The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

Casey shrugs.

  I hold the yardstick under my arm and grimace. I hook my finger into an imaginary trigger.

  “Okay, Casey.” Steely-eyed, I raise the yardstick at her: “What am I doing?” I aim it at her. Casey’s eyes widen. I ask: “What is this, Casey? What do you think this is?”

  Casey blurts: “Da gun, see wan him as he come dun ta roa.” She giggles, then stops, her hand over her mouth.

  I stop too, wondering if I haven’t gone too far in renewing the violence they can’t seem to get enough of in their own lives.

  Lisa signs to me sans voice: “Now, you’ll have to go back and teach this in the way her English teacher does. You have to find all the literary devices in the poem.”

  I sign: “Not today.” I show her my back. I turn to Casey and ask: “Why don’t you write me a paragraph telling me how you think Bess feels being tied up to the bedpost?”

  Casey nods quietly, and takes out a sheet of foolscap from her binder.

  Lisa lobs a grenade: “No, that’s not the assignment from her English teacher.”

  I lob back: “I am doing just one unit with her. As Casey isn’t doing well in English, she doesn’t comprehend the material.”

  Lisa gets down to it: “But what will I do?”

  I get down to it: “Work with me here.”

  Lisa purses her lips and turns away.

  I sink into my chair, my cheeks burning with anger. Why is Lisa so upset about this new arrangement? Can’t anyone see that Casey and her sister have been easy victims because of their deafness? Who is going to give them a voice to say what really happened?

  Then it dawns on me: Lisa is worried. About not being visible in the rest of the school. About her job becoming obsolete as I pull more and more kids out of their English classes to deliver the material myself.

  I argue with myself: Can’t she see that I’m doing more than just teaching?

  Myself: But she is hired to interpret and take notes. If she isn’t in the classrooms out there, how can she keep her job?

  I think: But if Casey doesn’t talk about what really happened, how can she think about what’s happened?

  I’d just turned six. My mother insisted that I write in a diary. Every day. One or two sentences about what had happened. Today.

  Why? Everyone already knows. Why do I have to write it down? Why do I have to remember anything that has happened to me?

  The real reason soon emerged. The diary became a battlefield over grammar, for verbs in past and present tenses. My mother wanted to fight this war, but I was a most reluctant soldier, only ferocious when provoked. After she changed my sentences, I waited until she turned her back, then erased her firm printing and slipped in my own phrase: “I jumping on box.” My mother came back and erased it again. She demanded that I write it properly. I was grateful when we forgot the diary at the end of my First Grade year, but I picked it up a couple of years later, and wrote whole paragraphs in the remaining blank pages: grammatically perfect paragraphs; detailed descriptions of who I was with, what I wore, what I did, even the smell of the yellow vinyl purse I got on the day my father took me to The Sound of Music.

  I flipped through the pages. There was the memory of my friend Margie and I jumping inside the large cardboard box in our living room and landing on the carpet.

  I realized: The diary gave me memory.

  At age seven, I was allowed to go swimming at our local pool in the summers with my best friend Laura, or by myself, at least three times a day, for swimming lessons in the morning, for the afternoon swim, water ballet afterwards, and, on some days, speed swimming, and for the evening swim until the pool closed at nine o’clock. I didn’t wear my hearing aid for most of the day, because I was so happy in that silent place, that said that the only thing that was real was me. All the communication I needed was in the wet, slick bodies of children bouncing around me, swimming between feet on the concrete pool floor, ripping off the swimming trunks of the boys I liked, shocked at the paleness of their bums in contrast to their sun-burned bodies, and all that time in the water did not consist of the past, present, and future. Water took me to a place outside of time, toward a destination that I did not know. Time-water ran in my ears when I tried to finish hearing what my parents said before they went on to another topic at supper. I didn’t know if I’d finished hearing what a person was saying or whether I’d started a new path, gathering vowels just as a river gathers twigs, leaves, pebbles as it rushes headlong to a lake.

  Green Journal

  I’m relieved that we don’t have to move to Saskatoon after all. I don’t want to enroll Joanne in that new special class for the hearing impaired in the Saskatoon Public School system. Dr. Buckwold is so impressed with her progress, and says that Joanne got the best possible education in preparation for entry into a regular school. We even took courses again at Minot during June and July, just to make sure we’d done all we could to prepare her for Grade Two. All the testing at Minot in June confirms that she’s nearly on par with her peers. I now drive Joanne to a speech therapist in Unity every Wednesday in lieu of art class. Mrs. Burrill has Joanne reading a lot of poetry out loud. It’s strange to hear Joanne practice reading poetry.

  Murray’s son Ben phones us one evening to say that he’d been in the basement of our house earlier that afternoon to pick up some boxes he’d left there.

  “Everything is soaked, Dad. You and Joanne better go down and check.”

  I never visit this room in our house. It’s full of old furniture, and Murray’s tools, which he forgets to put away, old paint cans, rags, computer magazines, vinyl records stacked on shelves of a bookcase, a mattress leaning against the wall.

  I complain as I bag mouldy cardboard: “Where is all this water coming from?” Murray tips a heavy bookshelf on its side. Mould is already growing on the bottom shelf.

  How long has the water been sitting in the room? How could we have missed it? We’ve been so busy. The girls sang at three concerts this week, and Anna acted in the school play.

  Murray grunts as he drags the wet mattress across the floor: “The walls aren’t wet. I think it’s coming up through the floor.”

  “You mean there’s some sort of an underground cavern somewhere?”

  “There must be.” He leans the mattress against the wall

  “It’s not the sewer, is it?” I speak to his back.

  Murray turns around. “No, the water is clean.”

  I think: Clean enough to swim in.

  Shadows began to spook me in the middle of the night. I woke up with a start at four o’clock in the morning, thoughts going round and round in my head like a manic carousel, Caroline, the girl I met in Regina when I was twelve, now the gorilla in Stranger at Green Knowe, who grunted and lowered herself to the floor, her buttocks firmly planted in the corner, her eyes large and sad as if to contain every grief that clung to the straw scattered across the floor, Green Knowe whispered its secrets to me: To live in this house, you must endure many hours of boredom, pretend to understand, lest you make others uncomfortable with your constant need to know everything that is going on. You can’t know everything and no one will ever know what happened to you. You’ll live with fragments, bits and pieces of things, puzzling over them long after everyone has said goodbye and gone home. A certain rage will move in you like sludge trying to move through blocked pipes, but you won’t know about any of these feelings because you’ll be frozen, like Judas in Dante’s hell, embedded in a lake of ice, shards of ice in your eyeballs so you can’t look at anything with interest anymore, and the people who live with you will know nothing of this. You’ve been relegated to the attic, forced to sit on newspaper, and eat bananas and fruits, and furtively roam the neighbourhood in the night.

  Green Journal

  Joanne is beginning to have difficulty, now that she has entered the upper elementary grades. She misses a lot of school. Her last report card indicates that she was sick for a total of one month of school (on and off), because of all those
stomach aches. I have no idea about why she keeps having stomach aches, or the whole lost month. Simply no idea, since I am so busy looking after her sister Ruth, and then David, who takes so much out of me, he is so stubborn. Her marks have plummeted, even math. Fractions, decimals, percentages, geometry. She wants to get her ears pierced. We say no, but she keeps badgering us about it. We dress her in the nicest clothes, buy her the best of everything. But pierced ears? Joanne says that every girl in her class has them. I hope that Joanne will want to stand apart from such silliness, but she can’t get the notion out of her head. She even writes “pierced earrings” on our grocery shopping list. We know that it’s a sort of membership requirement for Joanne, if she wants to belong to a certain group of girls, but it’ll take much more than pierced ears for her to belong to anyone.

  I wonder if she notices that her friends don’t come around anymore. I asked Sue yesterday about why her daughter Laura doesn’t visit. Sue hemmed and hawed and said something about how Joanne can’t keep up with the communication. Prepubescent girls just want to talk.

  Lisa interrupts my session with Nolan as I am in a passage from the short story, “Penny in the Dust”. She says: “You’re going too deep. You don’t need to explain that much.”

  I stand still, shocked.

  Nolan looks away, embarrassed.

  I think: But this is why I am using ASL with Nolan, to get at the deeper meanings that Signed English can never touch.

  I’ve seen Lisa’s Signed English interpreting and I can’t understand much of it, even though she delivers it in beautifully formed handshapes and in an easy rhythm. Nolan carefully hides his inattention at her bowdlerized explanations, rushed concepts, and assumptions of certain English idioms and phrases.

  I begin to sit morosely in coffee houses in the evenings, rushing out of the house without explanation, without indicating when I’ll be back, even darkly hinting that I might not even come back.

  In my classroom, I continue to worry about Andy and Casey. I fuss over them and rant to Sophie about how the twins will not make their own appointments by telephone, because they refuse to use a teletypewriter that will allow them to read what the other person says to them. Instead they will text their mother, instructing her to make an appointment with the doctor. They will not take buses around the city. They rely on family members and the boyfriend of the week to drive them. They will not use an fm system to augment their cochlear implants, insisting that they hear everything just fine, then they rely on me to reteach the material that was covered in scheduled classes. Then they begin to skip classes, until I offer to teach those classes in my own room, then they come every day, because they now can ask questions and ask for clarification, but they have increasingly insulated themselves from the Hearing world. I throw my books on to my desk with a bang.

  Sophie signs: “They are not our children.”

  “But their parents think that Andy and Casey are just fine. Remember, those girls can have basic conversations with anyone, and all you need is about five hundred words for that. That’s all most people can see when talking to a deaf or hard-of-hearing person. People are satisfied with so little.”

  Sophie signs: “No one wants to know what we know. Nobody asks us what we see in those kids.” She turns back to her herbalist manual.

  I nod, morose, inconsolable, and turn to the garden outside my window. There’s a dirty rust stain bleeding down one of the walls forming the enclosure. I haven’t seen that before. How can I expect to see things if I don’t look closely enough?

  Then Casey flings the door open to the classroom, tears streaming down her face.

  She says: “Something’s wrong with Andy. She’s in the bathroom.”

  She’s lying on her back in the girls’ bathroom, with a tea towel wrapped around her wrist. I shout: “Andy, wake up!” I pat her face lightly and shake her shoulders. Casey is sobbing on the other side of her.

  I shout again: “Wake up!” I tap Andy’s cheeks, arms, and hands insistently, while a plan is unfolding in my head. I know that the two school counsellors are away today, that their offices are empty and locked up on the second floor.

  I tell Casey: “Go get Mrs. Wapass. She’s in the Resource Room.” I think: Sophie will comfort her while I try to keep Andy from slipping away from me.

  Sophie comes back, her face draining as she sees me kneeling beside Andy on the floor.

  I give orders: “Go call 911. And take Casey back into our room, so she’ll be close by for questioning when the ambulance comes.”

  Andy remains passive as I increase the volume in my voice. “Andy, listen to me, it’s Ms. Weber, you must wake up.” I unwrap the tea towel around her wrist but there’s very little blood on it. I look for the cut, it is near her knuckle. A small, insignificant cut.

  It seems I am alone, interminably. A secretary comes into the bathroom to see what’s wrong.

  I say: “Sophie has called 911.”

  She walks out, leaving me more alone than ever.

  Andy’s face is white, her lips slowly turning purple. Her hair tumbles around her ears. I wonder if she has her cochlear implant turned on, and am about to check when a red bag plops down beside me. The paramedics have arrived. Sophie stands in the doorway.

  “Where’s Casey?” I demand. “They have to talk to her now.”

  Sophie’s face reddens. Is it anger or embarrassment? I have never seen her look like that.

  She signs: “Lisa sent her upstairs to guidance. She didn’t want Casey to upset the other students.” I stare at her: “You mean she is wandering upstairs by herself? Alone? Go get her now.”

  Sophie turns to leave, and I am heaving suddenly, realizing I can’t understand the paramedics. I need an interpreter and there is one, sitting in my classroom.

  Sophie runs back in with Casey and begins interpreting for me, when she realizes that the paramedics are speaking to me behind my back. I’m now able to answer the rapid fire questions and also comprehend Casey’s garbled responses.

  Casey sobs and Sophie interprets, listening very carefully: “She started passing out when we were walking over the bridge. I had to drag her, half carry her here.”

  Andy is strapped into the gurney and wheeled out to the front doors of the school. A paramedic quietly asks: “She’s taken some kind of a drug?”

  “Don’t know”, I say, “but you have to talk to her carefully, she’s deaf.”

  The paramedic shoots me a knowing look as he grasps the edge of Andy’s stretcher. I shrug, knowing that he expects drugs, suicide, and abuse, a messed up family, anything that will explain Andy lying unconscious on the bathroom floor. But not deafness.

  I receive a phone call that afternoon from the mother: “Thanks for helping Andy. She accidentally cut herself and passed out from the bleeding.” I raise my eyebrows at Sophie. I think: That little cut near Andy’s knuckle?

  The next morning, I let myself into my classroom, eyes still swollen from crying. Andy and Casey don’t know what’s happening to them and I can’t tell them, I can’t tell them about their deafness because they think they are fixed with those cochlear implants, they think they can hear everything, because the implants pick up every little noise, even the rustle of paper on a desk, what they don’t realize is that they don’t understand the human voices very clearly, that they have to strain to decipher the sound that comes off everyone’s lips, if they don’t think about how they struggle to hear, and always attribute their poor vocabulary, low reading and writing skills to being “dumb,” as Andy often says, how can they know they’ve been sexually abused as well?

  And I can’t dislodge the sullen lump of anger at Lisa who sat in my classroom protecting my other deaf students from Casey’s tears, sending her out alone like Jane Eyre on the high heath, wandering.

  I’m grateful for the darkness of late November mornings in the car on our way to work. I can’t breathe until I reach my classroom. Instead of telling Murray what’s going on, I tell him about Mary of Egypt, a
prostitute who sought out men, desperate enough to say she’d do it for no pay.

  “That sounds like a male fantasy,” he says as he clicks on the left signal, the headlights from onrushing cars light up his face.

  “Well, not really. She tried to enter a church, because she was curious about the mass that was being held, and was physically pushed away from the door.”

  “Well, of course, church people would turn away a prostitute.”

  “Well, no,” I say, “that’s not it. It was an invisible force. Something wouldn’t let her enter the church.”

  Murray responds: “Hmm.”

  I : “She realized what held her back. She went to confession, renounced her life of prostitution, and went back to the church door.”

  “She went in?”

  “Yeah, then she fled to the desert, never to be tempted by men again.”

  “What on earth was she doing in the desert?”

  “Looking at herself, examining herself thoroughly. It is the way of desert fathers and mothers. Stripping away all illusions.”

  Murray carefully noses the car into the parking lot, “I’m afraid I don’t understand why she had to go to the desert to do that.”

  A long forgotten dream suddenly comes to me, a recurring dream I had before leaving the Deaf community in Saskatoon to work in North Battleford. I am trying to lead Deaf people through a scorching desert plain dotted with mesquite and cactus. The safety of the mountains looms ahead.

  My stomach lurches. I think: This desert thing is silly. Why is everything I think about related to something I’ve read? After a quick hug and kiss, I clamber out of the car and run into the school, the classroom key in my hand. I pull the drapes open to the courtyard. It’s now ghostly white in the winter snow. The boughs of the trees are bent with snow and hoarfrost. The courtyard refuses to say anything to me.

  I say aloud to the empty classroom, and to the waiting garden: “I’m tired of keeping secrets. I’m tired of always speaking in literary code.”