The Seas Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the island who could hear foghorns at night and seagulls in the morning, and being responsible for so much listening made her a very quiet person.
    On the island my mother had a best friend named Marie. Marie was a very good lip reader because Marie had not been born deaf but lost her hearing swimming in a quarry that, after years, had filled with rain. Something was living in the water, Marie had told my mom and whatever it was had filled her ears and ruined her hearing with an infection. So Marie could talk a little bit, though my mother said Marie sounded like a donkey when she spoke. They’d run to the pet cemetery, and my mother couldn’t help but think that the animals were probably pricking up their ears down in their graves thinking that Marie was talking to them. She told Marie her theory. Marie brayed even louder. She wasn’t one to get offended because she sounded like a donkey. After that, the two of them always had it in their heads that they could talk to animals, even dead, ones and that was how they enjoyed themselves on the island.
    More from Marie than from her own parents, my mother tried to get to the heart of what it was like not to hear anything. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to be deaf herself. Marie signed to my mother that it wasn’t like what she might think. It wasn’t like a blank sheet of white paper because actually she heard things all the time. The sounds just came from inside rather than outside, like reading. But then that’s not really hearing, my mother answered, and Marie signed that what she meant was that deafness does not equal silence, which my mother understood. She liked to read a lot. Almost constantly. Then Marie said, braying in her way, “Also, it is wonderful.”
    “It is?”
    Marie read my mother’s lips and nodded yes.
    “Why?”
    “I can’t tell you. You have to be deaf to understand.”
    “Give it to me,” my mother signed and put her ear up against Marie’s ear. They lifted their hats against the cold and aligned their heads like spoons. The cartilage of both their small ears was as plastic as suction cups and after making adjustments they created a tight seal like kissing lips between their ears. Marie closed her eyes, telling whatever deafened her that it was wanted next door and furthermore she didn’t want it. It wasn’t that wonderful at all. They stood that way, ear to ear both wishing something would happen. They stood that way long enough to convince themselves that this transfer wasn’t going to work, and then they were cold and walked back to the school and my mother heard the waves striking against the wooden pylons of their pier and Marie didn’t.
    “After that, at night I would think about deafness in the way you might think of a beautiful man,” she told me. “I imagined its pockets and curves as though I could run my hand across deafness. I thought of it as a dark, heavy blanket that would pin me underneath it while I squirmed, which, at that time,” she said and winked, “was exactly what I was looking for.”
    When her parents retired they moved back here, back to where my mother’s father had been born. Immediately my mother stood out as an oddball, a loner, a reader, a young woman who didn’t yell at her parents or carry on much. She thought she wanted to be a writer. She thought that she would one day move to New York City and pursue a career.
    When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it. When she met him what happened was he took her out dancing and told her, “You make me feel like a pony.” She didn’t know what the hell that meant, but it made her damp inside like a flood, so the bottle broke and she didn’t care anymore as long as she could have him. All the good silent things