The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  “I don’t have a connection with the girls anymore. You’ve taken them away from me,” and slam the door fiercely behind me and climb the stairs to the living room, where I sense the spirits of Murray’s former tenants, dulled by ghostly television sets and computer games, giving me a glance sideways. I feel like I’m walking underwater. Murray, Anna, and Paula are muddy blobs, walking away from me. I slump on the brown velvet couch in confusion. No one is listening to me in this house.

  The next day, Paula comes back from school for lunch, and announces: “Mom, they’re really bad.”

  “Who?”

  “The kids. Holy Family in North Battleford was a much better school. Here the kids don’t do anything. And the teachers yell all the time.”

  I offer: “Well, it is a tough neighborhood.”

  But my confusion from the previous evening is deepening to panic: They’re not safe. I’ve delivered them into the hands of a controlling father and a neighborhood full of drug addicts, juvenile delinquents, and thieves.

  I say: “ . . . ”

  In better moments at the supper table, I lean forward with pleasure into the conversations, when Murray talks about things I already know, like literature, stories, tidbits of history, footholds I can grip when navigating the conversation between the four of us before the incessant babbling brook of personal anecdotes, plans, problem solving starts up, leaving me to sit in a quiet pool, unable to derive any sense of the topic.

  This moment. Listening to Murray tell Paula and Anna the story of Demeter and Persephone, for Paula’s benefit, who complained about having to study Greek myths.

  “It’s about a mother who lost her daughter to Hades, the god of the underworld . . . ”

  Deaf Girl-Wonder treads water and says: “Those myths are very important . . . ”

  Paula, hearing everything, both said and unsaid, says: “Yeah, yeah.” She sighs and turns away.

  The Controlling Father Lover Companion and Family Everything glances at me, his eyebrows raised high, and swims on into: “Persephone starves in her grief and finally eats those pomegranate seeds underground when she is with Hades. Then her mother, Demeter, and Hades strike a deal. Persephone is to live with her mother above ground amongst the flowers, grasses, and trees, but underground with Hades, her husband, in winter.”

  Paula, who doesn’t catch the significance of this little doubleedged story, says: “Dad, this is not important. Who cares . . . ”

  But Deaf Girl-Wonder catches onto the topic and interrupts with: “I saw a picture of Persephone, white and cold, lying on a flat stone tomb, her warm breath rising against the raw and frozen earth walls of her home in Hades.”

  What I hear, however, is: Continued chatter that pushes Demeter and her Persephone down the river of conversation. I want to swim after that precious cargo that has been sent carelessly floating down the rapid waters. I want to shout: I am Demeter! I’ve lost my girls to Hades, the god of the underworld, who says I can only have them part of the time.

  What I say instead is: “ . . . ”

  I sit and glower at Murray, angry that he doesn’t understand the power of stories, that he doesn’t swim with me to rescue the story from oblivion.

  We move into another house in south Regina, far away from that brassy yellow kitchen in the north end. My new kitchen has original metal Youngstown cabinets, no dishwasher, and a badly scratched and pocked enamel sink, but there is hope in the flowers outside, and there is water nearby, though certainly not in the house, I note, but in man-made Wascana Lake, where we walk in the evenings, brushing past dogs, people, and bikes, water too dirty to swim in, sidewalks dotted with goose poop, dried and frozen in November, where three months later, after supper, we are walking along on a path of grey snow, from which I keep veering every few paces so I can see Murray’s hands and face, because how else am I going to have a conversation? I have to see what I hear.

  I sign-complain: “The girls are still not talking to me much. They still spend too much time with you. And no one has any time for me.”

  Murray signs back: “It’s important that Anna and Paula have their father.”

  With gloved hands, I sign: “It isn’t healthy for the girls to have an invisible mother.” I shiver as a cloud passes overhead and makes Murray’s face seem even greyer.

  Walking along, Murray signs: “Joanne, be honest, you are not invisible.”

  My woolen fingers sign: “Maybe that’s how I am supposed to be.”

  Murray bends his head down toward me and reaches out to hug me: “Joanne, you’re not invisible. You are important to us.”

  I think: If I can’t participate in any conversations, I can’t feel that I am of significance to others. I say: “ . . . ” My body says: I am something.

  I follow Murray’s gaze toward a small island standing sentinel, its shores dark with frost, in the middle of the Wascana Lake. A lone goose hisses nearby as it waddles past us. I push my striped scarf closer to my face to ward off the roar of the wind rushing in my hearing aid, and I think: No. I am just nothing.

  A broad back with white-tipped needles scoots into a bush dark and wet with snow. A porcupine? Wild oats scratch my legs as I bend down to the ground, smelling the damp and cold earth, the dead leaves, the decay of insects, and the rich loam beneath. Murray standing, motionless, looking out over the lake, up at the last geese of the season flying overhead, as I look downward, caught by the layer of red and yellow leaves frosted with snow, and then something red catches the corner of my eye, a poor creature barely camouflaged by snow and autumn leaves: a fox, peering out from the bottom of the bush.

  A call from somewhere within me, a high pitched whistle, a sound I am unable to ignore, reverberating in my ears, not the first time that tinnitus has intruded into the noise of everyday, now, but it’s so insistent now that it unleashes Fear, and Fear screams: Something calamitous is about to happen! I stop suddenly on the footpath.

  Murray. Bending down towards me. “Joanne, what’s wrong?”

  I am struggling in my mind for something to say because I’m too filled with nothingness, except for a vague fear. And other people’s thoughts or stories. I think: Stories.

  I begin. “Have you ever heard of fox wives?”

  The answer, faint: “Hmm.”

  Excitedly now: “I saw a picture of a fox wife. She’s wearing a navy blue kimono and her baby is lying on a cushion at her feet. She doesn’t even look at her son.”

  Again that: “Hmm.” The look in Murray’s eyes is vacant.

  In full flight: “There are two weird things about this picture. She has a tail that comes out from the edge of her skirt. She also has a cloth stuffed in her mouth, the ends of which she holds in her hand.”

  Murray asks: “Why the cloth?”

  Taking the time to explain: “It’s a cloth used for blotting ink. Apparently, this fox wife was a writer. The kitsune, that’s the Japanese word for foxes, were intellectuals.”

  Which earns an: “Ah.”

  Which I fill out with: “Some kind of a vampire. A fox wife. She married a twelfth century nobleman and bore him a child. He was besotted with her.”

  Which earns this: “The fox wife bites him and turns to other men for their blood?”

  Which I dispel with: “No, that’s a European vampire. She just disappears, leaving him with the baby.”

  Murray, drawing me out: “But what do kitsune want, if they don’t want blood?”

  Drawn out now, I say: “Words. They want to fill themselves with words. Knowledge. They drain people because they are so needy for ideas, knowledge, and words. A kitsune’s human lover or child will waste away because the kitsune is so demanding.”

  A sudden chill descends upon us. I think: It must be the sudden gust of the north wind. I say: “There’s more. I looked up the story. The baby son became very sick, to the point of dying. The father was distraught, to the point where he forgot to sow his rice fields. The tax collectors then demanded taxes from a field of weeds.”
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  “I don’t see the point of this.”

  “One morning, the husband wandered to his field, now really worried that his son was going to die. Then he noticed that his field had been planted and rice was flourishing. When he looked more closely, he discovered that the arrowroot weeds were growing upside down, with their roots exposed.”

  Murray nods politely and his steps become quicker.

  I hope to keep up with him on the snow-tracked path, until I have a clear enough view to say: “Wait, there’s more. The husband ran back home to tell his wife, and discovered her sleeping in bed, with her fox tail switching out from the covers.”

  “Joanne, this is very interesting, but I really don’t see the point of this story.”

  “But there’s more to it. The wife took the dying baby into her arms and she and her husband walked back out to the field again. Then with tears in her eyes, the fox wife handed the child over to her husband, waved her hand at the sky, and the sky grew dark and heavy, and in the lengthening shadows she disappeared.”

  Murray is silent as we finish our brisk walk back home. He stamps the snow off his feet before he enters the house.

  Me, at his large long back: “Don’t you see the point of the story? The child only recovers when the fox wife leaves the husband.”

  Murray shrugs. His eyes are narrow and cautious. “It’s just a story, Joanne. We have our own lives to live. How about some coffee now?”

  Not to be put off, I say: “But there’s something vampirish about deafness. We live off Hearing people, off their good will, because we can’t hear well enough to participate in anything, everything is so complicated all the time, you’d have to interpret everything for me if I were to be involved. I just live off you. And maybe, Anna and Paula would be better off . . . ”

  The Hearing man says: “You’re living in the Hearing world now. You aren’t in the Deaf community.”

  His profoundly deaf fox wife says: “But . . . ”

  Wearing his husband mask now, the Hearing man says: “Remember Myklebust, that psychiatrist who did research on deaf children during the fifties? He said something like, ‘Deaf people experience the world in a lesser way . . . are egocentric, paranoid . . . ’”

  MY MOTHER:“Deaf people can be so self-centred. Be sure you don’t ever get like that.”

  I sit in glum silence. Murray is reading the paper that he has sprawled over the scratched dining room table. I think: Murray is too calm, he must not care. I can hardly bring myself to look at him. I know my eyes are smudged with fatigue and my face is pasty white. Surely I am a loathsome creature. To be pitied.

  PITIABLE CREATURE: “Murray, this isn’t working.”

  MURRAY: “We made a commitment, we’re in this together.” He pours me a cup of coffee as we sit at the kitchen table. He extracts a section of the newspaper from the pile on table.

  PITIABLE CREATURE:(Insists): “But I’m lonelier now than ever. You spend all your time with the girls and we don’t do anything together.”

  Murray pauses from his paper, and muses aloud: “It’s the myth of North Battleford, isn’t it? You and the girls, in that house, surrounded by your family, how things were so much better then, you weren’t even around Deaf people there, either; somehow you managed to convince yourself that you were Hearing.”

  PROUD (BUT STILL PITIABLE) CREATURE: “Well, it’s true, life was better then. I’m losing the girls now, they don’t talk to me anymore, and they always talk to you.”

  Murray’s signs are heavy and slow, his large fingers barely able to fully make the hand shapes, these hand shapes: “Look, Joanne, I’m so fortunate to have you, Anna, and Paula back with me again. You need to have some confidence that we can do this.”

  Silence.

  Silence. That evening, Murray slides behind me in our bed. He holds me tight. I turn toward him, my nightgown a thin cotton shift twisted in ropes underneath me, exasperated, I pull it off, and Murray begins to tap on my body with his large fingers, a Morse code on my skin: I am surprised I know what it means. A panic rises in me, my ears roar with tinnitus, while the tapping becomes insistent, it increases in intensity, this is a language I cannot pretend not to hear or understand. I bury my nose in the hairs on Murray’s chest while I explore the crevices and folds of his body with trembling fingers. I find a mole, a knotted muscle, and fine hairs, adjusting the cartography of his body in my head.

  Later I wake in the middle of the night. I look over the twisted sheets, the thrown pillows and the humped blankets. Doubt assails me. Is it worth having a Hearing husband, to go through the anxiety of not knowing what he will say in the dark, in the car, in the rain, in the middle of the night with the lamp turned off, in the middle of an accident, or a stirring moment? Or worse, having to endure long hours of boredom at family and social gatherings?

  I answer myself: Books are more satisfying. I’d rather read words that remain bolted to a page instead of flying off in fragments from a person’s mouth.

  What I don’t want to see: the clumsiness in Murray’s fingers, the unusual strain on his wrists as he chokes out the hand shapes. Doing all that for me.

  Early light is creeping around the edges of the bedroom curtains. No. It is only the moon sliding through the slats of the window blinds. I kick the covers and Murray stirs slightly. I’m hungry and I rise, snatching Jane Eyre from the bedside table.

  Jane Eyre bedecks herself in a white lace veil, a blushing bride ready for church, unaware that Rochester already has a mad wife in the attic. The wedding ceremony is interrupted by the one living relative of the mad wife. Humiliated, Jane flees across the moors, lugging an abominably heavy suitcase, and collapsing in a yard by a farmer’s pigpen. She eats the pig slop, and is found huddled against the door of a manor house. She has returned to her beginnings: an orphan, penniless, without family or friends; she has reached too high. Despite her intelligence and uncommon good sense, she doesn’t know her place. I think: I too, have returned to the Hearing world, and I too don’t know my place, living with a Hearing man, having Hearing children.

  Doubt says: Maybe you should just starve yourself to death.

  The moon shines through the kitchen window as I stand waiting for the kettle to come to a full boil, the steam pasting itself against the glass pane; over the top of the mist, the sky is lit by the city’s lights. When my tea is ready, I sit at the table and pick up Jane Eyre. I am playing Bible roulette with this book, but I must find out what to do. I stab a finger on a page, and I read: “All says I am wicked, and perhaps I might be so: what thoughts had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death?”

  I slam the book shut.

  I make a sandwich.

  I pick at it.

  I think: There’s a mad wife somewhere in this house. It’s a lurid thought, a melodramatic device from Gothic novels, but it has settled in me like a fishhook. Soon the shadows in the kitchen crowd around me and the moonlight becomes a veil ready for Jane’s wedding ceremony the next day, then I shake my head, and say, to myself, I should not identify this closely with a Bronte heroine. It’s unhealthy.

  I slip back into bed, wondering whether I can warm my cold feet on Murray’s. I tuck myself in backwards between his head and his knees. But the mad wife has come along with me. She says, between us: Why must I always rear up like a skittish horse when hearing people invite me into conversation and then their mumbling unplugs me without warning? Why can’t I attach to them when they want so much for me to belong to them? Murray stirs in his sleep, his body is like an iron pot- bellied stove. There are flames all around me now, licking at the edges of my tightly shut eyes.

  I think: Fox wives like to burn houses.

  JOANNE FOX WIFE:(Cackles maniacally) “ . . . !”

  Five

  ON AN EARLY JULY MORNING, MURRAY comes to me with a newspaper in his hand and points to an advertisement.

  Teacher of the deaf position . . . Regina Public School system . . .

  I counter: “No way.”
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  It’s been fifteen years since I last worked as a teacher of the Deaf. Since the closure of the R.J.D. Williams Provincial School for the Deaf in 1991, school boards have been responsible for educating deaf and hard-of-hearing, relying on special education teachers to address their needs and rarely hiring teachers of the deaf, using educational assistants with mostly no more than one or two years of postsecondary education and little formal training in deaf education or even sign language. Only the public and separate school boards in Regina and Saskatoon hire teachers of the deaf. Those positions have long been filled. I can’t believe that this opportunity has come at last, after so many years of taking on jobs that didn’t have much to do with deaf education, but now I’m not so sure I want this job, even though the opportunity will likely not appear again for another decade.

  I buy myself time. “But they’re going to want me to do the mainstreaming thing.”

  “Well, you were mainstreamed for all of your education.”

  I stall some more: “Yeah, well, it’s a pretty word. Everyone wants the deaf to be part of one great happy family, but no one is willing to do the work of integrating them.”

  “Apply anyway. It’s so much better than the job you have now.”

  I say: “ . . . ”

  He’s right. I’m miserable with my instructional design job at SIAST, endlessly cutting and pasting content from instructors’ notes into web pages. A secretarial job.

  And: Murray knows what I do best.

  And how did he know? I met Murray for the first time in 1987. R.J.D. Williams School. He had been working there for five years. I reported to him as a practicum student, fresh from the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. On a dark February morning, we were in his science laboratory, with two Deaf boys, who were studying magnetism. At first our conversation included the boys.

  The dark-haired one, curious, signed with his slender fingers, his eyebrows dark and heavy in thought: “Does your family sign?”

  My fingers stuttered: “Actually no. We’ve all gotten along without it.”