If a Tree Falls Read online

  Bill and I had taken our first sign language class the week before—an evening class at a nearby community college. The room was filled with twenty-somethings in search of a fun elective. We wheeled in Sophia, asleep in her stroller. Bill said he would take her outside if she woke. Exhausted but desperate to learn, we fumbled awkwardly in an attempt to copy the movements and expressions of the teacher and the students all around us. We watched their hands, free to soar, as ours clenched with necessity and grief.

  Now, milling around the picnic table, our smiles were forced, our movements awkward. We could do little more than wave and introduce ourselves by laboriously finger-spelling our names. Deaf parents conversed easily with one another as children scampered off toward play structures and swingsets. My mind flooded with anxieties: How would we ever gain fluency in this language? If hearing aids didn’t work for Sophia, would we need a live-in interpreter, a third person, to help us talk to our daughter?

  We walked beyond the picnic area, then found a narrow path leading to a river. Downhill from us, a little boy, no older than three, began running down the bank. His father rushed after him, waving his arms wildly, the biggest motions his body could make, signing to his son to stop. The boy did not see his father’s motions. His eyes were fixed on the glittering water and the white bloom of mountain laurel as he moved headlong, closer and closer. I gasped and shouted out senselessly to the boy. Bill began to sprint, then slowed as the father loped to his son. In time. Just in time to keep him from tumbling into the river.

  On the car ride home, Sophia woke up. Her big round eyes, glassy from sleep, now made me think of my mother’s eyes, huge marbles the color of the sea. As a child, they were to me an inlet to an incalculable tide. Sometimes they lapped me up and rocked me in their sweet, frothy wake. Other times they swept past me, as I bobbed unsteadily, alone. I used to sit, legs dangling, on my mother’s tiled bathroom counter as she made up her face in the gilded mirror.

  “Mom?”

  No answer.

  “Mom?”

  No answer.

  “Mom!”

  “What, honey?”

  “Mom, what color is the sky?”

  “Yup.”

  Was it her hearing loss? Or her need to tune out? To escape? Was it sheer exhaustion, raising four children and tracking conversations through the muddle of amplification? Why didn’t anyone help my mother when she was a child—get her hearing aids, teach her speech reading—support her so she could listen, so she could hear?

  As Bill drove the car, I stated what I wanted:

  I wanted Sophia to be safe.

  I wanted her to hear.

  I wanted to hear her.

  I wanted to be heard.

  California, November 2000

  DAY AND NIGHT, I STUDIED Sophia’s searching eyes, her pouty lips, her tiny hands. Her fingers were long and delicate, her nails translucent pink. Maybe she could learn to talk, to have whole conversations, with those hands. But would we ever be able to understand her? Could we master enough sign language to truly communicate, to share complicated feelings, discuss complex ideas? I feared our interactions would be over-simplified and artificial. I feared we wouldn’t be close or connected if I was fumbling to communicate in a second language. It could be Greek or Mandarin or Arabic. I wasn’t adept.

  I struggled each day to practice and learn Sign, but it came too slowly. I now had a stack of instruction books, index cards, a dictionary, a CD-ROM. I was inspired by the beauty of the language—the sensuality, the sense of it. I labored to build up a small vocabulary, but then I found myself forgetting signs, or mixing signs up. The sign for “summer” is similar to the sign for “black” and to the sign for “because.” And these are all difficult to distinguish—if you lack the proper flourishes—from “don’t know” and “forget.” In the midst of new motherhood, I couldn’t imagine forging my relationship with Sophia in this foreign language.

  I tried to envision Sophia’s future as a toddler, a teenager, an adult. Things we took for granted—whispering in a friend’s ear, talking on the telephone—how could these things be closed off for her? Would her opportunities for friendship, for love, for work, be limited if she were never to hear or speak? On her blue and pink flecked baby blanket, Sophia batted her arms like an orchestra conductor, as if marking out a concerto’s time with an invisible baton. I scooped her up and held her. Just held her and breathed her in. And breathed her out. And breathed her in again.

  Everywhere we went, my own ears burned with what she missed—a snippet of Mozart through a neighbor’s window, the tap-tap of a woodpecker on the forest path, the soft trickle of water at the stream. On our walks, I shifted Sophia from the stroller to the baby carrier so that she could feel the vibrations of my voice. Then I’d force myself to speak about the scene around us.“See that bird? That’s a robin. Robins eat worms. And they sing, Sophia. They sing beautiful bird songs.” A lump would rise, then, and choke my throat, and I’d struggle against it, worrying that Sophia could feel the vibrations of my sorrow as I swallowed.

  I’d be silent, after that, and my mind would occupy itself with fighting philosophers. Kant’s view that Deaf-Mutes could never attain concepts: it was wrong, premised on the false belief that the signs the Deaf use are incapable of universality. Modern linguists recognize Sign as a complete, natural language, not just a system of mere gestures . . .

  In the midst of my internal rants, I’d look down at Sophia, and see her huge seal-pup eyes locked on me. My hopes for Sophia always buoyed when I caught her watching me. She stared at my face, especially at my mouth, with intensity. I’d start up again, speaking to her, pointing out the redwood trees, the streams, the striated rocks. Maybe she was hearing me when I spoke, at least partially?

  I thought of Pearl as I walked on. Did she think that her deaf daughters could hear her at first? I’d had so little time with Sophia before the news of her hearing loss. Just hours before that hatted lady strode into our hospital room with that cart. How I’d wished for a full day, a week, a month with my baby, unworried by the news. It seemed a curse and a blessing now, to be beset by research and tests and findings. In Pearl’s day, before there was hearing technology, it probably didn’t matter that deafness could be more or less severe. Now, there were brainstem tests and audiograms documenting the precise degrees and contours of hearing loss. There were hearing aids and cochlear implants, signing schools, and manual schools. A myriad of options that at once heartened and disheartened us.

  Our options for communicating with Sophia included signing, speaking, or some combination of signing and speaking, together. The pros and cons of each tugged at us and tied us in knots.

  In theory, sign language would provide Sophia with language access right away, without risk of conceptual delays. At three months old, Sophia was already moving her fingers in imitation of my signing efforts. But the prospect of our becoming fluent was overwhelming. We couldn’t possibly express ourselves fully in Sign—at least, not anytime soon. For Sophia to gain full exposure to sign language, we’d have to hire a translator, an interpreter, someone in between us and our baby. We felt our intimacy with Sophia threatened. Possibly even more troubling was the fact that her options in the larger world as a signing Deaf person would be pointedly constrained; only .02 percent of people in the United States were fluent in sign language. How could we keep her from growing up isolated, or marginalized?

  Our audiologist put us in touch with a mother who combined Sign with speaking—the Total Communication approach—to communicate with her deaf three year old. When we met up with her family at an outdoor market, we saw that her child was almost exclusively signing his responses. As we talked to audiologists, speech pathologists, and teachers of the deaf, we came to believe that, in most total communication settings, signing took over as the predominant modality. Because speaking proved far more challenging for deaf children, Sign became the default.

  Speaking—the “oral” approach—would require fitting
Sophia with hearing aids and working with her to listen and speak. With the proper technology in place, Sophia would in theory hear all or at least most of the sounds I’d been grieving over. We would communicate with her in our native, spoken language. And she would learn to converse with the 99.98 percent of people who speak. The biggest risk with this approach was that she might not succeed in acquiring spoken language quickly or at all: we would not know for months whether the hearing aids and speech work provided her adequate access to spoken language. Without Sign to ensure the acquisition of concepts in this time period, she might be delayed, not just in language, but in thought.

  For weeks on end, we mulled over our options, read articles, spoke to, and emailed as many people as we could. A decision didn’t come to us all at once. But two separate conversations tipped us both toward the oral approach. Our friend Ian worked in a law firm with a deaf woman. Apparently, her hearing loss was the same severity as Sophia’s. She grew up wearing hearing aids, and her parents worked with her concertedly on speech and spoken language. From Ian’s account, the woman spoke very well and she was highly successful at work. From the woman’s own account—we initiated contact with her over e-mail—she was living a very happy life, with a loving partner, a productive career, strong friendships, and an unhampered sense of opportunity.

  Soon after our contact with her, we met an old friend of Bill’s we hadn’t seen in years. Over coffee, we described Sophia’s situation and the decision we faced. The friend turned to Bill:

  “Aren’t you a lawyer now?”

  Bill answered, “Yes.”

  “And you’re a philosopher?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You two are TALKERS, aren’t you?”

  “And Jennifer’s a singer, too,” Bill added.

  “Well, shouldn’t you consider all that?”

  From inside the “camps” of deafness—the “Signing” camp, the “Oral” camp—we often encountered a one-size-fits-all militancy. Now we considered the precise contours of Sophia’s hearing loss, the particular features of our family. Bill and I were talkers. We were constantly debating, questioning, arguing, doubting, agreeing, wondering aloud. And we were hearers, in the hearing world. A soundless, wordless world was unimaginable to us. The audiologist had touted the latest digital hearing aids: they could be set to the exact dimensions of Sophia’s hearing loss, programmed to amplify spoken language and to block out background noise. With this technology and speech work, there was a solid chance that Sophia could be trained to listen and speak. We could start right away.

  Bill and I became convinced—or we convinced ourselves—to try the “oral approach” with Sophia. We could always re-evaluate, or switch to Sign, if we saw delays in Sophia’s language capacities.

  Was it self-centeredness? Could we not fathom our baby in a world other than our own? Or selfishness—was it our own need for intimacy that guided us? We didn’t know. We were Sophia’s parents and our world was hers. We told ourselves that we could afford a trial period.

  I draped Sophia over my still-slackened womb as the audiologist pumped bright blue stuff—gooey silicon that looked like saltwater taffy—into Sophia’s ears to make earmold impressions for hearing aids. “Is it cold?” I pantomimed a shiver. Sophia’s eyebrows splayed wide.

  The hearing aids were huge, and they flopped off Sophia’s tiny, three-month-old ears. The first day we put them in at home, tentatively wedging the earmolds into place and tucking the aids behind Sophia’s ears, they whistled non-stop for an hour, until one of us finally pulled them out. The “feedback” came because Sophia was still too young to sit up, and whenever she leaned against anything—her crib mattress, her infant seat, the couch, the floor—the trapped sound traveled back into the microphone and was amplified again. After much experimentation, we found the baby carrier—with Sophia right up against one of our chests—to be our best solution: it held her head upright, so her hearing aids stopped whistling, and she was in close proximity to our speaking voices. Our first words, as soon as the aids were in: “We love you, Sophia.”

  I spoke into Sophia’s ears—“miked” at top volume—and I wondered, did Pearl try stubbornly, ineffectually, to speak to her girls even after she knew of their deafness? Did she persist in speaking the words she deemed most crucial into their unfixable ears? And did her girls hear her, if not through the sound waves, then through the contours of her face, through her expressions? I kept my eyes fixed on Sophia so she might read my expressions. Just in case my sound wasn’t getting through.

  In time, our pockets would be filled with toupee tape, strings, clips, and rubber bands—anything that might keep the hearing aids in Sophia’s ears long enough for her to hear a bit of spoken language each day. A read-through of Good Night Moon. A rendition of “When Cows Wake Up In The Morning, They Always Say ‘Good Day’.” Each day, we worked with Sophia on listening with her hearing aids. We no longer ignored the hum of the refrigerator, or the sizzling of a frying egg; we pointed out the crinkling leaves, the approach of footsteps, every faucet run of water. “I hear it,” I’d say and point to my ear, when the bed creaked, or a dog barked.

  Did she hear it? I didn’t know. I was half-reassured just by our having chosen a plan of action; half-terrified that it was a misguided one. I talked to Sophia constantly now. I narrated every activity and named every object in our path.

  I interjected signs here and there. I admired, even craved, sign language the more I learned it. You couldn’t turn away, stare off, do a thousand other things. It required presence and intimacy.

  I took Sophia’s hearing aids out for bath-time. In bathroom surround-sound, I alone heard the droplets of water drip from her short hair, the swishes and waves made by her kicks, the lap-lap of the water at the tub’s edge. Did she wonder what the water sounded like? Could she wonder it? I toweled her off, and put the hearing aids back in her ears. Holding her suspended above the bathwater, I grabbed a handful and let it drip drip drip into the tub.

  At night, Bill and I cradled Sophia in our arms and swayed to the rhythms of lullabies played far louder than lullabies ought to be. We had discs of lullabies from around the world: lilting voices from Tahiti; sharp operatic sopranos from Japan; gentle wooings from Israel.

  When Sophia’s eyes fluttered to close, we plied her with kisses and laid her down. Just before taking out her hearing aids, we’d whisper, “Bye, bye sound,” and wave good night.

  California, November 2000

  EACH MORNING, I GENTLY WRIGGLED Sophia’s hearing aids into her tiny ears. It stung me to see other mothers whispering softly in their babies’ ears, their babies responding with gurgles and coos and pudgy fingers tapping at their mothers’ lips. At the library, at the bookstore—mothers reading stories in airy, lilting voices; their children leaning in to listen, ready to catch magic. I couldn’t afford whispers with Sophia. I spoke loudly, with the sharp enunciation of a strict grammar school teacher. The gentlest nursery rhyme, the sweetest lullaby, I now belted out at full volume—a bull in the china shop of motherese.

  Only after Sophia’s birth did I start to view my own childhood through the lens of my mother’s hearing loss. I hadn’t before traced my experience—the feeling that I wasn’t being heard—to the dislocation in my mother’s own upbringing, to the ways she grew up unhearing, and also, unheard. Nor had I traced it to the constant punking-out of my mother’s hearing aid batteries. I began to wonder, in new motherhood, how it must have been for my mother with her hearing loss. I began to wonder how it was for Pearl—how she managed to moor her girls, so that they could in time tie a string from their wrists to their babies’. Awaken in the silence. How I might manage it.

  Bill and I started researching oral-deaf schools. Several schools had early infant programs to work with deaf babies and their parents on listening and vocalizing.

  We went to a school in commuting distance one morning. We walked through the classrooms, then observed a preschool group through a one-w
ay mirror inside a soundproof booth. Teachers drilled the students military-style. The children were just four or five years old, yet their foreheads tensed with effort. Their eyes pierced with concentration. They sputtered single-syllable sounds like “bah” and “pah”—sounds devoid of meaning. Not a single one of them was speaking. In the play area, they puttered about, lonely, each child in a bubble of isolation.

  In the parking lot, I gasped for cool air and burst into tears.

  “This is not the only school.” Bill said. He must have felt as I did. “We can look around. We can look around the country.”

  “Really?”

  We hadn’t spoken about moving. People in the juvenile court had recently encouraged Bill to apply to be the new commissioner. It was a dream of Bill’s to judge dependency cases. We both knew that if he were to get the job, he would be busy day and night. Now, my head swirled with the prospect of relocating.

  On the computer the next morning, I found sites for every oral school in the country. I followed up with calls. I had an instant rapport with the director of the parent-infant program at the oldest school, the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her name was Jan, and her perspective on deaf education was rooted in a rich study of child development. She asked about our bonding with Sophia, about our style of play. I phoned Bill at work, my voice full of excitement. He suggested we arrange a visit.