Later, tired and having lost momentum, we carried the children in our arms into their new room, their mattresses not much larger than the cardboard box where they had been sleeping. Then, in our bedroom, we slid onto our own mattress and wedged our legs together, saying nothing, but with our bodies saying something like maybe later, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll make love, make plans, tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Goodnight.
MOTHER TONGUES
When I was first invited to work on the soundscape project, I thought it seemed somewhat tacky, megalomaniacal, possibly too didactic. I was young, though not much younger than I am now, and still thought of myself as a hard-core political journalist. I also didn’t like the fact that the project, though it was orchestrated by NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and would eventually form part of their sound archive, was in part funded by some huge multinational corporations. I tried to do some research on their CEOs—for scandals, frauds, any fascist allegiances. But I had a little girl. So when I was told that the contract included medical insurance, and realized that I could live on the salary without having to do the myriad journalistic gigs I was taking on to survive, I stopped researching, stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract. I’m not sure what his reasons were, but at around the same time, my husband—who was then just a stranger specialized in acoustemology and not my husband or our children’s father—signed his.
The two of us gave ourselves completely to the soundscape project. Every day, while the children were in daycare and school, respectively, we went out into the city, not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new. We traveled in and out of the five boroughs, interviewing strangers, asking them to talk in and about their native tongues. He liked the days we spent in transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops. I liked the days we spent in schools, sampling children. He’d walk around the crowded cafeterias, his Porta-Brace sound bag hanging from a strap around his right shoulder, his boom held up at an angle, recording the cluster of voices, cutlery, footsteps. In hallways and classrooms, I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual, physical tongues—pink, earnest, disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues: the difficult position of the tongue’s tip in the Hispanic erre, the quick tongue-slaps against the palate in all the polysyllabic Kichwa and Karif words, the soft and downward curved bed of the tongue in the aspirated Arabic h.
The months passed, and we recorded voices, collected accents. We accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing.
TIME
We also accumulated things: plants, plates, books, chairs. We picked up objects from curbsides in affluent neighborhoods. Often, we realized later that we didn’t really need another chair, another bookshelf, and so we put it back outside, on the curbside of our less-affluent neighborhood, feeling that we were participants in the invisible left hand of wealth redistribution—the anti–Adam Smiths of sidewalks and curbsides. For a while, we continued to pick up objects from the streets, until we heard on the radio one day that there was a bedbug crisis in the city, so we stopped scavenging, quit redistributing wealth, and winter came, and then came spring.
It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life. One day, our books didn’t fit in the bookshelves anymore, and the big empty room in our apartment had become our living room. It had become the place where we watched movies, read books, assembled puzzles, napped, helped the children with their homework. Then the place where we had friends over, held long conversations after they’d left, fucked, said beautiful and horrible things to each other, and cleaned up in silence afterward.
Who knows how, and who knows where the time had gone, but one day, the boy had turned eight, then nine, and the girl was five. They had started going to the same public school. All the little strangers they had met, they now called their friends. There were soccer teams, gymnastics, end-of-year performances, sleepovers, always too many birthday parties, and the marks we had made on the hallway wall of our apartment to register our children’s heights suddenly summed up to a vertical story. They had grown so much taller. My husband thought they grew tall too fast. Unnaturally fast, he said, because of that organic whole milk they consumed in those little cartons; he thought that the milk was chemically altered to produce premature tallness in children. Maybe, I thought. But possibly, also, it was just that time had passed.
TEETH
How much more?
How much longer?
I suppose it’s the same with all children: if they are awake inside a car, they ask for attention, ask for bathroom stops, ask for snacks. But mostly they ask:
When will we get there?
We usually tell the boy and girl it’ll be just a little while. Or else we say:
Play with your toys.
Count all the white cars that pass.
Try to sleep.
Now, as we halt at a tollbooth near Philadelphia, they suddenly wake up, as if their sleep were synchronized—both between the two of them and, more inexplicably, with the car’s varying accelerations. From the backseat, the girl calls out:
How many more blocks?
Just a little while till we make a stop in Baltimore, I say.
But how many blocks till we get all the way to the end?
All the way to the end is Arizona. The plan is to drive from New York to the southeastern corner of the state. As we drive, southwest-bound toward the borderlands, my husband and I will each be working on our new sound projects, doing field recordings and surveys. I’ll focus on interviews with people, catch fragments of conversations among strangers, record the sound of news on the radio or voices in diners. When we get to Arizona, I’ll record my last samples and start editing everything. I have four weeks to get it all done. Then I’ll probably have to fly back to New York with the girl, but I’m not sure of that yet. I’m not sure what my husband’s exact plan is either. I study his face in profile. He concentrates on the road ahead. He’ll be sampling things like the sound of wind blowing through plains or parking lots; footsteps walking on gravel, cement, or sand; maybe pennies falling into cash registers, teeth grinding peanuts, a child’s hand probing a jacket pocket full of pebbles. I don’t know how long his new sound project will take him, or what will happen next. The girl breaks our silence, insisting:
I asked you a question, Mama, Papa: How many blocks till we get all the way there?
We have to remind ourselves to be patient. We know—I suppose even the boy knows—how confusing it must be to live in the timeless world of a five-year-old: a world not without time but with a surplus of it. My husband finally gives the girl an answer that seems to satisfy her:
We’ll get all the way there when you lose your second bottom tooth.
TONGUE TIES
When the girl was four and had started going to public school, she prematurely lost a tooth. Immediately after, she started stuttering. We never knew if the events were in fact causally related: school, tooth, stutter. But in our familial narrative, at least, the three things got tied together in a confusing, emotionally charged knot.