by Joanne Weber
Late one evening, I guided myself surreptitiously through St. Thomas More College. I peeped into the chapel, an auditorium, a cafeteria, and the Murray room, a multipurpose room where small intimate masses were held on Wednesdays. I opened the doors at the back of the Murray room and climbed the spiral staircase. There was the Chelsea lounge for receptions. A grand piano occupied a corner. Windows on all three sides looked out onto College Drive, and the campus. The Basilian Fathers had their own living quarters just off the lounge. I peered through the grilled glass window in the door at a black jacketed priest crossing the hall from a room to another room. The massive stone building brought to me memories of muffled voices, the slamming of doors, and the sudden snuffing out of lights. I whispered: Jane, this is Thornfield Hall.
Green Journal
Parenting Joanne during her first university year was difficult. She brought home a skirt she had purchased in a store, half price, a gorgeous rich red and gold diamond pattern with a band around her midriff decorated with strings of beads. I could see why she bought it. It was truly bohemian and a work of art, but she missed looking carefully at the back of the skirt. Right about the bottom area of her bum, the pattern dissolved into a huge red blotch. I told her that the skirt made her look like she’s had an accident with her period. She went silent, but then she came home the following weekend still wearing it. I was mortified.
And I had to snatch a volume of Plato from under her arm as she was preparing to go out for a walk around Wilkie. I scolded her about developing affectations. She wanted so much to be viewed as an intellectual. She wanted everyone to know how smart she was by flaunting her philosophy text at any old farmer who might be driving down the road. I was more concerned about her ability to live in the real world than she was. She really didn’t have a sniff. The way she carried on about the Saskatchewan Junior Citizen of the Year Award, one might have thought we were dragging her to the dentist for a root canal. I could understand why she might not want to be singled out because of her deafness, but she could have taken some sort of pride in functioning so well in the world.
She came home with a paper that had been given an “A” by Gladene Robertson, a professor in the Special Education Department at the University of Saskatchewan. Robertson’s comments included a sentence about Joanne’s remarkable ability to synthesize knowledge from a variety of sources. I saw a quiet sort of smile grow on Joanne’s face as I read that comment aloud. Clearly Joanne was pleased which meant more to her than any award she received for being so well integrated in the world. Come to think of it, that ability to synthesize must had come from those matching sets Ed and I made, all those attribute blocks, even the Montessori principles I tried to implement. Dr. Buckwold was right: developing cognitive thinking was more important than getting Joanne to articulate properly. Funny, as her vocabulary grew, even at university, she still mispronounced many words.
During the day, professors appeared before me and disappeared into offices and classrooms, or walked down hallways, laden with briefcases and books, deep in conversation. I could easily imagine what they were saying if they were talking about Plato or Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce’s Dubliners. If I read the same things they read, then to a certain extent I could predict what they would say. A plan formed in my head: An educated imagination was a means to enter those conversations before I faded away into oblivion, whereas my inability to decipher a spontaneous conversation rendered me invisible and alone, but I was only in first year, already scowling over the poverty of my knowledge, even though I was earning reasonable grades. I asked myself: How could this be possible? I couldn’t hear the lectures. Did the professors suspect that I was deaf and take pity on me? I thought: God forbid. Perhaps I was the only person who reads textbooks.
By the end of the first semester, I realized I could churn out the papers and write the examinations just by reading the assigned textbooks and the hasty notes scribbled by classmates. By late March I could no longer sleep. It was difficult to keep track of sound and time. I had a shower in the morning, the water pellets flew off my skin and down into the drain between my feet, and I thought: Was sound and time like water, always flowing away from me? I was no longer sure of anything.
It was English class and the professor was droning on. I leaned over to watch a classmate scrawl note on her clipboard, but she was left handed and had rounded her arm and fist to cover most of the paper.
PROFESSOR: “ . . . Arthuria . . . leg . . . sour . . . ”
I deduced: Chaucer drew from sources such as Arthurian legends? Must check the preface to the text. I heave a sigh of relief. I am getting better at guessing.
PROFESSOR: “O . . . wi . . . baa . . . boody . . . ”
I deduced: Bloody? Bawdy? Old something . . . Wife of Bath? I’ll have to reread it.
PROFESSOR: “ . . . Pig . . . a mush . . . trava . . . ”
I deduced: Pig in a bush? Travel? Oh, the travellers went on a pilgrimage.
“ . . . Seven . . . motif . . . ”
I thought: Seven motifs? Are there seven motifs in Chaucer? Never saw anything amounting to seven of anything.
My classmates furiously scribbled in a rarefied air of diligence and high seriousness.
There was no angry rebel skulking at the back of the room and if he exploded, I wouldn’t hear anyway. Only the occasional clank of the radiator in the small room startled me.
I thought: It is hard to live with so much nothingness. If I was in a large building, at least I could occupy rooms in my mind. In this small cramped classroom, I can’t even read anything on my table without seeming rude. The professor tapped my table. I wondered: Is this his way of alerting me to something he’s said? Dear God, does he know?
I was not sure what the damn tapping meant. I looked up at the wall but there was no clock. I was not even sure of the time. When I was stuck in a place like this, I could always take out a book so that time will cease to exist. But now time swelled like a bud of water clinging to the lip of a faucet.
PROFESSOR: “Shivaree . . . nigh . . . ady . . . ”
I sighed and steeled myself to wait: ten more minutes and this boredom will be over.
That evening, my mother phoned me, taking care to enunciate every word. Another drama ensued:
PLEASED MOTHER: “Joanne, you will receive an award for being the Saskatchewan Junior Citizen of the Year.”
SULLEN JOANNE: “Why on earth would they give me an award?”
INSISTING MOTHER: “They, Joanne, is the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association. You’ve accomplished so much with your deafness. All the volunteer work you’ve done, sports, and your marks.”
DEFIANT JOANNE: “Well, I am not going. I don’t want to receive an award for being able to endure boredom.”
EXASPERATED MOTHER:(Audible sigh)
JOANNE: “ . . . ”
DETERMINED MOTHER: “You are going. We’re picking you up tomorrow on our way to Regina. Ruth, David, and Carol are coming with us. We’ve booked a hotel, and the ceremony is the next day.”
The drama continued in Regina. I slumped on the hotel room bed, ignoring the excitement of my siblings as we prepared to attend a tour of the newspaper offices and the Legislative Building. My sister, Ruth, wanted to interview the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan and dignitaries from provincial and federal governments. I wanted to talk to nobody.
EXCITED MOTHER: “We will meet Kevin Hamm, the editor of the Unity Press, you know, our friend from Unity. He will navigate us through introductions with people from the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association and Pioneer Life Insurance, who are also sponsors of the event.”
DEAF DAUGHTER:(To no one in particular) “I just wish they would let me live my life.”
My mood did not improve when I met the other recipients. Agnes Powalinsky was being honored for her work with the mentally handicapped in their family-run special care home in Kinistino. She wanted to be a doctor. Jim Werbicki was a Ukrainian dancer, who achieved top marks. All that
practice, determination and focus! David Herbert and Michael Fenrich saved somebody’s life, for God’s sake. Diane Wassill and Ken Schneider were normal people with individual talents and achievements. But they wanted to give me an award for just being deaf! For sitting through five hours of school every day for twelve years in sheer boredom, understanding nothing, and I still couldn’t hear a damn thing in my university classes. The best I could do was to look interested and smile and laugh at the right time. I thought: I shouldn’t have to receive an award for doing that.
The final scene: My parents dropped me off in Saskatoon on their way back from Regina, and I slammed the door to the car before going up the steps to the residence at St.Paul’s Hospital.
As the winter months stretched into dirty spring, there was nowhere to go. After seeing the words sprawled on the concrete path leading up to the College of Agriculture: “Drag your scrag to the Ag Bag Drag,” a dance to beat all dances on campus that year, I couldn’t imagine being among drunken farmers, squealing blond girls with pouffed hair and tight jeans, or the band music throbbing in my ears. How could I follow what anyone said when they were moving their bodies? Heads had to be stable before I could lipread what anyone said. And there was so much shouting, banter, joking, teasing, and the liberal pouring of beer down the front of shirts and pants. How could that possibly mean anything?
It became harder to live with so much nothingness. Dullness seeped into my brain, eroding consciousness, leaving me to wander among fantasies and half-formed thoughts. Dullness said: My ability to cope with my deafness in the Hearing world is a powerful opiate for everyone around me. I should be mollified with the idea of being part of a family, a community, a something. Surely, someday, I will. After all, I’m almost Hearing, and will arrive in the Hearing world, that blessed place, I hope, soon.
At daily Mass, I liked to watch motes of dust dance in the stream of light from the stained glass windows, the flowing vestments of the priest, and the backs of people hunched in prayer. While the priest mumbled the rituals, I was already making a bed for myself on the altar. I would clear out the pews so that I could create a comfortable reading room with soft sofas and pillows. The kitchen would be in the vestry. With the soft light of the saints in the stained glass windows caressing my shoulders, I would sleep warm and safe, and my beliefs, patient blackbirds, would come to sit on the clipped green church lawn, having flown in sometime during the night.
According to legend, Mary of Egypt survived on a few greens here and there. I wonder: If she never met anyone during all those years, not even a Bedouin, didn’t she go mad? She must have reached an oasis from time to time in her wanderings; humans cannot survive without water.
So I ask Mary: How were you able to stay in a harsh and unyielding landscape for over forty years? Didn’t you have a friend?
Mary says: “ . . . ”
I watched people come and go in the library. There was a tall woman, large boned, who always wore dresses underneath a black blazer, her name was Lillian, I found that out. Her look was disdainful but intelligent and alert, like someone from another century, a medieval noblewoman, somber, quiet but with an eye for mischief as she winked at me when walking by my table, I decided that the only way I was ever going to meet her was to give her a poem I’d written, in which she was Lady Lillian. I invited her to my home for a poorly-cooked meal, relying on cheese and crackers for appetizers, and I found a soup I could warm up. I thought: There isn’t much else I could do on a hotplate. But she arrived at my door with her rucksack full of books as we planned to walk back to the library after supper.
The evening went passably well. My instinct about her was sharp enough, that she was pleased with the dreamy Lady Lillian poem I gave her. After that meal, we were friends, and with her encouragement, I became the unofficial poet in residence that year, handing out poems to people about themselves. Boosted by this new confidence, I began now to greet people and stopped to chat with them in the library, hallways, and classrooms, scribbled out many bad poems and began giving them away to people between studying, visiting, and swimming in the university pool. I didn’t write a poem for a young woman always rushing about in a plaid jumper over a white blouse with a huge bag strapped over her shoulder, because she came up to me and introduced herself, Dorene.
She said: “I’ve seen you around here a lot.”
She invited me to her suite on the top floor of a large house and offered me pills from her vitamin bottles on a table, and a pair of jeans.
She said: “These belonged to my brother who died last year.”
Her bag was slumped over to its side. A wet facecloth, poppy seed rolls wrapped in plastic, a couple of blackened bananas, a plastic drinking cup, and a book spilled out on to the floor.
I said hastily: “No thanks.”
She reached into her fridge and whisked out a paper plate shrouded in a napkin. Cookies. I reached stealthily for a cookie, but as I opened my mouth, a high pitched “eeeeeeeeeee” erupted into the room. My earmold had become dislodged by my bite.
Dorene nodded knowingly. She said: “I have a sister who’s deaf. She’s a student at Walter Murray High School.”
I took another bite of my cookie. I thought: No wonder she speaks so clearly.
“My parents found out that Janice was deaf when she was five,” she said. “For the first five years, they thought she was mentally retarded.” Dorene shook her head. “Then I persuaded them to let her move to Saskatoon so she can go to school here. She’s living with foster parents.”
I nodded in sympathy, but inwardly I wondered: How did this sort of thing still happen? It was 1978. Even I knew that there were good hearing aids, behind-the-ear ones, for profound hearing losses. I’d just acquired one. What a relief not to wear a body aid tucked between my breasts, with a heavy cord pulling down on my ear.
I didn’t know what I could say that would be of any use. I changed the subject.
Soon we were shopping every Saturday. Dorene had a great eye for sales since she left a small southeastern Saskatchewan town, with fifty dollars in her pocket, for Saskatoon upon her high school graduation, determined to attend university that fall, and knocked on doors, asking to live with people and to work for them in their homes. I knew that we were not thrown together without reason; despite my privileged middle class upbringing and her life in poverty on the farm, we both knew how to beg with a certain dignity. This friendship became an oasis in the endless stretches of boredom between waking and sleeping.
I am a desert mother, stumbling about in the sand, far from everyone but Murray, who reads horse stories by Dick Francis. I want to tell him: This is what it is like to live with so much nothingness. This is how I must live with the sheer indifference of the desert, that inner and outer landscape that threatens to devour me. Instead, I say: “Another tile fell off in the bathroom this morning.”
Murray lifts his head from the newspaper, nods and says: “We’ll redo the whole bathroom, but first we have a trip to plan.”
I slam the door to our bedroom and fling myself on our bed. A trip? I want a home where there is a balanced economy of silences and languages. I don’t want to wander overseas, especially with Murray and the girls. I don’t want to live in any more temporary homes. I want to live and die in the same house.
Eleven
I COMPLAIN TO SOPHIE ONE DAY, looking out the window at the lone evergreen tree skirted with fresh white snow: “It’s like we’re all locked in ice in here.”
Sophie offers: “Well, it’s cold outside.”
I nod slowly, then retreat to my desk. I look over the classroom and sigh. Every one of these students seems locked into their own frozen state. They are individual statues walking about in the room, unmoved by each other.
I ponder: How will they ever learn to live in a community, to be active participants in a group? But they are not fretting about it. After all, they’ve operated in dyads all their lives. Mother/child. Interpreter/ student. Teacher/student. An older sister/d
eaf sibling. Hearing friend /deaf. Helper/ helpless. Powerful one/weak one. One to one. One on one. One for one. One by one. Two in one. I shudder.
Melissa signs: “I don’t need interpreting. I have a cochlear implant.” She rolls her eyes in impatience at my inability to appreciate what the implant does for her.
I sign: “But you don’t even wear that processor most of the time. You don’t like to use your voice.”
Melissa turns away, stony faced.
I tap her arm: “It’s great that you have a cochlear implant. But don’t you think you need to develop your speech skills and listening skills?”
Melissa informs me: “I can hear perfectly.”
I inform her: “You mean you can hear sounds and voices, but can you understand what people are saying?”
Melissa says: “ . . . ” She drums her newly manicured fingers on the table, red nails, each with a green dot in the centre, sending the small beads jumping away from the leather piece she’s been working on.
I think: How can you sign when those nails are nearly a half inch longer than your fingers? I want to shout: “It’s not part of Deaf culture to have such long and colourful nails! It’s too distracting to watch!” But I check myself. She isn’t part of any Deaf community.
Melissa merely shrugs.
I leave her with the Hearing girls, who are laughing as they pick up beads with their needles. She’ll come to me later in the afternoon and complain about feeling like a freak because she’s sure that the Hearing girls are laughing at her and I’ll have to reassure her that the girls wouldn’t likely talk about her because they just wouldn’t care enough about her to do that, and I feel an overwhelming weariness.
The signs of American Sign Language are like explosions of a Japanese haiku on a page, a shower of images in which I can stand and pluck the fruit before it falls to the ground, heaping detonations of light, movement, and colour, the grimaces, the flashing of eyes, the rounded lips, the finger tracing a trodden path. Most Hearing people would stand oblivious through it all.