by Joanne Weber
Later that morning, I look at the small half circle of students facing me. It’s time for the talk, usually given after a month of watching, listening, and settling in. The leaves are already dirty against my classroom window, and the mornings are frosty. I sigh. It’s going to be the same damn speech. The same as last year.
“Look”, I say. “You’ve got to stop being such dumb deaf people. There is nothing wrong with your intelligence. But teachers are giving you pity passes because they think you can’t do the work and they just want to shove you on. Or they give you high marks because they think that will make you feel better about being deaf. You know you are not doing the work. And you are manipulating the interpreters into giving you answers to questions in homework and on exams. In this room, you will earn your marks. If you don’t work, you will fail my classes.” I pause. “I’ve failed plenty of kids in here before. Right, Jonathan?” He nods knowingly, a tall gangly young man, who is growing sideburns now that he has turfed the Alfalfa cowlick at the back of his head.
“And what’s this flopping your hands around like half dead fish? And your arms are like windmills, way too much to the top, the bottom, left and right sides. You were obviously taught sign language by hearing people who learned it from a book. They were too afraid to hang out with Deaf people. They thought sign language was easy, that knowing a few signs made them experts. But now, you will develop respect for our sign language. Sign has to be done in a certain way, your handshapes have to be correct, you will sign in the space that is mostly in the centre of your chest, you will learn to use classifiers. You will learn the grammar of ASL, you will . . . ” I pause: “You will learn to sign like real Deaf people.”
A student says: “But I’m not deaf, I can hear.”
“You’re deaf. You may hear, you may talk, you may sign but not having a full language either in English or ASL has affected your learning. That’s why you are here. You’re deaf. So what?” I flip the back of my hand out from under my chin. “You will learn to grieve over your hearing loss. You will see your Deafhood as a gift for others.”
I turn my back to these students, to hide my grin as I plug in my laptop into the projector, readying myself for class. I turn again to see their stricken faces.
“It’s not your fault,” I remind them. “You were never taught these things. And you will learn now.”
“Jonathan,” I sign to him: “You want to add anything to what I’ve said? You were here last year. You might want to share some of your wisdom.”
Jonathan’s smile is wide on his face as he signs: “JW, we make you crazy but you love us.”
Chapter Twenty-One
IN EARLY OCTOBER, I WAS DETERMINED to see a doctor. I’d put off the inevitable. Murray and I were together all the time, day and night. He had moved into an apartment. I still maintained mine. But it was for appearances only. I couldn’t think beyond this, couldn’t think of the pain this was causing my parents, Murray’s ex-wife, his children. I was too busy arguing for the validity of Deaf experience, knowledge, and wisdom.
The waiting room in the doctor’s office wasn’t inviting: chairs littered with magazines, people melting in their fall coats as the day started with a stern frost and ended up with an Indian summer afternoon.
I said to the doctor: “I am spotting.”
The doctor’s voice boomed over his clipboard pinned against his chest. He asked: “How about a pregnancy test?”
I asked: “Pregnancy test?”
I began a frantic search in my mind for the date of my last period. I thought: But I know, but I don’t want to know, but I know.
I said: “This arm.” I began to rub my right arm. “It’s causing me a lot of pain.”
He said: “Sometimes pregnancy will cause a condition like carpel tunnel. It goes away after the pregnancy.”
I said: “But I have had this problem for at least two years. It comes and goes but recently it has gotten worse.”
He said: “Well, that can be a repetitive motion injury, especially if you started signing late in your life. The only way you can heal is to stop signing. You’re about thirty now?”
I asked: “I have to stop signing?”
He answered: “Well, let’s take a pregnancy test first.”
An hour later, I asked the secretary in the medical clinic to phone Murray who was at school. I didn’t want to try to hear on the phone and the clinic didn’t have a teletypewriter, which would enable me to make the call myself, by typing to an operator who would then relay to Murray via voice.
I rehearsed explanations in my head while the secretary finished the call to Murray: I was trying to follow the natural family planning method, but I guess I misunderstood it. I thought: Murray will respond with silence. I have three university degrees, am a voracious reader, and have actually taught sex education to Deaf students. How it is possible that I’ve misunderstood some pamphlet or manual?
I was huddled in the corner of the examining room when Murray walked in, his overcoat fanning out behind him. The doctor was sitting on a stool, scribbling in the file opened on the examining table. The fluorescent light was flickering and humming overhead. Sterile gloves were already tossed in the open garbage. I had the curious sensation of floating up near the ceiling and seeing my arms wrapped around my waist, my eyes smudged like a trapped raccoon’s.
Murray moved his chair in front of me, sheathing my knees with his large hands.
He said: “What’s wrong, Joanne?”
I said: “I’m pregnant.”
His mouth opened in shock: “Well, Joanne, how would you know? We really don’t know yet, right? It’s possible that you may not be pregnant.”
Murray took my cold hand and covered it with both of his hands.
Dr. Williams had his say: “Because Joanne has some spotting, we’re not sure whether the pregnancy is viable. But her uterus does feel bulky.” He closed his file and stood with his arms crossed.
Murray said: “Why didn’t you use the pill or something?”
I stumbled out: “Uh, I don’t want to put chemicals in my body.”
Murray responded with: “Well, you’d have to do something if you didn’t want a baby.”
My voice broke into: “There’s the natural family planning method.”
Murray’s answer was: “That just doesn’t work. You’d have to abstain for at least a week out of every month.”
The doctor rolled his eyes and tapped his folder, while Murray eyed the floor, his mouth set in a line.
I explained: “It’s against my religion. Artificial birth control, I mean.”
Murray said: “Joanne, I thought you were a thinking sort of person. Karl Marx —”
I snapped: “I don’t know, Murray, okay?” I pronounced these words as if I were proclaiming a final judgment on the state of things.
But I did know. I thought: It’s hard to live with so much nothingness, the dullness that seeps into my brain, leaving me to wander among fantasies and half-formed thoughts. I know that being Hearing, in my family, at school, and with Murray, is an opiate, mollifying me with the promise of togetherness, homogeneity, and ties of blood and kin. A deep passivity has seeped into my bones, tempting me to not to think about difficult topics, to assume that someone else will take care of me. Being Hearing is like being drugged, dragged down into the quagmire of half understood sentences, words, and phrases; it’s easy to say yes or no to stupid actions, half-baked plans, and idiotic schemes, because I don’t have enough hearing to participate in anything with anyone.
Murray was conferring with the doctor.
About the child in my womb, I suppose. I thought: I have come to the limit of my moral development. And I really don’t have a clue what will happen next. Only the vague sense that someone else will figure it out for me and tell me later.
Murray’s face clouded in confusion as I laid my head against the tissue on the examining table and sank into heaviness. I knew what Murray was thinking, I thought: If my faith, my beliefs
are that important to me, why am I sleeping with a married man? Why am I living a life separate from my beliefs and values? Why don’t I live according to what I know to be true? Has deafness so set me apart from the world that it no longer matters what I believe or value? It doesn’t matter that I’m physically present at every Mass. Am I to be satisfied only with a life of reading? Shall I be satisfied only with those summer nights alone in my satin nightgown, rolling atop the nylon sleeping bag in the heavy canvas tent in my parents’ backyard?
In that cold examining room with Murray sitting at my knees, those questions were rhetorical, because I was pregnant.
Outside the clinic, the sky seemed like a sheet of steel coming down to press us flat. It was October, so the leaves in the parking lot lay in scraped piles against the clinic. As Murray opened the car for me, something caught his eye. He asked me to wait. I saw him disappear behind the clinic and come back carrying a box. He walked to a gutter between the parking lot and the clinic and picked something up. I couldn’t see it closely, until he walked up to my window and tilted the box toward me. It was a pigeon with a torn wing.
Murray took the pigeon to his classroom and the Deaf students helped him to care for it during the week until he set it free.
I began to wake up in the middle of the night and drain tall glasses of milk before going back to sleep. I wrote letters to my unborn child in my journal, explaining the situation: It isn’t that your father doesn’t love you, or me, it’s because he’s struggling with having made a horrendous mistake, of not finishing up his marriage in an appropriate way. Now he’s not sure if he wants to be with you and me, or with his wife and two sons. And I fiercely scribbled across the page: I’m waiting, and I hate it.
I still couldn’t believe that I’d betrayed my own religious values and beliefs. My mother was more tolerant. She explained: “It’s your biological clock. You’re almost thirty, for heaven’s sake.” Other women on staff at the school for the Deaf reminded me: “You’re not a teenager. You’ve got your education at least.”
But they said nothing of Murray, who was teaching in his classroom in the far corner of the school.
Finally, the day arrived when I had to tell the whole school. Patti had called all the students into the library. I stumbled in, wearing a loose blue jumper and blouse. They’d known me as a lover of granola clothes, loose fitting dresses, and bulky sweaters, so they were surprised when I signed to them, my signs tumbling out in guilt and shame: “I’m pregnant, and I’ve acted inappropriately and don’t do what I’ve done.”
Daily, Murray and I sat in restaurants, contemplating our lot in glum silence. Murray wanted to explore reconciliation with his wife. I wanted to clean up this mess in the best way. I thought it meant doing the hardest thing ever.
JOANNE FIX IT FAST: “Murray, I want you to be free to choose whatever you want to do.”
MUDDLED MURRAY: “But I’m emotionally committed to you.”
LOGICAL AND HEROIC JOANNE: “That doesn’t mean anything, Murray. You know it. I’m going to give the baby up for adoption. You don’t want to make a commitment to me, and I don’t want to raise this baby alone. Every child needs a mother and a father.”
BETWEEN ROCK AND HARD PLACE MURRAY: “It’s much more complicated than that.”
JOANNE QUICK QUESTIONS: “But then, what do you want?”
Murray shrugged. A look of bewilderment spread across his face. My fingers flew over the dirty dishes on the table, bringing my signs close to my enlarged breasts and distended belly, signing: “Look, if you don’t make any decisions, then I’ll have to.”
UNFOCUSSED MURRAY: “Let’s just focus here. Life is very messy. You want to clean it all up by leaving me, giving up the baby, and moving to another province to get a job.”
JOANNE ON HIGH HORSE: “I have to live according to my values and my faith.”
DESPERATE TO SLOW IT DOWN MURRAY: “The only reason you can believe what you believe is because your parents support you, send you money, and tell you to come home and live with them. You know they don’t think much of me.”
The tips of my fingers hit the lip of my coffee cup, sending black hot liquid over the table. My signs were tight, while my speech had become slurred. I couldn’t think anymore, I couldn’t sign and talk and think all at the same time. I finally said: “We have to do what’s right, Murray.”
“But what is right?”
Weeks went by and my face felt like a heavy stone mask. On the weekends, I either slept with Murray in a narrow single bed in his sparsely furnished apartment, or at Dorene’s. During the week, I stayed with David and Marion Gorrie, who’d taken me into their home. David taught in the Deaf Blind program at the school and he must have seen my stricken face, because he invited me to live with their family during the rest of my pregnancy. Meanwhile, I still had an apartment downtown. I thought: I have too many homes and nowhere to lay my head to sleep in peace.
Christmas came. I was five months pregnant. My family and I were seated around the dining room table. Bubbles clung to the underside of the glass lid over the holopsti, a delicacy reserved for Christmas. My father had painstakingly wrapped the gelatinous mixture of rice, pork, beef, garlic, ground potatoes, onions into rolls with sour cabbage leaves. The moist mixture lay steaming in tight rolls, stacked side by side in the warming dish like Cuban cigars. I was able to eat again after vomiting steadily for the past five months.
My father gave me a kitchen knife and a high-necked flannel nightgown for Christmas. I thought: What’s with the knife? And the flannel nightgown? My mother had baked Scotch oat cakes, which to my surprise I could eat too without vomiting. She told me: “Your grandmother used to eat dried oatmeal by the handful when she was pregnant.”
Back in Saskatoon after Christmas, Murray slid behind me in the single bed, pushing me toward the wall. Only the narrow space between my extended belly and the wall gave me enough room to bring my knees up some. Murray began to move his hands over my belly and breasts, while my mind turned over and over again, a tangled rope of images. Then there it was, the language between us that lured me into this mess.
But Murray was sending new messages that I didn’t understand. I was no closer to the meaning of this language. I sprang up, round bellied and naked, frantic in my search for my clothes, Murray leaned on his elbow, his eyes blinking in the lamplight, I ran naked into the bathroom and crouched close to the toilet, retching most violently, as if giant pincers were digging into my belly. I rested on the cool floor, waiting for the spinning in my head to stop.
Murray sat beside me, his arm on my shoulder, his face crestfallen. He said: “Joanne, this has been going on, night after night. I think you’re allergic to me.” His face was sad, his eyes shining with tears.
Finally, we went back to bed. Murray sank back into his pillow, his arm across his eyes. I waited, but he didn’t lift his arm. I slid out of bed and donned my clothes. It was now two am. I put on my coat and quietly closed the door to his apartment. I shivered in the idling car in the subzero winter night. I wanted to return, open the door, and back my body into Murray’s chest, sleep between his head and knees, and become a part of his dream, but I drove over the University Bridge to my downtown apartment.
After I let myself in, I sorted through my mail and breathed a sigh of relief. This was my home after all. I needed to be here, not sleeping at other people’s houses. I ran the hot water for a bath and later fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning, I called Christian Family Services to arrange to give up my baby for adoption.
Between months five and six of my pregnancy, Murray and I rushed time and time again to the emergency ward, only to be told that I had false labour pains. Then my doctor began to investigate more, and announced that I must have an operation.
He said: “You have an incompetent cervix. You’ll have to be sewn up to keep the baby from coming out too early. If you have another baby, you’ll have to have this operation again.”
This was the
simple explanation, I knew, but I didn’t tell anyone of how I’d dreamed the night before about lying on two single beds pushed together, giving birth to the baby, and seeing her fall between the two beds. I realized: I’d fall too, if she falls.
Anneliese was born blue and bloody on May 18, 1990. Murray had been at my side during the entire labour, massaging me during contractions and spraying me with hot water in the shower when I was too tired with the pain. He even interpreted for me in my meeting with the doctor preparing an epidural, and laid his head and arms over my head as the doctor inserted the long needle. I realized: He is with me in this pain.
A nurse inserted a plastic tube into Anna’s mouth to help her breathe and wiped down her mucous,and blood-marbled body. Murray came over to my side, holding our daughter swaddled in a pink blanket, and cooing to her in a low voice. His heavy brow lifted high over his blue eyes, while I strained to hear the first words between father and daughter. I couldn’t hear Murray as he searched through the blanket for Anneliese’s body, checking for any imperfections.
I sank back into the pillow, eyes closed, escaping into the red hot desert under my eyelids. A few moments later, I opened my eyes, still slumped on the hospital bed, sucking ice water. I closed my eyes again, until I felt a presence in the room. Someone had walked in. I opened my eyes to Patti, holding Anneliese in her arms. By now, my baby was only an hour old.
Patti signed to me: “What are you going to do? Keep her?”