See: Luke 1: 3-25
Even not speaking, he fussed.
For herself, Elizabeth would have been happy to go out into the streets, visiting. She would have invited the neighbors to every meal. It wasn’t that she wanted to gloat or to prove anything; those desires had vanished entirely the moment she knew it was true.
And she knew it was true — not just the miraculous thing of it but also the why of it. She’d told him, silent as he was. “Don’t you see?” she said, day after day, “The Lord has done this for me.”
What she meant was, “Don’t you see? There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing can go wrong now. I could run in the fields or swing from the branches of the cedar tree into the clear water of the river like I did when I was a girl and no one was watching, and still all should be well. The Lord has shown his favor; he has taken away my” — she meant our — “disgrace.”
But even not speaking, he fussed. When she said these things, his hands, which told her so clearly that he was hungry or thirsty or wished the door closed, rose and fell and wrung themselves. Then, defeated by the task of telling his heart, they came to rest in his lap, and he looked at her with imploring eyes.
So she did not go out all those five months, nor did they have anyone in. They rose in the morning in the half-dawn and went about their days as they had always done, she preparing the food and he eating it, the two of them moving about each other in a silence that became like a dance until night fell and they lay down beside each other, breathing into the silent darkness.
He could not speak and she found, as the days went by, that she had no need to, for what she wished to say was impossible to say and everything else did not matter.
Something that was like words but also that was not like words was forming inside her. She could not explain it, even to herself, even afterwards, years and years later, when the joy of those first days had been well-mixed with the agony of the last ones.
This thing that filled her was something like words, something like a song, something like some music that was beyond music, stranger and wilder than any music she had ever heard.
Sometimes she opened her mouth to sing it. She never could, of course. But when she tried, she noticed something new in this old husband of hers. Though she loved him with her whole soul, she had to be honest that he had always talked and fussed and second-guessed too much.
But then, in those five months, when silence had settled over them like a dance, and she, staring out the open door at the coming dawn would open her mouth to sing music beyond words, he would turn to look at her as he had never done in all the years before. His own words at last had settled, like silt, to the bottom of the clear river, and he looked at her, expectant and open as water, waiting for a girl to dive.
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