Season 2, episode 14: the noise inside //
Thursday, December 24, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Over the holidays we’re taking a pause from our pandemic Odyssey and giving you something a little different. First, if you haven’t signed up yet to receive our12 Days of Delight in your inbox, make sure you head to shelterinplacepodcast.info so you don’t miss our first gift, which goes out today. We’ve had so much fun putting these together, dreaming up ways to make this holiday season a little brighter and sweeter for you wherever you are. I’ll include a signup link in the show notes for today.

In the last episode I talked about my grandparents. This week I’m sharing a story that was inspired by them, that I wrote back in 2004 soon after they died. It won the fiction prize in my graduate program that year, was for another award, and was later published in an anthology called Building Bridges. If you’ve been listening from the very beginning, then you might remember that I shared it way back in March, when we were just five days in. It seemed like a good time to share it again, and also I’ve learned a few things about audio editing since I shared it the first time. It’s still one of my favorites, and I hope you enjoy it today. It’s called “The Noise Inside.”

*****

The second hand of our gold-edged wall clock marches around the numbers that have been around longer than even me. Sometimes when we were younger, the noise bothered Dean at night and he’d take it off the wall and put it in the kitchen, but I never heard it. Now he doesn’t hear it either; I can hear the periodic whistling of his hearing aid when he coughs. He sits next to me, rubbing his hands against his slacks like he doesn’t know what to do with them. They’ve been restless ever since we left the farm.

I reach over and touch his leg as he fumbles with the remote. It’s not that I’m tired of him, or of our life here with Adam and his family, or even of the Bonanza reruns. I’ve lived too many years that were more interesting than I wanted them to be to not appreciate the quiet rest of monotony. I just want something to surprise me a little now and then, the way rediscovering your own old thought can feel like a new one.

Dean pulls my hand into his lap and places it between callused palms. It’s then that I notice that Dean is moving his lips, but making no sound. My hearing will go any day now, I’ve been telling Dean for years, and maybe it’s finally happened. I saw a commercial on the TV last week that advertised a book of home remedies to stop the ill effects of aging, and I called the number immediately. Course I didn’t think about how my vision might go so I can’t read, something Dean teased me about, but with any luck that book will show up sooner than my sight will leave me.

Dean leans over toward the floor and I see he’s dropped the remote, but his barrel chest gets in the way. I feel tired and dizzy, or maybe I’m just sleepy from waking up too early. I probably bring all kinds of problems on my health by sleeping so little, but my body just won’t stick to the bed like it used to. Dean laughs at me whenever I tell him that I think I might be coming down with something really serious. He says if he can live to almost eighty eating bacon and eggs every day of his life, then I should be okay with a little less sleep. I don’t like his logic, but then I can’t help but smile a little when he teases me like that.

Dean points to the floor, where the remote is lurking behind my heels. I nudge the remote forward with my feet. My right foot moves, but my left one doesn’t budge. I’ve woken up with splitting headaches and nearly paralyzing neck aches that I swore were cancer or heart attacks, but have turned out to be nothing but my bones aging and maybe my mind softening a little. Still, this feels different. I try to clear my throat, but only a raspy breath escapes my lips. It feels like a last breath, and I force my lungs open to make sure they get the message. I inhale sharply and look at Dean.

He’s got the remote in his hands, the one that Karen taped cardboard over so we wouldn’t have to bother with the dozens of buttons that we never used anyway. I can make a German Chocolate cake from scratch and the best home made ice cream you’ll ever have, but I’ve never been able to figure out that remote, even with the cardboard on it. I try to focus on those buttons as Dean’s fingers fumble over the soft edges of cardboard. I reach out to touch his leg, but this time my hand stays in my lap like it’s not connected to me. My whole body is shaking. Across the room, the clock has suddenly come alive, its rigid secondhand clicking like a typewriter.

I try to say Dean’s name. It’s like trying to spell a word I know well—an easy word—but suddenly not recognizing it on paper. Dean dean den dene deanden. Inside my head the words form, but all they do is bump around and stick to each other.

Dean says something, but that old clock is snapping like a snare drum now, each movement of the secondhand louder than the one before it. It’s been silent my whole life, and now this. There’s another sound now too, in my ears and on the soft place on my neck. I look at Dean, wanting him to understand something I don’t yet, but he’s still staring at those buttons, trying to find the one that will start his show.

“Grace,” his lips move, but the sound is trapped between my ears. There’s a high-pitched squeal coming from the floor, or maybe it’s the TV, and so I squeeze my eyes shut to block the sound. “Grace,” Dean’s voice is just loud enough for me to hear. “Can you give me a hand?”

I find myself hating him in a way that is no longer familiar, but that I still remember from the early days of our marriage, when he would forget the time and let the roast and mashed potatoes get cold and gelatinous while he leaned against the freshly bailed hay with the other farmers and smoked cigarettes. I never worried that he’d be doing worse than that, but it still made me mad. Those were the young years, when so many little things would make me cry or yell. My grandchildren have never known that those years existed. I have become good at making things like anger and hate vanish like the smoke that came from his lips, but now I have to clench my fists to stop myself from hitting him. The fingernails in my right hand dig into my palm, and the pain feels like comfort until I notice that my left hand is as dead as a butchered hog. My anger quickly turns to desperation. My eyes water and I breathe faster.

My chest is slamming so fast that the sound of my pulse fills my ears until I can even feel it in the backs of my eye balls, some angry rhythm trying to get out.

I try to listen to Dean, thinking maybe if I can focus the terror will leave me, but all I can hear is that racket inside. His voice is thin and soft through the clicking and ringing and pounding, and I have to concentrate to hear it.

“Grays. Greeyes. Grays,” he says again and again, his hand grasping mine. Everywhere I look around the room, objects that were silent a moment ago are now crackling like static. I inhale sharply to make sure I still can. I lift the hand that still works and touch my cheek. It feels like someone else’s face. The left side is limp. I breathe faster and look at Dean. He shakes his head and his lips breathe words that are lost underneath the squealing, ticking, and hissing that surround me.

I think I’m screaming, but I can’t hear my own voice above all of the noise around me. Dean is no longer next to me. Grays. Pihls. Shee. Rahng. Whirry. Greyes. There are noises that break through the static, but not ones I recognize.

I remember that I’m looking for Dean when I see Karen standing in the hallway next to the living room, helping him get to the bathroom. With every step she takes on our cream-colored carpet, the floorboards creak and the foundation groans. I close my eyes and open them wide again. Dean should know something is wrong, but he won’t look at me.

“Grace, did I take my pills?” The question makes its way through all the buzzing racket, but it seems too ridiculous to be real, and besides, I can’t think how to answer it. From the bathroom I think I can hear the secretive chuckles of the clear yellow pills next to the chalky white and round maroon ones. I shake my head back and forth, but my movement feels slow and disjointed.

“Sweetheart?” I think I hear him say, and then I’m not sure if he said it, or if it was just in my head, trying to get away from all of that noise. His calm words are a cruel joke, a mocking kiss at the time when I need his help most.

I hear sounds, but they don’t make sense to me.

I can pick out voices coming from somewhere, but I can’t tell where. When a woman finally comes into the room and sees me there on the couch, she’s yelling. I’m staring at the clock on the mantel because it’s the one thing that seems consistent, even if it’s noisy enough to make me think I’m crazy. If I can keep watching that second hand go around, I can almost pretend that everything is normal, that I’m not shaking. If I can watch the clock, then there is still something real.

There’s someone standing at the edge of the room, and I make the mistake of looking at him instead of at the clock. He’s leaning on his walker. His inhaler screams and falls to the floor, and he starts to cough. I try to speak again, but my cry is inaudible. A loud pulse fills my ears and then bursts. My body freezes with white pain and when I can breathe again, I try to scream.

I catch my breath and open my eyes wide. All around me is the gray whiteness of a sunless day. The voices and the pulsing are gone. When I turn my head, Dean is sitting beside me again.

He smiles and speaks in his gruff, nearly inaudible way. “Any minute now the kids will come in all stained with red mouths.” He laughs hard, his whole body shaking. Underneath his plaid shirt and overalls his body is lean and taut with muscle. I put my hand in the crook of his elbow and feel safe, and realize that I don’t hurt anymore. Then I remember I’m still mad at him.

The fear creeps in again, until I see where we are. We’re sitting on the old green davenport on the front porch at the farm, looking out at the garden I loved like one of my children. It is ripe with shiny, plump tomatoes and hollyhocks as tall as me. It stretches for two dozen rows ahead of us, all the way to the corral where we keep the bull, and the gold fields beyond that go until they hit the sky somewhere many miles away. We worked hard to be able to call that land ours.

He looks at me and laughs, and then wiggles his fingers next to my ribs and tries to tickle me.

“Dean,” I try to say, still wanting to be mad at him, but my lips part and laughter comes out instead. Long eyelashes frame his dark, laughing eyes, and his jaw line is firm and smooth again. I try to trace it with my fingers, the way I used to when we were young.

“Look,” he says, pointing across the yard. Adam and Emma are children again, running toward us. Adam has a newborn scratch on his shin, the thin line of blood still wet. It doesn’t look serious, but I should put some hydrogen peroxide on it. Emma knows better than to play in that nice dress, and I wait for her to give me a look that says she knows she’s caught.

“We got berries, Mother,” Emma yells, her fingers clasped around the metal handle of an ice cream bucket. She leaves behind a trail of raspberries that sprinkle out while she runs.

“You’re dropping them, Snicklefritz,” Adam points behind her and then grabs a handful of berries from his bucket and stuffs it into his mouth. The red juice coats his lips and drips down his chin. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand, and transfers the stain to his denim slacks.

“Oh,” she stops and surveys her dress and then the trail nervously. “I’m atrocious.” She retraces her steps, picking up each fallen berry as she goes.

“She messed up her dress, Mother,” Adam calls out to me and receives a glare from his sister.

“Hush, Adam,” she hisses at him, her cheeks flushed. “I’ll tell mother about the cat.”

“She says she’d rather be pretty while she’s working than wear old clothes,” Adam tugs on his shirt collar and giggles nervously.

“Adam cut his leg,” she cries out, forgetting her berries for a moment. “He was pestering the cat with a stick!”

“It’s bleeding,” Adam grins. “Can I put a bandage on it?”

There are things I should scold them for, but I realized I don’t want to. I want to tell them instead that we have plenty of bandages and the dress can be washed, but when I open my mouth, all I can hear is my breath rasping out sporadically. I feel Dean beside me, shaking with laughter that subsides into wheezing.

He squeezes my hand. His hand is rough as sandpaper, but I don’t mind. I look at my hand in his, and notice that my veins stand out, thin and blue. I never did have pretty hands like my sister, Elsie, but then she wasn’t a farmer’s wife.

I look back toward the yard, but Adam and Emma are gone, and the garden has dissolved into the same whiteness that it emerged from. I can still feel Dean’s hand on mine, but the pulsing returns, and with it, the pain. My mouth tastes like bile.

I look beside me and see yellow roses sprouting from a blue glass vase. My eyes feel overused, but at least the pain in my head has subsided to a dull ache. The window next to me is black with the reflection of beeping machines displaying colored lines that zigzag up and down.

After a while I see someone next to me, and he squeezes my hand. He’s staring at my face, and he starts to cry. His dentures shift behind his lips, and he closes his mouth to reposition them.

“Do you know who I am, Sweetheart?” he says and leans over, struggling to stand from a wheel chair. He bends over and kisses my lips, but when I try to kiss him back, nothing happens. My lips hang on my face, and I shift in the white-sheeted bed. My whole body pulses, the way my fingers did when I slammed them in the oven door one evening as I was putting dinner on the table before Dean came in from the fields. I knelt on the tiled floor for a half hour and let our dinner burn, too shocked to cry.

“It’s okay,” Dean says. He sits down again and although I can see him squeeze my hand, I can’t feel it. I gasp and my breath cuts the back of my throat sharply. My arms and legs and head feel jittery, like when I found Dean face-down in the cornfield, his tractor still plowing without him a half mile away. I was crying before I even got to him, and when I turned him over I was sure he was dead. I cried even harder when I saw air bubbles through the mess of blood and flesh and dirt on his face. I was shaking so bad I could barely get back to the house to call the doctor.

I open my eyes to see Dean’s face, perfect except for the tiny scars that the stitches left around his eyes and on his cheekbones. I want to cry, but it doesn’t come. I close my eyes, my muscles aching and my head reeling. Behind my closed eyelids I can see colorless, transparent objects floating like bubbles out of my vision and into my head. My head throbs with pounding so loud that my ears start to hum. I hear beeping machines and the sound of tiny wheels on linoleum floors. Someone coughs, and from the next room over I can hear people crying.

“They want to take his arm,” someone says next to me, and even before I open my eyes, I know it’s Adam.

He is standing next to me wearing blue hospital scrubs, holding Karen’s hand. He has a closely-clipped beard now, and Karen’s belly is large and round.

“What did you tell them?” Karen says to him, glancing at me quickly before she speaks.

“I’m not going to let them do it,” he says quickly. “These small-town hospitals think you need to amputate whenever you’ve got anything bigger than a scratch.”

“You must have been so scared, Mom,” Karen says to me. I look down at my shaking hands.

“I’m glad he had the presence of mind to get back to the house,” Adam says, shaking his head. “I’d hate to think what would have happened if he would’ve stayed out there.”

I close my eyes and try not to think about Dean limping back to the house, his left arm hanging at the elbow by only a few ligaments. I told him a hundred times that I didn’t like him taking that gun with him plowing, no matter how many pheasants he saw.

A nurse comes into the room and speaks to Adam, but my eyes are too tired to keep them open. I close them tightly and try to block out the sounds of beeping and crying and breathing.

When I open them more people appear from behind the curtain next to my bed. I know the one with the stethoscope is Adam, and beside him is Emma, wearing a navy blazer and a long skirt. Karen is there too, wearing a green cotton dress and holding Adam’s hand, and she smiles at me. I can’t smile back, and I don’t want to. When I remember that I forgave Karen a long time ago for taking Adam away from us and moving all the way to Minnesota—that I love her now, and that Dean and I have lived under her roof for several happy years, it’s too late to give the smile I should’ve a moment ago.

“How is she, Adam?” Emma says, her voice wobbling like a minor tune.

“Dad says she fell in the bathroom a few days ago and hit her head, but she didn’t start acting strange until Sunday afternoon.” I can hear Adam’s voice, but my eyes won’t stay open or focused enough to see him. I want them to see that I’m right here, that I can hear them now that all that racket is gone, but I’m so sleepy.

“She was helping me get into the shower and she fell,” Dean says, his voice shaking. I open my eyes to let him know that I’m just clumsy, but if he understands this he doesn’t let me know.

Words float around the room, and although I know what they are saying is important, I can’t seem to focus. I close my eyes again and hear voices that echo in my head like they are being shouted into a well. I feel liquid seeping into the left side of my head, but when I open my eyes I’m not sure if what I felt was real, or if I only heard someone talking about blood in my brain.

One of the voices is garbled, and I can’t understand him. He starts to cry.

Something rumbles inside my head, and I writhe under the damp sheet. Dean squeezes my hands tighter, and I try to squeeze back with the one I can feel, but my head gets cloudy and I feel my neck drooping. Soon I give in, and slip into a place where my ragged breath and the beeping machines are only a backdrop to the occasional stabbing pain.

My stomach churns, and I clutch my belly to make the pain go away.

“We’ll be fine,” Dean says beside me. His face is young and too thin. “We’ll be fine.”

We are sitting at our kitchen table, the red check tablecloth clean and plastic. Our empty plates glare at us with nothing more to offer.

I press my index finger into a breadcrumb and then lick it carefully. There is a loaf of bread on the counter that needs to last us until Sunday. There are frozen peas that we can make last two weeks if we don’t eat more than we did tonight. Dean didn’t think about any of this and just assumed we’d have enough food. I was the one who pulled out the pad of paper and took an inventory of everything we had that would last us until the crops would start growing again, and that was if the weather was good.

In my more rational moments, I know that it is not Dean’s fault that we are this close to losing the farm. But right now I hate him for not listening to me when I said we should’ve moved into town. Dean knows that arguing with me now is useless. He can’t change that my sister is doing just fine with her new bakery in town, or that the early ice storm took everything from us this year.

Outside the kitchen window the wind slaps a tree branch against the house noisily, reminding us that this early spring will not make up for the early winter. This predicted April blizzard would stick around long enough to make us hate the month. I look at my hands. They are rough from work, but still young. The yellow of my wedding band stands out against my skin, and I put my hand in my lap so I won’t feel guilty for this one extravagance.

“I thought maybe we could have some potatoes,” Dean says, rubbing his hands together nervously.

“They’re gone,” I say, glaring at him. “Almost everything is gone. Even the frozen broccoli you can’t stand.”

He nods, and my stomach growls loudly again. Dean’s gaze meets mine, and he reaches into my lap and covers my hand with his. I look away, but leave my hand under his. We say nothing for long moments, and only the occasional sounds of our empty bellies disturb the quiet. Slowly I remember that he is no more to blame for this winter than I am.

At last I look up and smile. He watches me as I hurry over to the cupboard and pull down a jar of molasses from the top shelf. Mother gave it to me for Christmas, and I saved it for a time when we could afford to make cookies again. I hand Dean a spoon, and he hands it back to me.

We laugh as we take turns dipping our spoons into the big glass jar. The thick syrup is too sweet and makes us squint, but it slides down our throats and coats the hungry places inside. We stop after we’ve each had five spoonfuls, partly because we are starting to feel sick, but mostly because we know we’ll need this treat in another few days. I go to bed early in hopes that I can fall asleep before I get hungry again. Dean says he’ll come to bed as soon as he tends to the few cows that survived the winter. They will be too scrawny to sell, but we can’t let them die.

I fall asleep quickly, but wake up as soon as I hear Dean beside me. When I open my eyes, he’s sitting next to me, holding my hands. I try to smile at him, but can’t, so I grasp his hand tightly.

“Hi, Dad,” someone says. “Has the neurologist been in to see her today?”

“No,” Dean says after a long pause.

I struggle to keep my eyes open, and see tubes in my chest and arm, and a machine next to me with half a dozen green and orange lines that beep. I remember machines before, but can’t tell if these are the same. The room smells of sour milk and bleach. My stomach still hurts, and I wonder if that molasses did more harm than good.

“She looks better today,” I hear someone say.

Dean looks at me for a long time. “I don’t think she’ll be with us much longer,” he says. “I’ll never forget meeting her at Elsie’s birthday party,” he says. “She was sixteen and I was fourteen, and we were on the same team for pump-pump-pull-away.”

He kisses my hand and my fingers tighten on his. “All I could think about after that was Grace Hansen,” he says.

A machine next to me beeps loudly, and I close my eyes when the pulsing in my head gets too loud.

“I didn’t know there was a Grace Hansen before that day.”

I lift my eyelids and keep them open long enough to see his wet, creased face. The effort is overwhelming and I stir in the bed, my head suddenly raw with pain again.

For a long time all I can hear is labored breathing, and then a sharpness seizes my head, and I stretch on the bed. Someone whispers, “I’m right here, Sweetheart.” I try to open my eyes again, but the effort is overwhelming and a silent cry escapes my lips.

I hear someone talking about morphine and then the tubes are no longer in my arm. Then another one pokes in, more painful than the rest. My head is filled with cluttered words and I scream, only to discover that the room is silent except for the faint breath escaping my lips.

“Remember how you used to bring me lunch every day?” A voice breaks through the deafening sound of my rasping breath. “I used to see you coming in that red pickup a mile away, turning up the dust.” He laughs, but his voice catches in his throat.

“You’d come out there wearing that big sun hat,” he chuckles, and I hear wheezing that could be my own. “You were the prettiest thing I’d see all day. Still are.”

A dark-haired man leans against a bale of hay, and although I don’t know who he is, I know that I love him. He wipes cracked hands stained brown with dirt onto his overalls and turns to me with a roughened smile. I can hear his sweet, low voice that is more like music than speaking. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, people stop and listen just to hear the sound.

I think I hear him speaking to someone, but I can’t distinguish the words, as if they have learned a language I don’t know. After a while I stop trying to decipher it and just watch the laughter in his dark eyes.

I can hear voices all around me, and then I notice the piercing pain in my neck. I try to swallow, but my throat is dry and my mouth tastes like flour.

Someone sings a tune as familiar as the dark-haired man, and then several other voices join until the room is filled. It sounds like heaven, but I know I’m not there because my head rips whenever I move or breathe too deeply.

The music stops, and someone speaks, but the words seem blurred like when it used to rain on the farm and we would yell to each other while we were delivering a calf.

“Remember how we used to make mud pies in that old broken down stove by the garden?”

“We used to have pig weddings.”

“We didn’t,” a male voice joins in. “We’d throw rotten tomatoes at the hogs.”

The room fills with noise again, and I can’t tell who is saying what, but even without opening my eyes, I see the faces of my children and grandchildren. Although I can’t distinguish one from another, I know they are there from their voices and warmth.

One voice stands out from the rest. He grips my hand, and I hold it as tightly as I can.

“I’m right here, Sweetheart,” he says. He squeezes my hand tightly, and then leans over to kiss me. My lips are wet when he sits back, and I can feel his body shaking in his grip.

My head screams again, and I twist on the bed, desperate to make it stop. Moments pass and I stay as still as I can so my head will keep quiet. I can still feel pressure on my hand, and then I hear voices closer to my head.

“I love you, Grandma.”

“Grandma,” a thin, silvery voice says, “I love you.”

“I love you, Grandma,” says a hesitant tenor voice.

“I love you, Mom,” someone kisses me, and my cheeks are wet.

“Goodnight, Great-Grandma,” a small, pink voice says close to my ear.

The goodnights and I love yous mingle until they seem to be one chorus with a dozen different harmonies. My head starts to ache again, and then the voices are gone.

At last the familiar, rasping voice again. “I just hope I get to go be with her,” he says, his voice shaking and heaving. “I never lived without her.”

The noise inside my head is ripping and tearing so that I gasp just to keep it from spilling out, but I pretend it’s not there for just a moment, and strain to open my eyes.

When I let the light in, I find him just where I knew he would be, staring at my face for some sign. I open my eyes as wide as I can so I can see him, and I squeeze his hand and stare at his face as long as my eyes will stay open. He squeezes my hand hard, I see his dark, beautiful eyes, and for one moment, it is quiet.

***************

As always, if you listen to the very end of this episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, a little something to make you laugh. But first, I want to thank a couple of our supporters.

Connie Blackwood, thank you for reaching out to me all of those years ago and bringing me into the beautiful work that Micro Business Mentors does to support entrepreneurs in Uganda and the Philippines. It’s a rare and precious thing when a business relationship becomes a friendship, and I’m so grateful for yours. Your encouragement and appreciation has lifted me up often in this pandemic, and I’m so grateful for your continued support.

Carol Toninato--Toni--all my life you have been there in all of the important moments, cheering me on, taking a genuine interest in what I’m doing, and encouraging me along the way. This time of year especially my memories are full of your caramel corn, banana bread and Special K bars, and the Christmas ornaments you gifted first to me and now to my children year after year. Thank you for being such an essential part of our family, and for taking us in like we’re your own.

I also want to welcome Winnie Shi our newest Shelter in Place apprentice, who comes to us with a finance background and a curiosity for investigative journalism. There’s some really exciting stuff happening behind the scenes here at Shelter in Place, and we’re so grateful to Karma Compass and FLIK, two wonderful partner organizations that have helped us create a mentorship program to expand our vision and train the next generation of women podcasters, business owners, and storytellers. If you know someone who’d like to be a part of this, reach out!

None of this would be possible without listener support. Thanks to all of you who have made one-time or regular donations, rated and reviewed the show on Apple Podcasts, shared this podcast with your friends and family, connected with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and reached out to us to tell us that this work matters to you. If Shelter in Place has been a home to you in 2020, we hope you’ll consider giving a year-end gift to help us keep this work going in 2021. You can do that at our website shelterinplacepodcast.info. We’d love to hear from you.

Shelter in Place is a Hurrdat Media production. The Shelter in Place music was composed by Chase Horseman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects came from Storyblocks. Sarah Edgell is our Design Director, Nate Davis is our Creative Director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Fatima Romero-Afi, Sarai Waters, and Winnie Shi. Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.