Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  He has packed up his dorm room bit by bit, removing small loads to the Bronx via subway every Friday for some weeks now. The last items he will clear out after graduation, when he says goodbye to the staff. He has watched a tree outside his dorm window grow choked with rosy buds; these will blossom after he has gone.

  Graduation day brings rain and an odd chill, then turns muggy in late evening. The dinner before the ceremony is served under the flat fluorescent lights and air conditioning of the big cafeteria. Girls in sleeveless dresses show goose-flesh; boys lend their sport coats. They sit close together, the large graduating class and members of the faculty wedged tightly enough to impinge on signing, except that no one lets this happen; they rearrange place settings and push back chairs in order to chatter freely up and down the length of the tables, energy crackling from hand to eye. They bite their nails and lips. Of course they are nervous.

  James wears a white sport shirt, a dark, narrow tie. Tonight’s supper is a strangely formal conclusion after all those shared meals up in the dorm. Just the other night, he filled a plate in the old familiar kitchen, scooping rice and peas and chicken off the stove and joining two other students at the big table in the next room, all of it as routine and unremarkable as if he would go on eating dinner there forever.

  Pat Penn cooks the nightly meals, and often sits with them during dinner, her full white apron straining across her comfortable girth. Pat has a son who reminds her of James; James thinks of Pat as a second mother. Upon these impressions they have constructed a relationship that allows them to take special liberties with each other.

  “Where were you yesterday?” she commenced the other night, badgering James with formidable devotion.

  “Home,” James answered, using speech, his eyes mischievously alert. He set his fork down and waited eagerly for her reaction. The two other students peered over their corn on the cob, expectant, amused.

  “Why?” Pat snapped, moving her lips with concentrated purpose, her broad features fixed in a simulacrum of severity. She knows few signs but gestures widely to illustrate her points.

  “I was sleeping.” James answered her queries with a pretense of jaunty insolence but could not hide the delight with which he anticipated her retorts. He would not miss a moment of the woman’s chiding; on the contrary, he seemed ravenous for it, his eyes dancing with naked gratification.

  “Why?” Pat continued.

  “I went out Saturday, woke up next day with a cold.”

  “That was Saturday. Why were you out yesterday?”

  James laughed helplessly; Pat, the more experienced sparrer, concealed her smile and didn’t let up.

  “What did you do Sunday?”

  James reestablished his facade. “Slept.”

  “So why weren’t you here yesterday?”

  “I told you, I was sick.” He demonstrated with a sneeze.

  Pat eyed him until he squirmed. “You think I just got off the boat yesterday,” she said with a snort.

  “What?”

  She repeated herself, employing more emphatic gestures.

  “Water?” ventured James, frowning. Pat tried again, but James was unfamiliar with the English expression, and the literal meaning made no sense. He assumed he was reading her lips incorrectly. “Forget it, I don’t understand.”

  Pat would not relent. She stuck out her chin and challenged him further. “What are you going to do when you get to college?”

  “No problem,” said James, very cavalier. Then, seeing that he had gotten to her, he milked it. “No problem. College is different from high school. Don’t worry about it.”

  For a moment it appeared that they had reached a stalemate. Then Pat played her trump. She lowered one lid in a sultry wink and blew him a kiss; James fell apart laughing, completely undone.

  For two years Pat cooked him fried chicken and biscuits and collards, and, more important, badgered him and mothered him and understood his speech. Those dinners in the dorm are now over, and James will probably not find another Pat at Camden County College. He will have to live in an apartment, not a dorm, and fix his own suppers, and rouse himself for classes in the morning.

  James has performed a delicate balancing act. Right up until the end he has cut school, procrastinated, relied on the nagging of Pat and other staff members. He charmed his way into their good graces when he first came to Lexington, and now he has charmed himself right out of their reach.

  In the big cafeteria, the graduation dinner is over. James scrapes back his chair from the table. The seniors are all rising from their seats; the time has come for caps and gowns.

  Upstairs, in the lobby of the auditorium, the graduates mill around, slow to get in line. An audiologist comes down the hall, searching through the thicket of blue-and-white gowns. “Where’s James Taylor?” she asks no one in particular. “If anyone sees him, tell him he lost his hearing aid and I have it.”

  Parents and grandparents and siblings and friends pack the auditorium and keep on coming. Faculty ushers are carting more folding chairs into the huge room, setting up extra rows.

  James takes his place in line. A couple of cafeteria workers wheel carts of juice and cookies into the gym for the reception that will follow the ceremony; they shake his hand as they go by. A dorm worker slaps his back and shakes his hand. Someone passes him his missing hearing aid; he twists it into his ear. A gowned teacher paces the line, examining mortarboards and tassels. James switches his tassel to match hers, then puffs out his chest for inspection, his stance so earnest that the teacher stops to giggle. She sets him straight: “I already graduated! Mine’s on the left! Have you graduated yet?”

  When at last all the tassels are properly aligned, the lights inside the auditorium dim. Teachers cue the students that “Pomp and Circumstance” has started. They file through the doorway, which is trimmed with baby’s-breath and greens, march down the aisle, and fill the bleachers onstage. James sits in the highest row, looking regal in his sapphire gown, sage in his gilt-framed glasses. Somewhere in the darkness of the house sits his family: father, mother, mother’s boyfriend, three sisters, cousin, two baby nieces. He knew he’d get the extra tickets somehow.

  It is not enough to say that James has charmed his way through. Charm alone cannot account for the fact that he is graduating. Students come and go through these doors; some are able to receive help, some are not. Nor can James’s achievements be credited to the special attentions given to him because of his deafness. His deafness is neither a talisman nor a curse, but something at once more prosaic and profound: an aspect of himself.

  All around him on the bleachers sit classmates whose personal histories are mapped by their own struggles. Along lines of circumstance and lines of will, they have each navigated an individual path to this day. Some might look at these bleachers and see only deaf teenagers, set apart, united and dignified by the special struggles of deafness. But they are firmly linked to the others, those who sit in darkness just beyond the apron of the stage, an entire audience of lives mapped by individual struggles: hearing families, deaf families, teachers, ushers, interpreters, students. Although James cannot see or hear them, he senses their presence, their bodies and breath, and the occasional flashbulb popping blue in the corner of his eye.

  When it comes time for the students to receive their diplomas, they rise as one but approach the dais individually, where they shake hands, kiss cheeks, and accept the documents cased in leatherette. Crossing center stage on the way back to the bleachers, many of them mug or pose or sign messages into the audience: “Thank you all . . . I love you, Mom and Dad . . . See, Ma? I told you I’d graduate.” One student kneels, ducks his head, and points to the flat of his mortarboard, where he has used scraps of masking tape to spell I LUV LEX.

  James goes next to last. He does not sign a message; the members of his family do not know sign language. He lifts his diploma high, the sleeve of his gown billowing down around his armpit, and executes a crisp bow. As he is straightening, a
flashbulb goes off, and he spots his sisters, holding their babies in the air and cheering. The audience immediately goes black again, but now James knows just where his family is, and he smiles for a moment longer in that direction, as though he can really see them.

  The last speaker of the evening, a hearing man, talks about deaf pride. “One of the wonderful things about any great social movement,” he says, “is that we are all going to benefit from it.” James watches the interpreter nearest him. Another is signing for the adults on the dais across the stage, a third for members of the audience. On waves of light and waves of sound, the message is sent forth to each person in the room, and there is comfort in the fact that it is meant for them all. The signs and words weave a kind of spell joining two houses, two families.

  Later tonight, after the general reception in the gym, the dorm staff will throw James a private party. He knows that they have gotten him a sheet cake that says “Congratulations James” in yellow icing, and that the evening will end with all the Taylors going upstairs, where they will meet Pat and the other staff members and students, and everyone will have some cake. No one could question James’s riches tonight: for the first time, both of his families under one roof.

  Acknowledgments

  I am very grateful to all of the people at Lexington whose generosity, patience, expertise, and trust made this book possible, especially Sofia Normatov and James Taylor and their families, teachers, and friends; also Barbara Robinson, and Pat McCormac (for the blueprints and treacle).

  I would also like to thank Sam Freedman, Barney Karpfinger, Betsy Lerner, David Krajicek, Jim Evers, the Rochester Bureau, Dake Ackley, Reba, Andy, Michael, my father, and especially my mother, Sue.

  About the Author

  LEAH HAGER COHEN earned a B.A. in fiction writing at Hampshire College and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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