BY THE TIME MARK WAS A TEENAGER, Julia had grown far more than adept at lip-reading when talking to him, talking to Cal, or in the classroom as she needed it. The irony of a music teaching job opening at Woodlawn Elementary right as the ringing in her ears wouldn’t stop struck her and didn’t—it was either irony, or whatever the opposite of irony was—but no matter how inept kids were, she could still clap and find a rhythm and she could teach technique on violin, viola, cello, and bass. Her aural world had grown into a single amorphous blob of watery basslines and rhythm, but the aural world was better succumbed to than fled from. She still put on her old Bill Monroe records from time to time to hear what she could hear, to discover if any of Tater Tate or Kenny Baker’s old fiddle lines were still available in her spectrum.
Mostly what she heard was the thumping of the bass, which in bluegrass was as repetitive and boring as music got—one, four, one, four, one, five, one. Monroe had always liked playing in B-flat, no matter how challenging that was for fiddlers, and Julia had learned to play those melodies in closed positions with her left hand, unable to hit any open strings. One day in a book on astrophysics her book club was reading she discovered that when astronomers made actual audio recordings of the sound produced by a black hole, the black hole emitted a B-flat fifty-two octaves below the spectrum the human ear could hear. That seemed right. Her whole aural life was black-hole-bound, waiting to be sucked in for all eternity to a substance made of pure, soul-sucking gravity. That was a fate she’d have preferred to what was ahead.
When Mark was eight he took up piano, and Julia felt beyond grateful he’d not wanted to play the violin as Cal suggested—“But you could teach him everything you know!” he said. She could do no such thing. By that point she couldn’t even tell if her own intonation was on unless she was playing in first position on her G string—it was one thing to teach in a huge room full of kids whose faces she could read to see what was happening. But doing so one-on-one with her own son? He needed lessons from a real teacher. From someone who could still hear the upper registers. And besides, she told Cal, it just wasn’t possible for her to discipline the kid in the way he needed—the first time he touched the hair on her bow, the first time he unscrewed the bow’s frog and let the hairs swing taut and loose, she grew so angry she wouldn’t let him near the instrument for a week. The piano—that was the instrument for them. It was tuned every six months by a professional tuner and when you hit a key, it produced a note. Playing piano required precision but it did not require intonational precision. Whatever she needed to do to help Mark when he came home to practice she could do by sight and by feel.
Lip-reading became more of an issue as Mark’s friends started to come over when he was in high school. By that point Cal knew something was wrong with her hearing, but there was almost nothing he could do to help—no help she would accept, anyway. “You know, you could go see Steinway again,” Cal would tell her. “He’s developing all kinds of novel approaches to hearing loss himself, at his clinic.”
“Hearing aids,” Julia said. “Devices that look like plastic barnacles hanging off the sides of your head. I will not wear fucking plastic barnacles on the sides of my fucking head. I’m fine. I’m a young woman. A young mother. I can hear plenty. I can tell everything you’re saying, can’t I.”
For the most part what she was saying was true, even if she couldn’t quite hear herself saying it. Within a matter of weeks in the classroom she knew her students well enough to understand the vast majority of what came out of their mouths. If you could anticipate what was being said—if you knew for example that third-graders didn’t know a half note from a whole note, couldn’t even wrap their right thumb around the frog of a violin bow, didn’t know what an arpeggio was or how to identify a G clef—there was still a whole lot you could teach them. And there was the added benefit that the unbearable squeaking of an improperly bowed E string, while it might send a student’s classmates squirming in their seats, was for all intents and purposes inaudible for Julia. She appeared to any casual observer a saint gifted with infinite patience as she sat through the sourest notes ever played on a violin and viola, day after day, public performance after public performance. If you knew what you needed to beforehand, if you knew most of what was being said and played, you could understand 80, 90 percent of what you were hearing from context, experience, and prior knowledge.
It occurred to Julia only after the trouble arrived for Mark that this was the very definition of growing conservative: listening for patterns based on what you already knew, comprehending new stimuli based on set assumptions about the world and its context, waiting to hear a version of what you expected to be told and dismissing out of hand any new or contradictory information. She wondered how much it had come to blind her—deafen her—to what was happening in her own basement, trying to match what she saw in her son to what she wanted and expected his behavior to be. It was by necessity that she had no choice but to listen by watching, and wait to hear a version of what she was expecting to hear. Rather than reject it, she came to accept this new information: that there was a good reason people grew conservative as they grew older, as their failures and dysfunction got the best of them and left what it left behind, and she could do worse than to swallow it whole, even if it lodged in her throat like an undigested rodent.