The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  I say: “The pencil sharpener is broken. You have to take one half of the broken pencil and find a way to sharpen it without using the sharpener. If you need any tools, you may ask me.”

  I return to my desk, and stare straight into my stack of papers, because I do not want to see this pitiful creature struggle. Sophie shushes up the other students who are eager to offer him their solutions. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Billy sit at the table, holding the broken pencil.

  Billy sees another pencil on the table and picks it up. He asks: “Ms. Weber, can I use this pencil instead?”

  I answer: “No, you can only use the broken pencil.”

  I notice only a finger and a thumb protruding from the mass of cloth bunched at the end of his hands as he turns the broken pencil over and over. I put my finger to my lips and warn the other students: Do not help him. They bend their heads over their own books and papers, but they are watching. Finally Billy stands up and walks around the room. He sees another pencil sitting on the file cabinet.

  Billy Marley Wannabe asks: “Ms. Weber, how about this pencil?” He swallows nervously.

  I answer: “No, you need to figure out how to sharpen the pencil I gave you.”

  His lips tighten in anger as he turns away from me. His blond dreadlocks begin to shake silently. I look down at my desk, now unable to concentrate on what I’m doing. I casually move papers around on my desk to create a semblance of order. Other students are peeking at him out of the corners of their eyes.

  Finally, Billy walks up to the jar where I’ve jammed a pair of scissors with several markers. He opens the blades and begins to scrape. He comes to me, holding out the pencil whose stump barely reveals the lead. I look up at the tall fifteen-year-old boy and smile.

  He writes in his notebook: This is the hardest problem I have ever solved in my life.

  I find myself staring out into the silent courtyard often these days. I don’t like this enclosed space, I decide, so I pick a fight upon returning home to Murray.

  JOANNE PROBLEM SOLVER: “You’re monopolizing the girls. I don’t have that connection I had with them before we moved to Regina.”

  MURRAY PROBLEM FREE: “I’m not your enemy, Joanne. This is not about you or your deafness. Anna and Paula are teenagers and they don’t think much of anybody right now.”

  JOANNE SNORTING BULL:(Shaking her head) “It’s not that simple, Murray. They do find it easier to communicate with you.”

  MURRAY MATADOR: “Well, should I then poke pencils through my eardrums? At least you have a very good excuse for being angry all the time. I can’t blame any of my foibles upon anyone but myself.” He chuckles as he squeezes my hand.

  I remain silent, unsure.

  I think: There has to be a way to correct this ecological imbalance, where communication between the Deaf and Hearing is a series of misses, near misses and occasional connections, as I flip through the pages of the picture books I’ve collected for my Jungian retelling of fairy tales to my deaf students. They will just not read for enjoyment, and they can’t extract the main idea from a textbook. Yet. I ask: “How many of you have books at home, bookshelves with books at least?”

  They all shake their heads.

  So I ask: “Do you remember being read to as a child?”

  Again, no.

  I ask: “Do your parents read?”

  They shake their heads again.

  I grasp at straws: “How about newspapers?”

  One student raises her hand.

  So I’m reading Little Red Riding Hood illustrated by Beni Montresor, now long out of print, to my grade nine and grade twelve students, and showing them the pictures — this is a most disturbing picture book. I ask my students: “What do you see in the picture of the Wolf, dapper in a suit and a top hat lurking behind a tree, leering at Little Red Riding Hood?”

  Billy enunciates the word, “pedophile” very carefully.

  I think: What the hell? Sexual abuse? Has this kid endured sexual abuse?

  I become even bolder and jab a finger at the illustration of the wolf ’s stomach in which Little Red Riding, swallowed whole, floats in bliss. I ask the class: “She’s being swallowed up and looks pretty happy about it, doesn’t she? What does this picture remind you of?”

  Melissa says: “Too much alcohol?”

  I want to add: Yes, and being swallowed up by the demands of the Hearing world.

  Instead, I listen carefully to what they say. They say: “Drugs make me feel like that,” and “When I’m drunk, my head spins and I lie down just like that,” and Casey: “I don’t think about the sex when it happens.”

  I think: Dissociation occasioned by drugs, alcohol, and sexual abuse. Their knowledge is deep in their eyes. No wonder they can’t even think about the Hearing world swallowing them up, demanding that they live in a zombie state, always controlled by Hearing people. They have issues that are even more pressing than deafness. I turn the pages even more slowly. I think: These students don’t even have fairy tales or myths embedded into their consciousness because they can’t, won’t, don’t read, and their parents never read to them when they were young, yet they seem to readily grasp the metaphors in these pictures. The images unlock something in them perhaps for the first time.

  I ask: “Billy, do you have your math homework done?” His blond dreadlocks jammed under his hat give him a slightly angelic look.

  He answers, sort of: “I don’t have a pencil.”

  I grin, thinking: He knows enough not to borrow anything from me by now, having lost all my pencils that I lent to him, having gone through three sets of school supplies, and it’s only March. He relies on the goodwill of his classmates, continually borrowing their pencils and erasers and, of course, losing them as well. I say: “Billy, I’ll lend a pencil to you if you can give me a guarantee that I can keep while you’re using it. What about your hat?”

  Billy vigorously shakes his head: “No.”

  I try again. “Have you got any change?”

  He shakes his head again. “No.”

  Again: “What about a shoe? You can get it back when the bell rings.”

  He shakes his head again. His eyes become darker.

  Again: “Well, then you think of something.” I return back to my papers on my desk.

  A few minutes later, he returns to my desk, holding out a math textbook in his hands. He asks: “Would you accept this?”

  I admonish: “No, Billy, that textbook is mine. If you don’t give me the pencil back, you’ve got nothing to lose. The exchange has to include something personal, something of importance to you so that you will take care of my pencil and return it to me.”

  His eyes darken even more, and he walks away. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him take off his shoes and place them by my desk. His voice breaks as he struggles to form the words properly: “Ms. Weber, I need the pencil.” He sits in a chair, with the pencil in his hand, and begins to weep.

  I say: “ . . . ”

  The other students glance at him. They walk quietly around him. I motion to Sophie to leave him be. He continues to shake and weep with anger in his chair.

  Then he throws the pencil across my desk and slips his feet into his shoes. When the bell rings, he comes to stand by me.

  He asks: “Is my face okay?”

  I ask: “Are you okay?”

  He says: “I was very angry because you should never take anything personal away from anyone. It’s wrong.”

  I explain: “It’s a way to teach you to value your own things, and to value other people’s things. When you borrow something from others, you need to return it.”

  He says, his nostrils slightly flaring: “It’s wrong to take personal things away from me.”

  I think: Why didn’t you negotiate?

  But I know the answer: negotiation requires too much talking and he’s too used to people solving his problems for him. It’s easier for him to get what he wants without entering into an exchange of any kind.

 
; Fourteen

  I TRUDGE TO THE BASEMENT, WHERE various boxes stand piled high in the storage room. The air is close in that room. We haven’t opened the windows since we’ve moved in two years ago. I pull at the box of photographs and lug it back upstairs.

  Anna and Paula giggle over our first family photograph taken at Walmart, a rushed sitting during Christmas season. Murray has just had a haircut, and I look like a middle aged matron with no-nonsense, closely-cropped hair. Anna and Paula, young, fashion conscious, and wearing makeup, are the most pleasing people in the photograph. Otherwise the picture is painful to look at.

  Anna points out: “Mom, it’s not that bad. At least it’s only from our waists up.”

  I ask, suddenly suspicious: “What do you mean by that?”

  Anna recovers: “Well, you know, Mom, that you look fine from the waist up but from the bottom down . . . well . . . ”

  I demand: “Well?”

  Paula giggles: “You’ve got such a big bum and hips.”

  Anna adds: “You should always wear dark colours on your bottom. Forget those brightly coloured skirts you like to wear.”

  I ask: “How do you know all this?”

  Anna shrugs: “I just look at my own body, and at what other people wear. I think about the cut of clothing and how it flatters my body.”

  I am about to say: You’re a teenager! But I stop myself.

  Paula asks: “Are we hanging that family photo up anywhere?”

  I snap: “Of course not.”

  I think: What else am I not seeing?

  What I don’t see, I’ve seen already. I realize: I must grow into my own story. In the meantime, I patch my way with bits and pieces of other stories, waiting for it all to coalesce, gather inside my Deaf body. I look at my hands. I’ve always been here. But others don’t want my story. I don’t want it either. Not yet.

  I am three years old. It is summer. We are at Minot State College, where my parents are taking classes in deaf education and I am going to the Language Nursery School. I am walking across dry grass, its blades are needles prickling the soles of my feet, my father is studying in the big chair far away from the house near a group of trees, it is dry and hot and I have no shirt on, just panties and my leopard print blanket, my mother is in the big house, on the first floor in the house of many rooms, the house where something bad lives on the top floor, mama cooks and reads in that house, and writes on paper every night, my father comes in too and spreads his papers on the big table, we only stay in the bedrooms off the kitchen, sometimes I roam in the living room, but I don’t do that anymore because something bad lives up on the top floor of the house, I know because one day I go up many stairs, up to one floor, and then up to the next floor, and finally I walk down a long hallway with doors on either side, my blanket licking my heels as I drag it behind me, and the window at the end of the hall is bright, beckoning me, even though I have just been outside playing with my gun and cowboy hat. I take few more steps and there is a box to my right high up on the wall, something is thrusting out of the box, like a tongue out of a twisted face, the box has wavy curls about its face and a trapdoor for its mouth, I turn and run, my blanket flying in midair behind me, that night, my father has to spank me so I will stop screaming and go to sleep, finally I lay quietly in my bed, half asleep, thinking of the face that lives upstairs, the face that has a tongue that sticks in and out, the tongue that is like mine, which is supposed to move around in my mouth in the right places, to stick in and out at the right time, and it will follow me all the days of my life because somehow I have done something wrong because I went upstairs, to places I should not go.

  Last summer, Murray and I and our daughters stopped in Trois-Rivières in Quebec and entered a museum featuring an exhibit on the ogre that ate children. Outside the exhibit were child sized capes hanging on a row of hooks. A sign nearby invited us to don a cape and enter at our own risk, into the home of the ogre who, according to a television reporter on a television set right outside the exhibit, was responsible for the disappearances of many local children. The pictures of the missing children were posted outside the entrance to the exhibit.

  Anna, Paula, and I walked past the rack of cloaks to the doorway where we must part the hanging vines to step into the ogre’s home. I looked behind me and saw that Murray had the cape on, hood drawn over his curls. The length of the cape only reached his lower chest, since he was six feet tall. He looked like a hobbit.

  As I walked over the threshold of the exhibit, into the ogre’s mouth, the terror of Hansel and Gretel descended upon me, in the form of a sickening, familiar claustrophobia. As a child, I had begged my mother to put away the picture book whose cover featured an old woman with an evil grin towering over two hapless, rosy-cheeked children. The boughs of the trees in the dark forest around them seemed to reach out for the children, shielding yet obscuring them from the rest of humanity who could save them. My mother urged me to take a rational approach.

  “Joanne, these fairy tales are not real. They’re just stories.” Nevertheless, I begged her to put the book away up high above the kitchen cabinets. That book vibrated with a power that I could not understand, tectonic plates shifted within me every time I saw the cover of that book. This was the one book I could not abide in my growing preschool library collection. Boomy noises accompanied me through the innards of the ogre’s house where I saw what he had devoured for lunch. Were they the sounds of his stomach gurgling, I wondered, or someone just talking through a microphone? I walked through the ogre’s large, outstretched mouth and into a small octagonal room with mirrors on all sides. The mirrored door closed behind me and I saw myself everywhere. I searched for a handle on the pane that would let me out. There were no handles.

  I began to sweat profusely. The Phantom of the Opera. The room of mirrors that nearly drove Christine’s lover, Raoul, mad. Finally, I pushed on the mirrored panes. Suddenly a pane opened behind me and Murray stepped in with me, his cape still drawn over his head, grinning with a camera in his hand. The mirrored door closed behind him.

  “I need to get out of here,” I signed to Murray. “There’s no way out.”

  “There’s always a way out.” He chuckled and took a picture of me in the room of mirrors. Together we found the one panel that pushed out into another looped path through the exhibit.

  Now I am six. I am in Grade One. Every day I come down the stairs to our basement, the dark walls, the cold cement floors, the dusty boxes, the washing machine, and the stairs leading up to the kitchen, my father has left a small square of carpet underneath the stairs where I can crouch and fold my doll’s clothes carefully. A small swing hangs from the rafters just beside the stairs. When I’m done folding my doll clothes, I sit on the swing, where my heels lightly tap the deep freeze before I lean backwards, trying to swim with my legs leading out into the small basement room lined with shelves storing suitcases, boxes, and canning jars. I think: Basements are not good places. One day, I notice a light, a small light that bounces off the ceiling as I swing toward it, I twist my head around to look at it, the light is not coming from the sole light bulb screwed into the socket in the centre of the room, I leap off the swing, and the bones in my feet shiver as I scramble up the stairs as fast as I can, I am screaming, trying to tell my mother, there is someone down there with a light, someone trying to find out where I am.

  I sob: “Lik . . . lik . . . lik . . . ”

  My mother’s puzzled face bends over me, her arm around me, trying to console me.

  I think: Perhaps it is someone who doesn’t like me and is shining a light to search me out.

  My mother firmly grips my hand and pulls me down the stairs. I cling to her legs as she walks up to the deep freeze. She points to the window over it. I look closely at the small basement window, masked in grey dust, my mother’s finger traces the path from the window to the light that has settled on the wall opposite the window, sitting, waiting, silent. I see her mouth moving, she is trying to tell me that the ligh
t is coming from the outside, this small circle that is gold, purple, blue, pink, is coming from something beyond the window. I want to say, “But how can it have so many colours?” but all I can repeat is: “Lik . . . lik . . . lik.” At least, I am no longer screaming.

  I never play in the basement again, because it is a bad place where things I don’t understand are hiding and waiting to get me because I’ve done something wrong. I’m sure I’ve done something, although I don’t know what it is.

  At the end of my third year of university, I wrote poem after poem every night, inserting nursery rhymes, fairy tale characters, and theological imagery anywhere I could. I wanted to be mysterious, indecipherable, hiding under a façade like Dame Edith Sitwell, wearing heavy velvets and silks, and I briefly considered wearing a turban. I hadn’t worn jeans since my first year. Instead, I migrated to bohemian clothing, the world of long skirts, socks, blazers, and scarves. I was in love with anything that was different than what my sisters wore — those pink tracksuits, those white Reebok runners. In my mind, I had left the prosaic world behind. Instead, I was most preoccupied with developing an identity that established me as incomparable. I would be in a class of my own. This aggravated my mother greatly, I knew, but Dorene was most encouraging. My parents wouldn’t think of me taking a year off after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. I had it all worked out in my head: I was going to find a job somewhere. Work, maybe travel. My mother looked at me as if I was cracked to form such a notion.

  She asked: “How do you think you’re going to get a job with no skills?”

  I answered: “I’ll get something. Lots of people take time off from university.”

  She asked: “You can’t afford to do that. You must get some training to get a job.” She added rather darkly: “You don’t know how things are going to go for you in the job market.”

  I told her: “I want to teach. I want to change the world by encouraging students to break out and be themselves.”