Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

Susanna told me the kid’s whole story — he was born completely deaf, and they didn’t think he would ever hear or speak. The doctors said the cochlear implant was their only chance, so they got on the waiting list for the surgery, and when he was two they got a call that someone had canceled and they could have the spot if they brought him in the next day. He got the implant, and now he was eight and doing well. He went to a regular school where his teachers wore microphones that fed into his device, and he went to speech therapy. Susanna said he was easy to understand once you knew him, but she was hoping his speech would get better with the therapy. She went in and got his device to show me. It magnetically attached to his implant, which was under his skin.

Then she asked if I had always been hearing impaired and I gave her my deaf history. My parents realized something was wrong when I started answering the phone, and I would hold it up to my right ear and immediately switch it to my left ear. We went to a million hearing doctors but no one could diagnose me. Finally they took me to Boston, to the fanciest ear doctor. He said that some tubes in my ears were bigger than they were supposed to be. I had most of my hearing in my left ear, but was legally deaf in my right ear. I got hearing aids, and when I was a teenager the doctors wanted me to try an implant. Not a cochlear implant but a bone-anchored hearing aid, which was what it sounded like — a hearing aid that snapped on to a screw that was anchored in the skull. I didn’t tell Susanna or anybody else that when I imagined the screw in my skull and the snapping and unsnapping, I felt a charge run through all of my bones. I stuck with the regular hearing aids, and now I had fancy ones that were wireless.

Then the kid came out to the porch. He was only wearing underwear, and when he saw me he turned around and went back inside. He came back out with a T-shirt on, but still no pants. He didn’t look at me. He was scowling, but he had a sweet face under his long blond hair. His mom grabbed his hand and said, “This is Jane.” He looked at me for a second.

“This is Timmy,” she said to me. She offered him his hearing aids but he shook his head.

“Maybe show him yours?” she said.

I removed my hearing aids and held them out to him, but he didn’t look at them or at me. He went out to the backyard.

“Oh well,” Susanna said. “Maybe later.”

We watched him walk around the backyard and look at things, and Susanna tried to introduce me to him one more time, by yelling at him from the porch. I thought he was straight-up deaf without the hearing aids attached to his implant. Maybe he wasn’t. But in my experience, hearing people never really believed that you couldn’t hear them, even or maybe especially if they were your parents. Either way, there was no response from Timmy.

“He’s just shy,” said Susanna.

“No problem,” I said.

On the way out she asked me what my rate was, and I told her I made eighteen at my last babysitting job. She looked surprised and said she paid twelve, which she thought was pretty generous for one kid. She looked like she was doing the best she could, and I didn’t have any other job offers, so I said twelve was okay.

When I picked Timmy up from summer school later that week he seemed perfectly happy to leave with me. I asked him if he remembered me and he said yes. His speech wasn’t that different from any other eight-year-old boy’s. I asked him about his day, and he said it was fine. He didn’t do anything fun and he didn’t have a favorite subject. When we got to the apartment he let us in with the key in his backpack. I followed him into the dining room and was kind of shocked at how much of a mess it was. The table was covered with papers, and the floor was covered with more papers and magazines and toys. Next to the dining room was the living room, which I also hadn’t seen on Saturday, and it was even worse. The toys spilled over from the dining room, the couch cushions were on the floor, and in the window one side of the curtain rod had fallen and the curtain was bunched up on the lower end. In the dining room, Timmy had made a beeline for a laptop on the table and was sitting on top of a pile of clothes in a chair.

“Are you allowed to use that computer?” I said.

“Yes,” said Timmy. “Of course I am.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to check with your mom.”

I texted her, and she texted back saying it was okay but he needed to do his homework first. I asked what his homework was, and she said he would know and he would tell me.

“Okay, Timmy,” I said. “Your mom says you can use the computer but you have to do your homework first.”

“No!” he said.

“What’s your homework?” I said.

“I don’t know!” He continued playing.

I reached toward the computer, but Timmy slammed it shut before I touched it. He ran into the living room and threw himself onto the cushionless couch.

“I hate you!” he yelled. “You’re a jerk!”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” I said.

He turned the TV on.

“Timmy. Turn it off.”

“I hate you!” he yelled.

He alternated between telling me that he hated me and calling me a jerk for the next hour. I got him to turn off the TV but he wouldn’t move from the couch. For a while I sat in the dining room, getting a headache from the yelling, and wondering when he was going to wear himself out. Finally I made him a snack of peanut butter on crackers and brought it to him. He was quiet when he was eating, and I took the opportunity to suggest that when he was done we could start his homework. He told me I was a big jerk, but when he was done he came back into the dining room and sat down and opened his math book. He completed one page and said, “That’s enough.” I texted his mom again, and she texted back that the assignment sheet was on the table. I went through the piles of papers until I found it. I told him he had to do two pages of math and four pages of his reading workbook and he said, “See, I told you you were wrong.” But he did the pages, and when he was done he called me a jerk again and we went to the playground.

When we got there he ran around like crazy. I offered to play with him but he didn’t want to play with me or any of the kids there. I sat on a bench with some moms and watched kids trip in a poorly placed water drainage ditch between the bench area and the rest of the playground. After half an hour Timmy came running up and said he needed to go to the bathroom. There were Porta-Pottys right there, but he insisted that we drive home. When we got there we couldn’t get in. Somehow the key didn’t work anymore. I tried every lock trick I knew, but I couldn’t get the door open.

Timmy called me a stupid jerk and tried the lock himself. Then he said he didn’t need to use the bathroom anymore. He clearly did, so we drove to a pizza place, and then back to the playground. I texted Susanna to tell her we had locked ourselves out, and she said she would meet us at the playground.

I watched Timmy play on a big round wheel. Other kids were sitting on top of it, and he was pushing it and then jumping onto it himself. It seemed dangerous but I was too exhausted to do anything about it, and if I had learned anything in my years of babysitting, it was that nothing was as dangerous as it seemed to me. All the times my heart had stopped had always been for nothing.

So I watched him push the wheel with his strange intensity. He didn’t even seem to notice the other kids, and I wondered if he had a bigger problem than being deaf. I wondered if I could just tell Susanna that I wasn’t coming back tomorrow. I had never done anything like that, but I had also never been called a jerk for an entire afternoon. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that there was going to be no deaf mentor — deaf mentee relationship. Timmy was much deafer than I was, he was doing much better than I had, and he was a little asshole.