Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  When she goes, if she goes, her whole picture of herself will be altered against this new backdrop: a college campus, a place of learning, populated by culturally deaf adults. Her personal history will be recast in relation to theirs; it will intersect with others past and present, fall within a grid of common histories, a scaffold on which she could stand, on which she could put her weight. And it would hold her up.

  The idea is so large and heady it makes her feel suddenly wild to think it. Sofia scrambles after the others, catching up as they head out into the lilting noonday breeze and across the quad. They enter a large, sprawling building, which seems designed for them, expressly tailored to deaf people’s needs. A great section of the second story, up next to the snack bar, has been cut away, creating a kind of wide circular balcony above the pit of a first-floor lounge, so that students can spot each other and converse easily across the levels. Everywhere, sight lines are open. The Lexington group skirts the perimeter of the lounge and enters the campus bookstore; there is just enough time to shop before lunch.

  “We should get that for the school store,” says Sheema, tapping a fingernail on a display case. She and Sofia appraise the merchandise with entrepreneurial interest. Beneath her clicking nail, an assortment of ASL jewelry sparkles on a narrow glass shelf: tiny gold and silver hands molded into the hand shapes for I Love You and Friendship, attached to posts for pierced ears or with little loops soldered on so they can be worn around the neck as charms, or with backings for brooches or tieclips or cufflinks.

  Tamara, standing farther along the counter, breathes on the glass, then wipes the fog with the side of her fist. “Look at these,” she tells them, surveying rows of bookmarks, ink stamps, key chains, all cut with the same ASL hand shapes. Displayed on a lower shelf are flashers that can be attached to a doorbell or telephone ringer, and the latest, sleekest, portable TTYs (or telecommunication devices for the deaf, TDDs, as these trimmer models are properly called). There are travel alarm clocks that vibrate instead of beep and can be slipped beneath a pillow. (A long time ago, the students have heard—the story may be apocryphal, but they like it just the same—deaf people depended on a more organic alarm clock: if they wanted to rise from bed at a particular hour, they simply drank the commensurate amount of water immediately before retiring.) There are even baby criers, which are attached to a crib and trigger a light in the parents’ room when the infant wails. (Not very long ago, deaf parents rigged string from crib slats to their own toes and relied on the transmitted vibrations to know when their babies were stirring.)

  Behind them, one of the six-one-one boys is asking another student to explain something. “What does this say?” he wants to know, holding out a baseball cap and gliding his finger gently across the embroidery above the bill.

  “Gallaudet,” she tells him. Even though it’s a proper noun, the university’s name-sign is uniform with deaf people across the country, a standard part of the ASL lexicon.

  “Ohhh . . .” The student has a large face with an easy, rounded jaw, which now drifts open. He looks at the racks and racks of college sweatshirts, T-shirts, boxer shorts, jackets, sweaters. “All of those say the same thing . . .” He is just now realizing where they are.

  Some of their other classmates have paused outside the store to read the bulletin board: “Hearing Ear Dog Class Beginning”; “Sign Up for English Tutoring Now”; “Used Vibrator on Sale, Cheap.” This last item might raise eyebrows at a hearing college; here, within the context of the environment, it is understood to mean a tactile signaling device. Other classmates are already standing in line at the checkout counter, confident that whatever souvenirs may beckon from gift shops during their forthcoming museum visits, nothing will top what they have found here.

  The Gallaudet bookstore has everything. Besides the jewelry and the hi-tech assistive devices there are the books: books on deaf culture, on sign language (American and international), and on deaf educational and sociological issues; literature by and about deaf people; picture books for deaf children. Posters and bumper stickers carry such slogans as “Deaf people can do anything except hear.” The stock seems thrilling testimony to just how deaf-oriented the campus really is.

  Now the teachers are rounding up the Lex kids and herding them out of the bookstore and upstairs to the snack bar for lunch. Sofia has heard that everyone who works at Gallaudet must know some sign language, and it’s true: the hearing people behind the food line all seem able to use some. The students purchase burgers, pizza, and french fries, pump little swamps of ketchup onto their plates, and find a cluster of tables unoccupied by college students. Over their lunch tables, a couple of mounted television sets broadcast soap operas. Nobody pays them any notice until the commercials come on. Almost all of these bear closed captions, and their white block letters draw gazes upward.

  As the students eat, they busily point out people they know: this one graduated from Lexington two years ago, and this one’s sister is on the basketball team at the American School for the Deaf, in Hartford, and this one was at that party at the international deaf club in Brighton Beach. Sofia even recognizes another Russian immigrant, Eugenia, a young woman who graduated from Lexington a few years ago. Eugenia’s mother is the one who told Sofia’s mother about Lexington. Gallaudet attracts students, professors, and researchers from all over the world, but the community is so intimate that within five minutes of sitting down, Sofia has had three people she knows stop by her table to say hello.

  After lunch, the students pile back into the bus and go dutifully tramping around Washington. Two o’clock is the Capitol building; three o’clock, the Supreme Court; three-thirty, the Library of Congress; four o’clock, the American History Museum; five-thirty, the Lincoln Memorial. At this last stop, while the students clamber up the steps, Janie sits by the Reflecting Pool. The weather has been very fine all day; now, with the sun easing down, the air turns suddenly blue and bracing, the stone steps cool beneath her.

  All day long it has been Janie who has engaged the students, Janie who has most consistently informed and taught, who told them as they advanced on the Capitol that when a green light shines in the dome, it signifies that Congress is working on an issue of great importance; Janie who continued to talk with them when they were stuck in traffic, sharing an old Irish superstition that was part of her childhood, recapitulating details of her involvement in the Deaf President Now movement, dispensing trivia about the workings of the nation’s capital; Janie who pointed out landmarks from the bus. She has been constantly reorienting the students, giving them their bearings. Now, while she sits by the pool, resting her eyes on the coppery water, choppy now with an evening breeze, students come to stand by her.

  “Was it here that Martin Luther King spoke, or at the Jefferson Memorial?” one boy asks.

  Janie points out the spot from which Dr. King made his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Why do you think he spoke here?” she asks the student.

  “Because Lincoln had a role in ending slavery.”

  She nods, satisfied; he has made the connection.

  Other students drift over; they have just come from the Vietnam Memorial, where they saw someone holding a sheet of paper against the wall and drawing on it. “What was he doing?” the students want to know. Janie explains that he must have been making a rubbing of someone’s name—a brother or a father or perhaps a friend who died in the war.

  More students gather on the steps around her. They hug their arms around their waists and position themselves so they can see her sign. They bring her no specific questions, but having spied the congregation, having seen Janie dispensing information, they have wandered over, always hungry for more. Sofia sits on a lower step, holding her hair out of her eyes with one hand and regarding her teacher.

  In class, Janie is drill-sergeant tough. Her signing takes up the entire space in front of the board, where her strong hands illuminate concepts, structuring each one with logic and clarity. Any attempt at side conversations (which
students carry on in blithe silence in many hearing teachers’ classrooms) is thwarted instantly and emphatically, by Janie’s kicking a table leg or slapping her palm on the offending party’s notebook. One moment she is pulling up a chair and sitting among them; the next she has materialized across the room to whip down one of the roll-up maps or indicate a point on the time line that curves around two walls.

  Squinting into the wind, anchoring her hair at the back of her neck, Sofia looks up at Janie, who is signing against the backdrop of all those white steps and pillars, talking about presidents and amendments, looking a bit tired but utterly comfortable and knowledgeable. Once, in Russia, Sofia thought she might grow up to be a seamstress or a factory worker. Then, in America, she began to set her sights on becoming a lawyer. But now, just lately, she has been thinking perhaps she will be a social studies teacher.

  That night, when Sofia lies burrowed inside her sleeping bag in a dorm lounge at MSSD, she thinks of the college that lies so close, somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the hill. She thinks how this environment could belong to her, does belong to her. And her excitement turns to guilt. This time tomorrow she will be back in Rego Park, at her real home. She knows it’s her real home. She knows that. But it dawns on her now, in a bittersweet rush of guilt and relief, that she will not let her family prevent her from going to Gallaudet.

  They will have to let her go. They will have to understand, and let her learn about her cultural family, and trust that she will not forget her biological one. She can love both. It is her right to love both.

  Up here in the dorm lounge, a lamp still burns, but it does not bother Sofia. At her old school in Leningrad, the light switches were outside the bedrooms, and at a certain time each night the dorm matron would sweep down the hallways, aborting conversations as she brought darkness to each room. Now Sofia is dimly aware of mattresses all around her, bathed in light. Like a fleet of rafts, they support her classmates, some floating into sleep, others propped on elbows, still awake, still talking.

  16

  Interpreting

  During the short time that I worked as a freelance interpreter, it got so all I loved every day was the commute: the D train, most mornings, across the East River, the waves looking as if they were hammered out of sheet metal, the barges, the abandoned cars under the highway, the sun pulsing through the girders with such force that I had to lift my head from the pages of my book. Or at night, riding back to Brooklyn wedged between a man in a trenchcoat smelling of snow and pickle and a couple of women speaking Russian, each consecutive uptown bridge arched and lit like angel wings—in these moments alone I felt present, corporeal. The rest of the time I spent submerged in the lives of others, hollowed out so that I could cleanly conduct their messages.

  Those were lonely months—really, I worked solely as a freelancer for only two months, but they have swollen in my memory to consume an immeasurable, nebulous mass of time. I seemed to be always in motion that winter, shuttling by train and bus around the boroughs with my paperback, my crossword puzzle, my appointment book, bound into a kind of requisite solitude by the interpreters’ code of ethics. In scores of rooms I removed my coat, spoke and signed other people’s words for them, put the coat back on, fished for a subway token, and headed to the next job, never having given my name or shaken hands: less a person than an instrument.

  Interpreting was something I had dreamed of doing ever since I had learned there was such a job. When I was small and lived at Lexington, I had relatively little exposure to interpreters. The only professional ones I ever came into contact with were those who appeared infrequently on TV, framed in floating ovals in a corner of the screen. At Lexington, whenever a situation that called for an interpreter arose, a staff member would volunteer to step in informally—usually someone like my father, a hearing person who had grown up with deaf parents in a signing household. Interpreting took the form of incidental asides, and was so unobtrusive as to be unnoticeable.

  In those days, interpreting was still barely recognized as a profession. Although the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) was first proposed in 1964, it did not begin certifying interpreters until 1972. Even then, the idea of treating interpreting as a profession caught on gradually. Until 1972, no official standards or code of ethics had ever existed; few interpreters ever received remuneration for their work, and the quality of service varied dramatically from interpreter to interpreter.

  All of this constituted a grave disservice to deaf people. The lack of professional standards not only led to many incompetent people performing as interpreters, it also helped perpetuate several stereotypes among hearing people, chiefly that sign language could be picked up easily, that it was therefore a simplistic, primitive language, and that deaf people who signed were limited in their ability to comprehend and express abstract thoughts. Never mind that the interpreter may not understand the deaf person’s sophisticated use of ASL; never mind that the interpreter may not be experienced enough as a signer to convey the subtleties of the spoken English message. Almost always, when an interpreter does a poor job, either by voicing a deaf person’s signs in muddled or simplified language or by rendering a hearing person’s speech in unintelligible signs, it is the deaf person who comes off looking a bit slow, a trifle dull in intellect.

  It is no coincidence that RID came into being around the same time that researchers were first lauding ASL as a legitimate language and that deaf people were beginning to view themselves as a minority group with a civil rights agenda. Interpreters play a significant role in how the hearing world perceives deaf people. The professionalization of the field of interpreting translates into increased credibility and respect for deaf individuals as well as their political agenda.

  I neither knew nor cared about any of this when, at age thirteen, I encountered my first live interpreter. It was during a ceremony where my grandfather was to be posthumously honored, along with a few other hall-of-famers, by the Eastern States Athletic Association of the Deaf. In front of the podium, in a straight-backed chair, sat a woman in a silk blouse the color of pine trees. She interpreted the first speaker’s speech into sign language. Her hands were a bit plump, luminous against the shiny green. She had a great mass of hair like dark curly noodles and eyes ringed with lashes like punctuation marks, and everything about her was energetic. She was like a synapse, with impulses firing across her body.

  I could not follow what she said, although I did recognize a few of the signs, nor was I particularly interested in the content of the man’s speech. It was the picture of her sitting there, creating a juncture where two languages converged; it was the dance of white against green, her movements laden with meaning; it was her ability to join, the way she was drawing together all the people in the room, that we each might know exactly the same things as the others.

  For a moment my skin felt taut under a queer kind of pressure and I understood that nothing in the room—not the chandelier nor the sherbet melting in the cup before me nor even the speeches paying tribute to the honorees—was any finer than this act of joining. And as I watched, the image slid in past my intellect and lodged itself somewhere deeper. Like storytelling, that incessant loving rush of explaining and repositioning and telling again, all for the sake of finding something shared, something mutually recognized—so interpreting seemed to me. It seemed a kind of goodness.

  Then something went awry. Perhaps the interpreter was only in training. At any rate, she could not have been very experienced, for although the presenter’s speech was not esoteric or hurried or cluttered with awkward phrasing, and it did not pursue illogical tangents—all potential pitfalls for many good interpreters—she began to fall behind the speaker, and as she did she grew flustered, and as she grew flustered her signs grew stammering and halting. Before long it became clear that she was no longer providing even a rough-hewn interpretation of the speech.

  I felt for her then, as she went from being an instrument of understanding to a mute bloc
k, an impediment responsible for a communication deficit. (The presenter must have been the only one in the room who failed to notice the problem; he proceeded apace, while all the deaf people at the luncheon lost more and more of his speech.) The interpreter glanced about miserably. Her shirt seemed suddenly too bright and lustrous; her eyes, her hair, everything that had enhanced her expressiveness while she was conveying meaning now served only to underline her incompetence.

  My father then exchanged places with her, on some unseen signal, quietly, modestly assuming her seat, picking up threads of the speech with his long blunt fingers. As the interpreter slid into the vacant place beside me at the table, her cheeks were mottled with red; I felt mine burn as well. We watched my father interpret the rest of the speech. With his lanky slouch, his craggy face, his deep-set gray eyes, he appeared far less spectacular than the woman had, as well as far more relaxed, and if no particular art graced his movements, no particular tension afflicted them either. He had grown up in the language, and his signing looked effortless, natural. But I was not misled; I would never be able to lay claim to the language as my father could. Signing, for me, would require practice and effort.

  Next to me, the woman in green sipped icewater and composed herself in a kind of steely embarrassment. Watching her watch my father, I felt humble. I felt a respect for that which I did not know. And I understood—even then, on that day when the desire to become an interpreter first took hold—that there were risks involved in positioning oneself between two languages, as a link between two cultures. I sensed that those risks might extend well beyond embarrassment, and I vowed always to be careful.