The Best American Essays 2015 (27 page)

If I whistle, a high note triggers feedback. A harmony that pierces my sinuses and jaw, trills down my spine. My voice was already the loudest thing in my head. Now I'm a chorus only I can hear.

When a man cups my face with his hand and kisses me, the gentle pressure of his fingers against my ear sets the speaker off. His face is so close I'm sure he hears the screeching, but he's oblivious. While he lunges for the light switch I rip the hearing aid out, hide it in my purse.

Because everything within my body is louder than it should be, a symptom hearing aids can't mute, eating provides a kind of privacy. A bag of chips, a bowl of cereal, a crisp apple—I enter them like private rooms. Loudproof. The easiest pleasure comes from surrendering to the noise and giving up on any other experience I might have had while eating. This makes it difficult to eat during dinner parties, difficult to speak during family supper. If my plate is clean, I haven't been listening.

Hearing aids make this symptom worse, delivering deafness via meaningless crunching. They do this constantly, with smaller noises, in less irritating but more insidious ways. What sounded like clarity when I first tried them is, I know now, just the volume turned up. On everything. This lack of focus is disturbing. What I'm missing now isn't conversation. It's the impossible quality of natural sound and the ear's ability to create foreground and background, to cut static. To tune into my beloved's voice as he speaks from across the divide of a table, the dinner in front of me cooling with every word.

The Loudproof Room

I am tired of leaning closer, of watching faces for meaning. Though it sparks an easy intimacy with conversation partners. Though it is, by now, integral to the way I interpret and how I am perceived.

I want to hear.

If surgery goes well, a stapedotomy will restore 90 percent of normal hearing range without cutting me open. The deeper cut, the one I'm avoiding, would have addressed the dehiscence. I'll preserve those holes and keep my internal chorus.

My desire to hear has been rivaled, for years, by a fear of losing my sensibility. It is a part of myself that only I understand. My secret. Plus a deeper, colder fear: of going deaf altogether. A slipped knife, a wrong cut.

Disability can create sensibility. My disability is invisible, my limitations are aesthetic. They make art and they make mistakes, reminding me constantly that the way I sense and experience the world is different. At a slight angle, as Forster said of Cavafy. Which is a reminder that difference isn't unique to me. That's why listening creates a conversation. That's how reading creates a poem. It's terrifying to lose your senses. Then, sometimes, it's a pleasure.

JOHN REED

FROM
Vice

W
HEN
I
WAS
four or five, sometimes I'd walk into my grandmother's bedroom to find her weeping. She'd be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. I don't believe this was a side of herself she shared with other people; she may have felt we had a cosmic bond because I had her father's name as my middle name and his fair features. She was crying for Martha, her daughter, who died of melanoma at the age of twenty-eight. Ten years later, after Norman—her youngest child, my uncle—died, also at twenty-eight, she would weep for him.

People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don't get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don't wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

A few months ago I loaded the wife and kids into the car and went out to visit Grandma. I hadn't seen her in more than a year and a half, and in that time she had moved from her house to an assisted-living place to another assisted-living place. There was no good excuse for my lapse—I guess I couldn't quite deal with the way we'd left her house. A catastrophe. Full of stuff. The buyers said they'd take care of it, and they did; they tore the whole thing down. My brother had a friend from the neighborhood (out on Long Island, aka Lawng Islund) who said it was the scandal of the year.

That house, where I spent so much of my childhood visiting Grandma, was disgusting. In the late 1990s, my brother and I dedicated three days to cleaning it up. Joe, my grandmother's last boyfriend, had died, and his stuff was there. He was one of five dead people whose stuff was there, was everywhere. My aunt's stuff, my uncle's stuff, my grandfather's stuff, and Grandma's second husband's stuff filled, I'd estimate, about half the total volume of the house. Driver's licenses and important papers and half-finished projects and mementos like the rusted bolts my uncle Norman, on his diving trips, had dragged out of sunken wrecks. In the basement library we uncovered a vial of red viscous fluid. The vial, sealed with a hard wax or plastic, was hand-blown and quite beautiful, and the box was neatly jointed hardwood. We thought the thing might be valuable. It could have been old—we weren't sure. So we tried to sell it to an East Village curiosity shop, which advised that we dispose of it via the Poison Control Center.

In the basement's woodshop we found a sprinkling of half-melted heroin spoons (Grandma had let some pretty questionable characters crash with her), and in the backyard we found a big black garbage bag full of dead animals. You could tell it was animals from the outside of the bag; you could see the shapes of the corpses. We both peeked in but were so quick about it that all we confirmed was the presence of dead bodies, not what kind. My brother says he saw turtles, which seems likely, since my mother had owned half a dozen turtles that all perished in a sudden, inexplicable cataclysm. I saw an owl, which is less likely but also possible, since there are owls on Long Island. Most likely, we decided, the bag was full of cats and raccoons, which were always getting into Grandma's garbage. She'd yell at them from the back porch. The last time I saw the bag it was on the lawn waiting for the trash pickup. In the shining black plastic you could still see the rounded shapes of haunches.

In that house, even the stuff worth keeping was depressing. Once-beautiful oak rocking chairs and cherrywood secretary desks had been covered with white porch paint. Bookshelves were lined with mouse-eaten library castoffs. The carpets were thriving with mold. Dishes were stained or flecked with dried food. The toilets were full, unflushed, and dusted with baby powder. Grandma would say not flushing saved money, but really, she just wanted to remind you that everything was about saving money.

In Grandma's defense, she came to consciousness during the Great Depression and never mentally left the era. When the economy turned sour, in the 1990s and 2000s, she would point out the cultural similarities, laying it all out: during times of scarcity there's a turn to mystical thinking, self-help, and the occult, she'd tell us. I have no doubt that she was right. Even in her old age, she was insightful and informed. She'd rattle around her disgusting house with public radio blaring in every room. She knew everything, for instance that prune juice could be employed as hair dye (to this day her hair is prune-brown). She had heard a dentist advise on NPR that it was very important to rinse your mouth out with water and to floss, even if you didn't have a chance to brush your teeth, and as of this writing she's ninety-four and still has all her teeth in her head. Only now they're all loose. Her whole jaw looks like it's loose in her mouth.

When we went to visit her at the assisted-living place, I fixed her hearing aids, and my wife went out to get some adult diapers. Grandma barely knows who I am, and when I asked her about her children, she didn't remember Martha at all. I hadn't exactly missed her during those months of not visiting, so I didn't expect the visit to upset me. But Grandma not knowing Martha's name, Grandma lying in bed sucking on her unmoored jaw, Grandma with all of her teeth about to fall out—I almost lost it. The kids sat there, unblinking, their mouths hanging open in stupefied horror. For them, the last year has been a tour of deathbeds: Gigipop. Poppa. Abuelita. Granmaman. And now Grandma. It was obvious—she was next.

They managed to buck up when Grandma asked them to sing. They knew some German songs from school, and she joined in. She said that when she sings she returns to her childhood. She lives in it, she said, like it's the present moment. And maybe in her mind, when she sings, her childhood is still there—but I don't think there's much else there. Sometimes she points to her head and jokes about her “forgettery.”

It's strange to see a parental figure get like that. As a kid I'd stay at Grandma's house so my too-young parents could get a break, often for weeks at a time. She'd tell me that Jews invent things, that Jews don't drink, that Jews are smart because the philosophy of the Jews values thinking, and that I'm not supposed to call them Jews. She would say, “Even when we argue, you have a good mind.” When I announced my engagement to a Gentile, Grandma dropped to her knees and begged me not to get married in a church. The wedding took place on a tennis court, and Grandma was the belle of the ball, flirting with my wife's uncles, who were twenty years younger than she was. Grandma was always a good time, but when she wasn't the host, wasn't responsible for the food, it was like a weight was lifted from her, like she could really be free.

Grandma's expertise in nutrition dates back to the sixties. By the mid seventies, she had written several self-published mimeographed books on nutritional intake and vitamins. Around then or possibly earlier, I think, she started to poison people.

I can't pin down exactly what she did with what ingredients. I can't even be sure that she really did the things I think she did. All I have, really, are pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years. In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things), then she used laxatives, and then, as she got older and lazier, she moved on to prescription drugs.

Grandma never cooked the same thing twice, and her creations were greasy beyond belief and usually really weird. For example: chicken baked with apricots and canned tomatoes, or mixed-up ground meats with prunes, or pickled things. She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.

In later years her meals featured courses of ready-made, or nearly ready-made, food, and eventually that became her favored methodology. She had this effective strategy of finding the food you loved most, buying it in ridiculous amounts, and feeding it to you unrelentingly. You'd eat it—the imported Jarlsberg, the ice cream. And you'd pass out on the couch, or on the train back to the city. Of course, the longer you stayed with Grandma, the more likely it was that something bad would happen to you. If you visited her for a week, you'd suffer from the shits, you'd be exhausted, and your vision would start to blur.

At first my mother was the only one who'd refuse to eat Grandma's food, and I thought she was being paranoid. Then I started noticing that every time I went to Grandma's, I'd pass out on the couch or on the train on the way back to the city. When I stopped eating Grandma's food, my brother thought I was paranoid. But I stopped passing out, and pretty soon he stopped eating Grandma's food, too.

But here's the thing: you don't want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you—there's no doubt of that—and she's so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you've passed out so many times that you can't keep doubting yourself. Eventually we would arrive for holidays at Grandma's with groceries and takeout, and she'd seem relieved that we wouldn't let her touch our plates. By then her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn't notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.

So the question became, how did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat Grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.

So why would Grandma poison us? Well, for some time my mother has postulated that Grandma has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition that causes caregivers to poison or injure their charges. Me? I'm sure that Grandma wasn't trying to hurt anyone. If she slipped you a Mickey it was because she didn't want you to leave—she loved to make people miss their train. “Stay the night, stay the night,” she'd coo.

Other times Grandma's concerns seemed more practical. My mother, when she moved back to Grandma's for a brief time, had many pets—turtles, dogs, hamsters, cats—that successively took ill and died. And there was Joe, the ex-paratrooper who was Grandma's last boyfriend. He got into the habit of blowing his pension checks in Atlantic City and mooching off Grandma until the next check arrived. Then he got a broken leg and we got all these hysterical calls from Grandma saying she was forced to wait on him hand and foot—and then he was dead.

And what would Grandma say? Well, even if she was inclined or in a condition to tell me why she did what she did, I don't think she'd be able to. She's always been a mystery, even to herself. There's this story she would tell: when she was a very young girl, a boy tried to kiss her in a closet, so she shoved him away and ran home and cried and cried. “Why, Grandma?” we would ask her. “Because,” she would say, “I was in love with him!”