The Third Silence by Nancy Springer

The Third Silence
By Nancy Springer
    So a bunch of us were walking downtown after school. Town, as in, Small Town, USA. Make that Small College Town. Which is lucky for me, because there are professors, who have brainy kids, so I actually have friends, which is not the usual fate of the school Nerd of the Arts. Which I am, despite my name. Hi, I’m Brad Litwack, and could somebody please explain me to my dad?
    So it was May of junior year, my friends and I were heading toward the Emporium of Ice-Cream after another school day, and it was sunny and there should have been birds singing, but instead I heard car horns caroling. “What’s going on?”
    One of the girls said, “It’s coming from the square.”
    “Why do they call it a square? It’s a circle.”
    Horns crescendoed, and ahead I could see traffic piling up. You would think people would be able to handle a rudimentary roundabout with a Dead General on Horse statue in the middle, but at least once a year… I grinned. “Some tourist went the wrong way again!” I broke into a trot. Wanted to see.
    The circle was packed full of pissed-off horn honkers while more cars poured in from four directions like beans funneling into a jar. Cars tried to turn around, cars tried to cut across the grass island, cars drove on the sidewalks while my friends and I ran in the street. It was a wondrous mayhem. I laughed out loud.
    “What if it’s an accident ?” said one of the girls. “What if somebody died ?”
    “Nobody died!” I pointed at the epicenter of the mess, a muddle of heads around a woman who seemed to be standing on the hood of her car—
    Painting?
    I couldn’t be sure at first. I just saw her gestures, smooth and precise, as if she were conducting Tchaikovsky. And her face, grave and still, with long gray hair pulled back in a braid. I recognized her, kind of. I’d seen her around town, maybe walking a Welsh Corgi, maybe clerking at an antique shop? She was one of those older women you see without noticing, faded female in faded jeans blending into the campus environment.
    I saw a flash of yellow, brighter than the petunias around the Dead General, tipping the sweep of a long-handled brush.
    “Is she painting the car ?” somebody exclaimed.
    I barely heard. I was laughing again, like a child with a butterfly, and darting nearer, worming between cars and people. Yes, she was painting her car, a white junker angled to block traffic. On it and around it she had set out paint in big margarine buckets: crimson, caramel, lemon, sage, indigo, mauve, violet, each color with its own brand-new natural-wood-and-white-sable brushes. Moving as if she were choreographed, she finished the roof of her car and segued to the front left fender.
    I stopped laughing and just watched. Three wide strokes, indigo, mauve, violet, and she had painted a night sky over a hint of ocean. With the tip of her brush handle she pulled out white spindrift in the billows, white twinkles in the sky. Then with a smaller brush she started lettering something. I read aloud as she wrote, “All…dishevelled…wandering…stars.” I exclaimed, “Yeats!”
    She actually gave me a flicker of a glance over her shoulder as she moved on. She hadn’t spoken at all. Nobody spoke. Horns kept bawling, and some guy came storming over from his car yelling, “What the hell is…” But when he saw her painting, he shut up and just stood there, as quiet as everybody else. There was something so vehement about her silence that you forgot where you were going and just watched her.
    On the driver’s side door in crimson she wrote, “For Dario Fuentes.”
    Dario Fuentes? It was nobody I’d ever heard of, but I liked her lettering, arty and neat like origami.
    Around the car windows she wrote, “Western wind, when wilt thou blow?” and “Second star to the right and straight on until morning,” and “The rain never gets wet.”
    Like an operatic soprano soaring above the syncopated car horns, the