If a Tree Falls (3 page)

When Sophia was awake, I tickled her cheeks and played “bicycle” gently with her legs. I bounced her up and down, and entertained her with finger puppets. Sophia’s eyes widened with excitement when I brought my face close to hers from far away. Zoom. Kiss. Zoom. Kiss.

When she napped, I went to my desk and stared at the names on my family chart—those asterisked names—wondering about my deaf relatives. I worked my way through the audiologist’s binder: I read about deafness and called the parents of deaf children willing to provide information and support. I pumped extra breast milk because Sophia’s weight was low, and I prepared supplemental bottles. Friends came by with gifts, with food and hugs, and with the names of still other people to contact.

Bill and I were given the email addresses of two deaf grown-ups. Their childhood experiences were distressing. One woman described excruciating speech sessions in which she struggled to make vocalizations she could not hear—each utterance exchanged for a Froot Loop. At the age of sixteen, she became fluent in sign language and in the Deaf community found comfort and a sense of belonging for the first time in her life. The other wrote bitterly about how her parents sent her away to a Deaf school, largely severing their relationship with her. She felt she “belonged” at school but never at home. Since neither her parents nor her siblings learned Sign, holidays at home were endlessly lonely.

I had entered motherhood with my own pressing worries—worries that had nothing to do with a child’s hearing loss; worries that came from my experience growing
up amid intermittent connections and patchy hearing. Could I sustain a healthy connection with my baby? Could I mother my child whole? I felt full of holes, and the prospect of mothering disquieted me.

As a child, my mother’s rapt gaze fed me, filled me up. When I had her affection—her huge seafoam eyes lavishly, generously, focused on me—I held the world in my outstretched hands. But I never had it for long. Distracted or in a rush, my mother would turn away from me. Tune me out. She was masterful at tuning me out. Her hearing loss played an incalculable role—she could slip into her own private reverie, block out the world, disengage from me instantly and entirely. When I reasserted myself, she was sharp-edged. Her gentle brushing of my hair became an impatient ripping of tangles. Her zippering of my dress, a jaw into my flesh. My protests, my cries only hastened her retreat.

What would I be like with Sophia?
More than anything, I wanted to hear my baby. I wanted to be an anchoring force, steady and sure in my attention. As much as I worried about Sophia’s hearing, I worried about my
own
. I didn’t have a literal hearing loss, but I feared the disconnection I experienced in childhood. I feared it as if it was an inheritable trait.

One morning while Sophia slept, I tried to nap but couldn’t. I told myself I should shower, but instead I turned on the computer, and through the Internet entered the fractious and militant universe of deafness—the politics of inclusion and exclusion, the legacy of hurt feelings, the horror and awe of technological advancement.

There was a war going on. One side believed that deaf people should assimilate to the hearing culture by using hearing aids or cochlear implants to help them to hear and to speak. The other believed that deaf people should embrace Deaf culture, a world without sound, and communicate using sign language. The war was focused on new babies because deafness was now detectable at birth. Militants on the side of assimilation considered it a moral obligation to give babies access to the sounds of speech and access to the larger hearing world. Militants on the side of Deaf culture considered it a travesty to do so, arguing that deaf babies were being “altered” by technology, “mutilated” by surgeons, and stripped of their rightful membership in the Deaf community.

What side are you on
? the websites taunted me. Would we try to get Sophia to hear with the latest hearing
technology and then work on speech, on spoken language? Would we try to communicate with her in sign language?

I had stumbled into a minefield where any answer implied a prejudicial judgment. Was deafness a disability? Was it an essential identity? We wanted what was best for our baby, for our family! It was infuriating to think that our choices for Sophia were going to be judged by others, and on these terms.

I decided I’d better shower after all. Let the water wash over my thoughts.

In the shower’s mist, a shaft of bright light cast a prism rainbow on the white tile wall. I closed my eyes tight and bent my head into the spray. In another time and place, we wouldn’t have had these decisions to make for our deaf child. Pearl—the mother of the deaf sisters, Nellie and Bayla, listed on my family chart; she raised her babies in a remote Austrian shtetl with neither the luck nor the burden of modern options, with no choices concerning technology or education. What could she do but tote them along with her to the baker, to the butcher, to the synagogue, to the town square? And wonder what it was like for her girls, to weave in and out of the rickety stalls among the mingled smells of horse dung and hay; to watch the swirl of changing expressions—the winking eyes, the pursed lips, the
bushy beards—but
never to hear
the sounds of the bargaining, the beckoning, the greeting, the gossiping, blurted and sputtered and whispered and hissed.

Was that Sophia crying? I rushed out of the bathroom, grabbing a towel, and I stood dripping in front of my baby. Her eyes were fixed on the slats of sunlight crossing through the bars of her crib. I touched her cheek. She turned to look at me. Droplets of water ran from my hair and splashed soundlessly onto the wood floor.

WHEN SOPHIA WAS SIX WEEKS OLD, we ventured a cross-country flight to visit my parents and other family and friends. Early on a Friday morning, I lugged a last, overstuffed suitcase to the driveway while Bill loaded the car for the airport. Then, I folded my father’s fax sheets into my carry-on handbag, along with two tiny yellow mittens to keep Sophia from scratching herself while she slept. My hands shook as I zippered the bag. I was frayed from the middle of the night feedings. And I was preoccupied, consumed with trying to understand my family history, my deaf origins.

Day and night, my mind restlessly conjured images. From mere names on the genealogical page arose ashen cheeks, searching eyes, stubborn hands—whole lives fated to be filled with losses I shuddered against, even as I invented them. I scrutinized the pages of my family chart like a treasure map, like tea leaves, like the palm of a hand.
What heritage had I passed on, without knowing, to my baby?

I buckled Sophia into the car and pulled myself in to sit beside her. Soon I would learn whatever it was that I had missed of the family history. I would ask my parents every question I could think of, and call every living relative who might know something about our family’s deafness. I would talk to my two brothers and to my sister. We each had different childhood memories.

In my parents’ too-hot kitchen, decorated “country French,” I inhaled the familiar smells of perfume, pipe tobacco, and chicken sautéing in wine. I greeted my mother and father tenderly as they surrounded us, hugging us and cooing over Sophia. My love for them, and my longing to be babied in new motherhood, mingled with trepidation. I was offkilter in my parents’ rambling house, even with Bill by my side and Sophia anchored in my arms.

That afternoon, I stood before the mirror in my mother’s bathroom, cradling Sophia. My mother came to stand behind me. Her lips were glossed the color of raspberries and her salon blonde hair was styled in high coiffure. She looked at her granddaughter, then at her own reflection.

“She is absolutely beautiful. Don’t worry about the hearing loss—with those eyes, she’ll be just fine.”

“What?”

“Where do you think she got those eyes?” her stare darting between the reflection of Sophia’s eyes and her own.

“From Bill,” I said.

“You think?” My mother’s smile wavered.

Just then, I heard my father playing the violin. He had played every day of my life. The sound grew louder. A section of a Bach violin sonata, then a simple scale. I opened the bathroom door to see my father there in the hallway. He walked toward us, his chin still cocked on the rest, his right arm making long, broad strokes with his bow. The violin quivered within inches of Sophia’s ear, flecks of rosin dusting her cheek. Sophia didn’t turn to the sound.

“No, nothing,” my father muttered. His bow hand dropped to his side.

So there it was: the proof of Sophia’s hearing loss. It had come, not through last month’s brainstem tests or audiograms, but through the unheard Cs and B flats of my father’s violin.

As a girl, I took up the violin. And I dressed myself like my mother. I teetered in her spike high heels, and painted my face with her glossy makeup. I even flapped in her silk blouses and whooshed leg-to-leg in her funny leather pants. Decked out in her clothes, adorned in her gold, I sang to her.

At age eight, I sang whatever I learned in school. By eleven, I had amassed a repertoire of Broadway show tunes. My mother made requests: “Everything Was Beautiful at the Ballet” from
A Chorus Line
; “Not While I’m Around,” from
Sweeney Todd; “
Far From the Home I Love,” from
Fiddler on the Roof;
“And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,”
from Dreamgirls
. I trailed after her, from her dressing room to the bathroom mirror, and sang to her as she got dressed to the nines.

Would she ever have guessed that I liked her best at nighttime when she was in her robe, no makeup on? Her eyes were a shade paler somehow, her face softer than when powdered and tawny, her lips sweeter when no longer waxy and bright. Even at a young age, I intuited that the slathered-on foundations, the layering of brilliant colors, were compensation for ears that couldn’t hear well, for a father who didn’t stay, for a mother who couldn’t cope.

My mother blasted through many barriers of the times. She was determined to be self-sufficient. She earned her
social work doctorate and launched a career. But her focus was on appearances—her own appearance and those of her extensions: our house, my brothers and sister, me. She loved me fiercely, and I loved her. Only I couldn’t fix her attention on my being.

I made her things: a mop doll, a woodland diorama in a bowl. She thanked me tightly, then set about dismantling my handiwork—washing out the mop, dumping the twigs from the bowl, putting the house to rights—before she scurried off, retreating once more to her dressing room. I sat and watched her then from the periphery, a smudge at the edge of her looking glass.

I waited for her. I spent hours waiting. She chose a camisole from her closet. She styled her hair. My chatter, my questions, even my songs—nothing could retrieve her. She was distracted, lost in her own thoughts. I called out for her, still waiting. Couldn’t my mother hear me?