Silence

Tom Elliott

I’m not deaf. I don’t sign or read lips. I just hear less acutely than you probably do.

It could be a lot worse. I may not understand anything said in the next room, but face to face I do reasonably well. If I watch TV without my hearing aids, I’ll turn the volume up, but not earsplittingly so. I would survive the danger scenarios sometimes mooted for the hearing-deprived—smoke detectors unheard in the night, freight trains speeding towards level crossings, knife-wielding muggers demanding money. These sounds are within the range of even my unaided hearing, unless I draw an unusually soft-spoken mugger.

All true, but less consoling than you might think. I have indeed heard of the man who complained about having no shoes until he saw a man with no feet. His now-broadened perspective is doubtless a fine thing to have, but his blisters still hurt.

It makes me angry that I hear badly. I don’t want to exaggerate: I don’t spend every waking moment seething about my hearing. But anger is never very far away. I feel less-than. I get tired of asking to have things repeated. Sometimes, when I think I can get away with it, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear something at all, rather than ask. I’m not proud of this, but I do it anyway. Or I fake comprehension. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. One place it doesn’t work well is with jokes and, while this may sound petty, it irritates me that my hearing makes me miss jokes. If I know what a non-joke conversation is about, I can often follow even if I don’t get every word—much of everyday speech is that predictable. But jokes are different. They work precisely because they are not predictable, their punch lines something you weren’t expecting. I was listening to a joke at a party recently in a loud and crowded room, an environment in which my hearing aids are not much help. I knew it was a joke because it had the characteristic rhythms of joke telling: sentences had that “man walks into a bar” brevity, and no one interrupted the speaker when she paused. The punch line was obvious because everybody laughed—as of course I did too.  But I didn’t know what was funny until I asked my wife later; when the judge asked the obviously incompatible elderly couple why they had waited so long to divorce, they said they were waiting for the children to die.

You would likely have gotten the joke because the human ear, despite its Rube Goldberg complexity, normally works very well, even at noisy parties. When sound from the outside strikes the eardrum, it transfers the energy to a chain of little bones in the middle ear familiarly called the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. The stirrup bangs against a membrane covering the inner ear, and nerves in the cochlea—a fluid-filled, snail-shaped container–pick up the vibrations and send impulses to the brain, which interprets them as sound. This hodge-podge lets us hear everything from tuba rumblings at 20 hertz to near-canine pitches at 20,000. Multipart ears like these may even have given our mammalian forebears a survival advantage by helping them hunt at night, avoiding predatory reptiles during the day.

I, alas, would not have made it through the Mesozoic. All those moving parts, marvelous as they are for sensing everything from buzzing insects to the muffled tread of a T. Rex, constitute, as my mechanic grandfather said of the automatic transmission, more damned things to go wrong. What is going wrong for me is that abnormal bone growth—otosclerosis—is gradually welding the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup into immobile scrap iron, unable to transfer sound energy effectively.

Otosclerosis is not age related, as I often explain out of vanity. Children as young as seven have been diagnosed with it. I’m pretty sure mine didn’t start that early, but if I had started losing my hearing as a child and not, as I suspect, in my mid-thirties, it would have been appropriate, because somewhere in my childhood I began a long, close, and not-untroubled relationship to silence.

§

I was raised a quiet child in a quiet house. In those early postwar years people still said that children should be seen and not heard, but I also had a more specific reason not to make noise.  My father, a copy editor at Detroit’s afternoon newspaper, worked nights. He typically left for work after supper, returning before I was up, and sleeping during the day.  My parents’ bedroom door had a layer of sound-dampening padding on it, clad in dark brown leatherette dimpled by brass upholstery nails. This helped a little, but it was a small house, and a noisy child would never be too far from the sleeping breadwinner.

As a result, I spent a lot of time in my basement “laboratory,” as I styled it, being much into science. Of course, I also rode my bike and spent time with other kids, but the basement had a seductive appeal. One of my seventh-grade teachers referred to me, in a report card comment, as “a quiet little guy,” and he was right. I was quiet and was drawn to quiet places, to solitude. Which is what the basement offered. It was, as Andrew Marvell said of another below-grade space, “a fine and private place.”

I took things apart down there and built other things, or at least tried to. I spent a lot of time working on an electric motor that I’d read about in a book, the coils of which were insulated wire wrapped around a nail. Now, if I’d simply wanted a motor, I could have saved my allowance and bought one from a mail-order catalog. What I wanted, I think, was to do this all by myself, to make that nail spin without any help from anybody. It didn’t, and I was disappointed, but apparently not enough to leave the basement.

The still, beguiling library became my other place. The books spoke for themselves and did not require me to speak to them. I seldom asked anything of the librarians. “Look it up” was something I heard a lot, intended, I’m sure, to encourage a good knowledge of reference tools. I remember one car trip to visit my grandparents, on which my father was astonished by some gap in my knowledge—I forget what. The first thing I did when we arrived was to go to Grandpa’s World Book Encyclopedia and start reading, trying to learn everything and avoid censure in the future. (I grabbed the F volume at random and thus was briefly an expert on Admiral Farragut.)

Erudition, at least by the standards of Baldwin Elementary, resulted from all that reading and looking things up, but I rarely volunteered answers in class. This was partly from a desire not to stand out as “the smart kid,” but also from genuine diffidence. I wasn’t always sure I was right, and anyway, maybe somebody else wanted to talk.

Quietness stayed with me long after childhood. When I was in my thirties, working in a consulting company, someone in a meeting testily asked me to speak up. Another colleague defended me, saying, “You have to pay attention to what he says—it’s worth it.” I appreciated the vote of confidence, though I was embarrassed to need defending. I had not realized inaudibility was part of my work persona.

This may have been when my hearing was starting to deteriorate, a possible reason for my soft speech. Those of us with otosclerosis often think we are speaking louder than we actually are, since our own voices come directly and clearly to the inner ear through the bones of the head, whereas the voices of others come to us through our gunked-up middle ears. This makes us sound loud relative to them, and unconsciously we adjust our speaking level downward.

This explanation makes sense, but even coupled with a childhood in the Midwest, that warmbed of moderation, it might not be the whole story of my speech volume. I may still be speaking softly out of that anger I mentioned; if I can’t hear you, you’re not going to hear me. I’m pulling up the drawbridge. Illogical and self-sabotaging, to be sure, but are you always rational in your anger?

§

I broke down and got hearing aids in my fifties, a decision partly informed by a sixth-grade history lesson about the Spartans and their intolerance for physical weakness. Having gotten glasses a year or two before, vision had been on my mind. “What would someone with poor eyesight do in Sparta?” I’d asked. “You would try your best to conceal it,” Mrs. Reid told me.

All those years later, in the fell Spartan world of American business, I realized my hearing was a problem that might have gotten past concealment. Despite email and PowerPoint, hearing another human face to face and getting it right the first time was still important. If a key point of strategy was at issue, I might be able to pass off a request for repetition as a shrewd desire for clarity. However, if the question on the table was whether to break for lunch, it would sound like absentmindedness or worse. I had at the time a commercially useful amount of gray hair, suggesting experience but stopping short of senility. Poor hearing might push me past the tipping point: I would be the old deaf guy. The waters I swam in were not heavily shark infested, but still, the less bleeding the better.

So, after a meeting in which I had understood nothing said on the other side of the room—and after years of asking my wife, family, and friends to repeat things—I made the appointment that led to the sound-deadened chamber of the audiologist and the hearing aids now behind my ears.

Problem solved, then?

Well, yes and no.

From the practical perspective of making out what people are saying, my hearing aids are a great help. For all their sophisticated electronics, they rely on the same principle as the old-fashioned ear trumpet once so beloved of cartoonists: if the inner ear is not getting enough sound energy, just throw more into the outer ear. In place of the horn of the ear trumpet, a microphone and amplifier discreetly tucked behind the ear pick up and boost the sound from the air. A thin tube pipes the amplified sound right up to the ear drum, the hammer whales away a little harder on the anvil, and more sound gets to my inner ear. They’re not perfect, but I hear better with them than without. So yes, that problem is partially solved.

But being able to hear you was not the only reason I got hearing aids. I also got them to hear the world as you hear it, and in this they are less successful. Unlike eyeglasses, hearing aids are not neutral magnifiers, amplifying all sounds equally. If there is sound all around me, for example, they preferentially amplify what is coming from the front, since what we are facing is generally more important than something off to the side. They also boost high frequencies more than low because consonants, which are higher frequency sounds, are more critical than vowels for understanding spoken English.

I understand the value of this, and I appreciate the effort my audiologist took to find the point where high frequencies are loud enough for good word comprehension but not so loud that everything sounds tinny and brittle. But it does bother me that my aural reality is photoshopped, as it were. Looking out the window of the library where I am writing, I with my corrective lenses see the same wet green oak leaves anyone would see, tossing in a strong wind, but my electronics do not deliver precisely the same wind whistle from that one window that’s cracked slightly for ventilation. And even if they did, if our inner ears received identical sound waves, what we hear—our mental experience of sound—is what our brains decide we hear, and we don’t all do it the same way. The world I hear is simply not the world you hear. 

All that is a little abstract, though. A bigger practical difference between my soundscape and yours is that I can’t wear the aids all the time. Moisture harms them, so I take them out if I am working outside on hot sweaty days, and thus hear no soft breezes in the trees, no birds more subtle than crows. I don’t sleep with them in, so when I wake, I don’t know if it is raining unless I look outside. I miss these sounds in the sense of not hearing them, but also in the sense of regretting their absence. They may not be big things, but it bothers me to miss these common human experiences.

Also—and this may sound ungrateful as well as tautologica—having to use hearing aids is a constant reminder that I have to use hearing aids. Now, I could say the same thing about my eyeglasses, but there’s a big difference: wearing glasses in this society doesn’t say “old and feeble.” People who don’t need glasses sometimes wear them as fashion accessories. Nobody does that with hearing aids. It’s nice that Halle Berry and Pete Townshend have come out as using them, but I don’t see a big mainstreaming trend forming. Perhaps in time hearing aids will be no more stigmatizing than glasses, but if I believed that time was now, I might have gotten mine in a kicky turquoise, instead of a silver-gray that blends into my hair for maximum invisibility.

§

I glossed over something earlier. I said that hearing loss makes me feel less-than. This is true but incomplete. It also makes me feel excluded-from, which unfortunately is a way I have of thinking about myself that predates my hearing loss. I remember a question we got on a vocational interest test in elementary school: “Would you rather work with things or with people?” We were told there were no right or wrong answers, but I knew perfectly well that “people” was the right answer to that question. You’re supposed to prefer people to things. I also knew that “things” was the more truthful answer for me. Things had a benign neutrality. They could disappoint, like that nail and wire electric motor that was supposed to work but didn’t, but I never had to wonder whether they thought me worthy, whether they would pick me for their kickball team, whether they loved me. But of course, I checked “people,” because if you liked things better than people you were a weirdo.

And in those Eisenhower years I truly did not want to be odd, even as I catalogued the ways in which I was. My parents were rare Democrats in our suburb, and the Republican fathers of my friends went off to work in the morning, selling steel products (Pat’s dad) or running a tool and die business (Tim’s). They were home all weekend. My dad was nocturnal and worked Saturdays. I didn’t have the right stuff, either. A minor arch problem forced me to wear support heel shoes available in a limited range of styles, none of which the cool kids wore. And instead of an actual Erector set, I had some Erector parts, cobbled together with fragments of an oddball English construction toy with different sized girders and bolts. The ragtag conglomerations I made were not the steam shovels and suspension bridges pictured on the boxes of the genuine Erector sets I was certain every other kid had.

Not hearing well reinforces this childhood narrative of not fitting in. Others grasp punchlines I miss. My colleagues follow every nuance of the client’s remarks, while I rely on post-meeting debriefs. It’s easy for me to feel not quite part of the group at Thanksgiving, since I can’t always hear what is being said around the table.

“Well, boo-hoo,” you may be thinking. “This guy seriously feels all alienated and othery because his parents were Democrats and he didn’t hear his sister-in-law ask for the cranberry sauce? The horror! The horror!”

And you would have a point. My otherness has comparatively limited consequences. It does not put my life in danger if I jog in the wrong neighborhood. If my otherness and I go out to bring in the paper in the morning, we are unlikely to find a swastika chalked on the sidewalk. No one has ever told me to go back to my own country if I can’t hear in this one.

Furthermore, it’s not just me; no one experiences the world precisely as anyone else does. We are all of us Melville’s “Isolatoes”—me, Pat, Tim, the cool Republican kids in their penny loafers—each of us “living on a separate continent of his own.” Each of us the one who is not like the others. Still, for me, hearing loss broadens this universal gulf between the self and others. Not fully sharing the feelings and sensations of others is a barrier to kinship that I think we have some obligation to try to overcome. At best, hearing loss impedes that work. At worst, it is an excuse to avoid it altogether.

§

Now, it might be possible to make all this go away. A surgical procedure—stapedectomy—replaces the immobile stirrup bone with a shiny new synthetic one, improving the middle ear’s ability to transmit sound. Done under a microscope with tiny tools snaked in through the ear canal, it’s obviously fairly tricky work, but surgeons have been doing this operation for sixty years and seem to have gotten good at it. According to Massachusetts Eye and Ear, about 90 percent of the time hearing improves substantially, and most of the remaining cases show at least moderate improvement.

I don’t know if I am a candidate for stapedectomy, but oddly, considering all the griping I’ve just done, I’m not sure I would get one if I could.

Part of it is the risk. One percent of the time the operation results in total and permanent hearing loss in the ear being operated on. One percent is pretty small, statistically speaking, but who in a surgical waiting room thinks statistically? I’m not wild about the idea of anyone, however board-certified, poking sharp objects into my ear: a sneeze at the wrong time, a speck of dust on the microscope eyepiece. Relying on one bad ear for the rest of my life is not pleasant to contemplate, nor are miscellaneous other side effects, including facial nerve damage.

But there’s more to it. If I came out hearing perfectly, I would obviously gain a great deal, but I wonder if I would give up something as well. I get it when some deaf people object to cochlear implants, a surgical intervention that provides a version of hearing. Being deaf, for them, is not a disability requiring a cure. It is, rather, another way of being human, one with its own rich traditions and practices. By mentioning this I’m not claiming affinity with Deaf culture. I don’t feel my hearing loss places me in any rich tradition, except perhaps the one of being the butt of old-guy jokes. I take joy in spotting another hearing-aid wearer, but I do not feel myself a member of a community defined by impaired hearing. And yet, if I were to have two successful stapedectomies, some guilt-prone midwestern part of me might feel a little ashamed to have turned my back on the clan and thrown in with the fully-hearing Others.

I would also have to come to terms with losing some of the—well, I hate to say “benefits,” but OK, the benefits of hearing loss. I love that first intense hush when I switch off my hearing aids, and I can enjoy quiet during the day without the inconvenience of ear plugs. I can pretend I didn’t hear something to avoid dealing with it; obviously, people with perfect hearing do that too, but less plausibly. Bad hearing also gives me an occasional claim to special treatment. “Do you mind if we sit in a booth not a table? It’s easier for me to hear.” There is something gratifying about having this sort of modestly memorable attribute. Being hard of hearing, like being the town drunk, is not an identity most would aspire to, but it is an identity.

Now, I could lose these benefits quite happily. What I’m really concerned about is getting used to a new self. I knew a fellow very slightly in graduate school who got his awful teeth fixed for free at the university’s dental school, became confident and outgoing, ditched his wife, and became a player. Who knows what was up in the marriage to begin with, but it is tempting to see him getting up one morning, snapping his new choppers, and saying to himself as he packs his bags, “That was then, and this is now.” Those who know me know that my becoming a player would be a highly unlikely outcome of better hearing, but I am still uneasy about who the flawlessly hearing me would be and how comfortable I would be at being him. The people I know with good hearing—most of the people I know, in other words—are perfectly fine human beings, by and large, so it’s hardly rational to assume I would become impulsive and unlikeable merely because my ears are suddenly as good as theirs. But irrational as it may be, I do fear that.

I worry I might become aggressive and quick to judge. Quiet and reserve have always mediated my interactions with people, and perhaps for this reason others believe me more patient than I really am. Driving alone, I curse with vigor those ahead of me who don’t signal left turns, but I rarely honk. I wish this sprang from a civic-minded desire to decrease hostility on the roads, but it doesn’t. It’s me not feeling justified in going public with my impatient rage. But give me two good ears and a changed relationship with the world, and I might be laying on the horn and flipping the bird with abandon.

§

I don’t know if I’m a candidate for stapedectomy, and I actually hope I’m not and could avoid the decision. If I am, I still don’t know if I would make an appointment with a surgeon. The distance that has existed for decades between me and the world, due to the physics of my hearing and the reticence of my history, is something I have incorporated, in very close to a literal sense. This distance feels like an aspect of my body, and I may not be ready to have it surgically removed. I might lose track of myself.  If I walked back in time and down those cellar steps, I would want that boy to recognize me. He might perhaps be more likely to know who I was if, once or twice, I had to ask him to repeat something while he focused, head down, on the wire he was wrapping carefully around a nail.

Tom Elliott was born in Detroit and now lives in Brighton, Massachusetts, with his wife and two feral cats, who aren’t nearly as fierce as that sounds. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New Madrid, Mount Hope, New Delta Review, Vestal Review, and Corner Bar Magazine. He is currently working on a suspense novel. He can be found at www.tomelliottwriter.com.