by Joanne Weber
Nine
MY FRIEND LAURA’S PARENTS WENT TO Switzerland for a month, so we played Switzerland by getting old pantyhose and braiding the silky nylon stockings into braids. We pulled the elasticized waists, bums, and crotches over our heads and carefully tied bandannas around our foreheads on top of our wigs, tucking the ends at the nape of our necks. We read Heidi and practised the lines. No one wanted to be Charlotte in Frankfurt, so we took turns being Heidi. There was no Peter, but everything else Swiss was fascinating: the chocolates, the cheese, the mountains, and the fir trees whispering through Heidi’s window, Grandfather calling Heidi over the meadows, the goatherd, Peter, blowing his horn. Every day, Laura and I donned our vests (hers a real one from Switzerland, mine a dove grey vest decorated with a bit of braid, which my mother had sown for me) and in our backyard we swung high into the air, our imitation braids flapping down our backs as we pumped our knees, the air rushing up our long, full skirts feeling like mountain air as we ran through imaginary meadows.
Our last time together was the afternoon we played one of her older sister’s records. She was out for the afternoon, and we sat on the couch, listening to Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock”, moodily knitting scarves, while shadows reached into the living room. Laura told me what the words were to the refrain that played again and again on the turntable, something about not needing friendship. But pain and the need for friendship followed me as I went out the door after the long afternoon, trudging home in the purple snow. I was too naïve to realize that this was the last time I’d ever play with Laura, that she wanted something more from me than imitating characters in a book.
After that day, I tried to talk to Laura on the phone, but I couldn’t hear very well, and her mother told my mother that Laura was just so busy these days. I turned to reading, working my way through the Green Knowe books, until a new girl in the neighbourhood, Glenda, came by on her banana bike, a pudgy kid with wavy hair sloping down to her eyebrows, ridged by oil, who walked like a boy. Her strong arms swung a bat effortlessly, as I ran for her grounders, and when I played kick the can, she could outrun me and the neighbourhood kids, even though she was quite overweight. But these weren’t the first things I noticed about Glenda, she didn’t like to read and she didn’t play imaginary games, so I slowly began to put away my books, because I imagined, somehow, that she’d protect me, and teach me things that no one else could.
Glenda had pictures of David Cassidy from the Partridge family all over her bedroom walls. I looked at them with great curiosity. I couldn’t understand why there must be so many pictures of one person. She had quite a stack of magazines on the floor beside her bed too. We leafed through them, and then went out to ride our bikes. I now wanted a banana bike, because I saw how Glenda reared up in hers, as if she were reining in a wild stallion.
My parents said: “No, your bike is good enough.” They also said: “Glenda is not good for you. Find a different friend.”
But I turned away. I refused to look at their mouths. Laura was gone and there was only Elsie, whom Glenda refused to play with, because Elsie was German and poor, but Elsie was always faithful, a hanger-on. We wore identical coats, brown fake fur with a dark brown stripe down our backs, we jumped together in a large cardboard refrigerator box, and when I was over at her house, we ate cold chocolate cake.
She told me: “I eat it for breakfast every day.”
I was not envious, because when Elsie’s mother bought her ice skates, she purchased the skates five sizes too big, so while I whirled on the ice, Elsie was clinging to the sides of the rink, her feet encased in five layers of socks and skates that extended three inches past her toes. Her parents worked at the meat market all day, cutting up meat, and they always had blood on their aprons. Her mother smiled and talked at me in her broken English, her face worn with work. Elsie was always quiet when we were in the meat market.
Glenda didn’t like Elsie. Elsie was shorter than Glenda. But Elsie had started to develop breasts. Her hips were round. Her arms were soft. Her hair was cut in a bob, with bangs straight across her forehead. Her face was so German, with broad round cheeks and large brown eyes.
Glenda took me aside. She whispered: “Look at her chest,” and laughed.
I looked too and laughed. I didn’t know what else to do. Glenda’s laughter slowly erased memory after memory of my days with Elsie, how we jumped on the box together, rode our own bikes, knitted our scarves, played with jacks and my favourite game with elastics, where we tied full lengths of elastics into a loop, stretched them across two chairs six feet apart, then pretended to be acrobats, pulling down the lines with our feet, twisting, turning, and jumping in and out of the varying geometric patterns we created with our ankles, calves, and hips.
Glenda began to openly taunt Elsie about the size of her breasts. I stood beside Glenda, and joined in.
Elsie was so desperate that she wrote a letter to my mother: “Joanne and the other girls are making comments about my advanced development.”
I realized that someone had helped Elsie write this letter, most certainly not her mother who could barely speak English. “My advanced development,” a phrase so courteous, so abstract, so painfully put by an adult into Elsie’s life.
My mother took me aside. “You must stop this friendship. Glenda is not good for you, and Elsie has always been a good friend.” But I continued to play with Glenda, pretend my bike was really a banana bike and that I just hadn’t learned how to make it rear up like a wild stallion.
I snarled at my mother one day after several futile efforts to draw a house for an art project. My ruler lines were always at the wrong angle. Little shavings made with my eraser, rolled across the page.
I announced: “I’m going out to play with Glenda.” I bounced the ruler off a stack of books on the dining room table.
My mother called: “Wait, Joanne.” She sat down beside me and drew a line with a ruler on a piece of paper, and then drew another line freehand. She asked: “Which line do you think is the best?”
I pointed to the impeccably straight edge.
Then my mother asked: “Which is the most interesting line?”
I stared at the two lines and something ancient and familiar flooded into me: The best line doesn’t always point to its expected destination. I pointed to the freehand line my mother had drawn.
Murray’s chest is rising and falling in great heaves. We’ve just made love, and I lie awake twisted in our sheets and blankets, my mind unable to stop the frenzy of its own movement, thinking: Why am I with him, what is the language we share? I’m only with him because I’m such a good lip-reader. Hearing people like that. There isn’t much effort on their part. They merely have to talk. My mind whirs like a computer program, putting every possible sound I’ve heard to good use, making educated guesses. I think: What would happen if I became tired, distracted, or overwhelmed? It’d amount to a computer malfunction.
Signing with Murray is like sinking down into the leather seats of a Cadillac humming down a new black asphalt highway. The beauty of his words thrum in me, his body, his touch, his voice, the way he moves, opens a tunnel of light between us, a tunnel I want to travel, and of course, I can sign with him, his eyes follow my hands when I need them to — when I want to be Deaf. But all the reasons my heart knows dissolve in an underground lake of anger that sends its sulphurous fumes through every crevice of my being, especially my mouth and hands, resulting in the vitriolic attacks against him. I belch fire, and Murray stands there with his shield of love. It’s too much. I think: I am an impostor. A faker, a cheap imitation of a Hearing person. Murray will find me out, I’m sure he already has, he sees what a poor single parent mother I’ve been in North Battleford, leaving Anna and Paula to themselves while I worked frantically on my business contracts in my home office, taking breaks only to feed them, admonish them, and to answer the phone, those long days at daycares, in the homes of my sister and my parents, those strange thumps upstairs that I managed to ignore for thr
ee hours one evening only to emerge from my basement office and find that Anna had moved Paula and all her furniture into her room because she’d decided that Paula and I should stop sharing a room. I think: They were small gardens going on without me to tend to them, able to grow without me knowing any of the details.
Murray and I have this conversation many times:
Murray: “This is what I mean. Anna has been bullying Paula all these years.”
Joanne: “But Paula is very manipulative.”
Murray: “Yes, but with an older sister who must manage the affairs of her Deaf mother, what can you expect? They’re CODAs, Joanne.”
Children of Deaf Adults. Interpreting for the police at age seven, interpreting for the bank at age ten, answering the phone, interpreting at funerals and weddings. I had prided myself on not relying on my daughters in the same way. I think: Ouch.
Murray adds: “But they’ve had to grow away from you at such an early age. They’ve taken charge of themselves and their lives, knowing that you can’t hear well enough to understand what goes on between them. They’ve developed roles between them because you don’t hear them. Now they hide most things from you.”
Then I remember. Their backs turned, heads bent together in whispering, mysterious thumps in the bedroom, phone cords wrapped around their backs as they speak into the phone, the careless comments shouted upward to the top floor, the calls from the basement.
I remember the daycare worker say: “Your girls are wonderful, please don’t move them to another daycare, we love them here. They are so good, they behave so well.”
And the teachers: “I wish that the rest of your daughter’s class was as attentive and well behaved as your daughter. Paula needs to work on her spelling, that’s all.”
Teachers, daycare workers, friends, and colleagues all think I have two darling daughters. No one would ever know that my daughters are CODAs. Not even Anna and Paula. The three of us managed to fool everyone by approximating what was expected of us.
Except Murray. He isn’t easily deceived by my ability to imitate how others live, to have two high achieving daughters, and to pretend I am morally superior to Hearing people by engaging in hard work, a life of reading, and by withdrawal from frivolous conversation.
I wore bell bottom jeans, tight shirts to show off my own breasts. I found a purple bubble shirt that wouldn’t show too much of my hearing aid jammed between my breasts, but would still outline my own burgeoning figure. Glenda and I were smoking at the end of the school yard with Scott and Tom, in a little dugout fitted with a roof. Even though I couldn’t bring myself to inhale the disgusting cigarettes, I watched with fascination how Glenda was able to exhale the smoke out her nostrils. These small rebellions seemed so much better than reading books, because, finally, I belonged, I was a part of things without having to hear or talk too much, all I had to do was smoke a cigarette and rebel against my parents for absolutely no reason that I could see. I thought I might be able to participate in sports because Glenda swung a bat with those muscular arms and she ran like a boy, so I signed up for the basketball team, the volleyball team, and the cross country team, and began travelling with Glenda to the small towns around Wilkie, playing games at Unity, Cut Knife, and Biggar.
My father was quiet. As the principal at McLurg High School, he knew every kid that swirled past me in the hallways. He also knew that I was not athletic at all.
Late at night, Glenda and I sat in the back seat of a car, riding home from the basketball game. I watched the moon move in out of the frames of the car windows, imagining it chasing us home, when Glenda slid her arm around my shoulder. I remained immobile, wondering if anyone else was noticing. Then she bent her head close to mine, I told myself: This is not going to be a little girl kiss. This is something else. She pushed my head down, and her strong arm became a bough, where I could rest my head. We remained in this position several minutes, until I could feel her face coming closer to mine. I moved away from her, leaned forward away from the arm-bough that promised to shield me from loneliness, from no friends, from awkwardness.
The next day at school, I stood alone at my locker and turned away when Glenda came down the hall. I looked for Elsie, but she had turned away, too, to talk to some other girls. I thought: She knows I’m there, but she will never talk to me again. The knowledge flashed in me like a swallow that shoots across a lawn from a tree bough, flying too fast for me to notice the colour of its wings or the tilt of its head: I’ve missed a chance at genuine friendship for a belonging that I thought to be found by engaging in small rebellious acts that would pre-empt the need for conversation.
Glenda took to hanging around with a heavier girl, June, whose breasts and hips were the most voluptuous I had ever seen. Her legs even rubbed together, and I could see the holes in her pants near the crotch when she carelessly opened them. I turned away.
I walked past a table where I could see a piece of paper hastily dropped by Glenda and June as they clopped down the stairs ahead of me out of the library on the top floor of the school. Their laughter and squeals were punctuated by furtive looks at me at the top of the stairs. I turned back to the table and picked up the paper scrap.
In my hand was a list of names of all my classmates associated with a sex act, including fellatio and cunnilingus (although I didn’t know what it meant), like “Sidney wants to know what’s under those panties,” then I came to my name: “Joanne, the virgin, will scream when her cherry is popped. Ha ha, like that will ever happen.”
My face flushed, the paper was a burning coal in my hand, I wondered how others had thought about my sexuality before I could even conceive of it, on the weekends, while other girls in my class were giggling under the doe eyes of David Cassidy on their walls, I was watching musicals with my family, with my mother scribbling down lyrics to love songs as they were sung by Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn, and Barbra Streisand, and I read into the night because Glenda ignored me and Elsie refused to look at me, turning her back to me as I walked past her in the hallway, and I stood alone at my locker between classes and came to school nearly late, so I didn’t have to stand around by myself when the bell rang. I stopped wearing jeans. It was the seventies, and everyone was wearing bellbottom jeans, but I didn’t care, it was now Fortrel pants for me, the ones with a seam sewn down the middle of each leg. I started to sew my own clothes. I chose patterns that were loose and gathered, even though I checked myself in the mirror every day to make sure that my stomach was flat. I was grateful that the platform shoes I wore made me seem tall and willowy. It was time to lose myself in a house of fabric, to hide my curves and lines. In the summer, I stopped swimming. I didn’t want anyone to see me in a bathing suit, and I was uncomfortable with the lifeguards walking around in their swimsuits. I took down the pictures of the doe-eyed David Cassidy from the walls of my bedroom.
My parents said nothing to me about Glenda’s disappearance in my life. I wondered if they’d even noticed. They should have at least congratulated me for having figured out what Glenda was about. I wondered: Maybe they don’t care. I thought: Doesn’t matter. I can rely on books to live in the world, to peddle my knowledge as a passport to the land of the Hearing. It’s the only honest way I can be superior to the Hearing people, not by imitating and pretending but by reading.
Suddenly one late winter evening, this scene:
MURRAY EXPLORER: “Let’s take our renovation savings and go to England.”
The snowflakes are flying thick and fast outside the large window in the living room — another late snow, another refusal of the winter to submit to spring.
MRS. SENSIBLE: “Don’t you think we should focus on the repairs? The rotting sunroom that’s pulling away from the back of our house? The mouldy showers? Another tile fell off this morning when I was taking a bath.”
TANTALIZING MURRAY: “Joanne, hasn’t it always been a dream for you? To take the girls to Europe?”
BAITED FOX WIFE: “Yeah, but . . . ”
I drop my head toward my lap, not wanting to lipread Murray any further.
I think: There goes my chance for a real home, a home I can be proud of, where I can confidently invite other people instead of apologizing for the peeling sidewalk, the tangled dog leash that inevitably ends up on our front steps.
But Murray knows as well as I do, that our urge to travel is always stronger. The need to know, learn, and discover is greater than the need for a posh house. England will elevate me somehow, fill my head with important things, console me with images, written words, and historical data, so that I can sit through future spontaneous conversations with my family and not bother to embark on the futile chasing of their words flying in the air, and I think: Coffee shops, where I write furiously in a journal, are no places for a Deaf wife who should be at home with her Hearing husband and children. Or travelling in England.
I had never seen a grade eight teacher wear so much purple. I thought: Miss Johnson must have a very limited but imaginative budget, since she duly shows up in purple slacks and sweaters varying only in hue and texture. I secretly liked her, especially when she told us that we must compile an anthology of two hundred poems, although I heard the moans and thumps, slams of books in retort to an impossible assignment, especially from the farm boys and hockey players in my class. I sat in the front, reading the steady stream of emotion flitting across Miss Johnson’s face, as she fielded the objections from the back of the classroom. Finally she ran out in tears, and I stole a look at Dwight sitting across the aisle from me, her only other sympathizer. Dwight’s moistness poured off him like a melting iceberg. Each time he touched me on the shoulder to show me the page in order to follow a schoolmate reading aloud, he left an imprint on my blouse. His eyes brimmed often with almost tears, his hair was damp around the crown of his head, and his shoes squeaked like sodden sponges. I cringed each time he flipped my book to the correct page and laid his finger on a word, soaking it into a small dot of oil and sweat. I never lifted my head during the times when Miss Johnson hurried Dwight out of the room. I thought: Perhaps he waits until the last possible minute to go to the bathroom and must be hurried out before he wets the floor. Everyone raised their heads, listening to the noises outside the classroom, but all I could hear were muffled thumps, so I returned to my book.