Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“Sure, sure.”

“They will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll bet. I can imagine.”

“Mark my words.”

“Big deal. Federal case.”

“That’s what I think, Harold. The Mailbaggers—”

“We’ll see,” Harold cut in. Hurriedly he told Dick goodbye.

Then Henry Harper called.

“I’ve been trying to get Mrs. Dormer in Sun City since that night she spoke to you. Nobody answers the phone. Is she alive? Is she all right?”

“I don’t know, Henry. I haven’t heard.”

“Tell her she’s got to take her pills. That was foolish what I said about courage. She has to take her medicine. Mrs. Dormer, do you hear me? Please take your pills. You mustn’t have pain. You mustn’t have pain on my account.”

“My ears were pierced when I was ten years old,” a woman told him from Ft. Lauderdale. “It was the central event of my life.”

“How come?”

“My mother did it herself. She used a needle — like the gypsies — and for an anesthetic she held ice cubes to my lobes. The ice melted and soaked the collar of my dress. There was a lot of blood. It mixed with the melted water from the ice cubes, and with my tears too, I guess. Ice isn’t a good anesthetic. And Father was weeping to see me in pain, but Mother saw that the aperture would close. ‘Run,’ she said, ‘bring something we can slip through the hole.’ You’re supposed to use an earring, but Mother’s own ears had never been pierced and we didn’t have any. The colored girl offered hers but Mother wouldn’t take them. Father brought nylon fishing line. ‘It’s fifty-pound strength,’ he said, ‘it’s all I could find.’ They tried to push the fishing line through my ears, but it was too thick, of course, and Mother jabbed at my ears some more, pressing with the head of the pin this time, and a little white flesh fell off on my shoulder like the rolled-up paper in a punch- board, and after a while they could just slip the fishing line through. Father had used it before and there was salt from the ocean on the line—”

“This is a terrible story,” Dick said.

“Wait. The point isn’t pain. Wait. It isn’t the mess they made. There’s mess at birth. Wait.”

“Well, go on.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Wait. … I slept with the fishing line in my ears and the wounds suppurated and they took me to the doctor. The doctor was furious, of course. He removed the fishing line at once, and treated me with salves and antibiotics. ‘We’ll be lucky,’ he said, ‘if the ears don’t turn gangrenous. You came to me just in time.’

“But evidently we didn’t, or the infection hadn’t run its course, because the pain was worse than before and every morning there was blood on the pillow. Father wanted to take me back to the doctor, but something had happened to Mother. She’d become fierce. As I say, like a gypsy. ‘The doctor’s a fool,’ she said, and brought a newborn kitten and set it beside me on the bed and poured milk on my ears, and the kitten licked the milk, licked the ears, nursing my lobes. It felt strange and fine, and when the kitten wearied of licking at the dry lobes I would daub more milk on them and set the kitten back at my ears.

“In a few days the kitten came by herself and would lick at the lobes even without the milk. Maybe she thought the blood and the pus were part of the milk. Mother was a modern woman. I don’t know where she learned about this; maybe she read it, or maybe she just knew. So there we were, this ten-year-old Madonna and kitten, and even after my ears had healed I went around with it on my shoulder, transferring it from one shoulder to the other, its tongue at my ear, as though it were itself an earring.

“Then one day the kitten was gone. It disgusted Father, Mother said. Anyway, it had already done its job, she said. I cried, but Mother said Father had forbidden me the kitten and that was that.

“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.