Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The foreign language transition class was formed in 1984 in response to the increasing number of immigrants who were applying for admission to the school. As New York City’s population swelled with Caribbeans, Central and South Americans, Asians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans, so did Lexington’s. And while the public schools could funnel these students into bilingual classes or English-as-a-second-language programs, Lexington faced a more complex task. Many of the students’ home countries had no schools for the deaf. Some students had been schooled with mentally retarded children; some had never been schooled, never seen another deaf person, never worn a hearing aid. Some came knowing a few home-signs or invented gestures; others had no language system at all, signed, spoken, or written.

  When Sofia entered Lexington in November 1989, the school had one foreign language transition class; two years later it had four. Lexington currently has first-generation students from thirty-four different countries. The languages of their families include Portuguese and Cantonese, Urdu and Arabic, Farsi and Tagalog. The languages of the school are English and sign. The languages of the students are mixtures, or fragments thereof, or absent altogether.

  Sofia enrolled at Lexington after spending eight years in a residential school for the deaf in Leningrad, where she became fluent in Russian and developed excellent oral skills. With a strong base in a first language, she learned English far more quickly than those of her classmates who had never been to school. And while sign languages are no more universal than spoken languages (in fact, British Sign Language is distinct from ASL), Sofia’s fluency in Russian Sign Language helped her to acquire a second sign language more easily as well. With these advantages, she was able to get herself switched into the regular high school by the following September. Her transition was successful in every way except one: she had to leave her little sister behind.

  Sofia has two grown-up sisters, Adalina and Nadezhda (or Ada and Nellie, as they are called in the States), who are nearer her own age than Irina, seven years her junior. But it is Irina with whom she is closest, for Irina is also deaf. With disorderly hair forever liberating itself from the constraints of band and barrette and huge glasses magnifying and distorting clever brown eyes, Irina is the quintessential little sister—wheedling and obstinate, admiring and jealous, irrepressible and lovable.

  The job of rearing Irina has been largely foisted onto Sofia, who, as a deaf person, is expected to discipline, tutor, and care for her little sister. With her good Russian oral skills, she is also expected to act as the interpreter between her Russian-speaking family and Irina, who has come to rely more on English and ASL. When both sisters entered the single foreign language transition class two years ago, Sofia felt stifled by the rather too close quarters. But from her vantage point in the high school, a different sort of burden now nags at Sofia: Irina has yet to transfer into regular classes.

  “Hey, bubs, what are the hearing aids doing on your desk?” Margie Weissman circles in front of eleven-year-old Irina and leans on her desk. This teacher believes in audition. She has a solid, belting voice and almost never signs.

  Irina launches into an energetic excuse, her lopsided ponytail galloping crookedly behind her. Her voice, all deep breathy rushes and warbly Russian trills, sounds like wind and water.

  “What?” Margie squints, her glasses slipping until they straddle the round tip of her nose. “I can’t understand you. Put ’em on,” she directs, and Irina twists the molds into her ears and hooks the beige receivers behind them.

  Beside her, Irina’s classmate Walkiria has brought the voltage tester to her desk to check her hearing aids. She slips the round batteries, no bigger than grapefruit seeds, from her aids and holds them one at a time to a metal plate on the face of the small black box. Behind a little window, a needle springs to the right—good—and a second time—good also. Walkiria replaces the batteries, puts on her aids, and shoves the voltage tester onto Gianina’s desk. They are both from the Dominican Republic.

  Next to Gianina, Tericha waves for Margie’s attention, then begins a question in a timid pastiche of gesture and sound. She is from Jamaica and the newest member of the class. Margie shakes back her blunt reddish hair and frowns in concentration. “You need a new battery?” she guesses. She knows that Tericha, who has no aids of her own, has been using a pair of Lexington loaners that work only sporadically. “Where’s the tester? Wait for Gianina, she has the tester.” But that’s not what Tericha meant, and she tries again, pointing to her ear and then to her lap. “Oh, you want the group aid!” cries Margie. “Yes, me too, we’re waiting for that.”

  The four girls in this foreign language transition class have all recently had ear mold impressions taken. From these, new aids are being made to fit a group system. When it comes, Margie will wear a wireless microphone; the children will have FM receivers, two each, worn in little harnesses around their waists and wired to their hearing aids. The receivers, tuned to Margie’s microphone, will ensure that the signal of her voice remains constant no matter where she walks in the room; they will also diminish background noise.

  A month ago such wizardry was beyond Tericha’s ken. She was living with her grandmother in Jamaica and had never attended school in all her ten years of life. Tericha is not technically a foreign language transition student, since her parents’ native language is English. She might more aptly be called a no language transition student, except that already, after only a few weeks of school, language, or the seeds of it, is visibly straining within her willowy body, tested surreptitiously on shy lips, strung together gingerly on long fingers, soaking into her brilliant dark eyes.

  Irina and Walkiria, the class veterans, each having been here for two years, are far less taken with the notion of wearing group aids—having those bulky, chunky boxes hitched to their hips with institutional-looking nylon straps. At eleven and twelve years old, they fancy themselves boycatchers and value certain standards of appearance. Margie has struck a bargain with them: if they wear the group aids in class, they may switch to the less obtrusive, behind-the-ear model on excursions to the library, cafeteria, art room, and gym.

  This morning, still without the group system, Margie tests the girls individually. Covering her mouth with a sheet of loose-leaf paper, she addresses each one in a loud voice: “Good morning! Hello! How are you today?” “Are you down?” she bellows when one doesn’t respond. “Are you on? Hello! Hello!” When they do answer her back, she offers modifications. “Do me a favor,” she says, touching her throat. “Down a little, lower . . . lower the pitch . . . yes! How pretty! What a pretty voice!”

  Nearly everything in the classroom is fodder for instruction. Room 2-217 is sometimes known as the zoo, since tanks of fish and turtles and hamsters and snakes claim every available countertop. When the smell gets dreadful, Margie pours lemon juice on paper towels and disperses these impromptu sachets around the room. The students don’t complain; they are fascinated with the animals, especially the snakes. Margie has told them that snakes are deaf.

  “What happened yesterday with the larger snake?” she is asking. “What’s snake?” she calls to the Spanish-speaking aide who is sorting arts-and-crafts projects in the back of the room.

  “La serpiente.”

  “La serpiente. What happened with la serpiente?” Margie adds for the benefit of Walkiria and Gianina.

  “The snake was sick —” Irina begins to sign, eyes grave behind her glasses with their childish red plastic frames.

  “You don’t need to sign to me. Stop. I don’t understand that.” Margie screws her eyes shut and averts her face. Sometimes when hearing teachers say, “I don’t understand you,” they mean just that; other times they mean “I’m ignoring you until you use your voice.” This one obviously means the latter. Irina shrugs philosophically and commences chewing on the collar of her turtleneck.

  Walkiria stands and imitates the snake, thrashing and flailing in a little break dance. Rhinestone studs on her jeans catch the light and sparkl
e.

  “What is that?” demands Margie. “Give me some language.”

  And gradually they do come up with English for their thoughts: “strange behavior,” “sick,” “spilled the water dish.” Margie, standing by an easel, wields a felt-tipped pen, ready to catch all the vocabulary they can muster and transfer it to paper. All day she will do this, whether as part of a lesson or not; she will write their words for them to see.

  Even their snack, delivered mid-morning on a cafeteria tray, becomes a lesson in similes. “This muffin is like a rock,” Margie proclaims, and transcribes her sentence on the board. “Like a rock,” she repeats. She holds the wooden pointer to her chin while her pink lips open and shut, then uses it to tap the extremely solid baked good. The students study her, then bang their dry sesame seed muffins observantly against the desks.

  Throughout the day, scores of words appear in colored marker across the walls, labeling, linking, connecting life to language. Pens dry up and are traded. Every few minutes more words are inscribed, some flanked by their Spanish and Russian equivalents, for a key element of the program is maintaining and improving the child’s home language while teaching her English. The first language becomes a scaffold from which to build the second; the two develop in tandem, weaving a bridge between family and school. In the classroom, words overlap and tangle as the faded confetti of yesterday’s vocabulary, half erased, lingers across the board.

  In the Soviet Union, the Normatovs lived in Samarkand, a city in south-central Asia near the Black Sea. Bukharan Jews, they spoke a dialect of Farsi as well as Russian, and many of their customs had a Middle Eastern flavor. They were well-off. Mr. Normatov did bookkeeping for a department store. Mrs. Normatov obtained clothes and jewelry from non-Soviet countries and sold them in private transactions from their home.

  They lived in a huge one-story house behind a white clay wall, with a vegetable garden and trees that produced apples, pears, cherries, and apricots. The walls and high ceiling of their living room were hand-painted with elaborate designs and Stars of David. They held parties with musicians and belly dancers and many dozens of guests spilling from the living room into the stone courtyard. During the summers the family slept on cots in this courtyard, and above them the stars shone through the grape arbor.

  When Sofia was three, her parents sent her to School Number Twenty, an oral school for the deaf in Leningrad, so that she would learn to speak. Eight hours away by plane, Leningrad was so far north that on clear days Sofia could stand at the edge of the Baltic Sea and make out the vast gray shape of the Finnish coast. Sofia, and later Irina, lived most of their lives there, apart from the family, returning home only during the summers. School was their world, deafness their culture.

  Early in the spring of 1989, Iluysha and Ister Normatov and their four daughters left behind their family and friends and their large house with the living room frescoes. They left behind their chickens and dog and vegetable garden and much of their china and many of their clothes. With the government-allotted sixty rubles per person, no English, and two diamonds (one smuggled in a suitcase lining, the other in Mrs. Normatov’s back molar), they flew first to Austria, then to Italy, and after three months were permitted to pass on to their final destination, the United States, a country where they could practice Judaism publicly, with a rabbi in a synagogue, rather than covertly, behind their white clay wall.

  One of the biggest differences they found in their new home, a modest apartment in Rego Park, Queens, was that it was only three subway stops away from the Lexington School for the Deaf. In addition to adjusting to a new country, the Normatovs had to adjust to having the deaf family members stay with them not for a summer holiday but permanently.

  Even the flat white cardboard box containing the few photographs they brought with them from Samarkand bore testimony to the separateness of the two youngest children’s lives. Picture after picture chronicled birth and death, wedding and holiday, years of family gatherings from which the deaf girls were absent. Except for an occasional school photo, showing them in uniform, with their red Pioneer neckerchiefs and tin Lenin badges, they were virtually unaccounted for.

  Now, just as the Normatovs moved their religion from behind the wall, so Sofia and Irina emerged. In Rego Park they were no longer in someone else’s hands, with their lives taking place eight hours away, on the edge of the Baltic Sea. They were directly within view, slightly alien blood relatives.

  Across the hall from Irina’s classroom, the older foreign language transition students are counting lollipops. Synthetic cobwebs sag across the doorway. Glitter, spilled and trodden into the carpet, winks from the floor like mica. Neatly printed on oaktag and taped on the wall of cabinets are the words WITCH, APPLE, JACK-O’-LANTERN, OCTOBER, BROOM, GHOST, CANDIES, PUMPKIN, MOON. This afternoon the students will host a Halloween party for the younger children.

  This is Sofia’s former class. The students range from eighteen to twenty-one years old. They have not much longer to remain in school; after age twenty-one, the state will not pay for them to attend. Some of them know they will never make the transition into the regular high school. They must gather what they can here, in this class: it will be all they take with them when they leave.

  Right now the candy-sorting has halted because Jerry, a quiet young man from Haiti, has become intent on ascertaining the French word for lollipop. He thinks he remembers a word, a loose assemblage of syllables, and he tries these out in a low, reedy voice, but the teacher, Marcy Rosenbaum, shakes her head helplessly. So he attempts to fingerspell it, but at this Marcy squints with effort and pleads, “Slower.”

  Jerry sighs. Sweet-natured, he is shaped like a string bean with a neat round head.

  “Put your glasses on,” advises Angel impatiently, thumping his desk to get Marcy’s attention. He is less sweet-natured, and frequently indulges in rude ASL diatribes he knows his teacher can’t understand. Since emigrating from the Dominican Republic, he has picked up ASL far quicker than English, which is meted out in wrenchingly tedious doses and confounded by misunderstandings that often result in Angel’s lowering his head to his desk and refusing to look up.

  Obligingly, Marcy slides down the glasses wedged on top of her cropped brown hair, but she still can’t make out the word, so now Jerry rises, goes to the board, and writes out the letters he remembers, SUCEC, before giving up and diving for the battered French-English dictionary in his knapsack. By now the Dominican and Mexican students want to know their word for lollipop, too. Maria Joya, the Spanishspeaking aide, writes PALETA on the board. A visiting Russian-speaking aide adds LEDENETS to the list. At last Jerry fills in SUCETTE and the class resumes counting out lollipops and mini Nestlé crunch bars.

  The students make these forays to the board all day long, whenever they are struck by the need to know something. If their teacher can understand neither their speech nor their signs, they resort to the board as an alternative mode of communication. Now Angel, studying a painted witch replete with glitter-encrusted warts who is hanging on the wall, goes to the chalkboard and writes WATCH, WATCHATION. He summons Marcy for her opinion.

  She studies the board with her hands on her hips. “Maybe you mean vacation?” she suggests. Angel, with great irritation, jabs a finger toward the witch decoration. “Oh. No, that’s a different word,” Marcy tells him. “Look: watch, witch.” She emphasizes the movement of her mouth so that he can apprehend the distinction between the two vowels.

  This prompts Angel hurriedly to write WOTCH on the board. He whips his head around to the teacher.

  “Yes, you’re thinking of the different vowels. You have a good idea, but that’s not a word,” Marcy tells him.

  Angel underlines WOTCH and nods, adamant.

  “No, that’s not a word,” the teacher repeats.

  “I think yes in Spanish,” he persists.

  “No, no, that’s not Spanish.”

  “Russian, I think,” Angel amends.

  Marcy chuckles and shakes
her head.

  “Or French?” Angel stares at the word, his mouth slightly open. Marcy is already on her way to help another student.

  While Jerry is loading film in the Polaroid camera and Miguel and Jose are propping up the beanbag toss with a broomstick and masking tape, Francisco suddenly wants to know if Halloween is a religious holiday. The oldest member of the class, at twenty-one, he came from Mexico less than two years ago and must graduate this June. Strong and squarely built, he keeps his mouth in a constant firm line, tight dimples pressed in at either end.

  “Religious?” he asks the teacher, using the correct ASL sign.

  “I don’t know what you are saying,” she tells him.

  “Religious?” he repeats, this time tentatively, less certain that he has remembered the sign accurately.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know that sign.”

  He tries to fingerspell it. “R-E-G-I-L-A-R-Y.”

  Marcy chews the inside of her cheek, then flashes Francisco a tiny, defeated smile.

  “I think he’s saying ‘regular.’ No?” Maria, the aide, has wandered up behind Marcy. Both Marcy and Maria are taking sign language courses at Lexington during the school day. Last spring, after 127 years of being a famous oral school for the deaf, Lexington began requiring all teaching staff who are not proficient in sign language to start taking classes. But for now, neither of them can comprehend Francisco. He shakes his head, dimples set in resignation. Marcy crinkles her eyes in an apologetic smile. The question goes unanswered.