if you start to get scared, stop listening
Haven, a little less alone. Around 3:00 I heard the laughing voices of children in the neighborhood. Bill and I had been talking about starting a family, so I stopped my work, listened, and fantasized about our future. As soon as the distant, unknown voices became aware of me they turned malevolent, accusing me of being an alcoholic, a madwoman. “She sits inside and stares at the wall all day,” the voices said. “She’s crazy.” “So unfair,” I thought, for I was hard at work on an article about North Haven artist Nancy Sonnenfeld for the New Haven Advocate. I was staring at the wall, but I was staring because I was projecting slides of Mrs. Sonnenfeld’s portraits of irises onto the wall and recording my intellectual and emotional response to those pale, ghostlike, and disturbingly beautiful images. Delight in the neighborhood vanished. Scared and unhappy, I shut the window, turned the fan on, and went back to my writing. The voices got really mean just before Halloween. That weekend I drove to Carlisle, Massachusetts, where my mother and eldest sister, Elaine, and her family lived. My middle sister, Daphne, was attending a conference at Wang, in Lowell, and her presence in New England created a wonderful opportunity for all the Bien women to get together. At the beginning of my drive to Carlisle, everything was quiet. Then gradually I started hearing chatter in the background, which could have just been static on the radio because I couldn’t distinguish the words. I turned the radio off and on several times to test whether the voices were coming from it or from some other source. Finally I turned the radio off and kept it off. But my feelings of distress increased. When I pulled off at the rest stop on I-91, I saw a tan minivan with black curtains over the windows. The doors to the van were open, so I could see that the interior was also black and there was a double mattress where the seats should have been. Something about the way the van was decorated stirred my imagination. The black curtains, mattress, dark bedding, and tiger-striped pillows suggested illicit dalliances. I wanted to go up to it and peer in, but didn’t, stayed by a combination of propriety and fear.
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