Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  She never asked for help. Sam and Fannie were able to support their family without ever receiving financial assistance from public agencies or hearing relatives. Of course, the hearing relatives still felt entitled to offer bountiful unsolicited advice, especially in regard to the boys. The extent of their interference was often patronizing and hurtful. Fannie’s mothering, despite its keen force and great singleness of purpose, was never enough for them; they looked askance at the notion of a deaf woman rearing children. When Max contracted polio at age twelve, one of Sam’s sisters decided that Fannie had caused it and flatly informed her, “You didn’t care for him satisfactorily.”

  In fact, the relatives had passed judgment long before, appropriating Fannie’s right to motherhood before Max was even born. Recently, I asked my grandmother how she had named her sons. She had come north for a visit; my father and I had just picked her up at La Guardia Airport, and we were heading up the Sprain Brook Parkway toward Nyack. I sat with her in the back seat, where she supplied me with endless tough caramels from her minty-smelling pocketbook, extending a palm for the wrapper each time I accepted another.

  When I asked the question, she tilted her head at me, the soft folds of her face meeting in wary confusion. I signed the question to her again, rephrasing it, looking her full in the face so she could read my lips at the same time. “How did you think of their names, Max and Oscar? How did you choose them?”

  I sensed my father listening from the driver’s seat. He had never heard the story either.

  Hundreds of skinny bare trees rushed by outside the car windows before she answered. “The relatives,” she said at last, waving her hand in uneasy dismissal. “Grandpa’s family, they took care of it.”

  It took a moment for the meaning of her broad, bluntly formed syllables to sink in. As a young deaf woman, she had been judged unfit, incapable even of naming her own children.

  Living in Florida, Fannie has her routines, her daily markers and acquaintances. Walking to the Diplomat Mall down the street, she always passes somebody she knows: that young man with the big Adam’s apple and the sunglasses, that sweet Russian lady with all the purple veins, that rich Canadian couple who come every winter. They mouth large, voiceless greetings at her, and if the sun is not in her eyes, making lip reading impossible, she stops for a brief chat. At the mall she visits the kosher meat market, where they know her, gets a free cholesterol check from a freckled nurse at a folding table, and buys a cup of coffee at the food court, where she slips a fistful of marmalade, cream, and sugar packets into her purse.

  When I go to visit, my grandmother treats me to everything. We set out for the Aventura Mall, and she has all the change for the bus counted out (forty cents for senior citizens, eighty for me) and ready in her fist before we leave the apartment. The bus stops right outside her building and is crowded with retired people. We find seats near a man wearing a brown baseball cap on which is printed “OLD? My toupee is turning gray.” We drive by a series of pleasant beachfront villas; my grandmother appraises them with a stem and eager eye, informing me that mafiosi live there. She rakes over such visual details—her own form of eavesdropping, like a magpie scavenging for glitter among trash.

  Today she is consumed as well by the tremendous responsibility of looking after me. She frets over my bare shoulders on the air-conditioned bus, fishes around in her purse for some tissues, and tries to arrange these on my person like disposable shawls until I tell her to cut it out. She outlines the various bus routes for me with the solemnity of a general mapping maneuvers for his troops. She makes me travel to the front of the bus to get her a schedule, in case it has changed. Like a prudent tourist venturing out in a country where she does not speak the native language, she takes pains to equip herself with information beforehand.

  At the mall, she leads us to the French Bakery Café, a bustling cafeteria-style restaurant. We get hard rolls and pour our own coffee. She points to the pot with the orange handle: decaffeinated. “Deaf or regular?” she asks, signing.

  I frown and shake my head.

  “You get it? D-E-C-A-F. Deaf.”

  Now I catch on and laugh at her sign-pun.

  “That’s what we call it. Deaf coffee. You want regular?”

  The cashier, a young woman with black hair to her waist, recognizes my grandmother and greets her warmly. My grandmother likes to frequent the same places over and over; less effort is required in places where people already know her, know she is deaf. She knows the names of all her shops and refers to them affectionately, as if naming old friends: K-mart, Phar-Mor, Publix, Drug World. There, within the cool embrace of the automatic doors, among the orderly shelves of familiar products, she is never a stranger.

  She has friends in Florida, the ones she meets on Tuesdays, when local deaf people gather in a nearby church basement to win or lose a couple of dollars playing cards, and the old friends who have also migrated from the Bronx. Those who have cars sometimes give her rides to the deaf club that meets every other Saturday in Broward County, or drive her out to Rascal’s Delicatessen, a large kosher restaurant where 90 percent of the patrons seem to be fellow expatriates from the Bronx. Over fish and potatoes, they reminisce about their deceased friends and the days of the Union League, and share news about the new state telephone relay service and which television station has the best record for closed captioning and how to fill out Medicare and tax forms.

  Without any embarrassment or shame, my grandmother might ask for help in figuring out a bill or a notice from her building manager. Among deaf people, it is a cultural tradition to ask for and offer assistance with the ciphers of the hearing world. These evenings serve not only as social occasions but as vital exchanges of information. Afterward, my grandmother returns to her apartment alone, her pocketbook bulging with leftover dinner rolls wrapped in a paper napkin.

  Most evenings she stays home. She likes to lie on top of the bedsheets, catching an evening breeze through the screen window and watching a television show called That’s My Dog. The television in her bedroom is not hooked up to a decoder, but That’s My Dog isn’t closed-captioned anyway. It’s a game show on which the contestants are dogs. The format never varies; each night two dogs vie for the championship by competing in a maze, an obstacle course, and a talent portion. Very little language is necessary to follow the program; in fact, my grandmother’s viewing is probably enhanced by being deprived of the host’s patter. The program’s appeal is reminiscent of the physical slapstick I remember my grandfather enjoying on Knox Place. My grandmother tunes in faithfully; it makes her laugh out loud.

  On Wednesday and Friday mornings at ten o’clock she walks three blocks down Hallendale Beach Boulevard to the Greater Hallendale Adult Day Care Center. Against her deepest principles—all her life she has struggled not to be taken advantage of; never would she have dreamed of working for strangers without compensation—she has taken a volunteer job. Sometimes she pretends to have accepted the position naively and puts on an act of haggling with the director for a salary, as though she has yet to reconcile this alien generosity with her more exacting nature. The director, a large, pale-haired woman whose brusqueness has won my grandmother’s approval, just laughs. “Faye is wonderful, a great help,” she tells me. My grandmother leans in to read her lips, then blushes and tries not to look very pleased.

  My grandmother’s job is preparing lunch for the people at the center, many of whom have Alzheimer’s disease. She clips her nametag to the sleeve of her purple sweatshirt, pulls a hairnet over her bluntly cropped, straw-colored hair, and stretches on a pair of plastic gloves. The kitchen is small and bright and very clean. She consults a list to see how many people are eating lunch today and who gets a no-sodium or no-dairy meal, and then she distributes Styrofoam trays across the orange countertops and separates paper napkins and sets out fruit cups and spreads margarine on bread and starts brewing the coffee for herself and Hazra.

  Hazra is the full-time salaried worker. On Wednesdays and Frid
ays she and my grandmother are partners. Hazra is from the West Indies, about half my grandmother’s age but her equal in assiduousness. When my grandmother develops a more efficient method of dressing the individual salad cups—she snips open two little packets at once and squeezes them together to dress three salads in one shot—she shares this technique with Hazra, who is duly impressed. When they break for coffee, they commiserate heartily over the cheap trinkets they drew at the holiday grab bag—a plastic honey bear and a vial of ocean-scented toilet water called Ebb Tide—and agree that the gifts they contributed were of superior quality. They discuss their children, their health, their mutual passion for gambling and for the flea market held every weekend at the nearby greyhound track. My grandmother has taught Hazra the signs for coffee, milk, good, and thank you, but for conversational purposes she adapts to Hazra’s language.

  The two women look out from time to time at the activities going on in the main room. In the morning there is exercise. Twenty program participants sit slumped in their chairs; they look vacant, ethereal, barely there. The group leader calls out to them: Gussie, Bella, Jules, Doc! Revolve your ankles, lift your arms! Later she plays the piano while they sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Listen to the Mockingbird,” their bloodless voices ascending from strangely slack mouths. Here and there a narrow stalk ending in fingers jerks a rattle or a bell, and once a birdlike woman with harsh spots of rouge (the one my grandmother claims is the widow of a Mafia don) gets to her feet and begins to conduct, startlingly imperious in her kelly green suit.

  In the afternoon a young man arrives to lead “adult education,” which turns out to be current events. He sits with the participants, their chairs in a horseshoe around him, and with great animation paraphrases newspaper articles into a microphone. The participants either do or do not listen; it is impossible to tell. A sign on the wall offers the reminder that THIS CITY IS HALLENDALE. THE WEATHER IS CLOUDY. THE YEAR IS 1992.

  My grandmother and Hazra peek out philosophically from the kitchen. They inspect the infirm with an almost brutal detachment. My grandmother projects the unsentimental curiosity of a child watching a beetle that has tipped onto its brittle back and lies flailing its useless legs.

  The program participants at the Greater Hallendale Adult Day Care Center are all people who have lost crucial bits of information, the most basic details of their lives. The program here varies almost not at all from day to day, continuity being extremely important. The threads that bind these people to their own histories have worn thin, unraveled, snapped. The effects are evident in their gossamer bodies, their glassy eyes. Repetition and routine are their lifeblood now, the sap that keeps them going in the absence of memory.

  My grandmother too is missing crucial pieces from her own life: details that she never had the opportunity to overhear, experiences that she, as a deaf person, was spared or denied. In their absence, she has created a web of daily markers. Her pilfered marmalade and sugar packets, her ironing, her television shows, her bus routes, her volunteer work, her Tuesday card games—she tends to these fastidiously.

  But if she makes any association between herself and the adult day care participants, it is not a conscious one. She aligns herself with Hazra, this younger, hearing woman, her able and savvy kitchen partner. Sucking their teeth, they pass clinical gazes over the disabled ones in the main room. Then they shake their heads at each other and go back to work.

  10

  Stupid English

  It is too cold for grammar. January is not such a good month for parts of speech; this is the message clearly emanating from the students in Sofia’s English class as they enter the room and spy the forecast on the board: GRAMMAR REVIEW. Punchy, frenetic, they waste as much time as possible before Liz Wolter can begin the morning lesson. Chris rattles his boxes of peanut M & M’s, which he has been toting around in a cardboard satchel as part of a fundraiser for the Junior National Association of the Deaf. Juanita buys a box and pries it open with her short, narrow fingers, promptly setting loose an avalanche of candies across the table. Tamara rolls a bottle of white nail polish to Sofia, then asks to borrow lip gloss from Patti, who proceeds to search vigorously through her blue gym bag. Rushes of air pour with a hot congested sound from the heating unit under the windows, and sunlight prints brassy diamonds high on the wall.

  This is the top-level junior English section; these are the best students in their class. In a hearing school, they would be the ones most likely to enjoy English, the ones for whom it ought to cause the least amount of grief. But at Lexington, even among the brightest students, English remains to some degree unnatural, like foreign territory. If literature inhabits the most accessible region of this territory, if the language barrier is transcended by the animation of stories and drama, then grammar, it could be said, lies frozen in the nether regions, arbitrary and inscrutable.

  Sofia’s first exposure to English occurred less than three years ago; that she qualifies for placement in the top-level class signifies her great knack for languages. But the fact that she is grouped with classmates who are all American-born is probably at least as much an indication that most deaf students approach English as a second language as it is of her particular talent. And successful though she has been, it has not come easily; it was English class that once drove Sofia, usually so even-tempered, to dash her pencil at the chalkboard during a lesson and wail, “This is a stupid language!”

  Still, the students in this particular class can handle grammar lessons more readily than most; they have even requested them, asking Liz to administer periodic doses of grammar’s crazy rules. Naturally, whenever she honors their wish they automatically disown it, mounting great displays, veritable pageants, of resistance. Even now, sailing M & M’s and tubes of lip gloss across the table, they maintain a steady visual murmur against which the teacher must compete for their attention. Unruffled, Liz takes her seat at the doughnut-shaped table and zeroes in on Patti, directly to her right.

  Patti is a model of preoccupation. Having reached one hand around the back of her head, she is expertly palpating her ponytail (which has been growing progressively lighter in shade over the past several weeks; today it is the color of burnt taffy). Finding it still damp at the core, she removes her shiny black scrunchie and shakes the hair free over her shoulders, that it might dry more quickly. Liz taps her fingers gently on the table before her.

  “Patti, are you dreaming? Are you here?” she signs.

  Liz is one of the better signers among the hearing teachers at Lexington. Both her speech and her signs are clear and precise; she fits them together like the teeth of a zipper. She knows that English is her students’ most difficult subject and takes nothing for granted, answering every question in the same judicious tones. Taped to the board behind her hangs a list of vocabulary words from her freshman class: “Mustache—hair above the lips (men); Twang—sound from a bullet; Saliva—spit, the water in your mouth; Squeezing—hold very tightly (maybe a hug or maybe to make orange juice); Probably—maybe will; Tears—water from crying; Cinnamon—brown spice, sweet (eat with rice?).”

  “Do you have any work for me?” Liz queries.

  Patti, forever late with assignments, chews her lip and smiles sorrowfully.

  “Do you have the book?” presses Liz.

  Patti has still not returned The Friends, the novel they were working on before the holiday. Now she purses her lips and continues shaking her head.

  “Not even one little lightweight paperback book? Boooo!” Liz fingerspells the exclamation on both hands for emphasis, her lips puckering into a comically long tube. Patti laughs and tries to look penitent at the same time. Dispassionately, Liz registers a mark in her grade book. Then she looks up, full of purpose, at the rest of the class. The students cease their antics.

  “What do you remember about grammar?” Liz begins without preamble. She has a wonderful poker face, useful for eliciting sobriety; her eyes, pale and ingenuous, gaze from beneath hay-colored
bangs that fall as evenly as the calibrations on a ruler. Under the combined influence of their teacher’s manner and the subject at hand, the students become grave, focused.

  “Pronouns,” offers Sofia, unwittingly trilling the r in her Russian warble as she fingerspells the word.

  Liz stands and writes it on the board.

  “Adverbs and adjectives,” contributes Chris, managing to flip the letters off his long, knuckley fingers in such a way that they appear manly, virile.

  Liz adds these.

  “Nouns, verbs.” This from Sofia again.

  Liz writes, then pauses. A teacherly wrinkle forms between her brows. “What else? Nothing else?”

  “That’s enough,” maintains Juanita sincerely.

  Liz tucks in her lips to hide her amusement. “Okay. What are some pronouns?”

  As the students dictate haphazardly, Liz distributes their examples in columns: first person, second person, third person. The columns grow long warped tails as she crams them full of words. Each time the students think they are finished, Liz coaxes a few more examples, and they trickle forth until the board is cluttered with a confusing, monotonous inventory: I, me, we, you, they, them, he, she, it, her, him, mine, hers, his, their, its, your, our, those, these, who, whom, whose, that, this. The students wait skeptically for meaning to emerge.

  Now Liz switches to pure ASL. She makes the sign for a girl standing off to her right and for a boy off to her left, and then she shows the two figures coming together and kissing, rather sweetly. Her students smile. “Okay, how would I say that in English?”

  “They kissed,” suggests Sofia, speaking and using signed English.