The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  MRS. MOM: “That’s just teenage stuff.”

  Murray throws up his hands in exasperation.

  PAULA AND ANNA’S MOM: “They’re not telling you anything, because they don’t trust you. You’ve been away from them for nine years.”

  PITIABLE DEAF WOMAN:(Adds) “And they’re not talking to me because I’m Deaf.”

  MURRAY TEACHER THERAPIST: “Many teenagers try to be adults without learning the skills and responsibilities.”

  I claw the afghan off my body, thinking: There are to be only harsh solutions to this business of being Deaf in the Hearing world. Either I shut up, put up, take all responsibility for communication breakdowns, relying on my defective hearing to be a part of things and smile through it all, or I become a crusty, angry bitter woman who has found the great promise of being able to speak and hear to be profoundly lacking, no delicacy is possible with this, no gentle bursting of flowers, words, or shoots of green leaves, and I say: “I just want to be connected, I don’t care how, I don’t care if I have to use sign or speech, I just want to be close to someone without being yanked away by deafness.”

  MR. HEARING WITH THE LAST WORD: “But you don’t seem to try very hard to be close to anyone. You know that I thought you were married to someone else all those years, your lawyer put you down as being married on our court papers, that’s why I didn’t come around, I thought you wanted me out of your life, so don’t blame me if you didn’t bother to proofread what your lawyer wrote.”

  Murray’s large bulk throws a shadow over me. Through it, he softens and says: “That’s in the past. We can’t do anything about it. We need to do what’s right for the girls now.”

  I say: “I need sign language with the girls. For God’s sake, Murray, they’re going to think it’s a bloody hobby and not worth the time, because they can communicate with me just fine, one on one.”

  He offers: “Then give them time to understand your deafness.”

  FOX WIFE WITH THE LAST WORD: “What about us? The girls won’t trust you until I can trust you. If you know it all, know everything that’s going on with the girls and hear everything they say, then what do I have to offer them?”

  Jane Eyre doesn’t marry Rochester until he is sufficiently humiliated. And, our daughters don’t sign much. I can only communicate to them through speech and residual hearing. Murray signs passably, to me, but speaks to the girls. There are two languages, and English is the primary one. This is a house of Babel. Perhaps I should just adapt. Let Murray do all the thinking, talking, and giving. He has more information than I do. I have sign language, but I can’t even immerse my family in the Deaf culture or the Deaf community because the community in Regina is dying. There’s not much going on. Darts in a bar once a week. The yearly banquet. It wouldn’t be fair to expect teenagers to abandon their social lives to come to whist games and socialize with old Deaf people.

  I look at the foot of our marriage bed. At the four or five baskets of clean laundry. At the quilt nailed over the window because I am not sure if I want curtains, not sure if I want to stay. I want a Deaf house. Where sign and speech are not wasted. The two flowing back and forth into each other. Driven by silences. But there is a different silence that belongs in neither place, Deaf or Hearing. The silence that suggests tombs, churchyards, and a letting go after great pain. I don’t want even want to think about the strange secret garden at the back of my classroom with its perennials, growing with no effort from a gardener, in silence.

  Six

  THE RESOURCE ROOM WITH ITS OLD furniture, fraying carpet, fluorescent lighting, and ill-fitting curtains is an easy place, even in its shabbiness, reminiscent of a cabin at a lake. In the mornings, I am relieved as I enter the classroom at seven thirty, sink into my old velvet plush chair, and drink coffee while I survey my domain, but at the end of each day I have to walk down the great school hall toward the double doors where Murray is waiting for me in our car. Today, as we speed on Ring Road toward our house in the pelting rain, I suddenly wish that our house had an indoor swimming pool, and think: Might as well let water into the house. I can’t worry about everything.

  He is seventeen years old. Already a month of classes has gone by and he’s attended less than half the semester. He’s six feet tall, First Nations, with sharp black eyes that brim with tears, as he struggles, “I hate school. I don’t want to have to take Grade Ten English for the third time.”

  Earlier that day:

  LISA: “Nolan doesn’t take care to sign carefully and his fingerspelling is atrocious. He can’t spell.”

  MS. WEBER: “I wonder. Why can’t he pay attention to your interpreting?”

  LISA: “He pays attention just fine.”

  SOPHIE: “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t understand the signed English we’ve been using.”

  LISA:(Her mouth tightening) “He just doesn’t pay attention.”

  MS. WEBER: “At any rate, he has missed school four days this week.”

  LISA: “He often goes home to sleep during noon hours and just doesn’t come back. He doesn’t realize that all he has to do is show up and he’ll pass. His English teacher promised him that if he showed up during the last week of classes last spring, he’d pass that class. Of course, he stayed home.” She shakes her head and stoops to pick up her sheaf of papers from her desk before heading out the door.

  I stare at the closed door. I’ve seen Lisa somewhere before. Long ago.

  I think: “—?”

  Then I remember: The woman with the small dog in her arms! The house party after the presentation in Regina. The one who must have everything she wants.

  MS. WEBER: “Sophie, what do you know about Lisa?”

  SOPHIE: “She has a deaf son, Luke. Actually, he’s her sister’s son. Her sister got multiple sclerosis and Lisa took him in.”

  MS. WEBER: “And they use Signed English, of course.”

  SOPHIE: “Well, she wasn’t popular with the Deaf community.”

  MS. WEBER: “ . . . ”

  SOPHIE: “The school board was desperate back then. She is a single mother, very smart, worked hard to set up the program even though she had no university education or formal training. She learned sign language when Luke was about seven or eight after trying to teach him speech.”

  MS. WEBER: “Well, that’s a bit late in the game. Learning languages is more difficult after seven.”

  SOPHIE: “But she wanted her son to be oral. She tried so hard.” Silence. “Then she trained other interpreters.”

  MS. WEBER: “But then they relied on her, a Hearing person, to train and evaluate other Hearing interpreters. There were Deaf parents in that program. What about them?”

  SOPHIE: “They were Deaf.”

  MS. WEBER: “I know them. They both have university degrees from Gallaudet.”

  SOPHIE: “Doesn’t matter how smart and educated they were.” Sophie’s signs are blunt and hard. “Lisa won every battle. They had no power.”

  I have seen or heard of this before, these familiar scenarios now tumbling furiously into my brain like children smashing into each other at the end of a waterslide: mothers interpreting for their deaf children at school, mothers learning sign language from books or videos while avoiding Deaf adults, mothers advising school boards, mothers sitting with their deaf adult children at job interviews, and . . .

  I startle out of my reverie: Her deaf son who ran around ignoring me. “I’ve heard about him in the Deaf community.” The Deaf shook their heads about him, wondering why he was not allowed to join them, to participate in their curling teams, to join the storytelling at Deaf socials, to travel with them across Canada to the Deaf Olympics.

  Sophie nods: “Lisa wouldn’t let him be involved at all with the Deaf. Even though he can’t speak at all, and needs to sign, he can’t be with the Deaf.”

  I remonstrate: “That’s ridiculous, he is an adult now, isn’t he?”

  The door bursts open. Melissa scowls as she crosses the room and throws her books on the tabl
e with a resounding thump. Lisa follows and seats herself at her desk, preparing to sort her papers. Melissa slumps in her chair, raises her foot and crashes it on another chair.

  MELISSA: “I feel like a freak. They stare at me. I’m not going back to class.”

  JW: “Well, you are a freak in this place.”

  Lisa rises from her chair, her eyes round in alarm. She stands behind Melissa, her face stiff in uncertainty.

  LISA: “What Melissa means is . . . ”

  JW: “I . . . know . . . what . . . she . . . means. Melissa, there is a place in this world where you don’t have to feel like a freak. You don’t know ASL, so I’m going to help you along. Watch me carefully. I won’t sign the way you’re used to.”

  I drop the initials in my signing — those stupid, tight little handshapes I’ve been struggling to remember. Instead my lips blow, chuff, and tighten into a flat line. I perform the actions accompanied by emotions, raw and unrestrained, a theatre where there is no ambiguity in the body’s language. Blunt. An edge. Where one is sure to fall or cut oneself. This theatre contains spaces, vast regions, small claustrophobic boxes, or hilly terrain, or a map of the body.

  Melissa laughs outright.

  I stop short. I seldom hear laughter like that in my classroom. Even Nolan can’t laugh.

  I look up at the staff interpreters who appear shocked at my use of this contraband sign language. Lisa comes to stand beside Melissa, performing her signs in the awkward stiff manner of the Hearing. She makes the sign for “deaf,” swooping her index finger from her ear to her mouth in an awkward, frozen semicircle.

  I think: She is seeing this sign as the word is printed on a page.

  The Hearing sign in frozen, stiff handshapes, because then the signs are like words arranged on a page. This is the way the Hearing like it: words that have crystalline shapes, which are finite.

  LISA: “You look Deaf. Your face is different.”

  MS. WEBER: “It’s a part of me, I guess.” I think: I haven’t signed in American Sign Language for nearly five years with the Deaf community, but sign lives in my muscles and the sinews of my hands, arms, and face. It is roused out of its hibernation. English erodes around it.

  MELISSA: “Can we do more of that?”

  JW: “Not now. Maybe tomorrow. We have to finish your homework.”

  I think: My short outburst has been enough to plant a seed in Melissa’s mind and suspicion in Lisa’s. But now I know what I must do with Nolan.

  Sophie smiles behind Lisa’s back when I take Nolan to the conference room across the hall.

  Nolan settles into a black leather chair, his eyes blinking in the dim light.

  “What if I taught you English myself?” I ask him, “That way, you stay in the resource room. No interpreter. We’ll use ASL. After all, I’m an English teacher and have an honours degree in English literature.”

  Nolan swallows hard and nods.

  The next day, Lisa says: “He’ll need to know the literary devices, the elements of the short story, and how to write essays. English language.”

  I nod quietly.

  I think: Language of the eyes.

  I was five years old and the sun was shining. I plodded down two flights of stairs and rushed out the apartment building and across the street to the paddling pool. It was crowded, and as I gathered from the open mouths of the children splashing everywhere, very noisy. My mother had no concerns about me drowning; she stayed at home in our apartment across the street while my baby sister napped.

  She warned: “You must be extra careful because you won’t have your hearing aid on.”

  I took my hearing aid out. In silence, I swung a towel over my shoulders and padded barefoot across the hot asphalt road. Soon I was swimming among the ankles of the swimmers, dodging their steps while I blew bubbles around their feet, the water carrying me to a place of another silence, far away from people, cradling me in its arms, whispering: Come to me. You are safe from the Hearing. I am taking you to a place where there are no half noises, no muffled sounds, and no broken sentences or phrases, nobody is watching you. I dreamed in that underwater place of leg forests and fish girls and bubbles scurrying past my eyes, then out of the pool, I dreamed as I walked across the street, until a car stopped within inches of me, and a man jumped out. I couldn’t hear him, but I saw how the anger twisted his mouth, his wild gesticulations, and watched how he slammed the door to drive away in his car. I stood in the middle of the road, stricken, thinking: I’ve made someone angry, so angry because I am walking somewhere in a dream, in that underwater place where deafness doesn’t matter, but now I deserve to die, that man seems to say so. I rushed up the stairs to our apartment.

  I said: “Mama, ak see dent. I die.”

  My mother said: “No, you are all right. I watched from the window. But you weren’t looking, it’s a good thing he saw you.”

  She hugged me. But I lay down on our chesterfield.

  I said: “I die.”

  My mother said: “No, you won’t. The man . . . angry. He wants you to . . . ”

  But I was shaking so badly I couldn’t hear the rest of her words. I lay on the couch, watching her move about in the small kitchenette. Then I tasted blood in my mouth. I thought: I am being punished for leaving the water place, and for not looking both ways on the land, for not trying hard enough, for dreaming. I will die. I tried to focus, but my eyes hurt with chlorine. My mother walked slowly in the small kitchen, as if she was underwater too. Her face appeared muddy before my chlorine eyes. Soon, her body became a grey, shapeless, insignificant blob. I was in that underwater place, pulling my favourite blanket, the leopard spotted one, up to my face, thinking: Why is the man making me die? How can his anger reach inside of me and make my mouth bleed? I watched, my eyes just above the blanket, and I thought: Mama cannot save me, she doesn’t know what really happened and I can’t tell her because she thinks she knows. I want to go back to the pool. I want to be underwater. If my mother is going to be grey and shapeless like her words, I want to be back in the water, where I don’t have to hear anything anyway. But she came to me with a wet facecloth, and brushed my lips with it. Then she reached inside my mouth with her finger and pulled out my tooth. I looked at the blood smeared across the back of my hand, and at my mother’s kind eyes and her smile. Everything was so clear again. Except I still didn’t know how that angry man made my tooth come out.

  My mother gave me a large green ledger folder filled with letters from the John Tracy Clinic and a small green journal filled with her observations of my early progress. There are copies of tests on my hearing, intelligence, speech, and language, under the age of five. The papers have faded over time: uneven, typewritten. My mother’s journal entries range from detailed notes to hastily scribbled lists of words I’ve mastered. She has even entered diacritical notations of my speech in order to remember just how I’ve pronounced a word. In the back of the green scribbler, she has to-do lists to approximate the Montessori training that she knows she cannot fully provide. I shuffle the papers in my hands, searching for a word or a phrase, something that might indicate why or how I cannot be close to my husband and daughters, some malfunctioning of the brain, perhaps, some deep-seated personality disorder, or just a difficult temperament, but the letters and tests from the John Tracy Clinic are sunny. I sift through the exchange of letters between my mother and the speech pathologist at the clinic. She carefully explains the etiology of my hearing loss, how and where I got my first hearing aid, and how I, at the age of three, am not making any words except “up”. And how the speech pathologist says nothing much except keep working on it. Keep on keeping on. Amongst all my mother’s detailed descriptions of my speech and language development, I pause at these words:

  Our more immediate concern at this point is her drinking apple juice to the exclusion of other foods. We can’t seem to persuade her to eat any other foods or to drink milk or even water. Is it typical of deaf children to exercise such restrictions in their diet?<
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  Otherwise, there is no vein of sadness, frustration, or despair. Every professional assures my parents that my future is bright.

  The Japanese houses I’ve been researching in the library are famous for their judicious use of space, the genkan, for instance, an entrance through which one must remove their shoes, put on slippers, and walk through a set of short curtains brushing the shoulders, the world of the street or the wharf left behind. Genkan, the preparation for entry into a new world. A Japanese house is measured out in mats, according to traditional sized mats used under the feet, the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet along one side of the house toward the back, while the i-ma or the living space, is enveloped by rouka, long wooden passages alongside the house, and any of the rooms can be used for any purpose, just like I can use the space in front of me to represent anything in sign language: a mountain, a house, a road, open sea, or even the inside of an engine. In Japan, people sleep, eat, converse, study, and work in the i-ma in any way, there is more than one room for baths, a toilet room, a sink room, and a room with a tub. Washing with water is ritualistic, ceremonial even, one must wash hands from a spout in the corner of the toilet room after squatting over a hole, then wash hands in the sink, then wash the body with a wet cloth from a bowl of water in the sink room, and finally one must draw water from a heater — usually with pails — and fill a tub in the room, soak, and watch water ripple out from one’s body. I think: The Japanese have made the use of water into a ritual form as it is the lifeblood of the house, a singular vein running throughout the spine. And I am worried about keeping water out. All I need to do is keep water in the right places! I strike myself lightly on my head. In the Japanese home, every thud, footstep, bang, and accidental clash of teacups has a measured meaning. People with no privacy must communicate with the lifted eyebrow as soon as one’s back is turned. Swiping the air with index fingers, peeking around a sliding door, watching the shadows through a screen. Less is spoken, more is animated, presented to the eye if one is careful and observant. In other words, sign language! I feel a growing sense of excitement. This will be my Deaf House. An ecosystem of silences. An economy of words and signs in which nothing is wasted.