Things we Hear through the Walls
It’s been awhile — since graduate school — since I’ve lived in an actual apartment building. And whereas I didn’t forget that I used to be able to hear everything through the walls, I didn’t know exactly what, if anything, we’d hear here, in our Seattle high-rise.
Back in graduate school in Boston, in two different apartments, both sitting alongside The Fens, I seemed to hear all the things you didn’t want to hear: the scrabble of rodents, people fighting, the clang or tinkling crash of the bottles and trash thrown into the dumpster that sat in the alley, just below my living room window. I heard footsteps, I heard, inexplicably, loud bangs on the walls in the middle of the afternoon (maybe someone else in grad school, too?) I heard the sound, once, of Seal, playing on repeat in the apartment above, when all the roommates were away for an entire long weekend (I hear Kiss from a Rose, even today, and I’m right back there, in bed in the middle of the night, hugging a pillow over my head and trying to stuff it into my ears while I cursed into the mattress.)
I heard the clank and hiss of the radiator and the swearing and laughter of people coming into the building even later than I. I heard the squeaking of a baby mouse who got caught in one of the sticky tape traps behind the oven (Awful. Inhumane. Never again. So very sorry, Mouse.) Somehow all of these sounds were never as bad as the first night, though, when someone in a top floor apartment, drunk or high or furious or taking a joke too far, dropped a TV out the window into the interior, cracked-asphalt and crab grass ground that all of our windows overlooked. That crash was so startling, and so dramatic, that everything that came after really did pale in comparison. Those TVs we grew up with, long before flat screens came on the scene, were seriously hefty. And, based upon the volume of the crash, they carried a substantial number of interior parts.
Now, all the way back over here on the west coast, middle-aged and living in a high rise apartment that not only has an elevator but has ceilings made of concrete, we don’t seem to hear much at all. But what we do hear, so far, has been nearly the opposite of those sounds I heard long ago. Because from up above, now and then, we hear singing. A woman — as yet so far unmet —who lives in the apartment above us has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. She must be a professional, we muse, Not just that, she must be an opera singer. Clearly we need to meet this person and tell her that her singing, which bursts out of the blue, at all different times of day, and on all different days, is amazing. It’s like a disembodied gift that floats down from the clouds outside our windows, then explodes into our attention like the rain spatters on our north-facing windows. This singing is a mystery, and I want to meet the singer, but maybe not too quickly. I like the unexpected nature of it, and the way we are left to guess as to the human story behind it. But one of these days we’ll seek her out, and we’ll tell her we hear her sing sometimes. And that it’s beautiful.
We did meet our neighbors straight down the hall on our floor, and we hear their young daughter’s voice when they make their way to the elevator: her high, laughing baby-voice a memory catch-cord. I love that there’s another child right next door; another set of parents singing out “Do you want to push the button?” It makes the building feel more familiar, because so often we meet 30-something young people with earbuds on, coming home late from their hi-tech jobs in South Lake Union; living a life neither my husband nor I have lived.
Maybe our neighbors hear us, too, sometimes. I hope if they do they like what they hear as well. We’re a bit of a loud crew, but it’s loudness mostly having to do with conversation, and laughing, and races to get to the elevator button first. They almost certainly hear me play the piano, and I hope it’s like the singer is to us: I hope they hear the sound and it doesn’t annoy, or bother, or distract. Maybe for them, too, the sound of music reaching through the walls is like a bonus: one of those things you get to experience in an apartment building, where you have the opportunity to hear the sound of other peoples’ lives as they live them, bursting into song, and trilling with laughter, and squealing, “I DO wanna push button, Mommy! I do.”
