“But it wasn’t Father — it wasn’t Father at all. It was Mother. Wait. You’ll see.
“Two days after the kitten disappeared my mother came and examined my ears. She took each lobe and rolled it between her fingers like dough. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘They’re lovely and strong. I have a surprise.’
“They weren’t beautiful. They were hideous and mysterious to me. The holes had collapsed and were clean as scars. Like navels they were, with just that texture of lifeless second growth. Or properly speaking, not holes at all. One was a crease, an adjustment that flesh makes, like the change in a face when a tooth has been pulled. And one was a hole — a terrible absence where a feature should be. Or like a child’s sex organ, perhaps, unhaired and awful. Awful — they were awful.
“Mother’s surprise was earrings, of course. I was ten when this happened. Do you follow me? My character had already been formed. It had been formed on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale with the characters of my friends, and at motion-picture theaters and at pajama parties on weekends and by the long, extended summer of my Florida life.
“Then Mother showed me the earrings. Two pairs. One the post kind — button earrings, they’re called. Tiny coins like gold beauty spots. She put them in my ears and showed me my reflection in a glass. ‘Take them out. Mother. Please.’
“‘Are they heavy?’ she said. ‘Are you sensitive there? Don’t worry. We’ll butter the posts, or dip them in fat from a chicken I have. They’ll be all right.’
“‘Please, Mother. Oh, please take them out.’
“It was what I saw in the mirror. I was someone foreign, someone old. Like the gypsy again, or an aunt in a tintype. Like a man who tells fortunes, or someone who died. Like a child on a stage who plays the violin.
“Mother took the earring out and put in the other pair of earrings. These hung from a wire, a treacherous loop, and when they went in they opened fresh wounds. ‘How do you like them?’ my mother asked. This pair was silver, a long, thin, antique lattice and a queer wafer which swung from it. ‘Do you like them?’ she asked. She was so fierce. I knew they cost a lot. I knew more: I knew she had bought them even before she had pierced my ears! ‘They’re very nice,’ I said, and when she left I took them out, unwinding the loop from my ear as you might detach a key from a keyring. I slipped into the bathroom and got some of Mother’s vaginal jelly and greased the lobes. In the morning I left the house before she could see I wasn’t wearing the earrings.
“But now, now I was so conscious of my ears. I thought, I thought boys stared at them — you know? Nasty naked things. I went back and put the earrings on just to … well, cover myself. Again I was transformed into someone foreign, some little strange girl.
“That’s when everything began to change.
“All my girlhood, all my life, I had lived in the sun, but now my darkness wasn’t tan but something Mediterranean, a darkness in the genes, something gone black in the blood. There was pumice in it, a trace of volcanoes that slope to the sea, carbon on kettles from fires outdoors.
“I couldn’t ride a bicycle any more, or rollerskate. And the imagination of narrow disaster whetted: What if I should stumble? What if I should fall? The posts like actual stakes to me, the loopy wire hardware medieval. And dirty, dirty germs beyond the reach of sterilization— though I dropped the earrings every night in boiling water — as if the germs might be part of the metal itself, collected in its molecules, a poison of the intimate, the same reciprocal bacterial play as between a head and a hat or hair and a sweatband, toes and socks, a foot, a shoe. Foh! I was fearful not just because of the simple ripthreat to my ears, but because once the sores were reopened, once the crease had become a slash, the floodgates of disease would open too, death by one’s germs, one’s own now un-American alien chemistry.
“I took up music, one day simply appearing among my schoolmates with a violin (just as one day my surfboard disappeared: it was simply gone — my fierce mother, I suppose). And do you know that though I had no talent I played even from the beginning with a certain brooding seemliness? And the earrings like actual yokes, gyroscopic; I might have been fetching water from the well, balancing buckets up hills. Yes! Something even more Oriental than Mediterranean in the way I shuffled through childhood.
“Even in real summer I no longer wore shorts or jeans or went down to the sea in bathing suits. When skirts were short mine were long, when long, short — again that gyroscopic balance I spoke of — and don’t forget the earrings themselves, those gold and silver alternatives. (Why I could have been an alternative myself, a community reference point like a hyphen on a kitchen wall, Ft. Lauderdale’s little historical girl.)
“The boys were afraid of me, and gave off some dark respect, taking my gypsy bearings and seeing me even at thirteen and fourteen as whatever the adolescent equivalent of a divorcee might be. Thinking me hot where I was cool, cool where I burned. And although they sometimes asked me out — this was when I was sixteen or seventeen — it was as if there were chaperones behind a curtain, duennas, or invisible brothers, say, a troupe of jealous acrobats, dark ethnic stabbers with Mary’s medals on their necks.
“I am never without the earrings now — the collection has become enormous — and only take them off to boil them in water or sink them like teeth in a glass by my bed. I continue to soap my ears with vaginal jellies. And sometimes there are kittens too, still, which I train in the old way to pull at my cream-sweet lobes while I dream in my bed. I am thought reclusive, silent, but my silence is only the open secret of my ears. My hearing has been affected. Ears, I have ears. The better to hear you with, my dear.”
Ears, Dick Gibson thought, ears, yes. A chill went through him. The woman continued to talk, but he could barely follow her now; he was thinking of ears. Then she broke through his reverie. “—your fragile orphan, your soprano, or someone recovered from polio but not quite, who walks with a limp, the body’s broken English, something nasty there, the kind who groans in orgasm, who shouts dirty words during sex. Oh, my adoptive styles! I crochet but don’t drive, I stay in the house during menses, I burn easily, I go to museums, and am never seen without my sheet music.”
“Listen,” a caller said from Cincinnati, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m a schemer. That’s how I happened to catch your show. Certainly. A schemer lies awake nights, what do you think? I’m calling from the kitchen. The wife’s in bed. Sometimes when the schemes aren’t there, I come down and make myself a sandwich and drink some milk. I try to relax. Listen — it’s the first time I’ve called — I’ve been meaning to ask. How many of your callers are schemers, do you think? How many are up nights, looking for angles, thinking up ways, dreaming of means?
“You know what they say? ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ But let’s don’t kid ourselves, how many of us are inventors, how many of us are equipped? On the other hand, I’m not just talking about pipe dreams. A schemer has to look out for those. Because things look possible at night. Hope’s there, wishing is. But I’m looking for something sensible that would go, something meaningful that could really take off. As good as metals in the ground, opportunity like a national resource.
“After my wife had the baby I’d see her sterilizing bottles, preparing formulas, and I thought, what if there was a company that delivered that stuff already made up? What a boon that would be. I went to the milk people with my idea and they showed me why it wouldn’t work. (Though some outfit out west does it now and are making a killing.) Then I had this idea about renting shirts. You’d get them from the laundry and never have to buy any. They’d have your size on record and bring you fresh ones every week, different styles and colors, ties to match. So I went to this laundry company and they proved to me how it wasn’t feasible. That’s the secret, of course: it has to be feasible. Feasibility’s what separates the men from the boys schemer-wise. We’re always running up against the brick walls of the real; we live in a medium of reasons as other people live in a medium of air — on the one hand and on the other hand like left and right.”