by Amanda Stern
I feel scared and want to leave. “It’s very serious when someone dies or gets killed. Especially forty-eight people.” I use my strict voice so she knows I mean business and she shouldn’t try to kill me.
“A man said, ‘If I should ever grow desperate and kill myself, I should not use Friday for the purpose because Friday is an unlucky day and might bring me unhappiness.’ What is foolish in that?”
I don’t want to be an adult, I don’t want to grow up in a world that doesn’t take death or accidents seriously; where adults test kids by asking what’s foolish about being murdered or killing yourself. Did Dr. Rivka write these questions? If she thinks there’s something foolish about death when I know there’s not, why am I the one being tested?
Scapegoat
I am not doing well in school and the teachers call my mom and set up meetings. They want to know if I can see the board and hear the teacher the way the other kids can. How can I know if what I see and hear is different? I know this is my chance to get hearing aids, but now that it’s an option, I’m not sure I want to be deaf. If I can’t hear, how will I stop the person who sneaks up from behind to kill me? I’m so disappointed in myself. I thought by now I’d be over this. That I’d be able to leave my mom without feeling like I’m dying, and do what everyone else can do. Everyone else is worried about not doing well in school, but I don’t care about that. I’m starting to wonder if anyone can even hear me when I try to explain.
Siobhan calls on me when I don’t raise my hand and asks me to define a word. Everyone turns toward me and I can hear them waiting for me to get it wrong. All the letters in my head shake apart like a Boggle tray; I feel noisy and blank at the same time. I’m being timed and I can’t think and my feelings are a marching band across my body.
“I…I…I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll tell you when I get back,” I say, hurrying out of the classroom. Outside, I’m breathless, humiliated and shaking. I look for Kara, but she’s in science class with her head down.
But then I have a genius idea. I’ll write it down. My mom will read about my problem and explain the answer; even better, she’ll finally realize that I’m not working correctly and need some sort of medical equipment that makes people do things for me because I’m too broken to do things for myself.
“I’m in trouble with Siobhan. I ran out of class today because I didn’t know what the word ‘scapegoat’ meant,” I write to her in a note I leave on her pillow.
“I’ll call Marie tomorrow.” She leaves the note outside my bedroom door.
She calls Marie for everything. When I’m scared about going away on a field trip, didn’t do percents for my math homework, forgot to learn about the galaxy, or couldn’t memorize a sonnet I was supposed to recite—Marie. Even though she works for the school, Marie gets me out of everything: trips, homework, tests, and memorizing poems. It’s like there’s a secret channel between my mom and my school, my tutor, and my pediatrician. I know it’s about me, but no one will ever tell me what gets said. And afterward, it turns out I still don’t know what “scapegoat” means, how to do percents, what makes up the solar system, or the meaning of iambic pentameter.
Still, I’m sent for testing.
The doctor’s waiting room is the same as all my other doctors’ offices: plain and brown. The only magazines are for golf and sailing. I take it as a good sign that there is nothing for children here. It means they are serious about deafness. In the waiting room I practice cat’s cradle with my new babysitter, Margie. I know I’m here so they can test my hearing, but a small part of me wonders if they’ll be able to hear the inside of me, and then call my teachers and parents and even my pediatrician, Dr. Fine, for a big meeting to present the findings. People, this doctor will finally say, we have discovered the problem with your daughter and I know how to fix her. Here, have a listen. Then he’ll press Play on a tape recorder and everyone will hear the pinball sounds of all my worries crashing into one another and all my organs.
Soon a nurse comes out to fetch me. She makes Margie wait outside, which I don’t think is very friendly. In the next room, there’s a big brown chair facing a wall of glass windows. They tell me to sit, so I do. A doctor arrives but doesn’t say hello; he just juts a magic wand into my ear and makes it vibrate. I try to pretend I’m not surprised. He vibrates the wand in my other ear, too. Then he writes a note. When he pushes a piece of foam into both canals, I can hear the outside layers of the room at the same time I hear the inside layers of my brain. Then, finally, he says something.
“When you hear a sound out of your right ear, I want you to raise your right hand. Do the same with the left. Okay?”
I nod, but I immediately go blank inside at the words “left” and “right.” I look down at my hands, which look the same to me. I can write with both hands exactly the same way. The first time my mom saw me do that, she freaked out and made a phone call. A few days later a woman came over to our house and made me hop across the room on one foot and then the other. I showed her my right hand, right eye, right knee, right ear. I touched my right ear with my left hand. She asked, “Which hand do you eat with, lift with, throw with, draw with?” Then she wrapped tape around that hand and said, “From now on, you must always sit on your left hand.” But I can never remember which hand is left. She told my mom I was ambidextrous, and we never saw her again.
The deafness doctor leaves the room and goes behind the large window facing me, but I don’t hear any sound.
“Are you ready?” he asks. His voice sounds like it’s speaking from inside my brain. I hear it on both sides, so I raise both hands.
“Don’t raise your hand to my voice, only to the sounds you hear,” he says, adding, “And only raise one hand at a time. The one that correlates to the noise, not both.”
Shame spreads up my torso, into my neck. I don’t like getting things wrong. Isn’t a voice a sound?
A slow, glowing shriek is growing in my ear, higher and louder until it actually hurts my canals. I’ve never heard anything like this before. Did my head explode from being scared and now my brain is leaking? I look at the doctor, terrified, but when I see his expression I realize this is the sound. I throw my hand up. Soon the noise shrinks and I nearly cry with relief. Now there’s a new high-pitched sound in the other ear. I raise that hand. Soon notes are being flung at my ears over and over, and the high sounds linger behind like echoes circling around my ear hole. Sometimes there is no sound at all, and I sit waiting for one and when I look up, the doctor is waiting, too, and then he writes something down and I worry. It’s getting hard to keep track, because the old sounds stick, and I have to listen underneath the leftover sounds for the new ones coming in.
Am I supposed to keep my hand raised for as long as the sound plays? What did the person before me do? My hands are shooting up one after another after another. A couple of times when I raise one hand the doctor looks at me, surprised. My brain is getting tired. I’m feeling confused about sides. Once the noises are totally gone, the only thing I hear is the noises that didn’t erase.
“Now I want you to repeat the words I say as well as you can,” he says. “She.”
“She,” I say.
“Fahrenheit.”
“Fahrenheit.”
“Sister.”
“Sister.”
“Twins.”
“Twins.”
“Can you say twins again, please?”
“Twins.”
“One more time.”
I pause and swallow.
“Twinsssssssssssss,” I say, holding the s to show him I know how to say the word, so he won’t ask me again, and this can be over. I hold it until it whistles.
“One last time, please.”
I imagine that when someone hears or sees or finally understands what is happening inside my body, they’ll worry about me, but this doctor is not worried about me. He is making me repeat words because he has found something else. Just like at the eye doctor, where I went thinking noth
ing was wrong but came out with two wrong things, there is something new the hearing doctor has found. Why else would he keep making me repeat all these words? I am swept by a sick realization—no one has discovered my wrongness, not in all these years, and it dawns on me that they may never, and I’ll be stranded by myself, in my worry dungeon, without anyone to help me. Instead, I will just keep adding on other, extra things that are wrong. My hands feel like spaghetti in a strainer, and my mouth tastes like dirty rain. All the regular world sounds have been replaced by an endless hum, the dead bodies of all the noises he sent to me.
“Amanda, can you say twins for me, please?”
I look at the clock, whose big face and numbers once meant nothing to me, and although now I can read the numbers and say what they mean, time in the world never lines up with my pace. I never match anything, not time, or test answers, not even height or weight for my age, and now maybe not even my own wrongness. From now on, I will be like Etan: trapped somewhere in this city, a place known only to him but unknown to everyone else, and unable to be discovered. I am below the world; in the secret place broken kids are dropped. The people standing above don’t know how to save me.
“Twinsssssss,” I say. “Twinsssssssss.”
Frankie Bird
I’ve always had a name obsession because mine never quite fit me. Even my mom agrees I was misnamed. When I ask what she’d name me if she could do it again, without hesitation she says, “Fiona.” Amanda is the name for a girl who wears Laura Ashley dresses and cares about hygiene. “Amanda” helps her mother with domestic chores, wears pink tights on her head pretending it’s a veil, and practices walking down the aisle. I knew my name was wrong for me, just the way I knew I never matched the “normal” student those tests were testing me against, and I never got placed alongside the rest of my peers on the growth charts and percentile curves—I’ve never been where I was expected. Even now, in adulthood, the trappings other people seem to so effortlessly find continue to elude me. My internal has never matched my external and my external has never matched the world.
Since I was small, I’ve kept lists of favorite names I’ve loved. With my worn, broken-in clothes, my proud scrapes and scabs, and short mop of curls, Ramona was closer. Even Pippi. Or a boy’s name would have worked, too. Billie was good. Andy, also.
My pregnant friends always come to me for ideas—by the time I was in my thirties, I’d already named ten babies, not one of them mine. Once, at a writer’s colony, I told a table full of new friends that I was a veteran baby namer, while confessing the belief I’d been misnamed myself. A fellow writer said, “You’re a Frankie.” I remembered instantly that when I was twelve I had read The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers and immediately recognized Frankie Addams’s name as my own. Frankie is a name that matches my identity, one that stretches easily between feminine and masculine. Had it been mine from the start, I’m convinced I would have been better able to match the version of me others imagined. Which is why I want to pass down this name to my own child, a preemptive strike to remind myself to love the child who exists, not the child I expected. If she’s girly, she can be Frances, and if she’s boyish she can be Frankie. Frankie Bird. Maybe just Bird. My girl.
In the process of naming people’s babies, a process that’s spanned more than a decade, I’ve given away some names I love and then watched them grow too popular for me to use (Oliver, Declan). I’ve lived through at least three trend cycles, watching my secret list of coveted names pass by on embroidered knapsacks (Atticus, Scout, Mathilda); called out on the street (Vera! Milo! Arlo! Simon!); introduced to me in baby announcements (Agnes, Lulu, Iris, Maeve); and used in my own family (August, Charlie, Nico). All the names I’ve loved have been taken and used by others, but never Frankie. Frankie is mine.
And yet—I’m still no closer to having a real, human Frankie Bird of my own. It still feels like a joke that I’m forty. How can I be this old and feel…not grown-up? I’m waiting to feel the way everyone else my age seems to feel: capable enough for marriage and parenthood and career stability and mortgages. Almost all of my friends are married, even the ones I was sure never would be. Some are divorced and into their second marriages. A few have stepchildren. All my closest friends have children, even those who didn’t want them. I’ve sat through every pregnancy announcement, always happy for them and sad for me. Even if they’re pretending, even if some seem entirely incapable of being parents, spouses, or homeowners, they’re doing it. They’re either brave or stupid, jumping in before they’re ready, but I can’t. I don’t want to accidentally fuck anyone up. I almost ruined Pilot’s life, but not quite.
I’m not ready for another dog, and unlike some of my friends, I have no eggs in the freezer, but the drive to have a family isn’t going away, and that’s why I check the search box for “has kids” on OkCupid.
I write to a guy with a young daughter. He’s so handsome, I decide I can forgive him for living in Jersey City.
Jersey City and I exchange emails and he sends me another photo of himself, one with his daughter, who’s nine and very cute, but she looks sad. I forward the photo to my friend Laurie with a subject heading “Too old?” and she writes back that he’s cute but looks like he might have a ponytail. I feel a splash of disappointment, but Jersey City and I decide to talk on the phone.
Jersey City’s name is Javier. He has a type of accent I can’t place; it’s not exactly British, but it’s not not-British. He’s hilarious, and we make each other laugh instantly. When he tells me about himself, though, it’s a NASCAR race of red flags flying everywhere, and I walk to the other side of the room, as if I could somehow sidestep them. He’s forty-six, divorced from a woman he married impulsively, who left him with their daughter for a year. He doesn’t have a steady source of income. Right now he’s a cinematographer, although he really wants to be a filmmaker, maybe even a photographer; he’s not sure. He’s thinking he might even write a novel, although, of course, playwriting also appeals. My gut says to move on, and when I tell my friend Polly, she makes a face and says, “Hmm…not great for a forty-six-year-old man.” But that’s not what I want to hear, from Polly or my own gut. Besides, who am I to judge someone for not having his life together?
He calls me twice the next day and twice the day after that. It’s a lot, and it’s hard to concentrate on my own writing when he’s calling and emailing so much. But then, on the fourth or fifth phone call of the week, it all clicks into place, and I know I should never listen to my gut again. He tells me his daughter’s name: Frances. Frankie, for short.
* * *
Javier and I spend weeks talking on the phone. He’s been at his summer house in Maine this whole time, but now he’s coming in to meet me in New York. I’m excited but nervous. To make our meeting memorable, we decide to walk toward each other across Fourteenth Street. He’ll start at Seventh Avenue and walk west, and I’ll start at Eighth Avenue and walk east. When we think we see the other person, we’ll stop. The idea is absurd and hilarious, and so right up my alley that I worry I’m setting myself up for a huge disappointment. I’ve looked at his picture a million times and concluded that his face is so excellent that, unlike mine, there’s no wrong angle from which to look at him. Plus, his eyes squint when he smiles, and his smile reminds me of something embedded deeply in my subconscious that I can’t access. Our phone conversations have levity but are satisfying, and although I have questions that gnaw at me, my overall sense is one of certainty that this could work out. But I know my pattern, and it’s this: Out of the scraps of information I have before we even meet, I create a person who is perfect for me—and then when we do meet and he doesn’t match my unrealistic expectations, my disappointment unglues and debilitates me. In other words, I do to others what was done to me all my life—I expect the person I’ve imagined, rather than getting to know the person who arrives.
We text beforehand:
Javier: I’m almost there.
Me: Me too.
&
nbsp; Javier: What if you hate what you see?
Me: What if you hate what YOU see?
Javier: I won’t.
I’m sort of laughing as I walk toward Seventh Avenue, praying that this ugly dude isn’t him, hoping that hot guy is. I keep walking, absurdly nervous and excited. Sweating, mildly shaky. Someone is about to walk into me, and I’m annoyed, looking over his shoulder and about to walk around him when he stops, smiling. I almost keep walking, but then: “It’s me!” he says.
Oh no.
“Oh my God!” I say, forcing a smile. This can’t be him. Why can’t I ever meet someone my body doesn’t reject on sight?
I force myself to hug him to hide my disappointment. His profile said “5′6″,” but there’s nothing five foot six about him. He’s barely any taller than I am. It feels like they sent the wrong guy. He’s dressed like a college kid: pageboy cap, checked short-sleeved button-down, jeans, and dark brown huarache sandals. He’s wildly skinny. But the superficial concerns aren’t the real problem. There’s something worse that I’m preventing myself from acknowledging.
Clearly, he’s not having the same reaction. “It’s you! It’s you!” he keeps saying as we walk toward Eighth Avenue, grabbing my arm and letting his fingers linger. When he touches me, something spoils in my belly. I am flushed with mistrust. Can’t I just let myself meet someone I like? No matter whom I choose, my body never tells me what I want to hear. Besides, who says my body’s even right? I try to ignore it.
We decide to have lunch, but before we go inside, he wants to kiss me.
“Right now?” I try not to flinch.
“Yeah, let’s just get the first awkward kiss over with,” he says.
I have no idea how to say no. I wonder if kissing him will help knock this terrible feeling out of me. “Okay. Awkward kiss, here we go.”
We kiss and it’s not terrible. Were he a bad kisser, I’d have no problem ending things now. So long as you have a tongue, there’s no excuse for bad kissing. But he seems to know what he’s doing, and now I’m stuck. I feel nauseated and disappointed and yet, oddly, I’m drawn to a certain sexiness about him.