If a Tree Falls (21 page)

 

 

 

PEARL STANDS AT THE SINK. Little Sarah yanks at Pearl’s skirts, but she hardly notices. How much time has passed since that carriage drove out of Tasse? Each week, each day, each minute her hope withers, and now Pearl persists
—
subsists
—
on the echo of a question: How can she reunite her family in America?

In the front office of the School, Pearl runs her finger along the careful scroll work of the oak secretary, inhales the distant scent of polish. From down the corridor, Bayla is walking toward her, the school administrator a step behind. Bayla has altered since leaving Tasse, Pearl thinks
—
her face is more angular; she is taller even. She is wearing an unfamiliar dress. Pearl pauses before her child, then she rushes toward her, pulling her in. Bayla is stiff at first, then melts into her mother.

Pearl is lost, immediately, by Bayla’s simple but fluid hand movements, by her own inability to answer back. She shoves her plate off to the side and leans in on crossed hands. Write? Pearl frowns. If Bayla only knew how many times she started a letter, only to tear it up in despair! Malkie, the Scribe
—
he thinks she is crazy. Maybe she is. But Pearl bears the weight of an ocean between Nellie and Bayla. Without good news, she cannot manage to post a letter.

AT OUR KITCHEN TABLE, SOPHIA bent over a pad of paper and a basket of colored markers. It was a lazy Sunday morning, and while Bill and Juliet were out at the bagel shop, Sophia practiced writing her name in a rainbow array of colors, over and over again. Her letters were uneven and slanty, her S backward every time. I pulled a chair next to hers. Sophia gripped the thick pink marker to form a shaky, lopsided circle: a giant capital O.

I stared out our huge kitchen window. Did I want to inject cruelness into Pearl? Amidst a painful separation, have her sever all contact, go wordless, leave her girls bereft of their mother, confused and despairing? Was I vindictive? I was jolted by Sophia posing a question while she worked away at her letters.

“Mama, why do me and Juliet have hearing loss, but you and Daddy don’t?”

“Well, Soph,” I ventured—collecting my thoughts while reminding myself that she was not yet five years old—“every baby gets a growing plan, half from its mother and half from its father. A growing plan has all sorts of commands, to help the baby develop and be healthy. One command is to get something called potassium to the baby’s ears. In the growing plans Daddy and I passed to you, that command was missing. Daddy and I don’t have hearing loss because when we were growing, each of our plans only had
half
of the missing command. But you and Juliet both got a
whole
missing command, half from each of us.”

“So, will our babies be deaf?”

“Well, that will depend. Your babies will get their growing plans, half from you and half from their fathers. Your half will be missing the command. If the fathers’ plans have the command, then your babies won’t have hearing loss. If the fathers’ plans are missing the command, then it’s likely that your babies will be deaf. What do you think that would be like for you?”

After a long pause, “It would be ok. If we decided to, we could get our babies hearing aids or cochlear implants.”

While Sophia and I were talking, Bill and Juliet came home. Juliet settled herself on the kitchen floor beside us, her hands sticky with cream cheese, and set to work disabling her cochlear implant. She recently figured out how to reach to the back of her head and yank off the magnetic disc. She was one and a half now; her implant had been activated five months ago. It seemed she’d decided that hearing was hard work, and that she didn’t always want sound. I placed the magnet on again, but she glowered at me and batted it back off. I didn’t persist. I let her putter around the house soundlessly.

Juliet built a wooden tower, then knocked it down—without the kaboom. She typed on the keyboard of her play computer—without the click click click. I took her out to the swingset, and let her swing back and forth without the creak creak of the metal chains.

Juliet was happy enough for us to put her processor on each morning, but from then on, if a restaurant was too loud or she was tired,
yank
—and I rushed to catch her thousand dollar “ear” before she set it on a table smeared with ketchup or blue cheese dressing. Just as quickly, I raced to settle Juliet into a comfortable position, because with the blessing of quiet and the shut of her eyes, Juliet would fall asleep in seconds.

Juliet ripped her processor off at the sight of the blender
and the vacuum cleaner. She put it back on when she spied a favorite book we could read to her or a video she could watch. It was like a baseball cap—off for the bath, on for the playdate, off to skitter through the sprinkler, then back on for the cupcakes. I wondered sometimes whether to encourage it. Why
should
she hear the babies crying at the pediatrician’s office if she doesn’t have to? Why not miss the jackhammer blast when the car is stuck in traffic? Juliet sensed most of what was happening through vibrations anyway. Whether her sound was on or off, she knew when someone walked into the room, and she could read a face like a book.

Juliet’s favorite face was Sophia’s, and their play did not require hearing. Sophia put herself nose to nose with Juliet, locking eyes to secure her attention. Then Sophia led Juliet in play: they toted their baby dolls from room to room, they gave each other foot baths with bowls of warm water, they emptied every drawer in the house for inspection. They rigged up strings and cups and played telephone games. They put on music, whether or not they could hear it, and then they donned butterfly wings. So what if it was “Georgia Rae” that accompanied their dance moves and fairy games? So what if Bill and I might ourselves go deaf with the volume turned way up? They were having fun together, and they understood each other perfectly.

I marveled at the seeming irrelevance of sound. Juliet was fully ensconced in the life of our family and in the larger community all around her. She was bonding, exploring, playing, learning.

But not talking. Juliet was not talking yet. Juliet needed to hear in order to learn spoken language. With the lure of new storybooks, a set of bells, our old harmonica, we’d coax her and gently return the processing magnet—
glup
—to her head.

Juliet was still waking up through the night. Like a jack-in-the-box, she’d pop up and yell at the top of her lungs. (
She
didn’t hear it!) When I told my mother about Juliet’s wake-ups, she suggested that Juliet might feel disconnected and scared without her sound, through the dark of night.

“You have no idea, Jenny, how disconnecting a hearing loss can be. I’ve struggled my whole life with disconnection,” my mother said to me.

My mother’s words, so plain and disclosing—they untied me. I asked her to tell me about her childhood ear infections, the surgeries, her hearing loss. I don’t know why I had waited so long to ask her directly. My mother told me that she’d spent her childhood hiding her deafness. “Mouth
the words in chorus,” my grandmother Mae had suggested, when my mother brought news of her second grade concert.

My mother got her first pair of hearing aids in her thirties when my oldest brother was born. She had struggled, lip-reading, before that.