In a classroom at a middle school the effervescent students wanted me to know one among them “doesn’t talk.” Every day we’d all draw and add words to our drawings: I was the honored guest there for a two week arts in education gig. The teacher was a genius with seventh graders. And one among us they called “selectively mute.” I liked her doodles of Ren and Stimpy and the clear current of her own mind following its course amidst classroom chatter. By not talking she seemed to have obtained permission to keep alive her own world, even at school.
As we painted with watercolors and added words to our shapes, her classmates described to me how they trolled a local mall after school. They wanted me, a visitor from out of town, to know what was fun to do. I expressed interest in a knife shop they raved about. I asked a bright boy where it was in the land of the Mall but he couldn’t remember quite. But he said he’d figure it out.
The next day he’d forgotten his mission.
Same thing the next day.
I shrugged. I easily get lost and discouraged inside malls so if I didn’t go it didn’t matter to me. But on day five, as I lingered with my own sketch after the class tumbled out to lunch, I realized I wasn’t really paying attention to the girl who wouldn’t speak. It had become our joint habit to continue painting together and I’d become accustomed to her huge attention crouching inside a sheltering silence.
“It’s next to the Radio Shack,” she said clearly, simply, without effort.
I felt the hair stand up on my arms and the last boy out of the room turned wide-eyed in the doorway to stare.
“Not by the movie theaters,” she said firmly.
I felt wonder to hear words from she who had such a big file; her teacher had shown me how many papers existed in the system to support the mystery of her choosing not to talk. Now the boy in the doorway opened his mouth to exclaim, but I caught his eye to signal “Wait…” and I made as casual a reply as I could muster, feeling like a deer in the woods had walked close and bumped my elbow.
“So maybe if I went in by the Sears I wouldn’t get so lost,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“SHE TALKED!” the boy in the doorway shouted and I could feel him poised to bolt to the lunchroom with the news.
I raised a hand and he hesitated and outside I convinced him to talk to his teacher first. Inside I dabbed my paintbrush in green and added a hint of leaves to my drawing of a spare mulberry tree. She who had nothing more to say added red to Stimpy.
For the second week of the residency, the silent one and I continued to linger through the lunch breaks painting. Nothing else was said between us on Monday, or on Tuesday or Wednesday. On Thursday she made a drawing of a pond. Liquid blue green with stiff shores. No trees.
“They didn’t come back this year,” she said finally.
“Oh?” I said. I’d come to like our silence. After the buzz of classes, not talking at lunch was a very pleasant return to my own dream world. She wasn’t drawing Ren or Stimpy. She was drawing something else, something by the shore.
“There were 12,” she said.
“Twelve,” I murmured, trying not to cause her hand to stop moving by looking too closely, by being too interested.
“They all came last year.”
She’d drawn a goose and was drawing another. For a moment I could hear 12 of them stirring the air as they arrived by water where a quiet girl noticed.
“But not this year.”
I vanished myself, soon. On Friday afternoon, steering my car back into my own life, the praises of the teacher and a school counselor echoed; I’d reached a life that had stumped them, I guess. Mostly I thought about the painting of geese over a pond, a gift tucked into my artist’s toolbox. And I wondered what speaking would arrive next in a girl’s life. And why.
