The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  Then I see it. As a baby, she began to put her hand on my throat while I breastfed her, with her eyes gazing steadily into mine and her petite body nestled into my arms.

  Now I scoop her up and we snuggle down between the covers on her bed.

  I ask: “What do you mean?”

  Anna comes in then, my oldest daughter, and sits on the bed, already in her pyjamas, ready for our nightly episode of the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She holds it in her hand.

  “Something isn’t right, Mom,” Paula says. “I want to live with other people.”

  I say: “Have I hurt you? Have I done something wrong to you?”

  My mind races frantically, yes, I yelled at her the other day to get out of bed, to move more quickly, to look for her coat, and boots, on the double quick, otherwise I’d be late for work.

  “No,” Paula says. She shakes her head from side to side. “It’s just that we don’t have a dad and you’re . . . ”

  She pauses. But I’m too busy to notice the pause just then as I only hear about every third word she is saying and I must knit the meaning together at breakneck speed.

  I do, into: “Lots of kids don’t have their fathers with them.” Thinking: The pause, what was the pause about?

  I take her hand. She must be grieving. This must be difficult for her.

  Paula looks at me steadily as I entwine my fingers with hers. Her eyes suddenly too deep, she is too young to live with so much inside her. I ask: “What are you thinking, you with your half-wise thoughts?” Paula says: “Mom, it’s time to make peace with Dad. You two can work it out.”

  Anna is listening intently.

  I ask Anna: “Do you ever think about your dad, Anna? Do you ever want to see him?”

  Anna shrugs. Then she shakes her head. She says: “It’s okay, Mom. I’m happy here. I don’t need a dad.”

  I say: “Well then, we need to just do the best we can without him.” I add: “He has not contacted us for nine years.”

  Paula says: “But it’s time, Mom.” She insists: “You can do it.” She looks steadily into my eyes.

  “It’s time to brush your teeth,” I say.

  Our elbows bump each other as we shift for space in the tiny cramped bathroom. Each of us has our own way of fighting for possession of it. Discarded clothing and towels mark out the floor. I’ve made an effort at decorative domestication. I’ve dumped all the soap gifts into dusty wicker baskets half tilted on the torn linoleum.

  The girls creep into my bed with me, lifting their legs onto my feet in order to warm them. I reach for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

  Anna asks: “Did you lock the door?”

  I feign forgetfulness and dash downstairs to bolt the locks and set my purse right beside the door so that a thief will find exactly what he is looking for and be satisfied, and, no, I do not want to explain to my daughters how a thief might not be satisfied. Then I slide my cold feet atop of Anna and Paula’s.

  Paula giggles. She says: “Ouch, your feet burn.”

  Paula’s voice runs silently beneath my careful articulation of the words in the book I am reading: “We don’t have a dad and you’re . . . ” Oh. She meant to say, “and you’re deaf.” I read, snap off our bedside lamp, and wait for the restless forest of legs to quieten, thinking: everything was too sudden, too soon, ten years ago, our rushed affair, the birth of two daughters fifteen months apart, the unspoken question in each other’s eyes, what are we doing, as I struggled through the pregnancies, hospitalized to keep the babies from coming too soon, Murray mired in a struggle to extricate himself from his marriage and to parent his two young sons, everything beyond repair — our wrongdoing in rushing into sex, the pregnancies, and our neglect of the business of our lives, actions that harmed Murray’s two sons and their mother, and hurt my parents deeply. When things were beyond repair, I did what I always do: move somewhere else, after all, I had moved every two to three months, even every semester for most of my nine years of university, a running family joke. My parents counted: forty-seven times. My father kept a small trailer in his backyard, in case, and my mother always had a store of mops, brooms, and garbage bags for the cleaning before and after each move.

  I thought: There’s nothing strange about it. My reasons for moving are always compelling. The place is too small, too large, too expensive, too poorly kept up, and roommates come and go.

  Move out. Pack, clean, move, clean, unpack. I played house with my daughters, marvelling at the spaces that once held towels, sheets, and blankets, exclaiming over the closets, the depths of shelves, the spaces that held a myriad of possibilities, the excitement always mounting in me on moving day even while our clothing and toys sat in black plastic bags like manatees beached on the living room floor, moving every year with the girls, my father aging with every move, my mother tight lipped, cleaning and sweeping while I set up the beds in the new rooms in what were never real homes but temporary places, and finally when Paula was five years old, I was standing in the kitchen of our townhouse in Saskatoon and announcing that we were going to move to North Battleford, and tears streamed down Paula’s face.

  She begged: “Mom, think of what we have, the good things we have.”

  I explained: “I have a good paying job waiting for me there, so we have to go, no question about it.” Anna said nothing. She played quietly in the corner of the room, listening carefully.

  The day we moved, into a small wartime house in North Battleford. Paula found a cross-shaped twig on the sidewalk, clutched it, and said: “This is a good sign, Mom. This is our home.”

  Anna waved from the living room window.

  I took a deep breath and silently considered the house, I answered them: “We will call it Ladymint, because we are now ladies living in a house with white siding and green trim.” And I assured myself: It’s a friendly house.

  Inside, detergents, bleach, and rags, bread and cheese poked out of plastic shopping bags, the old maple flooring had several splinters, so I wouldn’t allow the girls to take off their shoes, I tried not to notice how the rooms were chopped up, designated for certain purposes, as if Ladymint already knew what was best for me, I tried to push the resentment out of my mind, and unpacked.

  I argued with myself: I like things open ended. I don’t like people or even houses making decisions for me. That way anything is possible and I can always leave if I don’t like it.

  I argued with myself a lot that day. I realized what the house would do to me: It will make me look into rooms to find Anna and Paula: a frustrating search. Especially if they’re in the basement or upstairs.

  Furthermore, the house said: A bedroom upstairs must remain a bedroom. The living room must be a living room, where else to put the living room furniture? Anyways, it is the only room big enough for the large couch.

  I argued back: All I need is one room. Size doesn’t matter. I stared down the stairs to the basement at the lurid carpet: green, orange, and brown, my eyes already hurting from too much visual noise, like static on a radio station.

  I said: You are not a Deaf house. You are not going to make living with deafness any easier for me.

  I watched my parents and my friends, who were carrying boxes and bags from the truck, sweating profusely on this October day, trusting that I had made good decisions, that I would finally settle down for many years, and I promised them silently: I will never move again and I will make peace with this house that is not for me.

  I pause, holding The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in my hands, Anna and Paula leaning heavily on my shoulders. We’re lying in my bed, pushed up against the window, my feather duvet is drawn up closely about our necks to protect ourselves from the winter night that always seems to seep through the window next to the bed. I hear a wild, shrieking noise. I smile to myself: I know what that noise is and where it’s coming from. I am tired. And I had too much coffee today. And I scarfed down that bag of chips after work. Too much salt. The shrieking goes on and I realize: It’s r
ather interesting, how my brain has the capacity to generate that variation in internal noise inside my ears.

  Anna says: “Mom, that’s weird.” I think: She means Aslan.

  I explain: “Well, it’s a paradox. Aslan isn’t safe, but he is good. Life is full of paradoxes like that. You know, two things that are opposite but somehow they work together.”

  Anna says: “No, Mom, the noise. That howling noise. Do you hear it? It’s so spooky.”

  I listen again. I ask her: “Where is it coming from?”

  She says: “I think it’s near the window.”

  The window is a square of Prussian blue. I had heard this before, and ran into my parents’ bedroom screaming about a ghost rattling and howling in my room. I wanted my mother to tell me that it was all inside my head and I could go back to sleep. Instead she led me to the window and placed my hand on the cold glass.

  “Your hearing aid is on, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but I still hear noises inside my head, even with my hearing aid on.”

  “Well, what you are hearing is real. When there is a strong wind, it rattles the panes, especially if the window is old.”

  Anna throws her arm across my neck, “I wish that noise would go away. It’s so creepy.”

  I turn on the night-lamp, “Shhh, it’s just a strong wind. Turn your hearing aids off.” I take out my own hearing aid and put it on the bedside table.

  The girls giggle at my old joke, and burrow down under the heavy duvet. Paula puts her hand on my throat, and Anna lays her head on my right shoulder. For a few moments, I feel the vibrations through their bodies. They’re talking to each other, jockeying for a position as to where they can put their hands, arms, and legs over my body. Soon I’m enclosed in the pen of their heavy and warm limbs as they sleep and I listen to the howling and shrieking in the house.

  I was not often home. I worked long hours as a coordinator for literacy and university at North West Regional College, leaving Anna and Paula with my sister in her home three blocks up the same street, and often with my parents in Wilkie, forty minutes’ drive away. I became the deaf-girl wonder, who travelled throughout the northwest and as far north as Makwa and Waterhen to learn how to foster literacy within aboriginal communities, and actually thought my hearing had improved, although my most recent audiograms all showed the same degree of hearing loss: profound deafness. But how could I explain my ability to attend meetings, to galvanize organizations into supporting the new programs, and my work with First Nations people who are so difficult to lipread?

  I told myself: You talk on the phone as smoothly as anyone. Until I realized it was familiar territory, that my contacts and I were talking about the same thing over and over again: that what I didn’t know, I looked up in articles, books, or reports, and what I didn’t hear, I cobbled together from reasonable guesses, and my degrees in arts, education, library science, and deaf education had me well prepared, as I received plaques, awards, kudos, cards, compliments, and a nod from my supervisor and the college president and was soon telling myself: It doesn’t matter anymore that you don’t understand what is being said at meetings and workshops. You are being applauded again and again for the work you are able to do.

  Between reports, programs, meetings, proposals, and more reports, I sprinkled crushed bay leaves by the baseboards to deter the ants from invading my cupboards; one morning Anna helped me chase a bat out of our front closet; late one evening, I was ankle deep in water, when the sewer backed up because the old trees had wrapped their roots around my pipes.

  I murmured to myself: Choking me.

  The house was not well insulated. During the hot days of summer, I packed picnic lunches and carried large coolers to Cochin, a half hour drive away, and only returned to Ladymint late at night, stepping past the tall evergreen trees and rattling my key in the sticky lock, as the house reached its arms toward us, mysterious and dark, then shuddered as I climbed the stairs, cradling sleeping Paula in my arms, urging Anna to follow me up the stairs, clutching her blanket. But Ladymint with its white wooden shutters on the kitchen window and creaking floors continued to demand things from me: The broken garage door! My father put in a new garage door. The back steps! My father built new ones. The linoleum floor in the kitchen! My father patched it. In a moment of appeasement, I brought all my remaining boxes from his garage in Wilkie. The look of relief on my parents’ faces was palpable.

  The furnace! It was late one spring evening. I stood in the cold basement, thinking, I could move again. But Joseph Naytowhow, a visiting storyteller working on a literacy project with me, trudged down the stairs to the basement and banged the furnace back to life. He lifted out a round plate from the furnace. Something I’d never seen before. He shrugged, and said: “It might last you the night, I don’t know.” He stepped away into the night.

  I stood at the screen door, envious of his vagabond ways, of how he was able to live in hotel rooms and with other people nearly every night of the year as he wandered Canada telling stories, and now I wanted his freedom — to move from community to community, to meet new people, to forge new relationships, and to shake the dust off my feet at the hint of trouble: no more fighting for recognition, for success, for admiration or approval, or even for people’s rights, and said, to myself, rather bitterly: Not even my own rights.

  Joseph’s drum beat through my dreams that night: We are all one people. We are all one nation. His kind eyes peered at me through a crowd of faces until I woke twisted in sheets and blankets, and weighted down by the limbs of my daughters, who had flung themselves over me, with my mind repeating over again:

  No more fighting. No more fighting for anything anymore.

  My parents became more sure I was going to stay in Ladymint. After all, it’d been two years already. I began to imagine planting flowers in the dirt bed outside the front window, began to save up for a deck wrapping around the entire house, sewed new pillow cushions for the couch, and planning new tiles for the kitchen and the bathroom. And then . . .

  PAULA:(Insistently) “I don’t want to live here anymore.”

  ABSENT MOTHER: “ . . . ” Paula began to run out of Ladymint after our arguments and roamed the streets near our house until I was frantic and found her at home again, curled up in the rocking chair, choking out between sobs: “I miss you, Mommy. You’re never here anymore.”

  Anna became more absent, too. She wanted to go to hockey games with her friends. She insisted she didn’t have any homework. I was uneasy. I talked to her teachers.

  INCESSANTLY PRAISING TEACHERS: “I wish everyone in my class were like Anna.”

  ARGUING ABSENT MOTHER: “Anna is a gifted child, and you must find something stimulating for her.”

  Nothing changed. Anna never seemed to have homework and she was too quiet.

  I hated the chopped up rooms in Ladymint: the badly worn front steps, the scrubby front yard, the tight staircase, and the worse thing was that I couldn’t see into the rooms, every noise was a phantom noise, I always wondered if they were real or imagined, because I could never see where the sounds were coming from, and I was spooked by the house’s incessant hums, buzzes, and howls during storms.

  A June evening. A group of friends and I listened to Joseph tell a story to my daughters about the Mosquito Man, then he took out his drum, and began to beat a slow rhythm, and instantly we rose, held hands, and moved sinuously in an improvised round dance, and as I wove my way through the dance, I began to see what others saw in me: A woman, smart, kind, funny, hard-working, single parent, with slightly defective speech but certainly nothing to worry about because she hears so well. But why wasn’t I celebrating my Deaf culture too? Why was I participating in a First Nations dance while being silent about my own language and culture? I watched Joseph settle my children for another story, and looked at my hands, arguing with myself: You haven’t signed to anyone in five years. But we’ve set down roots in North Battleford. And I no longer have difficulty living in Ladymint. And more insi
stently: God forbid, another move. And that was when everything began to change.

  Fall, and then winter. Paula, Anna and I are still reading together at night. The tall evergreen tree leans toward our window to listen. It’s a late February night. We reach the very last page of The Last Battle in the Narnia series. We are all quiet, until Paula says: “We have come to the end.”

  The forest of our legs falls heavy and I begin to move over Anna in order to back out of the bed, when Paula reaches for my throat, and says: “Mommy?”

  “Yes, Paula. I’m still here.” I settle myself between my daughters again.

  A few moments later, Paula is asleep. I finally lift myself over Anna’s still body, and move further away until I can feel the blanket covering only my shoulder and part of my hip. The rest of my back is cold and exposed. I slide my legs onto the floor until I come to a kneeling position. I ought to say a prayer. Instead, I smooth the blanket beside Anna’s shoulders, pushing the pillows into the warm space where I was lying.

  I enter my own bed. It’s an old rickety double bed, but I don’t care. I can’t hear it creak, sigh, or moan. I go into a dream, sad and heavy with the weight of Murray’s arms over my shoulders as I cover Paula’s bony hips with my own generous flesh and rest my hand on Anna’s back as she nestles against her sister. I’m naked in Murray’s arms, my back to him. We’re under a single white sheet, which, at intervals, Murray sends billowing over the four of us, a protective gesture. As the sheet settles, we lie fully awake, not moving, not speaking, aware of our breathing in tiny shallow hills. Words keeps forming in my throat and I want to speak, to define the small silences, but Murray tightens his arms around me, as if to bolt me into his body, and I soften and sleep.

  In the morning, I stand in my tiny white kitchen, staring at the marbled Arborite counter. The florescent light is flickering overhead. The dishwasher is humming. Outside, the day is already grey, the colour of dirty water.