If a Tree Falls (12 page)

When in summer Chava takes to bed in a difficult pregnancy, Nellie and Bayla visit her at her bedside, giving her
nancy, Nellie and Bayla visit her at her bedside, giving her
their quiet company. One day, Chava’s elderly mother shoos them away at the door with a despairing look in her eye. Nellie and Bayla turn from the door, confused. Then they see something trailing out of Chava’s bedroom window. A string, beginning with a loop from Chava’s bedpost, crisscrosses Tasse like a Cat’s Cradle. Nellie and Bayla follow the string this way and that through the village, until they come to the synagogue. The string is a prayer made visible, looped by Chava’s husband from home to the Ark. Now, he is crumpled in prayer, crying before the Holy Scrolls for the safety of Chava and their not-yet-born baby.

WE TIED A STRING BETWEEN Sophia’s hearing aids to hold them in place in her ears, and to keep them from getting lost when they came out. The audiologist provided it: a bright yellow string, threaded into a perfect child-sized clip. My hands shook the first time I looped up Sophia’s hearing aids to the yellow line and attached the clip to the back of her t-shirt. There were strings
everywhere—
my thoughts, their own tangled Cat’s Cradle; my feelings of grief, never far away.

One day, in the supermarket, the yellow string caught the attention of a little boy. Sophia was sitting in our shopping cart, holding her favorite blanket. The boy walked up to Sophia, and stared at the bright string and at the hearing aids it linked. Wordlessly, he reached up and yanked at the string, causing one hearing aid to pop out of Sophia’s ear.

“No, boy!” Sophia said, wagging her finger. She was nearly two and a half years old.

I looked into the boy’s face, trying to distinguish whether his act was borne of curiosity, or of malice, or some combination of the two. I decided on curiosity. So, I explained,“You know how some people wear glasses to help them see better? Well, my little girl, Sophia, wears hearing aids to help her hear better. This yellow string keeps her hearing aids in place.” I spoke in my most matter-of-fact voice, as I put Sophia’s hearing aid back into her ear.

“Oh,” the little boy said, watching intently. A woman’s call of “Timothy, Timothy!” caused him to turn and wander away.

As Sophia and I walked on, she said, “I hear with my hearin’ aids.”

“That’s right, honey,” I answered.

Then, noticing the rows of food around her, Sophia shouted, “Pasta!”

“Yes, that’s the kind you like.”

“Pickles!”

“Yes, honey.”

I steered Sophia into the next aisle. Right in front of us stood Jan.

“Hey! How are you two?” Jan asked, and gave us each a hug.

I started to blurt out what just happened with the little boy, but Sophia interrupted.

“Jan, I really non’t like wasabi.”

“Oh?”

Then Sophia said thoughtfully, about her pediatrician, “Dr. Kenny smells like peaches.”

Jan and I burst out laughing.

“To answer your question, Jan, we’re fine,” I said. “We’re just fine.”

Bill and I spoke of having another baby. We didn’t speak openly about the possibility of a second baby’s deafness. At a genetics consult shortly after Sophia’s birth, we were given a lab requisition form to test for genetic deafness. We never used it. The tests had to be run on Sophia’s blood—a lot of it—and we didn’t want to stress her tiny body for the sake of our knowledge base. The only other test our insurance company would cover was a test of my amniotic fluid when a fetus was already in utero. We had my father’s fax, of course, which seemed proof enough that I, at least, contributed a genetic deafness component. No one in Bill’s family had a record or even a recollection of deaf relatives. Still, it seemed likely—even if wildly coincidental—that Bill and I were both recessive gene carriers. How else to explain the fact that Bill and I were hearing, while Sophia
was not? It couldn’t be a dominant gene just from me, because a dominant gene would have rendered me hearing impaired, too. Under the recessive gene theory, there was a 25 percent chance that our next baby would have hearing loss, too. It was not a negligible chance.

My mind spun with thoughts of deaf siblings—of Nellie and Bayla, as I’d been imagining them: at the river, their toes grabbing the mushy bottom; at the market, their noses filled with the sharp smells of vinegar and fish; upon the shul bench, their eyes glued to the sanctuary door, to the crisscrossed length of string leading to the men’s gallery. All the accompanying sounds naturally arising in my mind, muted out. My ancestors’ existences, shrouded in silence and isolation.

Yet when I focused my attention on Sophia, I saw my self-possessed little girl engaged with family and friends. Turning to voices. Chattering away. Not just in English, either; during Hanukkah, Sophia imitated the Hebrew words we sang as we lit our menorah! We had so many advantages—education and resources and technology. We felt equipped to deal with hearing loss. The risk that our next baby would be hearing impaired wasn’t so worrying. We were buoyed by Sophia’s wellness.

Each morning, when the
New York Times
arrived at our doorstep, Sophia would toddle down the front steps to get it while Bill stood propped in the doorway, ready to catch its inner sections as Sophia bustled her way back inside. One September morning, Sophia paused as she leaned over the paper, its top half spread flat upon our brick walkway. There was a picture of a firefighter kneeling in solemn grief at a 9/11 memorial site. Without a word, Sophia gathered up the paper in her arms. She walked past Bill and went inside, took a Band Aid from the low kitchen cabinet, and placed it on the firefighter.

Sophia’s word list, still on our refrigerator, now included not just “ happy” and “sad” but “excited,”“disappointed,”“worried,” “scared,” and “silly.” Sophia was particularly attuned to facial expressions, and at two plus years old, feelings were her focus. When one day I praised her for being generous to another toddler, she said, “ I am generous, but I also have jealous.” And when I offered to make a face out of whipped cream for her dessert, she requested a face that was “frustrated.”

Sophia was oblivious to most social niceties. One night, at a neighborhood diner in time to catch the “early bird special,” Sophia pointed both at the leftover cups of coffee and at the predominantly elderly eaters and shouted:
“OLD, OLD, OLD!” We thought this was typical two-year-old fare, and (while horrified) we reveled in the normality of it. But when I told Jan, she said, “That’s such a “deaf” thing!” Are the deaf just naturally and excruciatingly direct? In the Signing community, they certainly don’t pull any punches—just look up the sign for “fat” and you’ll see.

Sophia began to converse, even bicker, with her best friend, Ben. They bickered mainly over the sippy cup of water that Sophia offered to Ben again and again, despite his patient declining and then his adamant refusals. It was a thrill to hear them in dialogue, in toddler-speak. Sophia delighted in choosing the colors of her newest set of earmolds: bright blues, pinks, purples, and greens swirled together. And at a birthday party for a friend, she sang “Happy Birthday,” enunciating the lyrics perfectly in full voice and astonishingly right on pitch. I looked across the room at Bill, whose eyes were welled up with tears. Neither one of us could have hoped for better. So many gains; at two and a half, Sophia’s language and speech were at her peer level.

Only her weight trailed behind. We soldiered on with pasta and cream.

To celebrate an anniversary, we arranged for Sophia to stay home with a trusted babysitter, and Bill and I went for a night away at a nearby inn. The next morning, we stopped at a bakery for pastries. A petite, elderly woman toting a big suitcase stopped us to ask for directions to a local shrine. When we got our bearings in the small Berkshire town, and realized that her destination was up a steep, winding road, Bill offered to drive her there.

On the windy hilltop at Marian Fathers Mercy Monastery, the lady took our hands in hers. “
You will have many blessings
,” she said. She stood stalwart in the gusts, waving until we drove out of sight. I couldn’t know then that one was already burrowing in my womb. We would name her Juliet.