The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  I bit into my thumb, pulling skin from near my nail, causing it to bleed.

  Now my thoughts were: I’ve ripped the fat from the meat, have torn the girls away from their father. I have run away, to keep myself, a Deaf woman, intact.

  I wiped my bleeding thumb against my jeans and looked away to the apple tree, whose spent blossoms had spit hard, gleaming yellow red fruit onto the lawn, thinking: Soon I’ll have a home of my own in Saskatoon, where my daughters’ hands will move like mine, mimicking my own swoops and falls. Their finger spelling will be loose and quick but carefully formed. There’ll be a time when life between us will bear a sweet lightness, a delicacy like the song of the Japanese, a domestic happiness between small birds fluffing their nest for the winter.

  I moved my children to a larger apartment on the east side of Saskatoon, and later to a townhouse. I became part of a community of single parents who’d all found their way into this low rental housing complex. I now owned a consulting business: Lang Tree. Initially, I hoped to serve the deaf students placed in schools scattered throughout the province. After a few contracts, I saw that I couldn’t provide support to anyone in the mainstreamed setting. I was called by principals desperate for a solution for a deaf student unable to speak intelligibly or comprehend what was happening in class, students were already outfitted with cochlear implants and additional technological equipment, I couldn’t recommend using sign language because there was no one for miles around who could sign, and I couldn’t recommend sending the child to a neighbouring provincial school for the Deaf, because school boards were obligated to provide services to all children with special needs within their home communities. I ended up recommending very little other than a gentle admonition: Keep trying.

  I began contract work with Saskatchewan Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services to a burgeoning clientele of Deaf and hard of hearing clients in Saskatoon. I became a jack of all trades, even counselling under the supervision of a licensed therapist. I became increasingly frantic. I wrote proposals in the hope of securing funding from the government to meet the need for residential housing, provided educational seminars on drug and alcohol abuse, entrepreneurial training, rural outreach workshops, and mental health workshops, and also substitute taught at Bishop Murray Tutorial High School, which had a resource program for high school deaf and hard of hearing students.

  My mother warned me: “Stop working so hard.” She came up to Saskatoon to stay with me and the girls, trying to keep us all from crashing.

  One day, I woke up with my entire left side numb. I held on to the walls of the hallway, fully dressed, ready for work.

  My mother said: “Stop. You must stop doing all this work.”

  I arranged for a two week leave of absence and visited Tam Jim, the traditional Chinese medicine practitioner.

  He felt my pulse, then paused. “Tell me about your dreams.”

  I told him: “I’m always dreaming about escaping from a group of people to the mountains, where I must go to look after Anna and Paula.”

  He wrote notes on his papers in the file folder. Then he said: “Maybe you don’t want to help Deaf people anymore.”

  I nodded in agreement and walked out of his office, feeling lighter and happier than I had been for the past five years. I’d always fought to keep some kind of a foothold in a deafnessrelated field, only to have the work evaporate: the first two years at the school for the Deaf before it closed, then SIAST for a six month temporary position, then the consulting business, where I become a community service worker at an agency, along with short term contracts with the Catholic School Board, because there wasn’t any work with the Deaf anywhere else, because I was so sure that my life passion was to work with the Deaf, because, after all, I borrowed a large sum of money to attend Gallaudet University and now, with my arm in intense pain, and the lack of steady work, I knew: I don’t want to do this anymore.

  I prowled the halls of the empty North West Regional College in North Battleford at night, peering into semi-lit offices with darkened computer screens and empty chairs, with stacks of papers and notes tidied on desks, and the frames of family portraits catching the light from the hall. My office remained lit, its floor littered with piles of papers containing data on the literacy levels in the northwest region of the province. It was 1998. A year since we’d moved here. I thought I’d enjoy the benefit of steady work in a small community. Instead, I spent several nights at the college, trying to finish up reports and projects left unfinished by people I’d hired. At seven in the morning, I nodded at the night janitors as I entered the bathroom — freshly bleached and deodorized. I stood at a large window in the hall and watched the pink fingers of morning across the low horizon. On the frostcrusted asphalt of the parking lot, I shivered and fumbled with my car keys, then went to have breakfast at my sister’s, where my children were sleeping, and wondered: Perhaps I’ll see them before they trip off to school. I haven’t seen them for three days now.

  After I picked up the girls from school that day, I scanned the dusty bookshelves in my home, estimating the number of books on the shelves. A sense of loss flooded over me: I no longer read. Too busy, too tired these days. These books warmed my childhood, creating a vividness that I couldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t been forewarned by a similar incident in a story. Hearing comes by knowing what sounds exist around you. I can’t hear any sound until I first read about it in a book. Memories flitted through my mind as I gently brushed the spines of the books with my fingertips: Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Dawn Wind; then the Russians: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in a red leather binding and gold leaf, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch; on to the French, Balzac, Cocteau, Baudelaire; David Copperfield, I’d read five times; the Bronte group; I lifted my finger over Jane Eyre before moving on to Vanity Fair, then Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, stopped at Christopher Fry’s This Lady’s Not for Burning, a play I also read in that summer tent long ago, rolling in my cream silk nightgown.

  The emptiness stretched out in my mind for miles in every direction. I realized: If I’m to live with my daughters in this small city, I have to live without the Deaf community. I have to live in a desert. But it’s hard to live with so much nothingness. The real desert, the rubble of stone, broken rock, barren mountains, and hills of sand, gives way to the world of broken vowels and suddenly torn words and phrases. I tortured myself with: At least, the desert fathers and mothers renounced the world, fled to the desert to live a life of prayer and sacrifice. But where can I go when trapped in a desert of broken sound? What is there to renounce? I whispered: Anyway, I’m not made for a life of renunciation and prayer.

  I picked up The Brothers Karamazov to read again. The next week, I rented Anna Karenina from the video store. The young man, Aaron, behind the till startled me as he exclaimed, “Oh that is such a wonderful movie, and the book is even better.” The week after that, I began Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. I now read to know that I was not alone.

  Green Journal

  Joanne’s move to North Battleford is a relief. We won’t have to run up to Saskatoon to bail her out. But she’s not working any less. She says she loves her job, and I imagine it brings her plenty of recognition and admiration in her workplace and from those Indian people she’s working with, but Anna and Paula don’t get enough time with her. Ed fixed the back porch on her house and found a secondhand garage door which he installed at the back of her garage. I’ve been organizing her food and wiping down shelves. She’s having trouble with those ants, so I mixed up some borax and icing sugar for her to put between the cracks in the walls and floors. I guess she’s all right, although Ed thinks it was a mistake for her to leave Saskatoon and the Deaf community. She had the sign language, he says, and no real difficulty with communication, now she’s back to square one. I guess you could look at it like that. I just wish she’d stop working so hard. She’s ve
ry creative, coming up with these proposals for more literacy programs at the college, but she has that same wan, tense face she had before she left for Gallaudet nearly ten years ago. The difficulty with her working so hard is that it keeps her from realizing that she’s deaf. I suspect that she thinks her hearing has improved because she’s pulling off all these amazing projects single-handedly. She doesn’t seem to want to stay home. She spends hours on the road, driving to meetings in Regina, Saskatoon, and all over the North West region, and out on the reserves. She’s such a wanderer, dragging Anna and Paula with her everywhere. Her sisters, Ruth and Carol, have roped me into praying a novena for her. Apparently Ruth has heard from her sisters-in-law about receiving hothouse roses from Thérèse of Lisieux as a favour in exchange for their prayers. I don’t put much store in these things, but we all prayed for a husband for Joanne, for someone to father those poor little girls. Nothing came of it, except on the last day of the novena, Rebecca, Ruth’s three-year-old daughter, came toddling over to her with three wild roses in her hand, picked from the field beside St. George School where we were taking a walk. We figured we got our roses, as Joanne is such a wild thing.

  JOHANNA

  In the spa, my body is slowed to a few delicate flutterings as I push against the amniotic like fluid. Here, silence is an additional molecule to all the mineral components lying in wait to penetrate my swollen joints in my hands. As I sink deeply into the steaming waters, outside in the weak winter sun, then I see it. Why King Lear doesn’t have a wife. The story bothers me since I’ve been considering it as an alternative to teaching Hamlet. Maybe my students will understand the story of a father with many regrets. They have father issues. Very few fathers are willing to learn sign language while mothers consult sign language dictionaries while going to the bathroom. And King Lear is the key to Anna and Paula that comes wafting over the waters in winter mists. His daughters have sided with their father in hopes of gaining his approval. Although Anna and Paula are hardly Goneril and Regan currying favor with their father for his kingdom. But there is something of it — in their turning their backs to me when I am in the room. They are still angry. And they will not know it until they meet some wise CODA woman in their futures.

  I wave my hand weakly in the water as if it were a wand to dispel the mists of what I don’t want to remember. Anna at age three, sobbing at the bottom of the long flight of stairs up to my office in Saskatoon: “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.” Blonde in a sky-blue knitted sweater, her large azure eyes rimmed red with tears, and I am helpless to explain why the waters have closed over us, why we are drowning without Murray in our lives. Instead, I am too bright, too cheerful with Anna though I know that I will pay the price for this decision someday. I will be made out to be a hysterical mother, easily dismissed. God forbid, no one will ignore a Deaf wife (not entirely), but a demented mother? Of course. We are everywhere.

  Now I am in Regina with the girls, having moved back from North Battleford several years ago and Demeter is still not very generous. Even though my daughters, the two little birds have flown away, left home, I am still going crazy with grief, keeping seeds in my tight fists, refusing to nurture plants, flowers and trees. Demeters all lose their daughters, especially to men they don’t approve of. We sniff, noses high in the air, of course we know better now, will always know better, until we find a way to nurture gardens going on without them, until we become more generous in our grief.

  Where’s the story for that? I ask myself. An answer comes too quickly. What, you are still relying on stories to explain your life to yourself? Why not? I retort. I can’t hear anything else, and it’s all I’ve got.

  Twenty-Three

  JOHANNA

  Sometimes I make the mistake of fishing for compliments from Murray. “Do you think I’m generous?” I ask him, early one Saturday morning in bed. He shrugs. Every time I ask these impossible questions, I feel I’ve thrust myself into some nebulous space, hurtling toward galaxies, dodging meteorites, my eyes blinded by some crazy warped speed. I’m nowhere with this, suspended between two points, and I want to be somewhere solid, fast.

  “Well?” I persist. “Sometimes,” he finally says. And he pulls our white quilt over his head and drops back to sleep. But not until I feel his arm around my waist.

  Another school year and it was the first day. I shook hands with one of the new teachers and explained that I worked in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program and that I was profoundly deaf.

  He exclaimed: “Isn’t it wonderful how the deaf are being integrated into our schools?”

  I continued, with caution: “Yes, but there are still many issues.”

  He expanded with: “But technology is taking down so many barriers for the deaf, isn’t it? The internet, text messaging, Facebook. It has opened up new worlds for them, hasn’t it?”

  I snapped out: “I’d prefer a warm body to a computer screen.” I turned away hastily and walked away.

  In my newly-dusted classroom, disconsolate, I shook my head, thinking: Nothing has changed. I’ve healed no one. Many students leave just as wounded as they arrived four or five years ago. Despite Sophie’s calm ministrations, our listening, and my attempts to comfort, to guide, to challenge, and to teach, many students haven’t been able to make a healthy transition into adult life. Some leave with an idea that they are Deaf, but haven’t been able to integrate the knowledge into their bodies. Many leave, dispirited, unmotivated, fearful, and perpetually dependent on their parents for their future.

  My hands were cold. I picked up my stainless steel tea cup to warm my fingers. As I sipped, warmth spread throughout my body. One of Nolan’s paintings was on the wall: an aboriginal elder, a woman clutching a bundle of eagle feathers.

  I remembered, when he showed it to me, I asked: “Is the woman Deaf? Her back is turned to us. All we can see is her grey streaked braids. She isn’t connected to anything else in the picture.”

  Nolan nodded his head slowly, and we stood there, looking at the brilliant cobalt-blue background and the corresponding blue in her fancy dress, beaded with intricate silver and white designs.

  With the autumn sun floating into the one window by my desk, I reminded myself: Nolan’s painting is a sign that he has begun to cherish his Deafhood as a gift for others.

  I took a deep breath to go on with the rest of the first day, resolved to welcome the new signing deaf student who will arrive soon.

  Gina couldn’t understand my signing, although she’d been signing all her life. She sat beside her father. Her interpreter sat beside me. Sophie and Catherine had arranged themselves further back, watching Gina’s interpreter very closely. The room was warm this late in the afternoon. The other students had long gone home for the day.

  Gina signed to me: “You don’t sign like my interpreter.” Her sign was English-like but with many misshapen handshapes, incorrect endings and prepositions.

  I resisted the urge to show her how her signs should be correctly formed in American Sign Language. Instead, I asked: “How many Deaf people have you known?”

  She shrugged.

  I asked again.

  She signed: “No one.” The sign for “no” and then held up her index finger to indicate the number “one.”

  That sign looked strange, even though it was technically correct in signed English. But the Deaf wouldn’t respond that way. They’d make the sign for “zero,” which looked entirely different: two 0s moving apart.

  My supervisor motioned to a middle-aged, heavy-set woman with strong mannish hands, and said: “Monica works with her.”

  I asked Monica: “Are you the only one who has worked with Gina?”

  Monica said: “I’m the only one in her home town that can sign. I’ve been with her since she entered kindergarten.”

  I asked: “So, you two have been together for . . . ”

  Monica answered: “Fifteen years. Gina’s nineteen. I’m the only interpreter she’s had.”

  I nodded slowly. I could now e
asily predict the answer to my next question.

  I asked: “What about you, Mr. Ellis? Do you sign with your daughter?”

  Mr. Ellis lifted his hands to demonstrate. He talked and signed: “Yes, uh, a little. Slow . . . It’s . . . How do you make the sign for the word ‘hard’?”

  I asked: “She has no mother?”

  He said: “Her mom abandoned her in the hospital when she was born.”

  I glanced at Gina. There was no expression on her face. Perhaps she’d had nineteen years to get used to the idea. Only, something told me that she wasn’t used to it at all.

  I signed: “Well, you’ll just have to learn new signs if you are to be with us.”

  Monica signed, pointing at Sophie, Catherine, and me: “But everyone here signs so different.”

  I answered: “That happens when you get into a community. People have different styles of signing, different vocabularies, different hand shapes and movements. We call them ‘dialects’ depending upon which Deaf community they are from.” Gina warned us: “It’s going to be hard for me.”

  I nodded my head absently. The room had become suddenly too warm and I couldn’t wait to leave and go home for the day.

  Later that fall, I realized: It’s harder for us. She wants constant attention. I can’t turn my back without her putting down her pencil and watching me work with another student. Her reading is at a grade two level. She can’t read most books that I give her.

  I decided that we’d start with The Miracle Worker, a play about Helen Keller, because Melissa had to complete her English credit. At first I’m delighted with all the questions Gina had, like: “Why is Helen Keller deaf? Why is she blind too? Where is United States?”