Violinist

by Candice May

 

Twice a week, I’m removed from the 1st grade classroom and escorted down the hall to sit in a metal chair across from Ms. Shirley, with her enormous glasses and enunciating voice. “Roll your tongue to the back of your throat,” she says. “Make the oval lips. Repeat after me: Rrrr-abbit. Rrrr-abbit. Rabbit.” I roll my tongue, make the oval lips: “Wwww-abbit. Wwww-abbit. Wabbit.” I’m seven years old and cannot pronounce ‘R.’ I cannot say four, or grow, or Shirley. My cheeks burn in class when the teacher asks us to call it out, tell her what season it is (Spring! Spwing!), which month (April! Apwil!), the colour of grass and trees (Green! Gween!)

*

Thirty years later, I sit crosslegged on a shiny leather couch, three sessions in with my new psychologist, Dr. Tom, a man who specializes in what he calls ‘harmonic resonance’, which appeals to me because my husband used that word before he left, or close to it: “Pam, there’s just no harmony.” I tell the psychologist that my husband’s words left an imprint, their own kind of harmonic resonance, and now all I hear is the word harm, like an echo. Dr. Tom leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees and asks, so gently, “Are you ready to cut those cords?”

*

The vocal cords: layered mucous membrane, soft tissue, stretched and folded, vibrating. In 1741, French anatomist Antoine Ferrein envisioned the vocal cords as strings of a violin, the moving air its bow.

*

Ms. Shirley gives me exercises to strengthen my pharynx: gargle with warm water and say ‘Grrr.’ Repeat words that end with ‘R’— car, floor, tear. Instead, I revel in the flat ‘W’ and ‘H’ sounds that puff from my mouth like stepping off a ledge, no bottom. My parents play records of Tchaikovsky and Bach, and I say their ghost-names over and over, whispering kov, kov, and bah, bah, like I’m sneaking candy. I say the words piano and cello and oboe; they are edgeless, like music itself, and my body lifts from the carpet, rises on each chord, endlessly.

*

Dr. Tom has methods. Visualize my husband sitting in the chair across from me. Visualize my heart a tangled ball of yarn. Visualize threads that extend outward, weaving into my husband’s heart, coiled and knotted. Expand the visualization; these threads are cords. “Thick cords like a suspension bridge,” I tell him, eyes closed, swaying from the height. Dr. Tom hands me an imaginary pair of bolt cutters and says, “These cut through anything.” I stand on the suspension bridge, one or two cuts between rectifying this attachment to my husband and falling, falling free.

*

There are true vocal cords and false vocal cords. The true ones, residents of the larynx, are our vocal persona. They produce the pitch of our voice, our accent, a sweet singing tone. The false cords live at the inferior edge of the larynx, our vocal shadow. They grunt, growl, and scream.

*

When I’m eight, I attain the perfect ‘R’. “Rosy,” I say. “Circus.” “Rare.” Ms. Shirley declares my vocal skills rehabilitated. Now I raise my hand in class, call out the answers. I read to the younger children. My assignments are riddled with gold stars. But at night, quiet beneath the blankets, I still whisper the forbidden words, the amputated ‘R’ sounds: “Vah. Eee. Oh.” Daytime, I’m a girl who can say “Rabbit.” Nighttime, I speak my own language.

*

“Arrrr! Raaaah!” Dr. Tom paces the room, pumps the air with his fist. “Yes, Pam, let’er out!” I’m cutting the cords between myself and my husband, falling, screaming. Dr. Tom says, “A scream is simply a harmonic infant. Arrrr!” I scream at my husband for leaving the pile of letters behind, words from his lover, and for shoving ‘R’ sounds into my mouth that punch my throat: affair, liar, divorce. I cut and scream and fall and cry until finally, I land on Dr. Tom’s carpet, curled in a ball, my vocal cords throbbing. “How’s that feel?” he asks, but when I open my mouth to speak, nothing comes out at all.

*

If I fall in love again, I want it to sound different. No ‘R’ sounds: romance, remarriage. Antoine Ferrein likened the vocal cords to a violin, and I imagine my violinist tucked safely behind the shield of my Adam’s apple. If I fall in love again, I hope you hear how it feels for me to say it—that quiet moment before an orchestra begins, the nervous rustling of sheet music. A concert hall, hushed. A tiny conductor awakens, tap-tapping my epiglottis. The chords of a piano come next, then the cello. When I say it, a symphony. Love. It sounds like this.

 

 

Candice May is a writer from British Columbia, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022, SmokeLong Quarterly, Epiphany, Masters Review, Atticus Review, PRISM International, Pleiades, December, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for ‘Best of the Net.’ She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

 

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