Somewhat Silent

I remember when I first got my contact lenses, and the eye doctor dropped them onto my eyes. I blinked a few times, saline clearing out of the way and the contact making contact with my eye- each blink brought a new level of clarity, like a camera focusing. Full into 20/20 view. I remember stepping outside and seeing the definition of each leaf on the trees, and each pebble that made up the walkway, and the little twigs that were mixed in. And staring with fascination at the world that I had been missing.

When I recieved my hearing aids, at 21 years of age, part of me expected the same experience, although I was pre-warned that it wouldn’t be the same.

Contacts are these thin little slivers of plastic, concave, complete in their simplicity and almost as complete in their correction.

My new hearing aids sat on a tray in front of me, beige plastic outer shell concealing electronics. Little switches and knobs sticking out, and a wire trailing from one to the computer where the audiologist was programming it against my audiogram. A little computer for each ear, custom-programmed.

The rubber was cold and hard in my ears, I hit the switches on each. There were three beeps and the sound of the silence of a soundproof booth washed over me with shill and crashing fury. The paper I was playing with rustled angrily, my fingernails scratching against it like nails on a chalkboard. The audiologist spoke, the crackling of the microphone and her voice cut through the air and through my ears and my head.

My first thought? “I hate this.”

I spoke, my own voice alien in my ears. I talked as if I was walking on a tightrope, hesitating at every syllable and every sound.

I jumped through the hoops of testing, and nodded a brave smile “I love this!” I said through my teeth. Resolved to make it work.

She said I might not want to wear them outside just yet, and I ignored her, stepping out into Manhattan, the sounds hitting me for the first time, though I had lived there for a year and a half already. Walking back to the subway I heard for the sounds of the cabs, the brakes on the cars screeching, the honking from several blocks away, people walked by screaming into cellphones, their clothing rubbing noisily against itself and their shoes smacking into the ground. A hellicopter hovered somewhere above sputtering and coughing, and beating its arms against the air with an effort that one can never see. A siren first from one direction then the other- honking preceding it in every direction. Birds screeched from trees, so different from the idyllic twittering I’d sometimes hear. And the leaves crashed against themselves and the trunks when the wind blew. And the wind? It howled in my ears like a hurricane, though it was just the slightest breeze.

Three visits, three levels of adjustment, each louder than the one before. And already, the first level hellish in its amplification, and laughable when plotted against the “normal” audiogram.

How can people stand this? This barrage of sounds? This loss of illusion? Where everything is so sadly and pathetically mechanical for the racket that it makes?

I stood waiting in the subway tunnel, and for the first time the preliminary puff of air as the train came floating into the station was accompanied by the sounds of the train and the people waiting to get onto the train. Shrill chattering clattering, nothing like the silent sea of humanity that I’d wash along with onto the floating train in virtual silence and demure murmurs.

I rode the subway home to hear for the first time the alien voice of my boyfriend as he babbled loudly in the nonsense that human speech still remained, and I watched his mouth for all the cues of lipreading, my talent of 18 years, improved none by these little noisemakers that perched painfully in my ears.

I was pre-warned that hearing aids weren’t the same as glasses or contacts. No amount of pre-warning can exemplify the difference.

I don’t look American, tall skinny and pale with huge eyes and cheekbones and a ribcage that you could quite possibly cut yourself on. And when I listen, I stare intently at the speaker’s face with obvious concentration, occasionally interrupting to have them repeat themselves.

I take my facial expressions from the immigrants I see- the Chinese, the Russians, the Italians, the French, everyone who does not speak English perfectly. I turn my face into a question mark of non-understanding.

Then I speak with an accent. Not a Massachusetts accent, not a New York accent, and not an overtly deaf accent. Part “she has allergies” and part “She’s from somewhere else.. Britain? France? Czechslovakia?”

New Yorkers play this game. Guess where the accent is from. They’ll rattle down a list of countries, looking increasingly crestfallen and finally they’ll give in.

Where are you from?

I smile. “Massachusetts”.

Their face turns into the question mark that I’ve since abandoned in the humor of the game, and in having heard all the names of the countries so many times already that the best guesses are emblazoned in my memory.

…Massachusetts

I nod. “You know, up north near Rhode Island and New Hampshire? Massachusetts.”

The confusion increases, and they try to figure it out. No, I mean where are you originally from? What country?

Massachusetts. That’s always the answer. Eventually I tire of playing cat and mouse, and say “Oh, you mean my accent? I’ve got a bit of an ear problem.” I brush back my hair to point out the hearing aids that I wear in both ears.

They blush. I guess it’s something like asking a fat lady when she’s due. Socially inappropriate. I don’t mind, though. In a way it’s sort of a compliment. I don’t think they try to play that game with someone when the accent in question is something ugly or mundane.

You have a beautiful accent. they murmer, and rush away.

Why aren’t you wearing your hearing aids? You ask, as if I’m walking around in the world with a serious eyesight problem, and refusing to wear glasses- bumping into things as I move about unable to see them.

Because I don’t like the way things sound with them. Because there’s no reprieve. Because sound assaults you from every angle, constantly, and I don’t know how you can live that way. Because I wonder sometimes how you can tolerate ears that don’t have off-switches, and that don’t mute the sound, abstract it, stretch it out into something new and quiet and peaceful.

I take my hearing aids out 90% of the time these days.

I always thought that if there was some kind of cure for my hearing loss, something that would restore my hearing, I’d jump on it.

My hearing aids have made me question that. Audiotory input is distracting, invasive, ugly far more often than it’s beautiful or touching or useful. And with my hearing the way it is, it’s beautiful more often than not, with a music in the wind and a built-in-blocking of the traffic noises or all the things that make life unpleasant.

Rain falls, rushing noisily in streams that the cars splash through with a rushing sound of tires on wet pavement, and the roar of an engine angry at the wetness of the environment. A the waterfall of water goes splashing up in sheets onto the sidewalks, crashing down like an ocean wave three times its size. People’s boots make tiny squeaking sounds, and the fabric of their umbrellas rustles in the wind.

I never realized before my hearing aids the cacophony that rain makes, and still hate to hear it. Instead, I slip my hearing aids out to hear the muted etchings of the rain that I grew up with. The soft high sound of it scraping against the plastic of my raincoat hood, and the light hissing beneath the cars, always with a splashing rushing sound as it passes by its closest point to me. The footsteps disappear, and people move like ghosts through the mist that always rises above the ground in Manhattan as cold rain hits hot pavement. The water falls inside my ears, and drips down my face like a shower, I’m oblivious to the cold and to the wet, as if the absense of the sounds of the rain ease its cutting impact.

I splash through puddles, stepping stronger to send the jets of water further, my mind’s eye hears it as it arcs through the air and splashes onto the pavement around it.

Strangers stare at me, confused, from under their umbrellas.

I laugh that silent laugh I have, and dance about in the rain, a million quiet muted sounds swirling around me like all the raindrops, among the crowd of the city, but as private as a shower, because somehow not hearing those that surround me makes it as if they do not exist.

In 1986 when my daughter Sarah lost her hearing, the doctors tried to push my and her dad to ok a then pretty experimental cochlear implant. Not agreeing with much of anything a doctor has to say, I didn’t think much about it. The doctors began to treat me as if I were a bad mother.
The audiologists, however, let me know that my attitude toward Sarah’s hearing loss was refreshing and frankly nice. Other parents, they told me, would come to them DEMANDING that they somehow “make their child ‘normal’ and ‘perfect’ again!” Sure I hoped Sarah’s hearing would somehow miraculously return, but I never considered that if it did not, my beautful intelligent happy child was now or would ever be less than perfect, whatever that was!

I told the doctors that if they removed the insides from my child’s ears, in upcoming years, should there be suddenly a repair for damaged nerves, she would be out of luck. Back then, the hearing aides only amplified the confusing noises her nerves sent to her brain. It was more frustrating to her than not being able to hear! Ditto for “auditory trainers” which many schools used then in an attempt to get deaf children to speak English.

I read about how in the past, schools would beat children who tried to speak in deaf schools which stressed sign only. There were so many politics in the world of the deaf (Deaf?) that I resolved to just help my daughter do what she wanted to do and leave the rest for her to decide when she became an adult.

I have never been sorry that I didn’t cave into the pleas of the doctors who clearly wanted to use my child as a guinea pig for their own glory.

It would be so nice if all people could be merely accepted as we are, with no attempts to turn us into little clones of eachother. We are all wonderfully different, and that should be celebrated!