His is a convenient deafness I am convinced is reserved exclusively for fathers. Mine can hear cricket scores through static louder than a hurricane yet can’t hear a simple set of directions. He will happily sit in his own bubble of silence until, occasionally, some thread of the conversation we are having will infiltrate his subconscious and he will join in, acting as though he has introduced the topic freshly to us.
‘We watched The Poseidon Adventure last night,’ Mum says.
‘Oh yeah?’ I prompt.
‘Jeez, it’s a good movie. That Shelley Winters!’
‘We loved watching that when we were kids,’ Jeff agrees. ‘That, and Towering Inferno.’
‘That scene where Shelley Winters swims though . . . classic. She was nominated for an Oscar, you know?’ I add in today’s useless film trivia.
‘Was she?’
Dad joins in, proving my suspicion that his selective deafness is mostly triggered by the sound of Mum’s voice . . . or Jeff’s accent. ‘That was a good movie we watched last night, wasn’t it, darl?’ he asks.
In the rear-view mirror I see Mum nod her head.
‘Eh, darl?’ Dad asks.
‘Yes!’ she says.
‘Not talking today, darl?’
‘I SAID YES!’
‘Well, she doesn’t usually respond so I have to guess,’ Dad says to no one in particular.
‘At least you’ll get the right response,’ I say, catching Dad’s throwaway comment. My solution to keeping the conversation going is to respond to almost every sentence he utters anyway. I’ve noticed this with a lot of folk from my parents’ generation – perhaps they need to hear a sound from the listener so they can rest assured they’re not being ignored and if they can’t hear properly they probably need the cues. Yeah. Really? Was it? Did he? Good one! Nice work! We find ourselves saying. It saves the inevitable prompt, and our irritation at being prompted. I do this in response to Dad’s chatter, even when my head is deep inside one of Mum’s crossword puzzle books and I’m putting in an answer that I know in my heart isn’t correct.
Dad says Mum is mute most of the time. It’s not an affliction anyone else on the planet has diagnosed . . . or noticed. He insists Mum’s lack of sound has nothing to do with his hearing but everything to do with Mum’s volume, tone, body language or that forced enunciation.
Often Mum’s confirmation of Dad’s not-needing-to-be confirmed statement remains inaudible to him, so he will jump straight to the chase, avoiding any back and forth: ‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it, darl?’ he says, following one millisecond of silence with, ‘So it’s not a beautiful morning then, it’s a terrible morning . . .’
Or he’ll kindly imagine an entire conversation on her behalf, to save Mum the hassle: ‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Yes, darl, it is a beautiful morning . . .’
‘I said yes!’ Mum screams about thirty-six times a day.
There is an inevitable measure of chafing that happens in any relationship that lasts such an incredible length of time – in this case, with the same person since you were sixteen years old. But sometimes Mum’s impatience only intensifies the frustration she feels in the first place. Does she respond forcefully to make a point for my benefit, or is she so tired of a tension that could probably be solved by a simple set of hearing aids that she is incapable of controlling her knee-jerk fed-up reaction? Either way, there are times I feel I’m managing both mine and Jeff’s and my parents’ relationships, and I step in to keep the peace: ‘You know, it’s not so far to Twilight Waters – they may have room.’
Whether Mum does or doesn’t respond to Dad, the situation is compounded by another quirk of Dad’s: he not only requires responses so loud they can be heard five streets away, but also insists on having the last word. No matter what you’ve responded with, even if it’s clearly the end of the conversation, Dad will have to add something else. This unavoidably puts you in a very awkward position. Do you let him have the last word even if that leaves an open question hanging, or do you respond and potentially carry on the conversation forever?
Glen had a lot of fun playing with this when we all lived under the same roof.
‘Okay Glen?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good?’
‘Yes, good.’
‘I said, “Okay?”’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘Glen . . .’
‘Yes, Da —?’
‘LISTENNNNNNN!’
This would echo throughout the now deserted streets of our neighbourhood. Tumbleweeds rolled along dirt roads. Lizards scurried into holes. Eagles took flight.
By then it was difficult for Glen to hide the smirk on his face. If you did as Dad demanded and listened very, very carefully, you might hear Glen whisper ‘Sorry’ as he walked off to his bedroom. Dad certainly didn’t.
‘Did you ever get hearing aids that worked for you, Dad?’
Hearing aids are a pet project of mine, I think they could save my mother from going insane.
‘Oh, that first pair, Skeet, they had so much feedback I couldn’t stand them for more than a few seconds.’ He shakes his head at the memory. Obviously a different kind of noise to the static of the car radio.
‘But they were only twenty bucks from some catalogue, weren’t they?’
‘Forty dollars!’ He is quick to correct me on their exorbitant price. ‘But they were too big and bulky.’
Admittedly they were the size of mangoes and had probably been manufactured in a communist factory in 1952.
‘He did go to his GP and get proper ones,’ Mum pipes up.
