Nineteen Metal Memories

Alex Harvey-Gurr

Nineteen. I see the stares. Not as many as I would have guessed after all my mother’s yelling. Times have changed since she was young and purportedly rebellious. Each one counts every metal stud, hoop, and dangle. What do they think about them?

None know that each piece of metal is a memory. Strangers stare at me passing on the street, on the B bus I take to go shopping, in line at the Vons where I buy sea salt and milk. I feel their stares at the piercings littering my ears. But that’s alright, I don’t mind. When you have nineteen ear piercings you get used to the whispers.

***

Seventeen was my bad piercing. That one I did myself, even though I’d always been proper about getting pierced at legitimate establishments from licensed professionals. It was the first night I’d had anything to drink in two years. Seventeen came on a Saturday night in May after I’d spent hours swigging Heaven Hill vodka straight from the plastic bottle with two girlfriends. They said I couldn’t be a true piercing bitch unless I did one myself, and after ten shots I believed them. So I cooked the needle I used for popping zits in a candle flame and jammed it into my left ear’s lower cartilage. Drunk and determined, I did it without waiting for the metal to cool. The cartilage and skin bubbled and sizzled inside and out. I felt my eyes roll back in my head as my entire body shook from the pain. I fell in a mental storm, the last thing I remember before blacking out seeing my own Thelma and Louise bent over me, laughing.

The next morning I woke up in my bed, needle still in my ear and blood spots staining my pillow case. I couldn’t tell if they were from the piercing or from the jabs left by the needle as I tossed in my sleep. I went back into the bathroom. My ear was swollen and angry red. I twisted the needle out, wincing as it caught and yanked on damaged flesh. I hissed under my breath as I forced a spare plastic diamond stud through the fresh hole and headed to the hospital for a tetanus booster and antibiotics to fight the impending infection.

That was the weekend after I found out my mother wouldn’t survive the end of the year.

***

It is traditional throughout human history for people to pierce their flesh. Otzi the Iceman had piercings along with his tattoos. Nowadays it is normal in some cultures for parents to pierce their baby girls’ ears. A late bloomer, I was eleven when I first got my ears pierced. My mother took me, her only daughter, to Claire’s to get a single lobe piercing done in each ear. She wanted me to get my ears pierced at the doctor’s office, just like she’d done nine years before, back when she was thirty-eight and newly pregnant with her second daughter. But Claire’s was the place where all my little friends went for their first, probably because there are 3,000 Claire’s boutiques in the U.S., and nearly a hundred in California, thirty-five in greater L.A. alone. Plus I’ve always hated doctors’ needles. She made me promise as we walked in that this would be the only time I did this, because bad girls get lots of piercings, she said. I promised; when I was younger I didn’t like disappointing my mother.

My mother walked to the other end of the store when the fifteen-year-old sales girl took a piercing gun to my pre-pubescent ears. I watched her jump as the plastic gun clicked loudly into place and shot sharpened blue studs through my lobes. She fiddled with pink scrunchies as the girl wiped away the few drops of blood on my ear lobes with a cotton ball, the thin threads catching on the studs and pulling at my ears just enough to make them throb a bit. I didn’t notice. All I thought was that I wished my mother would stand next to me and hold my hand when I got my first two piercings.

***

My mother was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease a week and a half before I turned eighteen. I had just moved into the dorms at Boulder, the farthest I would ever be from home. I listened with half an ear as my father fed me the generic “it’ll be okay” monologue while I Googled Huntington’s and pulled up a Youtube video of a man named Shawn. I watched the man try to walk down a hallway, cell phone shaking in my hand in time with Shawn’s as they grasped spasmodically at pixilated plaster walls.

I never talked with my mother about her illness, not once. Neither wanted to talk about the fact that over the next five years she would lose complete control over her body and develop chorea, that she would lose her memories and suffer from dementia. That in the end she won’t be able to swallow on her own, let alone eat. That there was a 50% chance that I too have the mutated Huntingtin gene. Talking about it would only remind me that I would be burying my mother before I was thirty, that I might be buried myself a decade or two later.

I got number five after that, my first cartilage piercing on the upper left ear’s helix. I chose cartilage because if it isn’t done right it can deform your ear and cause permanent nerve damage. I liked the idea of not being able to feel anything in the tip of my ear. I was disappointed when the piercing went smoothly. The guy used a needle, the first time I ever pierced with a needle, and as he stuck it through my tissue I tried to not imagine a nurse placing my mother’s IV.

***

Number ten. Number ten, the rook piercing on my left ear, was the first time I cried after a piercing. I cried because it was the first time I admitted to myself that I was doing this to myself because I was terrified of becoming my mother.

***

I started piercing to remember with number six. A generic cartilage with a black hoop midway up my right ear, number six marked the time I lost my virginity and drunkenly fucked a boy after drinking box wine in a stranger’s jacuzzi. I don’t remember his name, only that he had a strong chest with tufts of hair here and there, marking him a boy and not a man. I got a hoop because the piercer had to force half of the hoop through the fresh hole in order to close the earring with a little black ball. It hurt less than the fucking, but not much. I relished the dulled pain I felt in those first weeks when I’d spin the hoop through the new piercing. It ached and it throbbed and I loved it. It reminded me of the only real thing I could remember from that night. Memories of the aches stayed with me long after the piercing healed and it stopped hurting to twist the hoop through the hole over and over again until the ball hit my flesh and could go no further.

***

The last piercings I got with my mother were doubles on my lobes, numbers three and four. I got them because all the girls I wanted to be had them and maybe if I had doubles I’d be able to get a cute boyfriend or at least break a few hearts like my idols Melissa and Jane always seemed to be doing. I was fifteen. I don’t remember how I convinced her to let me get them done or drive me there. We went to The Icing, because I didn’t need someone my age piercing my ears. My mother dropped me off and drove down the street with a promise to meet me when it was done. She gave me thirty dollars, ten dollars short of what I needed, and I had to use the last of my babysitting money to cover everything.

My mother wouldn’t look at my ears for weeks. I started to wear my hair down after that, even during soccer games if I knew she was watching.

***

My mother accused me of being an attention seeking masochist when she saw my industrial, numbers eleven and twelve on my right ear. It was my “tough” piercing, as my girl friends called it, because they only knew tough guys who had industrials. The bar was sterling silver. I didn’t look at it in the mirror for a while because it reminded me of surgical instruments. My mother had pretended up until that point that she hadn’t seen my ears; I’d been careful to keep my hair down whenever I was home, but hair can only cover so much, and I knew she knew I’d been piercing. What did I do wrong, she asked as she walked towards me, arms swinging in front of her body like they’d gone numb. What did I do so wrong that my only daughter hurts herself to get people to notice her? I didn’t answer. She wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her why I really do it, that I wasn’t piercing because I wanted attention or liked the pain, not really. Or, like I’m sure she thought, because I was a bad seed.

I didn’t tell my mother that day that I pierced so that I would be able to look tough, even after I’d lost control of my arms and had to have someone else shave my armpits.

***

I was seventeen when my mother told me I killed my unborn sister. Two years old, the epitome of the terrible twos, I yanked both of my mother’s gold hoop earrings through her lobes. She’d had her ears pierced for only a month and a half. Ten weeks pregnant, my mother drove herself to the doctor’s office, me apparently shrieking in the backseat with my mother’s blood drying under my toddler finger nails. A brand new nurse gave her a mild sedative to dull the pain while they re-stitched her ears together. The nurse forgot to ask her for her medical history, and my mother forgot to mention it; she’s always been squeamish around blood. When she lost my baby sister that night, my mother bled so much it ruined the mattress. My father fed me my dinner for weeks after that while my mother sat in the rocking chair in my sister’s room, a blue mixing bowl in her lap for when she cried so hard she made herself vomit. I don’t remember any of this.

My mother was black out drunk when she told me this on the fifteenth anniversary of her miscarriage. My mother didn’t remember saying it in the morning, and I never told her, not even later that year when I didn’t invite her to my high school graduation when she asked me why I hated her so much.

***

Six months ago I came home for a short visit two weeks after I got a fifth lobe piercing on my right ear, the one I got to remember graduating from Boulder a semester early so that I could come home to help care for my mother. It was number eighteen, and I had no more open flesh on my right lobe. My mother called me Astrid when I walked through the door. Astrid was the name of my mother chose for my baby sister. The daughter she’d wanted and couldn’t have. Because of me.

That was the first time I cried in front of my mother in three years.

***

I got two cartilage piercings next to each other on my left ear when I decided that I didn’t want to see my future. I was twenty-one and a half when I got the call from my dad saying that they had scheduled me to get my DNA tested for HD a HDSA clinic at UCLA the following month. I told them to cancel it and hung up the phone without saying goodbye. I didn’t want the test. I didn’t want to have it recorded on a piece of paper a stranger to see that I would die young, out of control, and brain dead. I looked at myself in the mirror as I got ready to go to the piercing parlor that night, pieces of my mother scattered across my reflection.

I got a white gold twister earring with turquoise barbells to loop through numbers fifteen and sixteen, because the barbells matched my mother’s eyes. My eyes.

***

I promised my mother on my twenty-first birthday that I wouldn’t ever pierce my face. I was home for Thanksgiving vacation and had just gotten numbers thirteen and fourteen, a set of lobe piercings just above my triples on each ear to remind me that I wouldn’t drink that night. I’d given up drinking half a year before because I didn’t like blacking out. I didn’t need extra help forgetting. The only time she saw the piercings clearly was when the light caught the metal studs and hoops through my hair as I helped steady her when she walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was my job to help her move around the house because my father figured it would force us to talk. We hardly ever did.

It was on one of these bathroom trips that, in a rare moment of muscular stability, my mother reached up and touched my face. Her hands were thin and clammy and shook from the pressure of holding them steady. She stroked my cheeks and asked me with tears in her eyes to never pierce my face. I nodded silently, and as I nodded she started to smile. It was the first time she’d smiled at me that trip. I hugged my arms around her thin shoulders, trying to ignore my tightening throat as I waited for her to lose control, ready to catch her when the moment ended.

***

I got my piercing trio, triple lobe piercings and a tragus on my right ear, numbers seven eight and nine, to remember death and raccoons. The first time I experienced death was when I was driving with my friend Jay and he ran over a raccoon. The bump was barely noticeable as its small body collided with hard rubber and metal. Jay pulled over and jumped out, praying loudly he hadn’t hit a dog. I got out and watched him jog up and down the street looking for the body. I didn’t have the heart to point out the tuft of black and white fur in the bushes twenty feet behind our car that he’d missed in his hysteria, undeniable confirmation that he’d taken a life.

As he walked back he pulled out his phone and called his mother, telling her what had happened and asking her what he should do. I got back in the car. Sitting alone in a dark empty Camry, I wished I could ask my mother what to do when something died without crying.

***

I moved back home five months ago, turning down a paid internship with a prominent local real estate agency in Boulder that would’ve landed me twenty-five dollars an hour starting wage. I told them that I’d had a better offer at home. I got my nineteenth piercing that day, a conch piercing in my right ear, the only one I ever had a doctor do. I told myself it was to remember that after this was over I would be able to get a job, because I didn’t want to remember that that was the day my mother moved to Kindred Hospital for good.

I’ve been here at Kindred ever since, watching my mother’s memories ebb away with each blink of her bloodshot blue eyes, each jerk of her head. She doesn’t even call me Astrid anymore. She just blinks and stares. I tried to tell myself for a while that some part of her knew me when I sat at her bedside and stroked her hand for hours. I stopped wanting to pierce the day I accepted that she didn’t know my face.

Just a few weeks to go, I overheard a doctor tell a nurse; he thought I was asleep. I don’t think she’ll make it that long. Some days, the bad days, I touch my earrings and wonder if I too will lose the memories I’ve attached to all nineteen of them. The thought makes my stomach drop. But I always end up seeing something that reminds me of my mother, and I am filled with the sensation of drowning when I think about the fact that when my mother dies she is going to die looking at a stranger’s face. It’s when I start to cry that I stop touching my piercings and know what I need to do.

The day my mother dies will be the day I remove my piercings and let those holes, those memories, close. I will put the earrings in her coffin before the cremation and bury them with her ashes. I don’t need metal to remember, at least not yet. I will take each one out when she is lying on her death bed, watching me with those unrecognizing blue eyes that have made me cry more than anything else in my entire life. I will do this because I love my mother, even more than my own memories, even if she blames me, is disappointed in me, because she is my mother. And maybe, just maybe, when she sees me without nineteen metal memories stuck in my ears she will look at my face without hate and love me as her daughter just once before she leaves the earth.