Swimmer’s Ear Emma Burton

Swimmer’s Ear

Emma Burton

Eleanor pulled the water to either side of her body as though it were a curtain, then kicked her legs like a frog’s to propel her through. The heated water felt like an embrace over every part of her body. It supported her from below and surrounded her on either side. She breast-stroked to one side of the pool, then back, then there and back and there and back and there and back again until she’d exhausted her limbs sufficiently and it was almost time to pick her daughter up from school. Before she left, she heaved herself out of the water and dripped over to the other side of the pool where they kept the medicine balls and where the water was deep enough for the divers to slice into the water from their lofty platform above. As she walked around, she passed and observed a younger mother sitting with her toddler in the baby pool adjacent to the big pool. The toddler, with his floaties constricting his chubby arms, splashed his mother, and his mother splashed him back, and they both laughed. They continued for as long as Eleanor watched them, splashing and laughing. When she reached the other side, Eleanor lifted a dark blue ten-pound ball from its mesh enclosure on the pool deck where it sat clustered together with other balls of various weights and jewel-toned hues. She held the weight close to her chest with both hands, then jumped into the pool, letting the ball sink her until her feet collided with the bottom. Her ears strained under the pressure so she released the weight and fluttered back to the surface. On her way to retrieve it, she equalized the pressure in her ears by plugging her nose and blowing out until she felt a satisfying pop. She pulled the medicine ball to her chest again, already aware of her shortness of breath and the weight of the ball which seemed to have tripled five meters underwater. She kicked against its heaviness, feeling her quads burn as she gradually rose to the top and took in a humid lungful of air. She dropped and retrieved and dropped and retrieved and dropped and retrieved the ball until she feared she wouldn’t be able to make it to the surface another time and it really was time to fetch her daughter from school. In the pickup line at her daughter’s school, Eleanor edged her car forward as mothers and fathers collected their kids. She felt her hair drip down the nape of her neck from her wet bun, sticking the thin fabric of her shirt to her upper back. A wet ringing sound started in her right ear, then intensified, then stopped. It felt as though it had plugged itself with water, like someone had run a faucet into the ear until it was full, then turned the water off. Eleanor could not hear more than muffled voices from her right ear, and when she covered her left ear, it sounded as though she was obscuring her hearing in both. She pulled on her earlobe and shook her head to one side. The car behind her beeped to tell her to move forward in line. She spotted her daughter, and waved while tugging at her ear with one hand. Her daughter made her way toward the car with a slow plod. Eleanor remembered when her daughter used to sprint to the car when she saw it arrive, but now Clare was eleven, in fifth grade, and no longer sprinted to the car when she saw it arrive.

“Why were you late?” Clare asked Eleanor after hopping into the front seat. “I was hardly late, there’s a line of cars behind me,” Eleanor said, still tugging on her ear, passively irritated by her daughter’s tone but more preoccupied with her sudden hearing impairment. “Besides, don’t I get a hello?” “Hello.” Clare angled her body toward the window and pulled her legs into the car seat. Eleanor kept her hand at her ear as she drove. Clare looked over her shoulder at her mother. “What are you doing?”

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“ I think I might have an ear infection from swimming. I’m having trouble hearing out of this ear.” “Or maybe you’re just old. I can tell that you dye your hair, you know.” Eleanor exhaled out of her nose and chose to ignore her daughter’s mood. Clare had been drifting in and out of spells of spite and rudeness ever since Eleanor and her husband had decided to move her from private school to public school come next fall because of her husband’s recent layoff from his job as a payroll clerk. Clare was there on partial scholarship to begin with, but that other partial had become too much of a burden, at least for the near future. Eleanor reached over to her daughter to try to hold her hand. Clare shrugged her mother’s hand away and turned on the radio. The station played top 40 hits, but it was tuned one degree away from the clear broadcast, so the sound that came from the speakers was scratchy and grating. Clare was reaching the age where kids began to pull away, and any effort on Eleanor’s part to pull her closer seemed to achieve the opposite effect. Eleanor remembered when Clare was an infant and her favorite thing in the world was to sit with her child sleeping on her chest, breathing in the particular baby scent of the top of her head and feeling the warmth of her little body sink into her heart. What excited her about having a baby most was the endless love she could give her child, and the hope that that love would come back to her. At the same time, adolescence was something she feared deeply, the period where more love only seemed to reduce the intimacy that a mother shares so intensely with an infant, a toddler, a baby connected to her mother through blood and tissue in the womb. Eleanor drove in silence, but kept her right hand on the center console just in case Clare changed her mind.

Later that evening, Clare, Eleanor, and her husband, Daniel, sat around the dining room table amid small plates holding tapas which Daniel had prepared. Since the layoff, he had taken to spending the mornings looking for jobs and the afternoons methodically crafting complicated recipes for his wife and daughter to return to. On the table there were baby squid, olives in an herby dressing, a thick, oily tortilla, and various cheeses and hams. Dinner made Eleanor feel guilty somehow, as though she weren’t doing enough with the part-time job she had taken at the library, even while she harbored suspicions that the squid, olives, and certainly charcuterie had come prepackaged from the grocery store, in which case they also seemed like an exorbitant expense. Eleanor’s ear had begun to throb and ring with a distracting rhythm punctuated by sharp twinges of pain. She focused on the tentacles of the baby squid which appeared to undulate and wave at her placidly. “How was your day, El?” Daniel asked. “Yes, it looks delicious,” she said. “Honey, I asked how your day was.” “Mom, no offense, but that was kind of stupid,” Clare said. “I’m sorry, I think I have an ear infection. I can’t hear very well out of my right ear.” “But the left works fine?” Daniel said. “It’s actually quite painful,” Eleanor said.

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week.” “I’m sorry to hear that, hopefully it rights itself in a few days. Maybe take it easy on the laps this

Eleanor nodded and cut herself a wide slice of tortilla. The cross-section revealed a structure of egg, potato, and red peppers. When she pressed her fork into the top, oil pooled around the tines. “Are these octopuses?” Clare asked “They’re baby giant squids,” Daniel responded, wiggling his fingers like tentacles. “Cool,” Clare said. “You know, next year the sixth graders get to go to a lock-in at the aquarium for the whole entire night and basically sleep with the octopuses.” She bit into the tentacle of a squid and chewed it between her front teeth. “And jellyfish. And even sharks,” she said, looking up at her father. “Well, hopefully you can go with them,” he said. Eleanor nudged her husband’s foot under the table. They had reviewed their finances, done the math, contacted the school, found a part-time job for Eleanor, and still, at least for the next year, they found that they could not afford to spend the thousands of dollars it cost them to put Clare through private school. They had had the tough conversation with Clare at that very dining room table, the overhead light fixture giving the scene the impression of an investigation against the contrast of the dark kitchen as Clare asked why? when? what am I going to do? who am I going to be friends with? And they, mostly Eleanor, had labored over each answer, only for Daniel to give their daughter seeds of hope that they both knew would amount to nothing. There was nothing Eleanor wanted more than to assure her daughter that they could provide everything to her, but the reality in the short term was abundantly clear. Clare raised her eyebrows at Eleanor as if to say, see? I told you Dad would find a way. After dinner, Eleanor took two ibuprofen to calm the pounding feeling in her ear. Clare went to her room, and Eleanor asked Daniel if he could help her put in hydrogen peroxide drops. She lay down on the couch and he rummaged in the bathroom for the drops. He came over and knelt by the couch with the bottle in hand. Daniel leaned over and pulled at Eleanor’s earlobe. “That hurts, please be a bit more gentle.” “Sorry, here let me try something different.” He pulled at the cartilaginous top part of her ear, and squeezed a drop. She could feel it suspended in her ear canal, blocked by something that wouldn’t allow it to enter where it needed to go. He squeezed the dropper again, and she could feel the peroxide pool and overflow down her lobe and onto her neck. “Can I put my head in your lap?” she asked. He sat on the couch and she shifted her head onto his thigh. They used to sit like that when they were first dating, but it was usually the other way around. Daniel would lie down and fall asleep whenever they watched movies, and Eleanor would stay awake until the end. Daniel pulled at her earlobe again in an attempt to get the peroxide to sink down. “That’s sore, I already told you. Maybe let me try.” She stuck the dropper directly into her ear. The peroxide overflowed again, and with her head at an inclined angle, dripped onto the couch. “Oh shoot, let me get that,” Daniel said. Hurriedly, he lifted her head off of his leg and ran to grab some paper towels.

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“I think maybe I’ll get into bed and just try it again myself,” Eleanor said. She walked down the hallway with her head tilted to the side, and the walls appeared to slant toward each other. Eleanor tapped on the door of her daughter’s room, and upon hearing no answer, said goodnight softly to the closed door. She brushed her teeth sideways, the foam accumulating in one cheek and hanging there, a soft pouch. For a while, Eleanor drifted in and out of sleep. She half waited for Clare to come in and wish her good night, half waited for Daniel to come to bed and tickle her back while she sank out of lucidity. She imagined his arms around her, warming her and holding her secure. In the in-between of sleep and waking, the make-believe arms felt intensely real. Her dozing was interrupted by occasional bursts of pain that traveled from her ear to the back of her head and down her neck. Eventually, she heard Daniel’s footsteps in the hallway, but they stopped in front of Clare’s room. She could hear Clare giggle, the low tones of Daniel’s voice, all obscured by the doors and space between them as well as Eleanor’s right ear which churned with endless ringing.

A few days later, Eleanor visited the urgent care. The pain in her ear came back with waves between doses of ibuprofen and peroxide, and her hearing diminished more and more by the day. It felt like years since she’d been in the water, the one place where it made sense to hear not more than a fragment of the world around her, under the gentle ripples where the world was quiet. Eleanor entered the clinic and waited for the nurse to call her back. The nurse had long, brown hair in a ponytail and was short and petite. When she called, Eleanor followed her past another nurse who was short and petite and had brown hair. They both wore blue scrubs. The nurse weighed her, took her blood pressure, and had her sit on an examining table with crinkly white paper that reminded Eleanor of the parchment paper she used to bake cookies. When the doctor came in to examine Eleanor, she too was small with longer brown hair than both of the nurses. Eleanor wondered if they all went to the gym together. “The nurse said you’ve been taking drops at home? Have you noticed any relief since beginning with the drops?” “The pain subsides periodically, but I still can’t hear. There’s a strange ringing in my ear, and when I plug the other one, it’s like I’m plugging both. Sometimes there are sharp twinges of pain. It hurts when I press or pull on it. I’m a swimmer. Well, I swim recreationally. I love to swim. Sometimes I dive pretty deep, though. Maybe that’s it. I’ve noticed some discomfort a few times after swimming to the deepest part of the pool but this loss of hearing, this pain, is pretty new. It could be something that started a long time ago. I hope it’s not anything too serious.” It felt good to talk about her symptoms, to verbalize the minutiae of every little thing that was bothering her, every contextual element, to a person whose job it was to listen. “Do you feel like the drops have been going straight into the ear? Is someone helping you to put them in?” “I’ve been able to just take them on my own.”

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“Let’s take a look.” The doctor inserted the ear speculum and maneuvered it around the inside of Eleanor’s ear. The feeling was uncomfortable but somehow satisfying. It felt like the means to an end which would hopefully bring a great sense of relief. “I can see a lot of buildup. If the drops haven’t been working, I think the next thing is to try to wash

it out.”

The doctor left the room for a moment, and returned with a bottle of water with a long, hose-like nozzle and a basin with a divot cut out of one side. She asked Eleanor to hold the basin up by her ear, then inserted the nozzle into her ear canal. She squirted the water, which was warm, into Eleanor’s ear. The water spilled into the basin and down Eleanor’s neck. The doctor cupped the back of Eleanor’s head and Eleanor rested against it. The sensation was strange, and made her feel dizzy. She closed her eyes and focused on the smell of the doctor’s perfume, something like fruit that had overripened, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. The warmth of the water pressing into what almost felt like her brain gave her a feeling of warmth all over. The doctor stopped the water and asked Eleanor to take the basin away from her ear. Then, the doctor looked through the otoscope again and began to probe with a long, metal scoop. Eleanor leaned into it. The irritation inside her ear had been something she couldn’t reach for days, and the sensation of something moving in and around the source of her discomfort was almost cathartic. She felt taken care of, attended to. “Any relief there?” the doctor asked. “I still can’t hear. Maybe just a bit more with the water.” The doctor removed the metal instrument, wiped it, and set it down. She pushed a pale wisp of hair off of Eleanor’s neck, tucked it behind her ear. “Don’t want to get your hair stuck in there,” she said. The gesture was intimate in its action, yet pragmatic and sterile in its context. Eleanor chose to enjoy the feeling once more, resting her head in the doctor’s hand and letting the warmth of the water move through her. Once more, the doctor removed the water and went in with the metal tool. She scraped around the canal, then moved the tool into a deeper part of Eleanor’s ear. There was a rustling sound, then sudden clarity. She felt like her hearing had been restored and magnified, like she’d gained a new sense. The sensation was like nothing she’d ever experienced, like she was conscious of her first ever sounds in the world with fresh ears after months of the dull muffle of amniotic fluid. The doctor furrowed her brow intently while she worked, her brown eyes glassy and concentrated. “How is that?” She asked. Eleanor thought, then lied, “Maybe just once more. It’s feeling better, though. I think it just needs a little more.” Eleanor closed her eyes again as the doctor repeated the process. She savored every touch the doctor placed on her ear, her head, her face, her neck, each one intended for the sole purpose of healing her, providing her comfort and ease.

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