Otoplasty
by John Picard
Human Right Ear, Wikipedia
I was complaining to my mother about my ears. She was setting the table, arranging the silverware just so.
“They say I look like Dumbo.”
“Who does? Who says?”
“The kids at school.”
Actually, it was one kid, my sixth-grade crush. My classmates were teasing me in a mostly good-natured way, and I was enjoying the attention when pretty, pixyish Karen Rantovich, appraising me with her dark brown eyes, compared me to an elephant whose gigantic ears made it capable of flight. Home from school, I went straight to my mother who was more of a sounding board than a sympathetic listener, but my father, a remote and silent man, wasn’t even that.
“There’s nothing wrong with your ears,” she said, placing a bowl of mashed potatoes next to the string beans.
“They stick out,” I said. “One more than the other.”
“Ridiculous. They’re exactly the same.”
“No they’re not!”
“I’m not arguing with you about this. Tell your father it’s time for dinner.”
I already had some awareness of my asymmetrical aural appendages. Annual school photos showed a boy with a crew cut that made his uneven jug ears hard to miss. But not until I was approaching puberty, when personal appearance becomes critical to social success, did being compared to a Disney character, no matter how lovable, hit with such force. My father, though nearly bald, was a good-looking man. Unfairly, I blamed my mother whom I more closely resembled—small deep-set eyes, thin lips, receding chin—for ruining my chance at being handsome.
I hadn’t given my father enough credit, it turned out. He had, in fact, been listening: at the dinner table, when I was going on about the people at K-Mart staring at my ears; in the car, when I asked my mother if my new ball cap made my ears look bigger; in the living room, when we were watching Going My Way starring Bing Crosby and my mother complimented the actor’s loving-cup ears, and I said, “Yeah, but his are the same size!”
It was around this time my father asked me what I’d think about having them fixed. We were in the living room watching The Wide World of Sports and a commercial had just come on.
“Fixed?”
“They got this operation that pins your ears back. You think you’d want that?”
“I guess. Yeah. But…does it hurt?”
“Nah. They numb the area back there before they do anything.”
This was decades before the internet (1960), which meant my father had gone to the trouble of calling doctors and reading up on the procedure known as an otoplasty. I was touched. In a sense, my father’s offer was very much in character. He was extremely handy. He could fix anything—clocks, radios, TVs, automobile engines. With some expert help he could even fix my ears.
“When you wanna have it done?” he asked.
Christmas vacation was coming up, and I could have the operation then. But as much as I looked forward to fixing my ears, I didn’t want all of Hollywood Elementary gawking at me and wondering what was different. I would be starting Beltsville Junior High next fall, and I decided to launch my new, sleeker look at a school full of mostly strangers.
As much as I complained about my ears, I felt as if I only had myself to blame. If I’d left them alone, they would probably have been fine. They were actually similar to my father’s ears, which protruded but not so glaringly. No one would have thought of calling him Dumbo. Unfortunately, along with my mother’s facial features, I’d inherited her anxiety. She took little white pills to get her through the day. At night she sent me to bed too early, before I was sleepy, to give herself some stress-free quiet time. Wide awake, I would lie in bed for hours with my mind racing, which led to my discovery at six or seven that I could hear my heartbeat when my ear was on the pillow. Once I heard it, I couldn’t stop hearing it: bang, bang, bang. If I’d been able to fall sleep on my back, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But I’d convinced myself that I could only fall asleep on my stomach with my head sunk deep in my feather pillow. My solution was to fold my ear back flat against my head. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it worked: no rhythmic pounding. I’d been doing this every night for at least six years. What did I expect?
“I hope you appreciate what your father’s doing for you,” my mother said one afternoon when she called me into the master bedroom where she was folding clean laundry into neat piles. “Not that I think you need any operation.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Have you told him that?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you should.”
For reasons I didn’t fully understand, the prospect of initiating such a personal interaction with my father was too daunting to seriously consider. We’d never had anything like an in-depth conversation. Our exchanges were made up of grunts, murmurs, and short answers.
My ear issues were symptomatic of something larger. I felt like I was at war with my entire body. I had a Tourette’s-like condition that compelled me to jerk my head, blink my eyes, crane my neck, among other tics, to release the never-quite-extinguished nervous tension. I had endless colds and flus and coughs, missing days and weeks of school at a time. I didn’t have enough regard for my physical self to see to its proper upkeep. My hygiene was poor. I was guilty of sporadic bathing and, when I let it grow out, greasy hair. I didn’t care what clothes I wore. From spending so much time looking at my ears in the mirror, I realized my whole face was uneven: one eye was higher than the other, my nose was off-center, and my smile was crooked, as if the Creator had slapped the two sides of my face together in a careless rush. Now at least I could look forward to having a normal set of ears. By the time school let out for summer vacation, I was excited about the operation that would bring about a better me.
On a hot, sticky afternoon in early August, my father drove me to Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C. This was back when patients spent the night in the hospital before an early morning operation.
“You gonna be all right?” my father asked before leaving my private room. There was a couch for visitors along one wall and a TV on a portable stand in the corner.
“I think so,” I said.
As much as I was looking forward to my transformation, the reality of surgery was starting to set in. My father had assured me that I would be all right, but there was no getting around the fact that surgery meant cutting: knives were involved, blood.
“It’ll be fine,” my father said and flashed his debonair grin, a rare occurrence for a man with chronic depression.
My father was part of the generation that left all child-rearing to the mother. We seldom did anything as father and son. We never went fishing together. We never had a catch. Once, when my mother urged me to show some interest in what my father was doing under the hood of the family car, I went out and stood across from him while he tinkered with the engine. Neither of us spoke. I’m sure he felt as uncomfortable as I did from this factitious attempt at father-and-son bonding, and it wasn’t long before I went back into the house. But in that hospital room it was like he was owning that however remote and silent he might be, he’d found something he could do for me that was in his comfort zone, like putting up a swing set in the back yard or driving me to my Little League games.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
That night I did a lot of neck craning and head jerking before drifting off. My room had been stuffy when I checked in, and the nurse assigned to me had turned up the air conditioning. When I awoke in the middle of the night, the A/C was still running at full blast. Prone to self-defeating passivity, I neither got out of bed to adjust the temperature nor summoned the nurse to do it and spent the rest of the night shivering under a thin blanket.
I’d been told the otoplasty would be performed under a local anesthetic. I wasn’t sure what that meant until I was wheeled into the operating room (green walls, no windows) and moved onto the surgical table. A huge lamp loomed above me. On the counter to my left was a row of scary-looking implements from which the surgeon chose a very long needle. Without so much as a “This might pinch a little” he injected me in that tender spot where the back of the ear meets the hard cranial surface. The pain was searing and wouldn’t be surpassed until fifty years later when I had my first kidney stone. And the man had just begun. He gave me five more injections, a total of three for each ear, but I was no more likely to object to the spike being driven into my skull than I was to ring the nurse about my frigid room.
Anyway, I was well-numbed. The surgeon spent about half an hour on each ear, a dull scraping noise followed by a pulling sensation of the sutures going in. All done, he wrapped my head in gauze and bandages. I was woozy when my father got there, regarding me with a satisfied nod, as if pleased the surgery was over and done with. Walking head down to the car, I was embarrassed to be seen on city streets in a white turban.
In the days that followed, I took two aspirins every four hours for the soreness. I slept partially sitting up in bed so the sutures wouldn’t tear loose, which belied my certainty that I could only fall asleep on my stomach. My father checked in regularly with me, standing at the foot of the bed.
“How’s that feeling?” he would say, raising his hands to both sides of his head.
“Okay, I guess.”
“Gettin’ tired of it, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“It won’t be much longer. You afraid of what they’ll look like?”
“No,” I said, and I wasn’t, trusting that my father wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t in my best interest.
The big day arrived. Again I walked D.C.’s streets with my turbaned head lowered. The surgeon sat me down in his spacious office. His medical diploma hung on a wall next to a calendar advertising an insurance company. On his desk were framed headshots of his wife and two kids. The surgeon began peeling away the bandages, going round and round until I could feel the cool air on my head. He removed the gauze over and behind my ears. He used a small pair of scissors to cut away the sutures. Then he passed a hand mirror to me. I lifted it to my face; my ears, a startling shade of purple, had a severe, bent-back look.
My father asked the surgeon, “Are they gonna stay like that?”
“The swelling will go down and the discoloration, but yes.”
“Let’s go,” my father said to me.
My father was normally hard to read. He didn’t give much away. But on the drive back to the Maryland suburbs he kept glancing over at me, unable to hide an expression that morphed from curiosity to concern to dismay.
“Well, well,” my mother said noncommittally when I came through the front door. My father went up the stairs without a word. I spent that day and the ones after examining myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to convince myself the purple lumps pancaked to my head weren’t that bad.
“What’s wrong with Daddy?” I asked my mother, who was vacuuming in the living room. I didn’t have the patience to wait until she was finished.
She turned off the machine. “What did you say?”
“What’s wrong with Daddy?”
“What do you mean?”
“He won’t look at me.” At the dinner table, in the living room, in the car, I couldn’t catch his eye. “He hates them,” I said. “He hates my ears.”
“Listen to me,” she said, pointing a finger at me. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“They’re going to be fine, your ears. They’re healing, that’s all. I tried telling your father that, but you know how he is when he makes up his mind about something.” I didn’t know that about him, actually. “He won’t listen to me,” she said, “but he’ll listen to you.”
“Me?”
“He thinks you don’t like your ears.”
“I don’t!”
“Hush. I don’t want to hear another word about your ears. You and your father are making a big to-do about nothing. You need to let him know how much you appreciate what he did for you. Operations aren’t cheap, you know.”
“You mean you want me to lie?” I said, amazed to be told by my devoutly Christian mother that I had permission to bear false witness.
“You don’t have to lie. You just have to show a little gratitude.”
Once again, my mother was asking me to be intimate with my father when there was no precedent for it.
But she was right. Over the final weeks of summer vacation my ears became more and more presentable, regaining their normal color and appearing less glued to my head. I ceased bending my ears against my pillow. Either I did my best to ignore the drumbeat, or I flipped over onto my back. It did bother me, however, that my father remained convinced that the otoplasty was a mistake. But whenever we were alone together, I couldn’t find the words to tell him that I was not displeased.
I had the usual anxiety about going to a new school, while looking forward to debuting my aerodynamic appearance. I began making some adjustments to my hygiene: I washed my hair before the grease built up; I started using deodorant; I was discovering a healthy vanity I hadn’t known was there.
School started the Monday after Labor Day. The last Saturday in September was the school’s first social event, the Sadie Hawkins Dance, where gender roles were reversed: the girls invited the boys.
The weekend before the dance my mother called me into the kitchen for the second time that evening. “Aren’t you popular,” she said and handed me the phone.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi. It’s Karen.”
“Who?”
“Karen Rantovich.”
I was stunned to hear her voice; shocked when she invited me to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.
“I can’t,” I said. “Colleen Calhoun already asked me.” I’d taken Colleen’s call only minutes before.
“Oh well. Bye.”
Karen was one of several sixth graders from Hollywood Elementary who entered Beltsville Junior High. Colleen was another. I’d been flattered by her invitation and accepted without hesitation, never imagining that another girl, let alone the dark-eyed beauty with whom I was still smitten, would ask me. Eventually, I would curse my bad luck. I’d missed by a few lousy minutes the opportunity to spend an entire evening with my enduring crush—talking to her, dancing with her. That bitter regret would come later, but certain thrilling questions arose the moment I hung up. Was Karen Rantovich smitten with me? Was rearranging my ears what it took to catch her fancy or had her interest predated my otoplasty? I would never know. I was too shy to go out of my way to speak to her either before or after Sadie Hawkins (which she didn’t attend, intriguingly) and she left the school at the end of the semester.
I hadn’t moved when my father came in the kitchen for his evening snack. He sat at the kitchen table with a box of chocolate covered peanuts and a glass of ice water.
Giddy pleasure overcame my usual reticence around him.
“I was just invited to the Sadie Hawkins Dance,” I said. Of course, he didn’t know what that was, and, in a talkative mood, I explained.
“So, the girl asks the boy,” he said, shaking peanuts out of the box and into his palm.
“Right.”
He popped some in, chewed and swallowed. “I never been to one of those,” he said.
“Me either, but guess what?”
“What?”
“Two girls asked me to go with them.”
“Two?”
“Yeah.”
He raised his head and looked at me. “Well,” he said with the hint of a smile, “how about that?”