MUTED

    by Marcia Yudkin

When she was eight, Millie Katzenbach moved to the hills.  Her new school crouched low in the valley, red brick with four limbs, according to its picture on the Internet.  The day after Labor Day, her mother drove her there, along a winding oak and maple-lined road that downclined for minutes.

“Mommy, Mommy!” Millie cried, lifting her hands to her ears.

“That’s cloud-ear,” her mother, Lillie, explained.  “From the elevation drop.  Just yawn or swallow hard, sweetheart, and they’ll pop.”

Within weeks, Millie made good friends with this novel sensation, tickling it the way she wobbled a loose tooth, inviting and exploring it.  Cloud-ear fuzzed and muted sounds – a useful control for math class when it covered stuff she already knew, and for the lunchroom, where a girl named Cassie divided her time between whispering with Millie and laughing along with the chitchat of Aurora, Faith and Linda Sue across the table.  She dialed it in at home too, when her big brother Will turned up his metal music in the room sharing a wall with hers.  Without this tool, she’d never have made it through the tiresome stretches of school or finished her four allotted library books before it was time to return them.

Had anyone asked her, she’d have compared cloud-ear to closed eyelids, which shut out sights other than pure light.  With practice, she became better and better at muting, but didn’t everyone have this ability at least to some extent?

Perhaps not, because Miss Trent, her teacher, invited Mr. and Mrs. Katzenbach in for a special conference.  “I wonder, does Millie have a hearing problem?” she asked them.  “She’s a dreamy kid, out of it sometimes, and a few of her classmates crept up behind her the other day, yelled ‘Boo!’ and she didn’t even flinch.”

“What?” exclaimed Lillie, pale and indignant.  “She’s totally normal.”

Gil, Millie’s dad, stood up, pulling this way and that on his moustache.  “Thank you for the heads up.  We’ll take her to a specialist.”  An engineer at the local hospital, he soon determined which colleague of a colleague of a colleague had the best regional reputation and finagled an appointment for Millie.

Dr. LaFleur showed Millie into a padded booth and demonstrated how to click the button every time a beep sounded in her headphones.  “No matter how faint,” he instructed.  “Even if you think you might be imagining it.”

Millie spaced out at least twice during the half-hour hearing test.  It was just so boring to listen for peeps and bleeps.  After peering into each ear with a doodad that hurt her a little, Dr. LaFleur said to please go sit in the waiting room.

As both Mr. and Mrs. Katzenbach raised their eyebrows, Dr. LaFleur tapped his data printout with a pen.  “Your daughter’s hearing ability is normal, but with anomalies that may or may not be cause for concern.” 

“Normal!  You see, Gil?” said Lillie, poking her husband.

“What anomalies?” pursued Mr. Katzenbach.

“Does Millie dive?” inquired the doctor.  “Has she been on any kind of submarine ride?  Like at Disney?”

“Dive?  Submarine?”  Lillie pulled in her chin.  “What?  No, of course not.”

“What anomalies?” repeated Mr. Katzenbach.

Dr. LaFleur adjusted the striped blue tie that seemed to anchor his starched white lab coat.  “Is there anything at home or at school that Millie would rather not hear?”

“What?” Mrs. Katzenbach said again, more pale than when she’d spoken with Miss Trent. 

Mr. Katzenbach stood.  “Doctor, please!”

“Her eustachian tubes open and close in a way I’ve never seen.  I’ve only read about it once.  I’d like her to have a chat with my associate.”  He handed them a paper with the box next to “Grace Killigan, MSW, social worker” checked.  “Then we’ll talk again.  Most likely, Millie won’t need any treatment.”

In the car on the way home, Lillie hugged her daughter in the back seat.  “Normal!  Nothing to worry about.”

“Right,” affirmed Millie’s father, his gaze staunchly on the road.  “Just one more pesky appointment.”

Fiftyish, blondish Grace Killigan asked Mr. Katzenbach to please wait outside while she met with Millie.  This time, despite the medical-office setting, there were no high-tech noises on call.  Miss Killigan simply encouraged Millie to talk about what she liked to do, what a typical family dinner at home was like and so on.  At the end, Miss Killigan leaned forward with a big smile.  “You turn your ears on and off deliberately, don’t you, Millie?”

Millie smiled back at this woman who was the first person she’d met, of any age, who recognized her favorite books.  “I do, but don’t tell my parents or my teacher.  Cloud-ear is my superpower.”

Bio: The author of fiction in Yankee, Writers Forum, Ellipsis, Flash Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review and New Stories from New England, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/).  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR.  She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).