Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  At last the State Ed. people declare a recess. The doors are propped open; warmer air and more Tchaikovsky come in from the hallway. People rise, arching their backs and cracking their knuckles.

  One of the spectators, a woman with large red eyeglasses, approaches the deaf people as they move toward the exit. Describing exaggerated shapes with her florid lips, widening her eyes behind rhinestone rims, fairly patting their heads, she assures them that they have all done a marvelous job. Then she turns and confronts Oscar for more academic conversation (Does Lexington get many state-referred students? What kind of support services does it have? How many in a classroom?), leaving Don and Brenda and Melissa to wait against the wall like well-behaved children.

  When Oscar is able to disengage himself, he joins the others by the modest refreshments table. “Did you want to take some more hard candy?” he innocently signs to Don.

  “Oh, thanks. I did a lousy job?”

  Oscar grins. “I’m kidding.”

  “I know.” Don rakes up a small handful and waggishly offers one to Oscar. ”Here, you can have one, you were lousy too.”

  But at the top of the stairs, as the others turn toward the main doors, Oscar waves to catch their attention. “Throw out your candies. We’ll have lunch.”

  The hotel restaurant looks out on the western tip of La Guardia Airport, where a new U.S. Air building is being constructed. Already the sun is lowering. The building’s exposed girders gleam red and gold as the day tapers to late afternoon. Airplanes float toward cold landing strips, and the picture windows tremble.

  Oscar collapses heavily into a chair. He was up this morning at five-thirty, sitting at the kitchen table editing Don’s presentation while he waited for tea water to boil. He continued the editing when he arrived at Lexington at seven-thirty, then at ten handed the paper over to Don, who worked on the changes until it was time to meet in the lobby. Don is a bright, subtle, and witty thinker; nonetheless, he peppers his writing with odd constructions. Like that of many deaf people, his English does not reflect his intelligence; it reads like a slightly foreign language. (Last year Oscar offered to have three deaf administrators tutored in the mechanics of writing at Lexington’s expense. He felt that they were at a stage in their careers where their lack of English proficiency would hold them back and keep them at a disadvantage with hearing colleagues. Because the subject is emotionally charged, he made the offer quietly, casually, trying to be respectful of his colleagues’ dignity. None of the three responded to the offer; he did not mention it again.)

  Now, having gotten through the hearing, the group develops a giddy, irreverent mood. Don immediately seizes the centerpiece, a leafy poinsettia in a foil-wrapped pot, and sticks it beneath the table. (Deaf people need a full view of the torso as well as the face for comfortable communication; he is simply making the environment a little less restrictive.) They discuss the proceedings, which everyone feels went well. In retrospect, the hearing people’s lack of ease with the deaf presenters has acquired a wickedly humorous cast, and they chew over certain details, making one another laugh. The humor is the sort born of ironic necessity; they use it to salve the wounds of insensitivity.

  When Don whisked the plant from the center of the table, he employed a kind of radiant force that could suggest either playfulness or neatly diverted frustration. At the end of the meal he remembers to replace it. The others smile in deep camaraderie when he quips, “Now it’s a hearing table again.” The following week, on the last day before the holiday break, the entire high school converges for Color Olympics. Once again the main lobby seethes with bodies and excitement. The students have festooned themselves with a sort of tribal devotion: the yellow team has dismembered Rapunzel’s wig and braided strands of the yellow yam into their hair; the greens wear verdant stickers on their noses and foreheads; the blues have drawn navy lightning bolts on their cheeks and arms; the reds have somehow managed to scrounge up felt Santa Claus hats. They swarm through the lobby to the gymnasium, where the ceiling lights bathe them in edgy orange as they squash into the bleachers and break into their team cheers, a visual-acoustic cacophony that reverberates with exultant frenzy.

  This is what Oscar calls “licensed bedlam.” The tradition began ten years ago as an attempt to alleviate the multitude of disciplinary problems that tended to arise on the day before the two-week holiday. Since then, there have been fewer problems on this day than on any other. Tensions are now channeled into games instead of fistfights, but they still run high. For many students, the coming fortnight heralds a vast silence, an abyss: fourteen days engulfed by hearing people and loneliness.

  Today they come together with a kind of fierce intent. Color Olympics consists of four teams competing for six straight hours in a relentless series of events, including relay races, skits, trivia contests on deaf history, human pyramids, towers constructed of raw spaghetti and masking tape, teachers mummified in toilet paper. The tasks grow weirder and more feverish as the day progresses. The teams shuttle from gym to auditorium to cafeteria for different events, plowing down the halls preceded by the din of their cheers. They chant their team colors in rapid synchronism, both hands fingerspelling simultaneously. “Voice! Voice! Voice!” encourage the team leaders, on this one day taking up the plea usually reserved for speech teachers. The yell of preference is a kind of projectile hoot that arcs off the palate, loud enough for many of them to hear, kinesthetically satisfying even for those who can’t.

  The impulse for physical contact crackles with an almost biological imperative. As the participants travel from arena to arena, their body paint smudged and beaded, they pass one another and clasp hands glossy with sweat. They sprawl on the floor with limbs interlocking, lounge against each other’s knees, breathe over each other’s shoulders, softly tug at each other’s sleeves and ponytails. All this touch might be considered awkward or brash among hearing adolescents; at Lexington it is implicit.

  To amplify their instructions, teachers stand on chairs or stepladders, the visual equivalents of a megaphone. “Here’s my rendition of shouting,” a young hearing teacher on the blue team cries to her colleague, and she pumps the blue cheer straight over her head with both arms. No matter how urgently the teachers flick the lights, no matter how large the screen for the overhead projector is, they could not address the group without the students’ compliance, for deaf people must be willing to look in order for communication to take place. And they are willing. In the stillness of all these riveted eyes, the warmth of all these attentive bodies, there resides the awareness that tomorrow there will be no school, nor the next day, nor the day after that.

  At two-thirty, dismissal feels turbulent, jumbled. The temperature has dropped below freezing; the sky hovers, as dense and white as a hard-boiled egg, and every time the door opens the air smacks bitterly into the vestibule. Jointed blue foil letters spell out holiday wishes on the bus room wall, and beneath these signs the littlest children, freighted with wrapped parcels and candy canes, wait for attendants to lead them outside. Hearing aids come loose and whistle; a teacher’s jingle-bell earrings tinkle as she crouches to zip jackets and tie hoods. (“There should be jingle-light earrings for deaf people,” suggests one student.) Long after the last bus quits the lot, older students remain talking in chilly gray huddles, reluctant to leave even though their breath spurts in hoary plumes. Across the street, the holiday lights that crisscross the privet hedges have come on.

  The lucky ones are those on the girls’ basketball team, for they have license to stay a few hours more. Janie Moran, the social studies teacher who coaches the team, graduated from Lexington eight years ago. When two boys wander in and beg permission to do lay-ups at the opposite end of the court, she doesn’t have the heart to turn them away. And when Oscar pokes his head in at four o’clock, she shoots him an amused look.

  “Want to play?" Her signs, as always, are terse and robust.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not dressed for it.”

>   “I have shoes in the car.”

  He returns from the parking lot minutes later, his feet shod in dirty white sneakers. Oscar and the two boys scrimmage with the girls’ team for half an hour. They play hard, with more concentration than merriment. The gym, devoid now of all the bodies that packed it during Color Olympics, echoes harshly. The lights over the bleachers are off; shadows from that side of the room seem to lunge onto the court. The girls and boys pound back and forth. Oscar lopes along with them, his necktie streaming out in back.

  At four-thirty Janie reminds the team of their holiday schedule; they will practice a few times over the break. She also gets directions to the house of one of the students, who needs a ride. (Although her five younger, hearing siblings are afforded the privilege of using the subway, this girl’s parents don’t let their deaf daughter do so; basketball practice will be the only time during the next two weeks when she will see her friends.) Then practice is over and there are no more excuses to stay in the building.

  It is a shame that the State Ed. people couldn’t have visited the school today. When the new State Plan for Education of Students with Disabilities comes out in seven months, it will not reflect any of the testimony that the Lexington representatives delivered. It will mandate the “education of the pupil to the maximum extent appropriate with other pupils who do not have a disability.” It will stress that “the child should be educated in the school which he or she would attend if not disabled.” Creamily bound in red, white, and blue, it will state its terms in the neat, unemotional jargon of bureaucracy. It will make no attempt to recognize that to many people, deafness is not a pathology but a cultural identity.

  At quarter to five, Janie and Oscar turn off the lights, lock up the gym, and gently herd the remaining students outside. An aspirin-moon has risen, small and round, over the roofs across the street. Somewhere nearby, “Silent Night” is playing on a car radio, and now the last students drift out into it.

  5

  Words Left Unspoken

  My earliest memories of Sam Cohen are of his chin, which I remember as fiercely hard and pointy. Not pointy, my mother says, jutting; Grandpa had a strong, jutting chin. But against my very young face it felt like a chunk of honed granite swathed in stiff white bristles. Whenever we visited, he would lift us grandchildren up, most frequently by the elbows, and nuzzle our cheeks vigorously. This abrasive ritual greeting was our primary means of communication. In all my life, I never heard him speak a word I could understand.

  Sometimes he used his voice to get our attention. It made a shapeless, gusty sound, like a pair of bellows sending up sparks and soot in a blacksmith shop. And he made sounds when he was eating, sounds that, originating from other quarters, would have drawn chiding or expulsion from the table. He smacked his lips and sucked his teeth; his chewing was moist and percussive; he released deep, hushed moans from the back of his throat, like a dreaming dog. And he burped out loud. Sometimes it was all Reba, Andy, and I could do not to catch one another’s eyes and fall into giggles.

  Our grandfather played games with us, the more physical the better. He loved that hand game: he would extend his, palms up, and we would hover ours, palms down, above his, and lower them, lower, lower, until they were just nesting, and slap! he’d have sandwiched one of our hands, trapping it between his. When we reversed, I could never even graze his, so fast would he snatch them away, like big white fish.

  He played three-card monte with us, arranging the cards neatly between his long fingers, showing us once the jack of diamonds smirking, red and gold, underneath. And then, with motions as swift and implausible as a Saturday morning cartoon chase, his hands darted and faked and blurred and the cards lay still, face down and impassive. When we guessed the jack’s position correctly, it was only luck. When we guessed wrong, he would laugh—a fond, gravelly sound—and pick up the cards and begin again.

  He mimicked the way I ate. He compressed his mouth into dainty proportions as he nibbled air and carefully licked his lips and chewed tiny, precise bites, his teeth clicking, his eyelashes batting as he gazed shyly from under them. He could walk exactly like Charlie Chaplin and make nickels disappear, just vanish, from both his fists and up his sleeves; we never found them, no matter how we crawled over him, searching. All of this without any words.

  He and my grandmother lived in the Bronx, in the same apartment my father and Uncle Max had grown up in. It was on Knox Place, near Mosholu Parkway, a three-room apartment below street level. The kitchen was a tight squeeze of a place, especially with my grandmother bending over the oven, blocking the passage as she checked baked apples or stuffed cabbage, my grandfather sitting with splayed knees at the dinette. It was easy to get each other’s attention in there; a stamped foot sent vibrations clearly over the short distance, and an outstretched arm had a good chance of connecting with the other party.

  The living room was ampler and dimmer, with abundant floor and table lamps to accommodate signed conversation. Little windows set up high revealed the legs of passersby. And down below, burrowed in black leather chairs in front of the television, we children learned to love physical comedy. Long before the days of closed captioning, we listened to our grandfather laugh out loud at the snowy black-and-white antics of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges.

  During the time that I knew him, I saw his hairline shrink back and his eyes grow remote behind pairs of progressively thicker glasses. His athlete’s bones shed some of their grace and nimbleness; they began curving in on themselves as he stood, arms folded across his sunken chest. Even his long, thin smile seemed to recede deeper between his nose and his prominent chin. But his hands remained lithe, vital. As he teased and argued and chatted and joked, they were the instruments of his mind, the conduits of his thoughts.

  As far as anyone knows, Samuel Kolominsky was born deaf (according to the Lexington records, his parents “failed to take note until child was about one and a half years old”). His birthplace was Russia, somewhere near Kiev. Lexington records say he was born in 1908; my grandmother says it was 1907. He was a child when his family fled the czarist pogroms. Lexington records have him immigrating in 1913, at age five; my grandmother says he came to this country when he was three. Officials at Ellis Island altered the family name, writing down Cohen, but they did not detect his deafness, so Sam sailed on across the last ribbon of water to America.

  His name-sign at home: Daddy. His name-sign with friends: the thumb and index finger, perched just above the temple, rub against each other like grasshopper legs. One old friend attributes this to Sam’s hair, which was blond and thick and wavy. Another says it derived from his habit of twisting a lock between his fingers.

  Lexington records have him living variously at Clara, Moore, Siegel, Tehema, and Thirty-eighth streets in Brooklyn and on Avenue C in Manhattan. I knew him on Knox Place, and much later on Thieriot Avenue, in the Bronx. Wherever he lived, he loved to walk, the neighborhoods revolving silently like pictures in a Kinetoscope, unfurling themselves in full color around him.

  Shortly before he died, when I was thirteen, we found ourselves walking home from a coffee shop together on a warm night. My family had spent the day visiting my grandparents at their apartment. My grandmother and the rest of the family were walking half a block ahead; I hung back and made myself take my grandfather’s hand. We didn’t look at each other. His hand was warm and dry. His gait was uneven then, a long slow beat on the right, catch-up on the left. I measured my steps to his. It was dark except for the hazy pink cones of light cast by streetlamps. I found his rhythm, and breathed in it. That was the longest conversation we ever had.

  He died before I was really able to converse in sign. I have never seen his handwriting. I once saw his teeth, in a glass, on the bathroom windowsill. Now everything seems like a clue.

  One afternoon, after the last yellow buses had lumbered away from school, I went with my father down to the basement. He sorted among his plethora of keys while we descended t
he stairs, finally jangling out the master as we approached the heavy brown doors to Lexington’s storage room, an impressive if forbidding catacomb of huge proportions. Great sections of the windowless room were fenced into compartments very much resembling penal holding tanks; these enclaves contained spare equipment and ancient records belonging to the different departments. My father unlocked the gate of the largest one. Thin light shone murkily from dangling fixtures, and the pale, wet odor of mildew encouraged us to work quickly.

  Picking my way through cardboard boxes, film projectors, and sheets of particleboard, I nearly tumbled into a familiar figure: our old TTY, donated to the school when our family acquired a newer, portable model. The original stood at waist level, a stout gray metal beast with a keyboard that had clacked and collected oily clumps of dust. My grandmother, when visiting us, would demand an old toothbrush and, with the rapt solicitude of a paleontologist, clean between the keys. She still possessed one of these old models; she called hers the Monster.

  Up ahead, my father stood before the high banks of file cabinets. We suspected them of being wildly out of order; I was prepared to spend the afternoon down here, inhaling particles of mold and sifting through drawers of brittle documents. My father had asked one of the maintenance workers whether we could borrow a work light to prop above the files; he had intended to wait with me only until the light was delivered, but the spirit of the search had cast a spell, and now, in spite of himself, he scanned the rows of cabinets. Hands on hips, shoulders rounded over scooped chest, his posture mirrored his father’s. After a moment he embarked on the middle aisle. I trailed after him doubtfully. There were perhaps forty cabinets, not all of them labeled.

  I can’t say why I sank to my knees just where I did. I suppose my father had paused, thereby blocking me from going further. I suppose that because he was tall, I assumed the task of inspecting the lower drawers. I suppose it was as simple and meaningless as that.