The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  I told her: “You complain a lot.”

  Little Red Deaf Coat said: I will give you a picture of myself so that you’ll know what I’ll look like when you see me. Then you won’t be so scared.

  She scribbled over the entire page. I was shaking when she finished. It was a large ear over which an image of a deformed fetus was superimposed. The fetus was hooked up to a box with a long cord. In the corner of the page, she had scribbled: “Malformed fetus with an artificial mother.”

  I looked down in horror, uncertain as to what I’d drawn and what I’d done. I thought: Multiple personality disorder? A creature climbing out of my mind, locked up for so many years? Impossible. Moreover, she wants me to visit her every day.

  I visited her for a week. I pulled out the paper and scrawled with my left hand: Okay, I’m listening. What do you want me to do?

  Then there was an outpouring of rage, anger, bitterness, loneliness, and neediness: You always abandon me. Don’t ever do that again.

  I tried to reason with Little Red Deaf Coat: Not every day. I’m too busy. Papers, classes, you see?

  But she didn’t see and I gave up in disgust — in relief even. I thought: If I let her carry on like this any longer, she’ll destroy me.

  At Gallaudet University, I was homesick for the first time in all the years I’d lived away from Wilkie. I wanted to see my mother’s face and hear my father’s voice, but all I had were weekly letters, and Washington might as well have been on the other side of the world, and I’d never felt so lost in the sea of people, but at least at the University of Saskatchewan I was bound to run into people who lived in familiar towns, or in towns where my relatives had settled, there was always something to connect us: a shared ethnicity, religion, familial or geographical ties, networks of friends and professionals whose circles lapped out wider and wider, even at the University of Alberta, I met many people who were from Saskatoon or Regina, and now I went to mass on the Gallaudet campus and Father Larry, a tall rangy man with black, fuzzy hair and fierce eyebrows, signed and voiced the mass, a Hearing man fluent enough in his signs in an Englishy sort of way, and his seventy-five-year-old assistant insisted on squawking out the hymns in her best Deaf voice, and I tried to follow along with my voice, but quickly abandoned it, and I signed instead, but there was a guitar player, a young woman, who was watching the older woman carefully, managing to finish at the end of the old Deaf woman’s songs, and I realized: She is Deaf too.

  She extended her right hand forward, her eyes kind, her hair bobbing in a page boy cut, in a wool sweater and Birkenstocks, and said: “Hello, I’m Deb.”

  I looked down at my own feet: socks and Birkenstocks.

  Deb was in grad studies too, counselling, after trying the graduate program in Deaf education in Minnesota. We were quickly dubbed the Bobbsey twins, but I had difficulty trusting her, not because she was a granola type but because she knew too much, she understood too much, she had progressively lost her hearing after the age of five, her sign was Englishy, a rhythm not quite fluent, although her fingers were strong and quick.

  Soon we were racing in her battered car into Virginia to join a reel dancing club, where I was spun around regardless of rhythm up and down a long row of quartets, men breathing upon me while Deb’s eyes laughed as she passed me, and we attended the National Theatre of the Deaf performance of Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds, and dined with the Deaf actors afterwards, who’d performed the anachronistic play in ASL, without pause or hesitation, and on Fridays she put on Irish harp music in her dorm room, lit a candle and massaged my aching arm, and Kurt, another student in the grad studies department, came to join us afterwards, and we took her guitar to the open common area, to sing and sign. Badly.

  Kurt was in counselling too, and struggled to make his signs. I saw him on the first day at Gally, looking rather shell-shocked, a head taller than the signing clusters of students in the Ely Centre, conspicuous in that he was the only one in the room who continued to wear hearing aids flat against his closely shorn head, bewildered, befuddled by the signs whirring about him. He caught my eye. Soon, we were a trio, taking subways to the Catholic University, George Washington University, and Georgetown, to study. We attended a golden evening at the Ole Jim, a red brick antebellum house, where we watched Clayton Valli perform sign poetry, wondering how the rhythm of hands could guide the body in its many sways, then Chinatown, the Smithsonian, cherry tree blossoms in the spring, the White House, Library of Congress, Georgetown, the Catholic University of America, on subways and buses, and we signed to bus drivers because the city had a special affection for the Deaf.

  Despite my inauguration into the Deaf world, there was still a nagging sense that somehow I’d descended to a level lower than myself, that in the eyes of deaf education professionals, particularly in Saskatchewan, Gallaudet was not a “real” university, because it churned out undergraduates who were still not wholly fluent in English, although they’d developed a sophisticated fluency in ASL. Most of the students in our graduate programs were Hearing, and there were only five Deaf students including myself in the entire graduate studies department; our signing, our new found culture was still worth little to Hearing people who couldn’t sign.

  Kurt was determined to do something about this. He grabbed my hand. We ducked into a classroom at George Washington University, Deb having gone off with another friend to Virginia. He printed carefully on the blackboard: “How often do you clean your ear mold?”

  He turned to me sitting at a desk in the empty classroom.

  I giggled and scrawled my answer close to the question: “Once a year.”

  He wrote: “Eeew.” He wrote, with solemnity, the names of hearing aid companies. Danavox is in. Oticon is out.

  I joined him: “Who needs a Phonic Ear?”

  He answered: “My ears are carrying enough hardware already.”

  Through fits of guffaws, giggles, and snorts, we quickly filled up the blackboard with slogans from hearing aid companies, cochlear implant companies, speech and language pathologists, audiologists, and the last one: “What is so great about hearing birds sing if you can’t even understand a conversation?”

  Kurt and I were nearly in hysterics when we finished. We sat in desks across from each other, surveying what we had done.

  “I say, we leave it.” I began to insert my books in my backpack.

  Kurt said: “For the others.”

  I said, remembering Saskatchewan: “For ourselves.”

  On the subway home we were quiet, letting the train rock us through the tunnels and open ramps above the city. I thought of the economy of deafness: the hearing aid dispensers, the cochlear implant companies, surgeons, ENT specialists, the teachers of the Deaf, interpreters, all make their livelihood off the Deaf. They will save us from our deafness and make lots of money doing it. But, I should not bite the hands that feed me.

  Yet I was now in the Deaf world.

  In May, near the end of the second semester, after an afternoon at the Catholic university, Deb and I were stopped at the gates of Gallaudet, before we pushed our way past knotted crowds of students, whose hands were striking sparks. There was anger flying everywhere. The university was under siege. Every entry gate was guarded.

  We discovered: the Gallaudet Board of Governors had appointed a Hearing woman, Elizabeth Ann Zinser, who had a Ph.D. in nursing and who couldn’t even sign, as the new president of our university. The board had explained to the student body that Ms. Zinser would take sign language classes and promised to immerse herself in the Deaf community.

  We walked through the eerie quiet settling over the campus bowl. The Deaf students had closed the cafeteria. Garbage overflowed in disposal areas. Clouds of flies hung over the bags. Mice skittered on the grey cement pad behind the dorm buildings. Students streamed in and out of the dormitories to bring in food off campus for themselves and their friends.

  DEB: “This is a great moment of history.”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “ . . . ” I’
m not sure if I can support this protest movement. Beneath all that is Deaf in me is the persistent, nagging feeling that being Deaf is not the answer. Somehow, it’s not good enough. When we leave Gally, we will all have to make our way in the Hearing world somehow. I realized: Saskatchewan. It’s never far from my mind.

  Suddenly, I had too much work to do. The psychology paper was due next week, and I had to read the text for my speech therapy class, prepare for the Signed English exam and finish the language development assignment. Through the dormitory window, the red eyes of the tall Washington monument blinked, one off, one on, impervious to the marches, meetings, sudden groupings of signing students, and empty buildings. The early mornings were grey with a late spring overcast, although the cabbage roses along the footpaths were in full bloom.

  On the third morning of the “Deaf President Now” week, Deb smoothed the fraying quilt on my bed.

  DEB: “You’ve been holed up here for the last three days. Why don’t you come out with me and find out what’s going on with the protest?”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “I have work to do.”

  DEB: “But this is history in the making. You should be out there.”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “Look, I know what’s going on, okay? Gally students want a Deaf president to replace the new Hearing president who can’t even sign.”

  DEB: “But there’s more. I found out at the Abbey bar last night that the students want a board that has fifty percent Deaf and fifty percent Hearing representatives.”

  I sent a page flapping across my desk. “Uh uh.”

  She explained: “They want Jane Spilman to resign as chairperson of the board. She’s Hearing and is the real problem. She’s controlling the entire board.”

  I straightened my legs over the edge of the bed and arched my back, then asked: “Why are you telling me all this?” Today, the roar in my ears sounded like water rushing toward my tangled feelings, trying to break its way into the knots, the coils, the beginning of the snarled mess. I began again: “Deb, it’s a special interest group. We’re behaving like victims. I don’t want to be anybody’s victim.”

  DEB: “We’ve not been able to communicate in American Sign Language at educational institutions for nearly a couple hundred years.”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “Yes, but this is not the way to go about it. It’s against my conscience. I shouldn’t have to argue from the view point of having a special language and a culture in order to be treated with respect. I am not a victim.”

  DEB (SPUTTERS): “Joanne, this is USA in the twenty first century for God’s sake. Nobody will understand that.”

  My eyes narrowed. I was surveying Deb with the precision of an x-ray machine. Maybe there was a flaw that would explain her obtuseness. I tried to isolate that flaw from everything else that rang true about her. I said: “Look, the whole premise is wrong. I arrive at Gallaudet, only to find myself on the lowest rung of the social ladder because I can speak and because I went to school with Hearing kids. Now, because I’m not fluent in American Sign Language, didn’t have Deaf parents and didn’t go to a Deaf school, I should start up a protest for the hard of hearing, oral Deaf, mainstreamed people who are being treated like shit by Deaf people? This is just one group vying for power against another group. It’s all backwards.”

  DEB:(Coldly) “What do you suggest then?”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “Argue from the basis of needs as opposed to rights, I . . . ”

  DEB: “No one will listen to your needs.”

  MS. HEARING WEBER: “It’s just an ideology.”

  Deb picked up her jacket and left the room.

  That night, I dreamed of visiting a leper colony. The lepers showed me their stumps and patches of rotting flesh and I saw how infectious the disease was, I could even catch it from the ground by walking over the graves of deceased lepers, then I stooped into a low doorway of a thatched hut, a tall, gaunt priest was curled up in a fetal position in a very large shallow bowl filled with stagnant water, stirred, and the midges fluttered around him as he woke.

  He said: “Please hold me.”

  He said: “Kiss me.”

  I woke up chilled, and realized that I’d kicked off my covers in the middle of the night.

  I asked myself: “Who is this man in my dream and what does it all mean?”

  The answer came easily, too easily as I squirmed into my jeans: Fr. Damien, the priest who lived with lepers on Molokai, an island in the chain of Hawaiian slands, who eventually contracted the disease and died a leper.

  But I’d read enough Jungian psychology to know that dream figures represent a dimension of myself, that the little girl in the red coat has morphed into Fr. Damien, who wants to be held despite the hideousness of leprosy, uh, deafness, and the Deaf, who’ve absorbed the shame of being deaf by being told that the Hearing world is the only world they can possibly fit into with their defective hearing and speech, they are my leper friends who show me their wounds, but the Deaf who are barricading the gates of Gallaudet University are triumphant, because they’ve shown the world that they are capable of deep thought and action.

  The next night, Deb came into my room to tell me that the protesters were going to carry the banner from Martin Luther King’s historic protest on Capitol Hill thirty some years ago, “WE STILL HAVE A DREAM.” The next morning, I left my dormitory room to march in the protest up to Capitol Hill. It wasn’t only the promise of carrying the historic banner that propelled me out the door but my own dream that carried me to the front gate, where I took my place in the crowd behind the banner, Deb falling into step with me under the balmy May sky, Kurt catching my eye and grinning, then hands slapping against chests, wrists, palms, and arms, signs punctuated by hoots toward individuals caught up in other signing clusters, while the march inched up Capitol Hill with the long canvas sign as the masthead, the black slum community lining up along Florida Avenue and cheering as the Deaf students walked down the middle of the road with their hands flying, cars honking their horns, and many business people carrying briefcases waving as we approached Capitol Hill.

  The day was sunny and the mood was jovial. A week without services, classes, or cafeteria food had catapulted the student body into a holiday mood. When we arrived at Capitol Hill, the student leader, Greg Hlibok with fiery eyes bulging from a pale face and blond hair, punctuated the air with “Deaf President Now!” Then the news came: Elizabeth Zinzer, the president elect, has resigned. Now the signs went up with the number 3½ scrawled all over. The Deaf students now wanted three and a half demands to be met. They demanded that Jane Spilman, the chairman of the board resign, the new board to be comprised of fifty percent Deaf and fifty percent Hearing, and no reprisal for the student activists. After a few days of tense negotiations, the Deaf students were excused from any sort of discipline and returned peacefully to classes.

  The night before I was to fly back to Canada, Deb gave me her Derek Bell tape of Carolan’s harp music. We sat and listened to the entire tape, watching a candle flicker in her room, casting shadows against the wall.

  She finally said: “You don’t really trust me, Joanne.”

  I felt Little Red Deaf Coat rustling around inside of me. She rattled her bars: The whole Deaf thing is just wonderful, don’t be silly.

  But I thought: If I can’t manage more than a trite or facetious remark, then I better keep silent, because I don’t know how I am going to explain to her this crazy desire to go back to Saskatchewan. Even if it means entering hostile territory, it’s still home.

  Twenty

  MRS. WOODWARD, THE DIRECTOR OF SPEECH and Communication Disorders at the Saskatoon School Board office wore a jacket with beaded outlines of giraffes craning their necks over tall sequined grasses, a tribute, no doubt, to the richness of multiculturalism. I sat across from her, tucking my legs under the chair. I’d just returned from my year at Gallaudet hoping to land a job with this school board. She leaned forward to shake my hand. We played our story out:

  MRS. WOODWARD:
“Your resume is very impressive, Joanne. All that work at Canadian universities. You did graduate work at the University of Alberta?”

  JOANNE, MAYBE HEARING, IT DEPENDS: “Yes, I earned a master’s in library science, but I’m now a qualified teacher of the deaf, since I went to Gallaudet.”

  Mrs. Woodward refocused her eyes on me. She drew in her mouth as if to keep herself from blurting out something. She composed herself before continuing.

  MRS. WOODWARD: “We are concerned with how neutral you can be as a teacher of the deaf. After all, you have excellent speech skills. But you sign too. We are very committed to oralism.”

  I tried to swallow, but a small plate seemed to lodge itself sideways in my esophagus.

  JOANNE NOW HEARING:(With difficulty) “Mrs. Woodward, I assure you that I value my speech skills. I have no difficulty with oralism.”

  MRS. WOODWARD:(Smiling and nodding) “You’re wise not to give into the Deaf community and their demands for ASL. The Deaf here became so emotional over that Gallaudet University protest and picketed outside of the Provincial School for the Deaf here in Saskatoon. Even the local television station reported on their protest.”

  JOANNE CERTAINLY NOW HEARING (stammering): “You don’t need to worry. I’m committed to oralism as much as anybody else.” (Praying, silently: God, I need this job).

  MRS. WOODWARD:(Laying Joanne’s resume down on her desk top) “What do you think of the Deaf Pride movement?”

  JOANNE STILL HEARING:(To herself) Did something happen in Saskatchewan while I was away? (Carefully) “I don’t know of any organization called Deaf Pride.” (She shakes her head) mrs. woodward: (With a knowing look, as if to say: you don’t fool me) “I remember you when you were about ten. You gave a presentation to a group of parents in Regina. You gave those parents a lot of hope. (Extends her hand across her desk) Remarkable, just remarkable. I’m sorry to say, however, that we have no work for you.”