#66, Voice police
We saw a baby in Wegmans and Alice said “That baby is [pause for emphasis] sooooooooo cuuuuuuuuute.” (The baby was…fine.) We passed a small dog on the street and she said “That puppy is sooooo cute.” (Again, the dog was fine. It was a small dog, not a puppy.)
It was a wide-eyed girly girl voice, the one you’ve heard before. You’ve heard it all your life. But did my daughter have to be doing it? We were listening to “Shiny” in the car (summer again! Moana again!) and she screams from the backseat “OHMIGOD MOM HE SAID ‘YOU LOOK LIKE SEAFOOD.’”
I wrote last time about mom voice, but it made me think about kid voice too. When do you go from thinking that your kid’s talking voice is just plain adorable to realizing that your kid now has an agenda, and has different voices for different social situations, and is picking up tones and phrases from…I don’t know, culture! I hear her experimenting with new, gender-y ways of speaking and suddenly I’m glumly thinking, well, we had a nice run but Society is your mother now.
It’s a little ironic because I can do a pretty good rant about not policing women’s voices. When I was in my 20s, I moderated a panel, and a couple days later an older man who I considered a professional friend (he was on the same beat I was) said we needed to talk on the phone. I was extremely excited because I wondered what gossip he had for me that couldn’t be conveyed even via DM, but instead what he was calling me to suggest was that I get voice training, so that I could eliminate the vocal fry and upspeak.
I mean, he was a friend. He was a very nice man, and the suggestion didn’t rankle at the time; I truly believe he meant well and was only giving me advice that he thought would help my career. (I didn’t do it, though.) But then, much more recently, a different older man I was interviewing over the phone commented on how much I said “like,” and I felt…neither receptive nor nice about it. (He had also opened our phone conversation, when I called him, by saying, “Oh, you are young,” to which I said confusedly, “Wait, can you see me?” before realizing that, nope, it was my voice he was referring to, not my youthful face, which, if he’d been referring to, it would have been creepy but I would have been kind of great with it.)
(Later in this conversation, this man also asked me — mid-thought on something else that he was talking about — “What are you drinking?” because he could hear me drinking iced coffee.)
Oh, and then…in my 20s, getting into the subway, I said “excuse me” as I pushed past (as one must on a fucking crowded rush hour subway) an older woman — who told me, loudly, “You should really say excuse me,” and I started to say “sorry” before I played the moment back in my head, interrupted myself, and said, “Hey! Wait! I did say excuse me!” To which she goes, “You should have said it louder!”
Alice has been very into a series of books called Pinkalicious. I hate them. I mean, I take the kids to the library and let them choose their own books while I choose other books for them, and she somehow gravitated to this through powerful magnetic forces. “MOM! CAN YOU READ ME THIS?” she bellows through the library, while I’m in the new books section thumbing through How Mamas Love Their Babies, an activist children’s book that includes sex workers. (“Some mamas stay home with their babies all day long. It’s hard work…Some mamas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” I checked it out, of course, but neither kid was into it because they don’t give a shit about what mothers do all day.)
One of the recent Pinkalicious “anthologies” that we checked out came with a CD of all the stories — which is great because it means I don’t have to read the stories aloud myself (as often), but sucks because I do have to hear the stories read aloud to me constantly. The narrator of the Pinkalicious CD is a very, very young-sounding person, who I think is actually a child but could certainly, horribly, be an adult actor sounding like a child on purpose.
A thing I’ve noticed from listening to these stories so often — something I might not have noticed if I were just reading them myself — is how often Pinkalicious and her friends apologize. “I’m sorry.” “No, I’m sorry.” They apologize so much. In every story, it seems, there is an apology. It’s how they all end, except for the one where the class mean girl, Tiffany — who dresses in black — accuses Pinkalicious of not being funny enough and challenges her to a “joke-off.”
We were in Super 88, the Asian supermarket in Malden, buying the cans of Café du Monde chicory coffee that Kevin and I use for cold brew. We go through four “carafes” of cold brew a week, between the two of us. We buy it at Super 88 because it’s super cheap there, even cheaper than online wholesale. I always throw a couple of packages of frozen dumplings onto the conveyor belt as well, because I don’t want the cashier to think of me as the gentrifier buying nothing but 24 cans of coffee for cold brew. (When we still lived in New York, cashiers everywhere were so mean that I was better able to not care what they thought of me even when I was doing something like returning [unused] homeopathic yeast-infection medicine that I had bought in a moment of idiocy. [Yes, if you were wondering, homeopathic yeast-infection medicine is an actual yeast pill.] Now that we’re Massachusetts, cashiers are a lot nicer and so I have to make purchases that I think they would approve of.)
Playing over the loudspeakers of Super 88 was a Chinese pop-singer with an extremely high-pitched voice. Alice asked me, “Is that a girl singing, or is it a unicorn?”
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“I think it’s a unicorn.”