Norwich: Summer of 2017
John Cotter
The baby girl, Julianne, barks a little squawk as dinner winds down. Her brother, Colin—usually the one she imitates—follows her lead instead, giving off the roar a six-year-old roars when they’re being a dinosaur. The r in the roar still comes across like a w, but Julianne gets the point. She roars back and he roars louder, each ratchet a new chance for one to outroar the other.
My sister steps in: “Grammy’s going to give you both a bath.” Grammy is my mother, to whom my sister delegates. But my mother’s in the other room, and so the word comes out Grammy, that initial syllable meant to put my mother on alert, call her into service.
It works: Grammy recognizes her name, carried over the dishwater splash and the hum of the fridge. The TV’s been going all this while, tuned to a kid’s show full of chime and boing boing boing. My aged father rustles last week’s newspapers into a bundle to be recycled. All of this chorus—these waves in air— falls between thirty and sixty decibels. From the couch in the corner, on my back with my eyes closed (dizziness a symptom of Ménière’s disease) not a detail escapes me. Because today, on a summer holiday, a visit with my family, my ears work perfectly. My hearing aids switched off, tucked into my shirt pocket, I pick out all that’s important. The voices detach from background atmosphere, its busy buzz.
Without looking up, I can tell where each person’s stationed in the open-plan downstairs: kids in the dining room, Mom in the kitchen, Dad working his way upstairs with a heavy assist from the banister. My ears babysit the kids whether I want them to or not. If my brother-in-law clicks past something on TV that we’ve talked about, he won’t need to tell me. The warm hum is a metonym.
A little over an hour from now, I’ll snap the hearing aids on and set them in place, because my ears will have started failing again, noise sorting into a narrower band. I won’t be able to distinguish which voice belongs to niece or nephew. I’ll lose the TV noise behind the sink water running. And this too, one newspaper can obliterate.
But just now, with the kids whisked upstairs and the ringing in my ears that’s been dogging me all decade very briefly in abeyance, I take in silence for the final time. Or what passes for silence: the living silence of the untouched books on the shelves around me, the shush of my leg sweeping the couch as I sit up straighter, the whisk of my finger down a page.