Listen!

by Frances Itani

  “I hope my Katie never worries about me,” said Roma. “Not the way I worried about Mam. I want Katie to have a childhood. I don’t want her to have any guilt about me.”

  “She won’t,” said Liz. “Now, go to sleep, Roma. Get some rest on the train. We survived childhood. You did your best, and so did I. Would we have changed our lives if we’d had the chance? Probably not. I’ll see you in the morning, at the station.”

  Roma said goodnight to Liz and turned out the light in her roomette.

  Chapter Four

  The Language They Used

  The wheels of the train hurried along the tracks. Click-a-clicka, click-a-clicka. Then there was a bump, followed by another. Click-a-clicka started all over again. The same rhythm as before.

  The rhythm reminded Roma of songs she sang to Katie. She loved to sing to her daughter. Lullabies and rhymes and songs of all kinds.

  There was an old woman

  Who lived in a shoe

  and

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

  Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird

  and

  When you wake, you shall have

  All the pretty little horses.

  As a child, Roma had heard none of these.

  Mam did not sing because she had never heard a song. Roma’s father worked away from home most of the time. That’s why Roma learned lullabies and nursery rhymes only after Katie’s birth. She sang them as if they were prizes she and Katie had won.

  Mam, because of her deafness, had no way of knowing songs or rhymes. These had not been part of a deaf child’s life. The earliest language Mam had spoken was with her hands. She read lips, too, and received language through her eyes. Alert and quick, she didn’t miss much, but she could not sing or rhyme. She did know stories, however. Stories she told with her hands.

  Liz and Roma watched the hand-stories and signed back to their mother. Moving hands and fingers filled the air with language. From high chair, crib, and stroller, the girls used their baby hands to speak. They learned two languages: the spoken word and American Sign Language. As they grew older, they spelled out names of people and places in sign language. They used the hand alphabet and became good spellers.

  The house filled with visible language.

  Eyebrows lifted, eyebrows lowered. Faces frowned or grinned or laughed or became serious or sad. Lips moved. Lips were read. With fingers, Roma and Liz wrote words in the air. To get Mam’s attention, Roma and Liz flicked light switches off and on. They tapped Mam’s arm or pulled at her skirt. They stamped their feet on hardwood floors to make the wood vibrate. Their mother felt the vibration and looked their way.

  The sisters pounded their little fists on tables and chairs. They banged at walls. Doors slammed. Everyone was noisy. That’s what their house was like. Noisy.

  Their mother swept the floor, picked up a waste basket, and crashed it down. Mam did not know she was making so much noise. Upstairs, Roma and Liz shouted to each other from room to room. Mam did not know they shouted behind her back. The sisters could be wicked, and Mam wouldn’t know. How could she know, when she was deaf?

  When the girls were in the same room as Mam, their behaviour changed. They did not shout. Their mother was too quick for them. If they talked behind her back, she somehow knew.

  “Roma! What did you say?” Mam would ask. “I know you said something.”

  “Nothing,” Roma lied.

  “Liz? What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Liz lied.

  But Mam knew they had spoken. She could tell by looking at their faces.

  *

  Roma thought about the kitchen in their house. The noisiest place of all. When Roma was a child, Mam banged pots and pans and lids and spoons. Mam taught the girls to bake. On baking days, dishes piled high in the sink. The heat of the oven filled the room. Windows clouded over with steam.

  The stove in the kitchen burned coal in winter, wood in summer. On hot days when they had to cook, they burned a few sticks of wood. Just enough to heat food or cook a fast meal. In winter, the stove had to be kept going all the time.

  Mam had a book called the Cook’s Book. She had written all the recipes by hand. She had been collecting these recipes ever since she’d lived at the School for the Deaf.

  Liz and Roma wore long aprons when they baked. Roma picked up the Cook’s Book and read aloud. “Two yolks eggs beaten up.”

  They laughed and laughed. Mam read their lips and laughed, too. “Let’s beat up the eggs,” Mam said.

  “Stir cookies and drop,” Roma read.

  They laughed some more. Liz pretended to drop cookie dough on the floor.

  Mam had written in the Cook’s Book: Roll in white eggs.

  Did it matter if they cooked with white eggs or egg whites? Mam didn’t seem to care. That was all part of her private written language.

  One day Roma learned to bake a cake. “How many walnuts should I put in?” she asked.

  “Ten cents’ worth,” Mam replied. Roma knew exactly what her mother meant.

  They baked on weekends to prepare dessert for the girls’ school lunches. Roma did more baking after Mam went out to work. A year after Roma’s father died, Mam began to look for a job. She found work at a shirt factory and sewed at a machine all day. At the factory, she did not have to use her voice. She could do the job, even though she was deaf. One other deaf woman worked there, and she and Mam became good friends. The two women ate lunch together and used ASL as their language. By four o’clock every afternoon, Mam arrived home from work.

  At nine years of age, Roma could make lunches for school. She baked cookies and cakes. She heated leftovers and set the table for supper. She knew how to scramble eggs, boil eggs, and fry eggs. Roma was best at making eggs on toast.

  *

  The family had a visible language for sickness during Roma’s childhood. The sickness language started with Mam’s worried face. Then Mam felt Roma’s forehead to check for fever and sent her up to bed.

  Mam banged around the kitchen. When Roma heard footsteps on the stairs, she knew what was coming. Mam carried up a bowl of warm milk sprinkled with pepper. Roma had to drink the milk and pepper because her mother believed this could cure almost anything.

  After Roma drank the last drop, Mam brought out the scrapbook. Looking through the scrapbook was part of being sick. The crisp covers. The slap-slap of paper. Pages stuffed with Christmas cards, old valentines, and birthday cards. Pictures cut from magazines, pasted to the pages. Pictures of animals and food and flowers. Pictures of kings and queens. Pictures of fancy clothes Roma’s family would never have money to buy. Colourful pictures of places they would never see. Looking at the scrapbook was like taking a trip to a different world.

  Mam sat at the edge of the bed, watching over Roma’s shoulder as they turned the pages. Mam remembered pasting every picture. She had begun to fill the pages when she’d lived at the School for the Deaf. Sometimes, a story went with a picture. Mam told these stories with her hands. She had filled the scrapbook with stories from her life as a deaf child. The scrapbook, brought out only when Roma and Liz were sick, became part of the family language.

  Chapter Five

  The Thimble Man

  Liz met Roma at the station when the train pulled in. The two sisters spent the afternoon catching up and preparing food. Liz’s husband and children went out for the evening, and now the women had the place to themselves.

  When Liz’s friends arrived, she introduced them as Jessie and Eve. She explained that her friends belonged to a group called CODA: Children of Deaf Adults. A few months earlier, Liz had contacted CODA in Montreal. She missed Mam, and she wanted to talk to other children of deaf parents. At her first meeting, she had met Jessie and Eve. Roma had known about CODA, but had never joined.

  Now, Roma looked around the cozy dining room. Her sister sat at the head of the table. Jessie worked as a sign language interpreter. Eve was an actor who sometimes worked with deaf children
in a theatre group.

  After the four women had eaten and talked for a while, Liz served dessert. Each of the women had a photo propped next to her plate. They planned to share their stories while having dessert and coffee.

  “Who would like to go first?” Liz asked the others. She looked around the table.

  Roma held up her photo. “I’ll go first,” she said. “My story is about something that took place long ago, but I remember it well.”

  “Am I in the story?” Liz wanted to know.

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” Roma told her sister. “I’ll tell the story exactly the way I remember it.”

  Roma passed her photo around the table.

  “As you can see, there are two adult figures in my photo. Two adults outside, and a child’s small round face inside, looking through a window. Hollyhocks reach up from a narrow garden below the window. The tips of their flowers can be seen from inside the kitchen. I remember the colours, all pinks and whites.

  “I am the child at the window. My mother is one of the adults, and she is standing by the side of our old house. The Manor River is just out of sight.

  “I should explain that Liz and I always called our mother Mam. I’m not sure how that happened. We called her Mam from the time we were babies. Maybe that’s the way our deaf mother said the word Mom. But however this happened, everyone knew her as Mam. Even our father called her Mam.

  “In the photo, Mam is wearing white shorts and white sandals. Her back is to the camera, and her head is tilted. She has just washed her long, black hair. She is holding a hairbrush and trying to dry her hair in the sun. From outside, she is using the window as a mirror. You can see in the reflection that she has a huge smile on her face. I like to think she’s smiling at me. Because I am in the kitchen, sitting on a stool and looking out.

  “I don’t know who is behind the camera. Maybe a friend of Mam’s. Maybe a neighbour who lives in a house along the river. Anyway, someone took the picture on a weekday, when my father was away at work. I know this because, in the picture, I am doing my job.”

  *

  Roma’s story:

  My job was to wait for my baby sister to wake. When I heard Liz wake up, I had to let Mam know. I would do this by making the sign for “baby” through the window. Mam would see me signing, and she would come and lift Liz out of her crib. After that, I would be allowed to go out to play.

  I was four years old when the photo was taken. I know this because Mam wrote my name and the date on the back. If I was four, then Liz was two. Liz still had naps during the daytime, but I did not. Liz had her baby naps in the downstairs bedroom, where Mam had put a crib. This was a small room next to the kitchen. Every day at nap time, Mam gave Liz a baby bottle filled with milk. Liz drank the milk and went to sleep.

  When Liz woke from her nap, she stood in her crib. She picked up her empty baby bottle and threw it at the door frame. In her two-year-old way, she somehow knew that Mam was deaf. She threw the bottle to get Mam’s attention. She aimed it to hit the frame and land outside the bedroom door. That way, Mam would see it bounce. Liz was very smart.

  Mam was smart, too. In those days, baby bottles were made of glass. So the first time Liz threw one, it broke. Mam placed a thick mat on the kitchen floor. After that, when Liz threw a bottle, it bounced off the door frame and landed on the mat. There were no more broken baby bottles after that.

  But the day of this photo, Mam was outside, drying her hair. Inside, I had to sit on a stool by the window and listen for Liz. I’d become tired of waiting for her to throw her baby bottle.

  Through the screen door, I heard someone’s footsteps coming up the front walk. Step, drag. Step, drag. Only one person I knew dragged his foot to make that sound. The thimble man!

  Part of the thimble man can be seen here. He is the second adult in the photo. He looks as if he’s walking into the side of the picture.

  The thimble man had a puffy face and wide shoulders. He had been a soldier during the last war and had been wounded in the leg. He earned his living by selling small items door to door. He sold needles, thread, shiny thimbles, and buttons. He sold ribbons and scarves and combs and hairnets and cards of safety pins. Twice a year, he came to our house.

  The thimble man wore a long, heavy coat in all seasons, even in summer. He opened one side of his coat to display the items he had to sell. He had attached rows of silver thimbles of different sizes to the coat’s lining. Neat rows of buttons lined up beside the thimbles. Rows of needles in small envelopes were tucked into folds of cloth. Coloured scarves hung down. Everything was attached to the lining of the thimble man’s coat.

  Mam sewed all our clothes. Every time the thimble man visited, she bought sewing supplies from him. Sometimes, the thimble man had treats to sell, too. For small girls, he had tiny pins shaped like wishbones. They had sparkles and coloured stones stuck to them. The thimble man had once told me that I could wish on one of his pins. If I owned one, whatever I wished for would come true. Of course, that made me want a wishbone pin. I asked for one for my next birthday. Mam told me she would buy one, but I couldn’t wear it until the day I turned five.

  When I saw the thimble man, I forgot about baby Liz waking up. I slid off the stool and ran out the back door. In the backyard, Mam and the thimble man were making signs to each other. The thimble man did not know sign language, so he made up his own signs. He and Mam laughed at the language they created with their hands.

  We all forgot about Liz in her crib inside the house. The thimble man began to turn in circles. He held out the sides of his coat and began a slow dance. One foot dragged behind the other. With his coat open, he was as wide as two men. The sun sparkled on the wishbone pins, and scarves fluttered inside his coat. I was sure the thimble man was magic. I wanted to dance, too, and I turned circles behind him. We were both dancing outside the back door.

  When I heard Liz, her cry came from far away. Mam dropped coins into the thimble man’s hand. The thimble man closed his magic coat and waved goodbye. Dragging his foot behind him, he started back up the front walk. Step, drag. Step, drag.

  Liz was screaming now, and I had never heard her scream that way before. I pulled at Mam’s arm and made her look at my lips.

  “Mam!” I yelled. “The baby is screaming.”

  Mam could see from my face that something was wrong. She saw the word baby on my lips. She ran into the house, but I ran in a different direction. I ran toward the sound of Liz’s screams. That meant down the path that led to the river. In a moment, Mam was behind me, and then she was in front. We both saw Liz at the same time. Liz was splashing and crying. She had fallen into the river and couldn’t get out.

  Liz must have thrown her baby bottle when she woke up. When no one lifted her out of the crib, she climbed over the side. She walked out the front door and around the side of the house. No one saw her go down the path to the river.

  Mam ran into the river, her white sandals splashing through water. She grabbed Liz and lifted her up and out of the river. Because of the danger, Mam forgot that her hands were full. She’d been holding a thimble, buttons, and the wishbone pin for my birthday. All of these had been bought from the thimble man. Now, they were at the bottom of the river.

  Mam hugged Liz close to her chest and ran back to the house. Liz coughed and choked and spit up water. I ran behind. Liz was safe, and she did not drown. The three of us were all crying—Liz and Mam and I.

  I knew it was my fault that Liz got out the door and went to the river. Mam did not blame me, but I believed it was my fault. I hadn’t stayed on the stool to wait for Liz to wake up. Instead, I’d gone out to greet the thimble man. I had not done my job and listened. Because of this, Liz might have drowned. Because of this, my wishbone pin lay somewhere at the bottom of the river.

  *

  Liz, Jessie, and Eve watched while Roma placed the photo back on the table.

  “Wow. I’m glad I survived,” said Liz.

  “You know,” said Roma, �
�I used to wade along the shallow edge of the river. I wanted to find the wishbone pin. I looked for it even years later, when we were in our teens. But I never found it.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Liz. “Just a little way from shore, the current was strong in that river. The wishbone pin was probably dragged into deeper water the moment it was dropped. It’s probably at the bottom of Lake Ontario now.”

  “Good thing you knew enough to scream,” Roma said. “Or you’d be at the bottom of Lake Ontario, too.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Liz. “I was only two years old. I don’t even remember falling in.”

  “I’ll never forget,” said Roma. “Even though I was only four.”

  “I have heard part of that story before,” Liz told her CODA friends. “Mam never forgave herself for forgetting about me in the crib.”

  “Mam and I were both guilty,” said Roma.

  “Well, you can stop being guilty right now,” said Liz. “The world is full of people who can’t forgive themselves. What good does guilt do? Nothing bad happened, did it?”

  “No. You didn’t drown. But I always believed it was my fault that you fell in.”

  “You were four years old,” said Liz. “What are you talking about? You were a little child, yourself.”

  “Mam relied on me,” Roma said. “She counted on me to tell her when you threw your baby bottle. And the wishbone pin was lost. I never did get one for my fifth birthday.”

  “Oh, the wishbone pin,” said Liz.

  “I know it’s silly. All through childhood, I wondered if I’d find it. I really believed I could make a wish if I had the pin.”

  “What would you have wished for?” Liz asked.

  Roma thought for a moment. “A wish has to be kept secret,” she said. “Anyway, the pin wasn’t the most important part of the story. The important part was about worrying. I always worried about Mam.”

  “I did, too,” said Liz.