by Rick Bailey
“The what?” she would say.
“It’s been warm for October, don’t you think?”
“The what?”
Eventually she made peace with her condition. Summer evenings she sat on the end of the davenport, a headset clamped to her ears, listening to baseball games. If she detected a faint shimmering in her presence, what might be a person (she was also mostly blind), she made strangled pronouncements: “Jim Northrup hit a double!” She shouted to hear her voice over the headset: “Two out in the seventh!” During the day, she listened to the news and shared headlines. “Today is John D. Rockefeller’s birthday!”
The morning my dad woke mostly deaf, he sent out an email distress signal. I can’t hear. Later he called me on his cell phone. We tried to talk. “I can’t hear anything, son,” he said. I heard in his voice a tone I’d never heard before, a combination of perplexity, fear, and grief.
That day he drove himself to his ear doctor, reassuring me, and himself, that it was a matter of routine maintenance. “I get clogged up,” he said. “I’ll just have him rinse out some of the crud. He did it once before.”
Late that afternoon he called again.
“It’s not crud,” he said.
“WHAT DID THE DOCTOR SAY?”
“I don’t know what he said. I couldn’t hear him. But he’s going to operate on my ears in two weeks.”
“WHAT FOR? TO DO WHAT?”
“Operate in the office.”
“WHAT FOR?”
“I just can’t hear you, son,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
A few days later, I drive the ninety minutes north to his house to pick him up. We’re going to see the doctor, this time with a pair of functioning ears, to find out what’s wrong and what the doctor proposes to do about it. In person, I discover, my father’s hearing is even worse than it is on the phone. On the kitchen table are scraps of paper where Jackie, his helping lady, has written notes to him. I thawed a meatloaf for you. The oven cleaning will be done by three o’clock. You may smell something.
I write him a note too. No procedure today. Conference with the doctor.
“Let’s take my car,” he yells.
When I turn the key in the ignition, the radio comes on in a blast, at full volume. It’s so loud I duck. He doesn’t notice when I turn it off. He puts on his giant black old-guy wrap-around sunglasses and fastens his seatbelt. We make the silent ride across the river, through town, down the five-lane road, toward Saginaw. I tell him it’s cold, just to make conversation.
“What?” he yells.
Four inches from his left ear, I holler my meteorological observation.
He nods. “Just past the Catholic church on State Street,” he yells. “On the left.”
Years ago my wife and I visited an ear, nose, and throat doctor for a thyroid condition she had. His diagnosis was that her thyroid was sick, that it would continue to be sick for three months, that she could take steroids or aspirin for pain (she chose aspirin), and that eventually, with no active doctoring on his part, her thyroid would start to feel better, which it did. Twice when we went for appointments, the same little girl was there to have her cleft palate worked on. And both times, from the interior of the office, came her blood-curdling screams, sounds so awful, so harrowing, I would have been grateful to be made temporarily deaf.
At the office on State Street I drop my father off at the front door and go park the car. He checks in and takes a seat. While we wait our turn to see the doctor, he offers a number of conversation starters.
“Alfreda called today,” he yells. “She talked to Jackie.”
Next to the door, a woman and her daughter chat quietly while they wait. The little girl looks pleased to have been taken out of school. Whatever’s wrong with them, it’s not their hearing. Sitting a few seats over from us is another father and son team.
“The physical therapist comes Friday,” my father yells a few minutes later. “Boy, she gives me a workout.”
The receptionist, hearing this, starts to giggle. I nod and smile at her, gesturing for him to keep his voice down just a little. He holds up a finger, indicating he understands, and then closes his eyes and puts his head back. It’s March, and the office’s Christmas decorations are still up. From the sound system in the ceiling comes Christian rock, barely audible. There’s a lot of traffic noise as cars swish past the office. The traffic reminds me: he can’t hear. I wonder if it’s conventional to have music in an office for people with hearing problems.
On a clipboard I borrow from the receptionist, I write a few notes for him.
The doctor may want to put tubes in your ears.
“Floyd had tubes put in,” he yells. There’s no stopping him.
Did it help? I write.
“It’s hard to get a straight answer from him,” he yells in reply. He closes his eyes again, pondering Floyd’s or his situation. Just then the other father and son are called for their appointment. The son stands and waits as his father, like mine, lifts his whole body out of the chair, pauses, straightens it out, and with the help of a cane pushes himself mostly upright and achieves equilibrium. He waits a second or two, making sure he’s steady, and then takes a step.
Our turn comes. The doctor shakes my hand when he comes in the examining room. He has a thick, bristly mustache. He is burly and prematurely gray and diffident, almost ill at ease. He’s assisted by a thin woman between fifty and seventy with lots of suntan makeup and hair that looks like a wig. Her gaze, which follows the doctor, is nothing if not adoring. Wearing a white shirt with a bad tie and baggy black stay-press pants, he seems like a hesitant Wilford Brimley. He looks in my father’s ears, asks how he feels in a soft voice—he better than anyone knows shouting is futile—and explains what he thinks we should do. My father gives him a look that’s more blank than encouraging.
“He doesn’t read lips very well,” the doctor says, turning to me.
“You have a mustache,” I say. He smiles, taking it as a joke, which is not how I intended it.
The doctor shows me a graph that charts my father’s hearing loss. “He’s just lost more than half of what little he had left,” the doctor says, “probably because of an infection.” He wants to make a little incision in each ear drum, drain off the fluid, and put in some tubes.
“‘Time or tubes’ is what we say.” He lets that sink in.
“Will he get his hearing back?” I ask.
“Not all of it,” he says. “Not what he’d lost before.”
I point at the graph. “But this?”
He says he thinks the tubes should help. We shake on it, and his assistant schedules the procedure and goes over the details with me, while my father looks on. I’ll explain everything in an email, I write on the clipboard.
In the car, on the way back to his house, he yells over at me, “Did you have to take a none-of-your-business day to come with me to the doctor?” I tell him it’s okay. What are those days for, anyway? He shakes his head. It kills him just a little to accept so much help. “The doctor,” he shouts, “is a portly chap.” He smiles, holds out his hands to outline the doctor’s girth. A few miles down the road he breaks the silence again. “Tomorrow, he says, “I’m going to work on my garden tractor, get it ready for summer.”
Time or tubes. I’ll explain that in an email or maybe on one of Jackie’s scraps of paper.
“This car,” he says, “has a nice, quiet ride.” He looks across the dash, toward what happens next, toward home, obviously pleased with this little witticism. I think: Tell me another one, dad. I’m all ears.
33
No Secrets, Victoria
I was surprised recently to see this image appear every time I went to the Wix website: Heidi Klum, holding underpants. It’s a delicate subject, underwear. Personally, I’d rather talk about something else.
Wix is a let-us-host-your-website site. You would think images would scroll, to advertise a technical feature of their web-composition kit. They don’t. It’s all
Heidi, all the time, stretching those shorts. They look very stretchy. Which got me thinking about microfiber.
Some years ago I took a group on an excursion in Italy. We went to churches and museums in Florence and rode around Tuscany a little. It was a see, eat, shop, and relax trip. Among the travelers was one of my co-workers and his wife. He was a humanist who also happened to teach welding. One day over a dish of pasta he announced he had just bought some microfiber underwear. His wife Pam nodded. Both had an unmistakable twinkle in their eyes.
“What’s that?” I asked. I thought of myself as a sophisticate at the time, but when it came to underwear, I knew I was hopelessly retrograde and low fashion.
“High-tech,” Don said,
“Lightweight,” Pam said.
“Durable,” Don said.
Then they looked at each other. Again, the twinkle.
After lunch we went to the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. It’s a church not everyone gets to, across the Arno, well worth the walk, famous for the Brancacci Chapel. Inside the church, begun in 1268, Don pointed at a column, shook his head, and commented. Artists and architects, he said, get all the credit. Think of the man who worked on that column, coming to the job every day, carrying his tools, hammering away at tiny details in just one part of the church. How many columns did he detail in his lifetime? Did he have days off? Did he bring his wife and kids to the worksite so they could appreciate the scope of the project and see his small contribution? Did he live to see the doors of the church open?
From there we went to the chapel, where we saw the Masaccio frescos, known in particular for an image of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. On their faces they wear a devastating look of grief and shame. They know they are lost. They know they are naked. Thus begins, in human history, our life of toil, our knowledge of sin and death, and, as the other Masaccio frescos in the chapel show, humankind’s need for the New Adam and the Church.
Thus too begins, it could be argued, the history of clothes. And underwear.
Underwear history is sketchy. The Egyptians wore loincloths, the Romans an undergarment called a subligaculum. In medieval times men wore “braies,” from which we get the term “breeches.” Braies looked a lot like shorts, with a drawstring at the waist, and were a garment that could be pulled down and drawn up, explaining the term “drawers.” The history of women’s underwear, a problematic subject given gender politics, is sparse. Did they or didn’t they? The skirt and miniskirt had not been invented, making an answer to the call of nature, with long, voluminous dresses and shifts to manage, a complicated task. Pants were out of the question. (See Joan of Arc.) It was thought, until a recent, exciting discovery, that perhaps women wore no underwear at all.
Then from Lengberg Castle, in Austria’s East Tyrol, came a trove of textile finds the contents of which have significantly advanced our understanding of underwear history. The castle dates back to 1190; in a fifteenth-century castle-improvement project, a second story was added to the structure. In this second story, in 2008, a vault was uncovered, revealing medieval bras and underpants. Beatrix Nutz (that’s her real name), an expert in medieval and textile archeology at University of Innsbruck, has studied this find and speaks to its advancement of brief history. She asserts, “Trousers and underpants were considered a symbol of male power and women wearing them were pugnacious wives trying to usurp the authority of their husbands, or women of low morality.” For the historical record, Nutz notes that both Eleanor of Toledo and Maria de’ Medici owned underwear, as did Elizabeth I. In a description of an effigy of the great queen of England, there is mention of a corset and drawers.
A day or so later, we were getting ready to board a bus, taking to the hills around Greve to taste some wine. Don had a puckish look on his face.
“Today,” he said with a broad smile, “I’m walking with ease and comfort in my new microfiber underwear.”
“Cool,” Pam said.
“It’s a weave that breathes,” Don said.
Well, all right then, I thought.
I found some at the outdoor market in Piazza Santo Spirito. I made a couple of loops around the piazza, looking at cookery, dishware, linens, and food until I found socks and underwear. I pointed and said to the vendor, “Do you have microfiber? Medium, I think.”
She laid out a few pairs of briefs on the table, all black, and then picked up another pair and gave them the Heidi Klum stretch. “Three for ten euros,” she said.
I picked up a pair. They felt soft to the touch. Lightweight, as Pam said.
In white print across the front of the briefs was written, in English, in a font way too large, “SEX. KISS.” I handed them back. “Is this all you have?”
The vendor nodded.
Could I do it? Could I buy underwear with those words emblazoned across my (lower) abdomen? What on earth were Italians thinking? What would my wife think?
The Italians I know over there, in fact, seem to have a special feeling about underwear. I’ve been to a number of birthday parties, dinners where gifts were presented to the happy lady, almost always including dainty, minimalist lingerie. And she raises them aloft for all to see; and we toast her and her underwear. No secrets, Victoria. It’s simply a different attitude about sex, kiss than we have in the United States, especially the Midwest: playful vs. puritanical. On beaches in Italy men opt for briefs; American men are more likely to go with the baggy look, what Italians call, with a small hint of sarcasm, braghe (see “braie”).
I bought them.
Don was right: comfortable, lightweight, technologically up to date. In further Italy excursions in the years after that, I used to joke with travelers who joined me that, in the interest of traveling light, I took only two pairs of underwear with me, the ones I was wearing and the additional pair in my suitcase. “Miracle fabric,” I said. “Wash when you go to bed. They’re dry in the morning.”
So: I can wear SEX. KISS. (I might even be wearing them right now.) There remains this worry, a sorry cliché but a worry nonetheless: what if I’m in an accident? I’m sure healthcare professionals don’t bat an eye as they scissor underwear off an injured person. It’s not as if they look and make a note of what the patient was wearing. If they do, these days, the digital medical record might look like this: Underwear: ☺, ☹(Please check one).
34
Flip-Flops and the Leaning Tower of Pisa
The first time my wife took me to Italy after we were married, I wore flip-flops. It would be stifling, August-hot over there. I planned on wearing short-shorts and sleeveless T-shirts as much as possible, to maximize exposure to sun and air. And flip-flops. These were nice flip-flops I had bought at Pier 1, with rattan footbeds and royal purple velvet thongs, anything but ordinary. But no sooner did we arrive than she started to insult them.
“I can’t believe you wear those things,” she said.
I looked down, turned a foot, and admired the rattan. “Comfortable,” I said. “Naturally cool.”
A dismissive shake of the head.
I pointed to the purple thong. “And elegant.”
“You don’t see Italians wearing those things.”
Those things. She couldn’t bring herself even to say their name. Flip, flop. Flip-flop. In truth, I did not see any Italians wearing flip-flops. Neither did I see envious looks from passersby on the streets.
“Why don’t you get some ciabatte like Domenico’s?”
Domenico, her cousin, was an arbiter of fashion. In a state of relax, he wore both plastic beach ciabatte and wooden clogs. That summer it was obvious clogs were the most popular mode of transportation for Italians. On sidewalks you’d hear people clopping in and out of stores and trattorie, to and from the beach, like so many fashionably clothed horses. Clogs, I could see, were hot.
A few days later, at the mercato in Rimini, weary of hearing my footwear slandered, I picked up a pair of clogs, smooth blond wood with a wide blue leather band to fit over the bridge of the foot.
&
nbsp; “Yes,” she said.
No, I discovered repeatedly over the next week or so.
When we were kids, we called them thongs, not flip-flops. The first time I ever wore a pair was in the Straits of Mackinaw. The bridge was only a few years old, and my paternal grandmother wanted to see it in the worst way. “Daddy,” she’d say to my grandfather, “wouldn’t you like to see the bridge?”
He’d take his pipe out of his mouth, shake his head, and say, “No.”
Her sight and hearing were fading. She must have felt a sense of urgency.
“Why not?” she’d say.
“I’ve seen a bridge,” he’d answer.
Then one Thursday night late in the summer she called us and said Daddy was ready, and shouldn’t we go before he changed his mind?
We left early the next morning, drove north, and camped that night in a park at the base of the bridge, not far from Fort Michilimackinac. While my grandparents sat in lawn chairs through the afternoon, regarding the bridge, the rest of us did what seemed like the only sensible thing. We went swimming in the Straits. The water was cold and rough. We expected that. And the bottom was rocky, so rocky as to be almost impossible to navigate. My parents must have figured swimming was going to be essential, maybe the only thing, outside of the fort, that my brother and I would enjoy, because they loaded us into the car, drove to a nearby five-and-dime store, and bought thongs for us. (This was before the advent of swim shoes.) They came in one color: blue.
In theory, it seemed like a solution. In practice, it was a disaster. Thongs, we discovered, were more floatation device than barrier between your foot and sharp rocks. Take a step and one fetched loose and bobbed to the surface. When you reached for it, your toes clenched to hold the other one on. The moment you relaxed the second one also slipped free from your foot. In an act of desperation we tried tying them on with nylon clothesline. (This was before the advent of duct tape.) It was no use.
For a while after that, I associated thongs with frustration and failure, until they became flip-flops and, in my mind at least, inseparable from summer ease and freedom.