Finding Zoe

by Brandi Rarus

  My new awareness was shaky, like a foal first standing on its legs, but that afternoon a window had opened, and I saw that being deaf was the way I was meant to be. At that moment, I knew that going back to Central High for that first year had been a wasted year; I had been trying to prove to everyone that I was hearing, instead of knowing that being deaf was okay.

  I realized that I had a choice: I could continue trying to be “hearing” (having hearing friends and taking hearing classes) and fail, or I could be the best deaf person I could be. It was then that I began seeing my being deaf through the eyes of self-acceptance and understanding that it didn’t mean I was failing.

  After returning home from camp, I got a job at the Colonial Ice Cream Shop. I worked fountain and just loved eating the ice cream and making all those sundaes. The “Turtle” was made from two pumps of hot fudge, one pump of caramel, and pecans over vanilla ice cream. Another popular sundae, the “E.T.,” named after the movie released that summer, was made from one pump of peanut butter, two pumps of hot fudge, and Reese’s Pieces over vanilla ice cream.

  It was at the Colonial that I fell for a hearing guy, and fell hard, beginning a love affair that ultimately led me to discover my deep capacity to give and to receive love. My very first day on the job, Matt came right over to me and said, “Hey gorgeous,” and I thought, Hey gorgeous, yourself.

  Matt was seventeen; he was tall with dark brown, curly hair and green eyes and was as kind as he was versatile. He not only worked fountain with me but also did just about every other job in the joint—host, cook, waiter, supervisor. He was different from the crowd: steady, responsible, and loved having a good time. As soon as we began hanging around together, he learned to finger spell (signing words, letter by letter). Then, he bought The Joy of Signing, a popular book back then, and studied signing with a vengeance, picking it up quickly, which I really appreciated.

  Occasionally, it was Matt’s job to lock up the shop at night after everyone had gone home. I’d hang around, so it was just the two of us there all alone at midnight. He’d whip up a couple of Monte Cristos or patty melts, and we’d sit at a booth and eat. I brought my great-grandmother’s sterling silver candlesticks from home, which we hid in the ceiling right above the booth and took down whenever we dined.

  But Matt’s love notes were what I appreciated most of all; they made me fall in love with him. Every night around midnight, when I wasn’t at the restaurant with him, he’d drive by my house on the way home from work and leave me a letter in my mailbox. Some were strictly love letters; others were his thoughts about his day and other musings; we couldn’t communicate by phone, so letter writing took its place. First thing every morning, I ran to the mailbox to get his note, and then I’d write back, leaving my note in the mailbox in the afternoon for him to pick up that evening. Rather than receiving phone calls from my boyfriend, like hearing girls did, I received his amazing love letters. For once, being deaf had its privileges, and it was my secret—receiving little treasures that the hearing girls would never know . . . a whole box full of them. Matt had a way with words that went straight to the heart.

  Summer turned to fall, and once school started, my life was very full. Besides spending time with Matt, my horizons expanded in the deaf circles when I played the role of Lydia in the Chicago stage production of Children of a Lesser God and became Marlee Matlin’s understudy. Lydia wasn’t the lead role; she was one of the students at the school for the deaf. The Immediate Theater Company—an off-Broadway-caliber company—had been looking for someone to play the role and saw me perform it in our high school’s performance of the show, which they came to scout. (Throughout the years, I had participated in “Deaf Drama” as an extracurricular school activity.) The company offered me the role without even auditioning. However, my mother made me turn it down because she thought that it would place too big of a burden on my school schedule. But she agreed to let me be Marlee Matlin’s understudy.

  ME AND MATT AT MY SENIOR PROM

  When the show ran that summer, Marlee was in the middle of callbacks for the movie for the lead role of Sarah and was gone quite a bit, so I got to perform several times. Back then I did it just for fun. However, I can see now how acting on stage before hundreds of people in the role of a deaf character was a step toward later being on stage before thousands of people representing deafness for real.

  From the outside, my life was good; I had a fun job, a great boyfriend, and tons of friends, and I was performing—but on the inside, it was altogether different. Camp had begun my journey toward self-acceptance, but by being with Matt all the time, working at the Colonial, living with my hearing family, and still taking the hearing classes at school, I remained that hearing girl at heart, while my struggles continued to grow.

  At Matt’s graduation party at his parents’ home, he was busy entertaining and couldn’t be with me very much, and I felt uncomfortable in the crowd. The same thing occurred at his grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner: I felt so out of place at that table. Even working at the Colonial—something that I had enjoyed immensely—became more difficult for me to handle. Yes, one-on-one my lipreading was good, but the Colonial was a busy place; usually there were too many conversations happening at once. And just because I could easily talk to a single individual does not mean that people would take the time to talk to me; and when they did, it was usually to give me instructions, not make social talk. That is a big difference. Feeling increasingly left out of the social scene and more and more isolated, having Matt around was my saving grace.

  When it came time to choose a college, I went where my deaf friends were going: the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and is located in Upstate New York. NTID attracted deaf students like me who came from hearing families, had been mainstreamed in public school, and were “oral.”

  My other option, Gallaudet University, which is located in Washington, DC, had offered me early acceptance beginning January of that year, but I turned it down, wanting to finish high school with my friends and also wanting to have that time with Matt. In addition, because of my limited interactions with deaf people and my misconception that deaf people who don’t speak are not as smart as deaf people who do, I felt that Gallaudet, which tended to attract deaf people who signed and didn’t speak, would not be academically challenging. No one had ever explained to me that the deaf kids who don’t speak, don’t do so because they weren’t exposed to any language whatsoever until they were toddlers—neither sign language nor a spoken language—and that affects their ability to learn. I didn’t know that they were no less smart than the deaf kids who spoke, like me.

  This was often the case with deaf children who had hearing parents (which is 90% of all deaf children). Things today are different, but in the past, a child’s deafness often wasn’t discovered until the child was diagnosed with a language delay at two or three years old. By that time, the child has gone years without any language whatsoever, which can be detrimental to the child’s ability to learn.

  In contrast, deaf kids born to deaf parents are usually exposed to ASL from birth, just like hearing kids are exposed to a spoken language, and they are academically on par with hearing kids or deaf kids like me who were exposed to language early on.

  At the time, I didn’t even realize that Gallaudet was known as the Harvard of deaf universities! At that time, Gallaudet primarily attracted deaf students who had been exposed to sign language from birth, who, unlike me, came from deaf families, and who were part of the Deaf community and Deaf Culture. Instead of going to public school, these students were often sent by their parents to residential schools for the deaf, or stay-away schools. Living in the dorms with the other deaf students and being with deaf teachers and other deaf adults, they grew up immersed in Deaf Culture and ASL.

  When I arrived at NTID, it felt like Camp Mark Seven to the nth degree. I was in heaven—an entire university filled with deaf students for me to
meet, hang out with, and learn from. I was back in a communication-accessible environment twenty-four hours a day; I had arrived. There were deaf dorms, professors, staff, counselors, RAs, organizations, parties, sororities, fraternities—2,000 deaf people, just like me, who brought their “being deaf” with them to explore and cultivate. I had found my niche: people to whom I could relate on all levels, people who had pride in themselves and their culture, and people whose culture was so important to them that they were full-force with it, wanting to support others on their journeys as well.

  Even though most of us at NTID hadn’t grown up in the Deaf community, the bond and the understanding that we all shared allowed the Deaf Culture, which we had longed for, to be easily cultivated and expressed. We inhaled it. Discovering that deafness wasn’t our enemy nurtured our sense of self-acceptance and belonging. Classes and workshops on deaf-related issues and support from deaf professors helped us find our place within the Deaf community. In that milieu, I continued to evaluate myself.

  My struggles with trying to fit in but feeling different in the hearing community had fueled my lifelong desire to be the best—not the best in relation to others, but the best that I could be. Now I believed that I had the best—the best communication, friends, teachers—everything. I was driven, aware that I was changing, but I knew that the change wasn’t complete yet. I quickly became a member of the NTID Student Council. I was being propelled onward—the pull toward accepting being deaf was increasing by multitudes.

  Yet, I was also in a major identity crisis, feeling angry and rebellious at my family and Matt, whom I felt didn’t understand what it was like to be deaf or how important being deaf was to me. To be fair, even back in high school, I never let Matt understand, believing that if I really let go and fully embraced that I was deaf—if I went all the way and had more deaf friends and signed rather than spoke—he wouldn’t be comfortable with that part of me and wouldn’t want to spend his life dealing with my issues, my causes, and my world. I just focused on the present. I was on the crest of a wave, feeling stronger than ever before, yet still not accepting of those whom I felt didn’t understand me and had let me down.

  When I first arrived at NTID, I was carried away with being away from home. Immersed in this newfound world, it was easy to let Matt slip from my mind. I didn’t write him a single letter, and on Labor Day weekend, after having to practically force myself to go home, I saw him even though I didn’t want to, and he felt my distance. Then, I played hard back at school until Thanksgiving break, when I came home and wanted to patch things up between us. But when he picked me up and we got into his car, I could tell that he wasn’t himself. He was angry at me for “disappearing for months,” and told me he had started dating another girl.

  “It’s different. We have our song,” he said. “I really enjoy listening to the radio with her, listening to music . . .”

  His words made me sick to my stomach, but I didn’t say a word.

  Looking back, I know that Matt didn’t mean to hurt me with his comments, yet it shook me to the core because it was a sobering reminder to me that we were different. He was hearing and had the right to be hearing and enjoy those things—he deserved that. He didn’t have to be dragged into my Deaf World and my deaf issues. He had a right to his life, as much as I had the right to mine. Even though his words felt like a slick kick in the face, they helped me to face my own truth. Never had I felt such power, yet such pain; in order to love myself, I had to lose the one I loved.

  When summer came, I wrote Matt a letter; here’s the gist of it:

  Matt, I will always love you. But as I’ve grown up and entered the world, on my own, my choices for myself have changed. I am now part of the Deaf community and need a partner to share it all with me. I no longer want to stare at conversations I don’t understand because people don’t sign. I don’t want to spend holidays at a dinner table all alone in my own world because I am not following the conversations. I no longer want to feel this terrible pull between my love for you and a world that you are not part of. Nor do I want to force you to accept a world that is not yours.

  I hope that my community makes its own headlines someday, and that Deaf rights are pushed to the forefront, as we demand more awareness. Perhaps you’ll read about us in the newspaper or a magazine—and even meet another deaf person. Then you might understand why it was all so important to me, and even be glad that you were not there. Brandi

  Chapter Three

  DEAF PRESIDENT NOW

  HAVING A DEAF boyfriend helped me to adjust to NTID. To have a deaf man to walk with hand-in-hand, share meals, and have fun allowed me to begin accepting myself not only as a deaf person but also as a deaf woman in this new environment. Eric and I started dating in the midst of my self-awareness crescendo. He was 5’11”, with a large build, had blonde hair and cute dimples, and was sharp as a tack. He was very involved in his fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, so we went to frat parties all the time and hung out at the fraternity house. Although born deaf, he grew up orally, going to the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, one of the most prominent oral programs in the country. He first learned how to sign at NTID; until then, he used his voice and lip-read. His father was the president of the Clarke School for the Deaf (now, Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech) in Northampton, Massachusetts—the famous “oral” school that adhered to the philosophy that deaf students learn best when they can speak; they don’t use sign language there at all. We were two sponges soaking up our newfound environment and embracing our newly discovered culture and identities in unison (along with everyone around us).

  It was during that time that I entered and won the Miss NTID Pageant, which took place every year at the school. At the time it was a very popular event and sounded fun. What better way to explore being a deaf woman, I figured, and also have a blast. When I first arrived at NTID, I became friendly with the reigning queen, a woman named Angie, and she encouraged me to enter the pageant. I remember being so surprised that someone three years my senior would be so friendly and kind to me. She was absolutely beautiful and had the greatest smile. Angie’s background was similar to mine—hearing family, oral, mainstreamed; she even grew up in the town right next to mine in the suburbs of Chicago. I felt that she had accomplished so much with her life, and she became my role model. The following spring when I became Miss NTID, she crowned me.

  Pressing on with things Deaf, I signed up for the Miss Deaf Illinois state pageant that summer, the next step in the pageant circuit, which just happened to take place in my hometown of Naperville. I won that as well, and the following summer, in 1987, I became Miss Deaf Illinois. Honestly, it was great fun winning both pageants, but it was exploring myself as a deaf woman and person that was fueling me. I also have to admit that part of me still wanted to prove to my family and friends that I was capable and successful as a deaf person.

  Enveloped in my new and fabulous life, I took courses on Deaf History and Culture. Somewhere along the way, I made a profound revelation: my own personal struggles over the years reflected the struggles of all deaf people—the same struggles that they had been dealing with for centuries. The world truly was contained in a single grain of sand. I could not get over what I had learned. Like most minorities, deaf people have suffered due to the ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice of others, yet there was a sad, sick, twist to our story.

  Prior to 1750, the lives of people who were born deaf or became deaf prelingually were unthinkable. For thousands of years, given no exposure to any language, and therefore unable to learn, the congenitally deaf had been considered dumb or stupid. Regarded by primitive law as “incompetent,” they were barred from inheriting property, marrying, receiving an education, and engaging in challenging work—all things we consider basic human rights today. The law and society treated them as idiots. They often lived alone and penniless, and were forced to do menial jobs. (I understood even more deeply why, as an oral deaf person, I thought I was too smart for the deaf pro
gram; although deaf myself, I, too, had been influenced by this horrific fallacy.)

  Unable to speak and called “dumb” or “mute,” deaf people couldn’t communicate with their families, and except in large cities, they were cut off even from other deaf people. Having just a few simple signs and gestures, they were illiterate, considered uneducable, and lacked knowledge of the world.

  Without symbols to represent and combine ideas, they couldn’t acquire language. But the horrendous mistake—perpetuated since 355 BC when Aristotle proclaimed the deaf incapable of reason—was the idea that the symbols had to represent speech. The misperceptions about deaf people are ancient; the belittlement of mutes was part of the Mosaic Code, and St. Paul’s pronouncement in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes by hearing,” was misinterpreted for centuries to mean that the deaf were incapable of faith—and Rome wouldn’t condone anyone inheriting property, if he could not give confession.

  The seeds of change can be seen in the writings of Plato and in the sixteenth century when philosophers such as Jerome Cardan began questioning whether another form of language—one that involved the body—might be used to teach the deaf to communicate. Yet it wasn’t until the middle of the eighteenth century, a more enlightened time generally speaking, that the future for deaf people finally became brighter. It all began when a benevolent man, the Abbé de l’Épée, became involved with the poor deaf who roamed the streets of Paris and their native sign language. Not wanting their souls to be robbed of the Catechism, de l’Épée actually heard and then taught them.