Opal earrings

I had a death-wish for womanhood.

If I had to say now, retrospectively, why at age thirteen I got my ears pierced, I would say I did it to lose my grandmother’s earrings.

I know you don’t believe me. I’ve had trouble believing myself. The logic of this statement is so compounded as to warrant your skepticism. And maybe I’d say that I’m interested in that too, in invoking your distrust because, in another strange bit of logic, I’ve needed some misgivings to get here. (I’m one who is quite devout to doubt.) Yet, as I live on, as I continue to witness what might be called the irrational parts of me work as hard in reality as the rational parts of me, I do believe that, yes, in retrospect, I got my ears pierced so that I could bury another part of me underwater.

—

I had already lost two important, irreplaceable shiny white things to several fathoms. When I was eleven, I had a jet ski accident on a lake in Kingsport, Tennessee, and knocked out two of my front teeth. Once fished from the lake, I was gagged with towels and rushed to the emergency room. After surgery and stitches, I spent months recuperating my mouth over soft foods and dentist visits just in time to begin 6^th grade. The great wound of this accident had landed right where I already felt my deepest suffering. Nobody that I meet now would believe how horribly awkward and shy my speech used to be, how much pain once coursed through my entire body when I felt anyone expected a word from me. Nobody believes it, but I maintain that at age eleven I knocked out my front teeth to stop people from asking me to speak.

Later, when I began to feel more like myself again, when I began to accept my fake teeth, the strange yellow of them, and the new way of speaking around braces and dental prosthetics, and then even later after a growth spurt shot me seemingly overnight from 5’4ish to 5’9ish, I asked my parents about piercing my ears.

Of all the barren traditions of Western womanhood, I had set my eyes on this one. I was desperate to make more holes in me, to extend what could be adorned, to distract myself from my teeth and acne. I was desperate to enact this accepted, coveted violence against myself to see what all the women who had been instructing my life knew about accepted, coveted violence. It was a split-second experience with bondage that I needed because my teenage submission wasn’t enough. And, because of all of this yearning, it seemed like it would also be a spiritual act, along the lines of (but better than) the capitulations I was being asked to perform for the South and God. Like so many of my peers, I had a death wish for womanhood. I wanted to destroy myself in womanly things, so I regularly begged for this rite, until my mother and father, after painstaking review of a teenage desire, decided with a yes, a yes for thirteen.

It occurs to me now as strange, another way to disembody the sexuality of a girl, to have her fixate a notion of womanhood, of her own beauty and the right to it, on the ear. Of all the other tender anatomy of a person, the lobe is equally delicate and supple, and its penetration could be symbolic of other acts.

—

Years later, I sat on a Claire’s parlor chair, with jars of cotton balls and a stud catalog behind me, while my mother, at once holding my hand, chatted with the piercing technician dotting the lower margins of my ears with bullseyes. The technician came close to my side, my head right at her breast and armpit, the whole smell of her like a makeup counter at 5 p.m. She asked if I was ready, and I nodded. The little froth of bangs I had cut for myself rustled across my forehead in the motion of her arms, and then a click, like a muted cap gun, sent a warm rush to the side of my face.

Once I stopped the cleaning solution and took the studs out, I tried a new pair of earrings every day. Giant sunflowers that I twirled like little spurs in math class. Cubic zirconia something or others just because they sparkled like I thought I needed to. A dangly black-beaded pair that broke into pieces in the girls’ bathroom when I tried to untangle my hair from them. Having my ears pierced was a new world of obligations. It felt like dirty but necessary work to me. It felt like I was breathing at the speed that American women had to. I was pleased but also tired. There had to be traffic, good traffic, statement traffic on my earlobes, just as there had to be on my upper body, lower body, feet, and hands. I had to keep the moving parts moving and to be always new and invigorated by the quest for newness. Because I wasn’t rich, I did this with sale pieces, with whatever my mom could sneak past my father on the credit card. And then one day, when my mother and father decided to bestow upon me my grandmother’s opal earrings, I felt a relief. This was a signature piece, real opals, real gold, from another era. I could calm down. I could stop the mad race and wear these beautiful fiery moons for days, and nobody would question me because nobody else had fiery moons to put on their ears.

—

My father’s mother died when I was ten years old, a year before my jet ski accident, three years before I got my ears pierced. Her name was Ernestine, but almost everybody called her Teenie. Grandma Teenie to my brother and me. She was my first relationship with death. Grandma Teenie, for as few standout memories I have of her, is my first great memory of absence, real absence. When her scent and soft cheek and polyester pants and requests for kisses and chocolates left, I felt for the first time her life. She was also the first person to show me my father’s tears. I had never seen him cry before we understood she was not going to come back. And she was the first woman to share her love for another woman with me. I still have the People Magazine with Audrey Hepburn on the cover she gave me.

When I held the opal earrings for the first time, some crust of her fell off from the backs and into my fingers. I rushed to the bathroom to clean them off, as if I could erase the situation of this inheritance, as if I shouldn’t have to think of her to wear them. I wanted to stop the image of that dark hospital room where I last saw her, her earlobe on the pillow there and then that of a coffin. If I could go back to this first encounter with the opals at thirty-nine, I would cherish the moment, delight in the dust of my grandmother’s life falling into my hands, would hesitate before getting rid of any particle that might have been connected to her, but at thirteen I didn’t know how to love a dead person or death. I didn’t know how to let someone else’s memory live on within me, so I wasn’t at all sure about letting live on me.

—

I lost my grandmother’s earrings in a pool.

The disaster of their gift, because gifts are more often than we say a kind of disaster, was that they were really appropriate, too appropriate. See, opals are my birthstone. The jewel that some committee of unknowns had given to me and anyone else born of October. And at the superstitious age of thirteen, I thought they were mine, that an opal had some secret destiny for me. The loadedness of this feeling upon receiving my grandmother’s opals was almost too much to bear, so one summer day in 1998, I put on the earrings because they felt meant for me but also like a dare (for certainly too I had learned of the general myth that these stones are unlucky) and jumped into a minivan with my best friend Amanda. I was so happy to escape my family and the way I was with my family, and when we got to the club where Amanda’s family had a membership, I also felt like I was away from my family. My parents would never have had a membership to a club pool. This foreignness felt good, like a place to forget myself and the heavy family history I had twinkling on my ear lobes.

At sundown, when the pool was closing and we were packing our swim bags, I realized my crime. My panic was as quiet and pathetic as all the panic I’d ever known in my life. I think I said almost nothing, but Amanda, because she knew me well, understood how deep my pain ran. She took me back to the pool deck, and we stared into the still aqua water and its black lane lines that wrote no music. The club employees let us dive back in exceptionally, but after several probes of the floor, we found nothing.

The club was not a full mile from my house, but the mental conversations I was having in my head during that small drive were excruciating. When I got home and through the kitchen with barely a hello, I went to look at myself in the bathroom mirror. My grandmother was gone. Once again. My ears burned with the same pain I had after the piercing. This guilt was warm, and it was for me.

__

In my head, this was the jinx of the opals. I had lost them because I wasn’t worthy, because my affection for them was more vanity than love. I had wanted them because they were intriguing and unique, but I hated them because they reminded me of a woman’s body disappearing underground. My parents had been asking me to believe in heaven, had been trying to make her life precious and right. All the words that attached to her were blessed and maternal, and all of it gave me a queasy feeling in my gut. The more time that went by the less I understood of her. She was impossible, impossibly good. She was nothing like me, and now she was watching me from above. At age thirteen, I lost my grandmother’s earrings to stop people from asking me to be this woman.

One day, I did confess to my parents about the opals at the bottom of the pool, and they expressed, as they never were shy to do, their disapproval. By that time, the pool didn’t exist anymore. America had made a new stucco thing on top of it, and I had made a few other crimes against my family. By that time, I was starting to understand the strange dance of being a woman, in the world and in my family. Earrings, the whole subject of them had taken a backseat, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still a constant. This was a part of the strange dance. Now, I hardly ever lose earrings, but the risk is always there, the joke of the earring, of two things presenting as one. Earrings are terrible like that to me now, a sign of the jinx of womanhood, and yet so many women, like myself, have as girls begged to have this nuisance, to dance this duality, to put on the earrings and then to lose one in taking off a scarf in an office or at a lover’s house. Earrings for me now are the automatic frivolity of other automatic frivolities I’ve let consume my time, my pocketbook, and my home while I think of the other million things I must do.

Did I lose my grandmother’s earrings by accident? Almost surely, but the subconscious is a powerful teacher of our desires. Did I lose them because I had a secret wish to hurt her or myself or my parents? To save us? Did I think in losing the opals I could erase my own mortality? I wonder. Much of my writing-thirties have been spent reconstructing the fits and alienations of my girlhood, have been a mourning for the child who had to become a woman. I’ve needed two decades to look over all of the self- and community-inflicted damage, all of the everyday decay, but I’ve been curious, as I am today, about my “accidents,” my desire for the undesirable, to torture the innocence out of my own body. When I put on opals today, I am putting on all of this. I am putting on the jinxes and betrayals, the weird curses of family and love. When I put on opals today, I see my grandmother’s earrings at the bottom of the pool, I see two front teeth at the bottom of a lake. And I don’t forget the past injury or blame anyone, but I don’t ignore the symmetry either.