Falling Into the Silence

By Margaret Seven Wellman

Author Margaret Seven Wellman is the youngest child of veteran film director William A. Wellman and Busby Berkeley dancer and actor, Dorothy Coonan. Raised in Hollywood on a rambling ranch-style estate built in 1944, her childhood memories of home and family provide the foundational heart at the center of her stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Margaret Seven Wellman
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393852117

Book preview

Falling into the Silence

Falling into the Silence

Margaret Seven Wellman

Contents

Praise for Falling into the Silence

Pieces of the Past

Outskirts of Nowhere

Grace Land

Falling into the Silence

That Sound

Swan Valley

Home Lifeless

Phantom

The Fun House

Counting in Place

Celia Conquers the Horizon

Without Words

The Cabin

Colors

A Pink Card

The Beginning?

Person in the Mirror

A Coat of Memories

Barrington

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Praise for Falling into the Silence

…lyrical, tender, expressive to the bone, yet magical in its essence. I felt the generations of love and hurt, pain and neglect, yearning and desperation in my deepest heart. Ms. Wellman is an expressive, honest, aggressive, passionate writer. I believe her story telling will embolden those who wish to express their own truth.

—Maria Florio/Earthworks films, Oscar winner, Broken Rainbow

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Maggie Wellman’s writing is a wonder! So beautiful and enigmatic, ever-shifting, at every paragraph heading off in exactly the right new direction, leaving great curling wafts of childhood behind in its path...light as glass but sturdy and true as timbers—something fashioned from pure memory.

—Guy Maddin, Director of My Winnipeg

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These short stories are compelling little gems that sparkle like the pastiche of a master water colorist.

—Bruce Davison, Award-winning actor

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Maggie Wellman’s short stories and autobiographical essays create an achingly beautiful effect: with a variety of narrators, she sings the human heart in the same true key, regardless of the differences in lyrics. I was transported.

—Mimi Kennedy, Renowned actress, author, and activist

"We carry our homes within us,

which enables us to fly."

—John Cage

Pieces of the Past

This room is where I sit when I am visiting. The couch is dressed in green plaid, Mother’s favorite color, and faces Father’s fit for a king size leather chair. The blond wooden table at my feet, glossy with polish, features a large glass terrarium containing a small ivy plant and a smaller piece of driftwood. I think about where that wood came from when it was part of a tree. Did it sway in a tropical breeze or suffer under harsh winds before it floated its way to me.

There is a wall of shelves behind the couch, jam packed with books, trophies, a golden clock, and a stack of leather bound albums filled with old black and white photographs of faded and rusty faces. I recognize a few of the people and places in the timeworn snapshots, but most speak to long ago days when my family was smaller, before I was born.

I am alone in the room. My hands lie claustrophobic in my lap, aching to pull the pictures out of the albums and tear them up in slow and precise movements. I smile at the thought of the pieces falling like confetti onto the table in front of me.

How breathtaking it would be, to pick up age-old scraps of black and white pictures and fasten them to colorful fragments of others, recreating memories that include my voice, my heartbeat. And I am no longer a stranger to the past.

Outskirts of Nowhere

Grandma’s Farm is on the outskirts of nowhere, and it is my destiny to spend summers there when my parents go on vacation. It isn’t as if our homelife is full of chaos and they need to escape. With no brothers or sisters to prank and tease, our house is quiet and orderly, with evenings dedicated to planning their next getaway.

My parents do not have time for me. Mother’s routine is packed with activities that never veer far from the sameness of the day before. In the morning, there are to-do lists to make for the housekeeper and a menu to plan for our evening meal. In the afternoon, Mother spends several hours tending her beloved rose garden. Every day, she picks one long stem rose to place in a crystal bud vase on our dining room table. Like it’s an honored guest.

Father’s job dictates he leave home at 7 a.m. and return home at 7 p.m., tired when he leaves and tired when he comes back. I know little of the in-between of his day, but I think his accounting business must be bland and unexciting, as he attempts, nightly, to spice up his life by dousing everything on his dinner plate with Tabasco hot sauce. Or maybe Father does that in rebellion to Mother’s healthy meals, his singular and silent act of defiance, soundless to the ear but screaming in emotional wavelengths like insane jazz. Dizzy Gillespie Plays Pot Roast.

Grandma’s Farmhouse is ancient and almost entirely empty. The Family Room is the hub, with the television in the middle and the terminally sagging couch parked in front of it. Here’s where we spend our evenings watching comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies and Leave It To Beaver. Grandma and I fit perfectly on the couch together, with our feet up on the coffee table and a fresh plate of gingersnap cookies at arms’ reach. I feel a certain ownership in this space since no one else in the family ever ventures to visit Grandma except me.

A small Dining Room table is set up in the Kitchen, with two chairs, mismatched. I sit quietly and keep Grandma company while she fixes our meals, made from her harvest of fruit and vegetables. Grandma stands at the ancient stove with her back to me, stirring a bubbling pot and humming tunes. Every so often, she turns around and gasps when she sees me, like she has forgotten I am there. But quick as a wink, her look of shock melts into a wide and heartfelt smile, leaving me helpless to do anything but return it with my own toothy grin.

There are two Bedrooms upstairs, Grandma’s huge square Master Bedroom with a four poster bed, and my small square Guest Room for no guests but me. I sleep on a reddish and ratty velvet sleeper sofa that is stuck in bed mode and always piled high with the clothes I shed after each day’s roaming. It is time to do the washing when I can no longer sleep under the heavy weight of the growing mass of dirty jeans and t-shirts.

Late at night, when only a faint glow of the hall light spills under the door into my room, I imagine Mother as a child, asleep in the dark next to