The Shape of the Air
Hattie was out back at the rain barrel drowning kittens when the salesman came calling. She didn’t care for this business at the rain barrel , but such was her life that her likes and dislikes had long ceased any prominence. Facts had supplanted desires and the facts surrounding Hattie Vorhwig were hard and soundless. A couple of stray cats had found sanctuary under her porch and while she didn’t mind the new tenants, she couldn’t afford their offspring that grew like weeds in warm weather, bringing about this business at the rain barrel. Desires had nothing to do with anything.
She was staring off at the poplars up on the ridge line, focusing on their easy swaying and not the more frantic motions closer at hand, when a man in white flickered around the corner of her house and into the backyard. She looked at the figure with a mixture of annoyance and gratitude that only comes with being interrupted in the middle of a task where necessity and unpleasantness so conflict.
Salesman, she thought, looking at the suitcase and eager walk. She put the last kitten down and it scrambled away after a dragonfly, unaware of the horribly thin distinction between lucky and unlucky.
The man in white with the bulging suitcase was talking and smiling at the same time and spit jumped like fleas from his lips. My, but he talks quickly, Hattie thought as she dried her hands on her apron and waited for the man to notice she was deaf. This took some time: time in which the fast talking man never seemed to pause for air but somehow ignored the lack of oxygen and pressed on with his pitch.
Maybe he breathes through his pores, she wondered as she watched the words bump into one another on the way out of his mouth. Maybe he breathes like a plant.
Empty of words, the salesman stared at Hattie and smiled and nothing more, like a doll needing its string pulled to continue with its foolishness. She shook her head and pointed to her ear and the salesman came back to life. “Yes!” she read, though she knew that soft words like yes were the easiest to confuse; and this was another fact surrounding Hattie Vorhwig; she most clearly understood only hard words, like no, words brittle with consonants and hurt: no, never, goodbye.
But there was no confusion this time as the salesman nodded his head like a runaway pump handle and started fussing with the clasps on his suitcase. Hattie wondered if she should go ahead and just speak, something she usually avoided because of the cringe and the nod: people hearing her flat voice, didn’t matter who, would cringe in discomfort and then nod like well-oiled idiots at every word, hoping there would be few remaining.
Hattie now lived by pointing and occasionally writing, but mostly pointing. This simple fact had ripped the abstract from her life and she was shackled to an utterly tangible existence, one in which there was nothing that couldn’t simply be pointed at.
She had not been born deaf. High fever had stolen her hearing when she was twelve. She was now forty-three. She didn’t remember much about that time, only that when the fever broke it had stolen the sound out of her life. She had learned she was deaf as she lay sweating in her fever bed on the front porch where her parents had moved her hoping the breezes would put out the fires raging in her skull. She had opened her eyes to see her father standing over her with his pistol pointed at her face.
Before she could flinch he pulled the trigger.
She felt the hot air and smelled the burnt powder. Her father looked at her mother and said, “see, she can’t hear nothing.” Hattie waited for those words to come but they never did. Her father dropped the revolver and started to cry into his fists and then she understood she was deaf.
_ _ _ _ _
He’s selling me a radio, Hattie now marveled. He’s so busy selling he hasn’t noticed I’m not likely to need a radio. She smiled and tried to pick up what he was saying, but it was hard work discerning words from the flashing teeth and chapped lips.
“This is solid ___ equipment____, no tubes to ____.
A lady like you in the middle of nowhere needs the ____ of mind a citizen band radio_____provide. It lets you keep in ____neighbors, no matter___far those neighbors____.”
The young man talked like a chicken pecking at scattered seed and Hattie sweated to keep up.
“___see___have electricity, so there’s nothing keep- ing____the airways.” Now he took a breath.
A radio.
The thought sat on her shoulder like a tamed bird. Its sheer unnecessary quality tugged at her, a spiteful waste glittering against the dull backdrop of her frugality. After her parents had died over in the fire at Ellis’ barn in 1937, when she was sixteen, Hattie stayed on at the farm and scratched a life from the dirt. It was now 1964. Once a month, from spring through fall, she took her crops to market and lived off the small profits by buying little other than salt and seed. This would be a whole month’s profit. She grinned. The salesman smiled. And Hattie Vorhwig bought herself a CB radio.
After the fever had left her and her father had stopped shooting at her to make certain, Hattie returned to the small school that served the farming county of Warren. The teacher gave her a quick hug and put her in the back so as to not be a distraction. She was given a Braille textbook to her studies; and when she complained that she could still see, she was given a note to take home for her parents mentioning their child’s disruptive and ungrateful behavior. She was sent to bed without supper that night and reminded to be thankful for whatever steps were taken to accommodate her specialness.
So Hattie sat in the back of the class and stared at the back of the teacher’s head, guessing as to what those lips were saying while running her fingers over her textbook and wishing she was blind. She knew when Fridays came around on account of the teacher, Miss Donovan, wore a black ribbon in her hair cause she was a serious Catholic, but Hattie never gleaned much more than that. She never asked for the teacher to face her while talking because she was special and enough steps had been taken. “So, who wants to answer that, how about you, Hattie?”
She dropped out about a month into high school and planted herself among the corn and winter wheat of her parent’s sixty-four acres. Days and weeks and months and years bled into each other like dyed wool, so by the time the sales- man came calling, Hattie herself felt like Braille, a raised relief of a woman signifying greater things only by implication.
_ _ _ _ _
The salesman didn’t want to part with his display model. “I’ve got_____to visit,” he said, handing her a pamphlet entitled The World of Radio. He told Hattie that her very own radio would arrive by mail in three or four weeks, but Hattie stood firm: it would be that one in the suitcase or it would be nothing. All she had to do was point. She got the one in the suitcase, paying for it with cash she kept in her dead daddy’s shoes. Seeing the salesman back to his car, she thought of telling the eager man who never stopped talking and never stopped smiling that he had just sold a radio to a deaf woman, giving him perhaps the greatest of salesmen tall tales, but she hesitated, reveling in the secret irony of her purchase. He was the first person in years to talk to her normally and without the exaggerated pronunciation and sad looks, and Hattie felt a rush of despair at his leaving. She in fact grabbed his sleeve to prevent this, but when he turned to face her he looked tired and hassled and so she merely smiled and waved goodbye.
She placed the unit and small antennae on the kitchen table and went to bed, exhausted by the salesman and feeling foolish from her actions. She dreamt furiously of fast lips and sweet kisses—lips forming words the like she had never seen combined in the daylight. She of course had seen these words individually and in different context. She had even stitched those words together like a patchwork quilt of different conversations weeks apart:
Herbert at the feed store: “____beautiful weather we’re having, though I would guess the farmers would love some more rain.”
The nice man in the post office, Curtis Rowland: “___so, that will be forty cents, Miss Hattie.”
And when she had the ones she wanted, words sweet with vowels, she lay in bed, closed her eyes, and played them back: Beautiful Hattie, I love you so. It was enough, she told herself.
Now there was the radio. She avoided it in the morning, eating breakfast out on the porch so not to be confronted with it so early in the day. The stray cats opened and closed their mouths in silent meows like children chewing bubble gum, and so she gave them half of her scrambled eggs. The lucky kitten from the rain barrel brushed against her ankles and she picked it up and held in her lap, scratching its warm belly. She held the little tabby up underneath its front legs and pressed it against her left ear, feeling the vibrations of its happiness moving through her dead ear and down her jawbone. If only, she wondered, if only she could press a loving man’s head against her ear as he said normal words in extraordinary arrangements and feel the vibrations of happiness. She could respond safely. She could even hum, because in that embrace articulations meant nothing as sound was reduced to its only tangible quality. If only, she thought, there were such a man for her.
This thought stayed with her like an itch as she fed the hens in the coop: if only there were such a man for her. In the shed where she kept the tools: if only there were such a man for her. In the root cellar sorting canned vegetables: if only there were such a man for her. In the middle of weeding the peas she stuck dirty fingers in her ears to block out the only sound she could hear, that of herself wishing and wanting while crouched in the rows. Though she could feel the grainy soil in her ear canal, this new sound would not be blocked, and, for a horrible moment, she despaired of ever knowing si- lence again.
She gave up on the day’s chores, washed up, and lay in her bed while the sun was still high and her thoughts still burning. I must be feverish, she thought as she fought the sheets, turning and kicking, seeking solace in her motions and finding only sweat. She collapsed into sleep just before dusk and the fever dreams came at her, filling her head with voices without bodies, sounds without sources: See, she can’t hear nothing; Hattie, I love you so; I see___have electricity, so there’s noth- ing keeping____the airways. She awoke to find herself standing in the kitchen, her skin wet with perspiration and pimpled with the chill of the night air. She stared at the radio on the table, and then understood she would hear.
After showering, Hattie put on the only dress she owned, a lacy affair that had been her mother’s. Hattie had never wore it and it smelled like cedar and lilac. There was dust on the shoulders and collar but Hattie had never felt so beautiful. She had her mother’s frame and her father’s face and she saw both of them in her as she stood in that dress. She had no makeup so she sat in front of the mirror in her bedroom and pinched her cheeks until they reddened and her blue eyes watered. She brushed her hair with long strokes, feeling the sound of her tangles yielding in her scalp and down her neck. She smiled and went into the kitchen.
She placed the small antenna on the windowsill next to the avocado seed she had suspended with toothpicks in a mason jar half-filled with water. She turned the machine on and stared at the red light, taking comfort from its implication that there was a real power in the machine, a power that couldn’t simply be pointed at anymore than one could point at the shape of air or the truth in a lover’s smile but that existed all the same.
She held the handset gently, leaned forward like a child tasting hot soup, pressed the button, closed her eyes, and spoke.
And she bounced across the atmosphere.
Hello? Hello, can anybody hear me? My name is Hattie. Can anybody hear me?
Breathless, she released the button and looked out of the window at the dark sky she had just traveled. She turned the volume up as loud as it would go, twisted the squelch knob all the way to the left, pressed her head against the small screen-covered speaker in the corner of the receiver, and her ears came alive. She closed her eyes and tried to read the lips of the man she just knew was arranging the words only for her. His lips were full and he spoke with care, and she felt everything he said. He loved her. He always would.
She started to hum into the microphone, not wasting time with the distraction of tone and syllables but cutting straight to the heart of the matter.
My name is Hattie Vorhwig. I’ve waited so long to talk with you.
And the voice was the words and then the sounds and finally the vibrations of a late love blooming in a slowly rising chest, and she listened until dawn.
Originally published in Yemassee Literary Magazine, Spring 2000 by pm skinner
