Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  They parked on Webster Avenue, which was studded with bodegas and fried chicken joints, shops shut tight behind corrugated metal doors, lots strewn with rubble, rusted car parts and slashed furniture. Setback from the street, James’s building rose, as thick and solid as a heavyweight boxer. The lobby, dim and stinking of urine, offered little relief from the hot, cloying brightness outside. The two women from Lexington waited alone for the elevator, but when it arrived they were joined by others, silent women who had been waiting hidden in protected corners. All together they packed the dank metal box for its ascent.

  The social worker and the supervisor got out on the fourteenth floor, turned left past the meager squares of caged glass that permitted a suggestion of filmy light into the corridor, and knocked on the last door. Delores Taylor, a small, wiry woman, opened it for them, a dripping wooden spoon in her hand. Her face shone with moisture; crescents of finely beaded sweat were gathered under each eye and across her brow and upper lip. Behind her, in an otherwise bare kitchen, a pot of soiled bedsheets stood bubbling on the stove. Around the corner was another room, perhaps built as a living room, devoid of any furnishings.

  Mrs. Taylor welcomed the visitors in her rich, dry voice. She disappeared into a third room to rouse James. From where the women stood, it appeared to contain a mattress and nothing else. Through the thickly painted yellow walls, sounds from other apartments sifted: a chorus of tinny radios, television game shows, voices in Spanish and English. In a moment James emerged, wearing shorts and pulling on a T-shirt, his eyes still puffy with sleep and now widening in surprise.

  They spoke gently. James did want to go to school. He had no sneakers. He had no notebooks. There was no money. No, they hadn’t been collecting Social Supplemental Income (SSI) benefits from the government. Both James and his disabled brother were eligible for these benefits, but Mrs. Taylor had little time to assemble all the documents necessary for the application: medical histories, proof of income, birth certificates, gas and electric bills, and proof of who lived in the apartment and how much each person earned, these last items being frequently nebulous and in flux. By the time she finally obtained one document, another would have become invalid. And all the while there were the other children to care for: Joseph, at fourteen the youngest and in trouble with the law; Andre, one year older, who had spina bifida and was in a wheelchair; James’s older sisters, Linda and Denise, both of whom would become pregnant and eventually leave high school.

  The Lexington women advised Mrs. Taylor on how to complete the SSI application and discussed the option of James’s moving into the five-day residence. James promised to start coming to school. Everybody thanked everybody else. In the kitchen, the sheets boiled. The adults shook hands damply.

  On Monday, James showed up as agreed and began his second year as a freshman, after failing the first. In February he gained admission to the dormitory, then decided not to move in. He was recorded absent 64 out of 180 days. His year-end grades were three F’s, two D-’s, two D’s, and a C—in speech. This was determined to be enough of an improvement for James, at the end of the year, to be promoted to the tenth grade.

  The cast list goes up and James is Prince Charming. Rehearsals start immediately. From now until the end of the term, all seniors report to the auditorium during English period. The auditorium is cold, cavernous, elegant. The teachers post an attendance chart in the vestibule. Students initial themselves present and drift down the incline to clump onstage and form pockets in the aisles, kneel over the backs of blue plush seats and straddle the neatly bolted rows, all in order to see one another so they can talk.

  The teachers must labor to get everyone’s attention in this room, so large and scantily lit, with high pools of cool, waxy light submitting to shadow halfway down the walls. At the start of each rehearsal, one of the teachers stands center stage, waving her arms and stamping her feet. “Can you see? Tap your neighbor, get everyone’s attention. All right? Get him, is he looking?” And when everyone is, she splits them into groups, different scenes with different teachers, some onstage, others scattered throughout the house.

  The script, already abridged and edited into simpler English, nonetheless teems with linguistic challenges. First, the students create name-signs for their characters. Some borrow existing signs from ASL: the baker, the witch, the prince, the wolf. But there are no standard signs for proper names. Fingerspelling grows tedious, and it’s too hard to decipher from the back of the auditorium. So Rapunzel mixes her initial with a physical characteristic, becoming R-long-curly-hair, and Jack combines his initial with his behavior to become J-thief. Officially, Cinderella’s sign is a C brushed straight down the cheek, but among themselves, in the descriptive fashion of ASL, the students dub her Poor-Poor Clean.

  The greatest task falls to the two narrators, Robert Connor and Lisa Santiago, who are responsible for signing long passages throughout the play. Robert is gentle and stately, an articulate signer who rarely uses any voice. Lisa is more kinetic, forever swinging her lanky arms and snapping her fingers; she is the most oral student in her class. Together this disparate couple work in the far corner of the back aisle, consulting each other and Mary Jo LoPiccolo Maguire, one of the directors.

  “Cinderella planted a branch on her mother’s grave,” Robert mumble-signs with one hand, reading from the script and thinking through a translation. He looks up at Mary Jo, forehead deeply wrinkled. There is no specific sign for branch, so he tests two possibilities. “B-R-A-N-C-H?” he fingerspells as he mouths the word exaggeratedly, his lips smacking dryly on the plosive. “Or branch?” This time he uses ASL classifiers to describe the shape visually.

  “Yeah, I think it’s better to show it,” says Mary Jo. ”It’ll be too hard to see fingerspelling from back here.”

  Robert reads on. “She wept so much her tears watered the grave and made the branch grow.” He looks up again, dropping his jaw in mock horror. ”How . . . ?”

  “I know.” Mary Jo nods in sympathy. “When we did the adaptation, we said that part’d be hard to sign.”

  Robert hands his script to Lisa. She holds it before him so he can sign with both hands. He thinks a moment, then begins experimenting. First he sets up the grave, then the branch on the grave, then Cinderella crying. He shows the tears arching from her cheeks, dousing the branch, which now lifts and swells into a tree.

  “Good, very clear!” Mary Jo tells him.

  “You don’t mind that it’s not in English word order?”

  “No, whatever you feel most comfortable with. Lisa’s going to speak and sign, so she’ll be following the English, right?”

  Lisa shrugs and rocks on her ankles. “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s afraid that when she gets onstage she won’t remember to use her voice.

  “Well, anyway, as long as it’s clear, it can be signed English or ASL," Mary Jo assures them. At the actual performance, an overhead projector will provide the text on a screen above the stage, low-budget simultaneous captioning for anyone who doesn’t understand sign language.

  Props prove an additional obstacle in a play with signing actors. Cinderella, hindered by her feather duster during one speech, hands it to her stepmother. “No, no, that’s not going to work,” grumble the directors, sitting in darkness below the stage. “Tell her just to drop it on the floor.” Jack, fresh from the giant’s lair, bursts onstage with a golden goose and a harp in his hands, only to realize that he is rendered mute by his booty. “Can he stick them under his armpit or something?” the directors say, groaning. “Can we get him a knapsack?” Because they sit in shadows, invisible to the actors, each time they need to give direction one of them must hop onstage, into the light, before the actors even know that they should halt the scene.

  Rehearsals progress; Thanksgiving comes and goes; painted rocks and trees and now a giant cardboard tower materialize onstage. Teachers wheel racks of costumes into the auditorium, pounce on idle st
udents, and whisk them into capes and gowns. The directors all catch cold; they sit up front with boxes of tissues and bottles of juice; they lose their patience.

  “James! You are the most unprincelike person this morning,” snaps Adele Sands-Berking on the day of dress rehearsal, going into her bossy big sister act. Adele was James’s English teacher his sophomore and junior years; he knows the routine and cuts his eyes, but not rudely, for he tempers all his irreverence with humor. A dimple flashes as his lips pull back, a chipped upper tooth setting off his saucy grin.

  It is mid-December, one day before the performance. Chaos laps at the edges of the auditorium. Teachers baste gold braid onto costumes and nail extra supports behind drooping stage trees. Girls cross their arms and shiver in shimmery low-cut gowns. Boys, self-conscious in tights and tunics, grip one another in brutish headlocks. Adele has hustled James and Marina, who plays the baker’s wife, into a quiet spot at the rear of the house to polish their tryst scene.

  “What is this, James?” Adele, normally elegant and proper, assumes a stiff Bronx tilt to her neck and starts shifting and slouching like a homeboy. James can’t help laughing at her mimicry. “Come on, remember —formal!” she tells him, snapping into a regal stance. He indulges her with a fair estimation and she appraises him sourly. “Huh. Better.”

  James and Marina run through the scene gingerly, balking at any romantic touches Adele tries to insert. When the prince is supposed to dip the baker’s wife in an embrace, they teeter and laugh. When he is supposed to circle her with his arms and make the sign for fun on the tip of her nose, he fakes it, skimming air and leaning on her shoulder in a most comradely fashion. When he is supposed to lift her and carry her off into the woods, he complains that he’s not strong enough.

  “James,” hisses Adele, fixing him with a mean eye, “you’re a wrestler. She’s not heavy.” Marina, dainty and compact, giggles. James picks her up, and his eyes bug out and his cheeks grow shiny and puffed with exertion.

  Adele mutters to herself, “Oh, James.”

  The lights go out.

  “What happened?” James’s voice comes anxiously, urgently through the dark. A breath of fear and helplessness wafts through the auditorium. All over the room communication is severed, except among hearing people, and now the teachers begin to call to one another through the dark. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing some gels.”

  “Could we have the work lights back on, please?”

  A moment later they chug on. James recovers his poise, then scowls at Adele as though she controlled the light switch.

  “Okay, pick her up again. I want to see your snakiest charm,” Adele commands, not wasting a second. ”We all know you are sincere; now I want to see . . . snake.”

  James sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and uses his voice. “Later.”

  Adele glowers at him, shaking a blond curl back from her pale, pointed features. “Now.”

  James, his eyes insouciant, meets her gaze and tries to contain a smile. “Later,” he challenges.

  “Now.”

  “Later.”

  “Now now NOW.” Suddenly she switches tacks. The bully vanishes and Adele appeals, “Don’t fight with me, James, the play is tomorrow. Tomorrow. It’s just starting to get good and now you have to work it.”

  So he and Marina do the scene again. James begins to ooze a little snakiness and Adele perks up. Arrogant charm creeps across his face; his eyebrows lift in an expression of worldliness. With all the savoir-faire he can muster, he sweeps the baker’s wife into his arms (this slip of a damsel? why, she’s as light as air!) and conveys her grandly into the woods, tossing a last smug glance over his shoulder at Adele.

  “Yes!” she cries. “That’s good, that’s it!”

  James nods. He knows how to deliver. He has perfected the art of walking the line, the line drawn taut between tough and obliging, between cool and sweet. In his world, attitude is everything. Maintain strength; know when to bend. He knows exactly how to behave to get by.

  This year, senior year, he increases his gold. A new ring, a chainlink bracelet, another religious medallion. It annoys him that everyone—the teachers, the dorm staff—makes such a fuss. “Where did you get the money?” they ask. “Did you pay for that yourself?” What they mean is, did he pay for it, period? And it bothers him, yes, but he keeps his anger in check. Always. His velvety eyes grow hard and remote, but everything else stays loose, disaffected.

  But why shouldn’t he have eight pairs of sneakers, Filas and Reeboks and Patrick Ewings and New Balances, trimmed orange and turquoise and purple and red and black? Why shouldn’t he wear a beeper, one that vibrates rather than beeps, to keep in touch with his friends? Why shouldn’t he wear gold now that he can afford it, now that he has a job and earns his own money? Why shouldn’t he look like other young men in his neighborhood, hearing men, tough, sharp, in charge of their lives? A prince is entitled to his gold. To James they say, “You look like a drug dealer.” And his eyes go from velvet to ice, but everything else stays loose.

  It was three weeks before the end of his sophomore year—almost two years after the home visit, almost four years after he entered Lexington—when James finally moved into the dorm. The referral for admission required a battery of tests, including a psychological evaluation, which found James to have “support and stability needs, and feelings of isolation and frustration,” and suggested that “he may feel alone at times, especially at home.”

  He moved from the Bronx into his own room in the school, equipped with a small sink and a minifridge, a wooden bed and two desks, a dresser and a wardrobe and a closet, even his own bathroom. In the old days, this whole floor and the floor above it housed the dormitory. Now, with stricter state rules about who is eligible for residency, only five students live on a short leg of corridor, with more furniture and more space than they can possibly use. Living here, James gets help with his homework, does his laundry for free in the machines down the hall, and eats a hot supper, with seconds if he likes. When his siblings and hearing friends hear about his school and his room in the dorm, they whistle with envy. Somehow, being deaf, he is the lucky one, receiving special services and special care, getting a chance nobody offered them.

  Baseball caps, orange and purple and aqua and black, dangle from thumbtacks on the wall behind his bed. More thumbtacks stretch a plastic Gap bag into a neat rectangle above his desk. A poster shows a trio of Latina women wearing evening gowns and holding long-necked brown bottles under the caption “La familia Budweiser”; another displays a white kitten with blue eyes and the motto “I’m perfect just the way I am.” Tacked to a small corkboard are the business cards of James’s vocational and guidance counselors, the phone number of the relay service on a pink memo slip, and a schedule for driver’s education classes. A Lexington calendar displaying the entire year on one strip of paper is covered with marks, each one indicating another day lived. This is no mere inventory of dates; the marks are not the black X’s of an adolescent’s impatience with biding time—they are green slashes rising diagonally across the days, earnest and victorious.

  James’s prize possession is the secondhand radio and cassette player he inherited from some hearing friends. On this he listens to his music, his reggae and his rap, with the bass up high so that it vibrates in his chest and in the pit of his throat. Above 118 decibels he can detect sound with his right ear. He listens to his music and the rhythm of home, of his brothers and his sisters, of the sidewalk and the street. He listens until one or two or three A.M. some nights, behind a closed door, alone in his room in the school for the deaf.

  4

  The Least Restrictive Environment

  The lobby this noon is thick with people. Teachers and secretaries are returning from lunch breaks with shiny cheeks, the smell of winter in their coats. The senior class has set up a bake sale just inside the glass doors, and staff members pause over the long folding tables to examine the goods. They shell out quarters
and go back to their classrooms and offices bearing squares of chocolate cake with green icing on little paper salvers. Children pile in from recess, sweaty and sniffing, dragging their fat down jackets behind them like vivid cocoons.

  Although they were supposed to meet at twelve-thirty, the committee of four who are to attend a public hearing of the State Education Department do not congregate in the main lobby until nearly one o’clock. Melissa Draganac, a high school senior, is the youngest of the group. She has dressed for the occasion in a smart black blazer and a short pleated skirt, and she clutches her printed speech in two hands. Donald Galloway, the director of Pupil Personnel Services, is there too, wearing a bright tie and chewing peppermint gum. Brenda Fraenkel, the assistant principal, joins them breathlessly with a fine clicking of heels across the tile, her earrings knocking against her jaw. Oscar arrives last, dispelling (as usual) the myth that hearing people are more punctual than deaf people. “Ready?” he asks, and they step outdoors.

  It is December tenth. The air is as sharp as alcohol, shot through with clear gold light. The plane trees that line the strip of parking spaces have shed from the top down; their upper branches look lean and free, while leaves collect like gold coins at their roots. The quartet drives from the lot. They are on their way to give testimony before the education department, which is preparing to draft a new State Plan for Education of Students with Disabilities. If the plan endorses the increasingly popular trend of mainstreaming, schools for the deaf may be facing extinction. So their mission today is a grave one: they are going to try to save Lexington, and Lexington is so much more than their school. For deaf people (90 percent of whom are born into hearing families), schools are the locus of deaf culture.

  As they pull away from the red-brick building, so broad and solid and teeming with activity, it seems implausible that Lexington’s future might be threatened. But they have all heard the news about other schools for the deaf. The Maryland School might be closed down this summer; enrollment at the Governor Baxter School in Maine has dwindled to fourteen students; out on Long Island, the Mill Neck School has shut down many of its sports programs because there are not enough students to form teams. As the mainstreaming movement gathers momentum across the country, diverting more and more deaf students into hearing schools, schools for the deaf tally their budgets and watch their enrollments and wait.