The Summer Without Men

from her and began to pace, jiggling him as I walked back and forth across the floor. Without turning to look at me, she said in a voice hard with determination, “I will not go back there tonight. I do not want to be there when he comes home. Not tonight.” I offered them my bed, to which she said, “We can sleep there, all four. It’s a king, right?”
    We did sleep there, all four or five of us, depending on how you counted. After giving Lola a couple of shots of whiskey from the Burdas’ stash of hard liquor, I rocked Simon to sleep and laid him on the bed, a fat ball of babyhood in blue pajamas with feet, who breathed loudly from his chest, tiny lips pursing and unpursing automatically. I dug out a small blanket I had hidden away and wrapped him up in it to protect him from the air-conditioning and then carried in the unconscious Flora, who snorted once when I pulled the blanket over her, but she quickly rolled over and settled into deep sleep. After I returned, Lola and I sat together for a while. She did not want to talk about Pete. I asked her about the row, but she said that their fights were stupid, that they were always about nothing, nothing that was important, that she was tired, tired of Pete, tired of herself, sometimes even tired of the children. I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, without a transition of any kind, she began to tell me that for three years after she had started school as a child, she had not uttered a word. “I talked at home, to my parents, to my brothers, but I never said anything in school, not to anybody. I don’t remember much about preschool, but I remember a little about kindergarten. I remember Mrs. Frodermeyer leaning over me. Her face was really big and close. And she asked me why I didn’t answer her. She said it wasn’t polite. I knew that. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. I just couldn’t.” Lola looked at her hands. “My mom says that sometime in the first grade I started whispering in school. She was overjoyed. Her kid had whispered. And then, little by little, I guess I just got louder.”
    After Lola was nestled beside her children on the bed, I sat down on the edge and stroked her head for about twenty minutes. She’s only two years older than Daisy, I said to myself. I thought of her, Lola, the silent little girl who couldn’t talk in school. The anxiety of speaking in a place that isn’t home, that’s outside, that’s strange. It had a name, as so many things do, selective mutism, not so uncommon in young children. I thought then of a young woman who had been a patient with me in the hospital, and I tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t. She hadn’t spoken either, not a word. Thin and white and blond, she had made me think of a tubercular revenant from the Romantic age. I saw her as she wandered stiffly up and down the hallway, hunched over, long pale hair drawn over her face like a veil, carrying a plastic pitcher she held very close to her mouth so she could spit into it, sometimes silently, sometimes noisily hawking up gobs of mucus from her lungs, which made the other patients snicker. Once, I had seen her dart behind a sofa in the common area, crouch down, disappear from sight, and then, after a moment, I heard the hoarse roar of her vomiting into the pitcher. Inside out. Keep the outside out. Seal me shut, tight as a drum. Close my eyes. Shut my mouth. Bar the doors. Pull down the shades. Leave me be in my wordless sanctum, my fortress of madness. Poor girl, where was she now?
    I found a spot beside Flora and eventually fell asleep, despite the slumberland concert provided by my overnight guests: the whistling of congested little Simon, the masticatory noises of Flora as she sucked and chomped on her index finger, and the restless murmurs and single word emitted by Lola. Several times, in a small high voice, she said, “No.” Although I remained in bed with them, my mind roamed as was its wont onto thoughts of Boris and Sidney and the Pause and the sex diary in hiatus. I thought of writing about the innumerable dreams from which I had woken in full riotous orgasm or perhaps about F.G., whom I had called the Grazer because he was a nibbler and a chewer, who moved up and down my body as if it were a delectable green field. I then allowed myself several minutes of extreme irritation over the biogenetic fantasy that it was