Clip-On

It was the last day of my freshman year of high school. I had just taken a math final, which meant spending three hours in a cavernous gym, silently plugging number after number into my calculator in a futile attempt to get a single point of extra credit and eventually giving up.

Walking out of the gym, the May morning felt extra bright. I have always liked to wear pretty, flowery things when I take tests, and that day, I wore a pink patchwork dress to go with my pink backpack. In the backpack was a glass water bottle, a small arsenal of pencils, a calculator, and the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, all of which I piled into my bicycle basket as I prepared to go home.

I had recently become enchanted by Walt Whitman, by the beauty he found in life and the beauty with which he verbalized it. Realizing this, my English teacher gave me a battered copy of Leaves of Grass in the last week of school. It was filled with purple ink annotations from his own readings and rereadings, as well as pencil markings that I imagined came from other students anointed by his generosity. I aspired to feel the level of awe I witnessed within those pages, both from Whitman and the thoughtful readers that had come before me.

Every time I picked up that book, the person I wanted to become took a more defined shape. Now, biking over sloping hills, gazing at leaves of grass, both literal and literary, hair and hem fluttering in the wind, I remembered the girl that I had pictured and felt that I had become her.

About a year and a half prior, there had been no wind in my hair. Rather, I was sitting by my grandmother’s bedside amid a bitter Minnesota winter, waiting for her to die. It had been a long wait, seven years on paper, but a lifelong wait for her. This is not a commentary on how we spend our lives waiting to die; it is simply that my grandmother lived her life in constant fear — fear of disorder, fear of sickness and death. As is the irony of such lives, her OCD and the debilitating effect it had on her culminated in an anachronistically young stroke and a complete lack of control over not only her surroundings but her own self.

One thing I loved about my grandmother were her earlobes. They were wonderfully soft and had an eerie, ethereal translucence to them, the aftermath of a lifetime of clip-on earrings. She was afraid, she told me, of infection, and of how much piercing her ears would hurt.

I thought her earrings were the most beautiful things in the world. When I was five, I begged her to let me wear them, but when she put them on me, I was shocked by how much they hurt.

“耳朵疼不疼?”she asked me, seeing the beginnings of tears in my eyes. Are your ears hurting?

“不疼!” I insisted. Nope!

I looked at myself in the mirror, enchanted with the purple stones that gleamed from under my hair. This, I told myself, was what being a lady felt like.

The dull, throbbing ache soon became piercing, and I had to remove the earrings. I was not cut out to be a lady yet, but I had time. Soon, my ears would be as soft and elegant as my grandmothers’.

Nine years later, I listened to the phlegm rumble in her throat and considered her fragile beauty. A chunk of her skull had been removed for surgery, creating a sizable dent in her forehead. I still admired the way her delicate, papery skin stretched across her face, but her earlobes only looked grotesque to me now, softened by decades of pain.

By then I had gotten my ears pierced. Not once, not even when they had gotten infected from some cheap airport earrings, had they hurt as much as those clip-on earrings had. As I thumbed my ears and observed hers, I wrote in my diary, it took so much strength for her to be a coward.

On that May day, I decided that instead of going home, I would find beauty. Specifically, I would find it at the intersection of Holly and Prentice, where the mountains would be in full view and my vision would be bracketed in flowers. Reading Leaves of Grass had put a romantic streak in me, as did thinking about my grandmother’s thin, misshapen face and my own strong legs that pumped me up and down Quincy Avenue. Moved by Whitman and the ephemerality of my youth, I decided that I would embrace whatever beauty and grace were available to me and maximize the life that I was, at the moment, so happy with.

I turned on Holly and flew through a neighborhood lined with grand houses. My bike’s tires crackled warmly against the ground; my dress fluttered ebulliently; I was going to see the miracles of beauty as the world presented them, my grandmother was smiling upon me from above with vicarious joy, and summer had begun; it, and I, were limitless.

Then, I hit a pothole.

Everything fell out of the basket. The pencils, the calculator, the glass bottle, and that well-loved book, which, after the bottle shattered, was damp and rippled. Water seeped through the pages, coloring the poetry with rivulets of purple ink.

I skidded to a stop. All of a sudden, the world seemed very large, the sky enormous, and the beauties of the earth a long trek away. Somewhere in the heavens, my grandmother clucked at me, exasperated and bemused. The sun glinted softly off of the tiny crystal studs in my ears.

Sometimes, I told myself, you should just go home.

Leaves of Grass ruffled in the wind. It seemed to invite me to spend the afternoon on my bedroom floor with it and my dog and maybe a good TV show, which was, I decided, the way I was going to be maximizing my lifetime today.