by Joanne Weber
I continued to ignore Dwight. I didn’t want to encourage him, because he now shuffled behind me as I hurried down the school’s marble steps and into the park. The dirty white cenotaphs blocked my backward glances at him. I thought, Perhaps he hides behind them, but I often caught sight of his arm, or a leg, scuffling through leaves and sending pebbles of the gravel path to roll near my own scurrying feet. When his shadow crossed mine, I looked up at his reptilian skin and the greasy hair stacked over the collar of his dirty white shirt. His jaw was so tight, it even looked wired shut. His eyes suggested all that is wrong with religion, because they shone, a kind of shining that I didn’t like. I wanted to tell him to stop following me, that the park was my home, a life of reading had created vast regions within me now, the spaces I inhabited must be larger than the house I lived in with my parents and my siblings: an English moor spiked with purple heather, the Russian steppes waving with wheat, the prairies, where the pungent smell of canola rose from the yellow flowers in the hot summer, the park, a house where the evergreen trees forming the quadrangle were my walls, that allowed in gentle breezes and filtered out the furious sun, the cool steps of the cenotaph, even though hard and angular, my divan, where I sat to gaze at the mown lawns and carefully tended flowerbeds where not a single soul was in sight, and broken branches with sad green leaves glittering in the sun after a storm and sparrows darting across the empty benches. When Dwight’s shadow caught up with mine, I could feel tiny claws scraping the back of my throat, the dying twitches of a small animal, as I forced it down with hard swallows. I wanted to tell him to stop, but every time I turned around, he smiled and nodded, always careful to keep a few steps behind me. The wind lifted my hair and a whine began in my ears. The tinnitus said: Whizz, bang, ring, ring, whine, whine, whine, tit, tit, hiss. Some days it was harder to hear over the noise in my head, but today I could hear the wind sighing in the branches. Dwight looked straight ahead.
I thought: He’s afraid of me.
But he caught me looking at him and his face lifted in joy. I said nothing and dashed out from the lane of evergreen trees down the street to my home.
During typing class in the last week of June, I was pounding on the typewriter keys until I felt a thud behind me, as if a bowling ball had been dropped on the hardwood floor beneath my feet. The clacking of typewriters ceased, and a strange thrumming began under my feet. I paused in a moment of indecision.
I decided: Okay, I will look.
Over the shoulder of the crouched teacher, I saw the grease stiffened hair sticking straight up from Dwight’s forehead, the whites of his eyes, and saliva bubbling from his grey lips. It came to me in the roar of my ears: Dwight’s adoration of me is simply a neurological misfiring.
I felt the flurry of movement behind me as the ambulance workers came. I thought I heard Dwight moaning, but I didn’t want to check to see if I was right. I thought: His desire to be close to me is nothing more than the strange machinations of his brain. Dwight is kind to me because I’m deaf. His kindness is merely a bargain. All disabled people should stick together. That’s what he thinks. But I’m not disabled. Rather, I’m more intelligent and capable than most of my Hearing peers because I read, read, and read.
At noon, I ran away from the school into the new rain. The drops on the greasy grey sidewalk bloomed in jagged petals the minute they hit the surface, I could feel them between the hairs on my scalp while the trees galumphed in the wind, their green boughs outstretched for more rain. I lifted my face and the rain ran in delicate lines down my cheeks.
One summer morning after reading Jane Eyre deep into the night, lying in the tent warmed by the early morning sun, I paused to think of the paper that was dropped on the library table by Glenda and June.
Was it because of my deafness? Was I that loathsome?
I remembered running to the mirror in the girls’ bathroom after hastily crumpling up the note and throwing it in the garbage, watching my lips move, over-exaggerated, listening to my hollow voice, for the first time, how my tongue twisted to the right side of my mouth as if it had a life of its own, worrying that deafness had deformed my body, set me apart, unworthy of a fire between my legs, or a man’s mouth on mine, that deafness had made me into a virgin.
I crawled from the tent on my knees in that pink cream nightgown, stumbled onto the wet grass with my finger between the covers of Jane Eyre. The great meaning must be in the spiralling staircase where Jane can peer down at Rochester walking into his office after blowing her a kiss: “Farewell, Jane!”
Indeed, I was the strong, plucky Jane loved by ugly Rochester, admired for what I could do with my deafness, but not loved by normal or ordinary people. I thought: Only Dwight loves me.
Once I stopped breathing heavily, I went into the house. My mother was stirring one of her homemade soups. I watched her chop onions and celery. I breathed in the smell of the steamy chicken broth, but I knew I had to leave this warmth. I thought hard. Where would I go?
I balance the coffee shop tray as I head toward a table — empty except for a litter of cups and used napkins. I whisk them to another nearby table already overflowing with dirty dishes and sit with my back to the windows so no one can see me if they’re walking by. The afternoon is already wearing away, with my last glimpse outside I see a grey pallor falling over the street, the faces of the people scurrying by are pinched with cold. I sit, grateful for the steaming windows, the warmth of the coffee cup in my hands, my open journal on the table, and the Hearing people who surround me with their words, noises, and sounds that I’ll never comprehend, I look at the room around me as if I’m peering through a pane of glass: their mouths move, noises fly everywhere, meaningless. I think: It’s what I am used to.
But I wonder: Who are these people? The truck drivers that come in with their smeared coffee travel mugs. The man who reads his Bible in the corner. The heavy women with poodle hair and sweatpants. And I think: There is an air of aimlessness in the shop, people slowly coming and going, the chink chink of the till, the hot coffee pooling around cups on the counters. But reading makes me feel not so alone. Jane’s sharp, astringent voice hisses in my ear: If you’re reading, then why sit in a coffee house? I imagine her pursing her lips, folding her hands together just above her belly. I see her pulling her shawl more closely around her. She says: You are a snob.
I pack my journal in my bag and stumble out the door, scurry to the car, sharp spears of the first November snow ping against my cheeks, I want to purge myself of my deafness and my need for sign language, I think: Now. I want now to happen. The now that’s been lying in wait for me. Time’s bloodhound crouched at the exit of all my tunnels and escape routes! I drive too fast, stop the car with a jerk in front of our house, wildly look up at the rising moon, and down again at the glitter on the light covering of snow, the découpage of frozen leaves on the road, trip and fall by the split tree at the front of the house, a meal of crushed leaves worked into the faded grass between the exposed roots bringing a faint metallic smell to my nostrils, and I think: The fall air has arrested the decay. It will begin again in the spring.
In the house, Langley Hall, bookcases line the walls. I think: Why haven’t I noticed their heaviness? Books and papers. Books stacked sideways against books stacked vertically. The bookcases lining three walls of the living room and extending far into the dining room. Something is gnawing my stomach. A small animal is nestled inside me. It has begun to masticate my innards.
Our bedroom too, is lined with bookcases from ceiling to floor. Atop a row of books, I have stuffed a brassiere, and a T-shirt. A towel hangs on a nail hammered into the side of one bookshelf. I think: There is someone or something unwelcome in this house. It must go from me. Either I must leave this house or it must go. And I think: How do I make it go? Must I leave my husband, and take our two daughters? Again? Out the window, clouds like scraps of torn black lace claw their way past the moon.
Mad fox wife howls: “ . . . !”
I think: I don
’t know how to talk to my daughters. Especially when Murray is in the room. I’ve never been good with small talk, the world seems polluted with it, the endless jingoism, the right smart sayings, the pithy comments, the foolish giggles of teenage girls, and worst, the bright words, the words that suggest happiness, optimism, quick intimacy, a solution for every problem, a platitude for pain.
Mad fox wife howls again: “ . . . !”
I try to coax myself, sternly, even though my mind feels drained of words: Make up stuff to talk about. Talk about the weather, the neglected garden at this time of year, how the tulips are now bedded in the soil, waiting for spring, and the yellowing grass around the lake.
Within a few minutes, a wordless stupor comes over me, a slow beckoning to dullness amidst the chatter of my daughters and Murray at the supper table. I eat, sinking in the irony of having learned to speak and to hear with my residual hearing, but not hearing enough to participate in a conversation. I inwardly snarl at deaf education professionals who attempted to clean my English language ability simply with the soap of grammar, their promise that good speech, no matter how faulty my hearing, would provide the ticket to the world at large, the ticket to jobs, family, love, and happiness. I still remain a Deaf woman who hovers in the shadows.
In my classroom, Nolan approaches me, a book balanced on his outstretched hands. I suppose that he thinks that the worship of a beautifully bound book can lead him to literacy. If my aboriginal deaf students were all living in pre-contact times, they would’ve had their own literacy. They would’ve wrapped their blankets around their necks and read the tracks in the fresh loam, watched the stars at night, built caches of stones to warn others, and painted marks on skins of tipis. That knowledge is dying with their elders. Their elders are libraries disintegrating with old age. I think: This literacy involves keen observation, experience, and deduction based on visual clues alone: the Deaf have access to it.
The students watch as I finger the golden whorls on the cover of Nolan’s book and caress the silken endpapers. Slowly, I weave the narrow red grosgrain ribbon through my fingers. My hand runs lightly over the gilt-edged pages fanning outwards from the red leather binding. A map of Odysseus’ travails is in the back. Essays on Homer’s work are interspersed like islands throughout the pages.
Nolan tells me: “I paid one hundred and fifty dollars for this book.”
I want to say nothing, and nod to preserve this sacred ceremony of this book. Surely the silence of our deafness is enough to make the book holy. But I think: Why pretend, Nolan, to read books you cannot read? Even if you could, you’d still be very alone. I also think: Give him his essay. You’ve marked it. It’s sitting right there on your desk. I say, continuing to slowly flip the pages: “ . . . ”
Nolan snatches the book away from my grasping hands. The air is bright, sending the faces of the silent students into shadow as he pushes the book back into its gilded case. Silence follows him like an unmarked trail as he hastily leaves my classroom. His paper remains stacked against my books. I have given his essay a narrow red zero for plagiarism.
Ten
I HAVE NO PATIENCE WITH MARY of Egypt. She chooses to become helpless before the God she professes to love, she chooses to lie in the desert, parched, baked, and feral; without a consistent supply of water, food, or shelter, she has chosen to confront the harshest of all landscapes. I click my tongue with impatience at a picture of her prone body, her arm across her eyes, shielding herself from the sun. Why doesn’t she run to a shelter, to friends, or to family, where she can be at home, where she can be cared for, and where she can care for others? What on earth makes her stay in the desert, where there’s nothing but rocks, stones, prickly cactus, camel trains sliding in the shifting sands, and dangerous animals that prowl about at night. Why do I think she has something I don’t have?
It was my last month of high school. I asked myself: Is it a low pitched whine, or a moan? I was sitting in my grade twelve biology class. It was the last period of the day, and I had to sit for another hour yet, oblivious again to all the talking that was going on. I’d just sat through four hours, polite, smiling, nodding, keeping my eyes open and trying to look alert so I could convince my teachers and classmates that I was indeed a part of this class. I stared straight ahead, my eyes fixed on the clock, the foghorn playing its unceasing moan in my ears. Except that sometimes it was a sort of a whine. Sort of. I was trying to figure out the rhyme or reason to this tinnitus. I wondered: Did it play according to my moods? If I heard a cluster of snakes about me, hissing as I bent my head over my books, did it mean that I was in an altered mental state? Am I a cobra ready to rear up at any moment if provoked any longer? Was the noise in my ears a remnant of another language, something I’ve heard before? Yet, the foghorn was the most common sound. I asked myself: Is it the long song of booooooorinnnnnnnng or is it that I am most aware of the noise when I am bored or restless? I glanced at my teacher, Mr. Scotton, in his white lab coat, rubbing his beard with his hand. He had such a pert sound to his voice, he sounded excited, animated, alive. I could only hear his vowels sliding up and down. I tried to attend to the vowels, trying to parse them into something I could understand. Instead I slid back into the whine inside my ears. The vowels outside my head; inside my ears, the moan. I cast a glance around the room. Everyone else seemed motionless. Papers remained piled neatly before them, books were unopened. I thought: If only I could read my biology text right here and now, the moan in my ears might abate for a while. But I couldn’t open up a text book and read right there in front of Mr. Scotton and everyone else too. I thought: It would be rude. I’d be chastised for having bad manners, for being anti-social. Worse, yet, I’d get reprimanded for not paying attention, for not listening.
I looked longingly at the biology text as the moan increased in my ears and I thought: I’ll have to spend a couple of hours in the evening, going through the book, making notes, charts, and diagrams, to help myself learn the material. Too bad I can’t do it now, so I can relax, read a book, and listen to some music in the evening. I shifted restlessly in my chair. Mentally, I sang to myself, trying to fit words to the long moan: Down in the valley, valley so looooooooooow, hang your head over, hear the wind blooooooowwww.
Suddenly, hands snatched at their books and papers. Chairs were pushed back from their tables. Mr. Scotton had turned his back to the class. I realized: Oh, class is finished. I never heard the bell, the looooooow tone I had heard on countless occasions, the tone I longed for at the end of every class.
In the last days of the final semester before high-school graduation, I was dreaming of university: pristine white halls, freshly mowed green quadrangles, and window seats in old buildings. I thought: I will bathe in a sea of words that will splash its bright and vivacious vowels and consonants. I will begin a life with people at last. It will be nothing like the whispers, giggles, and boisterous shouts of my classmates in high school. There will only be dignified speeches.
My father said: “The best thing about university is you’ll get to live in a dorm with other roommates. You’ll get cooked meals, and you won’t have to worry about housekeeping.”
I scanned my mother’s kitchen counter: a rubble of opened tins, torn cereal boxes, dirty cups, and vegetable peelings. Red, yellow, orange, and purple, the hill of clutter made a noise in my head, a series of sharp quick hisses, a station not quite tuned into its bandwidth. I thought: In my new home, everything will be spare, white, and clean.
During the first week in September, I went to the Shannon Library at St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon, and stacked my books on a table, claiming my end as I saw the other students did, went back and forth between classes to sit at my table, looking over at the students whose heads were bent down, intent on their books and papers.
My mother urged me: “Go to the cafeteria on the lower floor, eat the terrible chili on Fridays, and go to Mass every day.” She continued: “Eventually someone will stop and say hello.”
Ins
tead, a girl from my high school class in Wilkie came rushing up to me in the cafeteria with: “I want to quit, I hate this place.”
I looked behind her at the cafeteria, the heavy stone pillars that marked off every ten feet, and the blue Arborite tables arranged in long, snaking rows between the pillars. I said: “You’ve only been here a week.”
I had attended a couple of parties with her in the twelfth grade, yet all I could remember is her sitting on her boyfriend’s lap, downing a beer. She must miss him. It never occurred to me to quit, even though I hadn’t spoken with a single person for the past three weeks — other than the girls at St. Paul’s Residence.
It was a long wait.
In the meantime, my thoughts behaved like bored birds, pecking listlessly at the ground, then flying off before I was able to grasp them. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my keys anymore.
I had to rummage through my backpack every night in the dorm hallway in front of the door to my room.
In psychology class, I finally leaned toward a girl sitting next to me, who looked pleasant enough. I said: “Mind if I photocopy your notes? I can’t make good notes at all.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I’d heard nothing of the lecture, that I was deaf.
She smiled and nodded. She said: “I’m Janet. Your name?”
It was a start. I didn’t say much when we exchanged notes, because I wanted to hurry back to the library at the Catholic college I’d came to inhabit like a timid wren, occasionally putting my head out and up over my table to look around.