OUT NOW
Turnfeather
Jim Bellarosa
Pip and Brenda Hardtiff married at 38, four months after meeting. They wondered before taking their vows if their brief courtship had established a foundation solid enough for a durable union, but captured by the swelling rapture of their love, they swooned to the eternal promise of marriage.
Before the wedding the couple spent their savings on a mortgage. The pride of home ownership deepened the magic of their intoxicating adventure, and with their bliss swelling beyond all the joys of their prior lives, they began life together as spellbound newlyweds.
Three months later---it was early November---they argued about the presidential election. Brenda declared for the Democrats, Pip for the Republicans. Feeling betrayed, and furious, Brenda swirled at her husband and shrieked:
“I won’t license such disloyalty by casting a vote you intend to mock and nullify with your own!” She shunned the polls the next day.
After Pip voted Brenda wouldn’t speak to him. Befuddled, but annoyed too, Pip tried then tired of trying to encourage conversation. Three days later his gregarious and fun loving parents stopped by. Their joviality soon thawed the frosty atmosphere in the home and opened an avenue for the newlyweds’ reconciliation.
Afterwards Pip wondered if he somehow shared the blame for their discord, but he dared not risk exploring such a hot topic with Brenda while its embers still glowed. A house once divided against itself loses its dignity, he smirked, but one twice divided loses its reputation.
For the next two months amiability again embraced the couple’s relations. Then one Friday night Pip reversed his wife’s rotor again by declining her impromptu suggestion for a weekend away. Ballistic instantly---hollering, cursing, sneering and sobbing---Brenda convened a second congress of silence.
A thicker, heavier gloom stilled the Hardtiff’s home the next day. Pip considered summoning his parents for another healing hour, but thought better of inaugurating a band-aid dependency. Instead, he fled the scene of his sorrows and joined a buddy for an afternoon of bowling.
Preoccupied with his marital woes, Pip sulked as his bowling ball played Goofy for the gallery, and after his last string he almost wished he’d stayed home. Leaving the alley, he shared his marital troubles with his friend, who soon confessed to a similar, earlier, episode with his own wife.
“I bought a huge wooden ear and stood it on the front lawn,” the friend said, “and then I pulled a chair up beside it. Probably at the instigation of a smart aleck neighbor, a TV crew appeared and began broadcasting our humiliation to the whole city. Soon strangers were calling begging Martha to show mercy on me. The notoriety brought her such humility she gave in and she hasn’t shut up since.”
Pip laughed. The humor buoyed his spirits, ignited his imagination, and when he arrived home he bounced up the steps into his house.
Busy blending a meatloaf for their dinner when Pip sauntered into the kitchen, Brenda ignored him. He seated himself at the table and watched in the grotesque solemnity of their silence as she worked to prepare a meal that would later form the centerpiece of an awkward ritual. Her fingers carved through the meaty mixture rhythmically, smoothly, and watching them, her eyes never glanced away. The small chime clock in the kitchen struck five, the refrigerator hummed through its cycle and shut off. The radio, the TV were off.
“Why if there’s a song called Silent Night isn’t there one called Silent Day?” Pip asked suddenly.
Brenda’s hands hesitated for just an instant then resumed working. Her attention, her eyes, squinting a bit now, remained focused on her diligent hands. She insulted Pip’s question with silence.
Pip left the house, returned before long with a six-pack. Brenda, strangely elaborating on her culinary venture, stood peeling apples for a pie. Pip opened a beer and played spectator at the table again. Brenda’s hands, it seemed to him, had lost the fluid rhythm he’d noted earlier and she nicked her finger with the peeler.
“If Paul Simon sang The Sounds of Silence with you you’d be a redundancy,” Pip said. He finished his beer, got up and went outside to salt some ice on his steps.
That evening after dinner’s main course, Pip told Brenda that if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had cold-shouldered the Great Depression as ruthlessly as she shunned her husband, the country would’ve had no fireside chats to lean on.
“Talk and plenty of it is what puts hair on a nation’s chest,” he chortled, slapping the table.
Brenda sighed, got up and returned with apple pie. Halfway through dessert Pip cleared his throat and asked:
“Did you know the expression Cat got your tongue? comes from a fable where a cat chewed off the tongue of a shoe when the shoe’s owner had his foot in his mouth?”
Brenda frowned, rose from the table, slipped on her coat and drove off in her car. Pip assumed she’d visit her sister across town, as she sometimes did Saturday evening, which would mean a late return. So, he straightened up the kitchen and at nine o’clock he watched a movie. Another beer induced an irresistible drowsiness….and a sound night’s sleep.
When Brenda’s silence stretched into the next afternoon, Pip decided that only a more sustained barrage of teasing could rout her obstinacy. He’d be returning to work the next day, however….
Pip bought a parrot at a mall Sunday afternoon and took him in a cage to a secluded section of the concourse. Ignoring the curious glances of the intermittent passersby, he coached the parrot for two hours, taught him to squawk “Don’t mention it,” “Repeat after me,” “I’m in a hurry---keep it short.” The parrot learned quickly, responded fluently, soon chatted spontaneously and incessantly, and Pip felt sure he’d recruited a loyal ally, an indefatigable sidekick that couldn’t be switched off. He brought the parrot home and at once the garrulous and spirited bird lit up---“Polly wants a talker,” he said, “Let’s talk this over like civilized folks,” “Your husband’s a peach,” etc.
Fed up before long, Brenda retired early and slammed the bedroom door to muffle the parrot’s gibberish. Pip thought he recognized in her quick irritation a temperamental brittleness bound to shatter the next day under the parrot’s interminable and relentless babbling. He smiled, winked at his animated accomplice.
The parrot mounted his podium just as Pip left for work in the morning. Often during the workday Pip thought about the nonsense his wife would be enduring as the conversational partner to an echo, and he chuckled to a co-worker about the parrot making his debut in the comic opera “Silent Fight.” But above all he longed for an imminent return to normalcy in his marriage.
When Pip returned home that evening his wife still would not speak to him. Neither would the parrot.