The Voiceover Artist (5 page)

Whenever I find myself waiting, I look for a way to prepare for what I'm waiting for. That's how I now understand all the hours I spent as a kid sitting on my bed with a radio in my lap, listening to commercials: I was preparing, even when I could not speak, to be a voiceover artist. I picked up my lector's workbook and turned to the scripture readings I was scheduled to deliver this coming Sunday in my second outing as a lector at St. Asella's. Maybe, I thought, it is preparation that will separate me, in a way that talent alone cannot, from other voiceover artists with a range and timbre like mine.

So I dug into the text. Over more than ten recitations, I sought out the natural rhythm of each passage and gave voice to it. I practiced the multi-syllabic Hebrew and Canaanite names in the first reading until they sounded as natural on my lips as my mother's name, and repeated the Greek names of the cities mentioned in the second reading until their pronunciations were as familiar to me as those of Leyton and Peoria. When I'd honed my delivery of each reading, I closed the workbook. Part of preparing effectively, it seemed to me, was knowing when you were doing more harm than good to your voice and performance. All told, my preparation for Sunday had eaten up only ninety minutes. It was still Tuesday, and only two in the afternoon.

Connor still hadn't called me back. The prospect of calling him again, conceding my need of him even as I waited helplessly for some share of success that might rival his, seemed doubly debasing. I held my phone, waiting another minute for it to come to life in my hand and for Connor's name to appear on the pale blue screen. Then I opened the phone's address book, arrowed down to my brother's name, and selected it. Connor did not answer. I imagined him in active pursuit of his own dream, at work without waiting, his phone ringing silently in the small pocket of a backpack he'd thrown in the corner of a rehearsal space somewhere on Chicago's North Side. I listened to his voice—my voice, but steeped in confidence—in the outgoing message and hung up.

I lay down on the dusty upholstery of my couch, trying to persuade myself that an afternoon with good work already done and nothing left to do was a luxury I should enjoy. I could take a nap. I could read a book. I could get out and explore my new neighborhood. But what I did instead was think of Brittany. With equal parts imagining and recollection, I felt her breath on my neck as she rubbed herself against me, acting out the closeness we'd made with our voices and our attentiveness. Alone in my apartment, I acted out my present deprivation with a hand down the front of pants still buttoned, as if I might finish before I realized what I was doing.

2

 

Young Simon

 

SIMON WATCHED THROUGH
 his open bedroom door as his mother, May, tried to roust his father from an easy chair.

“I— I— I'll s— stay h— home with C— Connor,” Frank said, keeping his eyes on the television. “He— he's s— still f— f— feverish.”

“Connor is coming with us,” May said.

Simon's father looked up at his wife. “He's s— s— still sick, m— May!”

“He's fine, actually. His fever broke last night.”

“H— he should be h— here!” he said. “R— r— resting!”

“Frank,” she said, calmly. “Please.”

Out in the yard, Simon climbed up and into the back seat of the pickup truck and scooted to its far side. He pulled a seatbelt across his lap and buckled it at his right hip. Connor hoisted himself up on the truck step, squealed as he fell forward into the cab, and took the seat next to the near window. May leaned in and drew Connor's seat belt from its sheath.

“I don't need the seat belt, mommy,” Connor said.

“Everyone needs a seat belt,” May said.

“Not me, mommy. I can hold on. See?”

“I see,” she said, and clicked the tongue of the buckle into its clasp. May looked up at her older son and found that he was already strapped in safely. “Oh!” she said. “Thank you for buckling yourself, Simon.”

Simon did not reply.

“Next time I'll buckle myself, mommy,” Connor said.

“Okay,” May said.

Frank covered the three-and-a-half miles to St. Paul's, the only Catholic parish in Leyton, in less than five minutes, delivering himself and his family to church ten minutes before mass would start. Having unbuckled himself and announced his achievement, Connor was lifted out of the back seat by his mother.

“Whoa!” Connor said. “You're strong, mommy!”

May laughed. “Well, thank you!”

She extended a hand to Simon, but he ignored it and jumped down to the asphalt. Cloaked in the solitude of his newly adopted silence, Simon felt rugged and brave. No one could make him say how his father had failed him. No one could make Simon say a word.

As they neared the church doors, Frank said, “I— I— I'm having a cigarette.”

“Okay,” May said. “We'll see you inside.”

“See you inside, daddy,” Connor said, turning his head to smile at his unsmiling father.

On another day, Simon would have gladly followed his father to the patch of grass beside the church doors and pulled needles off the evergreen shrubs while Frank smoked. But today, Simon followed his mother into the flowers-and-old-people smell of the church, hoping that his father felt very much alone.

 

•••

 

FEVER AND SORE
 throat had kept Simon out of second grade the previous Friday and put him in bed early Friday night. Before sunrise on Saturday morning, he walked into the dark living room to find an empty pizza box on the folding tray next to his father's recliner and, on the couch, a plate with the crusts—Connor never ate the crusts—of three pieces of pizza. Standing with one bare foot on top of the other, Simon fretted that he had missed out on some fun with his father, fun that could neither be recreated nor recouped. Later that morning, Simon heard his mother telling his father that Connor woke up with a throat so sore he wouldn't talk, and that she'd be taking Connor to see the doctor. Simon was not happy that his brother's throat was sore, but he was not sad, either. Simon had been sick; now, it was Connor's turn to be.

When his father went out to rake the leaves in the yard, Simon returned to his bedroom, sat on the bed with his radio in his lap, and listened to the voices. They spoke of football and test drives and lawn tractors. Simon repeated after the voices, the way that Connor repeated after the television characters, and counted how many words he could speak before his stutter caught one in his throat and clutched it tight. Simon's all-time record was six consecutive, cleanly repeated words. That Saturday morning, his best was three in a row.

When Frank opened Simon's bedroom door, Simon's first thought was that he was in trouble.

Frank's flannel shirtsleeves were cuffed to the elbow and he smelled of wet leaves.

“W— we're going into t— town,” Frank said.

The moment his father finished speaking, Simon turned off the radio and returned it to the top of his wooden bedside table. Then he hopped down off of his bed and followed Frank out of the house. The leaves from the two big oaks were gone from the front lawn but still littered the larger sideyard, covering most of the orange and yellow blooms of the marigolds in his mother's garden. A black mound of leaves smoldered, sending wisps of gray smoke into the wind. It seemed strange to Simon that his father was leaving a chore half done, but he didn't mention it.

Most of the four-mile drive between the Davies residence and Leyton town square was two-lane highway. Simon sat in the front seat, fighting the urge to smile as his mind made a flipbook of the rows of tall, dying corn stalks on either side of the road. It's not that a trip into town was a rare event. Frank would bring Simon and Connor into town whenever their mother spent the better part of a Saturday at a baby or bridal shower. What made today different was that Connor was not along for the ride, which meant that Simon now had what Connor had enjoyed the night before while Simon lay in bed breaking a fever: their father all to himself.

At the western boundary of incorporated Leyton, Frank slowed at a stop sign and rolled through an empty intersection. To Simon, whose closest neighbor lived an eighth of a mile away, the modest one-story homes that lined both sides of the street seemed to be just inches away from each other. Simon wondered if any of his classmates lived in these houses. He had never been invited to a classmate's home, and Simon's own home was, as he'd heard his mother say before, seldom presentable, even if the visitors were just kids.

“Kids have parents,” May would say.

The streets surrounding Leyton's town square were paved in red brick. As the truck's worn tires rumbled over the masonry, Simon stared out the windshield, and then his father's window, at the obelisk at the center of the square. The pointed column reminded Simon of the big monument in Washington, D.C., a picture of which hung above the blackboard in his classroom. Simon figured the smaller version commemorated something, but what was a mystery to him. The idea that he and his father might solve that mystery together made Simon want to smile again.

Frank parked the pickup two storefronts down from the confectioner's. Simon unlatched the passenger-side door and kicked it open with his right foot. He shoved the door closed, then ran around the front of the truck to the window of the candy store, pressing his nose to the glass and cupping his hands at the side of his head to better see the jars and boxes filled with sweets.

“T— t—”

Take your face off the glass.

Simon knew what his father was trying to say, but he knew better than to do what his father said before he had finished saying it. He kept his face and hands where they were.

“T— take your f— face off that glass.”

Simon stepped back as soon as his father had finished speaking. He eyed the smudges he'd left on the window and felt bad, but figured that trying to wipe them off with the sleeve of his shirt would only make his father angry.

Frank pulled open the candy store's door, ringing the rusty bells that hung down its interior side. Simon rushed in ahead of him and stood over the central display: clear plastic boxes, four across and six rows high, tiered up and back like stadium seating, each box protecting a different treat from the open air. Simon ogled loose chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate-covered almonds, and malted-milk balls as densely packed and plentiful as the multi-colored plastic balls in the nets at the Chuck E. Cheese in Peoria. There were also individually wrapped hard candies: root-beer barrels, peppermint swirls and butterscotch disks. Beneath one of the scratched plastic box lids were several pounds of cashews, a favorite of Simon's father.

“C— candy,” Simon remembered his father telling him, “is k— kids' s— stuff.”

Sensing that his father's patience for browsing was running short, Simon hurried to the shelves lined with cardboard boxes of wrapped candies he had never seen anywhere outside this store. They had names like Necco and Beemans and Zotz. Something about the names and the letterforms on the wrappers told Simon that these were the kind of candies his father might have enjoyed when he was a kid.

“A— a— all right, ch— choose something,” Frank said.

Simon walked straight to the store's front counter, no longer a browser but a serious buyer. Suckers were his candy of choice. They were sweet from start to finish, and each had a clean, white paper stick that kept his hands from getting sticky. But what Simon liked best about suckers was his recent discovery that, when he was actively working a sucker, melting its layers of hard sugar with his tongue, people were more likely to ask him yes-or-no questions that he could answer with a nod or a shrug instead of a stuttered word. Only Connor's presence did more than a sucker to ensure that no one asked Simon to speak. Connor could make himself sound like the cartoon characters on TV and mimic the announcers who narrated his father's ballgames. Even when Connor spoke in his regular voice, people listened to him, and they laughed right when Connor wanted them to
.

Simon stood on his toes and reached into a fish bowl filled with Dum Dums. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding two suckers—one butterscotch-flavored, the other cherry soda. He looked up at his father.

“O— Okay, get ‘em both.”

Simon set both Dum Dums on the glass top of the counter while the bespectacled man behind it rang them up on his mechanical register.

“Fifty cents.”

Frank handed the man two quarters.

“Do you need a bag?” the man asked Simon.

Simon shook his head and grabbed his suckers off the counter.

“Y— you mean, n— no— no thank you.”

Simon turned back toward the man, but did not look up at him. “N— no th— th— tha— thank you.”

“Okay,” the man said. “See you soon.”

Simon followed his father to the door, unwrapping the butterscotch sucker as he walked. Outside, lost in the task of scraping away a piece of waxed paper from the sucker's upper hemisphere, Simon headed for the truck.

“Th— this way,” Frank said.

Simon's father was still standing in front of the candy store, jerking his thumb in the other direction. Simon eyed the obelisk and considered asking his father if they could have a look at the inscriptions on its base.

“C— come on, now.”

Walking slowly toward his father, Simon picked the last bit of paper from the sucker and popped the tiny yellow planet into his mouth.

Lately, Simon had been thinking about going silent permanently, whether he had a sucker or not. He recognized that, at first, when he stopped speaking, his parents and teachers and schoolmates would try, with commands and demands and unkind words, to make him talk. Simon also knew that they could not make him speak, that to speak or not was his decision. Simon felt powerful in silence, but he also felt alone. And he worried that Frank would take his silence as an insinuation that he, too, would be better off shutting up than stuttering. Silence was something fun to imagine, something to enjoy with the sweetness of a sucker, but Simon understood that he could not allow himself to go silent forever unless his father went first.

Simon kept his head down, milking the sucker for a slow, steady stream of flavor and watching the backs of his father's boots. The boots stopped in front of a single cement step.

“Pit—pit stop,” Frank said.

He held open a green door and waved Simon through it. The sign above the door read, The Four Corners.

Simon had been to the Four Corners before. It was dark inside, he remembered, and smelled clean and dirty all at once. He didn't like this place, but Frank's hand clamped down on his shoulder, and they were inside before he knew it.

“Hey, Frank,” someone said.

The voice came from one of the three silhouettes at a table toward the back, to the left of the bar. As their faces became visible in the low neon light thrown around them by the beer signs, Simon did not recognize the men from church or school or anywhere. He figured that they worked with his father at the factory, as many parents of his classmates did.

Frank raised one hand to the men and pushed Simon away from them, toward the bar, with the other. “F—fellas,” he said.

Frank lifted Simon up, set him on a barstool directly in front of the television, and took the stool to his son's left. Peering behind his father's back, Simon spied on the men at the table. He wished that they would ask his father and him to join them. He wished that the men were his father's friends. So far as Simon knew, his father didn't have any friends. Simon imagined that his father felt the same way about men his own age that Simon felt about the kids at school: that they knew too much about him without understanding him at all.