The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  My mother and father, both teachers, shook their heads: “Impossible. You won’t be able to hear well enough to manage a classroom.”

  Mom added: “Besides . . . ” And silently looked up and down at my clothes.

  Finally we settled on librarianship. Grudgingly. I could understand the reasons. Libraries were quiet places. Communication would be a lot easier.

  My mother: “One to one.” She pointed out: “You don’t have to deal with a lot of people.”

  Quickly: “But I don’t want to hide in a library. I can’t see myself working in a library. Shelving books, signing out books, a spinster with a home cluttered with poems and a cat.”

  And to myself, although I dared not admit it to anyone: I wanted to be noticed. I wanted a following, of some sort. I wanted to be a writer, a passionate artist who would confound everyone with words whose meanings flashed like fireflies in the dark.

  But I saw the worry in my mother’s eyes and entered the University of Alberta that fall in the library science graduate program. My mother gave me a briefcase for my birthday in October. I sent it back. I was still walking with Dylan Thomas in the October wind whose frosty fingers punished my hair, and I certainly did not want to carry a briefcase that the wind would slap against my hip.

  The students enrolled in the library science graduate program seemed to be exactly the people I wanted to avoid. There were too many: briefcases, pens tucked in pockets, pleated pants, pinstriped shirts. They talked about: modems, computers, databases, information retrieval, and cataloguing. I sat in the classes, unable to comprehend: any of it. The textbooks were: unspeakably dull and uninspiring. The only class I looked forward to was Children’s Literature. I could explore Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales. Catriona de Scossa, a refined looking woman taught me History of the Book, another class I attended eagerly because I had found textbooks featuring photographic plates of illuminated manuscripts, tracing my fingers over the swirls on shiny pages. I discovered Marshall McLuhan. Otherwise, I sat in a river of voices, bubbling, rushing, racing past my nothingness. At least in English literature at the University of Saskatchewan, I read and reread literary texts while the professors lectured. In library science, deciphering a cataloguing problem involved input from the entire class. Words swirled about my head. We all crowded around one computer, while a professor typed in commands and explained what to do. I stared at the back of his head. I thought: Precise details, concrete facts, procedures, stray bits of pertinent data quadruples in the classroom and the assignments. I took refuge in Children’s and Adolescent Literature, History of the Book, and Storytelling. Anything where there was a reasonable chance I could bullshit my way through. Yet I kept scoring “A”s and “B”s in all my classes, not only the ones that I felt reasonably competent in. Instead of feeling pleasure in my achievements, I became increasingly anguished at receiving “A” after “A”. I thought: There has to be a mistake. How could I earn a graduate degree without the faintest idea of what is going on? I scolded myself: You’re simply adept at hiding how little you know and hear. As if reading fairy tales provided you with all the knowledge you needed. You’re trapped in your daily nothingness, sallying forth to class, saying as little as possible. You are an imposter.

  I could see that my professors were kind, so the problem had to be within myself, I had fooled them somehow. Desperate, I began attending Mass every day at St. Joseph’s College. It had a sparse chapel, with no pews except along the sides. The open green-carpeted expanse before the altar invited people to sit cross legged on the floor. It was always packed on Sundays. I sat on the floor with others, seeking meaning in this otherwise meaningless existence. Somehow, I was noticed without having to say a word, or engaging in any word play in order to convince anyone of my intelligence but by merely sitting in a chapel, oblivious to sermons, having to rouse myself out of my reveries in order to kneel, stand, and move my hands according to ritual practices.

  I sit moodily in a coffee shop, pen poised over my journal. Why didn’t I teach Anna and Paula to sign? I sign all the time now, despite the pain in my wrists. I do it for my students, why didn’t I do it for my daughters? I shake my head. I know why. I don’t want them to become CODAS, to interpret for me, to struggle with doctors, lawyers, police, and insurance people. I am proud enough of what I already know. I don’t need their help. And I wanted to spare them the CODA guilt that would surely descend upon them when they became young women. The guilt of taking advantage of my deafness to escape the house without me hearing the door close, making secret plans, mumbling into the telephone, meeting people I disapproved of, laying with boys in some field or car. I shake my head. Such magical thinking.

  I worry about Anna the most. I am her Demeter, she is my Persephone. Somehow, she has been taken away from me by my deafness, the Lord Hades. I know it in her eyes, in her silence, in her refusal to talk. Deafness has tucked her into an underworld of bewildering voices too old for her to understand. I argue with myself: How can she be a CODA if she doesn’t sign well? Easily. She phones. I don’t answer because I don’t hear her. I am not at home where she needs me because I am too busy proving my worth to others.

  Hades comforts her, coaxes her into crouching alone by an underwater lake, its sulphurous fumes feeding her anger.

  Mark interrupted me while I was reading a newspaper in St. Joseph’s lounge after mass. He was a large man, muscular, athletic, with thinning hair on top, but with a kind face. He was quite nervous as he asked me where I was from, what program I was in. It turned out that he was taking theology and philosophy, similar to the classes I took at the University of Saskatchewan.

  He came to my dorm room for early morning jogs. I became sick with love. We lengthened our walks around the campus. We hid in empty corridors and college classrooms, holding hands and kissing. He broke away from me suddenly when someone came into the classroom or around the corner. Soon we were hiding in his room, in my room. We no longer went out anywhere. We sat at separate tables in the library. But whenever we could find an empty classroom, a lone corridor, or an abandoned stairwell, we were groping like starved children.

  I dwelled: Why this new need for secrecy? Is he ashamed of me? Is it because I’m deaf? Am I too wild looking? Too bohemian? He did ask me if I was comfortable in my low flat shoes and the thick socks that I wore with my skirts. That was a hint, wasn’t it? He doesn’t like my clothes.

  I began to struggle into the tight jeans discarded by my younger sister. Still fascinated with colours, I bought red, gold, and cornflower-blue jeans. I even got a jean jacket. I reminded myself: It’s the eighties. The bohemian look is out.

  But the secrecy continued.

  I wrote poems, sick with longing. Between the stacks at the college library, I began to read books on marriage, sexuality, the history of married saints, and monasticism. I read Thomas Merton, Jean Cocteau, Baudelaire, and Balzac. The history of Heloise and Abelard had me weeping. I thought: Is Mark not driving me into a cloister with this secret love to be buried under the guise of celibacy? Is my life to be spent in hiding?

  When Mark pretended that I was nothing to him, as he walked casually past me in the hallways of St. Joseph’s College, I rebelled against his rule of secrecy and donned my bohemian clothes again — my nun’s habit. I thought: I don’t care what anyone sees in me. I don’t care what anyone thinks. My bohemian clothes ensure that no man will approach me. They will even protect me from Mark.

  Yet, when I felt Mark watching me, I struggled into the tight jeans, but when he turned away from me for days at a time, I pulled on my skirts, socks and shoes, because wearing those jeans put me in a class of women trying to attract men with tight clothes and sculpted bodies, secretive women, as if I was trying to help him to peel off those jeans with his imagination in order to lure him past the heavy hearing aid that sat on my left ear.

  This schizophrenic existence continued for four years. While Mark earned a degree in philosophy and theology, I struggled to finish my library
science classes and began to take upper year English classes at the University of Alberta, studying the novels of Thomas Hardy, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and G.M. Hopkins. An elderly lady in one of those classes, Madeleine, invited me to her home in an apartment across the High Level Bridge for tea, a rare moment of peace in her sunlit living room in quiet conversation about books and writers. I walked slowly back over the bridge during rush hour traffic, with my hearing aid shut off to block out traffic sounds. I thought: How weary I am chasing a man who essentially doesn’t want me. I thought: Something is dreadfully wrong with me. Something went wrong a long time ago. I thought: The little girl in a red coat. I resolved: Enough hiding. Enough of Mark’s secrets that I am not privy to. Hiding under the cover of darkness, in the middle of the night, at St. Joseph’s College, in corners, empty classrooms, his residence bedroom, and the auditorium in the basement has to come to an end.

  No wonder I didn’t like basements.

  Our staff interpreter Lisa’s eyebrows are high on her face: “Isn’t Nolan going to the pep rally?” Her voice hits the exact note of innocence. Even I can detect it. “Shall I interpret for him on Thursday?”

  It is not an innocent question. I think: Nolan is eighteen years old, over six feet tall, built like a football player, and doesn’t have a friend in the school. He misses school on the pep rally days. He misses the days before and after the pep rally, too. At this pep rally, all the students will sit as usual in a darkened gym peering over top of each other’s heads to view the antics going on at the front of the gym. The program will be augmented by strobe lights, screams from the audience, and candy flung out over the heads of the students. This time, though, Lisa will be ready, with the pep rally program propped on a music stand, to interpret for Nolan, the only deaf student in a high school of nine hundred people (Melissa has to go to a doctor’s appointment). And: Lisa will stand at the front in full view of everyone, a tidy aside from the wild antics on the stage, and Nolan will be made to sit with the grade nines, corralled into the front of the gym.

  Catherine sees my hesitancy. She shakes her head and says: “Nolan should go, he should be part of the school. He should not hide in this classroom, away from everyone else.” She adds: “Nolan has to do what the other students do. There shouldn’t be any special rules for him.”

  I say: “He’ll just stay home.” I think: Dear God, when to hide, and when not to hide? I think: If I had an answer for that question, perhaps Lisa wouldn’t be so uneasy.

  Lisa gives her opinion: “Well, too bad for him. He doesn’t value his education enough to come to school. He’s just hiding from everyone. Just think, he could’ve graduated last year if he didn’t play such games.”

  I say: “It wouldn’t be so bad, if there was someone to go with him.”

  Catherine volunteers this: “I’ll sit with him.” Her dyed hair seems unnaturally bright at the moment.

  I think: Did she get a new dye job or have I just seen her in a new light? Her eyes are dark. Worn with care.

  I say: “I think he won’t like that.”

  Lisa remarks: “He is so spoiled. So overindulged. He’ll just manipulate people into bending rules for him just because he’s deaf. He needs to learn to be a part of things instead of creating his own world to suit himself.”

  I say: “ . . . (Sigh) . . . ” I think: Lisa’s right. Nolan’s parents have parked him in front of the TV set ever since he was a toddler. Now, he plays for hours on his Xbox in his bedroom alone and watches every new movie released in the year. He has no friends in this school because no one his age signs, and he does no homework, so he’s jeopardizing his chances of earning enough credits to graduate.

  In her lined face, Lisa’s wisdom flashes out at me, like a jolt of electricity. Then I realize: This is what she is so upset about, this business of integrating deaf into the Hearing world. If the deaf remain sequestered, apart from the Hearing, how are they to be integrated? They must be pushed against their most natural inclinations, which is to be with their own kind or to be alone. Yet, sitting with an elderly woman in a darkened gym full of screaming teenagers or remaining in my classroom to work on Hamlet is really no choice at all. I retort sharply:

  “Entering a room of meaninglessness, even with an interpreter at your side, reduced to the role of a passive spectator. Would you choose it?”

  Lisa’s voice is just as strident as she says: “If I wanted to be a part of things, yes.” She adds: “He’ll be just as alone if he stays in the room with you.”

  I think: Working quietly in my room, alone. None of these choices is acceptable. I look steadily at Lisa. I sign: “No. Nolan will be allowed to choose. He is old enough.”

  Lisa signs back: “What about Melissa? She won’t want to go if Nolan hides in the room during every pep rally.”

  I sign: “Melissa needs to go. She hasn’t gone to a pep rally yet, since she’s in grade nine and she needs to figure out how she can participate in a pep rally with other hearing students.”

  Lisa signs: “So now you are making rules for one person and not the other?”

  I answer with: “Yes, I am. A deaf person must have as many choices as possible. But they must know what it is that they are choosing. Nolan is old enough to know.”

  I brush chalk dust off my sleeve and walk back to my desk. I know that inconsistency is my Achilles heel as I gauge each situation as it develops. Yet my intuition has created a labyrinth for Lisa to stumble around in. I cannot provide her with a clear set of guidelines.

  In early May, Lisa takes me into the corner of the staff room and signs in small crabbed signs: “I’ve decided to resign and to look for work elsewhere.”

  I study the diminutive woman before me: toothpick slim and topped with a meringue of moussed and sprayed blonde hair. A sadness comes over me: I’ve failed to connect with her, to reassure her of her valuable contributions to this program, to laud her for her years of commitment to educational interpreting, and to praise her own dedicated work with our students. I’ve been too angry about how she skulked around the classroom, I only saw her guerrilla potshots at me as a frantic protest from a monstrous ego, after all, she wanted to be the authoritative interpreter relying on the mystique of being the mother who knew fully about deafness and being the only person who could sign in the school so the Hearing professionals around her would leave well enough alone, assuming that she knew everything there was to know about deaf education, even though she possessed only a grade twelve education, now I’ve come along, a Deaf teacher, fluent in American Sign Language, and she’s no longer the revered authority, we could have made a great team if it weren’t for our egos. I think, bitterly: With my need to prove myself as an authority on deaf education and her years of competent Signed English and as a mother of a successful deaf adult, we can’t coexist in the same room. I say:

  “Well, best wishes for your future.” I walk away.

  Later, I’m confused at my own abruptness. I have no apologies, no words of regret, not even any words of kindness or appreciation for Lisa, and despite my failure to connect with her, my heart cannot help but swell in jubilation and relief. I see things she doesn’t see.

  Later, that week, another pep rally is scheduled. Lisa walks around in a tense silence, saying nothing when Nolan stays in my room. Another memory is throbbing in my veins, fractured by the pep rally’s strobe lights, coloured lights roaming over gyrating bodies, and the thumping of the music, even though my hearing aid is turned off: Every high school dance I attended, was the same. The same thumps, lights, and gyrating bodies. My spirit lifted high above the throbbing crowd and I was bewildered by the strangeness of the flashing lights and people moving in unison. I melted into the darkness along the walls of the huge gymnasium. But where else could I go?

  I awaken early the next morning and look out on the green lawn. At least fifty blackbirds have flown in some time before dawn and are now sitting quietly on the grass. I move closer to the window. A bird senses my movement and twitches her head
, alerting the others. In a crazy moment, I see: The blackbird is Lisa. Quickly the bird and her companions gather themselves into a spiral and fly away from me.

  Fifteen

  THE PEAR ORCHARD SITS IN MY hand, after I’ve lifted it out from the box of books dropped off by Paul, the editor from Hagios Press. There it is, in my hands, its cover featuring two pears nestled together inside a twig bent into a circle. Finally, after twenty years of writing. Poems about leaning towards the love of Hearing men and then running away. But it is more than that, I tell myself, there is always singing in my head and there shouldn’t be, because sound is muffled to me, but in my head, there is a singing bird. All day long. I turn phrases over in my head, wearing them to smooth melodies, stones that fit the palms of my hands. It is a small wonder that I’ve always wanted to sing but I obeyed my father who cautioned me not to sing loudly in a choir because I’m tone deaf. Yet somehow, I could catch music and fit it to the songs inside my head. At age ten, standing in the midst of an elementary school choir, I sang inwardly to a melancholy ballad that was reverberating all about me: my wife was bare naked, bare naked as can be. Those lyrics sounded better to me than the ones on the sheet music before me. And: The poor man in my head, something had gone wrong between him and his wife. Another strange ditty came to my consciousness as I stepped over the threshold to womanhood, a moment of ecstatic joy: I looked down and saw I was golden with sunflower petals for a crown/mercies on me were high in loading, nay no longer could I weep to drown.

  Will Hearing people be able to hear the music in this book of my poems, The Pear Orchard? Instead of always being asked if I could hear their music, if I could enjoy music just like they do, will anyone be able to hear what I hear?

  “Go litel book,” as Chaucer would say, make your way in the Hearing world.