Our mothers thought we would learn our lesson then and quit our talkety-talk for good. We tried but couldn’t stop. We kept talking, and the talking held us aloft. When our mothers got sick of the constant buzzing overhead, they brought us to the docks and launched us into the air. With nothing to bump up against, we rose into the clouds. And soon our mother’s skirts were nothing but colorful Q u i e t C a m p 45 dots. We cleared rooftops, trees. Now we bob like balloons above a lake. We talk together and all at once. Our talk collides. Our talk congeals. Our talk swells to a roar. What a racket we make. Such noise. Such noise. As we drift to shore and land by a fleet of canoes. Miss Jacqueline waits for us there. She gathers us up, a rabble of raucous girls. Miss Jacqueline says, Hush. Miss Jacqueline says, Shut those clatter traps. Miss Jacqueline says, Little girls should be seen and not heard. We can talk for weeks without stop. We have special reserves of spit in our glands and calluses on our tongues. Our mouths are caches of fast twitch muscles. A recessive gene, they think, also common in certain frogs and venomous snakes. A rowdy tribe, we walk through the woods. We carry sticks. We kick at weeds. The sound of our speech swarms like the hiss of cicadas thrashing out of their husks. Syllables tap off our teeth. Our dimples crease and uncrease in a Morse Code frenzy. Blippety-blip-blip-blip. A language of dots and dashes. Of clicks and clacks. Miss Jacqueline says we sound like a meeting of Congolese tribes. We’ve seen psychologists and meditation coaches. Speech therapists , etiquette instructors, priests. We’ve whiled away afternoons in principals’ offices, juvenile detention centers, soundproof rooms. We’ve been punished, bribed, disinherited, shamed, spanked. None of it worked. Now we are here. We congregate on either side of a long pine table in front of plates of carrots and beans. We can’t be quiet long enough to learn each other’s names. We can’t be quiet long enough to eat. We are always hungry. Our stomachs’ whimperings are low hums below the upper registers of our speech. We hold our silverware tight in our fists. Like tuning forks they buzz, and this sound joins the rest. Noise Machine Chatterbox Loud Mouth Big Mouth Tick Face Busy Body Mosquito Breath Horse Teeth Blabber Mouth Blubber Face Vomit Machine—these are our names. 4 6 Q u i e t C a m p Miss Jacqueline escorts us to cabins. We climb into bunk beds and pull wool blankets up to our chins. We recite nursery rhymes and jingles to fall asleep. When the wick of the lamp blows out, the darkness exacerbates the noise. We hear howling in the distance , only it sounds like a pack of boys. There’s a face in the window , a long-limbed shadow moving beside the door. We recite the Oscar Meyer song for comfort. In the night, our consciousness dislodges, and we slip away. But not the talk. We keep talking, a conversation with no through lines. Non sequiturs spill from our lips, dribble over our chins. Every so often an interjection wakes us up. Miss Muffitt! Her tuffit! Her tuffit! J-E-L-L-O! Hush, Little Tick! In the morning, we feel unhinged. We pray for recovery. Retreat. Remission. Stillness. We dream. Someday we will hear all of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Someday we will hear our hearts keeping time in our chests. At breakfast, Miss Jacqueline announces the rules of the camp. No speech. No sound. Silence is law. Offenders will be punished. If we think she is joking, we should visit the annex and see the cabinets that house her collection of pickled tongues. When we were young, our mothers gave us dolls with no mouths. Just a smooth patch of skin under the nose. We fed them bottles through their ears. We learned to administer IVs into their cotton veins. We taught them...