The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  The

  DEAF HOUSE

  The

  DEAF HOUSE

  JOANNE WEBER

  © Joanne Weber, 2013

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Weber, Joanne, 1959–, author

  The deaf house / Joanne Weber.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-48-9 (pbk.). ISBN 978-1-927068-49-6

  (html). ISBN 978-1-927068-79-3 (pdf)

  1. Weber, Joanne, 1959-. 2. Deaf–Canada–Biography.

  3. Poets, Canadian (English)–21st century–Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS8645.E235Z53 2013 C811’.6 C2013-903951-1

  C2013-903952-X

  Cover painting, Butterfly Pudding by Susan Dupor

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  “All one people” by Joseph Naytowhow and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Miyoutakwan Music,

  2000. Used by permission

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada

  Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada

  through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  Note

  The use of the capital “D” as in “Deaf ” represents identification with the Deaf community, use of American Sign Language (ASL), and the participation in Deaf culture as a way of life, whereas use of the lower case “d” as in “deaf ” indicates a diagnosis of hearing loss by the medical profession and a primary desire to belong only to the hearing world. Such deaf individuals may identify themselves as “hearing impaired” and primarily rely on technology (hearing aids, cochlear implants, assistive listening devices) in order to hear and speak. Many of these individuals do sign but have adopted a sign code invented by hearing people (Signed English or a variation of a manually coded English). Even though they may sign, they do not identify with the Deaf community nor participate in Deaf community events. Instead, they may see themselves as disabled and as belonging to the hearing world only whereas the Deaf do not perceive themselves as disabled but as belonging to a linguistic minority. Sign languages are now recognized as bona fide languages and are accepted as additional languages of study at the PhD level in many universities throughout the world.

  The use of upper and lower case “d/D” is strategically used throughout this work. Likewise, the word “hearing” is capitalized in order to stress the Deaf perception of Hearing people as belonging to their own linguistic groups characterized by spoken languages.

  For Murray,

  Anna and Paula

  Contents

  Book One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Book Two

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Note

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK ONE

  One

  “WHERE IS THE BABY?”

  My mother stands blinking in the hall light, her nightgown tumbling forward as she bends down to hold me.

  She says: “What baby? There is no baby.”

  The baby is crying. It won’t stop.

  I insist: “You have to find the baby. I can hear the baby crying. Listen.”

  I run to her with my hearing aid. She fits it into my ear. Strangely, I can’t hear the baby anymore. I think: Oh yes, he is still crying, but not so loud.

  My mother shakes her head. Her hair is all awry and because she isn’t wearing her glasses, her eyes are piercing. My father shifts underneath the blankets on the bed behind her.

  She says: “There is no baby, Joanne. Go back to bed.”

  “Yes, there is. I can’t sleep. The baby won’t stop crying. It sounds like it’s right in my bedroom with me.”

  My mother sighs: “Let’s go and look.” She takes my hand.

  We turn on the light, and my bed reveals crushed blankets, and a pillow cratered by my head.

  I say: “It’s under the bed.” I think: Yes, it must be. I drop to my knees, feeling the rough carpet beneath my hands. I see a sock and a doll that slid down the other side of the bed. I think: Maybe she was crying. I slide my hand under the bed and pull her out.

  My mother says: “Joanne, you have ringing in the ears. That baby sound is in your head.”

  I say: “But I can’t sleep. Make it go away.”

  She explains: “I can’t. There is nothing that will make it go away.”

  “Why not?”

  My mother sighs. She leads me to the kitchen and sits me down at the dining room table. She draws a picture of an ear and puts a spiral at the end of a long tunnel. She draws little lines along the seashell (like the one I see in my favourite seashore book). She says: “It is called the ‘coke-lee-a’. There are the hairs, see? We all have them along these circles. Yours are damaged.” She erases some of the lines. There are now shortened or broken hairs. She looks at me carefully. She draws a line by the cochlear spiral and upwards into a mass of curls. She says: “This line is your nerve going into your brain.” She points to the curly mass. “The nerve is damaged. Those noises are coming from that damaged nerve that goes into your brain.”

  I ask: “So the baby isn’t real?”

  She shakes her head: “No, it isn’t.”

  “But how do I make it stop crying?”

  “You can’t.”

  I can’t. The enormity of this sinks into me. I am eight years old. I can’t stop the noises in my head. I suddenly realize: I’ve always had these noises. They’re not always baby cries, but a vacuum cleaner going full tilt over a carpet, high pitched hissing noises as if an angry snake was nearby, the clanging of church bells, which I thought I heard when I woke up to go to the bathroom a few nights ago.

  My mother bends down again toward me. She suggests: “Keep your hearing aid on, Joanne. See if you can go back to sleep with your hearing aid on.”

  In the morning, I stir sleepily, with the hearing aid cord wrapped around my neck, and the hard bulge of the ear mold in my cheek. The little white box is in its harness on my chest.

  My mother comes into the room and shakes me. She says: “Your hearing aid is whistling, the mold is not in your ear. Shut it off.”

  I grope for the switch and turn over. My mother pulls the blankets up around me. She knows I’ve had a hard night, but now I’m fully awake. I’m not hearing the baby anymore, but a fire truck is going down the street. I’m sure of it.

  Wilkie, Saskatchewan

  A strange woman is sitting in the living room with my mother. I�
�ve just come home from school. My mother’s tea set is out on the coffee table. Usually it’s covered with books and papers, but now the old brown teapot stands on a tray beside fine china cups emblazoned with the Saskatchewan prairie lily. And my mother has dug up napkins from somewhere. The woman is rather burly and mannish. She wears a black dress with pearls and matching pumps. Her face is broad and her dark hair is simply combed back.

  My mother’s face reddens as she says: “This is Miss Lorraine O’Connor. From Regina.”

  Miss O’Connor smiles and takes my hand. She says: “This must be Joanne.” She nods at my mother, with a flush of pleasure. “Joanne, how would you like to come to Regina to talk to a group of parents about your life?”

  My mother begins: “We’d put you on a bus.”

  Miss O’Connor finishes: “And I’d pick you up when you get off. Then you can stay at my place. Oh Joanne, they’d love to hear from you about what you are able to do.”

  Sitting in the humming but stationary bus beside the only gas station in our town, waving through the window to my parents, my suitcase stowed in the cavity of the bus, the driver in his grey suit and cap is strolling down the aisle, counting as he taps the tops of seats, I wave again, hardly able to see my parents’ faces in the dark morning. Then the bus lurches down the quiet streets of the sleeping town away to the highway and the pink flush of morning spreading over fields locked in ice and snow, my nose pressing against the glass, the telephone wires between poles form noises inside my head, swe-eoop, swee-oop, not being afraid, travelling to Regina, a city I’ve never visited, and a woman I’ve only met once, or what I’m supposed to do there, thinking of the book I’m reading, A Stranger at Green Knowe, how I really don’t understand it although I feel compelled to finish it because it’s about a mysterious house set in a leafy, green thicket choked with vines, and there’s a gorilla in the house, hiding from humans, and the secret of the house goes back centuries, enters the present, and then darts back, although I can’t make head nor tail of Ping, a small boy who skips through the novel’s centuries, but I want to know why the gorilla is hiding in the attic in Green Knowe.

  Yesterday, at school, I held up that book to a boy sitting across from me, the one with the freckles across his nose, who wore striped T-shirts every day.

  I said: “This book has no pictures.” I held it up in front of him, thinking that he, this boy I liked so much, would marvel that words had the power to form pictures in the mind. Instead, he stared at me and said, “You ah stoopeh,” and then turned to chatter with the other boys along the aisle.

  It’s already evening when Miss O’Connor meets me at the bus depot, standing tall with her cane at her side, watching the men quickly unload my suitcase from the bus. Soon I’m looking out of the windows of her small car, as she drives through Wascana Park. Her voice drifts over me and I smell peppermint on her breath. I’ve no idea what she’s saying, but I politely nod my head.

  That evening, I stand in a drafty church basement somewhere in Regina, with my boots squeaking in melting puddles of snow, a necklace of indigo windows circling the ceiling, the parents I’ve come to meet sitting on hard straight-backed chairs stenciled with the name of the church, St. Peter’s Parish, all leaning forward to catch my slightly muffled words, except for a man at the back, who sprawls in his chair, his head thrown back as he looks up at the brown mould staining the ceiling. I eye him. Mostly, I just see his stomach.

  I say: “I’m just like the other kids. I’m eleven years old and in grade six. My favourite subjects are English and Social Studies.”

  A woman raises her hand. Her hair is straggling out from a loose bun. She asks: “Your spee perect. Are you reaee pro unn deee eaf?”

  I say: “ . . . ” Something has slid into my brain, and caused it to stop. I hang suspended in a cage atop of a ferris wheel while the operator has thrown the switch to let someone else out on the ground.

  Miss O’Connor steps up and leans on her cane: “Joanne’s progress is very remarkable. She is profoundly deaf, yet as you can see, she is able to develop speech and reading skills comparable with her peers, or even higher. She is an excellent example of what can be done if one is willing to do the hard work and make all the necessary sacrifices.”

  The room erupts in a buzz of voices. Finally the woman tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and pats her bun. I wish I could do that, tuck my hair behind my ear, leaving my hearing aid fully exposed. I’ve watched the nonchalant gestures of the girls in class, the sudden flips of locks, and the mild shakes of their heads in order to straighten the hair around their shoulders, but I feel the thick swath of bangs pushing down on my eyebrows as I check the narrow twisted cord from the ear mold that plugs my left ear. My right ear lies flat and snug against my head and the cord wraps around my neck and snakes down the middle of my chest to the small white box that nestles in a body harness underneath my clothes.

  The woman with the bun turns to me again and asks: “What yuh readee leveh lie?”

  I push my ear mold impatiently. The sweat in my outer ear is causing the mold to slip.

  I hear: “How are you able to heah what go on in the claaaroom?” The woman with the bun. I still can’t understand the question, but I have a faint idea of what she might mean, only I’m not sure if she wants to know how much I can hear or how much I can do without hearing. Suddenly, the question feels like a trap, waiting for me, an innocent snare lying casually atop of the grass.

  I say: “Well, I don’t need any help.”

  It’s the end. I clutch the lottery ticket given to me as a “thank you” for the presentation while the women shrug into their coats and huddle near the stairs leading up to the outside doors, with their heads outstretched like ravens looking for food, turning toward each other to monitor looks of surprise or dismay, the men have left to warm the cars, the exhaust is already curling up against the indigo windows. Miss O’Connor weaves her way through the now disheveled rows of chairs toward me and speaks carefully: “Joanne, how would you like to meet their deaf children? We’ve been invited to a party for you at one of their homes.”

  The house has been scrubbed for the occasion. The smell of ammonia tinges the air. The house is noisy with the laughter of adults, the shrieks of small children running about the forest of their legs, and the television blaring, deaf children bouncing boisterously and shouting vociferously on the living room couch, a boy chasing a girl around the heavy coffee table, oblivious to the spilled Kool Aid dripping onto the floor. None of them look at me. They’re intent on jumping on the couch. A girl flees down the hallway toward a bedroom.

  I am introduced to them, one by one. Their names crash over me until I finally hear one: Caroline. I hear her name because I’ve read it before. I sat down one afternoon with my father’s saxophone music, the song that had words under the notes. I slid my finger over the words and sang: Can’t you hear me calling for you, Caroline?

  The others wander off after the short introductions, but Caroline stays on the couch. Her wide skirt spans over her drawn up feet.

  I ask her: “How old are you, Caroline?”

  A series of croaks, gawks, and yelps spill from her mouth. Her face is strained as she tries to form the words. I can lipread her enough to see that she can make the right movements with her lips and tongue to form the words, but the sound coming from her mouth is nasal, high pitched, strained, and raw.

  Her mother turns to me. She says: “Caroline is eight. We’re so happy to know that she will become like you one day.”

  I nod slowly, unsure of what to say to this creature before me. She hardly seems human, though she is anxious about her dress, smoothing it over her legs. A woman stands beside me, stroking her poodle at the same time. She must be the owner of the house.

  Afterwards, Miss O’Connor drives slowly back through the park toward her apartment in Hillsdale. The street lamps light the serpentine road sweeping past the Legislative Building, stark and brooding in the dark. The river is pocked with bro
ken ice, and the low moon casts eerie shadows over the high snow banks.

  The next morning, still in the dark, Miss O’Connor takes me to the bus station, again my luggage is stored in the cavernous reaches of the bus, I better go to the bathroom at the end of the bus before it moves, I can’t stand to sit on a toilet that jiggles under my thighs, and when I finish washing my hands I notice my eyes, hyperfocused, even at seven-thirty in the morning, the light over the small steel sink barely outlining my face, and the sun hasn’t even risen outside yet. I mouth my name Joanne Weber and see how my mouth movements are exaggerated, unlike those of the children in my class then, over the quiet hum of the bus, I speak, listening carefully, my voice hollow, as if I am speaking from behind a door.

  Green Knowe is a familiar weight in my lap. I lean my head against the glass as the bus hums its way through sleeping Regina. A snow plow moves slowly south on Albert Street. Half asleep, behind a door, I hear voices in the other rooms of Green Knowe, talking about the gorilla who must hide in the attic, the gorilla’s name is Caroline, and the voices are making plans, no, have already made plans, for all the years I’ve been alive, because time is different in that book, nothing is straightforward from birth to death, and I’ve never known these architects of Green Knowe before, they’re not my parents, can’t be my parents, but they’re stronger, more powerful than my dogged mother who coaxed me into wearing headphones on my ears when I was two, more resourceful than my father who made wooden puzzles out of scrap wood, puzzle pieces of barnyard animals, oink, oink, bow wow, meow, meow, neigh, neigh, hush, hush, the voices babble to me in dull cadences, lulling me until I wake in the screech of another sundog day, mesmerized by the swe-oop, swe-oop of the telephone wires.

  Two

  “MOM, I’D RATHER LIVE IN A different family.”

  My daughter, Paula. Nine years old. Tears are streaming down her face. She places her hand lightly on my throat. My throat constricts. I shouldn’t let Paula do this to me, yet I think somehow I deserve it. The queerness of the gesture is a reminder of something I can’t quite grasp.