Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  And then, just last Thursday, James startled everyone by getting suspended. A dorm counselor charged that James had hit him while he was trying to encourage James to do his homework. James denied the story, said the counselor had been provoking him, annoying him, yanking at his arm; he had only shoved the counselor away. In either case, even the differences in the meaning of touch between deaf and hearing cultures could not have accounted for this behavior.

  By reputation, James is nonconfrontational. He is one of the students most often called on by staff members to help break up fights. For the yearbook, he was voted “most easygoing.” Even in his days of truancy and horseplay, James was never a fighter. The incident was grounds for a one-night suspension from the dorm as well as some concern, and the dorm supervisor took pains to assure Mrs. Taylor in his requisite note that James was usually pleasant and responsible, a dorm leader.

  As for James, he took his punishment coolly, stretching the one-night suspension from the dorm into a three-day leave from all of Lexington. When he showed up again, he was his felicitous old self. But something seemed to be slightly altered. Perhaps the hiatus allowed him to discharge the anxiety over graduation. Now, his bearing at the class meeting seems somehow serene, quietly resolute. As he gives the speakers his sober attention, he appears every bit the college-bound man. His head in profile is round and neat, with a crisp diagonal part shaved into his short fade. The rims of his eyeglasses frame his concentration like gold parentheses.

  The class officers run through a long agenda, from the treasurer’s report to prom tickets to senior luncheon to the class gift. The students act as podiums for each other, holding papers so presenters can read information and still have their hands free to sign. Two class advisers, both of them deaf, periodically interject comments and reminders.

  “All of you who are graduating,” explains one of them, informing the students about the upcoming alumni festival, “you will all become alumni.”

  James repeats the sign: alumni. It’s new to him, similar to the sign for graduate. He tries it out on his own hands and nods.

  At the front of the room, the class officers segue into a heated discussion about the class gift to the school. One faction is in favor of a television with a built-in decoder for the media department. Another advocates the purchase of books on deaf culture for the library. The students debate seriously; this will be their legacy.

  Next to James, Paul Escobar is paying little attention. It won’t be his legacy; he’s not graduating. Twisting his head, he stamps his foot in an effort to solicit the attention of one of the class advisers, sitting four yards away. With all the bodies and commotion in the carpeted room, she doesn’t feel the vibrations. Paul thrusts his arm sideways, jerks it once, twice, in what ought to be her peripheral vision, but the adviser is caught up in following the debate at the front of the room and does not turn.

  “Yo, deaf!” Paul calls aloud, rudely, in his excellent speech. This fares no better, of course, but allows him to vent some frustration and at the same time to reassure himself of his superiority in at least one area: oral skills. At last he snatches off his baseball cap and throws it at her feet. She turns in his direction.

  “Can I buy a class T-shirt even though I’m not graduating? ” he wants to know. But her gaze never lands on him; she has missed his question entirely, and now her attention goes back to the class officers. Paul gives up and sinks into a muscular slouch, barrel-legged dungarees shoved out before him. He sneaks a sideways glance at James, who is following the class meeting with such ardor that he hasn’t even noticed Paul’s antics. James, his old Bronx compatriot, his homeboy from first grade, his buddy in the Lex dorm—James is graduating without him, going off to college. Paul’s eyelids droop.

  James sits at the edge of his seat. It has just been announced that because this year’s class is so large (nearly fifty students), everyone will be allowed only five tickets for graduation, and he is dismayed. Five is not nearly enough. Several students protest, and one of the advisers asks for a show of hands: “How many people would want six tickets for graduation night?”

  James pumps both hands in the air, signing, “Eight, eight!” Even eight tickets would not be enough. He’d like nine. No, ten. The number of people he calls sister and cousin exceeds the parameters prescribed by biology. Up on Webster Avenue, a young man’s graduation from high school is no small cause for celebration, and James knows all the family friends will be clamoring to attend.

  The advisers promise to lobby for six tickets each. When the meeting is finished and the schoolday over, the seniors push back their chairs and weave to the front of the room. They have one last thing to tackle: figuring out the lineup for graduation. By tradition, the graduates process into the auditorium in order of height, so now they scrutinize one another, press back to back, lay palms flat across crowns. The girls tiptoe, pretending to wear pumps. The advisers survey the line, switching kids every so often. Someone notes the arrangement on a yellow legal pad.

  The line begins with the shortest ones, who are standing under the clock. The middle-size girls find themselves in front of the chalkboard, which they automatically fill with hearts and flowers and their graffiti tags. The line continues, progressively more crowded and jostling, toward the exit. Other students—freshmen, sophomores, juniors—released from their last period classes, swarm around lockers just outside the door. Paul slips out, blending into the mass of those not graduating; James watches his friend recede down the hall. Then he commits himself to a place in line.

  The buses have all left. James sits alone on the steps outside the student entrance. This spot is always shady in the afternoon; he can look out on the hot brilliance across the street and feel a pleasant chill from the metal banister against his spine. The litter gracing the steps below him reflects the time of year: a couple of peach pits, still glistening with strands of fruit; a pair of sunglasses with neon-bright frames, discarded or forgotten; the melted remains of an ice cream sandwich; a penny and a hearing aid battery, like twin charms, brown and silver.

  He has been waiting here since dismissal, an hour and twenty minutes ago, for the arrival of his sisters, who want to attend his senior luncheon, which will be held in the Diamond Room at Shea Stadium this Sunday. Guest tickets are twenty-five dollars each, and the deadline to purchase them is today, so James has told his sisters that if they want to go they had better get themselves to Jackson Heights with cash before the day ends. He waits without impatience or worry, and is rewarded at last as five young women round the corner of the privet hedges and make their way toward him, laughing boisterously.

  James does not budge, but smiles a private smile as he watches the approach of this delegation: his sisters, some by blood and some by name and all of them having made the complicated trip (two buses, two trains) to Jackson Heights. Maureen, the oldest and sassiest, was born in Jamaica but has the same father as James; Denise, whom James calls Neenee, is his full sister; Kisha and DeeDee are cousins; and Tina he describes as “my brother Joseph’s baby’s mother.” As soon as the women spot him, their volume and mirth increase, and they cluster at the bottom of the steps, pointing to their mouths and stomachs.

  “Food, James. We want to eat. We hungry.” Maureen, wearing a pair of satiny hot orange shorts, goes pigeon-toed, does a little squat, and points at her crotch. “I got to go bathroom, James.” The others crack up and look over their shoulders to see if they are scandalizing anyone. The houses across the street look so sedate. Someone is slapping fresh paint onto his wrought iron railing. The lush branches of the towering plane trees in front of the school sway with the rushing sound of surf, then grow calm again. The women look back at James, Neenee jabbing a finger at her mouth to remind him.

  “I don’t have any food,” he says. They are accustomed to his speech and recognize most of the words (although sometimes one must ask another to decipher something she has missed), just as James is accustomed to the movements of their lips. “You’re too l
ate,” he announces boldly. “Go out to eat.”

  The women fall out again, bent over with laughter. “Snap! Did you hear what he say? He say we can go out to eat! Damn!” They eye him with glittering approval.

  “Well, c’mon, James, I got to get to the bathroom!” Maureen tosses her head; a hundred skinny braids tipped in gold foil beckon him, and James, descending like royalty among the women, leads them along the length of the school building to the main entrance, where they sign in as his visitors. He shows them to the bathroom; all five disappear inside.

  James waits in the hall by the general office. On the stand to his left rests an old Lexington institution, the Black Book—a loose-leaf binder of community announcements that functions as a visual public address system. It is mostly used by staff and faculty, but now James flips idly through its contents. Lexington Annual BBQ, June 19th; Deaf Ministry Revival at the Beulah Church of God; Seido Karate for Deaf Adults; Job Opening at the New York Deaf Theatre; Sign Language Storytellers at the Queens Borough Public Library; Found Hearing Aid, Come to Health Services; Thank You to the Lexington AIDS Walk Team; Beautiful Room for Rent Near School; Third Annual Deaf Playwrights Competition; Deaf Purebreed Dalmatian Puppy for Adoption; the Latino Cable TV Station Will Film Lex’s Hispanic Dance Club on Tuesday.

  James’s sisters could not have imagined all this activity, this extended network of supports and services, which is available to James whether he chooses to use it or not. This is the first time any of them have visited James here at Lexington, his home five days a week. Now, one by one, they emerge from the bathroom and proceed without pause to satisfy their next basic need.

  “We can’t get food, James?”

  “I’m serious, I’m so hungry.”

  He shakes his head, turning up his palms and widening his eyes to impress them with the futility of their pleas. “You’re too late,” he tells them.

  Maureen cracks open the bathroom door, sticks her head inside, and calls to the cousins, who are still fussing in front of the mirror, “Dang, he say we can’t get the school hot lunch, we too late!”

  The tiled chamber amplifies her voice back into the hall, and a stream of staff members, all pendulous briefcases and clicking heels, veers widely around the group without slowing down as they check their boxes in the general office on the way home. They look back over their shoulders with curiosity and caution, making rapid, instinctive judgments about the tenor and purpose of these strangers.

  James waits all the while without visible discomfort or embarrassment, displaying impatience only when Tina, the last to come out of the bathroom, finally joins the others in the hall, and then it is only in fun. He leans against the wall and shakes his head in mock dismay. “Girls always take too long in the bathroom.”

  “What he say?”

  “He say you take too long.”

  “I got to eat something.”

  “James, we hungry.”

  “Come on,” he tells them, deciding to take them on a tour before he collects their money for the luncheon tickets.

  The gracious chaperon, the perfect host, he conducts them to the residential wing with the easy dignity conferred by proprietorship, a claim he is entitled to make simply by virtue of being deaf. On these grounds, he is a native son. He seems to know everyone they pass, and to each teacher or maintenance worker he volunteers with muffled pride, “My sisters.” He does not hear but seems to sense the fond editorializing that ensues behind his back: “I thought they were his girlfriends . . . Looks like a harem . . . James and his entourage.” His place here is certain, blessed, and they make an impressive spectacle, the six of them sashaying down the main corridor.

  At the elevator to the dorm, James swings to a halt and punches the green up arrow.

  “You got a elevator?” cries Neenee.

  The doors slide open in response. The women step inside, checking it out, exclaiming, “Oh! Oh! Uh-huh!” The tired old box heaves them hesitantly up to the second floor, where they spill out and trail after James, their attention fixed thirstily on the educational displays lining the hall, lengths of bulletin board checkered with construction paper backgrounds on which are mounted maps, drawings, diagrams, reports. Maureen can’t help but read aloud the words cut from colored paper and stapled across the boards: “Our Neighborhood Communities . . . Our Field Trip . . . Seasons of the Year.”

  “This school is baad,” Kisha praises.

  “I wouldn’t mind coming to a school like this.”

  Maureen pauses in front of a poster on which are mounted samples of real currency from assorted nations. “I like that one,” she says slyly, tapping a long orange nail against a shakily attached dollar bill. The others laugh. They catch up with James.

  He has taken a left into the dorm living room, which leads to the warren of laundry area, bedrooms, and modest kitchen, this last being their destination. Breakfasts and dinners are cooked here each day for the dorm residents; between meals they can help themselves. James takes clear plastic cups from a wooden cupboard and pours five cherry Kool-Aids from a pitcher in the fridge. “You pay me back for this,” he says, ribbing the women coolly, sending them again into peals of laughter.

  They drink and survey the place approvingly.

  “You got a kitchen.”

  “This where you cook?”

  “You got foods here!”

  Maureen minces comically to a corner shelf and lifts the cover off a cake dish. “What’s this?” she asks James, pointing a finger daringly close.

  “Carrot cake,” he replies, unfazed. “Left over from yesterday.”

  She pinches off an edge, speedily claps the lid back down, and makes a show of tasting the sample. The others laugh at her audacity, but James observes her with neither amusement nor indignation. His gaze is steady, lucid, almost musing. The sisters’ presence here in the dorm kitchen, crowded against sink and stove and wooden cabinets, flashing their feisty spirits, their door-knocker earrings, their unabashed hunger—it is as if their filling up this kitchen has triggered in James a moment of self-reflection. With all the external excitement, his gaze seems inwardly trained, as if their presence permits him a certain awareness of his own favored, fortunate position here. With it comes an undeniable sense of loss, however, as the distance between his ease and his older sister’s jittery bravado grows wrenchingly vast.

  If Maureen feels the distance, she does not seem to register or mourn it. She grins and licks cake from her fingers with a smacking noise, tossing her head so that tiny darts of light bounce from the gold tips of her braids. James blinks. He gestures with his chin, addressing them all. “Come on, I’m going to show you my room.”

  “What he say?”

  “His room, he say he going to show us his room.”

  They set their Kool-Aid cups by the sink and follow James farther along the narrow passages. When he unlocks his door and leads them across the threshold, his sisters whistle and hoot.

  “Oh dang! Snap.”

  “This is fly.”

  “This your room?”

  “When you graduate, you going to keep the bed?”

  “This is my room. Don’t touch anything,” says James, but they know he is teasing and press past him, scouting out the closet, the bathroom, pulling open his wardrobe, his drawers, inspecting the posters on the walls, taking in every object: sneakers, books, flowered curtains, and a box of cheddar-flavored crackers, which Maureen seizes. She plunges her arm in up to the elbow. Kisha and Neenee directly follow suit, scattering cracker pollen in their wake.

  “You clean my floor,” says James.

  “That’s right. With a vacuum,” Maureen cracks back.

  “A broom,” needles James.

  “Boy!” Maureen stretches out on his bed, eating crackers one by one from her cupped palm, too content to play the dozens and rag back on James. “This is nice. I could stay here.”

  “They got a McDonald’s around here?” wonders Neenee.

  They pick over the conte
nts of his room, desire and praise slipping wistfully from their lips.

  “I wish I could go here.”

  “This is so nice.”

  “I’d like to go to a place like this.”

  “My school ain’t no place you want to be.”

  James leans against the edge of his desk and watches them. Each one’s conversation overlaps too quickly and randomly with that of the others for him to follow, and he does not try. He folds his arms and rests in the invisible web their voices spin, detached in their midst, an outsider even in his own room.

  “You have to be deaf to go here?” asks Kisha in earnest.

  “James not deaf. He hearing. He faking.”

  “Naw, he’s deaf.”

  “Then how come when you call him real loud from the kitchen he turn around and come back real fast?”

  “I know.” Maureen speaks up grandly from the bed. “That’s, see, he gets the vibrations, ‘cause they bounce off the walls.”

  “Then how come when you call all the way from the other end of the apartment he can hear?” demands Neenee.

  “‘Cause he hearing.” Maureen shrugs.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “This room is snap!” Tina declares softly. Oblivious to the speculation over James’s auditory abilities, she has been assessing the furnishings with a keen and loving eye, and now stops suddenly, brought up short by her own image. “It even got a mirror.”

  The others look. A ten-dollar full-length tacked to the wall reflects them all in its candid strip of glass: five wistful guests and one who belongs.

  It isn’t only that he has increased his gold (new ring, new medallion, new bracelet); this year James has gotten eyeglasses, had his wisdom teeth out, and, a week before graduation, received his new hearing aids. He has passed his Regents Competency Tests and his learner’s permit test, made honor roll, and been accepted to college. He has taken care of business as never before, stalling nearly every inch of the way, falling one step back for every two steps forward, but he has got there nevertheless, so that now, like it or not, there is nothing left for him to do but leave.