A little girl in polka-dot pants and her Mummy stand at the door of a lavender house. Yes, a lavender house, a single-floor conventional California ranch-style house, yet a whimsical and not-normal house, with a fat chimney where the beige has been painted over with more lavender, and also with an elaborate mosaic of tiny mirrors, reaching as high as the eaves and lovingly formed into the shape of a sun. There’s also a van outside, painted Easter-egg purple and emblazoned with the words BabyEarPiercing.com, Since 1987.
Mummy rings three times before the door opens, and the two disappear inside.
The walls are lavender. Little glass cases display a child’s assortment of ear jewelry, twinkly but too blunt to be tug-tug-tugged by tubby fingers. Studs in silver and gold, and hoops, and stones for every birth month. The little girl skitters across the slate floor and peers for a moment into display cases, then staggers over to look at a funhouse reflection of herself in a wall that is made up entirely of mirror shards. Next to a case of lotions and potions is a tiny sink and two half-eggshell chairs on silver posts, each with a diminutive purple coverlet.
The proprietress of this fantasyland is a woman named Angel, and she is the only object absent of color. Her hair, if there is any, is hidden under a black cap. She wears black tights, a black turtleneck, a pair of white fleece armlets, and a gray sweater with little leather shoulder straps and severe steel buckles that make her look vaguely Goth. It is not a stretch to imagine that Angel once wore lavender flounces and a tiara, but sometime on the hard road between 1987 and here her fashion sense took a darker turn, and now she lances earlobes in the guise of a bike messenger, or maybe a burglar.
Angel is unhappy with Mummy because she’s late. In fact, it is possible that the door went unopened so long in order to exact a punishment. Mummy is informed that due to tardiness the twenty-minute jewelry consultation would need to be cut short.
No problem, says Mummy, and in less than two minutes she has picked out a pair of studs, 18-carat yellow gold just like they adorned her with on visits with family in South India when she was a child. Next Angel asks, as if anticipating the answer, whether Mummy would want the girl in her lap during the procedure, and adds that she doesn’t recommend it. No, Mummy answers, isn’t that what the chairs are for? You’re the professional, do your thing.
The front door opens and the girl’s aunt arrives, her American father’s sister, with her two children in tow. No one wants to miss this.
The aunt first got her ears pierced when she was eight, on a trip to the fair with her own father, when he acquiesced to her whining and offered a choice between the earrings or the stuffed bear. Imagine the fit her mother had when she got home. The earrings were banished, the holes grew over, and the aunt’s ears were re-pierced at the age of thirteen, when she had crossed the American jewelry demarcation line.
The little girl is whisked off the floor and placed in the chair. Angel dons a pair of lavender surgical gloves and dips a toothpick in ink. She marks one earlobe dead center. Her right earlobe is wider than her left, she remarks. 
Little girls get upset at the markings, Angel says, looking warily at both the girl and her mother. But the mother is strangely calm for a mother, and the little girl isn’t unhappy. Bewildered at finding herself in a dentist’s chair at Lavender-Land, but not fussing.
It is the moment. Angel takes the earring, nested in a hole-punch device, and braces the sharp tip of the post against the girl’s earlobe. Mummy caresses the girl’s head in her hands. The girl looks quizzically at Angel out of the corner of her eye. A click, and the girl wails. A face crossed with shock and pain, the kind of face — I trusted you, how could you do this to me? — that has caused mothers and Angel countless bouts of anguish in this room, but this Mummy is steadfast. She envelops the girl’s squirming hands in hers as Angel places the backing on the post, changes sides, overcomes a feint by the bawling girl and pushes in the other. More wailing.
The girl is lifted out of the chair by Mummy, who is delighted at the sight of the golden baubles in her daughter’s ears, and swooped around to be shown off to her aunt and cousins, sitting in the waiting chairs. The girl is so surprised at the transition and at the sight of her cousins that she stops crying. Mummy carries her over to the room’s one intact mirror. “How pretty is the baby!” she coos. The girl looks at the image of herself in the mirror, with her adorned and slightly reddened ears, and her face screws up into a bout of blubbering.
A moment later the crying and sadness are past. The child sits on the floor eating crackers as if nothing had happened. Angel says she had never seen such a mellow baby. Angel asks the girl if her ears feel hot, and with her hand fans air toward her ears. “Hot go ‘way?” the girl asks.
Everyone gets up to go. Angel says to Mummy, don’t you have any questions? No, you pretty much covered it, Mummy says. I’ve got my info sheet here.
A lifetime of earring-wearing ahead, and the pain of the piercing already forgotten.
Leave a Reply