Contract with the World by Jane Rule

Author:Jane Rule [Rule, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2945-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-05-01T17:00:00+00:00

Roxanne Recording

ROXANNE WAS MAKING A sound map of the house. What other people might have fixed, a dripping tap or squeaking hinge, she listened to. What other people blanked out—the refrigerator or furnace going on, a plane passing overhead—she heard. She was interested in the difference in tone between eggshells and chicken bones in the garbage disposal. She compared the refilling times of the two toilets. She recorded the boys’ feet up and down the stairs, in and out of the house, and she asked them to spend one rainy afternoon doing nothing but sitting down over and over again on different pieces of living-room furniture.

“Victor farted—on purpose,” Tony said, outraged.

“It’s okay; it’s okay,” Roxanne assured him. “Everything is okay.”

One morning she was out on the front lawn, setting up the sprinkler, and heard Tony upstairs practicing his violin. She got bowing exercises through the slow rhythm of water, falling back and forth like a metronome. The next morning she recorded only the sprinkler, then only Tony’s bowing. She wanted her machines to be one-voiced instruments as much as possible, not the garbage cans of sound like radios, everything jammed together at one source.

Roxanne rarely listened to recorded music. Alma’s stereo gave some space for the music to happen in but still not enough. It was like putting a whole orchestra into an elevator. She would not listen to symphonies at all unless she could go to the concert and see the numbers of instruments. Listening to a record gave you no idea how many violins were trying to vanish into the same note, an odd exercise to do over and over again for centuries, the obliteration of distinctive sound for volume. But, given a choice, she’d any day rather stand on a street corner and listen to a band march by each instrument giving her a solo a couple of steps long inside the traveling collective of sound.

Musical instruments were not of major interest to her, and she doubted that they would have been even if she’d had a childhood like Tony’s, practicing an hour before breakfast every morning. She would have been out with Victor listening to the neighborhood dogs bark, throwing stones into the fishpond, talking back to the crows. And like Victor, she’d rather shout than sing. The only kind of singing she could listen to was the sort people did alone, where they might imitate for a while the unnatural pretentiousness of the professional singer but soon turn it into the sound joke it was. Most singing was like the resonance of a cleft palate or the voice of someone born profoundly deaf. Learning to sing was like learning to limp. Roxanne had refused in school to carry a tune, except in her head, where she couldn’t help it. If she’d been allowed to whistle, she might have cooperated, but only on her own, not with a bunch of others.

One of Roxanne’s chief difficulties in learning to understand and be understood was that she had so little sense of what was commonly irritating and commonly pleasurable to listen to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.