The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  I sign to Melissa: “Don’t you think that Hearing people sign in a messy way, that their hands are so awkward and their faces are so dead?”

  She shrugs and signs back to me: “They sign just fine to me.”

  I want to say: No. The hands of the Hearing are birds with broken or deformed wings, creatures that flap in a crude and rudimentary manner. Their signs are defective visual noise, just as Melissa’s deaf speech is defective and painful to listen to. How can I tell her that she sounds like Donald Duck?

  I say: “ . . . ”

  I get up and turn my back to Melissa and stand before the window, my eyes blinking over the field of ice diamonds in the afternoon sun in the silent courtyard, thinking of names of businesses, organizations, fundraising events or even games: Silent Hands, Silent Painter, Silent Barber, Silent Walk, Silent Volleyball. Ugh. I turn to Melissa again. I ask her: “What do you think of this business of always talking about silence in association with the Deaf? You know, ‘Silent Walk’ for instance. You went on one last year to help raise money for Saskatchewan Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services.”

  Melissa shrugs and says: “It’s okay to me.”

  I want to say: But there is no silence in the Deaf community. Objects float in the air around me as I sign. My signs disappear rapidly after being anchored in an invisible place. My lips twist, puff, stretch into a grimace, indicating size, texture, number, intensity, and thickness. I shape my face into masks of emotion that I never thought existed within me. There is no silence in my hands. They are the wings of a bird. There is the sudden dip, the lifting of a shoulder, the folding of the last feathers on the end of a wing. As I take flight, my thinking changes. I order ideas in my head in terms of visual relevance. Like when I turn on the TV, the picture bubbling up on the screen tells me more than its accompanying sound.

  I look at Melissa’s head, bent down over her homework. She is struggling to decipher a paragraph that is written at a grade ten reading level. In a few minutes, I’ll have to sit down and explain the whole paragraph to her in sign language, because there is no time for her to figure it out. I’ll soon have to rescue her from the desert of words because she can’t understand the structure of English.

  I think: Murray will pick me up after school, as always. As I climb into the car, I’ll have to turn my head, to lipread him, while he’ll say something like, “How was your day?” What else do people say after they’ve been apart for a day? I can nod to indicate that I have understood his question, spoken quickly while driving, with hands firmly gripping the steering wheel. He’ll be sure to ask what the girls are doing after school. Ballet? Riding? Vocal lessons? Piano? I have their schedule memorized, so this part will go well. But the chances of appearing like a slightly addled child will increase, as Murray will want to regale me with stories about his work, his brother, or his older sons. I close my eyes and think: I’ll not think that far ahead. But I know that the spoken words will relentlessly come soon.

  MURRAY: “Joanne, do you remember the list of things you were supposed to do yesterday? What about the groceries?”

  JOANNE EYRE: “Pardon me?”

  MURRAY: “Don’t forget the list of jobs and to get the groceries.”

  JOANNE EYRE: “Groceries? What about . . . ”

  MURRAY: “Yeah, we’re out of milk.”

  JOANNE EYRE: “I forgot about it.” I look down at my hands. “I’m so sorry.”

  When it happens, a muddiness seeps into my thoughts and I’m unable to concentrate. I hear the edge in Murray’s voice, the signal I’ve been waiting for. He’s getting tired of me and my sudden fits of anger. Perhaps he has had enough of making love to a Deaf woman. I’ve heard that many Hearing men seek out Deaf women for the sounds they’ll make or not make, for the added sensuality that will somehow pour out through their fingers because they are cut off from sound, for any innovative postures and techniques that might well up from the deprivation of sound. I think: Is the appeal of making love to a Deaf woman like the appeal of making love to a virgin? Is there something virginal about silence? I think hard on it. Silence sets the Deaf apart, virginity sets a woman apart, a virginal silence, all that deprivation. In other words: unmitigated boredom.

  I think: Hmmm. Virginal Silence might make a title for a book someday but that’s about it.

  I say: “ . . . (Sigh) . . . ”

  I know: I have become a hateful creature. I am slipping away from him, away from the beauty of his face and his large hands into a dark well where the rhythm of words, metaphors, symbols, similes rushing in and out of my heart, once tireless in their coming, going, and returning now feels like foreign blood in my body.

  My mother once said: “All women must learn to be virgins during their marriages. ‘Virgin’ means ‘to be set apart from everyone else.’ Husbands must learn to see their wives as set apart from all the other women that cross their lives.”

  I realize: Virginity is not only about wearing a satin nightgown and reading far into the night alone, rolling on a nylon sleeping bag in a tent. It’s about accepting that I’ve been set apart because of deafness. I’ve been sent by deafness to the desert, although not of my own volition.

  Not yet.

  Twelve

  EASTER VACATION. MY COUSIN LIVES AT Sylvan Lake, in a cabin two blocks from the shore, a squatter, the last in a row of otherwise gleaming aluminum-sided white houses. Its dirty stucco is a reminder of a once genteel lakeside community in the early fifties, a house now stubborn in its refusal to improve its image. Murray’s hand in the small of my back feels protective as I walk on the sunken stone path to the door.

  Inside, the overwhelming smell of dog saliva and dander fills my gorge, a dachshund and a basset hound sprawl on the floor like tossed bolsters before a four-by-four television screen, the VCR and DVD player blinking like silent spaceship consoles, Len, in dirty shorts and T-shirt, on an L-shaped sofa, where all four of us arrange ourselves. Every inch of the countertop is covered with dirty dishes, emptied fast food containers, and drained beer bottles, the two dogs come up to me and lick my leg, perfuming me with rank dog odour, while Murray chuckles at something on the screen, his head nodding in agreement.

  I could ask Len to turn on the closed captioning so I can at least comprehend what’s being said, but I know that Hearing people don’t like to see ribbons of text running across the screen, and I haven’t come all this way to watch television, I want to have a conversation. I twist my head behind the couch toward the kitchen, trying to stem the tide of indignation rising in me, and think, I could go for a walk along the beach alone, but inertia weighs down my bones. The endless stream of images on the monstrous screen urges me to surrender and sink into the black hole of the worn sofa. The girls are nodding occasionally at things Murray and Len say, now several empty beer bottles sit around Len’s and Murray’s ankles, while the television screen bears down on me with an overwhelming benevolence, its images of food — a cooking show glistening, vegetables fried up in gleaming saucepans. Overcome with the close smell of dog, the cigarettes, and beer, I tap Murray on his leg. I sign to him so that Len can’t detect any frustration in my voice: “Can I speak to you for a minute? Outside.”

  Len turns his gaze back to the screen, while we let ourselves out the screen door. Outside, I slide down the crumbling steps, careful not to trip on the toe grips. It is a little family drama:

  JOANNE OF EGYPT: “Murray, I need to go.”

  MURRAY: “Joanne, what’s wrong now?”

  I exhale. I have my eyes trained on the forest at the edge of the yard. The sudden flight of blackbirds rising from the meadow beyond the forest startles me.

  JOANNE OF EGYPT: “Nothing really.”

  MURRAY: “All right then.”

  I turn to go back inside. Murray’s hand is upon my shoulder as I cross the splintered threshold.

  Over the next two hours, this new resolve to endure the visit for Murray and our daughters’ sake dissolves slowly like a hard sugar pill in water. I think:
I have an extra car key in my purse, nestled among Kleenex, old bills, and my wallet. If worse comes to worst, I can bolt and breach the front door to our car. I poke Murray again: “Put me on a bus back to Regina. I’m getting really angry.”

  I’m careful to make my signs large and clear and my face pleasant and impassive. I don’t want Len to see the anger in my face, and I know that he won’t understand the meaning of claw hands scraping across my chest.

  Murray’s puzzled face prompts me to slow down.

  The pretence of pleasantness hardens my facial muscles. My jaw is locked into a spasm of cheeriness.

  Murray is clearly exasperated, and jerks his head to indicate we should step outside again.

  Somewhere a bird caws. To my left, a magpie alights on the small, fraying lawn. Carrion birds. I feel a tap on my shoulder.

  Murray says, with his voice: “You’re being so disrespectful to Len. Get a grip on yourself.”

  I try to soften my voice: “I don’t think you understand what’s going on.”

  Murray’s lips say: “How do you think Len feels about your carrying on? Stop being so dramatic.”

  My voice hardens and I feel as though my skin is being ripped, like old worn fabric ready for the rag pile. It says: “I don’t think he cares.” I draw in a jagged breath. As I let it out again, it says: “I need to go somewhere. I’m too isolated.”

  Murray’s lips say: “How does that help? Leaving me and Anna and Paula here helps you feel less isolated?”

  My whole body says: “Being among strangers feels more honest.”

  Murray’s whole face says: “Joanne, get a hold of yourself. You always say these things and then you say you’re sorry the next day.”

  I shake my head and turn to go inside, the living room now darkened in the evening hours, and sit beside Anna and Paula still curled on the couch, mesmerized by the shadows cast by the flickering screen. Finally I ask, ever so politely, if the closed captioning can be turned on. I think: More reading as usual.

  I read somewhere that prisoners who, are left in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, do not cope well after release from prison. Often they will literally recreate the environment by living alone, and take on the same weird behaviours they developed in the darkness of their cells. Just so that they can feel that they are in control of themselves.

  Thirteen

  ON THE DAY AFTER EASTER VACATION, I sign to Sophie over the oral students’ heads although they’re not the least bit curious. And Melissa’s okay with all the wooden signed English shooting forth from the staff interpreters’ hands, a cochlear implant she rarely uses, and beading with Hearing aboriginal girls who are always talking, giggling at something, Melissa pays attention to no one else but them in the school and while she remains oblivious to me and Sophie. In these small snippets of signing to Sophie, I sense the return of my Deaf mind, igniting the small synaptic explosions in my brain, as I synthesize my body, hands, and face into a fleeting series of postures and gestures coloured by several shades of intensities. Finally I turn to Melissa and my other students: “I have a Deaf body, you have a Deaf body. There is one hell of a difference between a Deaf body and a Hearing body.”

  I’m desperate to tell them of the other world waiting for them, a community of hidden people who are alive and vibrant within their own language and culture, but the oral deaf students say nothing and Melissa waits impassively too, and then I sigh and go on, with the curriculum I must cover, with Shakespeare, novels, plays, and poetry, even though my students are semi-literate, even Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is too difficult for them, listless in their dyadic worlds, depending on me to help them graduate with a grade twelve diploma clutched in their hands, that says they have received an education equal to that of their Hearing peers.

  “Cochlear implants, who can argue with that?” I tell a teacher on our staff during our lunch break: “But very few people know about the cochlear implants that have failed or the kids who are implanted but need sign language anyway, there’s no backup plan, no alternatives, sign language is not presented as an option.” I pause: “And they can’t read very well.”

  But she says: “They’re not that much different than their classmates who are not reading either.”

  Before I can protest that it’s not the same, my colleague nods politely and waves briefly to me as we part in the long, wide hallway. I return to Sophie, who is quietly reading at her desk.

  I break the silence with: “I’m tired of not being able to use my professional training, knowledge and experience with these kids. By the time they come to me from elementary school, I can’t do much. The damage is done.”

  Sophie signs: “Joanne, we can only do what we can. We have no control over anything.”

  Not mollified: “But even if we were to espouse the oral route entirely, these students still have terrible speech, there’s hardly any speech therapy available at the high school level, and they aren’t reading enough. How can anyone say that this program is working?”

  Sophie looks up. She signs, stone-faced: “It’s audism. The Hearing want the deaf to be like them. They are prejudiced against people who can’t talk like them.”

  But I’m not finished. I must rant again like I’ve ranted every day since I arrived in this room: “But it is not only about sign language. It’s that we are a low incidence population. Nobody cares about a handful of deaf kids who can’t function well in the hearing world. No one gives a shit.”

  Sophie shrugs into: “The parents of those deaf kids think their kids are doing fine. And that’s all that matters. If they’re happy, then we’re doing our job.”

  I slump angrily into my chair. Sophie’s sarcasm only succeeds in making my gorge rise again, and I sign: “It’s a matter of perception. The deaf kids who can’t live up to the oral promises are stranded in their home communities, maybe live in their parents’ basement for the rest of their lives. They deserve just as much of a life as anyone else.”

  Sophie sighs: “Joanne, you’re getting too tired and frustrated. Find something else to do.”

  I sign: “No one is going to do anything for a few kids scattered all over the province. Even those deaf kids will say they’re doing fine. Wouldn’t you say you were doing just fine if you had someone taking care of you all the time?”

  Sophie says: “ . . . ”

  I finally drop my hands into my lap and sit at my desk.

  I feel a tightness in my chest these days, as if I’m locked in a garbage compressor. Plastic bottles, tin cans, and cardboard boxes pop, crackle, and explode in my ears as the walls come closer together, then the grinding, crushing, and whirring closes in on me. The tinnitus is becoming more and more deafening. I think: I have to deal with this. I have to be able to solve problems and teach my students to solve problems if we are to get anywhere. I remind myself: If I am to get anywhere.

  A Classroom Drama:

  JW: “Now we have to learn to take control of the conversation. Not let it control us. You see?”

  MELISSA: “But . . . ”

  JW: “You just sit there and let it go on and on without you. Interrupt for God’s sake, make a comment, ask a question, and the focus is back on you. Go ahead, you try it.”

  MELISSA: “I can’t slide in that fast. I have to be sure of what I think is going on.” (Melissa twists in her chair, motioning at the door) “The bell just rang.”

  JW: “Yeah, I know.” (Aside to Sophie) “It’s hard to believe there’s a heaven if you’ve never seen it.” (JW waits until she hears the click of the doorknob, satisfied that Melissa has closed the door behind her, and has merged into the stream of Hearing kids rushing headlong to their classes. She is no longer JW).

  JOANNE: “Who am I kidding, thinking that I can teach Melissa to politely interrupt a conversation with a group of Hearing people who don’t know sign, and request that they focus on her?”

  SOPHIE: “It’s called assertiveness. Many Hearing teachers of the deaf seem to think it’s the
answer to deafness.”

  JOANNE: “ . . . ”

  Sophie shrugs.

  Murray is reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. His grey whiskers shine in the lamp over our bed, and he swallows in concentration. I can’t resist any longer.

  I say: “Murray, why are you reading those?”

  He looks over the top of his reading glasses. He says: “They’re interesting.”

  Later that week, I tell my students, two of them teenage boys, that my husband, now in his fifties, is reading fairy tales. They just stare at me, uncomprehending. I tell Gillian, our school librarian the same thing.

  She says: “You and your husband must have a lot in common.”

  Billy chokes out his words, mentally preparing himself to include every vowel and consonant, speaking in grammatically correct English, at a very slow pace, because he tries to form the words in his head first before pushing them out of his mouth, he is like a stutterer without a stutter, he is deafer than I am and his cochlear implant, that he’s had since age two, doesn’t help him that much. He has spent his allowance on his dreadlocks, hoping that they’ll fetch a friend for him.

  I beckon Billy to come over to my desk. He shuffles up, his hands encased in the folds of his sleeves.

  I say: “Here’s a pencil. I want you to break it for me.”

  Bob Marley Wannabe clarifies: “You want me to break the pencil?”

  I affirm: “Yes.”

  As he takes the pencil into his hands, I rise from my chair with a roll of masking tape in my hand and walk to the other end of the room where the pencil sharpener is. I put long strips of tape in an X-formation over it and turn to Billy, taking care to enunciate carefully to him.