If a Tree Falls Page 7

  On occasion, I would see people Signing. And though we had opted for hearing aids and an oral approach for Sophia, I would find myself crossing streets, nearly jumping buses, in order to get a chance to introduce Sophia and to explain, in my halting sign language, that Sophia was hearing impaired, too. They would fawn over her, signing out her sweetness and beauty. Then they would face her directly and sign to her and she would stare back at them, absorbing their open expressions.

  One day I saw two women, deaf and blind, signing into each other’s hands. My thoughts ran me, then, to the setting sun on the Sabbath, no lanterns lit along the shtetl streets. The dusky shadows would have ended the possibility of further conversation for Nellie and Bayla—unless they took up each other’s hands, as the deaf-blind do, and signed into each other’s palms. I longed, then, to share in the hand language of the Deaf—Nellie and Bayla’s home Sign, their only buffer from utter isolation. And I vowed to arm Sophia with everything the modern world would allow to make her less isolated, less vulnerable. A TTY system, if she couldn’t talk on the phone. A vibrating alarm clock. A light-up smoke detector.

  Surprisingly, the Deaf people we met didn’t often challenge our decision to try hearing aids. It was the hearing people who subjected me to their questions, opinions, exclamations, and doubts. They stopped me on the street, in the pharmacy, at the coffee shop. “ Why does your baby have hearing aids?” “Will she get better?” “Are you sure she needs those?” “ What’s wrong with her?”

  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.

  Galicia, 1876

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

  Swathed by the girls in the day, Pearl is caught off guard when Moshe comes to her bed one night. His body feels heavy and his mouth is rough. He touches her hair, searches her face. His eyes beg her to see him but Pearl is unsure if she wants to look. Maybe it’s better that they cannot read each other’s faces. As she feels him enter her, she blurts out her fears. He wraps his arms around her, whispers words of faith. Words she is not sure either of them believe.

  Night after night, Moshe reaches for her. Within a few months, she knows she has conceived again. Her breasts swell, her belly rounds. Everywhere Pearl goes, people talk and she bristles. “May this one be a boy, yes? A hearing boy!” No matter that Nellie and Bayla are standing right by her side, reading their lips, their faces. Pearl begins to stay at home, keeping the girls there with her whenever she can. When Nellie and Bayla get restless, she sends them outside. At five and three, they chase the chickens or pet the goats in the shade of a tree.

  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?

  A soft whimper forces her eyes away from the boys to a clutched heap just steps away from her now. Her girls lie in the grass, their arms bent over their heads, their fingers intertwined. So many rocks, aimed at their ears. They yelp violently when Pearl first kneels down to comfort them, then they bury their streaming faces in the folds of her skirts.

  Pearl lifts her daughters and carries them crumpled, one in each arm, over the hill and into the house. She slams the door behind her with new fear, new hatred. She couldn’t be sure those boys were from the market, the ones she saw running away. Who, then? As she cleans her girls’ scrapes, dries their blood, she vows to help them. She speaks to them now in a steady stream and they watch her through their tears. For a long while, they lie folded in her embrace.

  That night, Pearl feeds Moshe dinner, then sits him in the living room chair.

  “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.”

  Moshe considers this, then stands up. From the bedroom doorway, he looks in on Nellie and Bayla as they sleep. Even in the darkness, he can see that Nellie’s lips are dark red and swollen. Bayla’s arms are cut and bruised. How could this happen?

  Moshe pulls at his shirtsleeves, cuffing them close around his wrists. “All right, Pearl,” he mutters. “I will go.”

  The morning Rayzl begins her tutelage, Nellie and Bayla start out shyly, knitted close to Pearl’s sides. But as Rayzl gestures broadly to them, her face open and warm, the girls sidle nearer.

  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 . . .

  Rayzl walks through the village with Nellie and Bayla at her sides. She stops often to point at a familiar object. Then she signs its name. Inside the bakery: the mandel bread, the almond cakes, the babkes, the rugelach. Along the river path: the oaks and lindens, the grey mushrooms, the blackberry vines. At the market: the meats and fish, the buckwheat groats, the spices, the vinegars, the salves, the leathers. And hooked under everyone’s arm, the baskets for toting their finds and trades. Back at home: the tables and chairs, the beds and trunks, the books, the yarns, the Shabbat candles and candlesticks. In an excited daze, Nellie imitates Rayzl’s signs. She shows Rayzl their own homemade signs for things, some so alike; some so different from hers. With each new name she learns from Rayzl, Nellie beams as if she has acquired the thing itself.

  Week after week, Nellie’s dictionary, and her universe, grows. “Apricot is rock,” Nellie signs at lunchtime, to convey her fruit’s hardness. Now Rayzl works, not just on the names of objects, but on descriptors, the qualities of things. The wax is hot; the bucket is empty; the table is thick; the wild strawberries are sweet. Bayla does not advance so quickly. She often breaks away in the middle of a lesson, settling herself in the barn until Nellie retrieves her.

  Most nights before bed, Nellie carries the oil lamp to her bedside, and she practices flattening, rounding, blowing, popping, and puffing her mouth the way Rayzl has showed her. On the eve of her seventh birthday, Nellie stares into the small, smoky looking-glass and studies her face—her eyes, the bridge of her nose, the angle of her cheeks, her ears. Her worthless ears. Nellie lowers the mirror slightly to her lips, and looks on as the pout in her lips becomes a sputter, itchy and tickly at the same time. Her new baby sister, Elish, laughs to see Nellie’s faces. Nellie cheers a little, and uses the mirror to play peek-a-boo.

  Chava, who knew Rayzl first, stops often at the house, delighting the girls with honey cakes and scraps of bright colored cloth for dressing up their ragdolls. She sits with Pearl over sweet mint tea while Rayzl tutors Nellie and Bayla, and together they wonder at Rayzl’s magic.

  When in summer Chava takes to bed in a difficult pregnancy, Nellie and Bayla visit her at her bedside, giving her nancy, Nellie and Bayla visit her at her bedside, giving her their quiet company. One day, Chava’s elderly mother shoos them away at the door with a despairing look in her eye. Nellie and Bayla turn from the door, confused. Then they see something trailing out of Chava’s bedroom window. A string, beginning with a loop from Chava’s bedpost, crisscrosses Tasse like a Cat’s Cradle. Nellie and Bayla follow the string this way and that through the village, until they come to the synagogue. The string is a prayer made visible, looped by Chava’s husband from home to the Ark. Now, he is crumpled in prayer, crying before the Holy Scrolls for the safety of Chava and their not-yet-born baby.

  Nellie and Bayla sit gravely on a bench outside the sanctuary, until Moshe spots their dusky shadows and leads them home. In the middle of the night, Pearl shakes them awake. Nellie rushes to the front door and there she sees a length of string trailing low along the ground, caked in dirt. Whimpers of grief clump and fall like wet snowflakes from Chava’s bedroom window. Sorrow, no less felt when unheard.

  Massachusetts, December 2002

  WE TIED A STRING BETWEEN Sophia’s hearing aids to hold them in place in her ears, and to keep them from getting lost when they came out. The audiologist provided it: a bright yellow string, threaded into a perfect child-sized clip. My hands shook the first time I looped up Sophia’s hearing aids to the yellow line and attached the clip to the back of her t-shirt. There were strings everywhere—my thoughts, their own tangled Cat’s Cradle; my feelings of grief, never far away.

  One day, in the supermarket, the yellow string caught the attention of a little boy. Sophia was sitting in our shopping cart, holding her favorite blanket. The boy walked up to Sophia, and stared at the bright string and at the hearing aids it linked. Wordlessly, he reached up and yanked at the string, causing one hearing aid to pop out of Sophia’s ear.

  “No, boy!” Sophia said, wagging her finger. She was nearly two and a half years old.

  I looked into the boy’s face, trying to distinguish whether his act was borne of curiosity, or of malice, or some combination of the two. I decided on curiosity. So, I explained,“You know how some people wear glasses to help them see better? Well, my little girl, Sophia, wears hearing aids to help her hear better. This yellow string keeps her hearing aids in place.” I spoke in my most matter-of-fact voice, as I put Sophia’s hearing aid back into her ear.

  “Oh,” the little boy said, watching intently. A woman’s call of “Timothy, Timothy!” caused him to turn and wander away.

  As Sophia and I walked on, she said, “I hear with my hearin’ aids.”

  “That’s right, honey,” I answered.

  Then, noticing the rows of food around her, Sophia shouted, “Pasta!”

  “Yes, that’s the kind you like.”

  “Pickles!”

  “Yes, honey.”

  I steered Sophia into the next aisle. Right in front of
us stood Jan.

  “Hey! How are you two?” Jan asked, and gave us each a hug.

  I started to blurt out what just happened with the little boy, but Sophia interrupted.

  “Jan, I really non’t like wasabi.”

  “Oh?”

  Then Sophia said thoughtfully, about her pediatrician, “Dr. Kenny smells like peaches.”

  Jan and I burst out laughing.

  “To answer your question, Jan, we’re fine,” I said. “We’re just fine.”

  Bill and I spoke of having another baby. We didn’t speak openly about the possibility of a second baby’s deafness. At a genetics consult shortly after Sophia’s birth, we were given a lab requisition form to test for genetic deafness. We never used it. The tests had to be run on Sophia’s blood—a lot of it—and we didn’t want to stress her tiny body for the sake of our knowledge base. The only other test our insurance company would cover was a test of my amniotic fluid when a fetus was already in utero. We had my father’s fax, of course, which seemed proof enough that I, at least, contributed a genetic deafness component. No one in Bill’s family had a record or even a recollection of deaf relatives. Still, it seemed likely—even if wildly coincidental—that Bill and I were both recessive gene carriers. How else to explain the fact that Bill and I were hearing, while Sophia was not? It couldn’t be a dominant gene just from me, because a dominant gene would have rendered me hearing impaired, too. Under the recessive gene theory, there was a 25 percent chance that our next baby would have hearing loss, too. It was not a negligible chance.

  My mind spun with thoughts of deaf siblings—of Nellie and Bayla, as I’d been imagining them: at the river, their toes grabbing the mushy bottom; at the market, their noses filled with the sharp smells of vinegar and fish; upon the shul bench, their eyes glued to the sanctuary door, to the crisscrossed length of string leading to the men’s gallery. All the accompanying sounds naturally arising in my mind, muted out. My ancestors’ existences, shrouded in silence and isolation.