Hearing the Sweetest Songs

Every year when I was a child, a man brought a big, black, squeaking machine to school. When he discovered I couldn’t hear all his peeps and squeaks, he would get very excited. The nurse would draw a chart with a deep canyon in it. Then I would listen to the squeaks two or three times, while the adults—who were all acting very, very nice—would watch me raise my hand. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I heard the squeaks or just imagined them, but I liked being the center of attention.

My parents said I lost my hearing to pneumonia as a baby, but I knew I hadn’t lost anything. None of my parts had dropped off. Nothing had changed: if I wanted to listen to Beethoven, I could put my head between the speakers and turn the dial up to 7. I could hear jets at thea irport a block away. I could hear my mom when she was in the same room—if I wanted to. I could even hear my cat purr if I put my good ear right on top of him.

I wasn’t aware of not hearing until I began to wear a hearing aid at the age of 30. It shattered my peace: shoes creaking, papers crackling, pencils tapping, phones ringing, refrigerators humming, people cracking knuckles, clearing throats and blowing noses! Cars, bikes, dogs, cats, kids all seemed to appear from nowhere and fly right at me.

I was constantly startled, unnerved, agitated—exhausted. I felt as though inquisitorial Nazis in an old World War II film were burning the side of my head with a merciless white spotlight. Under that onslaught, I had to break down and confess: I couldn’t hear.

Suddenly, I began to discover many things I couldn’t do.

I couldn’t identify sounds.  One afternoon, while lying on my side watching a football game on TV, I kept hearing a noise that sounded like my cat playing with a flexible spring doorstop. I checked, but the cat was asleep. Finally, I happened to lift my head as the noise occurred. Heard through my good ear, the metallic buzz turned out to be the referee’s whistle.

I couldn’t tell where sounds came from. I couldn’t find my phone under the blizzard of papers on my desk. The more it rang, the deeper I dug. I frantically shoved mounds of paper onto the floor and finally had to track it down by following the cord from the wall.

When I lived alone, I felt helpless because I couldn’t hear alarm clocks, vulnerable because I couldn’t hear the front door open and frightened because I wouldn’t hear a burglar until it was too late.

Then one day I missed a job interview because of the phone. I had gotten off the subway 20 minutes early, eager and dressed to the nines. But the address I had written down didn’t exist! I must have misheard it. I searched the street, becoming overheated, late and frantic, knowing that if I confessed that I couldn’t hear on the phone, I would make my odds of getting hired even worse.

For the first time, I felt unequal, disadvantaged and disabled. Now that I had something to compare to, I knew that I had lost something: not just my hearing, but my independence and my sense of wholeness. I had always hated to be seen as inferior, so I never mentioned my lack of hearing. Unlike a wheelchair or a white cane, my disability doesn’t announce itself. For most of my life, I chose to pass as “abled”, and I thought I did it quite well.

But after I got a hearing aid, a business friend said, “You know, Nicolette, you think you get away with not hearing, but you don’t. Sometimes, in meetings, you answer the wrong question. People don’t know you can’t hear, so they think you’re daydreaming, eccentric, stupid—or just plain rude. It would be better to just tell them.”

I wondered about that then, and I still do. If I tell, I risk being seen as unable rather than disabled. Sometimes, when I say I can’t hear, the waiter will turn to my companion and say, “What does she want?” as though I have lost my power of speech.

If I tell, people may see only my disability. Once someone is labeled “deaf,” “crippled,” “mute” or “aged,” that’s too often all they are. I’m a writer, a painter, a slapdash housekeeper, a gardener who grows wondrous roses; my hearing is just part of the whole. It’s a tender part, and you should handle it with care. But like most people with a disability, I don’t mind if you ask about it.

In fact, you should ask, because it’s an important part of me, something my friends see as part of my character. My friend Anne always rests a hand on my elbow in parking lots, since several times, drivers who assume that I can hear them have nearly run me over. When I hold my head at a certain angle, my husband, Mason, will say, “It’s a plane” or “It’s a siren.” And my mother loves to laugh about what I thought I heard: last week I was told that “the Minotaurs in the garden are getting out of hand.” I imagined capering bullmen and I was disappointed to learn that all we had in the garden were overgrown “baby tears.”

Not hearing can be funny, or frustrating. And once in a while, it can be the cause of something truly transcendent. One morning at the shore I was listening to the ocean when Mason said, “Hear the bird?” What bird? I listened hard until I heard a faint, unbirdlike, croaking sound. If he hadn’t mentioned it I would never have noticed it. As I listened, slowly I began to hear—or perhaps imagine—a distant song. Did I really hear it? Or just hear in my heart what he shared with me? I don’t care. Songs imagined are as sweet as songs heard, and songs shared are sweeter still.

That sharing is what I want for all of us. We’re all just temporarily abled, and every one of us. If we live long enough, will become disabled in some way. Those of us who have gotten there first can tell you how to cope with phones and alarm clocks. About ways of holding a book, opening a door and leaning on a crutch all at the same time. And what it’s like to give up in despair on Thursday, then begin all over again on Friday, because there’s no other choice—and because the roses are beginning to bud in the garden.

These are conversations we all should have, and it’s not that hard to begin. Just let me see your lips when you speak. Stay in the same room. Don’t shout. And ask what you want to know.

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This piece is probably my most famous piece of writing. Originally published in the “My Turn” section of Newsweek on May 23, 1994, it has been republished in several anthologies and a textbook; it was even used in a Japanese college-level text for students who were studying English.