The Enormous Earbuds

Jim and Irene bought a house in Green Hills because the realtor said it was in the best school district. They had no children, but they’d heard that good schools kept property values high, which meant desirable people were attracted, and others less so were priced out. To them, this had a watertight logic, so they assumed it was valid.

They’d lived in Green Hills for nearly two years but hadn’t gotten to know anyone well. They had over-the-fence friendships with their immediate neighbors, and there were familiar faces who nodded at the grocery store, but since they weren’t members of a church and had no children in school, they had little occasion to meet others. This was fine with Jim, who occupied his free time with reading.

Irene didn’t have the benefit of any hobbies. She kept the childless house, prepared dinners she knew Jim liked, and poked around in the yard, but nothing she planted ever thrived. Her doctor noted she was putting on weight, from the combined insults of her sedentary days and the extra snacks she allowed herself to help pass the long hours. He prescribed walks, every day if she could manage it, and of no less than half an hour. She needed to think about her heart, he said.

Irene was good at taking direction. With sensible shoes and an unfocused determination, Irene set out one Tuesday morning, intending to march briskly along the sidewalks of Green Hills.

Intention exceeded motivation; she was bored by the second block. The monotony of the affectless housefronts, and not a single soul in a yard, left her feeling lost. Occasional cars passed, but the drivers seemed intent with their errands and didn’t wave or glance her way. She might have been anywhere, or nowhere, but she didn’t feel that she was part of where she was.

Irene had also found the hills of Green Hills to be more formidable than she’d noticed from her car. She paused halfway up her own street to catch her breath.

One evening she confessed to Jim that her first attempts at exercising had not gone well. She spoke of her vague dissatisfaction, of not knowing just what was wrong, suspecting he wouldn’t care. He put a finger in his book and listened, encouraging her to keep trying, that she would develop a momentum, that she might even come to enjoy what he called her “me time.”

The next day he presented her with a pair of earbuds.

“Goodness! What are these?” He often gave her off-kilter gifts, things he thought she would like because he liked them.

“The kids call them earbuds. You can wear them when you’re walking and listen to music on your phone. Make your time more enjoyable.”

Irene examined the earbuds suspiciously. They looked vaguely nasty. White teardrops that seemed too small to play music and too enormous to fit in her ears, resting smugly in their little white capsule.

“They’re easy to use,” Jim told her with a wink. “They connect to your phone using Bluetooth. You can listen to music. Podcasts. Audiobooks. Anything.”

While not a technophobe, Irene had never grown familiar with the deeper workings of her phone.

Jim’s gentle enthusiasm, and his slightly better facility with technology, stirred an unfamiliar willingness to try something new. He showed her how to rest the buds in her ears—they felt uncertain there, as though they would fall out at any moment – and how to engage the Bluetooth on her phone. Then he opened the podcast app and found a true crime series he thought she would like. Irene hadn’t been able to follow his fingers as they tapped away, but then she heard some wispy words.

“I can hear something, barely.”

Jim adjusted the sound level, and suddenly there were voices in Irene’s head. She looked around to find the people who were speaking, as though there were intruders in her home. All she found was Jim with his mild smile. She was in two worlds then. Her home, intimately familiar and just the way she liked it. But also, this otherness. These voices in her head. Her great Uncle Jaspar had heard voices too; they had to send him away.

These voices were discussing a cold case crime. Irene reached for the arm of a chair and eased herself into it.

“I just picked that to show you how it works. You can change it to music if you’d rather.”

Irene heard Jim over the words inside her head. She was in both worlds, and her mind needed time to understand. Of course, she understood, but she had never experienced this before. Irene removed the earbuds and set them on the table.

“Do you like them?”

“They’ll take some getting used to. I’m not sure I know how to make them work.”

Jim walked her through the steps to call up the Bluetooth and make the earbuds speak. Then he downloaded several apps to let her choose among music, recorded books, and several podcasts. It may as well have been magic.

Irene was stumbling into a new world, but Jim was there to hold her hand. Except she knew he wouldn’t be there the next morning when she tried to do it on her own.

And when she did try, she did something wrong. The true crime podcast looked like it was running as she stood on her front porch, but nothing was coming out of the buds that rested doubtfully in her ears. Afraid to push any buttons, she instead called Jim at his office. He guessed correctly that she hadn’t engaged the Bluetooth, and when he talked through how to do it, the voices in her head returned. It all seemed beyond her, but she stepped off the porch and began her wander through the neighborhood.

Irene was in two worlds again. She soon found it easy to listen to the lurid story in her head, picturing the scenes being described and the faces of those involved. The unpleasantness was real but held at a safe distance. Yet she was also present on the sidewalks of her neighborhood, feeling the sun on her face and the strain in her calves as she ascended her street. She was there and not there, and Irene enjoyed this insulation from both worlds.

Time passed heedlessly for Irene as she immersed herself in the podcast, and when she looked around, she found that her feet had taken her into a part of her subdivision she rarely entered, even in her car. And it was here that the magical technology failed her.

The voices in the podcast crackled and faded, and then she heard a woman crying. It was a deep, soulful, private crying, and Irene wondered if this were part of the story, a reenactment of some moment of pain. Yet it didn’t sound like acting; it sounded real to her, as though some woman was broadcasting her tremendous sorrow to the universe.

Irene took the phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen, but nothing about it was different. And as abruptly as it started, the crying stopped, and the animated voices of the true crime podcast resumed.

She might have continued with her walk except that a car horn tooted. Irene saw that she was standing in someone’s driveway, and that someone was in a car at the curb, wanting to pull into the driveway.

Irene waved to the woman in the car and stepped out of her way. The car pulled into the driveway and parked, then the woman got out.

“Sorry I honked. But you looked like you were in another world.”

“Oh, this thing drives me crazy,” Irene said, waving her phone. “I can’t make it work half the time.”

“I’m Meryl,” said the woman standing by her car. “I’ve seen you walking around the neighborhood. Do you live in Green Hills?”

She had a genuine smile and an emphatic manner that Irene couldn’t pinpoint. The way she stood maybe? The tone of her voice?

“I’m Irene. Yes, I live over that way.”

“Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”

“That sounds delightful.” Irene, not sure how to turn off the podcast, turned off her phone instead and then remembered to remove the earbuds. She put them in her pocket and then walked up the driveway.

They sat at the table in Meryl’s bright kitchen, a room with polished wooden cabinets and gleaming countertops. They had left their shoes at the front door. Irene was in her socks, but that didn’t seem to bother Meryl, so she didn’t let it bother her either.

“Green Hills is such a nice place to live,” began Meryl, bringing over two mugs of coffee. The way she sat upright in her chair, surrounded by her immaculate kitchen, suggested to Irene that Meryl wanted to will her words into reality, that by living nicely she was making the world nice as well. It was a sentiment Irene realized she could agree with. She and Jim had chosen Green Hills because it was better than the other developments they’d looked at.

“Of course, we have our challenges,” Meryl went on, this time with resignation. She ran her thumb along the rim of her mug, and Irene guessed she was deciding if her guest was worthy of some confidence.

Irene considered herself worthy of any confidence, and she was happy to give Meryl the opening she was seeking. “How so?”

“Well,” she began, with what Irene could see was a feigned reluctance. But then Meryl leaned slightly toward her and spoke just above a whisper. “Have you seen that house on Sutton Place? The one with green shutters? I just came from there.”

Irene hadn’t, or if she had she couldn’t place it. But Meryl was underway.

“You have to park on the side of their yard and look through the slats of their fence to see. Their back yard doesn’t have a blade of grass on it! I’m sure they have dogs that probably bark all night. It’s an embarrassment to the neighborhood, something like that! It affects us all.”

Irene found herself nodding. She didn’t know the house or the yard, but there was a yappy little dog a few doors down that she could hear barking in the afternoon sometimes. That did seem like an annoyance she shouldn’t have to endure now that Meryl put the thought in her head.

“I’ve reported the address to the city several times, but they tell me there is nothing they can do. Apparently, it’s not a code violation to let your backyard become mud. I’ve told the homes association about it too, but they refuse to act.”

Like most of their neighbors, Irene and Jim hired a lawn service that fertilized a few times during the year. Their grass was thick, the same deep green as on the brochures. And while that meant Jim had to push the lawnmower more, they knew it was important to keep up their property values. Everyone knew that. A yard without grass in her neighborhood began to bother Irene in a way she’d never considered before.

By the time her visit with Meryl ended, Irene had forgotten the crying woman she’d heard on her earbuds. Nor did she try to re-engage the true crime podcast. She would have Jim walk her through the steps again that evening. When she got home, though, she immediately jumped in her car and drove to Sutton Place to see this house for herself. And, peering through the fence pickets carefully, she could see it was just as Meryl described it.

Meryl had invited Irene to her weekly coffee klatch. A group of women from all over Green Hills met “just to kibitz and laugh and talk about our husbands,” and it sounded wonderful to Irene, who always had trouble finding ways to fill her days.

That evening, Jim patiently showed her how to call up the podcasts and explained how she could select among them so she could choose as the mood struck. He watched as she followed the steps herself until she was confident she could do it, and then he returned to his book while Irene got busy polishing her kitchen countertop while also in the world of true crime.

The next morning, after Jim had left for the office and her toast and eggs had settled in her stomach, Irene stepped out of her house and put the earbuds in place. Then she expertly called up one of the new history podcasts Jim had fetched for her. She didn’t know how to select specific episodes, so she listened to whatever queued up, which was about French settlements in what would one day be Illinois. It wasn’t uninteresting, and the narrator was enthusiastic, and Irene had never known of this bit of history, so this opening to a distant world got her going.

But she was barely a block from her house when she once again had trouble. The narrator’s voice crackled and faded, and instead she heard two people arguing.

“Already this morning?”

“Don’t bark at me or I’ll just have another.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this!”

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this!”

But these words faded as Irene walked, and soon enough the enthusiastic narrator resumed his words about intrepid French settlers.

Irene barely understood the magic in her hand. She guessed she had somehow picked up the broadcast of a novel or maybe a play. When she was a child, her father’s car radio would sometimes lose a signal as some other station came in more strongly. She supposed that was happening with her earbuds.

Her walk that day took her not only past Meryl’s house but also farther to the house on Sutton Place where she again shook her head and wondered if she should add her voice to the complaints reported to city hall.

Her earbuds crackled a few more times on her walk, but there were no other intrusions of different shows.

On coffee klatch day, Irene decided to walk to Meryl’s house. It wasn’t far, and she was a committed walker now, helped by the podcasts, even if the little dramatic incursions had continued. Always domestic problems, which troubled her, but they were brief, and she was able to dismiss them readily.

Yet as she neared Meryl’s house, she again heard someone crying. It was a child this time, and then words came.

“Momma, it hurts!”

“Grab my hand, baby. Squeeze my hand. Give me your pain.”

Irene’s feet stopped. She was only one door from Meryl’s house, but she was rooted in place. She watched with unseeing eyes as two cars pulled into Meryl’s driveway and unfamiliar women got out and went to Meryl’s door.

The crying had changed to whimpering, and Irene told herself that these actors, these readers were truly talented if they could transmit emotion that intensely. But then the earbuds crackled, and her history podcast returned. Irene found she could move, and she continued to Meryl’s house.

Inside she was welcomed and introduced to the half dozen women there, all from the neighborhood, all without shoes. They were seated around the room and had been in the middle of a conversation. She recognized two faces, but most were new to her.

Irene expected to be asked for her opinion of the Sutton Place house, which she was prepared to give, but instead the conversation was about a house only two blocks away. It was being painted.

“I knew when I saw all of those Mexicans driving through the neighborhood that someone was getting their house painted,” said Irene’s new friend Virginia. “I mean, why else would a bunch of Mexicans be in Green Hills? But you won’t believe the color. Yellow! They’re painting a house yellow!”

“Whose house?”

“I don’t know their name. I haven’t met them, but if they’re painting their house yellow, I don’t think I want to meet them.”

“I’ve seen them around,” said Meryl. “Dumpy husband and wife. Retired. They do volunteer work, I think. Their lawn is patchy.”

“Oh, I know who you mean,” blurted Beatrice, Irene’s other new friend. “I heard about them at church. Nice people supposedly. But painting their house yellow? They don’t seem like the right fit for our neighborhood if you ask me.”

Irene knew the house from her walks. She’d already decided that its peeling paint was an eyesore. She’d have to see if yellow was just a different kind of eyesore; she was nearly certain it would be.

Several conversations had started then. Yard farming teens. “That’s why I have that big rock in the corner of my property,” said Meryl. A group home proposed in the neighboring subdivision and how that would drag down property values for everyone. “I heard it’s a bunch of recovering alcoholics!” The family in the nicest house in Green Hills that never came to the Easter Egg roll. “Are they too good for us?” Irene tried to listen to each, thinking there would be some opportunity for her to add her thoughts. She didn’t want these ladies to think she was simple.

No one thought Irene was simple. No one thought of Irene at all. She existed only as a silent validator of their opinions. Each person in Meryl’s comfortable living room lived and breathed in her own hermetic world, confident that her thoughts and feelings were valid, universal, and confirmed.

Irene didn’t say much that day; the conversations snapped along too quickly for her to find a way in. There was no pause button like with her podcasts. But she enjoyed the time among her new friends and looked forward to the next week.

She walked home with buoyancy and forgot the history podcast. She’d also forgotten that she wanted to see the yellow house, so she intended to steer her feet over there the next day on her walk.

When Jim came home that evening, she mentioned the intruding podcasts and wondered why it was happening. Could it be the weather? Fluctuations in the barometer? Sunspots? He tried the earbuds to see if he could repeat what had happened—they even walked around the block—but he had no luck. He guessed she was picking up signals of the shows other people were listening to. This seemed reasonable and comforting. All she was hearing were dramatizations of domestic strife, like the untidy lives in the overwrought soaps her mother had watched.

“Unless you are hearing voices,” Jim offered. “Like your crazy Uncle Jaspar.”

“Great Uncle Jaspar.”

When Irene set out on her walk the next day, the history podcast was about the Trail of Tears. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to listen to something depressing, but she decided to give it a go and maybe switch to something else if it got tough.

She was only two doors from her house, making her way up the hill, when the earbuds crackled, and different voices entered her head.

“When are you going to tell them?” It was a young man’s voice.

“I don’t know.” A different young man’s voice.

“You gotta tell them, Mitch. We can’t hide forever.”

It happened that a high school boy named Mitchell lived in the house Irene was stopped before. She liked him. An affable, industrious kid who offered to mow their lawn and shovel the snow off their driveway several times.

“They’ll be so disappointed. My dad has never had nice things to say about gays.”

“Maybe because he doesn’t know any.”

“This is gonna be hard. Just hold me. I feel safe when you hold me.”

Was this Mitchell? Irene wondered. Was her neighbor boy gay? But he wasn’t. Or maybe he was, but this wasn’t her Mitchell she was hearing. It was simply another intrusion, and Irene powered up the hill. Still, it bothered her to think that some boy was afraid to come out to his parents. If she had a son, well, she’d love him regardless of something like that.

Irene guessed that her Bluetooth must have been strong that morning, for many houses she passed were broadcasting to her. Someone was getting a divorce. Someone’s daughter got into Stanford. Someone had missed a couple of mortgage payments. Someone had another miscarriage. That saddened her, and Irene found she didn’t care to hear about the Trail of Tears. Nor did she want to hear the domestic dramas her neighbors all seemed interested in listening to.

She turned off her phone and put the earbuds in her pocket, walking down the sidewalk trying to listen to the birds. The faint roar of the traffic on the highway a mile away was more welcome than these disquieting peeks into other people’s lives, even if they were made-up people.

Yet when she drew near Meryl’s house, she caught herself thinking about the crying woman and the sick child who called her Momma. Carefully she transferred the buds into her ears. Then she tapped on her phone to call up the true crime podcast, the one she had been listening to when she’d first heard the woman crying.

But she didn’t hear crying. She heard screaming. The child was screaming.

“I don’t want chemo, Momma. I don’t want to go to the clinic ever again!”

“You have to, Stella. You have to get well.”

“NO!”

“You have to, baby.”

She wondered if the whole world could hear the fierce, terrified screams of the child. But soon Irene heard only whimpering. She didn’t know if it was from the mother or the child.

Irene looked at the house before her. What was really happening inside that tidy façade? What was happening inside any of the houses around her? She didn’t know. She’d never wanted to know. But somehow, she did want to know the story of this house. She listened for what her earbuds would deliver next, but she only heard what may have been a plate or cup being set down, a person falling into a chair, labored breathing.

Irene felt tired in a sudden, deep way she’d never experienced before. On uncertain feet she stepped over to the boulder on the corner of Meryl’s yard and seated herself. Her earbuds were silent, having given her what they would for now; she took them from her ears and set them beside her on the rock.

It was too sad, the intruding story she had heard. Why would anyone want to listen to a story like that? She realized, with an exhaustion in her soul, that it really could be happening behind the closed front door of the house she sat beside. At that moment. Or in any of the houses around her. And if not that exact story, something much like it. These little snippets of domestic drama might be happening in the real world, all around her. Every house held its story. You never know these things. Mostly you don’t want to know these things. And yet, they were still there. Private, but not necessarily hidden. Just not shared. Because who wants to take up another’s burden?

The yellow house would have to wait. Irene wanted to get home and, well, she wasn’t sure. Rest. Have a long bath. Or a nap. Turn off the world and the voices for a while and live just within herself. She tried to keep her eyes straight ahead as she walked, tried not to reflect on the fragments of life she might hear from the houses she was passing. She had her own life to lead, and though it was a pretty good life, she had her share of troubles too. They were enough for her.

The next morning—she would walk in a different direction, maybe to the park with plenty of open space—she realized she had left her earbuds on the rock in Meryl’s yard. But when she got there in her car, they were gone.

For an instant she felt free. Free of the podcasts. Free of the intrusions. Free of hearing about other people’s misery. But it was only for a moment, and while she didn’t expect her original earbuds to turn up, she knew she could replace them. She drove to the store and managed to buy a pair identical to what Jim had given her.

When she got home, she synced the new earbuds to her phone—how easy it was to connect once she tried—and finally started her walk. They worked perfectly. She queued up an episode about a glorious world’s fair long ago and didn’t hear any crackling. Instead of the park, she decided to finally have a look at the yellow house so she could talk about it the next time at Meryl’s. Yet as she passed Mitchell’s house, she wondered if he’d been able to speak to his parents and how they reacted. Except it wasn’t him, she reminded herself. It was merely a coincidence. Heavens, the boy would have been in school when she had passed the house before.

Nor did she hear any of the other intrusions that bedeviled her prior walks. The earbuds were mercifully cooperative, spilling forth excited words about the coming wonders a past age had foreseen. Flying cars never happened, and the naivete of those people made her laugh aloud. This was how her walks should go. She could live safely inside her own head and not be troubled with things that were not her concern.

And until she came before the house where Stella lived, Irene had fully believed this. But her feet stopped and her assurance waivered. The world’s fair voices in her head droned on, but she no longer cared. She removed the earbuds and studied them. She tapped them with her fingernail and then put them back in her ears, but they didn’t crackle. She switched to the true crime podcast, but it didn’t allow any intrusion. These new earbuds wouldn’t tell her what was happening behind the blue front door of Stella’s house.

She couldn’t say how long she waited before that house, ignoring the history podcast, waiting for the telltale crackle to let her know she was about to share in another person’s life. At some point she realized how strange she must look standing in one place for however long she had, so she walked home. When she got there, she lay on the couch and wished for some understanding. She felt emptiness, at once hollow and heavy, and she didn’t know why. Jim found her asleep when he got home that evening.

When Meryl’s next coffee klatch at came, Irene couldn’t persuade herself to go. The vague emptiness hadn’t left her, and coffee with those ladies seemed just more of it. But when she’d spoken to Jim at breakfast about her reluctance, he encouraged her to go, to get out of the house she was haunting, for he could see that something was troubling her.

Irene drove to Meryl’s, leaving the new earbuds at home because she did not want to risk hearing some new intrusion yet also afraid that maybe she never would again. She parked on the street, leaving the driveway for the other ladies. As she crossed the walk, she looked at the house next door. It was silent. It did not speak any secrets to her.

The ladies were all pleased to see Irene, and she took her accustomed place off to the side as the chatter began.

The yellow house continued to raise their ire, and Meryl took control of the conversation this time, for she had an agenda.

“At the next homes association meeting I’m going to make a proposal that houses in Green Hills may be painted with only four colors. All muted. Nothing flashy or trashy. We’ll not have this nonsense of yellow houses in our neighborhood!”

“If we allow one,” piped Beatrice. “Others will follow. Why, it would look like a carnival instead of a quality subdivision that will attract the right kind of people.”

Everyone agreed. Perhaps the homes association should hire a commercial lawn service to mow everyone’s yard, someone suggested. None of this lawn mowing at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. Or letting the grass get too long. Or not feeding it. That’s how they do it in gated communities after all.

It tumbled on, but Irene wasn’t listening. Her mind was elsewhere as the coffee grew cold in her mug. Her new earbuds had worked perfectly, which meant they had failed her. She would never again be touched by others’ lives that way. She would never know the rest of Stella’s story.

Meryl had to say her name twice.

“Irene, are you with us?”

She looked at Meryl with wet eyes and said, “Who lives in the house next door? Is there a little girl named Stella there?”

The room went silent before Irene’s intrusion.

“Oh,” stammered Meryl, Irene’s question thwarting her campaign. “They’re to themselves. I don’t even know their names. They do have a little girl. Must be homeschooling her because I never see the child.”

The vacancy in Irene’s eyes left then. Her face hardened as she set her mug on the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she rose from the chair and crossed the room. All eyes followed her, but no one spoke.

Irene hurried to the front door and tore it open, not shutting it behind her. She ran across Meryl’s front yard in her socks and onto the porch of the neighboring house. Then she fell upon the blue front door, slapping it with her hand. “Let me in. Please, let me in.”

Irene dropped to her knees on the welcome mat, leaning her whole body against the door.

When it opened, she fell inside.