Learning to Talk

A yellow bedroom with Venetian blinds and books and coins in a house
with banisters and linoleum. A family that sang “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”

together at the kitchen table but somehow forgot to teach me to speak.

When you were in fourth grade, you remember, don’t you, the girl who never raised

her hand in class? Remember the classroom with the smell of old turtle water
and how the leg of the chair attached to your desk wobbles back and forth,

back and forth? And when the teacher leaves the room for a moment, that girl
climbs up on her desk. High above the classroom, she looks around in awe

at the tops of the heads of others who function so very normally.

The teacher comes back in the room cluttering while the girl still stands up high.

“Why I’m surprised at you! It’s just not like you. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Of course, I have nothing to say for myself. I sit down in silence. I am still dizzy

from that moment. Four years later we move. This house has a basketball net and
electric garage door opener. We’ve been there for weeks, and I’m in my bedroom,

lying on a pink shag carpet, reading. My sister passes the open doorway, a group
of neighborhood kids in tow. I glance up as she squawks, “See, I told you so. I told you I

really had a sister.” Even when I become a slender nineteen-year-old, I cannot order
Chinese take-out on the phone. I can think the words in my head, perfectly. But cannot

get them to come out of my mouth and still breathe. Becoming friends with people
is hard when you cannot talk to them. Yet somehow I get married; have children.

Despite my own incompetence, they learn to talk. Oh how they talk! I hear
my four-year-old going on and on about her day. “Who are you talking to?”

I ask. “Oh, no one, momma” she replies, cheerily. “Just talking to myself.”
Where did she come from, I wonder enviously. It is two decades before I realize

a wordless marriage doesn’t work very well. I can no longer watch the knickknacks
grow old as I sit at the dining room table, hoping my mouth will open. It takes me months

to learn to say the word “good-bye.” I am quite sure I did not pronounce it correctly.
I run away. In Europe, in a city where no one speaks English, finally I feel safe. A man

comes up to me and asks in French if I want a drink. It is midnight, twenty-eight

years and eleven hours after the last high school French class I ever took.

My face can barely be seen in the darkness. At first I am so self-consciously

speaking in “French”, but then. There’s a moment when you watch a movie

with sub-titles and you forget you’re reading the words and not hearing them.
After a few minutes I forgot I wasn’t speaking English, forgot I didn’t know

Lisa Hickey
how to speak at all. The Frenchman and I talk of traveling, weather, politics.
I need to pay close attention to understand. I am alternately rapt and garrulous.

My drink is done. I need to go. I am flying back in the morning. The Frenchman
walks me to my hotel, and there on a street corner in Zurich, he kisses me, speaks:

“Tu est belle. Tres belle. S’il vous plait, ne pas aller.” I don’t believe I am
beautiful, and I must go. But this much I do believe:

that this is the start of the conversation I have been waiting for all my life.

photo: omad

photo: clearlyambiguous

Lisa Hickey