Two Dads are Better than None

Chad's Ear - I wrote this story in the spring of 2001 when I lived in New York City. I was written for a creative writing class I took through Gotham Writers Workshop

Chad's Ear

By trade I am a teacher and probably, I feel, one of the simpler sort of characters that you would come into contact with. My life has certainly had its share of ups and downs, so when I arrived at my 42nd birthday and realized to myself that I wanted to continue being nothing more than a 5th grade teacher, I took a certain amount of comfort in that. People consider teachers to be heroes to a certain extent, but I feel less like a hero as the years wear on and more like a simple person who plays a small role in the lives of these young boys and girls. There was a time, during my first marriage, when I attacked teaching with such passion that I truly believed I somehow mattered in these children's lives. What I have come to discover over the years is that they actually matter more in mine.


I teach 5th grade at Ford Elementary School in a small town called Katy outside of Houston. Like any sprawling suburb today, Katy is very much a microcosm of the world. We have our good and bad elements, our rich and poor parts and mostly our typical human feelings of love, hate, life and death. We are, in a nutshell, "run of the mill".


After my second wife, Lisa, left two years ago and moved to California. I opted to stay. I kept the house, my job and the car while she took our daughter and a red Civic to California to begin her new life with Doug. While I will admit it was not the most amicable divorce, the thought of my daughter Aiya being thousands of miles away and starting elementary school in San Diego was one of those things that hurt me the most. I had become very close to my 5 year-old daughter and was beginning to feel, in no uncertain terms, that her life mattered more than mine, that it carried with it my hopes and the hopes of my ex-wife. Lisa was a good mother but she and I had changed after 11 years of marriage. To be quite honest, we had not really been in love for years and we both knew it.


One morning while Lisa was on her way to work, her mother called to tell her that her father had finally died of colon cancer. After that, a piece of her died and no matter how hard I tried, I could not get her back. And strangest of all, part of that lifelong bond that died between father and daughter was just beginning to blossom between Aiya and myself. Looking back, I am sure Lisa could sense it too. When he died three years ago, Lisa decided that she had been living her life in vain, always doing what others wanted and expected and felt there was a lot more out there than just the quiet cool summer nights that Texas offered us from our back porch, so she left.


While waiting for our food at a drive-thru one night she acknowledged that she was in love with someone named Doug. She started crying and all I remember was feeling slightly embarrassed as my sad suburban drama unfolded while a teenager handed us sacks of food through a small window. Doug was a co-worker who had taken a better paying position in San Diego a year earlier. Those business trips to San Diego for meetings and projects that were screwed up so bad they had to call in the pro were really just excuses to be with Doug. Now suddenly I realized just how screwed up things had become. I won't lie and say it came as a total surprise. We rarely made love and our lives had become more focused on Aiya, Lisa's career, my teaching and just being simple stand-up citizens in Katy. I thought we were just having a bad year, like a lot of couples do.


That was two years ago. Suffice it to say that the last two years of my life have consisted of basically teaching, seeing my daughter Aiya a few times a year and visiting my father in Shreveport. My older sister and her husband live about half an hour away and I get invited over for dinner frequently. They live outside of Galveston in a small house with their two boys. Often, after two bottles of wine and with my face glowing, I would sit next to their swimming pool after dinner and watch the sky change from orange to violet and feel a kind of utter loss and longing to connect that I could not describe. But I always had the "kids" as I called them and I simply transferred all that was missing from my life into my perception theirs. It was after everything had fallen apart that I realized I was truly meant to be here, sitting at my neat desk in the front of classroom 204 surrounded by holiday displays and keeping close tabs on the “Superstar Board" Perhaps I needed them more than they needed me.


Over the years my students seemed to become progressively more of a challenge too. I had been appointed guardian of their dysfunctional lives and all the things that happened at home were somehow not supposed to affect them. Parents just did not understand why I could not make their children behave and turn them into the brilliant protege for whom they hoped. Don't get me wrong. I did what I could. I taught them all the things that had been blessed by the school board, by the parents and by the state. My students' test scores were above average and I took a certain amount of pride in that. Unfortunately this was never enough. The Katy Independent School District was quickly becoming an up and coming place to raise a family and as I drove to school in the morning and stared along the highway, bricked developments with large houses and mothers talking on phones inside their BMWs would stare back at me. I knew that things were changing and I could see it in the faces of the children. Well-dressed kids starved for attention would look back at me. On lessons covering Greek mythology a few would tell me of their family trip to Mykonos. A student once taught the whole class how to read sailing navigation charts during a lesson on Spanish Conquistadors. He had picked it up after spending the summer on his father's yacht in Barbados. As I said, I am simple guy so I am not above forgetting, just for a few seconds, that I am also a student of life when I teach. And yet while the times had changed, children remained basically the same. The reason I am telling you this is because it all became strikingly apparent last September when Chad entered my classroom for the first time.


Before I even met Chad, I could tell he was in for a rough year. His school records told that he was thin and small and had just moved to Katy a few months before. His address told me that he lived in the older part of town, near me and countless others in our tract homes. Our houses were all basically the same, just rearranged and colored differently. Every house had three bedrooms and the style of the time in which they were constructed in dictated that only certain colors were applied. Twenty years ago, Forest Hills Residential Park was the assembly line of houses. A wave of men would come and lay pipes, then foundation and so on. I thought of the poor bastard who had to spray drywall on over 200 houses and all of the sudden my job didn't seem so bad. This was the kind of neighborhood we shared. Still, this did not prepare me for what awaited me that first day he walked in.


"You’re live close by me. I live in Forest Hills too"I told him, shaking his little hand and trying to sound hopeful during what was obviously one of the more stressful situations in a child's life. In the back of my mind I also hoped somewhere a teacher was doing the same for my Aiya in San Diego.


"Do you have a dog?" He asked
"Yes I do in fact. Do you ?"I replied.
"What color is it?"He asked.
"I have a black and white Chihuahua named Pepper." I said, thinking of Pepper at home no doubt sleeping on my bed or in my chair.
"I found a dead black and white dog near the highway yesterday. Some kids were shooting it with a BB gun." He said these words very flatly with an emotionless voice and the expression on my face must have changed because I instantly thought back to make sure I had seen Pepper this morning. After I was sure I had, I made an odd laugh told him to find a seat since other kids had started filling the room and the muffled tones of his soft voice were gone.


But the words were not what caught my attention. What stuck out the most about the strange boy was his left ear. I tried not to notice as he told me about the dead dog, but I found my eyes drifting and his eyes followed mine closely. Chad was thin and a bit short for a boy his age. He had a new backpack, brown eyes and his front teeth seemed disproportionate in size to the rest of his face. His hair was auburn and a bit wavy and you could tell someone had tried to get it to lay flat. He had eyes that squinted when he smiled and looked like a typical kid and not that different, except for the ear. His left ear looked abnormally large for such a thin small face and his hair tried to cover it. At first I was sure it was nothing more than just a bit larger, but as I watched him that day, I noticed his right ear actually looked much smaller and appeared to be the proper size for an 11 or 12 year old boy. This would cause me to look at Chad a bit longer than I had intended during class and after doing this a few times, he would instinctively reach up and try to cover his left ear with his hair. I am sure it was a nervous habit that he had developed over the years, no doubt in order to deal with the cruel nature of other 11 and 12 years old. So I tried in vain not to notice it in an effort to be the proper disciplinarian that was expected.


Just to set the record straight, I had very little tolerance of children teasing others in class, and until now my students always seemed to comply fairly well. But it was the times when children were amongst themselves that I could not control. It was their own world in which adults and teachers were not privy, in those instances after school or at the lunch table. Needless to say, a few weeks into the year I was relieved when a boy in the back named Charles befriended Chad. And although the girls seemed not to notice him in the least, the classroom relationships seemed fairly copasetic and that was all I could really hope for, so I was content.


A few weeks into the school year, we were studying mammals and I had asked them to choose a book on one that was extinct, another part of our curriculum that was force-fed. It had become quite the thing to teach science now with a very eco-friendly slant and the recycling bins around the school enforced this. Yet the cynic in me still felt that these kids deposited waste in large trash cans at home where The Help quickly put it next to the street to be removed. From there it was sorted at some place far away from the large green lawns with sprinklers systems and manicured hedges. In my mind I imagined most of these children came from houses that had full-grown adult size bushes planted around them, overflowing hibiscus that dwarfed the ones I had been raising in my backyard for years. That was what money allowed you to do, I thought, change things, speed them up and get them like you wanted them now.


One Tuesday afternoon, the children were working at different tables throughout the library filling out required information on their selected books. That was when I heard the yelling. I walked over to a table in a corner of the library and found a boy named Joshua on the floor with his nose bleeding and Chad standing above him with a red face and his fists clenched. Joshua was at least half a foot taller than Chad and had an astonished look on his face as the red blood dripped on the short-pile orange carpet.


"He hit me. "Joshua cried and the usual onslaught of voices trying to explain their side of the story started from all sides. I made Chad sit down alone at a different table as the librarian led Joshua to the nurse. Leo and Mark were not particularly friends with either boy in the fight, so I asked them to tell me what happened, hoping to get an unbiased explanation.


"He called Chad Elephant Ear that's why." Said Leo. His freckled face looked excited and serious.
"Yeah and Joshua tried to touch it. Only Chad had ignored him the whole time."Mark reported.
"So what started it?"I asked, my expression looking like that of a serious teacher I am sure.
"Joshua thumped it then."Leo said, imitating the gesture of a very sharp thump.
Mark now took over the explanation." Then all of the sudden Chad jumped up and turned around and hit Joshua right in the face really fast."He stressed the word really as I butted in.
"Now Leo, is that exactly what happened?" I asked, moving my glasses down to the end of my nose.
"I promise Mr. Matthews. You should have seen how scared Joshua looked, especially when he started bleeding."
"Yeah, he freaked." Mark added.


I went back and spoke to Chad. He was sitting alone at the table with his face looking red and stern. He looked sweaty and the ear looked a bit more irritated and swollen than I had remembered. His arms were folded and he had a very angry look on his face.


"Chad, do you want to tell me what happened? We don't allow hitting and I think you know that." I said, thinking how odd that phrase sounded and how it only sounded okay in this location and under these circumstances.
"He touched my ear." He said. He stared straight ahead and refused to look at me, his eyes instead looking out the window across the library. I was about to launch into a speech I had given a thousand times before when all of the sudden he did something that shocked me. In one slow gesture he pulled his right hand over the tender ear and looked me in the eyes.
"My ear is very special. I don't want anyone to touch it."He said looking up at me. I could see the tears swelling up and he made no effort to hide them, he simply cried but never made a sound. I looked around the room and instructed him to work alone at this table, patting him on the back and opting for the collected cool-headed teacher role instead of asking questions. As we were getting ready to leave the library, I thought how it would have been to witness this small wiry kid with a big ear punch someone so much bigger. In my head, the event seemed surreal and I could almost see his small clenched fist striking Joshua in the nose.
As I finished my lecture to Chad with "And will you be hitting anyone again?" He quickly responded with, "If they touch my ear I will."I thought back to how he'd had been doing so far. He was basically a good student and seemed to do fairly well, even though he was not particularly social. This had been the only incident so far and to be honest, I was surprised that his ear had not become a source of conflict earlier. Still, I was respectful of his situation. The peculiarity of the ear had taken a hold on me, so much so that I agreed to let this situation slide and not bring other adults into the circle, thereby focusing more unneeded attention on the large ear.


As the weeks wore on, my interest in the ear grew. It sometimes looked soft and had a certain warm glow and then other times it looked floppy and perhaps two inches bigger than its left counterpart. As fall changed to winter and the students would come in from playing outside the ear looked sharp and alert and very aware of its surroundings. Chad usually played alone or with two other boys who accepted him from time to time and they preferred playing away from the others in a smaller tighter tribe. The bigger kids had not picked on Chad since the incident in the library but it was a different story with the girls in class.


When I found a note next to his desk with the words "To Dumbo" scribbled in loopy cursive on the outside, the cruelty of children resurfaced yet again. Three girls I had separated early in the school year seemed to duck down as I asked everyone in a loud voice. "Who's been passing notes?" I said, then once more louder."I said who has been passing notes in my class?" Someone suggested I read it and when I saw the words "To Dumbo" it felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach and every one of the children knew what it said and they only wanted me to read it. I slipped it into my pocket and proclaimed that anyone passing notes would be sent to the principal. Then I realized in this day of non-corporal punishment just how empty that threat was. I tore it into shreds with a bit more theatrical flair than needed and threw it into the trash. A teacher never knows if these thing encourage or discourage the behavior, but my quick return to the TV placed in the corner of the room was at least some indication that the ear would not detract from the task at hand. Chad sunk in his chair as we focused back on the history lesson we were watching and I felt once again this poor boy's ear had taken center stage. It was like everyone in the class knew exactly what the note said and had seen the cruel drawing inside. Chad tried to look stoic and indifferent, only by looking so expressionless, he appeared as if he was looking past the TV, past the wall and into the distance. His eyes glossed over and even though the light was off I still felt sorry for him.


During the Spring Open House I would usually meet all the parents. It was also when the PTA drive kicked off and the school district would push to get as many parents as possible to write little $10 checks that somehow made them concerned individuals and official members of the Parent-Teacher Association. Why was it called an association? I did not want to associate with these people. They typically showed up 7 months into the school year and played this game, which was quite simple actually. They pretended to be concerned parents and I would let them act out their little charade. The parents were always very much what I expected and it amazed me how they were really a reflection of their kids, since from where I sat, I didn't really know the adults. It was with this mindset that I approached meeting Chad's parents. Part of me too was anxious to see the size of his mother's and father's ears. I think in simple terms so I was half expecting his father to have large ears and his mother have small ones. Was it genetically possible for one ear to take after the mother and one to take after the father? These were the kind of foolish thoughts I played with.


Unfortunately, Chad showed up with his father when three other sets of parents were in the room, talking and walking around. As I sat on my desk wearing the tweed jacket I pulled out once a year for Parent Night I was distracted seeing him walk around while I tried to stare at his ears. As I quickly closed up conversations and said nice things, I was hoping to at least introduce myself to his father and catch a closer glimpse of his ears. When I finally did, I was surprised at how small and average they were. He was dressed in jeans and a short sleeved golf shirt and stood with his hands in his pocket while chewing gum. He reminded me of a high school gym coach for some reason, but his eyes looked much warmer. I talked a bit of how Chad was doing and then his father shot his arm out and stared up at his watch. "We gotta go son."he said as he put his hand on Chad's neck. At the same time, another mom quickly popped in and was already greeting me. Later that night as I turned off the fluorescent lights and locked the door, I felt a little disappointed.


As the months passed, I thought about the ear again and again and even considered asking Chad about it one day. I decided against it because I sensed he was still getting teased about it. And while the children were not exactly afraid of Chad, they were never friendly to him either, perhaps since the ear was such a noticeable feature and he was such a quiet boy. As the year continued on however, he no longer wore his hair to cover it but rather had a haircut too short to hide it. And even when the other children stared at it, as I am sure they did, he would follow their eyes closely and not turn the bigger ear away. On a few occasions when I had called his name and the noise from everyone talking was too loud, he would turn the left ear towards me as if to say "What?"and I understood it perfectly. He sometimes even smiled when he did this. What was it that made the ear so special, I thought.


Towards the end of the year, I always gave students an assignment that allowed them a certain amount of freedom to do as they wished. The assignment was this:Give a report (with a visual aid) about something you would like to do one day.The intent was to allow students to talk about heroes, future careers, almost anything they wished. In this day of MTV and short attention spans, I would allow students to play up to two minutes of video on our classroom TV. Typically they would play perhaps two minutes of some video or perhaps clips of a famous athlete and then tell the class why they wanted to do this. It was one of my more favorite activities since it was so open-ended and really allowed students to do what they wanted in this day of regimented curriculum and strict guidelines. It was also significant since our school district considered 5th grade to be the last year of elementary school. After this year, the students would pack up all their dreams, change schools, get lockers and have a whole new set of fears. For all practical purposes, they would be "thrown to the lions" as I would joke, since the mascot for Katy Jr. High was indeed a lion.


Imagine my surprise when I asked them to submit a topic to me for approval and received Chad's. In scratchy letters on a 3 by 5 card were the two words "Ear Surgeon" At first I thought it was some sort of mean joke the other kids had played, but Chad’s distinct childish signature at the bottom proved to me that he did indeed select this topic. I was surprised at how bold it seemed for this little boy to choose a subject so revealing. When I expressed my concern to Deborah, our resident music teacher and one of the few teachers I actually got along with in the break room, she thought it was brave too.
"Perhaps he just wants to have plastic surgery on it someday. You know how a lot of these kids are. Half the girls at Katy High have had something done to them at one point." She shook her head, but in a teasing sort of way. Besides, I can't remember the last time I didn't see someone's mom wrapped in bandages the last time I went to the mall."We both laughed at this.


Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he was going to have it fixed before his grand entrance into Jr. High. Perhaps then things would become a bit more normal for him and the other kids would not give him funny looks. Maybe this was his way of preparing his classmates for the transformation he would undergo this summer.


Several times throughout the year I would overhear stories about the ear, sometimes from other teachers, sometimes from students. As the year progressed, a few had even asked him about the large left ear. His response was the same, even when the school nurse asked him. "That's just the way I was born." He would say with a shrug as he looked down. “Besides, nobody has identical ears." and most people would shake their head and try not to stare at the floppy piece of cartilage on the side of his head.


When the day approached for them to deliver their reports, I woke up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Part of me was excited but part of me was afraid that if indeed Chad were trying to set his peers up for some sort of transformation he would undergo this summer, this would give them just one more small thing to hold over him, one more awkward conversation in front of new faces." What happened to your big ear?" they would ask and he would have to explain. Another part of me felt sad to see the ear go. It had become such an endearing fixture as the year went by and had honestly become so much a part of who he was, that I almost wanted him to keep it. He had become more confident with it and the ear had taught us a great lesson in acceptance the past few months.


After a girl named Jennifer had delivered a report on wanting to go to the moon, complete with video footage of the latest shuttle mission, it would be Chad's turn. Since Katy Texas was located not far from the NASA space center, I could always count on at least two reports from future space explorers. Other students reported on various careers and one clever kid had even brought in a life size cardboard cut-out of Michael Jordon, which he stood next to as he talked about basketball.


When Chad walked to the front and handed me the video to put in the machine, he announced to the class that his report was on ear surgery. Since the students had kept their topics a secret, there were always either moans or cheers once the topic was known. After Chad had said the words "Ear surger" there was complete silence and the students looked at each other not sure what to think.


I turned the lights off and pushed play. TV static filled the screen and Chad stood back and stared at the TV, looking up at it. The picture changed to a close up of a surgery procedure. A bright white light was focused directly on an ear and there was a bit of blood and the sound of surgeons talking in the background. Some students made sounds of disgust and pretended to throw-up as the clip played on. Chad was not the least bit distracted and his eyes stood fixed on the TV.
"This is what an ear surgery looks like." He said. My hands followed the every move of the surgeons and I could feel my stomach getting tighter. And then, slowly, without warning the most wonderful thing appeared before our eyes.


The video zoomed out to reveal the head to which the ear was attached and everyone knew instantly that the baby in the video was Chad. A red faced newborn infant filled the screen, crying and trying to put his fist in his mouth. It was one of the strangest sites I had ever seen and I sat there transfixed on the TV with my mouth half open. The same large ear was attached to a small infant head. The ear looked huge in comparison to the small hairless head of the baby. Everyone stared at the ear for what felt like an eternity and then the screen went black. Chad turned towards the class with his eyebrows raised and look around. All eyes were on him. He cleared his soft voice and looked down at the piece of paper he was to read from.


"The doctors gave me my mom's ear since she did not need it anymore. When I was born, the doctor said that I did not want to come out plus my mother was very sick. They had to use these things called forceps to get me out, and while they were getting me out, they pulled off my ear. My dad told me that I almost died too. They sewed her grown-up ear on to my baby head. That's why my mom's ear is bigger than mine."He stopped to look up and everyone's eyes were all focus on the soft glowing ear.
"As I get older my right ear will get bigger. One day it might even be bigger than my mom's ear. I would like to be an ear surgeon because I want to put people back together. This is my dream. Thank you."
He shuffled slowly to his desk and sat down and then rested his chin on his desk. Everyone stared at me. I took off my glasses and turned away as I wiped my eyes and no one said anything for a long time. As I stared out the window, I suddenly felt as if I wanted nothing more than to have piece of someone I loved sewn onto my body, where it would be forever; a physical piece of them attached to me that would never leave. And as I looked back at their little faces with tears in my eyes, I grazed my own ear with rough clumsy fingertips and I smiled. Chad stared back at me and a sense of joy swept over me that I have never felt before. For the rest of that day, I dare to say that I was not the only one in that room, that school or the entire city of Katy who would have given anything in the world to have Chad's ear. The ear radiated and its presence filled the room and that day we all felt like Chad stood on the shoulders of Gods and our lives seemed so very small.