She was washing the kitchen windows today, which is a task I have never once seen her enjoy but which she does anyway, with a blue bottle and a gray cloth that smells sharp enough to make my nose twitch from across the room. I don’t understand the purpose of it. The windows always look the same to me — bright, then less bright, then bright again depending on the sky — but she sprayed the glass in long arcs and wiped it down in circles, and somewhere in the middle of the second window she started humming.
I want to describe the humming accurately, because I don’t think anyone else in this house is positioned to report on it the way I am.
It is not a song I recognize, if it is a song at all and not just a shape her voice makes when her hands are busy. It rises in places you wouldn’t expect it to, drops when you’d think it would hold, and twice today she lost the thread of it completely and had to start over a few notes back, like retracing her steps to find where she left something. She is not, and I say this with the full authority of an animal who has spent a great deal of time in close range of her voice, a gifted singer. But I have come to understand that this doesn’t matter to me in the way I once assumed it would.
I jumped onto the counter to be nearer to it, which she noticed almost immediately and did not allow. I got down. I got back up two windows later when her attention was elsewhere, and she noticed that too, but by then the humming had picked back up on some private, wandering path of its own, and she only put one hand against my side to move me a few inches over instead of removing me altogether, so I considered it a technical win.
From the counter I could watch the cloth make its slow drag across the glass, leaving a wet arc that caught the light for a moment before drying invisible, and I could feel the small vibration of her humming coming up faintly through the counter itself when she leaned in close to get a smudge near the bottom corner. I don’t know if she knows she does this — leans her whole weight into her arm to get at a spot, humming louder without seeming to notice the volume climbing. I have decided she doesn’t. I think if you asked her right now what she’d been singing an hour ago, she wouldn’t be able to tell you. It didn’t seem aimed at anyone. It wasn’t aimed at me, certainly, though I received it anyway, the way you receive weather.
There was a stretch in the middle where she switched from the wandering hum to actual words, just a handful of them, repeated — I don’t know the words, I only know the shape her mouth made and that it was the same four or five sounds coming back around every so often like she’d hooked onto a line she liked and kept returning to it before letting it go again. This part I liked best. It had a different quality to it, steadier, like she meant it more, even though I have no evidence she meant any of it at all and every reason to believe none of this was for my benefit in the first place.
I fell asleep on the counter before she finished the last window. I don’t love admitting that, because I’d like to say I stayed alert and monitoring for the whole performance, evaluating each pass of the cloth with appropriate seriousness, but the sun had come around into a patch just past the sink and the humming had gone low and steady and I simply went down into it the way you go down a set of stairs you’ve walked a thousand times, not thinking about your feet. I woke up when she picked up the bucket to dump the water, and by then the windows were done, streaked in places already from where the light had dried the spray too fast, and she wasn’t humming anymore. She’d gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet after a clock stops — not silence exactly, just the specific absence of a sound you’d stopped consciously hearing an hour ago and only notice once it’s gone.
She picked me up off the counter, finally, both hands under me, and said something about my being too heavy to keep sneaking up there, which I chose to receive as a compliment on my substantial and admirable frame rather than the complaint it was clearly intended as. I let myself be carried to the floor. I did not go far. I sat by the base of the cabinet and watched her wring out the cloth over the sink, and when she started humming again — just a few notes, absent-minded, already halfway to somewhere else in her head — I didn’t get back up on the counter. I just stayed where I was and listened to the rest of it from there, off-key and half-finished as it was, until she turned the water off and the kitchen went back to being an ordinary quiet kitchen with nothing at all happening in it.