the colors

(eleanor)

To this she startled herself awake night after night for months, always convinced that the voice had been real, always certain that she had somehow broken the spell by waking. She began sleeping with a pillow over her face, tissues torn and twisted in her ears, seeking the same isolation that had gone before. Sequestering herself from the smallest noises of her parents' home, which groaned like a railway bridge in the night. Her mother stood in her doorway at night, the hall light turned off behind her, and watched Eleanor's still, sleeping frame. She saw what Eleanor didn't: the interruption of this stillness, Eleanor's good leg twitching, her to-the-thigh castbound one too heavy to budge. Each morning the sheets were soaked through. Each morning Eleanor awoke more withdrawn than the one before.

She looked for the voice everywhere, hoping to sense it in the touch of her mother's plants against her face, in the rush of water from the bathtub faucet. She listened for it, but knew that it was not a voice she would hear. Knew it was a voice she would only feel.

She ached for it. And it never came.

For years Eleanor wondered if she couldn't hear it because she was fixated on the voice, and not who it belonged to. Was detecting God as simple as acknowledging that he was there? She could never tell. Thoughts so simple maddened her; she always felt that she was forever lost to the voice simply because she was too inquisitive, too curious, too analytical. That God spoke to those who simply believed, who waited, and not, perhaps, to those who impatiently pounded their fists against their plaster-covered extremities and screamed angrily into their pillow each morning.

She knew her parents thought she had lost her mind. She wondered about it herself. She would politely accept the soup her mother would bring her each afternoon, would smile when her mother snapped the television on to Eleanor's favorite show, would wait for her mother to leave. Would struggle across the room to turn the TV off, put the soup aside and would, again and again, transcribe all she remembered of her conversation. Forgetting seemed an impossibility, but all the same it terrified her.

She taught herself to paint. One idyllic suburban night, Eleanor wheeled her chair into the family room where her father read and smoked his pipe and her mother was cross-stitching another Bible verse to go on the wall at the church. Her parents smiled to see her, nodded at each other when Eleanor propped a canvas on her lap and began to paint. When she an hour later flung the canvas and her palette into the fireplace and wheeled her chair about in such consternation that her splayed and splinted leg sent the glass-topped end table crashing to the floor, her mother threw up her hands -- and her cross-stitching needles -- and snapped, "Eleanor, what on earth has gotten into you?"

And Eleanor looked up at her mother with eyes streaked red from paint, from sleeplessness, and said, "I can't make the colors."

That night Eleanor dreamt for the first time that she was falling, and woke silent, stunned by a dream that was already fading. She swore she felt the wind on her face. She opened her eyes to see her mother sitting on the edge of her bed, pressing a damp cloth to Eleanor's forehead. Her mother's long curls touched Eleanor's cheek. Eleanor took her mother's hand, and rolled onto her side, curling her body into an awkward apostrophe, and cried until her mother fell asleep beside her.