by Dave Reidy
“This is easily three shots, Simon,” Brittany said, holding up her glass and smiling.
I waggled. “I figured I’d save myself a trip.”
“Next time in, you’ll have to carry her,” Connor said.
Brittany flashed Connor a hard look that softened when she read the hint of a smile on his face. “We’ll see who’s carrying who.”
She took a swig of bourbon, held it in her mouth for a moment, swallowed and coughed. Connor laughed, letting his head fall back against the aluminum frame of his chair.
I held my beer bottle in the air. “I’d like to make a toast.”
Connor stared at me. Then, with an amused look on his face, he stood up and raised his glass.
I waggled, suddenly embarrassed by the formality of my gesture. I had never given a toast before. I stood there between the two people who knew me best, awash in feelings that were too predictable, too revealing, or too sentimental to be given words and voice. As Brittany and Connor waited and tension mounted in my neck, I waggled again and said, “To the Windy City!”
Connor laughed. “He sounds like a radio commercial already.”
I angled my bottle toward Connor’s tumbler and made contact with it just as Brittany’s did. Then I chased Brittany’s retreating hand hungrily, as if the tapping of my bottleneck against her glass would somehow make binding our spoken plans and promises. The bottle caught only her knuckle, a flesh-muted tap that made no sound. I would have tried again, but Brittany was already drinking the toast, so I put the mouth of the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and gulped.
•••
THE MONDAY AFTER my debut as a lector at St. Asella’s, I started pursuing the part of my Chicago dream that still stood a chance: the part that had nothing to do with Brittany.
I plugged a gently used microphone into my computer and recorded the radio commercials I had been rehearsing for weeks: one for the Chicago Blackhawks, another for Arc Home Electronics, and a spot for the Ulysses S. Grant Museum in Galena, Illinois. Then I cut together a one-minute medley that demonstrated high-quality performance across my wide range of energies, tempos, volumes and tones. My deliveries extended from whispered to stentorian and from gentle to aggressive, but I did only one voice—my own—and played only one role: myself. The kind of voiceover work I wanted to do was the kind I’d always appreciated most, the kind Larry Sellers did: straight announcement, which relied upon the artist’s virtuosic vocal ability and won the listener’s attention with a subconscious appeal to her innate desire for perfection. In a commercial that called for straight announcement, the meaning of the words mattered less than how the words were said. And characters didn’t matter at all.
If the voiceover agents want someone who creates characters, I thought, they’ll have to find Connor.
Early Tuesday morning, I burned my demo onto seven CDs and scrawled my name and phone number on their non-writable sides in permanent marker. I stuffed the CDs into envelopes along with folded copies of my cover letter, the characters of which bore the white striations left behind by a nearly empty ink cartridge. With the envelopes in my otherwise empty messenger bag, I headed out on foot.
The first agency I visited was Skyline Talent, the organization that had represented Larry Sellers for much of his long career. Sellers had grown up in Sampere, a small, Central Illinois township near my hometown of Leyton. Since coming to Chicago in the 1970s, he’d done national radio commercials and had been, for almost two decades, the voice of Jewel Food Stores. I’d studied Larry Sellers’ work since I was thirteen years old, and it was while listening to one of Larry’s performances that I selected the word I’d use to induce the seizures, spasms and fits that brought back my vocal muscles from atrophy. “Financing.” Because of the agency’s connection to Larry Sellers, and the inseparability, in my own mind, of the sound of his voice from the existence of mine, the four-block walk from my apartment to the offices of Skyline Talent was more pilgrimage than errand.
I walked through the front door and left my demo in the hands of the receptionist. Then I turned around and walked out. I didn’t introduce myself or ask to speak to any agents—not at Skyline, not at any agency. I wasn’t interested in, or good at, making small talk. Besides, I saw no reason to put a face to my voice. My demo was my good side, and I wanted the agents to see it before they knew anything else about me.
By noon on Tuesday, back at my apartment, all the momentum I’d felt while making and delivering my demo was gone. In its place was a gloomy understanding that simply seeing myself as a voiceover artist did not make me one. I hadn’t considered, until just then, the sheer number of things that had to happen before an agent would call with an offer to represent me. A receptionist would have to put my demo in the hands of an agent. That agent would have to decide the demo was worth listening to, with nothing more to go on than a cover letter. Any agent who did decide, against her better judgment, to give my demo a chance would have to find the time and attention to listen to it. And even if she found the time, there was no telling if she’d like my work. If having talent wasn’t enough to ensure Connor’s success, how could it guarantee my own? I began to see each of my morning deliveries as a missed opportunity. With a chance to do any of them again, I would have gladly initiated and endured small talk to increase, by even a fraction of a percentage, the likelihood that an agent would give my demo a fair listen.
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.
