The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  Murray’s back was turned to us, a rare moment of privacy.

  I signed back: “I don’t know anymore. Murray wants her to be given to those parents we selected.”

  Patti inserted her finger between the blankets to stroke Anna’s chin and looked into my eyes.

  She said: “Her name sign will be A on the chin and will land as A on her heart. That’s because she started in your head and now has landed in your heart.”

  Green Journal

  I thought, well, with her being nearly thirty, I’m hardly surprised she’s pregnant. It’s as if those two planted a crop and hoped for failure. The worst thing is that Joanne is so impulsive and highly suggestible. This is not the sort of thing she’d do on her own. Clearly, Murray was able to persuade her to compromise on her values and to abandon her faith. I know how much Joanne values being Catholic. He obviously persuaded her to fling away her morals and beliefs.

  I don’t think that Joanne realized that she wouldn’t have a job after this Task Force business was done. We did our best, even wrote a brief and attended a few meetings. The school for the Deaf needs to remain an option for deaf kids who can’t function in a mainstream environment. Not everyone can do what Joanne can do and that’s okay. But not everyone involved in the stakeholder groups has teaching experience and understands this. Ed and I have no problem understanding where, when, and how mainstreaming might not work for many deaf children, but now the school will be closed at the end of June and Joanne will be out of work.

  It’s so hard to believe the path she’s taken. She was always a good girl. We never had to worry about her, and Ed always gave her the car anytime she asked for it. When she talked about how bored she was cruising up and down the main drag with her friends, I knew she’d be okay. She was too much into her books and all her activities — figure skating, swimming, drama, volunteering at the developmental centre, piano — to be a worry of any kind. But she really balked when we wouldn’t allow her to attend the bush party on her graduation night. She stomped up to her bedroom during supper when we remained adamant, but I knew that she’d be bored there. She’d been bored at the last one. That party seemed to lodge itself in Joanne’s mind as some significant ritual, some rite of passage. She’d even found an escort, one of Ed and Fay Keller’s boys, and I’d bought her a pink dress. Her Aunt Joanne and Uncle Paul were invited out along with my mother and I thought that’d be plenty of excitement right there. Ed and I didn’t want her to go out to Coldspring and drink in the bush with all those kids. I had a keen feeling that something bad was going to happen. We made sure that Joanne was delivered to our doorstep at midnight. It turned out that one of her classmates did die that night. He was drunk when he rolled his car on his way back from Coldspring.

  Now I’m beginning to wonder if Joanne skipped her teenage years. Perhaps this is the payback for not allowing her to go to that bush party, and now she’s pregnant by a married man who can’t make up his mind whether he should go back to his wife or be with her. I often tell Joanne: “If he’s worth anything, he’ll go back to his wife and look after his two young boys.”

  I’m not sleeping well these nights and have moved into one of the small bedrooms so I don’t disturb Ed. Too many dreams. Too many thoughts about Joanne. Perhaps something went terribly wrong in the way we raised her. Last night, though, I dreamed of her baby being born. The sky outside the hospital room was very dark when the child was brought in. I watched the sky become emblazoned with different colours, first a dark purple, then a lighter green, then a warm orange, and then it turned into the normal flush of early morning: a light grey blue. It reminded me of Julian of Norwich: All will be well.

  Twenty-Two

  Green Journal

  Joanne’s been unemployed since the school closed in June. She turned down offers of deaf education jobs in Manitoba. She thought there was hope that the school for the Deaf wouldn’t be closed. Anyway, she’s right not to move with a small baby on her hands. How ironic. Joanne has put all this effort into becoming Deaf, and is now allowing some Hearing man to keep her trapped in Saskatchewan. She tells us there’s going to be an exodus of her Deaf colleagues. She’ll be the only Deaf teacher left behind. Simply because she got pregnant.

  At the end of summer, on the first day of the term for the last year at the Deaf school, Murray came to see me. Anna played at our feet, clutching her yellow quilt with the white swans while he showed me a letter he’d just received. He was shaking his head.

  “They’ve fired me. Damn.” He folded up the paper in his hand. “And to make it look like an innocent layoff, the Ministry sacrificed Angela too. She’s been in her classroom all last week getting it ready for the new school year. She got this letter just now. I was talking to her a few minutes ago. They did this to shut me up.”

  Green Journal

  Well, Joanne’s foolishness is not likely to end anytime soon. She’s pregnant again, and it is six months since Anna was born. And Murray is now in Regina, living with his boys and working at his new government job. Joanne just got a short term job at SIAST in Saskatoon, replacing a teacher in the deaf adult program there. She’ll have her hands full, being pregnant, looking after a toddler and teaching full-time. And I don’t think she wants to move to Regina to join Murray.

  I told myself: It’s a scorched landscape, as I held Anna and Paula’s hands to prevent them from running pell-mell down the quiet, abandoned hallways of the former school for the Deaf —open during the day because an English as a Second Language program administered by the University of Saskatchewan had encroached upon the former classrooms. Meeting with other Deaf in the cultural centre felt like huddling in a bombed-out shelter. I didn’t know this Deaf life as a child, but I had no difficulty understanding how Deaf culture depended on the school for its survival. Everyone in the Deaf community attended every graduation, play, concert, performance, tea, barbecue, and picnic and every softball, volleyball, and darts game hosted here. The older Deaf women were surrogate grandmothers to the students. The boys slammed each other into lockers along the halls, swearing vociferously, but remaining brothers even in their adult years, after growing up to be barbers, printers, house painters, postal workers, and farmers. They had cousins, aunts, and uncles scattered in a radius around Saskatoon. They didn’t visit them much. Those weren’t their families.

  We were a straggling bunch now, bolstered occasionally by Deaf leaders from Ontario and British Columbia, who flew out to exhort us to keep up the fight and not lose hope. Murray urged me not to give up, but I could barely think of Deaf education anymore, now that I woke up in the middle of the night to breastfeed Paula, and change diapers on both daughters.

  I thought: Murray and I can’t get it together.

  I couldn’t bring myself to move to Regina though I wished I could. I even put a deposit on an apartment near Murray’s home, then panicked. Meanwhile I was on social assistance, living in a tiny apartment in Saskatoon, completing small contracts for the Catholic School Board. Murray continued to coax me to move, but he was too unsure of what he really wanted. I liked my tiny Saskatoon apartment. It was the only life that made sense, to be far away from a Hearing man who was in too much grief over his collapsed marriage, yet I couldn’t stay in Saskatoon longer than three or four days. I packed diapers, toys, and blankets for a short trip to Regina every weekend to visit Murray in his house. After a few days in Regina, I was anxious to get back to Saskatoon, to my Deaf women friends, to the playgrounds, parks, and paths along the riverbank. Anna was nearly three. I was spooked when I thought of myself at three, in a red coat. The tiny apartment seemed haunted when I woke up in the middle of the night, sure that a hand had passed over my face. Jane Eyre wakes up too, I reminded myself, to the screams of the mad wife. I felt chest pains and choking sensations in my throat, but I told myself: I am being overly dramatic. But somewhere, someone was crying in me. All the time.

  With Anna and Paula firmly strapped in their car seats behind me, and the roar of the wind,
and a few hours of the exhilaration of being on the road with no one to disturb me, and the smell of canola in August taking me back to when I was a child riding in the car with my father, I arrived in Regina, but the next morning I wanted to pack up and go back to Saskatoon again. I could see the Wascana Freeway through the trees as Anna and Paula played in the backyard. Murray worked throughout the day. I looked after his sons when they came home from school, and cooked meals, but during the day I listlessly wandered through his house, singing to my daughters like a distracted Ophelia.

  I thought: There are too many things wrong with this life. I don’t see enough Deaf people in Regina to feel all the ways I am Deaf in my body, other than not being able to hear very well. In Saskatoon, I’m a single parent without a job. And: There’s no place for me. I don’t belong anywhere, least of all with Murray. He’s still grieving. He’s kind to me and clearly loves Anna and Paula, but he keeps mementos of his wife in his house and garage.

  Meanwhile, in my backpack, I carried pictures of my childhood: the red coat, the yellow dress, the doll I’d forgotten, and the red playhouse by the sandbox, and thought: There are too many things that are wrong. Everything is lost, gone, or destroyed.

  In all this restless shuffling from place to place, I was too lonely and too isolated. Something was devouring me from the inside.

  Traffic was already thundering along the Ring Road in Regina when I awoke and breastfed Paula, who fell asleep again with a droplet of milk snaking its way down her chin. Anna was playing at my feet, looking into a hand mirror that Murray had bought for her birthday. She tried to fit her round three-year-old face into it by holding it at different distances. After breakfast, Murray bent down to kiss Anna, then stood before me, where I was cradling Paula on the couch.

  He said: “You look tired, Joanne.”

  I said: “I’m fine.” I bit my lip. I wanted to make it a proper goodbye, but my tongue seemed locked inside my mouth. I was uncertain about leaving him. I wanted to say one more time: Let me have a room here in this house. I thought: This solution is more reasonable than taking children away from their father.

  But he still didn’t know what he wanted, his wife or me. He just said: “Stay indoors today, Joanne. This heat wave is very dangerous.”

  I nodded. My mind was racing. This is all wrong. He cares for me, I’ve got it all wrong.

  He said: “Joanne, did you hear me? Make sure you put sunblock on the girls and a hat if you have to go out. And always take a water bottle with you.”

  Then he held out his arms. Surprised, I put Paula down on the couch and walked into his chest, interlocking my cold hands around his neck, but during the short embrace, I thought: How condescending he is. Always telling me what to do. As if I don’t know my own mind about things. He is the Hearing man who is only with me because he wants to feel powerful.

  He called out: “Goodbye.”

  I said: “ . . . ”

  I was waiting for the faint click of the doorknob.

  I was not going back to Saskatoon that day. This was the journey I had to take, to find out where I must go from here. Dorene was waiting for me in Calgary. She knew how tormented I was. The week before, she’d phoned me: “Come to Calgary, Jo, and stay with us. David and I miss you, we love you, and James and Desiree will be happy to play with Anna and Paula. Come so you can make your mind up about things.”

  My small car wasn’t air conditioned. The drive from Regina to Calgary would take all day. I hadn’t done much long distance driving, except back and forth between Regina and Saskatoon. I picked up the keys by the phone and gently pushed Anna toward the door. She was clutching her swan quilt. I backed the car out the garage slowly, like pulling a sticky popsicle from its thin paper bag. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave. I stopped for groceries, and at least five pounds of chocolate. The air rushing through the open windows didn’t bother me. I’d tucked my hearing aid in the glove compartment. The sky was cloudless and defiant. The heat wave that Murray warned me about was following us across the prairie, Anna and Paula sucked on ice water in their bottles, I popped a chocolate into my mouth every few minutes, soon the car was on the Yellowhead. I clutched my written directions at the wheel, glanced at Paula and Anna strapped in their car seats behind me, they’d gone to sleep again under the steady hum of the car, with its windows wide open to the sweet pungent smell of yellow canola. In Swift Current, I was desperate for a paddling pool. After a few moments of dipping our ankles in the cool water, a thunderstorm chased us back into the car. Out on the highway, swathed in damp towels, feet streaked with long blades of grass, we sang until our reedy voices became drowned by the roar of the air coming through the rolled down windows.

  The clouds on the horizon continued to fulminate in angry colonnades as I pulled over to a little town huddled around a gas station and an adjoining restaurant. A fall of multi-coloured beads separated the restaurant from the gas station. Short runs of red, blue, green, pink, and orange glass beads clacked against each other as Anna and Paula ran back and forth through the doorway. I clenched my jaw as the beads separated over their heads and crashed against the door frame. I called: “Anna and Paula, stop running through the beads.” But they ran to the end of the restaurant past me. I could feel the stare of the farmers pausing over their coffee cups. I clapped my hands smartly, “Paula, Anna, come to Mom, come.”

  Paula charged from the far end of the restaurant, whipping past my outstretched hands. Anna was a close second. The restaurant cook, an energetic woman in her sixties with a badly stained white apron, came out of the kitchen to watch. She stood with her hands on her hips. She ordered: “Come here.”

  She beckoned us past the soup simmering on the stove to a back entry padded with large black garbage bags. Finally, we were standing at the back of the building, in the tall grasses, watching the cook fumble with the latch on a plain wooden door silvered with age. The door flattened the grass as the cook stepped inside, feeling the inner wall for a light.

  She talked over her shoulder before preparing to lead us down the wooden steps into the basement: “Ooo ay in eer.”

  My daughters and I sat on chairs around a dirty card table in the cool, dark room, staring up at the shaft of light through the open door, where tall blades of grass bent in the cool wind. The cook hurried down the creaking steps, and I caught her face as she came near.

  She said: “Here’s nice cold water.” She set glasses down on the dirty table between Anna and Paula. I let the cool water roll over my tongue, taking my breathing slow. The cook was standing on the first stair up. Light surrounded the back of her head, casting her face into shadow. She was talking and I couldn’t see her face well enough to lipread her. I wondered: Is she an angel?

  Then I was back on the highway to Calgary, and realized: I’m more than halfway on this journey. I’ve outrun the angry clouds. My children are thriving. The goodwill of the angel cook and the chocolates have kept my fear at bay.

  In Medicine Hat, in the approaching evening and persisting heat, I found a park with a swimming pool, and made sandwiches on top of the cooler, watching the girls play in the playground. Later, when the lid of the black sky was about to close on the horizon, they were suddenly quiet in the car. The car windows framed the snapshots of lightning as I hunched over the steering wheel. Wind buffeted the car toward the shoulder. I could see my white knuckle bones as I gripped the wheel to force the car back onto the highway. I reached into the cooler beside me and felt melting ice and floating bits of lettuce, soggy bread crusts, and torn cheese slices. No more chocolate. A thousand spears of rain rushed towards the window. It was now a mask of swollen rivulets. I slowed the car again and made out a roadside gas station. I stepped out of the car. The wind was at my back.

  A gas attendant in saggy grey overalls stood behind a dirt encrusted cash register and pulled his cap further down on his head as I approached him.

  I asked: “Is there a tornado warning?”

  He said: “Oonan oooo l
eeen aaadeeoo?”

  I lied, pushing in my ear mold for a snugger fit as I didn’t want a squeal to betray me: “The car radio is not working. It is okay to go on? Yes or no?”

  He said: “Yeah.” He nodded.

  I came into Calgary at midnight. A wasteland of lights sprawled before me, a city sleeping in the wake of storm. I cruised down ghostlike freeways, calm and mysterious in the dark. The girls were sleeping in the back, Paula’s fine black hair awry in wisps across her forehead and Anna’s blond curls sticky with heat. I clutched my written directions and slowed the car at each street corner so that I could decipher the house numbers. Finally, I eased onto an empty street, turning off the motor as lights sprang on in a house.

  Dorene greeted me wide-eyed at the door, with: “Jo, I’ve been so worried. A child died in a car today because of the heat.”

  I said: “We’re all right.” I laid my sleeping daughters on the foldout couch in the living room. In the kitchen, lit only by the back porch light, I sipped tea and explained the delays.

  I awoke with the sun already high in the window, and I could see Anna running back and forth on the deck through the sliding doors in the kitchen, playing with James and Desiree, Dorene’s preschool children. I found a clean coffee mug and strolled out onto the deck with a book of haiku I’d stuffed into my backpack. The morning sun poked through the large apple tree in the backyard, onto the carpet of yellow and red crab-apples. Already some leaves had turned yellow — the first flames of autumn. I opened my book on my lap. The words were petals: cherry tree blossoms in the spring, tea ceremonies on low-lying tables, clean-swept houses with sliding bamboo doors, a delicacy, a measured way of life, no visual noise, no busy lines, shapes, forms, dots, circles, rectangles, or bold colors, no confusion, none of Murray’s anguish about whether he will have me or his wife, no more waiting for him to make up his mind. I thought: My house is a Japanese house. Sliding doors to large open rooms. Low furniture, sparse and simple. A house that contains an intelligent and thoughtful life.