If a Tree Falls (24 page)

 

 

 

IN TASSE, PEARL PACES BACK AND FORTH across the kitchen floor, holding the Headmaster’s letter. How could Bayla be so foolhardy? The dangers she might have faced
—
and now, an entire boatfare, lost!

Pearl looks down at her cracked hands. It’s her own fault! She should have written to Bayla. At the very least, she should have written to explain how they are trying
—
trying to save, trying to secure all the boat tickets. If Bayla knew this, she might not have struck out alone. What had Pearl been thinking? If tearing up her letters was self-punishment, it served to punish her children, too.

Nellie must be married a whole year already. Who knows? She may even be expecting a baby
—
the family’s first grandchild. Without her. Without Bayla.

The saving is so slow, no matter how little they eat. Moshe is insistent now that they all travel together. But it will take
years before they have enough money for so many boat tickets.
One
ticket with sponsors on both sides
—
that they can afford.

 

 

 

BILL BEGAN A NIGHTLY TRADITION of dancing with the girls after dinner. With his own (kid-friendly) rendition of Crazy Town’s “Come my lady, Come, come my lady, You’re my butterfly, Sugar, Baby,” he’d lead Sophia and Juliet, dancing, to the playroom, or to the living room, or out onto the screened porch.

With the CD player loaded with “Sweet Baby James” and other favorites, Bill taught Sophia “the bump”, and twirled her in the air in graceful ballet poses. Juliet combined chasing games and tumbling. I joined in, dancing with Bill, assisting Juliet in long arm flips, and pirouetting, hand in hand, with Sophia.

Yet in mid-song, nearly every night, I would break off—to throw the laundry in, to wipe down the table, to write in my journal. At some point in all the hoopla, the girls would come looking for me, charging at me, yelling exuberantly, “Mama, Mama,” their arms wide open. They seemed to
want to absorb me, to swallow me up. Sometimes, I felt the overwhelming urge to dodge them both, like a basketball player fake shooting to send blockers astray. I had work to do, and I wanted a bit of time to myself.

Their little faces were hopeful, their cheeks still curved with the chub that buoyed them in slow growth. They looked at me with their bright, sparkling eyes, as if I was the host of their treasure hunt. Their arms were wiry thin but strong; they heaved with the earnest determination to carry all that they could collect from me.

I stepped away, but they continued to follow me. I plied them with distractions—cinnamon sticks, acorn hats, a chocolate bunny. Anything. Take of anything. Just not of me.

But it was me that they wanted. As they sought to soak up every droplet, I wanted to yell out:
I am not as sweet and milky as I seem!

I had stayed present through the crises. Despite my doubts and worries about mothering—despite my fear that disconnection was, in my family, an inheritable trait—I had forged steady connections with my daughters. I’d tended to them, I’d nourished them—and despite all the challenges, they were thriving and happy. They were hearing and talking. I could be proud of my mothering, proud of all that I’d overcome from within and from without to
mother my girls well. Yet, more and more, as they grew sturdy and strong, I found myself withdrawing from them. Now that they were up and running—“on the air,” as the audiologist liked to call it—I found myself receding. As I’d feared all along, I was turning inward. Away.

Just for a rest? I couldn’t be sure.

Their deafness had jolted me into attentiveness. But now, it was no longer necessary for me to take notice of every sound around us, to reinforce every utterance they heard or made. I hoped it was a symptom of normalcy. After so much vigilance, I was finally just a tired mother, with the luxury to safely ignore my children.

Yet I feared it was otherwise. There was disconnection in my blood. It pumped through the generations. “Jenny, don’t you hear Juliet? She’s calling for you,” Bill would say.

My attention was elsewhere.

Without intending it, I blocked out their chatter until they tugged on my sleeve. I didn’t sit long with them. Restless, I excused myself to fold the towels rather than play. I ignored requests—Juliet would have to get her own sippy cup of water; Sophia could pull on her jumper by herself.

I couldn’t construe my lack of attention as a strategy
for helping them become more independent. I was retreating. Even my writing projects—writing about them, writing about my longings to connect to them—served as an escape from being with them. I wanted to be separate, sometimes urgently, as if I’d vanish otherwise.

One afternoon, Juliet came to get me in my room. A babysitter was coming in a few minutes and I was dressing to meet Bill for dinner.

“What is it, honey?” I asked as I fiddled to get an earring on.

“Sophia hurt her back,” Juliet said, and she waited for me to follow her to the playroom.

There I stood, a minute too long, fooling with the earring, jabbing my lobe persistently while Juliet waited, staring at me. And as I stood there, fiddling, not managing to get the earring into my pierced ear and not managing to move toward the playroom either, my eyes met Juliet’s, reflected in the mirror, and I saw in my daughter’s waiting gaze all that I knew and had known. At that moment, I gathered up my girl, apologizing, saying how silly of me, let’s run down the stairs quickly. I felt lucky that, when we got there, Sophia was up and bouncing once again on our little trampoline.

THE NEXT FRIDAY NIGHT, I PREPARED to drive to my parents’ house with the girls. My anger at my mother—at how she had spoken to Sophia about hating her hearing loss—had mostly subsided. Bill was traveling for work and the girls wanted to stay at my parents’ house. My father would entertain them with the funny popping sound he could make by thrusting his finger into the inside pouch of his cheek. My mother would make their favorite fish dinner, let them carry around her bottles of shiny pink nail polish, and give them pretty ribbons and bows for their hair.

After packing up the car, I skittered with Sophia and Juliet, each hoisted in the crook of an arm, to the car. I buckled them into their car seats, handed them their blankets, then settled myself into the driver’s seat, checking that I had my wallet and cell phone, water and snacks. Just before starting the engine, I twisted around to face them: “Want
to take off your sound?” It was coming on nine o’ clock, time for sleep.

Sophia gently dislodged her hearing aids. Juliet batted her hand at the wire of her cochlear implant processor, causing the magnetic disk to drop from her head.

I rifled through the CDs. I could listen to music on the drive. Anything I wanted, and as loud as I wanted, now that the girls didn’t have their “sound.” Maybe John Hiatt. He was always a favorite. “Georgia Rae” was playing by the time I turned on the highway. “Lucky for you, child, you look like your mama.” I glanced in the rear view mirror. Both girls were sound asleep; cheeks flushed, hair matted like new seal pups. They did look like their mama, and I looked like mine.

Sophia woke up when I stopped the car in my parents’ driveway. I left Juliet asleep in her seat while Sophia and I lugged in our stuff. The kitchen lights were bright enough for a police interrogation, and it smelled like roast turkey. There was a flurry of greetings and the usual question: “
You left Juliet sleeping in the car?
” I went back out to carry Juliet in through the other door where the lighting could be dimmed.

Back in the kitchen, my parents had returned to whatever they were doing before we arrived. Sophia was drawing a picture—all hearts and flowers—with colored
markers. When she finished, I carried her off to bed, hoping the picture she made would remain on the refrigerator where I mounted it, and not be folded into the big wicker trash barrel.

I woke the next morning to the sound of my father’s violin. The girls were out of bed already, and I found them sitting on the couch, intently listening to my father practicing a Beethoven sonata. When they saw me, they begged to take a bath in my mother’s newly remodeled bathroom. The bathtub was a swimming pool for them, with jet bubbles and new toys. “Sure,” I said, and I went to fill up the tub.

Warm water rushed into the tub as Sophia and Juliet gleefully yanked off their pajamas. Hearing devices were piled high, whistling and blinking, into my one dry palm, as my girls slipped into the bubbling water together and instantly, wordlessly, began a game of handing each other “fountain drink” supplies—tall plastic cups to fill with water then “top off” with bath foam to create hot chocolate with whipped cream.

Watching Sophia and Juliet, their eyes locked now in soundless communion, I thought of Nellie and Bayla. Reunited, at last, in America. Walking briskly together down Union Street in Brooklyn, their hands soaring, alive with their old home signs, until their arms linked and they shared the silence of all but the pulse reverberating in the
crook of their interlocked elbows. I never did find a Census Report or any other document showing Bayla arriving in America. But she
had
to have come. Across an ocean, to a new world. She had to. To lock elbows with her sister.

In the bath, Juliet had just learned how to lean backward in the water to wet her hair, and now she wanted the shampoo. I squeezed some strawberry-scented shampoo in her palm and she rubbed it on her temples. Then she abruptly stood up, lather streaking down the sides of her face, her belly and legs. She scrambled out of the tub, refusing to allow me to rinse the shampoo out of her hair. I scooped her up, wrapped her in a fluffy towel, and tried to hold her over the tub while pouring cupfuls of water on her hair. Sophia was busy crafting beards and goatees on her chin with the excess bubbles in the bath.