If a Tree Falls (22 page)

“I wanted to be able to hear my children,” my mother told me.

She went back to brainstorming about Juliet’s sleep troubles, suggesting that, perhaps, Juliet could sleep with her implant processor on, or that Bill and I could talk to Juliet about her fears at night.

As my mother spoke, I imagined her sitting in an audiologist’s chair, getting hearing aids for the first time. Maybe she held her new baby in her lap. Maybe she shivered as the cold silicon molded inside her ears. Her own mother, nowhere in sight.

My mother had wanted a string, a steady connection, to her children! It was her aim, her
longing
, no matter how tattered it turned out to be. It was
mine
.

She continued problem solving. We could try warm milk or chamomile tea at Juliet’s bedtime, or calming music just before we removed her sound for the night. And as my mother spoke, I wondered at how my daughters’ deafness had summoned her forward, steadied her, bridged her
lost connections—enabling her to hear, and in hearing, to respond.

One sunny morning in May, Juliet stood in the kitchen and signed for milk, her right hand pumping at an imaginary cow udder. Her hair was still a surprise of auburn—as unexpected as Bill’s reddened beard stubble when he left off shaving—and it tumbled around her face, all waves and curls, like ribbon candy. Juliet was tinier even than Sophia was at that age, donning a pink and white sundress that billowed at her ankles. We would have been worried about her low weight, too, if we hadn’t been through it before with Sophia. We could add all the butter and cream in the world. We simply made small children.

“You want milk?” I asked, signing to her as I spoke. “Sure,” I continued narrating in my over-enunciating way, “I’ll get you some.”

I went to the fridge and took out the milk. As I poured milk into her bottle, I heard a word declared in a high, quiet register:

“Milk.”

I turned on my heels, spilling milk all over the granite counter. Juliet’s eyes danced and her cheeks rose with a slow, broad smile.

“Milk,” she said again, now more loudly.

“Milk—yes!” I stuttered back in awe, and I grabbed her two hands and spun her long-armed around the kitchen, as she squealed with delight.

For the next few weeks, Bill and I danced through our days as we poured, drank and added MILK to everything! At the market, I stocked up: vanilla milk, coconut milk, condensed milk, buttermilk. Maple milk. Tiger’s milk! Strawberry and chocolate milk. (Anyone for cocoa? So what if it’s May?) Just to hear the precious utterance from Juliet’s lips, again and again and again.

A flow of words came tumbling after: bye-bye, dog, yellow, top, shoe, ball, cup. Just like with Sophia, Juliet was hearing, and she was speaking! She sounded wonderful.

Before Juliet started speaking, I was haunted by questions. Would the language center in Juliet’s brain make sense of the electronic stimulations? Would she sound electronic? There was not a hint of Vader nor his friends in her voice. To hear Juliet speak just like a hearing child, with a clear, resonant voice, was amazing.

As Juliet’s vocabulary grew, I kept a list of words on the fridge, as I had with Sophia. One day, I took down the girls’
word lists and placed them side by side. At the stage when Sophia was seemingly obsessed with emotions—
happy, silly, angry
—Juliet was consumed with action verbs—
kick, run, throw
. Their distinctiveness—Sophia perching quietly in our arms, studying the faces around her; and Juliet rolling a ball, then jubilantly running to catch it—found expression even here, in the
order
of words that each child spoke.

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.

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.