A Stitch of Time

by Lauren Marks

Everyone had a different reason. One person fingerspelled W-E-D-D-I-N-G. Another, S-O-N. Sarahlena seemed to understand people’s answers, though we students had a much harder time following one another. We all kept looking down at our alphabets, and every time we broke eye contact, we’d lose our place in the conversation.

  Then it was my turn.

  I fingerspelled: A-N-E-U-R-Y-S-M.

  Sarahlena looked at me quizzically.

  My new teacher repeated my word back, with a question lingering on her hands: A-N-E-U-R-Y-S-M?

  Yes. I nodded. B-R-A-I-N aneurysm. I pointed to myself. A-P-H-A-S-I-A.

  This was not something I usually shared in public because I didn’t want the attention it might bring. But I knew that everyone else was equally inexperienced with this fingerspelling, and it was entirely possible that only my teacher understood my disclosure. It was our secret.

  The first ASL lesson had all the basics of any language class: how to answer yes or no questions, how to explain when you didn’t understand. In sign language, I discovered that there weren’t different words for scared, terrified, alarmed, and panicked. They shared the exact same sign, but it could be expressed at different levels of physical intensity. In spoken language, I still struggled with synonyms. It was laborious to learn twelve words meaning the same thing, and then be expected to refine the perfect usage and context for each one. With sign language, one word would do as long as you expressed it well.

  Sarahlena insisted that everyone in the class had to be much more demonstrative. They had to drop their neutral expression, and the propriety associated with personal boundaries. How rigid were your hands? How wide were your eyes? All were integral parts of employing this language.

  When your face is vacant, so are your words, Sarahlena explained. Your face changes your meaning entirely in ASL. It can be the difference between a conflict and a joke. She put a supremely goofy expression on her face. It is okay to be S-I-L-L-Y, she signed and spelled. Just never be B-L-A-N-D.

  At GLAD, I was starting to understand that language and gesture had a lot in common. Being immersed in so much physical imitation seemed to shape, or at least sharpen, some of my language skills. In the hospital five months earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to remember or recite my traditional alphabet. But now, when Justine asked me to go through the alphabet, I could do one aloud and another on my hands. I wasn’t even consulting my notes. This was proof that my attention span had gotten stronger and I could learn and memorize more.

  I’m not even the worst student in the class! I beamed at Justine. Everyone around me is struggling too.

  Have you been able to continue your reading? she asked.

  I’m taking a break from the long Casanova memoir, but started a much shorter book: the autobiography of Helen Keller.

  Was that an assignment for your ASL class? she asked.

  No, it was my mom’s copy. When she was a teenager, she played Helen Keller in a production of The Miracle Worker.

  I told Justine how interesting I found the phrases Keller chose to employ in her text. She wrote “I saw” and “I heard” a lot, even though she couldn’t do either. And the supplementary materials to her book were just as good. It wasn’t just Helen telling her story to a wide readership years later; the writings of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, were included too. Helen had even permeated my dreams.

  The Sullivan letters are incredible, I explained. Sometimes you can find a letter that will correspond with something Keller has recounted in her book, but the Sullivan document was written on the day the events actually transpired. So it’s the difference between real-time reporting and hind . . . oh . . . umm . . . hindmind?

  Hindsight.

  Yes, I said. Exactly. The difference between real-time reporting and hindsight. These two types of writing can be so radically different from each other. I love those layers.

  That’s so cool! Justine said, an oversize grin on her face. It was thoroughly enjoyable to share this information with someone who seemed equally invested. See you this time next week? she asked.

  But I couldn’t immediately respond. My mother had told me that our insurance company was threatening to stop covering my sessions. She had left them a couple of messages and we were waiting to hear back from them. I had avoided mentioning it earlier because speech therapy was my home away from home, and I had hoped I could continue with my sessions as usual.

  Reluctantly, I decided that there was no time like the present, and explained the situation. Justine wasn’t at all surprised.

  It was bound to happen, she lamented. It’s criminal if you ask me, but speech therapy is usually only subsidized for the first few months after a stroke. We will figure this out together.

  We will? I asked. How?

  Don’t know yet, she said. If you can’t pay for sessions anymore, maybe we could do bartering for a little while—a sort of therapy exchange? Might be able to use your talents in helping out another patient of mine.

  Um, I murmured. Maybe, but I am not sure how I could be helpful. . . .

  Justine nodded. Let me think about it and get back to you, she said.

  Soon after the suggestion that I might be placed in some kind of a position of authority again, I went on to dream vividly of Helen Keller and Casanova, where my subconscious spared no expense in displaying my carnival of insecurities.

  Dream

  LOCATION: huge empty warehouse

  I am friends with Cassanova and whe suggests an activity, a display. We were to reconvene after we had a time to show what we had been working on (auto-biographical?)

  Cassanova went first. He mhad spent a great deal of money and props. The audience consisted of only two people, me and Helen Keller. His project fills the whole warehouse. He conjured up a gaggle galling of figures. Living and dead, physical and ethereal, spanning incredible ages of time. The lights of dead flickering like phosphourescents in the sea.

  It was my turn. I used the empty space and used my own body. I began to fly, I inch, a gesture, I contort. There was a sense Cassanova and Keller were not as impressed.

  I thought his piece was incredible but hardly plausibly autobiographical but slick. He had felt mine was not slicke enough, lacking necessary artifice. She didn’t say, but Keller seemed to be on his side.

  A few days after our session, Justine clarified what she meant by a “therapy exchange,” telling me she had arranged for me to meet another client of hers. I nervously warmed to the idea.

  This tutoring was just a one-time thing, she said, something we would experiment with and discuss afterward. The young woman attended speech and language therapy, too, though our sessions took place on different days, so our paths hadn’t crossed before. Justine explained that the girl was working on admission requirements for high school applications, and she was starting a personal essay.

  But why do you think I could help her? I asked, unsure.

  Why not? Justine said. Essays are much more your specialty than mine these days.

  Alicia and Justine cleared off a small desk for me in between their offices. It wasn’t a proper room, just part of the hallway in an alcove with the fax machine, but it could serve the purpose well enough. The girl, Chloe, arrived without the clamor I expected from a teenager. Clear-eyed, she stood in the corridor silent and slim as a birch tree, with an unusually graceful bearing.

  Take a seat, I said, introducing myself in my most professional voice. Justine tells me you are applying to high schools?

  Chloe’s long hair fell into her face and she placed the errant strands behind her ear as she sat down.

  A couple of schools, yeah, she said. The wood surface between us had just enough room for two sets of hands, so when she pulled out her notebook, she kept it on her lap.

  Have you written down something already? I asked. Can I see it?

  It’s just scribbling, she said, gripping the folder tightly. I thought I should write about dance. Or maybe what I do in student council. I think I am supposed to tell t
hem something important about me, but I can’t think of anything big. My life is pretty boring.

  I seriously doubt that, I said, trying to impersonate someone who knew what she was doing.

  What advice could I give as a writing tutor? Aside from my time at GLAD, I still hadn’t really revealed my language condition in public. Still, I could write about my aphasia in my journals and explore it in an essay. I knew I could admit things in my writing that I would never say aloud. I couldn’t remember my high school application process, but I suspected that at this age a lot of applicants tended to sound alike.

  Everyone writes what they think a selection committee wants to hear, I said. They write about all their accomplishments, what they want to do after college, and all their big plans. But no one really knows what they are doing yet. I’d much rather hear about something you don’t want your new school to know about you.

  The girl’s eyes looked pained. What do you mean?

  I told her that vulnerability, and expressing that vulnerability well, can differentiate a person from the pack in a very striking way.

  She gave a sidelong look at the fax machine, and started to absentmindedly pick at her fingernail polish. My tenuous confidence was instantly deflated—I had lost her. This approach had been my only big idea for her essay, and it appeared to be falling flat, perhaps making her too embarrassed to continue. Did the girl think I was employed in this practice? Or had Justine already told her that I was a patient too? Either way, I was sure my incompetence had been unmasked.

  Well . . . the girl said tentatively. And my ears quickly perked up.

  Yeah? I asked.

  I . . . I suck my thumb, she said. My whole life, and even now sometimes, when I’m nervous. That’s why I lisp. That’s why I came to speech therapy in the first place.

  I hadn’t heard any lisp at all, but I was overjoyed by her prospective topic. That’s exactly what you should include on your application! I exclaimed.

  The girl’s shoulders locked together. No, she said. No way. That’s, like, a kindergartener problem. No self-respecting school would accept me after I told them that.

  We never want to admit weakness, I said. But our weaknesses can define us much more than our strengths. They aren’t always bad things to have.

  She looked at me, somewhat confused, and I didn’t blame her. Before the rupture, this idea of strength in weakness wouldn’t have made much sense to me, either. I realized this was an opportunity, though. Not just for this girl, but for me, too. Only minutes earlier, I had relished the idea that this girl might mistake me as an experienced, neurotypical professional, but now I wanted her to see me as someone who was also actively struggling with my speech, not so different from her at all.

  •  •  •

  My parents like to remind me that I had an early predisposition toward language. Precocious by first grade, I was memorizing scenes from movies and TV shows, reciting back dialogue long before I could actually comprehend the meaning of the lines or understand whether the language was appropriate for a child or not. This youthful talent—and parents who owned an advertising agency—landed me a few commercials that ended up partially paying for my college tuition. As an actor, I delved into hundreds, if not thousands, of plays, committing many roles to memory. There were characters who spoke in riddles or songs, some in Elizabethan English, others in Dada garbles. At least once I had spoken all of my lines in a language I wasn’t even fluent in. I had a long and luxurious romp in language, and when I was being trained at NYU, I let myself believe that I was well on my way to making a living in words. Still, this kind of passion required a “day job” to maintain. And by the time I became a grad student, overworked and underpaid, I didn’t find nearly as much joy in words. Language subtly continued to affect my motivations, but the more experience I gained, the less I was aware of the ways it had shaped my landscape of desire. It had become a little ordinary.

  After college, I faced the reality that a career in language rarely paid the rent. I still loved going onstage and still produced avant-garde pieces with my friends, but as my creativity thrived, my bank account did not. I didn’t like to audition for shows I didn’t care about, which meant I hardly auditioned at all. Five years after I had left college, I was reconsidering all of my life choices.

  It was hard not to compare myself to my parents at my age. Not only had they found the person they would one day marry, they were working actors. They lived in Europe; my dad was writing plays, my mom was teaching children’s theater, and they made extra money dubbing German movies into English. They were hardly rich, but they had pursued their passion for performance and lived off it. That was exactly what I wanted. So why hadn’t I figured it out yet?

  In this period of flux, I had applied to a couple of PhD programs and was accepted into a good one in New York. After my first year, I was awarded a full stipend for the next two terms, with a teaching fellowship. Soon, I would be leading a class of undergraduates in the speech department. Unlike my stalled artistic life, it felt like I was finally getting an appointment commensurate with some actual accomplishments.

  This teaching position was one of the main reasons I decided to travel to see Krass in Paris in the first place; he had been one of my most influential instructors at university and I was hungry for guidance. Would my academic pursuits come at the expense of my life in art? I needed confirmation that this was the right path. I needed to know what I was doing, and how and why I was doing it. It had to be the right choice.

  I remember the two of us sitting on his terrace, a white tablecloth between us, tea lights flickering. Krass peered into the globe of red wine in his hands as if he were examining tea leaves.

  They will be lucky to have you, he said. I always knew you’d be a teacher.

  But it didn’t turn out that way at all. The day I should have started teaching “The Art of Public Speaking” in front of a college class in New York, I was in a hospital bed in Edinburgh unable to even say my parents’ names.

  Nonetheless, Krass’s prediction was coming to pass, just not in a way I had ever expected. In Justine’s speech therapy practice, I had no way of knowing if Chloe would follow my instructions—it was the first and last time I ever saw her. But it was clear that the advice I was giving her was something I needed for myself. I had told people that I was a writer even before I could finish a grammatical sentence. If I thought about that too much, there was something delusional about it, even fraudulent. That changed if I could dictate the terms, though. I started to let myself believe that I could be a writer and an aphasic, and that didn’t have to be an oxymoron. Not really. Because people never excelled at anything until they had failed at it for a very, very long time.

  20

  A few nights later, Jonah and I were chatting over the phone. He was well aware that my go-to conversation topic these days tended to be Helen Keller, so he asked if I had encountered any new information about her that I found especially interesting.

  Of course! I said. Did you know that the very first thing Helen published created a pretty big controversy? It even started a rift between her and her closest friends.

  Don’t think I ever heard about that, he said. What happened?

  She was still a kid, really, I said. A short story she wrote was published, but soon after, people noticed that it had striking similarities to another story written by a different author. A contemporary. She had no memory of reading the story and didn’t have a copy of it in her braille library. She sincerely thought the story was her own invention, but suddenly, she was under extreme scrutiny.

  I explained that the most likely scenario was that the story had been signed into Helen’s hand at some point and she had simply forgotten it happened. She was only twelve years old at the time, meaning she had only been using language for four years. This fable would’ve been coming to her alongside her history homework, her Latin, Greek, and French instructions, her rudimentary exposure to the life cycles of plants and animals. Dur
ing that massive influx of new information in the form of words, someone probably signed the story, or some elements of the story, into her palm, making this quick transfer of nonessential material little more than an afterthought. But soon after she published the story under her name, she was forced to defend herself. Everything from her intelligence to her intention was called into question.

  Wow, Jonah said. That’s heavy.

  It was hard for me to imagine how Helen created her systems of managing incoming information, sorting and prioritizing it. The field of her learning had been so parched, and then, all at once, it was drenched. It must have been so easy to misunderstand things as she was putting ideas into categories. I struggled with that sort of thing myself.

  Can you imagine explaining copyright law to a twelve-year-old? I asked Jonah. Any twelve-year-old. Now, try to introduce the concept to a deaf child’s hand. . . .

  Uh-huh, Jonah said. His tone was a little distant.

  Jonah?

  Mmm.

  Have you drifted off somewhere?

  Jonah snapped back to attention. Oops, he said, flustered. Sorry.

  No problem. I can get so absorbed in this stuff. What were you thinking about?

  Forget it, he said. It was totally unrelated, and I promise it wouldn’t at all further this discussion. Remind me what you were saying?

  Oh, it’s totally fine, I said. We can change the subject and discuss what’s on your mind now. What is it?

  Well, he said. If you must know . . .

  And I must. I smiled into the phone. I must!

  I was just thinking about sex, he said. With you, of course.

  Now it was my turn to be flustered. I was always surprised when our conversations took a turn like this. It had been five and a half months since Jonah and I lived in the same city, and my drive for physical intimacy had gone the way of my cravings for salty food or coffee or booze. My desires were inconstant and unfocused. It had been different when we had seen each other in person, but in general, I didn’t have much mental space for longing.