Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The auditorium, with its dank shadowy aisles, its blue velvet curtains imposing a kind of leaden formality, seems a suitable site for this event. A message on the overhead projector hails “Good morning! Reading RCT . . . You need: a pencil, a lapboard, concentration.” Pencils and lapboards line the apron of the stage; concentration is fostered by the presence of the high school supervisor, who solemnly patrols the front of the room.

  James arrives, attired in matching tan denim pants and jacket, a black-and-gold baseball cap, all his gold rings. He takes a seat at the rear of the first section, on the aisle. This is a social spot; on their way to the stage, girls bend down to kiss him on the neck and boys clasp his hand for luck. But his primary reason for choosing it is easy access to the interpreters. It is a key spot. James knows because he has taken the test before, as a junior, when he failed by six points.

  He cannot fail today. Even if he completes his personal essay, he needs an academic diploma to be accepted by a college. In order to get an academic diploma, he must pass this test. It feels like a bargain to him, a deal offered by hearing people. If he can prove himself here, in their language, then when he leaves Lexington he will gain the security of their continuing approval.

  Now the seats are filling in; forty students are spread out, one per row. Dispersed among them are a few alumni who graduated with IEP diplomas in years past. Some return every year to retake the exam, still trying to win academic diplomas, the key to college and better jobs.

  The high school supervisor steps onstage to explain the rules, which are projected beside her as she signs and speaks.

  “No talking to each other,” she begins.

  “Freedom of speech!” wisecracks a stocky, pink-faced boy in the front row, his beefy hands held up above his head so students sitting behind him can see.

  “Not here,” she retorts, catching his unvoiced comment with the sharp eye of a veteran staff member. “Freedom of silence!” Her hands complete the austere arcs of silence and linger a moment in space, draping a visual hush over the auditorium. She goes on, explaining the rules for interpreters.

  “Staff may sign the passage. Staff may watch you sign. Staff may read aloud — some students may have enough hearing that it helps them to hear the sentence out loud. Staff may not give answers.”

  The RCTs are available in twenty-nine spoken languages, from Mandarin to Lao to Amharic. The State Board of Regents also allows the test to be translated into sign language. Unlike the other twenty-nine languages, ASL does not get a standard translation (something that could be accomplished with a videotape). Instead, teachers at schools for the deaf double as interpreters.

  “No egging staff on to tell you the right answer,” the supervisor warns with spirit. She mimes the part of a pleading student, desperate and smarmy. A few students chuckle. “I know you are skilled at that. Forget it!” She signs the admonition with two hands for emphasis.

  At eight-fifteen, the proctors begin handing out the test. It consists of seven multiple-choice questions for each of ten reading passages. There is no time limit; students may continue working on it all day.

  Within minutes, hands start appearing above the seats. Some pop up urgently; others levitate slowly, patient and resolute. The nine proctors are in hot demand. They move from summons to summons like contestants on a bizarre game show, interpreting passages, jogging on to the next waving hand.

  James struggles through the first passage, about the rangeland of the American West, underlining, as he practiced in English class, the parts he doesn’t understand. Heavy black marks grow along the page like a rash. He holds his arm in the air until it begins to prick, then drops it halfway, his elbow resting on the seat. “Not enough teachers,” he complains to himself. “Lousy." Finally he uses his voice, and the high school supervisor comes over and rests her hand on his baseball cap.

  “Do you need this on to take the test?” she teases.

  “Yes,” he says grimly.

  “Okay, where are you, which one?”

  He points to the first paragraph.

  “James! You’re going to be here till midnight!”

  “No," he contradicts aloud, without impudence; it is a statement of fact.

  The supervisor signs the first paragraph in English word order, interpreting “ranchers” as people who take care of animals and “overgrazed” as eat too much. A chorus of whistling hearing aids swells and diminishes like crickets in the chilly, high-ceilinged room.

  “Again,” James says, and she obliges. He asks her to sign the questions now, with each of their multiple choices. After she has moved away, he continues to study the questions, rings flashing as he fingerspells to himself. After a bit, he sighs and erases something with vigor.

  Across the great room, the hearing proctors call to each other.

  “Betty? What’s the sign for ‘result’?”

  “Maria! Could you interpret for her? I don’t know all the words.”

  “How should I sign ‘integrity’?”

  “What about ‘meanders’?”

  “How do you do ‘fluids’?”

  And from a deaf proctor, “We’re really allowed to sign all the words for them?”

  “Yes,” he is told by a hearing teacher.

  He shrugs. “1 thought this was a reading test.”

  At eleven-forty-five, bag lunches are wheeled in on a big metal cart from the cafeteria. James doesn’t budge; he is in the midst of working one-on-one with an instructional aide. She sits backward in the chair directly in front of him, breathing the minty smell of her chewing gum all over the page as she reads upside-down. He is on the fifth passage, the one about the human skull. Around them, other students wave their hands in the air, but James won’t relinquish the aide; he holds her with his focus, with his need.

  Students take apples and sandwiches from the cart. Proctors go off to lunch breaks and are replaced by others, who roam the aisles, squat and kneel, and climb backward over seats. Students drum fingers on the wooden lapboards, drag palms across their brows, crack their knuckles. Gradually they finish and turn in their computerized answer sheets with neatly blackened ovals. Other students come in; the science RCT begins. James works on. He is one of only eight students still working on the reading test. A teacher makes him stop to eat something. He slides a dry ham sandwich from its wax-paper envelope, takes one bite, and, reading, forgets to chew.

  James is picky about interpreters, always looking around to see who is standing nearby before he raises his hand, then monopolizing his favorites for as long as he can. Since there are no specific guidelines from the Board of Regents and the teachers’ signing styles are so diverse, interpretations vary from person to person. On one side of the room, a teacher gets to a word she doesn’t know how to sign and fingerspells P-A-T-R-I-L-I-N-E-A-L. On the other side of the room, another teacher gives the conceptual equivalent in ASL, signing on the father’s side of the family. In each case the student accepts what is offered.

  The effort to understand deaf people’s own mode of communication is in its infancy. Educators are just beginning to acknowledge that the suppression of sign language might rob deaf children of the opportunity to learn, to experience, to understand. But efforts to mitigate the problem may be resulting in further injustice. After all, the cover of today’s test booklet states, “This is a test to find out how well you read.” Does interpreting English into ASL really test a student’s reading ability?

  Educators have been failing deaf children for centuries. The history of deaf education has been marked by a single goal: to get deaf people to communicate like hearing people. Does an increase in the number of deaf students who pass the test do more to assuage educators’ own sense of frustration and failure than to serve the students themselves? If a separate standard exists for deaf students, does this put them at a disadvantage when they graduate and enter the hearing world?

  By one-thirty, James is one of the last three students working on the reading test. Adele Sands-Berk
ing has arrived for her proctoring shift. James, arching his back and yawning, spots her sitting cross-legged at one corner of the stage, interpreting for two juniors sprawled on their stomachs. Adele has always advised her students to get teachers whose signing they’re most familiar with to interpret for them. James palms the apple from his bag lunch and ambles over to sit on the stage steps.

  He waits as the juniors finish, then edges up to Adele. He nods a brief hello and slides the test booklet toward her: the passage on Venezuelan mesas. His eyelids are drooping; he looks sullen, but Adele knows it is only fatigue. She signs for him. “Again,” he says. She repeats it; he circles an answer. They move on. When he misses one, Adele mutters, “No, honey,” to the back of his head.

  By now James is the only person working on the reading test. He has been here for six hours. All these bodies, for all these hours, have done little to warm the huge room. James sits hunched in his tan denim, skimming his pencil over the page as he studies and restudies the passage.

  His apple is resting on the stage. Adele scoops it up and polishes it on her knee.

  “What are you doing?" James asks, distracted from the test.

  “You’ve never heard of giving an apple to the teacher?” She is trying to make him smile.

  James rolls his eyes. He retrieves the apple and sticks it in his jacket pocket. He has no time to play.

  11

  Number-One Home

  Sofia tries to look on her newly assigned task of selling yearbook ads as an honor. After all, she is only a junior intern, not even a full-fledged member of the yearbook staff. Ordinarily this would be Jasmine’s duty, but Jasmine, the senior in charge of advertising, is absent today. So, having suddenly noticed that February is upon them, with pages and pages of ads yet to be sold, the yearbook adviser has dispatched Sofia to the local shopping plaza to rustle up some business.

  She sets out from school with a copy of last year’s yearbook and a stack of advertising order forms tucked under her arm, her pink quilted jacket unzipped. Winter feels worn through today. A dry Christmas tree lies stripped on the curb across the street, an old plastic jug of antifreeze lolls in the gutter, and the pavement wears a dull coat of patchy white salt. Catty-cornered from the school squats the shopping plaza, its hindquarters huge and daunting with concrete loading docks and slatted metal doors that slide straight up to reveal the gaping bowels of the supermarket. Sofia hurries past a group of men shouting to one another as they unload crates of pineapple from an eighteen-wheeler. Up the block and around the corner, she comes upon the somewhat less forbidding fronts of the shops and reminds herself to bolster her courage.

  Lexington’s yearbook staff comprises nine of the brightest, most dynamic senior class members and two junior interns. Sofia knows that being selected as one of the interns is an honor in itself; to be entrusted with her present mission, standing in for Jasmine, is almost too heady for words. In addition to being the advertising editor of the yearbook, Jasmine is cocaptain of the cheerleading squad, a choreographer for the dance troupe, and the senior class secretary. She wears her hair in a studied mane, with lustrous brown waves slopping over one eye. Sofia used to be a little bit intimidated by her: glamorous Jasmine, poised and respected, her Mona Lisa smile radiating a mysterious assurance. Within the context of Lexington, she is formidable. But outside Lexington, from the vantage point of the Jackson Heights merchants, Jasmine is just another deaf girl, just another one of those kids whose speech they cannot understand.

  Sofia inherits the task with mixed feelings. Because she knows she has been picked for her capabilities, it is beyond her to think of refusing it. But a twinge of reluctance slows her after she crosses Thirty-first Avenue, stalls her for a moment on the sidewalk. The sky above the shops is a fervent blue. Late-afternoon light glances off the antennas and windshields of parked cars. Wind slaps the ends of Sofia’s long hair against her face, and with tempting abandon it dances leaves and empty potato chip bags down the street. She draws in a sharp cold breath and swings open the door to the laundromat.

  A young woman with curly red hair and chapped red hands stands behind the counter counting out piles of change from her apron pockets. She wears a puffy down vest as a guard against drafts and looks up at the cause of this current gust with a long-suffering shiver.

  Sofia approaches the counter, mustering her most professional air. “The manager,” she says, and says it again.

  Both Sofia and the red-haired woman concentrate hard on Sofia’s articulation. Having no way of gauging how much noise the washing machines may be making, Sofia aims her voice for a moderate volume. Her speech is richly nasal; the edges of the words are loose, elastic.

  On the second try the red-haired woman nods—a successful transmission of meaning. “He don’t come in during the day” is her answer, which she delivers in a clipped Queens rattle, simultaneously looking down at her configurations of coins.

  Because of the downsweep of the woman’s head, Sofia misses this statement. She tries to guess what was said, cross-referencing the woman’s body language with her own mental list of possible responses, but she does not have enough clues to form a hypothesis. She tries a different tack.

  “Would you like to please support Lexington School and yearbook?” she asks, smoothly sliding last year’s yearbook onto the counter. It is opened to a spread of advertisements placed by local shopkeepers. The red-haired woman has not entirely understood Sofia’s words, but scanning the visual information before her, she is able to deduce the purpose of the visit.

  “They’re not here,” she tells Sofia again. “The manager’s not here.”

  Sofia watches the woman’s mouth closely. The woman does not flinch from such unnerving attention but patiently repeats the message, winding dry, cracked lips around her Queens accent. Sofia understands. She proceeds to phase two, peeling a sheet from her stack of advertising order forms.

  “Will you give this to the manager? If he wants to order an advertisement, please to call this number.” Sofia points to the telephone number. Her speech has become incidental; the order form, the prop, relates the story.

  “I’ll give this to the manager,” the woman suggests, her curls obscuring her face as she bends over to read the form. Sofia hesitates, not sure what the woman said or whether it constituted a dismissal. Straightening, the woman creases the paper in quarters and sticks it into a rear jeans pocket. “I’ll give it to him,” she repeats, nodding at Sofia, who smiles now, dips her head in thanks, and pushes back through the swinging glass door.

  One down, thirteen to go. She will be late getting home again this evening.

  It has been a hard week. Sofia has been swamped with schoolwork, studying for midterms and the Regents exams and the Regents Competency Tests. She has been working overtime on the yearbook and putting in her regular hours at the school store, and she has been talking with Louann Katz, her guidance counselor, about life after graduation. The junior class is beginning to take field trips to colleges that have programs for deaf students. Now, just when Sofia has started to feel at home in her class at Lexington, she must begin making plans to leave. With the encouragement of her guidance counselor and teachers, she has set her sights on attending Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts college for deaf students. Sofia is thrilled by the idea of living in an environment where everyone is deaf, but the prospect is scary as well as exciting. All at once the future is impinging on the present. And to make things worse, she has been quarreling with her mother.

  Last Friday Sofia stayed at school all afternoon, working on the yearbook. She went home to find her mother bustling about their cramped kitchen, fuming as she prepared the Sabbath dinner. Mrs. Normatov chastised Sofia for staying at school so late and called her selfish for not coming straight home to help.

  “I’ll help you now,” Sofia offered, switching into Russian, as she does automatically upon entering the apartment. Wearily, she took up her role of good daughter, shucking her shoes and bookb
ag by the front door, presenting herself ready for duty. But her mother was already deep in her foul mood, and now it spread to Sofia as well, so that as she carried plates of radishes and stuffed grape leaves to the table set up by one wall of the small living room, a hard seed of indignation was germinating.

  Perhaps this seed was what provoked her, during Sabbath dinner, to ask the question that escalated the conflict. She waited until after the little cup of sweet red wine had been passed around. Her father had closed his worn brown Bible and set it next to his plate; he had torn off chunks of bagel, dipped them into the dish of salt, and passed them around to his family members. The rituals thus completed, everyone had been about to begin the meal in earnest when Sofia spoke.

  “Mother,” she had asked, pitching her clearest Russian syllables across the table, “when I graduate, will you let me go to Gallaudet?”

  “Nyet” came the reply. As flat as that.

  “Why?” Her question, charged with frustration, incurred the family’s silent warning: “Hush, Sofia, don’t antagonize Mama, not on the Sabbath.” Anyway, she knew why. Gallaudet University is in Washington, D.C., five hours away by car, too far from the strongholds of the family and the Russian Jewish community. Education is fine with Sofia’s parents inasmuch as it prepares her to be a successful, productive adult in the hearing world. But if she were to go to Gallaudet, if she were to migrate fully into a world of deafness, she would be lost; she would lose her sense of obligation to the family; she would become Other.

  The simmering tension between school and home is the crux of this conflict, and has arisen with increasing frequency this year. Last year, while Sofia was still a greenhorn in the high school, she was more available to take on chores at home: cooking, cleaning, tending to her baby nephew and younger sister. But this year she has school commitments virtually every afternoon. She talks freely and passionately about deaf pride, asserts her right to use sign language rather than speech, has even begun to challenge her mother’s expectations of her. Her Lexington friends don’t have so many responsibilities at home; her Lexington clubs and activities demand more of her time; as a deaf person, she is entitled to develop her ties to the deaf community.