Deafening (12 page)

Grania thinks of the walk she and Mamo had taken the evening before she left home. They’d walked along the shore of the bay to the rocky place near the edge of the woods. The place where they carried the burlap bag from the O’Shaughnessy trunk.
When things get bad.

Grania, sitting on the edge of her narrow school bed, commands herself to remember.

She soon learns that even though she is encouraged every day to use her voice with her teacher, she is barely understood. She resolves to keep her voice inside, not to let it out. But her teacher, Miss Amos, won’t settle for that. She taps Grania on the shoulder, watches her lips, brings Grania’s attention back to her own lips to see the shapes of the words she is trying to say. Grania has been put into a mid-level group because she is quick to lip read, and because of the home schooling with Mamo. It has been decided that she will be taught a mixture of oral and manual training.

Miss Amos instructs her in the single-hand alphabet, which Grania, already knowing her printed letters, has no trouble learning. She also learns to use the signing space in front of her neck and
upper chest. Signs made at the lower chest and waist are harder to see. She tries to watch faces, as well as hands that are in motion around her. “Keep eye contact,” her teacher insists. If Grania looks away, once again Miss Amos brings her attention back.

Miss Amos, in her twenties, has dark brown hair in a style rolled back from her forehead. Every day she wears an ankle-length panelled skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and a narrow tie that hangs from neckline to waist. Every day, the necktie is a different colour: Kelly green, old rose, heliotrope, fawn, cerise. Miss Amos is eager to teach, eager to have the children learn. Sometimes she rolls the sleeves of her blouse right up her thin arms and past her angular elbows, as if she is digging in to teach the children one more important thing. She delights in their accomplishments. She is as proud as they are, when the children achieve.

Along with Grania, there are eleven other children in the room. Eight of these know the sign language. They signal to one another with animation; they prance like mimes. Grania watches the expressions on their faces change as rapidly as the messages on their lightning fingers and hands. She begins to learn signs for food: her small closed fist raps her temple for cabbage; knuckles rub an imaginary tear from the corner of her eye for onion; two fingers tap-tap the back of her hand for potato. She learns to cut a hand wedge for Sunday pie; she grinds her palms together for cheese. During a meal in the dining hall, when she sees a spider on the wall, she crosses one wrist over the other and sends her fingers scurrying through the air before her, delighting the others at the table.

She begins to send signals out slowly from her body, but she is frustrated by the flap and flurry of hands that face her when signals try to come back in. At times she sees nothing more than a rapid blur and cannot differentiate even one sign from another. Her eye movements are not quick enough to catch up to the speed of the hands and fingers around her.

Instead, she pays attention to lips as she has done at home. But in the classroom, Miss Amos wants more: she wants Grania to
anticipate, to see a signal that a word is about to form, to guess what it will mean as a whole. This works in slow motion with Miss Amos, whom Grania now tries to please, but away from the classroom the other children expect her to understand not lips but hands, and at their speed. If Grania does not understand, she is left out.

The only place where she can move lips and hands freely, in any way she wishes, is in the chapel. During daily prayers, surrounded by other deaf children, there is no one to hear or notice the babble of nonsense words that Grania’s voice speaks, or the meaningless signs her hands create. She begins to look forward to the regular time when she can stand in the chapel and blather anything at all. Every day, she comes away from the chapel feeling refreshed.

And then, unexpectedly, one Saturday as she walks through the dark panelled corridor on her way into the dining hall, she watches spelling fingers that face her on the way out. The fingers spell C-E-D-R-I-C. Cedric is on duty, an older student warns. Which means:
Behave during the meal.

Mr. Cedric is a teacher as well as the editor of the school paper,
The Canadian Mute.
He is not unfair, but he expects good behaviour when he is in charge. It is only when Grania finishes eating and leaves the table that she feels a delayed rush of triumph. She realizes that when she walked through the doorway on her way in, she understood the finger-spelled name.

The next day, missives that once tumbled incomprehensibly through air become single words strung together, sentences she can understand. A language is taking shape, one in which, haltingly, she is beginning to take part. She misses and misunderstands, but puts meaning—right or wrong—to words that come at her in sign. Her hands, to her surprise, and jerkily at first, begin to send ideas out. Her face and body punctuate; her eyes receive. She is falling into, she is entering a new world. She is joining the larger conversation of hands.

Grania now knows that her deafness will always have more significance at school than it ever did at home. The teachers are constantly
bringing the fact of it to her attention. It is their mission to try to fix the damage deafness has inflicted upon her speech; relentlessly, they try to remedy and repair. She is marched back and forth between classes. She is taught by one teacher with signing hands and other teachers who know only how to speak. The new matron of the school, who arrived shortly after Grania, knows no more of the sign language than she does. The children watch and laugh and give encouragement while Matron also attempts to learn.

Grania sees hands that are open and relaxed, and fingers that are stiff and stuck as tightly together as if they are glued. In class with Miss Amos, she tries to train herself to feel her voice, to keep the measure of its volume. As all but one of her teachers are hearing, she has to take care that her voice does not blurt out and make a hard noise, a bad noise.

Through all of this, and knowing that her Deseronto home has been stored in a private place buried inside herself along with her tears, she slowly begins to feel that she has sisters and brothers, more than she could ever have imagined. The difference is that these children, almost three hundred of them, are like herself. Sisters and brothers who are not afraid to raise a hand and ask a question of a teacher like Miss Amos, with her Kelly green tie and her rolled-back hair.

Grania creates words silently inside her mouth. Her teacher is telling the story of Sammy and the monkey and turning over cards that hold pictures of a monkey dressed in a waistcoat and a flat round hat. Miss Amos writes on lines ruled across the chalkboard.

Sammy bought a monkey.

He sold the poor monkey because it was sick.

When the story is over, she taps her hand rhythmically against her side while Grania and eleven other pupils in the room try to chant

p as in pie and

b as in buy

and m as in my.

And Grania slaps the side of her own dress.

In the afternoons, they take turns sitting in pairs on side-by-side chairs that are pulled up to a low table that has a rectangular tilting mirror attached to the back. Grania’s partner is Nola, who is also nine years old and who has been deaf from meningitis since she was two. The girls pucker their lips, leaving a small opening between; they growl at the mirror, showing teeth; they open and shut their mouths. When they finish their turn at the table, they return to the front of the class and stand at Miss Amos’ desk and blow out candles for
P
as fast as the teacher can relight them. More drill, day in, day out, week after week, the class recites

oo

as in boo

as in boom

as in whom.

Wooms
, Grania thinks.
The password.

Poom
, she thinks.

Her private word from the dugout under the wharf. Someone made a stink, but who? She thinks of Kenan who is going to marry Tress some day, and Tress herself, and their joking friend Orryn, and how they all laughed inside the hideout and tried to teach her to say the forbidden word
fart
, but Grania refused and made her own word:
Poom.

Where did the word come from? She laughs to herself.

Did she laugh out loud? Miss Amos is frowning.

The tongue draws back inside the mouth

ah, bah

and bow-wow

and huff muff.

And she is so tired.

The days run together and she is instructed to use more voice, more breath, not so much breath. She holds fingers to her teacher’s lips and feels the puff of air with
beat
and
peat.
And places a hand on her teacher’s throat for
fox
and
flax.

“Lightly, now,” her teacher tells her. “Feel the word. Now to my throat, back to my lips. Let the shape of the word fall into your fingers. Scoop it up with your hand.”

I for ice

See the rice.

See the mice.

“Voice, use voice.” Miss Amos’ lips shape the instruction, again and again. “Work at control. You must control your voice.”

The children print careful words across their slates. They learn to pass sound from one pair of lips to another. They shout into the air, test their own throats, lips and tongues. They roar out of the silence inside them.

On Sunday afternoon, Grania accompanies the other children to the assembly hall to see the magic lantern views of “The Life of Christ.” Most of what is signed by Mr. Norris, the teacher who shows the views, is understood. Grania sits in the partially lighted room and is amazed to see each of the stories of Jesus presented in a picture. She thinks of the sampler on her wall at home:
God’s eye for my seeing, God’s ear for my hearing
, and wonders if Saint Patrick might have been deaf and used God’s ear to hear.

After supper, when she is back in her dormitory, Grania organizes and reorganizes every item she owns. At the bottom of her
drawer are two letters she has received from home, one from Mamo and one from Tress. Each is a page long and has been unfolded and read and folded again. Mother will be writing next, Tress told her in the last letter. Grania checks the contents of her shared cupboard, and her shelf in the communal bathroom down the hall. She has a hook for her towel, her own cup, a place for toothbrush and soap. In her room, she arranges and rearranges stockings and underwear, two nightgowns, an extra pair of bootlaces, handkerchiefs, and wide ribbons for her hair. The ribbons are a gift from Aunt Maggie, who brought them to the house and buffed them over a lightbulb on one of the parlour lamps to get the store wrinkles out.

She folds and pats two sets of long woollen drawers for winter, and one Swiss-ribbed top. In Payson’s Indelible Ink, her name is printed inside each item of clothing. She inspects her horn comb, her olive-wood brush, the photo of Mamo lying flat in her drawer—she does not want anyone but herself to look at Mamo. She holds the hand mirror given to her by Tress and stares into it and says words of her oral homework. She fastens a nib to her pen and dips the nib in ink and writes out her letters. She makes neat words and sentences and reads what she has copied from lines Miss Amos wrote across the board during Friday’s class. She sits on the edge of her bed and lifts her
Sunday
book to her lap and turns the pages. She invents her own caption:
Dulcie was an orphan who lived at the school the rest of her days.

After supper, when it is time for lights out, she lies stiffly on her back and keeps her eyes wide open in the dark. When her eyes adjust to the beam of light that slides under the door, she turns on her side and looks around. Some of the girls are older, twelve and thirteen. Each is aware of the word
quiet
, the word used by hearing teachers and staff, but never by the children.

Who cares?
Nola once signed to Grania.
Who cares about quiet?
Noise is something that is present during the hours of light. It is the
quiet of hearing persons that rules the dark. Every girl in the dorm has learned
quiet
through warnings, in the same way that Grania learned
quiet
at home when she tiptoed across the rag rug.

Nola stirs from her bed in the corner. Every night after the house mother shuts the door, she slides out from beneath the covers, kneels on the floor and prays. Grania can see her lips in the dim streak of light. Nola always says the same prayer:
Please God, don’t let me wake up blind.

Nola has told Grania that at home, after she became deaf, her mother wakened her every morning and asked, “Can you see?” Every morning, a different object was held up for Nola to identify—a thimble, a spoon, a doily, a cup. Nola has been asked so many times if she can see, she is now terrified that she will go blind.

Across from Nola is Bridie with the heart-shaped face. She wears her hair loosely pulled back and held in place with hairpins that she is forever losing. During the day, she is the liveliest of all the girls, but at night she pulls the covers over her head and refuses to look out again until morning. And Erma is there. Erma who never stops talking—with voice—to herself and to everyone else who cannot hear.

Grace is not totally deaf; she has a low level of hearing. But Grace’s biggest wish is to have no hearing at all. She tells the others that in articulation class, her teacher nags her: “Blow your nose, clear the passages. Feel the pressure in your ear canals. Listen to your sounds.” She is supposed to find the place in her ears where she is deaf.

“How do I know where I’m deaf?” her hands ask Grania. “Teacher says:
Swallow, listen, blow your nose.
That’s supposed to tell me where I’m deaf in my ears. But if there is other noise in the room, I don’t hear anything. And there is always noise in the room.”