By Susan Bloom Malus

     Yes, my sister says, a large set of headphones covering her ears. She is responding to sounds generated by Marissa, an open-faced young audiologist visible through a glass panel, from an adjoining room. Yes. Yes. Yes. A pause and then a few more: Yes. Yes.
     She is going to be fitted with a hearing aid. I am with her in a soundproofed room, listening to her take a hearing test. Ironies emanate.
     We are not a family that communicates. For instance, it was only last year, when I was over fifty, that I learned that my sister, three years younger, had always been deaf in one ear.
     We had met for lunch in a dim, faux-pub restaurant in the Wall Street area. Our table was near the center of a crowded and noisy room filled with small groups that talked louder and louder in order to overpower each other.
     “Sit here,” my sister said, gesturing to her right. “You’re on the wrong side.”
     “The wrong side of what?”
     She’s repeating words spooled into the headphones: Smart. Well. Jaw. Cop. Live. One. Die. Gave. Chest. Your. Knee. Hum. New. Cars. Young. Wait. Care.
     Care? As children, we suffered under a mother who hovered between a reluctance to converse and a nervous vigilance about spoken language.
    Hearing someone confuse this and next, for example, her jaw would set. What an idiot, she would say as angrily as if some crime had been committed. For that moment, having not been the criminals, we would be safe under the umbrella of her anger. If, however, one of us mispronounced a word, we would be shoved right out into the rain. She would correct us with something approaching ferocity, her syllables distinct, her tone withering, the implication being that only idiots – a favorite word – would make such an error.
     When not correcting us, she tended toward silence. Questions brought only deferrals. Asked if we could go to the zoo on the weekend or where the East River was in relationship to our apartment building or just how the sperm, illustrated in a book she handed to me one evening, reached the illustrated egg, she deferred endlessly: not now, wait until your father gets home, your father is too tired, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.
     Little wonder that my sister and I learned hesitation along with speech.
In the restaurant, I looked at her incredulously. “You mean,” I said, “that you’ve always been deaf in that ear? Always?”
     “Always. It’s congenital.”
     My surprise was that there was a reason for what always seemed like indifference or unresponsiveness, behavior so similar to our mother’s that I had never questioned it. Her surprise was that I didn’t know.
     On second thought, neither of us was entirely surprised.
     During that lunch, my sister told me how, in her twenties, she had taken herself to an audiologist who told her that there was nothing that could be done other than surgery, which then held great risks. He never mentioned a hearing aid.
     “That was a long time ago. There’s a lot of new technology,” I said. “You could see my E.N.T. guy.”
     And so she did and now we are here, in this closed box of a room. Book. Call. River. Open. Slim. Quiet.

     The family silence hung between us for much of our adulthood. Slights and angers accumulated, occasionally exploding into loud, useless arguments. The specifics didn’t matter; what we really fought over was who had been hurt most by the other, who had suffered more.
     For many of those years, we only met at family events, where we barely spoke and where my sister seemed not to hear an endless series of sarcastic comments directed at me by my brother-in-law. “So,” he would say at some family gathering, all twenty-five of us crammed into whoever’s dining room was largest, “so Susan lives in fancy-schmancy Park Slope.”
     “It isn’t so fancy.” I had a rent-stabilized apartment that needed a good plastering and painting. It was in a walk-up. Nothing fancy there.
     “But Flatbush it ain’t. Staten Island it ain’t,” he said, naming the part of Brooklyn where my sister and I had grown up, the borough where they had lived for twenty years.
     I wanted to say, “You’re such an asshole. A parochial bore. And a traitor, a Jew turned right-wing because the economy (inflation was high then, in the teens) isn’t going your way.” But I only looked down at the long table of cousins. Some were rolling their eyes and didn’t need me to say anything; others were waiting to see how easily I could be baited. I settled for, “That isn’t a crime,” and asked for someone to pass the potatoes.
     My sister, frozen by an unhappiness that looked like indifference, sat silent. For years I was angry about this. It was only later that she told me how furiously she fought with him at home.
     Why not in public? I don’t have the heart to ask.

     She too has her honed points of anger. My second marriage took place without any family at an upstate justice of the peace. After we started meeting for lunch, she told me how hurt she had been. I was surprised; our estrangement had been so deep that it never occurred to me that it would matter to her.
     I apologized without too much explanation. She accepted this. We’re friends now but there are still silences. It seems the safer route.
     We had expected to go from the waiting room to an office where we would ask the questions we were preparing, but instead were led by Marissa to the soundproofed room. My sister sat in an upholstered armchair, I in a cheap, armless desk chair. Marissa, in jeans and a tee shirt, stood in the doorway explaining what would happen. Then she left, bolting the door behind her. It closed with a soft grinding sound, reminding me of airlocks in sci-fi movies. A light went on in an adjoining room; Marissa raised a hand from the other side of a windowed partition.
     I looked around. Our little room was cozy despite the panels of perforated metal, row upon row of perfectly aligned little holes, that comprised the walls and low ceiling. I reached out a hand; it was cold to the touch. Grey industrial carpeting padded the floor. Two speakers, one large and one small, were mounted at different heights on the same wall. A small white ribbon, tied to a ventilation grate in the ceiling, danced wildly. “It’s like a space capsule,” I said, but though I was on her right — her hearing-side, she didn’t answer.
     Either I had spoken too softly or she was nervous. I didn’t repeat myself.
     Swiveling back, I saw that Marissa now wore headphones and held a sheet of paper in front of her mouth.
     “Do you read lips?” I asked my sister.
     This time she answered. “Of course I do, everyone who has a hearing problem reads lips,” she said in her matter-of-fact way.  
     Now that I know, of course, it seems amazing that I never guessed. But her partial deafness doesn’t explain everything. Just a few weeks earlier, in her newly renovated kitchen, I stood behind her as she fiddled with something in the oven. I commented on the complexities of the computerized stove; there was no answer. “It’s smarter than I am,” I said, louder this time.
     “I heard you,” she said, her back still to me.
     “Then why didn’t you answer?”
     She stopped what she was doing and turned around. “I don’t know,” she said. We looked at one another – I certainly didn’t know – and then she returned to the preparation of dinner.

     Just as there were times when my sister and I got along, there were happy times with my mother. I remember the early grade school lunches when we came home to find, on the best days, English muffin pizza, acrid with their swipe of tomato paste, Velveeta bubbling on top. My mother and one of my aunts, who also lived in our building and whose cheerful, chatty nature often provided relief, prepared lunch together for me, my sister and my younger cousin. We ate, they chatted. We may have talked among ourselves, too, though I don’t recall that. “Do you know that Dana is afraid of pigeons?” my aunt would begin, setting off a rocketing laughter. Dana was an upstairs neighbor, a sweet, beautiful, Marilynesque young mother, buxom and blonde, who never read a book. She had a stout husband who wore jewelry and was believed to be a gangster. “A husband like him and she’s afraid of pigeons?” They would laugh themselves to tears, segue from one neighbor to another. School was never so interesting.
      In retrospect, I see how different my mother was with her sisters, neither of whom were locked into silences. With them, she could chat and gossip. With us, there was nothing. Was she waiting for us, the children, to retrieve her from her silence? I sometimes think so. My sister disagrees.
     “She doesn’t like children,” she said in her reasonable way. “She never did, she still doesn’t.”
     Well, that too.

     She is in headphones now, responding with “yeses” to a series of sounds Marissa is generating into her muffed ears. The white ribbon dances above our heads.
      Yes. Yes. Yes, she intones, her voice changing as she goes along. At first, with frequent repetition, there’s excitement. Yes, yes, yes. I’m suddenly thrown back to college, to the first time I read Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses. The recollection falls upon me with such immediacy that I can see the print on the page, the rapid strides of the professor who read passages almost from memory while criss-crossing the room. A man of alarming thinness and intensity, he had just recently become a father. He often sat at the crib, he told us, reading Joyce to the baby.
    I was Susan Bloom then. In one of my first English classes, a professor asked me if I knew who Molly Bloom was. I didn’t. His amusement, which was contained and polite, led me to think that I had better find out.
     There were no silences in college classes. Everything could be said. Even yes, yes, yes.
     A long pause. Yes. More pause. Yes, softly and less frequently, a little uncertain, perhaps a little demoralized.
     The room is becoming close despite the little ribbon fluttering on about air flow. I wonder if it’s there so people can see that there is ventilation, so they won’t panic at the bolted door, the increasingly airless quality of the room.
     Now the test changes. She’s going to repeat words that will emanate from the speakers on the wall. I will hear them too, of course.
     They are ordinary words, spoken within a narrow auditory range. Oatmeal. Baseball. Airplane. Hot dog. Outside. Hardware. Key. Elf. Star. Odd. Way.
     There’s a pause. I lean over and say, “Do you want to cheat? Since I’m in here?”
     She smiles. “I don’t think so.” Her tone almost has a lilt.
     Rain. Road. Playground. Sidewalk. Hot dog. Oatmeal. Daybreak. Full. Bells. Souls. Jam. What. Aisles. Birthday.
     Birthday. On my sister’s fortieth, I found myself depressed. We exchanged nothing, not even a call or a card. Why keep this up, I thought? Is it making anyone happy?
     On impulse, I headed out into “fancy-schmancy” Park Slope, where florists abound. Wondering if I would regret it, I had flowers sent to her home for her birthday. Hedging my bets, they weren’t extravagant; neither were they cheap.
     She called; we met for what would be the first of many lunches. On my birthday, she gave me a coffee table book entitled Sisters. The year after that, we finally started talking about our childhood. When we came to the more recent past, we were delicate, probing its frozen surface with carefully poised sentences.
     I swivel my chair. The chair is silent but my stomach rumbles.
     Marissa comes in to place a hearing device around the back of my sister’s ear. The door is open behind her, letting in cool air. She explains that we will hear a rush of static from a speaker followed by a jumble of voices. “Restaurant noise,” she tells us. “Just repeat the words you hear me saying against the background noise.” She again bolts the door. We hear the static, then the voices, then Marissa reciting a simple list of words. There. East. Knee. Carve. Smart. Well. Jaw. Off. Cap. Does. That. With. Here.
     I am here by invitation. And the occasion itself, the hearing test, has a surprising ceremonial quality. There are starts and stops, hushed silences, words heard and intoned. Juxtapositions leap out at me: a womblike room, religious intensity, a service in the service of a sense.
     For a moment, I think of us as twins in a motherless womb; that, having found each other, we no longer need a mother.
     This is a romantic notion. I know that my matter-of-fact sister, who lives in a business world that I only half understand, whose work life is filled with technology and numbers, would find it strange. Writing in my notebook, I cross it out, then box it in.
     “Motherless” reminds me that when my son was three or four, he and a little girl would pack toy suitcases and play leaving home. I would hear one of them say, “Let’s pretend our mothers are dead.” Then they would wave goodbye to me and proceed to the dining room to start their new lives.
     Will. Darn. Or. Dawn. Toy. Cook. Shoe. None. If. Up. Store. On. Not. Shin. Earn. Deal. Wet. As. Or.
     She has little trouble repeating the words.
     The door is unlocked, cooler air floats in. Marissa stands in the doorway and talks to us. The test is over.

      When we leave, we have confirmed that the hearing loss is not the result of nerve damage but of a physical blockage, most likely a congenitally malformed bone, correctable with surgery (which she knows but has decided against). We have learned that the expensive digital hearing aid that tucks into the canal of the ear (the ITC) won’t work for her kind of hearing loss. She needs the simplest, least expensive type, an ITE (in the ear) aid. It will be cast from a mold and have a volume control wheel. She may find that she doesn’t always need it, that at the movies, for example, she hears as well without as with it. We have learned too that people have trouble adjusting to hearing aids because the brain needs time to adapt to a flood of new sounds and to learn how to filter out what is unnecessary. She should start by using it for a few hours a day. “It gets harder to adjust as you get older,” Marissa says. “If you had done this earlier….” she shrugs.
     We stop for coffee at a nearby luncheonette. It’s long and narrow, a straight snake of a place, with one barely manageable aisle separating undersized tables from an old-fashioned counter with red-topped stools. At one of the tiny tables, with people squeezing past us, my sister tells me this story:
     When she was in fourth or fifth grade, the school sent home a letter instructing our parents to take her for a hearing test. A doctor was found; her hearing was tested. A second appointment was set for a Saturday. On Friday, my sister’s best friend called, wanting to go to the movies the next day.
     “Go,” our mother said, “don’t worry about the doctor. Go to the movies.”
     “Are you sure?” my sister now says, repeating her childish words, her voice shaken by a sudden tremor. Then she breathes deeply and continues. With the school note as evidence, she tells me, she lobbied hard for the first appointment. No one spoke to her about the results. Canceling the second held implications that she couldn’t or, in our family wouldn’t, have articulated. What’s going to happen to me? Are you going to take care of me?
     As per our family mode, this is all news to me.
     “What did you do?” I ask.
     “I went to the movies.”
    “And?”
    “And she never made another appointment and I never asked about it.” She pauses. “I assumed there was something shameful about the whole thing. We never talked about it again.”
     The waitress drops the bill onto the table. My sister says, “I think she must have been frightened by the responsibility. How else can you explain it?”
    I agree. It’s a conclusion we’ve reached before.
   Our mother was efficient to an extreme. She ran a well-stocked, well-organized household on little money. Items in the pantry were alphabetized, linens in the linen closet never sagged or toppled, we always had boots in the winter, matching short-and-top sets in the summer; she was known among neighbors for being able to trim their children’s bangs in a neat line. When we were in high school, she returned to work as a secretary. When computers made their first appearance in offices, she learned how to use one.
    Still, she must have been frightened by the responsibility of raising children. How else to explain such a shocking lapse?

     A few days after the hearing test, I speak to my mother on the phone. She is kinder and gentler now, fond of, if not close to, her grandchildren, no longer censorious and rarely disagreeable. She lives in Florida with her two sisters, she a widow, they both divorcees. Now in their late seventies and early eighties, they’re nearly always together.
     She starts off the conversation with a medical report. One aunt has lung cancer, the other a serious problem with circulation and kidneys. A neighbor has died; a cousin is ill. I get detailed news of who is going to see which doctor, what doctors seen have said, how everyone feels. Sometimes it’s more than I want to know but I don’t complain. Until recently, I knew nothing about the health of either of my aunts; their children knew nothing of the other two. Gathered with the cousins for a holiday, I would find out that one aunt was ill; my cousins would learn that my mother had just had a small surgical procedure. We were mystified and frustrated. No matter what, who or how we asked, information was transmitted only down direct biological lines, despite the fact that when any of us called, any of them might answer. “I’m fine,” a sick aunt would say to me when she wasn’t and then pass the phone to my mother. The truth only emerged if I happened to speak with one of my cousins.
     For years I argued with my mother. “You have to tell me these things,” I would say. “It isn’t right. These are the aunts I grew up with.” She would say, “You know that I can’t talk about things that upset me.” I would reply, “Then how will I know anything?”
     A long silence would follow. Then she would ask about my son and my husband.
     “You think I’m going to tell you anything?” I said.
    Another long silence; then she would change the subject.
    One day though, on such a call, I told her a blunt truth. “Do you know what we call the three of you?” I said, the “we” referring to my sister and cousins.
     “What?”
     “The Black Hole.”
     “What are you talking about?”
     “You know, black holes, information goes in but nothing goes out. We tell you all about us but you don’t send any information back.”
     “Oh my God.” She was laughing, calling over my aunt. “They call us the Black Hole.” She had to put the phone down and explain. I could hear them both laughing.
     Why did that make such a difference? I don’t know, but after that she faithfully reported everything, as did the other aunts.
     In the current conversation, I mention the hearing test.
     “Why didn’t she tell me?” my mother says. “I just spoke to her. She didn’t even mention it.”
     “I don’t know,” I hear myself say. “Why don’t you ask her?” I immediately want to retract this; if she asks, she might be told. Do I want to start my sister’s war? When she says, “I don’t know,” sounding troubled, I continue to foment trouble. “Just ask her. Tell her I mentioned it. It isn’t a secret.”
     But of course it’s a secret; that’s why I can’t stop trying to spill it. My sister would have told her if she wanted her to know; my job is to stay out of it. But I’m frustrated. After all these years, we’re still hoarding information.
     “You’re right,” my mother says resolutely. “I’m going to ask her about it the next time we talk.”
      A few days later, I call my sister.
     “You want to know about the conversation, don’t you?” she asks without any prompting.
     I’m relieved. Guilt has been needling me. “Of course I do. I thought maybe I started World War III.”
     “No,” she says. “I really wanted to say, ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested since you never were’ but I decided not to.”
     “Why?”
     “You know what she would say. That she doesn’t remember, that it never happened.”
    “Maybe you should ask. Maybe there was something about that second appointment that you don’t know. Maybe,” I said, offering a likely scenario, “she only had bad news and didn’t want to tell you.” I paused, then said, “But do it when you’re not angry.”
     A pause. “When won’t I be angry about this?”

     Growing up in silence felt like growing up in a featureless world, a world with little commentary or explanation. The walls of that world were smooth and glossy and without scale. They didn’t inform about size, strength, competence. Like mirrors, they reflected my anxiety. I often lived on the cusp of knowing and not-knowing, trying to define myself in a landscape I didn’t understand. At times I felt as if some breeze might come along and carry me away. I’m better anchored these days, by what I’ve learned, by the life I’ve created. Still, I fear heights and deep water, places where one might be cut loose and disappear. To my mind, featureless places.
     For months I think about calling my mother and asking her myself – why didn’t you make that second appointment?
—but even as I think about it, the old childhood hopelessness fogs my brain, smothering any impulse to act. She won’t know, she won’t remember, she won’t answer my questions.
     One day, however, when my mother and I are talking and I’m not thinking about the hearing test, my subconscious, that handy being-within-my-being, slips the question in under the radar of a censoriousness that, in reality, no longer exists. I find myself asking in a friendly tone why my sister didn’t have that second appointment.
     My mother’s answer surprises me. I don’t remember exactly. But I guess there was no point. He said nothing could be done.
     I tell her that my sister doesn’t seem to know that, as she didn’t tell her.
    Silence. I can tell that we’re swimming toward the Black Hole. Finally she says, There was nothing to tell. Nothing but bad news.

     It’s months before I tell my sister about this conversation. For a while, most amazing, I forget about it. And when I do remember it’s as if I’m recalling a distant event, something years in the past, that I’m reluctant to bring up. Nothing but bad news? I mock myself, knowing that I’m stuck in my mother’s sad logic. Yet each time I think about it, feelings like churned dust rise to choke me and I wonder if this is what I’ve learned, finally: Not just silence, not just hesitation, but an actual process of forgetting. I wonder, is this is what my mother experiences: a blank space where memory should be to which those tired answers, You know I can’t talk about bad news, there was no point, stand as poor witness.
     If there is a choice (and given my own amnesia, I’m not so sure) I would choose remembering. To remember is to speculate and contemplate; to me, in my life, it implies hope. It offers markers for a featureless world, ways of providing depth, color and scale. It allows me to wonder: Could our mother have sent my sister to the movies as a kindness? Could she have been trying to distract a child from what she, the mother, did not understand was the most important fact in a young life? And then the knock-out punch of questions, the one that takes my breath away: Rather than thinking that she didn’t like children, could we now think that she just didn’t understand them?
     What a marker this would be. Believed, it would change the way I perceive my childhood.
     I finally remember to tell my sister. I’m worried that she’ll be angry at the lateness of this news flash but she seems unperturbed and not at all surprised. At least it isn’t the way we treat our children, she says. I agree and take some comfort in that and in at least trying to say to knowing Yes, yes, yes.