9
Falling in Love
I fell in love for the first time in the second grade. Actually, I didn’t so much fall in love as choose, pragmatically, to be in love. (This would not be the case in later life, as I have been married three times in all—certainly I am more optimistic than pragmatic.)
On the first day of school I spotted a new girl in our class. Our desks were arranged alphabetically, and as I was a U, I sat in the rear of the room, while she, a W, sat at a desk to my right, immediately under a window. My earliest memory of her is the glowing halo that ringed her golden curls as a beam of sunlight fell on her head. She looked like an angel. Her small, straight nose was flecked with freckles, and completing the picture, her generous, ever-smiling mouth was filled with tiny, unbelievably white teeth.
Not until she stood up at her desk for the first time, having been called on by the teacher to read a poem, did I realize that she was much taller than me. And in all the years we traveled from grade to grade, ever upward, right into and through high school, I never caught up. She turned out to be the tallest child in our class and in every class she was ever in. Her name was Eve.
The second thing I noticed about Eve that day was her left hand. Actually, what I noted was the absence of her left hand, as she kept it in her lap the entire hour. And when she stood to read, she pushed it deep into the pocket of her tartan dress. This seemed odd to me, and awkward, as it meant that she had to hold the heavy book of poems she was reading from with only one hand.
A week of classes passed before the mystery was solved. One morning she sneezed. She was dipping her pen in the inkwell of her desk with her right hand when the sneeze overcame her, so reflexively she brought her left hand to her mouth. It was then that I saw that her left pinky curled over the adjacent finger. The pinky looked like the shepherd’s crook in a picture book I had read.
Eve saw me staring at her hand and quickly dropped it into her lap, where it lay hidden beneath her desktop. Staring straight ahead, with a fixed expression on her face, she blushed. I saw that she was embarrassed.
As the school year progressed, I noticed that the other children also became aware of Eve’s hand. Like children the world over, instinctive in their cruelty, they would stare at her hand whenever it made a rare appearance. And they would laugh at the sight of it. Eve would cringe at their stares and shrink at the sound of their laughter. She never stood straight, as she tried to minimize her height. But when her classmates laughed, she didn’t just slump; she seemed almost to hunch over. Often the laughter was not even directed at her. Kids laugh at most anything. But for Eve, every single laugh was directed at her and her misshapen hand.
Whenever I saw her distress, at some deep level of my young soul I instinctively related to what she was feeling because I had my own source of shame that, like hers, had to do with feeling different. For children, anything that marks them out as different is acutely embarrassing. In my case it was my father and mother who were different, and I was ashamed of them, in the same way that Eve was ashamed of her hand.
Once I made the connection between her embarrassment and mine, I decided to be in love with her.
It took some time, but after a while Eve became comfortable in my presence. Though she lived just around the corner from me, on West Tenth Street, in those days, at our age, around the corner was another world altogether. We children on West Ninth Street had no need to ever leave our block. There was absolutely nothing on West Tenth Street that was not available to me right outside our apartment house door on West Ninth Street—until I met Eve. Soon I was carrying her books home for her at the end of every school day. And I arranged to meet her at the stoop in front of her two-family house every morning before school began.
Eventually Eve introduced me to her mother. She had no father. The reason for this absence of a father was never made clear to me. And was never discussed.
After some time had passed, I asked Eve to come to my house. She agreed, and I duly introduced her to my mother. Just as she never said anything about her absent father, I had not told Eve that my mother was deaf. I didn’t know how. And somehow I knew that it wouldn’t matter to Eve.
Although surprised at my signing to my mother as I introduced her, Eve did not stare or act funny in any way. Afterward she asked me many questions: “How did you learn sign language?” “How did you communicate with your parents before you learned?” “Have they always been deaf?” “Why aren’t you deaf as well?” Her questions seemed born of genuine interest and did not embarrass me.
I had some questions of my own. “Were you born that way?” “Did you get your hand caught in a door?” “Can a doctor straighten out your pinky?” My questions did not embarrass her either.
In time she asked me to teach her some signs. As most signs require two hands to execute, she had some difficulty at first. But eventually she lost her self-consciousness in front of me and learned even the most complex ones I taught her. Using both of her hands, she would show off her signing to my mother. My mother would sign back, “Very clear. Very beautiful signs.” And I would translate my mother’s approval to Eve.
One day our teacher told the class that every morning of the following month we would begin the day with a student doing a demonstration of some kind of learning project. The project was ours to choose. Our teacher suggested some possible projects for our consideration. We could prepare a science project, for instance, involving butterflies in a jar. As she said this, every kid had the identical thought: Butterflies in Brooklyn? Groans of protest spread throughout the classroom. “Or possibly you could show us worms burrowing into their habitat.” But where would we find worms? Practically all of Brooklyn was paved over with concrete and macadam. More groans. “Or you could make an ant farm.” Finally, we thought, here at last was a practical suggestion. After all, we knew where to find ants on our block. But we couldn’t all present ant farms.
Having exhausted her limited repertory of ideas, our teacher gave up and said, “Any project will be satisfactory.” She added, “Originality, and mastery of the project, is what counts. Make it interesting. And if you wish, you may pair up and present the project jointly.”
I looked at Eve, and Eve looked at me. In unspoken agreement we agreed we would join forces to prepare and present a project. But what would the project be?
After much discussion in the lunchroom, we hit upon an idea. An excellent idea, we thought. It would be original, as the teacher insisted. It would be interesting—of that we were sure. Now all we had to do was master it; or at least Eve would have to, since we had decided to do a sign language project. We would call our project “Writing on Air.”
For the next four weeks Eve and I spent most of our spare time after school practicing signing on her front stoop. We were so energetic, we drew a crowd of fascinated neighborhood kids.
“Teach us! Teach us!” they clamored. “We want to learn your secret language.”
I, who had always been somewhat embarrassed to sign to my father on the street, now exulted in the attention my knowledge of this exotic form of communication was garnering. And so I began to show off, flaunting with exaggerated gestures some of the more complicated signs that my father had taught me. Of course the signs I enacted were basically just a vocabulary list presented for effect alone—I made no attempt to use them in context. But that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the complexity and dexterity of the sign itself.
My sign for acrobat brought down the house. My father had recently taken me to the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden and had taught me many circus signs. They were all new to me, as we had had no previous need for them in our Brooklyn apartment. Once I learned them, however, I found any excuse to use them. “Look, Mom,” I signed as I jumped onto my bed. “I’m an acrobat.” My right index and middle fingers, shaped like the legs of an acrobat, stood on my open, upturned left palm. Then the “legs” on my right hand flexed, jumped, flipped over, and executed a double somersa
ult before descending back onto my left palm, where they stood, triumphant, slightly quivering from the impact. My sign was so good, I swear you could see the sawdust covering the circus arena of my left palm. At least I could—and my mother applauded.
As for secret signs, far and away the best one was the graphic sign for defecate. The right thumb is grasped in the fist of the left hand. Then quickly—or as the case may be when somewhat constipated, with exquisite slowness—the thumb is drawn down from the enclosed right fist. Faster would be the case if you had been eating prunes.
The children loved it! Now every kid in the neighborhood could say shit in sign.
Finally the day arrived as scheduled. The presenting of the projects began.
Eve and I sat through the most boring displays and incomprehensible explanations of why fireflies light up (which they absolutely refused to do in their jelly jar homes, being otherwise occupied sucking on the grape jelly under the lid); where mosquitoes go to die after biting you (this display featured ten dead mosquitoes lying peacefully on a bed of leaves at the bottom of an airless jar whose lid a kid had neglected to puncture with a nail); and how a moth turns into a butterfly (this one we didn’t believe for a minute). Then it was our turn.
We stood at the front of the class. The idea was that Eve would position herself somewhat to my rear, where I couldn’t see her, and she would hold up—in her right hand, of course—a drawing of the sign I was supposed to perform. When she called out the word for the sign, I would, from memory, execute it, in a kind of visual spelling bee.
When the teacher introduced us, half the class made the sign for shit. The other half nearly fell out of their chairs laughing. The teacher stood, dumbstruck, not having a clue as to what was going on. The room was a bedlam of hands in motion.
Shit, shit, shit signs flew through the air, were flung through the air. It was a hailstorm of shit. A tornado of turds.
It took quite a while for the teacher to restore order.
Once again she introduced Eve and me, with the warning that any further outburst, whatever the heck it was about, would be rewarded with a trip to the principal’s office.
We began. Eve called out “penguin.” I dropped both my hands, palms facing downward, fingers held together, to either side of my waist. Then, hunching up my shoulders, I alternately raised and lowered each shoulder. To emphasize this sign, I lurched forward, stiff-legged, mimicking the lumbering gait of a penguin as it traversed an ice floe. The class applauded.
Eve asked for “deer.” Now I made what I imagined was the face of a startled deer, possibly caught in the headlights of a car on Flatbush Avenue, placing both my open hands above my head, all ten fingers splayed and shooting outward into stiff antler appendages. These I wiggled convincingly, as the class broke into a cheer.
“Elk?”
I was an elk.
“Moose?”
I was a moose.
The class loved it. “More. More!”
“Elephant?” My right hand formed a cup with its back resting against my nose. My hand moved gracefully, ponderously, out from my nose, curving downward, and while it turned under, seeking peanuts that were now visible to the imagination, on the dirt floor of the circus ring of our minds.
The class erupted in shouts of glee. My signs were killing them. This had to be better than ten dead mosquitoes and a bunch of fireflies that would not light.
Eve took me through a jungle of animals and a zoo full of exotic birds.
Then she began a list of the more complex signs that we had agreed upon.
The first sign was for a concept we were both familiar with. “What is the sign for embarrass?” she asked.
I made the sign for red, as in blood, moving my index finger up and down my red lips; then both my palms cradled my face, moving slowly upward, as if the red blush of blood were rising up, suffusing my entire face in a blossoming blush of mortification.
The class was fascinated.
Then Eve asked, “What is the sign for discard?” I drew a blank. I stood mute.
Eve prompted again: “Discard?”
I stood there at the front of the class, all eyes focused on me, my hands at my sides, defeated, a genuine blush of embarrassment now flooding my face; somehow I had completely forgotten this sign.
Eve realized that there was no use in asking me again to sign this concept.
She dropped the cards and rushed to my side to rescue me.
Discard is a sign that requires both hands to execute.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she withdrew her left hand from her pocket and positioned it in the air for the entire class to see. Palm open and facing the class, pinky finger crooked in its permanently twisted position, with her open “normal” right hand she drew her fingertips across the palm of her hated left hand toward her pinky.
Suddenly she closed her right hand, as if clasping something, and swiftly withdrew it from her left palm, as if she had discovered a loathsome object there, and with a forceful motion she flung it to the floor, all the while making an expression of such distaste that the class fully expected the obscene object to leap up and scurry out of the room.
The audience was stunned into silence at her performance. The children fully understood what Eve had done, what her sign had signified—for her.
No one laughed.
Suddenly the class erupted in shouts of approval. Now Eve blushed, not in embarrassment, but from pride.
From that day on she never hid her hand again.
And at that moment I fell genuinely, not calculatingly, in love with Eve.
10
Tales Told
One afternoon after school was out, a sudden drenching downpour drove all of the kids on my block back into their apartments. As was her habit whenever she saw me house-bound and at loose ends, my mother pulled me into the kitchen, sat me down at the table, and proceeded to cook me something to eat. I loved to watch her cook: throw in a little bit of this, a little bit of that, then a pinch of something else (never consulting a recipe, never measuring), mix, turn up the flame on the stove, and then wait until the mouthwatering concoction was done, which she always knew intuitively, without once looking at the clock.
Setting before me a fresh batch of matzoh brei, she watched me eat, with the strangest expression on her face.
“You know, your father was not my first choice for a husband,” she signed.
As good as the delightful mix of crumbly eggs and cracking-crisp matzoh was, I stopped eating. What in the world, I thought, is this all about?
“I want to tell you a story,” she signed. “I want you to understand me.”
I put down my fork and concentrated on my mother’s hands and face and body. And I listened to her voice as she signed. My friends could not understand my mother’s speech, but I understood every word.
“When I was a girl, as you know, I loved going to the beach in Coney Island. It was my favorite place in the whole world, outside of my school. I was a naughty girl. I liked boys. I was crazy about boys. And they were crazy about me.”
My mother and her friends at Coney Island
There are many signs for crazy, but the one she used to indicate how she loved those young boys involved her kissing the back of her closed hand. Over and over she kissed her hand, indicating clearly the strength of her feelings, her need for acceptance, her desire for attention.
To convey to me the power she had over them, she shaped her hand in a claw and shook it back and forth in front of her face, indicating that they were crazy/dizzy/nuts for her.
Then she told me the story of her great lost love.
“My big love was a hearing boy. I loved him, and he adored me.”
Describing this Coney Island Adonis, long since consigned to the mists of memory, but re-created in her mind this day as vividly as if he still waited for her on Bay 6, she spoke of him lovingly and in great detail. He had a golden tan, she said, the result of repeated exposures to the summer sun, aided by the
hourly application to his skin of a concoction of chicken fat, virgin olive oil, and iodine. “When I looked at him,” she signed, a faraway look in her eyes, “his skin glowed, and I saw his body covered in a golden light.”
Apparently he lifted weights, for she told me he had muscles all over his body, even in places she didn’t think boys could have muscles. When she said this, I could swear, she blushed.
“My father hated him,” she signed. “He had heard about this boy from a neighbor, who told my father that this boy was touching me and kissing me under the boardwalk. This was not true. But I knew he wanted to do that, if I’d let him. I was a flirt. I was a tease. I was naughty. But I was a good girl.” She smiled, no doubt picturing in her mind the beautiful, fresh, innocent young girl she had been so many summers ago. Then her face darkened.
“One day when I came home from the beach, my father slapped me across the face. I was shocked. My father had never hit me. My father, Max, was a Gypsy, you know. My mother told me that his family lived in the forest in the old country. ‘They lived like animals,’ she said. I don’t think my mother ever loved my father.
“Though he was free with his hands with my brothers, he had always spoiled me. We had no money, and he had no steady job, but what little he had, he would spend on me, buying me small treats. I think he felt sad all of his life that I was deaf. He didn’t know why, but he blamed himself. He felt guilty.
“It was only after he slapped me that I found out the reason for his anger. The boy I was crazy for didn’t have a job. And didn’t have a trade. And he was not deaf. Just like baseball, three strikes and you’re out.
“My father forbade me to see the boy ever again. And the next weekend he went to Bay 6 and confronted the boy, muscles and all. When the boy laughed in my father’s face, at his arm-waving and screaming, my father, who was strong as an ox, socked him.
“From then on the boy paid no attention to me. I was heartbroken, especially when I saw him flirting with another deaf girl. I don’t know if I really loved him or not, but what I needed, I realized later, was the attention he gave me. Attention from a hearing person, which no other hearing person had ever shown me.”
Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love Page 9