Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Now Grania lies stiffly on her back, waiting. But Tress doesn’t move. Grania tries shifting her tied foot and pulls. She feels resistance. Then, two tugs back. She tugs again to be sure.

  She is one tug, Tress is two.

  She rolls on her side and stretches the rope until it is barely taut, just enough so that she can feel Tress at the other end. Now the rope name-signs are clear. Now the two create tug patterns, back and forth—patterns that are meaningless, that make them laugh silently to themselves in the dark.

  Grania does not think about falling into sound. She dreams the softness of rope secured around an ankle—a scarf, a sock, a tie. She is bound to shore, no longer adrift in the dark. She is not afraid. She sleeps a deep and restful sleep.

  Between breakfast and lunch, when the hotel dining room is quiet, Mother walks through the passageway and brings Grania to the kitchen at the back of the house. Mother pours a cup of tea for herself and sets it on the table. There are suds in the cup. Grania wants to tell Mother that suds are lucky. But Mother has heard every one of Mamo’s sayings and will not want to hear them again. Isn’t Mamo Mother’s own mother? This is complicated to think about because it means believing that Mother was once a small girl named Agnes, and she has no picture in her head for that.

  “Watch what I’m saying. It is dangerous not to hear,” Mother says. “Especially when you are outside, away from the house. You can be hurt. I want you to listen.” She cups a hand behind her right ear. Listen.

  She has placed a scarf on the kitchen table, and a wide lid that is used to cover the fry pan.

  “Stand here.” She positions Grania in the middle of the kitchen and picks up the lid and the scarf. “Listen hard. Do you understand? I am going to cover your eyes. I am going to drop this on the floor.” She feigns dropping the lid but does not release it. “Try to hear. Point where you think it lands—front, behind, this side, that side.”

  Grania watches with interest. Mother’s lips are tight, her eyes dark with intent while she folds the scarf to make a narrow band. She has not removed her apron, which is wrapped over her dress like a vest and tied in the middle. The stripes of the apron are as blue as the inside of the speckled pot hanging from a wall hook behind.

  Grania nods. She breathes through her mouth while Mother places the scarf over her eyes and partly over her nose and knots it at the back of her head. She feels hands on her shoulders and she is turned, once, twice, and firmly stopped. Mother’s hands let her know that she is to remain still.

  The floor is covered with spider-cracked linoleum. Grania is wearing long white stockings and lace-up shoes. A quiver of vibration enters the right side of her body. She points right. Mother removes the blindfold.

  “No,” she says. “But it’s not your fault. Bernard came in and slammed the door. You heard the door, that’s good.”

  Bernard looks back as he walks through to the hall. He heads for the heavy curtain draped across the bottom of the stairs. He rolls his eyes and shakes his head, enough so that Grania can see but Mother cannot. He bolts for the stairs and disappears, the movement of the curtain settling behind him. Grania knows that because of Bernard’s bad lung he will be short of breath before he reaches the top. She has seen him upstairs, one hand pressed against his chest, his shoulders rising and falling as he breathes.

  The scarf covers her eyes again, more tightly this time. She tries to open her eyes under the cloth, hating the darkness. Her body sways and recovers. Shoulder blades are poised. There is tingling in her hands, her fingers, her calves. Her feet want to jump. Is Mother in front or beside or behind? Something shudders through her. She points to the left, behind.

  Mother tugs down the blindfold. She is not smiling. “Two times,” she says and holds up two fingers. “I dropped it two times. Back there, and close behind.” She walks to the end of the kitchen and demonstrates where she first dropped the lid. Grania watches it wobble-wobble and settle to stillness on the floor.

  “The second time was good,” Mother’s lips say. “Before that, the noise was too far away. Next time, I’ll use a bigger lid.”

  Mamo walks into the kitchen, one eyebrow raised. The scent of Canada Bouquet sweeps in with her. “What in Sam Sorrow is all the noise?” In the same split second she sees the blindfold around Grania’s neck.

  Mother unties the scarf and waves Grania away. She will not continue while Mamo is in the room. “Find Tress and go outside,” she says. “Go and find Kenan and Orryn, and play.”

  Grania moves towards the screen door but turns and stands in the doorway, trying to see the words that fall from Mamo’s lips.

  “You’re wasting your time, Agnes. If you want to help her, take off her shoes. Let her feel the vibrations through her feet. Send her to special school. Belleville isn’t that far away. It’s small, but it’s a railroad city. It will be easy to get her there and back. The school has been there for more than thirty years—though God knows I’ll miss her if she goes.”

  Mamo does not add that she has been making inquiries, asking around. “She needs to learn to read and write,” she says. “To speak with some of the hand language they teach there. She already uses her hands—her whole body—when she talks to us. She won’t be held back. She’ll learn quickly—you know there’s no one quicker in this family.”

  Mamo’s voice softens as she lays her hand on her daughter’s arm. “Accept her as she is, Aggie. Stop feeling guilty. It isn’t your fault. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want to, you’ll never be able to make the child hear.”

  But Mother has turned away. She bangs the lid back onto the fry pan and twists the scarf between her hands. Mother will make her own decisions about what Grania will hear and where she will go. Mother has been the cause of Grania’s deafness, and she will be the one to help her get some of her hearing back.

  Grania and Tress walk through town, away from the bay. Their friends Kenan and Orryn are not around. When the girls come to the schoolyard they head for the edge of a cluster of maples, where there are two swings. Grania stares at the summer-empty schoolhouse, the one Bernard used to attend, the one Tress goes to now. The one Patrick will attend when he is older. The one Grania would be allowed to go to if the scarlet fever hadn’t stopped her ears from hearing.

  She climbs onto the swing and pumps her feet. If she swings high enough, the leaves of the tree brush her shoulders just before her body sinks down and up again.

  Two boys Grania has never seen before run into the schoolyard and over to the swings; they push at each other while they wait their turn. Tress knows one boy; his father works behind the desk at the hotel called Deseronto House, which is also on Main Street. The boys look up while Grania swings. They shout a word and then they point and run, looking back, laughing as they pelt across the open schoolyard. Grania laughs too, but she is puzzled. She looks to Tress, who has slowed her own swing and now jumps off. Tress is not laughing. Her lips make three words.

  “Run, Graw! Skunk!”

  Grania leaps. The girls run across the yard and collapse beside the boys. Skunk stink is in the air.

  “Skunk!” Grania yells at the boys, but the skunk has already hurried along the edge of the trees and disappeared.

  “Skunk!” she yells again. But she sees that the word has come out wrong. The boys are laughing at her now.

  “Dummy!” the taller boy yells. “Listen to her. She’s a dummy!”

  Grania reads the word from his lips and sees a shout from Tress. The boys run off.

  Tress places her hands on Grania’s shoulders and makes her look at her lips.

  “Skunk.”

  “Skunk!”

  “No.”

  Why is it wrong? She is saying what she sees. She yanks away from Tress’s grip.

  “Don’t give up,” Tress says. “It won’t work if you give up. Sk! Sk!” Tress is scowling.

  “Skunk.”

  “Better.” Tress shrugs. She points after the boys, who are far away now. To make Grani
a feel better she points to the boys again and makes the crazy sign beside her ear—fingers bent, wrist waggling. She heads back towards the swings.

  But Grania wants to stay where she is. She wants to lie on the grass and sleep a long sleep. She has slipped back. She has used what Mamo calls her “weary speech” but she doesn’t care. Not one bit. She feels like yelling out the worst sounds, the difficult, impossible sounds, sk and ch and sh. She feels like mixing them up on purpose. Let Tress be as grumpy as she wants to be. Grania will invent her own language, and no one, not even Tress, will be able to understand or interfere.

  But she needs Tress. Without her, she won’t know what is going on.

  She follows her sister back to the swings and climbs on and pumps her feet. Her shadow swings beneath her, fat-thin, fat-thin, and every word she knows drops away. She allows the words to fall, one by one, and pulls into the place where her silence lies, the place where she is safe. She kicks her feet at the sky.

  “THEN BEGAN A TERRIBLE FIGHT.” Three children at a fence are watching a cowboy who is trying to stay on a bucking horse. The horse’s body makes an arc; its back legs kick straight out behind.

  Grania knows the word fight. A short word that spills into the air with one lip movement. Mamo tells her she pronounces it only too well. They practise the caption until Grania is able to repeat every word correctly.

  Mamo closes the Sunday book for the day. “When the children taunt, fight back,” she says and puts an arm around Grania.

  But what Grania reads from Mamo’s lips is taught.

  When the children taught, fight back.

  Grania can make meaning from any word, right or wrong. Sometimes she carries a sentence in her head for years before she understands her mistake.

  When the children taught, she is going to be ready to fight.

  When Mr. Eaton’s new catalogue arrives by mail from Toronto, the old one may be pillaged for play. Grania and Tress sit on the rag rug, each with a pair of Mamo’s sewing scissors. Carefully, they separate whole pages from the binding. They begin to cut out their family, trimming carefully and closely around necks and chins, elbows and toes. The ladies they prefer are the ones wearing drawers and chemises, or long walking skirts. On these models, other clothing can be fastened once the ladies have been pasted to cardboard. The ladies have tiny waists and bountiful hips that tilt back curvaceously, and this makes them look as if they will fall forward on their correct and smiling faces. The ladies have to be propped, to stand.

  The sisters make tiny nicks in the ladies’ hands. They give them mirrors to gaze into, and broad hats with turned-up rims and feathers that sweep to the side. They dress the ladies in gowns that spill regally around the floor at their feet. If the ladies are travelling ladies, they are draped with opossum capes and fox muffs. Or marten collars that have heads and claws that meet backs and tails when a slit is made in the centre and a lady’s head popped through.

  They give their ladies camisoles with widely cut paper tabs to fit over delicate shoulders; they give them lace trimmings and bows. They provide boots for their feet, tea sets to pour, feather dusters to swish, fans to flutter, and mangles with three rollers so they can wash the family clothes. Because the ladies are forced to stretch out straight, they are tilted onto davenports and given the longest beds to lie upon. They sleep in fits and starts because their eyes are always open wide.

  The ladies are given whole families, unearned and complete. First, there is a baby, tied up in a barrowcoat. Tress says that when she grows up, she plans to have two babies, a boy named Pritchett and a girl named Jane. Next, they cut around girls who wear white underwear and have wardrobes of petticoats, wide-collared dresses and pointed shoes. The girls’ feet are always about to step somewhere. “They are stepping out,” Tress tells Grania.

  In the expanding cutout family, there is sometimes a brother and always a man. The man is chosen from the underwear page, which makes the sisters laugh and laugh. The men on this page look like strongmen from the circus. The stoutest man is buttoned to the chin; he wears long drawers and stands on black pointy toes. The toes are so small and pointy they look as if they won’t hold his weight. But he is easy to dress, in top hat and ample suits. They give him a pipe for his hand, a trunk for a voyage, a long beaver coat, and a ladder to climb should he desire to work outside. They hold the man’s face close to the lady’s, and they make them kiss, a rapid cardboard peck. They lift the tabs and remove the clothes and let the man and lady stare at each other in their underwear. The man is always known as Oscar. The lady is never given a name.

  Sometimes Oscar doesn’t listen to his lady. To teach Oscar a lesson, the lady goes travelling by herself. She is given a Saratoga trunk and a cabin bag for her trip. When Oscar speaks to the children, it is to tell them to eat with their mouths closed and to have good manners. The children, especially the girls, pay attention but they never have ears. Nor do the ladies. Not Grania’s ladies. Tress doesn’t care if an ear is showing but Grania chooses girls and ladies whose rolls or puffs of hair cover their ears. If their hair is swept high, or bunched on top so that tiny bits of earlobe are showing, Grania rejects them. Her girls and ladies do not need ears. They can manage perfectly well without.

  “Mother,” she calls softly. “Mother.”

  She repeats the word in a flattened way, hoping that the voice coming out of her is not too urgent, hoping that it will bring Mother, without anger or impatience, to her side.

  Grania is hot; her hair is stuck to her temples. Her limbs ache; her throat hurts.

  “Mother.” A staccato call, a persistent code telegraphed through the dark.

  Tress appears by the side of the bed. “What’s the matter?” She makes their private sign, palms up. She’s squinting through the shadows. “It’s late.”

  “I’m sick. I want Mother.”

  “You’re not calling loud enough. She’ll never hear.” Tress opens her mouth and hollers, “Mo-ther! Graw needs you!”

  But it is not Mother who comes, but Mamo. Mother is at the hotel, making dough for tomorrow’s chicken pot pies. Work at the hotel is never finished. It is Mamo who hears the call.

  Mamo removes the gown from Grania’s body. Washes and soothes; brings down the fever; tucks back the red hair and blows warm breath into Grania’s ear. She crosses the room and holds a hand to Tress’s forehead, but Tress is cool and fast asleep. It is Grania who succumbs to colds or La Grippe when the germs are going around. The scarlet fever that made her deaf seems to have weakened her, made her vulnerable to illness. Grania and Bernard are the two to be watched. Bernard, seventeen now, was born with the bad lung. The other two, Tress and Patrick—their father says—are as strong as two oxen in a yoke. Tress, now nine, inherited the high forehead, the dark eyes and dark brown hair of her mother, along with her mother’s strength.

  Mamo thinks of Agnes as a young girl—a dark-eyed girl who ran on her toes before she walked, who delighted in play and expressed herself in laughter. Her father’s girl. His child of joy, their firstborn. But weeks after the family sailed away from Ireland, Agnes was forced to watch her father’s wrapped body slide into the sea. Strong and healthy when they left Ireland, he succumbed to fever on the ship, a fever that hopped like a deathly flea from one sleeping person to the next in the open quarters below. The sheet was wrapped round and round him; the crew stood in silence to one side of his body and remained there while a group of women Mamo scarcely knew wailed and prayed on the other. They faced the silent men as if wailing would hold the crew responsible for the poor food and the lack of fresh air below, and the shortage of water.

  Mamo and Agnes stood together, and the sea mist wet their hair, and neither uttered a sound. Their hands rested on the damp shoulders of the three younger children. Mamo clutched the small wooden cross that had belonged to her husband, and after the body disappeared beneath the waves of the dark sea, she went below and placed the cross in the O’Shaughnessy trunk, and there it has stayed ever since.

/>   She had drawn strength from her eldest daughter that day. And after that, responsibility fell to Agnes, more responsibility than should ever have been pressed on a young girl. Mamo knew this, but had little choice when she needed help with the younger three. There was another journey to face over land, after they left the ship, and few prospects at the end of it—except for a cousin Mamo had in Mystic. Any hope they were able to muster had been tied up in the existence of that one cousin.

  But Agnes had missed her father. Mamo could scarcely grieve, herself, because she was always aware of the wretched, unuttered sorrow of her eldest daughter. Agnes had begged a scrap of black material from a widow on the ship and she stretched and flattened it and tied it around her neck, a ragged band that she refused to remove. Her eyes dulled; her face became set in some fixed memory or promise of her own. If she wept, she wept away from Mamo’s view. And then, one year later to the day, she untied the black rag from her neck and burned it, and ended the mourning for her father. But she was no longer given to laughter. Never the way she had been, as a child.