Write the Truth: Excerpt from A SILENT TREATMENT by Jeannie Vanasco
Write the truth, my mom tells me. Otherwise it wouldn’t be honest. Or interesting.
***
THE SECOND OR THIRD DAY (MAYBE)
I forget words.
I hold a string with pieces of metal attached to it. The pieces are shaped like cats. I dangle it in front of Chris.
This is—
I pause.
I know I sound like an idiot, I continue, but the name of it. You know.
Wind chime, Chris says.
Did my mom give this to us the Easter she wasn’t talking to us?
Chris can’t remember, but he also can’t remember if she talked to us the past two Easters.
My mom’s silences—a few days here, almost six months there, over the five years since she moved in with Chris and me—amount to a year and a half, at least.
A year ago I told her: When you don’t talk to me, it’s all I can think about. I feel sick constantly.
Next time I do it, she said, yell at me. Tell me to go to hell.
I can’t do that, I said.
Sure you can.
I’m not telling you to go to hell.
Why not?
Because. I don’t know. Just don’t do it again.
But she did it again. Then she did it again, again. And, now (I think), again.
I write Start to-do list and immediately cross it off.
Emails, checklists, those I can do.
But any writing beyond that?
About her silence? (Mom: If I didn’t want you to write about it, I shouldn’t have done it.)
And during her silence? (Mom: You don’t need my permission.)
Enduring her silence, what I’m attempting here: to turn a painful distraction from writing into writing.
I’m not so delusional that I fail to register another impulse: to make writing its own distraction, one that prevents me from feeling my pain.
And here’s something else I already did: Start A Silent Treatment.
But how many times have I done that?
(Mom: It’s a good title.)
What if you walk down there? Chris asks.
We’re sitting at the dining room table with our coffees and wind chime. He’s wearing a gray shirt and boxers. The boxers are patterned with bacon and eggs, even though he’s a vegetarian like me. They arrived as part of some underwear subscription service. Last month was unicorns.
Behind him, outside three narrow windows, is my mom’s private stairwell. It connects her basement apartment to our shared deck. Behind me, in our dining room’s far corner, is a door, probably locked. On the other side is her second set of stairs. During a silence, she climbs those only to deliver letters or holiday gifts while Chris and I sleep. (Mom: You are such a disappointment to me. Until I can leave here, leave me alone. I want no further contact.) One Christmas she cracked open the dining room door and tossed up my card. It flew into the room, like a magic trick, and landed on the hardwood floor.
Or we could pretend this isn’t happening, I tell him. That’s what I did last time, and she stopped doing it after a couple weeks.
But she can go months, he says and stands. What are you doing?
Closing the drapes.
But she might think that means something, I say. Why don’t I try to talk to her? he says.
No, I tell him. I should do it. She’s my mother.
Mother sounds cold. Its coldness feels right. She’s being cold.
But my attached to mother or mom suddenly sounds strange. Maybe the possessiveness bothers me.
What else do I call her?
Barb sounds like what it is: a sharp projection near the tip of an arrow or hook, angled away from the main point to make extraction hard.
Barb can also be a hurtful or disparaging remark. Barbara?
When a childhood friend addressed her mother by name, I was shocked. I still began my letters to Santa, Dear Mr. Claus. I expected my friend to be sent under-ground. (In kindergarten, I announced I was grounding myself—for what, I forget—and went to the basement.)
To you, her mother snapped, I’m Mom.
It sounded like a barb.
(Mom: A book needs conflict.)
Go to hell, I tell the wind chime. To hell with you. Why don’t you go to hell?
But what would happen if I said it to her?
I’d cry. That’s what I’d do.
What I’m doing.
I google help me end the silent treatment and am instructed not to. I am not dealing with a normal person, these online strangers claim.
But if a peer-reviewed psychology study reports that 67 percent of Americans have inflicted silence, that means 67 percent of Americans are not normal.
Well.
Duration, though. The study didn’t specify duration.
Until she moved to Baltimore, we spoke on the phone almost every day. Most calls lasted an hour. She usually waited for me to call her. When she called first, she asked: Am I interrupting?
Our calls began shortly after I left Sandusky, Ohio, at eighteen, for a university near Chicago. My dad died a month later. After that, she increasingly talked about how miserable she was.
She hated her job: You know I’d make more at McDonald’s than I make at the library?
She hated her house: I wish it’d burn down when the animals and I aren’t home. Or I wish the city would buy it off me and turn it into a parking lot.
She missed my dad: What I wouldn’t give to have him back.
She missed me: I wish I could live near you. I hate this stinking town. I’m so proud of you for getting out. I was never brave enough or smart enough.
Even our letters referenced our phone calls.
Dear Mom, Not much has happened in the four hours since I hung up with you . . .
Jeannie, Sorry about crying on the phone Sunday night . . .
(I recently found the letters—hers to me, inside a wood box underneath my office daybed, and mine to her, inside folders of official documents that she’d asked me to store—and felt relieved. They confirmed that we did get along.)
After college, I moved to New York, and for about a decade lived in a series of rent-stabilized apartments. My mom loved to visit. She’d never ridden a plane before.
I wish I could move to New York, she said. It’s never boring.
She reminded me that if it ever became too expensive, I could move back home.
You wouldn’t have to worry about rent or groceries, she said. You could have all day to write.
She stopped mentioning this after Chris and I started dating, but I knew the offer was still there.
After he and I moved to Baltimore for my teaching job, we rented a row house that cost the same as our New York shotgun apartment.
Now we can live in the same city, I said to her, if you still want to do that. Baltimore is so much more afford-able than New York.
Then she said what she often said: I just want to be close to you.
Maybe she didn’t hear me call down yesterday morning and evening. She’s deaf in her left ear. Her dad blew smoke in it when she was a girl, thinking that’d cure her ear infections. If she can’t see who’s speaking or what’s making noise, she has trouble determining where the sound is coming from, or registering a sound at all.
I turn off the air purifier (too loud, allege online reviews), kneel, pluck some cat hair off the area rug, and press my ear against the dining room floor.
A contractor installed insulation to muffle the noise between the first floor and the basement, which, in two months, he transformed from a dingy unfinished space into a bright apartment. My mom says the insulation works, but when Chris and I are in our dining room, we can hear if she’s in her living room, watching TV, talking on the phone, or playing fetch with her dog, Max.
Is that packing tape?
Paper crumpling?
I should know the sound of paper crumpling. (Mom: You’re the writer. You decide what to include.)
Maybe the my of my mother sounds strange because she seems strange. I doubted my mom would use the silent treatment again. (Mom: I won’t do it again.)
Signs she’s avoiding or preparing to avoid me:
– I open the door off my dining room, call down, Mom?, and she doesn’t answer—even though I heard her moving around moments ago. I shout Mom? again, and she still doesn’t reply.
– She texts two-letter replies, such as ok and no.
– She locks the door off the dining room.
– She takes out her trash before sunrise.
– She sits hunched on the front steps—not the steps to our porch but the steps closest to the sidewalk (our front lawn is on a small hill)—staring off.
– She stops feeding the squirrels and birds.
– She keeps her lights off.
– She keeps her phone off.
– She stacks cardboard boxes in the laundry room or garage or on the deck. Sometimes she includes a moving checklist with the names of retirement communities hundreds of miles away in Ohio.
– She writes letters. Her cruelest claims, We never did get along. Her softest reads, I love you but I think we do better at a distance.
She never did this to me when I was a child, not that I recall.
She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn’t want to say something they’d regret.
What does she want to say now that she’d regret?
If I focus on one object, one without any sentimental associations, that might calm me.
The radiator, let’s start there.
But is it ray-dee-ate-er or rad-ee-ate-er? I remember the realtor and the contractor pronouncing it rad and not ray. Or did they call it a rod-ee-ate-er? Must be regional.
As a child, I corrected my mom when she said warsh instead of wash: I warshed all your clothes and Do you need anything warshed?
I still feel horrible about that.
She also told me: I could have gone to Warshington, DC, after high school. I was a good typist. I had an offer to be a secretary, but my dad wouldn’t let me. He said I’d get raped there. He said I had to get married or he was kicking me out of the house.
I sit at the dining room table and call her phone. It rings and rings below me. Frank Sinatra croons New York, New York.
I should have lied: It’s impossible to make an entire song your ringtone.
When we’re together and she chooses not to answer, I sometimes remind her: To make it stop, you press this button.
But when strangers glare, I want to tell them: She and my dad went dancing every Friday before I was born. When he, a longtime New Yorker, walked into the room, the DJ would play this song.
Even though he died twenty years ago, I tell my dad: I’m trying, I really am, but you know how she can be.
I remember him attempting to break her silences. Once he followed her to the basement, and I heard something smash. (Mom: He kept talking and talking. He wouldn’t let it go. You wanted to transfer out of Catholic school, and I said absolutely not. So I threw the hot iron against the wall. I just wanted you to have a good education.)
I touch the doorknob the way one does in a fire and quietly test the lock. The knob turns. I open the door slightly and peer down her stairwell. The lights are off.
Mom? I want to say.
But I’m afraid to speak.
Excerpted from A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco. Copyright © 2025 by Jeannie Vanasco. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
About the Author
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs A Silent Treatment, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye (Tin House). Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
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