If a Tree Falls (11 page)

There were days that I returned home exhausted from fielding questions, angry, and filled with self-doubt. What if Sophia wasn’t really hearing spoken language with her hearing aids? Hearing aids amplified sound, but they did so
indiscriminately
—they amplified the hum of the fan or the rumble of a passing truck just as much they amplified speaking voices. And they did so
crudely
, making sounds louder, but not clearer, thus adding further distortion to Sophia’s auditory process. The range of sound Sophia produced was narrow—high squeals and oohs—nothing like the rich babbling of babies, the sputterings of every possible language packed within. At ten months old, Sophia barely vocalized at all. And there was plenty of time each day when her hearing aids weren’t even in her ears:
at bath-time, at nap-time, and at all the other times in the day when she pulled them out, poised to stuff them into her mouth.

I acquired an almost mystic ability to sense when Sophia was about to put an earmold in her mouth. Even in the car, when she sat behind me in her backward facing car seat, I knew. The drive to eat hearing technology—it deserves its own mention as a stage in oral development! I told myself it could be worse. At the Boston Children’s Hospital, there was a large shadow box in the Otolaryngology waiting room that displayed all of the things surgeons had taken out of the ears, noses, and throats of children since the 1950s: fish hooks, nails, coins, open safety pins, and unidentifiable metal objects, some as big as nail clippers, each pinned into its allotted square with a typed description of the object, where in the body it was lodged, and when (and by whom) it was removed.

My fear that Sophia might choke on or swallow her hearing aids was matched only by my panic that we’d permanently lose them. They were expensive—over four thousand dollars—and she’d have to go weeks without hearing before they could be replaced. Sophia’s newest favorite game, while we walked along forest paths with Lucca, was to throw her hearing aids into the woods from high up on her perch in my backpack. Their beige color made a perfect
camouflage, and it sometimes took me hours, searching through leaves, retracing my steps, to find them.

Late at night, Bill and I would each take a toothpick and delicately pick out the mashed bananas, the dirt, and the carpet fuzz from her hearing aid microphones. The “silver lining” of Sophia’s hearing loss was that when she slept unaided, we could be as loud as we wished: we could talk, we could shout, we could have friends over late into the night, we could have sex—so long as we didn’t change the light. Sophia would wake to changes of light.

During Sophia’s waking hours, I spent time focusing with her on single words, “power words” that could help her get things she wanted.
STOP
and
GO
and
MORE
and
ALL DONE
. I did the (incessant) talking:
“Do you want to OPEN the bag?; let’s OPEN it; I’m OPENING the bag; see, I OPENED it.
” Every utterance I made felt loud, over-articulated, contrived, and repetitive.

Then one sunny summer morning, I sat Sophia in her blue and white striped high chair. Heavy cream filled her bottle and elbow noodles saturated with butter and cheese covered her tray. As usual, she was not much interested in eating. Instead she was all about testing me: looking right at me as I said “no,” and hurling bits of pasta onto the floor.

And then I heard it:

“UP!”

“
What
? What did you say?”

“UP!”

I snatched her UP—her words
would
have power! I spun her around the kitchen, and called everyone I knew. Sophia’s first word: “UP!” She was an optimist!

Then, just two days later: “OUT!”

A mover, a shaker! Sophia wanted UP and OUT!

And soon after, a long list of words: sock, cup, light, keys. And foods—so many foods—apple, pasta, banana, cheese, corn, soup—a happy byproduct of our obsessing over what (and how little) she ate. I wrote down every word she spoke on a bright pink page and placed it on our white refrigerator door.

Sophia sported a curious Kentucky accent. And she spoke as if she frequented roadside fast food stands, asking for “hot doggies” and the like.

By the time Sophia was a year and a half old, she no longer pulled her hearing aids out; they were part of her. When she woke up, she pointed to her ears and then to the Dri Aid container where her hearing aids were stored over
night. She
wanted
to hear, to be plugged into the sounds of the day. She knew nothing of our anxieties over whether her hearing loss was
progressive
—always a looming possibility that the audiologists monitored in the testing booth. We fretted, too, over Sophia’s hearing aid settings. Three separate brainstem tests yielded three different audiograms, and we engaged in endless debates with the audiologists over how Sophia’s hearing aids should be digitally programmed, given the discrepancies.

Despite our worries, Sophia’s language capacities exploded. Our joy over her strides, her first words and expanded babbles, hit a high when Sophia muttered the word “shit” under her breath. With hearing aids, “SHIT” is hard to reproduce accurately; yet Sophia managed it with perfect diction one day when she spilled cranberry juice all over the blue living room rug—her utterance pre-empting my own. And I felt assured of Sophia’s linguistic competence the day that, upon my yelling “Oh God!” (as I watched a bowl of chocolate pudding splatter the kitchen wall), Sophia exclaimed “Jesus!” with just the right intonation.

 

 

 

IF PEARL CAN BE SURE OF ANYTHING, it is that God
—
blessed be He
—
works in mysterious ways.

Late one afternoon, Pearl stands in the open doorway, the dusky air a relief from the heat of the day. She breathes in the scents of wood, apricot, and straw. A shriek jolts Pearl’s body a few steps out the door. A rock flies past her in the direction of the ridge, its arc cutting the thick air. Then another rock, aired from the opposite direction. A volley of thuds, then high-pitched yowlings, like pained cats. “Where? Where are you? Nellie!” Pearl chastises herself as she runs: she shouldn’t have let the girls alone, she should have been watching them. The rocks are still flying, one landing now near her foot. Pearl tops the hill, and sees five or six boys scattering. She strains to recognize them
—
are they the peasant boys who sell grain at the market?

“I could kill those boys.” Pearl waits for her bottom lip to stop trembling. “There is a young woman, Rayzl. Chava told me about her
—
they met at the book bazaar. Her parents are deaf and so are several of her aunts. She used a hand language before she learned to speak. Moshe
—
maybe she can tutor the girls, help them. Who knows, maybe she can teach them to speak? She was just married. Why don’t you go talk to her husband. I can scrimp at the market to pay for lessons
—
please, Moshe.”

Pearl watches her girls fluttering around their new teacher, and now unexpectedly she aches with regret. Jealousy.
She
should be teaching them about the world all around. She should know them
—
their thoughts, their fears, their wishes and dreams. Yet she does not. Not in their intricacies. Nellie and Bayla have grown together, bonded in their deafness, as if inside an unbroken circle. For someone else now
—
a stranger
—
to weave herself in! It’s what Pearl wanted for them, yes, so that they could learn and grow stronger. And yet . . .