If a Tree Falls

by Jennifer Rosner

  It wasn’t long before Juliet was belting out “ Tomorrow” from the musical Annie, in full voice, to anyone who would listen. After her “performances,” she’d bend her body into a deep bow, her rosy cheeks soaking in the enthusiastic applause. Then Sophia would want a turn, and she’d take over with a ballad about white buffalo, or something from The Sound of Music or another musical we rented from the library.

  Singing! Our girls were singing! Music was inside them, just as it was inside me, and they reveled in it. I began to warm up my voice, something I hadn’t done for years, since the days when I had trained to sing opera. When I sang to Sophia and Juliet, they stilled and stared, studying my mouth, my face, in awed silence. Bill, too, showed his appreciation, chiding me for staying quiet for so long. In the car, we sang rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” until my voice cracked with the thrill of it, and I had to break off from my part, and take a catching breath, before starting up again.

  At night, Bill and I removed the girls’ sound systems, ran the bath, and placed Sophia and Juliet in the tub together. The transition from hearing to not hearing, as from clothed to unclothed, was seamless for them. Their play, and sometimes their arguing—“Juliet took my pinwheel, Mama! It really is mine”—went on uninterrupted. In the bath, they signed while they splashed, enjoying even the ill-given gift of water trumpets that made music they couldn’t hear. Afterwards, goosebumps rubbed soft by warm towels, Sophia brushed Juliet’s hair, moving gingerly around the implant scar, styling. Each time the brush caught the curls at the base of her neck, Juliet arched her head back and smiled, tickled by Sophia’s gentle movements.

  I watched them as they stood together on the dampened bath rug, laughing and shivering as their towels slipped down, and I wondered at all that we had given them and also stolen away. They came wired into this world able to bypass sound. It showed in their eyes, which stared things down until they understood them completely. And it showed in their peacefulness as they puttered about, damp hair pressed against their pajamas, gathering piles of books to look at before settling soundlessly into bed. We brought them access to sound, and with it worldly opportunities, but more selfishly, access to our experience and the form of language we use to express and describe it. I told myself that, when they were older, they could decide for themselves whether to hear and speak; they could take off their hearing technology if they preferred to, and live their lives Deaf. But deep down, I knew that was not entirely true. They were listeners now, understanding the world through audition; and they were speakers now, organizing their experiences into the categories of spoken language. We had placed them on one side of the divide. To straddle it looked impossible.

  We didn’t regret our decisions for Sophia and Juliet. But we feared the exclusions they might face. To some in the signing Deaf community, Sophia and Juliet would be outliers, hearing and speaking. They might even be offenders or traitors, having opted out of their deafness with technology and oral education. To some in the hearing world, Sophia and Juliet would be damaged, disabled, or at the very least, different. They had been taunted, already, by a hearing child: “You can’t hear me, you can’t hear me,” a mean-spirited girl chanted while splashing in a kiddie pool one day. She had seen Sophia and Juliet hand Bill their hearing devices before they jumped into the water. Bill scolded the girl, and she seemed chastened, but afterwards, all I could think was how lucky Sophia and Juliet were to be unable to hear her. And how important it was for them to grow up strong, with confidence and self-esteem, and a sense of belonging.

  Massachusetts, December 2006

  SOPHIA AND JULIET HUDDLED in the window seat beneath our coziest fleece blanket. It was dark already, though it wasn’t yet five o’ clock. A short winter day. I’d tell stories until suppertime.

  Lately, I had taken to revising old fairy tales. Rapunzel, high up in her tower, couldn’t hear the prince so very well. When the prince yelled up, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” Rapunzel rummaged among bartletts and boscs to hurl down a pear. Cinderella couldn’t hear the clock strike midnight—the chime’s frequency was too high—so in my version of the story, it was the sudden chafe of her old rags emerging beneath her sparkling gown that sent her running from the palace and into the woods. And Snow White missed entirely the knock on the seven dwarves’ little arched door, and it was all for the best, because she never gave entry to the evil queen disguised as an old peddler woman with shiny, magic apples.

  I was just taking up Rumpelstiltskin when the phone rang. I switched on a favorite book on tape-All of A Kind Family-and took the phone call. It was a mother I’d recently met. Her baby was deaf and she wanted recommendations of Sign Language books and Sign videos. When I hung up, the girls demanded to know who I was talking to, and what I was talking about. So I told them: “Do you remember the little baby, Lily? Well, Lily is deaf and her mom had some questions for me.”

  Sophia gave a nod of understanding and settled herself back into the cushions of the window seat to continue listening to the book. But Juliet stood looking at me.

  “Lily’s deaf?” she asked.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Deaf like Goya?” We had a children’s video about the deaf painter, Goya.

  “Yes. Deaf like Goya. And like you.”

  “I’m deaf?”

  “Yes, Juliet, you’re deaf.”

  “I’m deaf?”

  “Yes, honey. You know how, when you take off your sound, you can’t hear anything? That’s because you’re deaf.”

  “I’m deaf?”

  “Uh—yes. You know how we play with Jan every week at the Clarke School for the Deaf, and how all your friends there are deaf? You’re deaf.”

  As I stood there, as incredulous as Juliet, I wondered suddenly, did I somehow forget to do or say something I was supposed to do or say? Had I omitted to inform Juliet of this basic fact of her life?

  Our family’s whole structure was framed around the fact of Sophia’s and Juliet’s deafness. Daily, we changed hearing aid and implant batteries like most parents changed diapers. We tested FM systems and cleaned earmolds. We scanned every restaurant, every room we walked into, for its acoustic qualities. And then there were all those recast fairy tales.

  I tried to see it from Juliet’s perspective. Each morning, like most little girls put on barrettes and headbands, she put on her implant processor. And with it, she was hearing. So she wasn’t deaf. There was the little detail that she could turn her hearing off—she could remove her processor—and then she couldn’t hear up to 112 decibels. She was deaf!

  I knew that Juliet would one day recognize her deafness as a difference, and that her initial surprise at her deafness would, in all likelihood, morph—into loneliness when she couldn’t hear the banter of classmates; into happiness when a true friend stopped to fill her in on what she missed; into fatigue when she met the muddle of relentless auditory input; into relief when she turned off her sound and recharged in a way unknown to hearing people.

  Sophia was just starting to grapple with the ways her hearing loss might affect her life. One night, in the open span of our living room, Bill twirled Sophia while she held herself in long, graceful arabesque poses—a ballerina spinning around and around. Then, abruptly, she rearranged herself in Bill’s arms, to be face to face with him.

  “Daddy, do you think I’ll dance like this at my wedding?”

  “Yes, Sophia, I do.”

  “But”—she stammered—“do you think any one will love me—I mean, with my hearing aids?”

  No hint of this before. Her difference. And what it might mean.

  That night, as I tucked Sophia into bed, I said, “You know, Sophia, there are people in this world who make up reasons not to love others—because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or some other difference between them—but those people are not focused on what matters. If a person doesn’t love you because you have a hearing loss, then that person is not worthy of your love. You are a wonderful pers
on with a full heart, and those who know what matters in this life will come to know you and love you for who you are.”

  As I was saying all this, I wondered: is this really where I should be heading, into a discussion about social justice and prejudice? Shouldn’t I just hug my girl and ask, with the disbelief I truly felt: “You—who can read any face, who can quiet any baby, who can cause any dog, however hyper, to settle calmly, magically, at your feet? You—whose eyes are rivaled only by Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay? Someone not love you? Daddy and I are already buying bolts for the door to keep the hordes away.”

  But I didn’t change my course. Sophia was telling us that she knew: she knew she had a difference. And she was asking us: would she be OK?

  As we spoke, I thought of the prejudice, the pain, inflicted on Deaf people throughout history. Their “difference”: a basis for denying them their intelligence, their humanity. I doubted that Nellie and Bayla escaped it.

  Later, in a phone call to my sister, I wondered if I handled the conversation with Sophia very well. My sister assured me that it wouldn’t be my last chance: I’d have all those teenage years to hone my response.

  I dreaded to think of the teenage years; already both girls ripped off their sound when they didn’t want to hear what we were saying. I’d read that it was typical of teenage deaf kids to take off their hearing technology to fit in at school. Not a winning strategy for academic success, or much else.

  These days, Sophia wore her hair up in a high ponytail, seemingly proud of her new, fancy, gold-glitter earmolds. But I knew that one day her hair would come down to cover over, to camouflage, her hearing aids. I could only hope that the hiding impulse—so familiar, a pulsing in the vein—might be short-lived, and that she wouldn’t remove her hearing aids altogether.

  For now, Bill and I were all about staying positive. Deafness could mean colorful earware; funny fairy tale stories. So I got furious at my mother one day, during a visit to my parents’ house. I was troubleshooting a problem with Juliet’s earmold and implant processor when I overheard my mother say to Sophia,

  “I just hate this. Don’t you hate this?”

  Sophia looked at my mother uncertainly, and said, “My earmolds aren’t bothering me.”

  “No,” my mother said, “Not the earmolds. The hearing loss. I hate it. Don’t you hate it?”

  At which point, I picked up Sophia and carried her into another room.

  “Sophia,” I said, as calmly as I could, “Grandma is frustrated because her hearing aids don’t work very well. They whistle a lot—don’t they?—and she has a lot of trouble hearing with them. Her earmolds bother her, too. They are made out of hard plastic, not like your soft ones, and they hurt her ears. That’s why she was saying all that. She feels frustrated.”

  “Why doesn’t Grandma get new hearing aids? Or put Vaseline on her earmolds, so they won’t hurt so much.”

  “I’m not sure, honey. I’ll suggest that.”

  Then I went to find my mother. Was it her own need for connection, for commiseration, that drove her, boundaryless, into such a leaky conversation with my daughter?

  “What was that about?” I demanded. “Sophia is six years old, and she knows no other life. If she comes to hate her hearing loss, we’ll deal with that. But let’s not lead her there.”

  My mother apologized profusely.

  New York, 1887

  ON THE DAY BEFORE HER WEDDING, Nellie does not bob in the center of a sea of friends, or dance through the streets wrapped tight in a flurry, a moving snowball of aunts or cousins, all figures in white. She does not bask in the calm of the one sister who knows her better than she knows herself. Nellie walks to the shul, to the woman’s mikva bath for a ritual cleansing, alone.

  The following evening, just beyond the synagogue courtyard, Nellie stands shaking in her borrowed dress. A swish of tulle veils her freshly powdered face. Mordechai is already standing beneath the chuppah with his parents. The knots of his necktie and his shoelaces are undone in accordance with tradition, and he is wearing a white robe, a kittel. His hair is freshly cropped, his eyes bursting brown.

  Nellie looks out at the small crowd: Elish and Herschel; Mordechai’s brothers and sisters; Sylvia; Lill and Samuel Baumann. They are all holding candles, yellow flames flickering before their eyes, their cheeks. Nellie draws a deep breath from her hollow stomach. Despite her letters pleading for her family to come, she stands without Bayla. Without Pearl.

  Nellie shifts her weight. She feels hot in her dress. Her chest is tight and her mouth is dry from fasting. She worries, suddenly, that her breath is sour. Guests gather in close to recite blessings. Nellie fixes her eyes on Mordechai and lets the ceremonial wine settle her nerves. Mordechai slips a solid gold band onto her finger. His broad smile summons a flutter from deep in her belly.

  Nellie does not hear the crunch of her petticoat, the shattering of glass beneath Mordechai’s foot, the high whinny of the accordion. She lurches with Mordechai’s passionate kiss on her lips. Before he leads her away from the guests, for a time of privacy, Lill clutches Nellie’s face in her hands and kisses her forehead—an imprint, a jolt. Her mother, her father. Where on earth could they be? Still in Tasse? And where is Bayla—alone in a strange city—an airless dormitory room—in a scratchy school uniform? Nellie’s heeled shoes sink into the sodden ground as Mordechai ushers her across the courtyard lawn.

  Weeks later Nellie stands in the kitchen, looking at the plants on the windowsill, puzzling over the strong smells in Mordechai’s house. Did the herring spoil? Was the milk rancid? She walks downstairs and out onto the sidewalk, only to be assaulted by other overpowering smells: horse dung, the pungent scent of passing men, the burn of chestnuts from the pushcart on the corner. These days, Nellie can’t get through market shopping without bringing along a flour sack stuffed with orange peels to hold to her nose. When the nausea hits, it accompanies her a full week before she realizes: she is pregnant. With Mordechai by her side as she lurches past the open pickle barrels, Nellie rejoices in her expectant condition.

  By day, at work at the corset factory, Nellie dreams of her baby to come. By night, she dreams only of Tasse. She can’t bear to write of the news to her sister, to her mother. To concede that they are nowhere near on their way. Nellie’s belly grows round and taut; she puts her hand on her side, where she feels a flutter, a kick. Mordechai kisses her in that very spot, taps out a message of love with his hands. Then he kisses Nellie’s cheeks, her forehead, her fluttering eyelids.

  When the labor contractions start, Mordechai’s mother sends for Lill and Sylvia, and together, the three women help Nellie birth her baby girl. By dawn, Nellie is holding her baby close, inhaling the warm dough of her cheek. She bounces her, spells B-E-R-T-H-A, an American name, with quick fingers along her baby’s plump thigh. Her fingers move nonstop, full of doting and love, along her baby’s tiny spine, across her diapered bottom, up the now-curling soles of her chubby feet.

  It is Elish who first notices that Bertha does not blink her eyes or turn her head to sound. Even amidst the blasting of the shofar on Rosh Hoshana, when other babies cry, Bertha drifts in and out of sleep. One hundred blasts in all—single blasts at the call of Tekiah; a staccato series of three at the call of Shevarim; nine short blasts at the call of Teruah, and the longest mournful wail at the final call of Tekiah Godol—the New Year’s calls to awaken, drift up to the ceiling unheard.

  Elish comes to Nellie’s room one night at bedtime. Nellie has a piece of string in her hands, and Elish watches as Nellie ties one end of the string around Bertha’s tiny pink wrist. The other end, Nellie loops around her own wrist. Elish looks at her sister quizzically, and Nellie signs that the string tugs and wakes her when Bertha cries in the night.

  “I think the baby is deaf,” Elish signs.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why do you think so?”

  “She doesn’t cry at loud noises; she doesn’t even wake. Watch.” Elish cl
aps her hands loudly behind Bertha’s head. “Nothing. No. I am certain she doesn’t hear.”

  Nellie stands over Bertha. With her unstrung hand, she wipes a droplet of milk from Bertha’s face. Thoughts ricochet in Nellie’s head, and her longing for Bayla surges stronger than ever. Elish taps Nellie on the arm, startling her. With eyes still fixed on her baby, Nellie signs, “It is good, Elish. It is good this way. Please, get Mordechai for me. He will want to know.”

  On Friday afternoons, in the work-filled hours prior to the Sabbath, Nellie does not hear the scurried preparations. The chop-chop of onions, potatoes, and carrots. The squeak of the oven door. The whoosh of a hair brush. The soft rustle of silk.

  Just before twilight, when the girls and women gather before the table, when Nellie stands with Bertha strapped to her chest—crisscrossed close and tied with Bayla’s shawl—she does not hear the prayer over the candles, spoken and sung. She stands with Elish on one side, Mordechai’s sisters on the other, and Nellie fights with her eyes. Opened, she sees her mother-in-law’s lips moving in prayer. Closed . . .

  When Nellie closes her eyes, she sees her past life. Pearl, circling her hands in the candlelight, her head covered with white lace. Moshe, striding home from shul, his eyes dancing with excitement, his bushy beard hiding away his words. Bayla, crouching in the nook beneath the windowsill, her signs sparking in the dusky shaft of a day’s remaining light. All the little ones, crawling, toddling, running through the house. Rayzl, tumbling out of the carriage, her arms filled with tablets and chalk. Chava’s belly jutting out from under her bedsheets.

  As Nellie strives to make a house with Mordechai and his family, a deep pain burrows into the sockets of her eyes, and she fights to keep them from closing. She fights to rid her mind of its natural topics, to banish her internal questions about why she hasn’t received word from her parents or Bayla, and why they haven’t yet come. Her imagination strong-arms its way in: Bayla at school, Bayla alone amongst strangers on the High Holidays. Perhaps Bayla walked to the iron-girded bridge—Nellie saw it from the carriage—perhaps she walked there to throw hunks of bread into the rushing river beneath. To cast off the year’s sins, to ask for and to grant forgiveness.