by Joanne Weber
His eyes were compassionate, kind but daring: Go on. Don’t give up. I went toward it, thinking it a new country.
Carol said: “Wait. I’ll come with you.” She stood up and handed over Sammy in his bib, his mouth full of potato, to Colin.
Carol and I conversed quietly in the other room, away from the noise and shrill cries of the children. She spoke of the books she read while struggling to care for five children under the age of twelve. I listened, marvelling at how she managed to remain so intellectually engaged with books while attacking daily mountains of laundry and dishes, and thought: Stories nurture her too, especially when she’s overrun by children and their incessant demands. And: Like me, she needs this quiet lull during this meal.
As I drained the last of my coffee, I saw: My Deafhood at the table has become a gift to her at this very moment. I’ve finally become generous without having to try.
A few days later, we were back in Regina, carting jars of Mom’s homemade soup, packages of lentil burgers, and a casserole dish of holopsti into the house. Dad’s stolen wine story still played itself over and over again. My father, as a little boy, took some wine, but not all of it, not to get drunk but to outwit an adult who cherished an illusion. I realized: His stories are full of subversion. His wildness as a little boy growing up in a German-Russian settlement in Revenue, how he smoked at the age of six, skipped school, fought other boys, stole candies from any store, even his father’s and, as he often reminded us, how he became a teacher because he’d done everything that his wildest students could have done and even more. Most of his stories had encouraged me to be wild and ferocious in outwitting life’s vicissitudes, to make friends with the part of me that can’t be tamed. Every story had led me through labyrinths, to where the darkness shall be light, to a room of love in the centre.
I’ve come to love this anonymity, this shunned Deaf body. It is my cell that taught me everything. It is a newfound freedom. I write of the failures that are now imprinted in my body. I speak of the darkness of my failures despite my successes. I’m not one of the great Deaf leaders who will change the face of Deaf education in this province or this country. I’ll never be a famous researcher, activist, politician, or sign language literary giant who travels the world, sharing knowledge of Deafhood, Deaf culture, and linguistics. I’ll never inspire great assemblies of the Deaf or the Hearing. I’ll likely not become a Deaf university professor, like David Mason at York University, and teach Hearing teachers how to teach deaf children, and I won’t likely train interpreters to work in a school setting, nor have any impact on diehard oralists who present auditory training and cochlear implants as the only options to parents newly-stricken with grief at discovering their child is deaf. I am, however, a well-educated Deaf woman in love with American Sign Language and books written in the English language.
My own failure to connect with those whom I love, the failure to empower other deaf children, the failure to speak out when I need to, the failure to be kind and patient with those who don’t understand deafness are of more concern to me now. I must find a way to speak truth without the fire of the dragon escaping my lips. I am hidden away in a tiny classroom with Casey, Andy, Melissa, Nolan, and Gina, who remain unhealed and forgotten. I don’t want their lives to be erased by ignorance, prejudice, or the egos of their family and friends. The world will be better for knowing about how to live with failure. In a culture obsessed with triumphs over adversity of every kind, I go on in the cell I live in. That small space in which I live is the house of my own Deaf body.
The warped floor creaked under my feet as I traversed the length of the family room and all its books. Winter howled outside. I drew the curtains more tightly over the windows. Upstairs, my husband lay sleeping. I opened my laptop, I didn’t have my hearing aid on and I didn’t hear the noises of the house or the computer as I began to type furiously. A few minutes later, I felt Murray’s hand on my shoulder. Murray signed to me: “Toby’s barking.”
I grinned at him, standing dishevelled in his bathrobe. It was two o’clock in the morning and our beagle, Toby, was awake and was now barking madly. I apologized and quickly closed down the laptop, slid into bed, warming my cold feet on Murray, warming myself with the beauty of my husband, and of our daughters. I heard voices in my Deaf body. They murmured: Deaf and Hearing, attic and basement, man and woman, mother and child, city and desert, man and beast, God and man, dragon and angel, as I fell asleep, dreaming of Caroline, the gorilla in the attic at Green Knowe, the sweeooop of those telephone wires, and the screech of the sundog winter day.
JOHANNA
After forty years of wandering in the desert, Mary of Egypt comes across an oasis. Standing on the edge of the desert, she can look down into the verdant green bank cradling a creek. Palm trees extend their long shadow fingers toward her, while the smell of grass nearly overpowers her. Yet she doesn’t move toward the lush leaves of grass, the heavily burdened fig trees. Rather, she stands naked and shrivelled, her hair, white twisted wool-like strands. The sun warms her bare behind.
Then a cloak is suddenly flung about her shoulders. She backs away in alarm. The musty smell of the cloak is overpowering, and she can feel its collar, stiff with dirt and grease. A man steps back too, sensing her feral air. Then he introduces himself, weeping at the same time. He is Zossima, a monk from a nearby monastery in the oasis. Choking on tears of shame, he describes his own wanderings in the oasis, asking God if he could find a person holier than him, a person who could tell him more than what he already knows. He touches her skin, his fingers leaving a ring of moist fingerprints on her arm. He has seen every bird, beast, and flower. He has found birds of paradise. He has collected the dew in large broad leaves. He has been fascinated with the exotic lizards. Mary looks down at her feet, now crusted with soil moistened by his copious tears.
She doesn’t want to leave the desert. But she could stand next to the oasis for Zossima’s sake. She could talk to him, tell him of her travels. But her stories aren’t going to help him much. He should listen to his own stories instead of running around trying to find someone who is holier than him. It isn’t a competition.
Next year, she tells him. She points to a nearby grove of trees whose sheltering branches entwine together to make a roof. Already, the long grasses are bent as if to make a bed for her. Meet me next year right here and maybe . . .
Noises, both inside and outside of my head, are of little consequence. My body is here. This is what I sense when my mother tells me that the fridge has cut in, that the noise is not in my head, or when Murray tells me that the sudden crack I just heard was not Langley House emitting an arthritic yelp, but something inside my head.
This morning, Murray and I sat at the dining room table littered with newspapers and books. I was drinking his impossibly strong coffee.
He asked: “Do you remember the time when you wanted to hunt down every source of tinnitus, and find a way to solve it?”
I mumbled: “So?” I was becoming uncomfortable and started picking off the small white feathers that have buried themselves into my sweater. I’ll never wear a goose down filled jacket again.
He said: “Ah, but I remember you listing off all the sources: the wine you really liked, the Chocolan (I bought you a case of it, so you still have to drink it all up), your medicine, the electric toothbrush, the car fan, vitamin supplements, the jazz concerts that Anna and Paula sang at, the sudden backfiring of our Olds 98.”
I questioned: “What are you saying?”
Murray said: “I don’t know. You figure it out.” He gave his characteristic shrug, the shrug that aggravated his former Deaf students when they asked for answers to the questions they’d posed themselves.
I picked at the feathers on my sweater. The darn things refused to come off. I was hardly able to grasp their tiny filaments between my thumb and forefinger. I thought: In between my ears there is a space, that is in command now, that decides what I am to see and hear, to know, to understand, and how to l
ive, and I live in that space, it is my home. Technology and scientific knowledge will never conquer this space. Meanwhile, my house and its noises invade my body inhabiting its rooms, rooms constructed of mortar, brick, stone, and wood: Ladymint, Langley Hall, my classroom, the castles and cathedrals of England, they all emit noises which I cannot attend to. The noises are in the shadows, I’ve learned to leave them there. It requires a discipline of the mind, of the heart, to give them no more credence than what they deserve.
There is no solution, no cure, no rehabilitation, there is my body that just is. Fired into the world, my Deaf body has become the house for me.
Note
This work is a fictionalized account of actual events in my life and in the lives of my students, and I have made some changes to the story’s chronology. The names and descriptions of students, childhood friends, teaching staff, and educational interpreters bear no relationship to actual people, though the incidents are, in all essentials, true. Family members, Deaf community members, key people who inspired me and guided me are drawn from life and presented as themselves.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Thistledown Press for publishing this work. I particularly want to thank Seán Virgo for his brave editing, intuitively grasping the garguantan task at hand, and to hold my hand through it all. His astute directions, his wise commentaries, and “weasel” eyes have brought the manuscript to where it wanted to be; Harold Rhenisch for transforming what was once a bulky and unwieldy manuscript into a story with varied layers of “voices”; Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild which promoted and administered the John V. Hicks Manuscript Award (for which this book was selected in 2011); City of Regina which provided a Writing Award toward the completion of this manuscript in 2008; my parents, Edward and Lois Weber. Without their love and support, I would have never become who I am; my two sisters and brother, Ruth Cey, Carol Keller, and David Weber who have cheered me on over the years; Regina Public Schools for their support of my writing and teaching adolescent students who are Deaf and hard of hearing. I especially want to thank my colleagues, Cathy Arthur MacDonald, Morgan Reed, Cori Miller, Jewel Whyte, Jackie Frohlick, Lee Agarand, Sara Randall, and Cindi Orthner who supported me as a Deaf teacher; Gillian Sernich and Sherol Evans in their early readings of this manuscript and for their encouragement; members of my writing group: Joanne Gerber, Bruce Rice, Eric Greenway, Sharon Delint, Bonnie Dunlop; Paul Wilson for his support in promoting the manuscript; Karl and Ben Valiaho, Anna and Paula’s brothers for their good cheer, music, and soul conversations along the way; Chrystene Ells, a noted playwright and film director, who demonstrated how to express complex ideas about the essentially Buddhist notion of “not two, not yet one”, especially in her most recent work, Kaleidocycle; the Deaf community members who are committed to furthering the education of Deaf children and who have accompanied me throughout these difficult years of advocating for those who must learn through sign language, especially Roger Carver and Allard Thomas; Terry Swayn who vetted the manuscript from the family perspective; my daughters, Anna and Paula, who contributed their life material to this book; and finally, to Murray, who trusted me to write anything about him. Without him, this story would have never been told.
This work has been inspired by two books: Belden Lane’s The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, the writings of Desert Fathers and Mothers and Paddy Ladd’s Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood.
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY KELLY FRIZZELL
JOANNE WEBER obtained degrees in English, Library Science and Education and did graduate work at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, where she became fluent in American Sign Language. She now teaches in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program at Thom Collegiate. Joanne and her husband live in Regina, Saskatchewan. The Pear Orchard was her first collection of poetry; The Deaf House is her first creative non-fiction.