Train Go Sorry Page 4

  Marcy Rosenbaum became a teacher of the deaf in the days of oral supremacy. Like Margie Weissman, she believes in speech and auditory training in the classroom. She is convinced that oral communication is the route to success, and it bothers her that so much attention has lately been directed to sign language and deaf pride. She agrees that these things should be given a place at Lexington, but not to the detriment of teaching English literacy, or, as she puts it, advancing the goal of “approaching the hearing population.”

  A half-hour before lunch, Marcy gives her students free time. They gravitate to the board, vying for a piece of chalk. The beanbags have given rise to a discussion about beans, only no one can think of a word for bean and they all have different signs for it. Francisco and Angel each manipulate chalk over a patch of board, drawing pinto beans and lima beans, snap beans and kidney beans, and this triggers in Jerry the memory of a French word, HARICOT, and Miguel comes up with FRIJOLES. Then Angel acts out peeling and crying, and Francisco triumphantly scrawls OINON on the board, and Jose knows the sign for it: a knuckle twisted at the eye. Chalk clicks furiously as the clock ticks on toward lunch. This is their vehicle; with a piece of chalk they can make themselves heard, and they continue practicing the art of conversation among themselves until the bell rings.

  Sofia and her friends come out of Pat and Joe’s, biting gingerly into their ice cream, and cross Thirty-first Avenue to join the milling crowds of Lexington kids waiting for the public bus. With their student passes, the mile to the Roosevelt Avenue subway is a free ride. The sky hangs low and white, like cotton batting. Leaves in sodden heaps clog the gutters. The afternoon has turned damp and cold; the ice cream thrills dizzily through their teeth. Three stooped women wearing raincoats and clutching shopping bags wait for the bus as well. They eye the signing students with wary curiosity.

  Across Seventy-fifth Street, a crotchety homeowner steps out on his veranda to glare at a cluster of Lexington students chatting on the street comer. “Move along!” he tells them, padding halfway down his steps in worn leather slippers. “Don’t stand there!” The students regard him blandly, watch his lips flap unintelligibly and his face grow livid. After a moment they lose interest and resume their conversation.

  Sofia feels rain on her face. She glances at the sky, which seems to have sunk even lower, and peers along the avenue for the bus. Then she is caught up again in the activity and talk, all the movements boiling up around her as students relate opinions and gossip while their audiences press close and jockey for clear sight lines. The signing is fast and spicy and physical, with no apologies to the three women in raincoats or the man across the street. One of the students wears a T-shirt he bought at the school store; across the chest it reads “Deaf Pride.”

  When Sofia first came to Lexington, she didn’t know her transition would be two-tiered. She managed to speed out of the foreign language transition class in only eight months, substantially less than the average duration of three years. By September 1990 she was an ebullient fledgling American, eager to merge with the rest of the high school sophomore class. And it was here that she encountered the second tier, the part that now allows her to stand boldly on the corner, blinking her lashes against the spattering rain, signing with friends in plain view of the world.

  Here she encountered the deaf studies class. The course comprised a variety of subjects, from the history and grammar of ASL to the physiology of the inner ear, from technological developments in devices for the deaf to the students’ personal identities as members of the deaf community. In Russia there had been nothing like it—no talk of deaf studies, deaf culture, deaf pride.

  The teacher, Donald Galloway, had created the course at Lexington only four years earlier. He had a wide-open pink face and a ready, gurgling laugh. He was the first deaf teacher Sofia had ever had. He asked the students to keep journals.

  Sofia bought a wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. In this journal, with the involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language, she recorded her explorations of deafness. Here, in this slim turquoise book, remnants of her journey into herself are preserved. “Who am I?” reads her final entry.

  I found out that who I am.

  I am Deaf and Jewish girl.

  I learned a lot about deaf culture and deaf’s language. Before Deaf Studies I was negative that I am Deaf because I grew up in Russia. In Russia for deaf people didn’t have ability to successful of their goal. Also no technology for Deaf people. That why I thought always I was negative.

  After Deaf Studies I learned a lot. In U.S.A. had tty, closed captioned and technology for deaf. Many deaf people has ability to be successful their goal or dream. Now, I am proud of me and everybody who are deaf. Also has club, college, universitet and good school, community for Deaf. I can do anything what I want.

  My favorite issue or sentense:

  “Deaf can do it except hear.”

  On the corner of Thirty-first Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, the autumn rain is falling in earnest, and the students lift the backs of their jackets up over their heads like so many turtles. The rain is cold. It strikes an old bed frame and box spring that have been dragged to the curb for removal, drenches mashed cigarette boxes, and twists, oily, into the gutter. Sofia remembers the warm, pungent rains of Samarkand, her first home.

  She is keeping them straight, her separate lives, as she moves between countries, as she moves between her hearing family and her deaf community. She is piecing them together from what has been available, from what she can gather: a family photograph in which she does not appear, the five American spellings of her name, the stories she has written in her turquoise notebook.

  As cool water mats her hair and trickles down her socks, she huddles with the others, glad to be in America amid the strong deaf. “I miss my Samarkand rain,” she signs to a friend, but her smile is not wistful. Just now, down the avenue, the bus is coming into view.

  3

  Prince Charming

  He wears his name in gold block letters pierced through his left ear, just beneath the hearing aid. His name-sign, thumb and index finger pinching earlobe, derives from this inch-long stud: james. Around his neck he wears a gold chain, a heavy cord that dips several inches below his clavicles and suspends a large religious medallion. On three fingers of his left hand he wears broad gold rings, each stamped with a different image: a lion, the Virgin Mary, the Cadillac insignia. Just now he eases this hand into his jeans pocket, fumbles a moment, and withdraws it again, the fingers bare.

  The guest speaker addressing the career education class is talking about how to cope with emergency. James knows this is the topic because it’s written on the board, along with a drawing of a tightrope. He himself came to class late, missing the beginning of the lecture. He takes a seat in the horseshoe of chairs facing the chalkboard, peels the wrapper off a KitKat bar, and breaks off a couple of sticks for the girls on either side of him. When he looks up, the speaker is drawing a safety net under the tightrope.

  Career education meets for one hour three times a week, and is required for all seniors. The speaker today is a counselor from Lexington’s living skills center. Although he is hearing, he signs in ASL and does not use any voice. The little bits of sound that do spatter oddly from his throat are roughly hewn creaks and rasps, as though he were imitating a deaf person. James, who relies partly on audition and lip reading, has some trouble understanding him. He understands the words on the board, though: HOUSING PROGRAMS, FOOD STAMPS, WELFARE. James clasps his hands and leans forward, elbows on knees, a position of supreme attentiveness. Shortly, his lids begin to droop.

  James Taylor is a success story. Everyone says so—teachers, counselors, administrators—commenting at length on his marked change in behavior since he first arrived at Lex. He came from St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf in the Bronx, started here as a fourteen-year-old prefreshman, and his teachers all shake their heads at memories of what he was like then.

  James missed 148 days of sc
hool in his first year at Lexington. When he did show up, it was in one of the two or three shirts and pairs of pants he always wore. The clothes were always clean. James was always hungry. He could never concentrate in class. So each morning, instead of going to first period, he reported to a little room within the high school office. Paul Escobar, his school friend from the Bronx, reported there as well, and an instructional aide helped them get ready for school, dispensing juice and toast, cereal, a pencil, a notebook—whatever seemed to be missing, whatever the school could supply. But James came so rarely—once a week, less—and generally wound up falling asleep in his hooded sweatshirt, cheek pressed against the white plastic table.

  Now, in career ed, autumn light tilts through the window across his chin and James jerks himself awake. It has taken him nineteen years to become a senior in high school and arrive at today’s lesson, “How to Cope with Emergency,” and what they call emergency turns out to be a fair description of most of James’s life. The speaker is discussing food stamps now, saying that it is illegal to sell them for cash. “Drug addicts may do that,” he is explaining. James jiggles his foot and sighs. A tremendously thick braid hangs down the back of the girl next to him. Absently, he hooks a finger through the broad plait. The girl glances to see whether he is calling her, then looks placidly back at the speaker, letting James bounce the braid softly against her spine.

  In the five years since he entered Lexington, James has pared his absences down to about one a week, usually on Monday, when he must ride two buses and two subway trains from his mother’s apartment on Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The other days his commute is simpler: down one flight of stairs. During the week he stays in Lexington’s five-day residence, reserved for students whose home life “inhibits their progress in learning.” The referral for James came easily—he was truant, he was failing, he was hungry. Now, beginning his second full year in the dorm, James is an honor roll student and president of the Black Culture Club. Too old to be on the wrestling team (he was a cocaptain last year), he has taken a job monitoring the bus room after school. Lexington pays him five dollars an hour, enough to keep him in sneakers and jelly doughnuts.

  The guest speaker talks about the New York City Housing Authority. “ Sometimes you must wait forever for public housing. Single mothers with babies are the first priority. But if a single man fills out the application, he can wait forever.” The speaker is short and neat. He has a shiny head and a navy sport coat with four gold buttons at each cuff. He arcs a piece of chalk as he signs. ”Some of the housing projects are nice,” he says. “Some are really awful.”

  None of this is news to James. He glances distractedly around the room. Crayon drawings of autumn leaves have been stuck up next to the door. In the mornings, this is the bus room for the little children. His classmates give the speaker their careful attention, even those who are certainly bound for college and good jobs. They know deaf people can be almost anything today: lawyers, psychologists, dancers, architects. But they also know that they will be facing the bleakest job market in decades, that even their hearing counterparts will be scrambling for positions, and that most employers are, after all, hearing. So they sit up straight and watch the speaker with respect.

  “If an emergency happens,” he is saying, “if you lose your job or something, these safety nets can really save you. The city right now has lousy services for the deaf, not enough interpreters. Don’t fall through the cracks. If you need to go for welfare, ask for an interpreter. They’re required to provide one. Please, don’t go without an interpreter. There may be something you don’t understand and you’ll get turned down.” Now he begins to mime, treading along an imaginary tightrope and holding out his arms, maneuvering an invisible pole for balance and taking another step, and the class watches, half laughing, half wincing as he bends and totters.

  James does not see. He has dozed off again, his head hanging down, the religious medallion rocking gently. But then, James has already been through the cracks and back. The speaker’s pantomime is no more gripping than the image of his own mother and the high-wire act she has performed all his life. She has raised an entire family on this wire, swaying and steadying through fire, eviction, single motherhood, disease, crime, and jail. Today’s lesson doesn’t teach James anything he hasn’t already lived.

  The English department chooses Into the Woods, an adaptation of fairy tales, as the senior class play. The seventeen teachers and instructional aides split up the various duties: directing, constructing the sets, making costumes. Two teachers adapt the script, spending more than twenty hours over a two-week period cutting, reordering sentences, and making the dialogue easier to translate into sign language. They all begin reviewing the fairy tales with their senior classes.

  Although many of the students are already familiar with the stories, this sort of cultural literacy cannot be taken for granted in a school for the deaf. In grade school, while their hearing counterparts were listening to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, Lexington students might have been learning what beans were. While hearing siblings were learning how to pronounce the names Rapunzel and Rumplestiltskin, Lexington students were sitting in speech rooms learning how to pronounce their own names, with plastic sticks pressing their tongues into shape. And while hearing children were learning to read stories, deaf children were just beginning to learn how to read their own parents’ lips.

  On the day of auditions, in mid-November, a great sheet of newsprint taped to the wall of what is called the minitheater reads “Seniors: Sign your name by the characters you would like to act. Also tell your shoe size and clothes size.” Some of the students are still a bit shaky on the plots and uncertain about which characters they would like to try out for. One dark-haired boy writes his name by each part, just to be safe. A girl with thick glasses and her mouth in an anxious pucker tells her teacher she knows there was a part she wanted to audition for, but she can’t remember the name. “It was a girl,” she offers helpfully. Three other teachers hover over a blushing boy and speculate on his pants size. “He’s thin,” muses one. “I bet about a twenty-eight.” He rummages helpfully around his waistband for a label.

  They audition without scripts, acting out prescribed bits of action: the glass-slipper-fitting scene, the wolf-in-Grandmother’s-bed scene, the Jack-milking-his-cow scene. Scripts would slow the proceedings by provoking fuss over translations and unfamiliar English words. This way, even the students who have trouble reading are free to ham it up as much as they like, and they do.

  A would-be Cinderella takes the stage to soliloquize in a baseball jacket and stone-washed jeans. Gazing moonily at the ceiling, she appeals to the spirit of her dead mother. “O Mother, why must I clean all day? I want a beautiful dress so that I can go to the ball!”

  The girl auditioning for the ghost of Cinderella’s mother cocks her head in a streetwise manner. “Cinderella, what’s your problem?” she inquires, setting off gales of laughter among the teachers.

  “O Mother, it is my stepsisters. They are mean to me, and unfairly say I cannot go to the ball.”

  “Just ignore them,” the mother advises sensibly. “Don’t let it bother you.”

  A girl trying out for Red Riding Hood cups a hand to her hearing aid, pretending to listen for a “Come in!” before entering Grandmother’s house.

  A girl trying out for the part of a stepsister signs no with such vigor that she accidentally scratches Cinderella’s nose.

  A boy trying out for Jack’s cow begins lowing in the middle of a scene, loudly, in his best estimation of bovine woe.

  The teachers shriek and snort with laughter.

  James sits to the side, his arms spread across the backs of two folding chairs, one leg flung across the seat of another, and laughs roundly with his friends. He finds this year’s choice of play disappointing, the fairy-tale theme too immature for seniors, but when his turn comes he ambles gamely onstage, his clunky Timberland boots fashionably unlaced. His classmates hoot and pound th
e floor, sending vibrations to summon him, and when he looks around they tell him to remove his baseball cap onstage. He flings it amiably into the audience.

  It’s the Rapunzel-finds-her-blinded-prince scene. The long-lost prince, whose eyes were put out by thorns when he fell from Rapunzel’s tower, wanders aimlessly onstage. James’s rendition of blindness reveals a deaf person’s special horror of losing his sight. He staggers and falls to the ground, creeps about extending shakily splayed fingers, and rolls belly up. A few students laugh as James collapses heavily onto his back.

  Now Rapunzel steps in from the wings, happening upon the scene with fretful joy. She kneels and takes the prince’s head in her lap. As she cries, her tears are supposed to water his wounded eyes and heal them, magically restoring sight. Rapunzel dutifully sobs and shakes imaginary tears over his face. James continues to lie there, thrashing weakly.

  “You’re healed, James,” one of the teachers coaches futilely.

  Rapunzel attempts to drag him to his feet.

  “You can see now, James,” another teacher calls to the oblivious prince. “Get up.”

  He doesn’t, though. He is a blind prince, and deaf, and deeply into the scene. He allows everyone to see him helpless, and he extends the moment, big strong James lying as passive and defenseless as a baby, allowing everyone to see him vulnerable, in need of care.

  Three years ago in September they went looking for him. James had, of course, been absent a great deal during his prefreshman and freshman years, but now it was the end of the second week of school and he hadn’t shown up once. In fact, no one had seen him since June. The students had no news. So Friday afternoon the social worker and the high school supervisor drove up to the Bronx. They didn’t like to make home visits, especially unannounced, but the Taylors had no phone and they were worried.