Читать книгу My Name Is Jody Williams - Jody Williams - Страница 14
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
A Special Place in Hell
When they took increasing pleasure in harassing Steve, I became certain Billy and Bobby, the boys who lived next door, merited a special place in hell. Certainly their souls must be dark if they could act like that toward my handicapped brother. He hadn't chosen to be deaf. He couldn't help it if he couldn't talk. The brothers morphed from simply irritating next-door neighbors into nasty nemeses we'd escape only with our move away from Poultney.
Billy and Bobby etched themselves into my memory on a day that started out innocuously enough when Steve and I set out for a bike ride. We pedaled away from our house on Norton Avenue toward the hill at the end of the street, which seemed immense at the time. There, we turned left at the corner where our cousins lived and continued around the block and back to the front of the house. One spin around that small block was never enough, but we weren't allowed to venture farther into the wild reaches of Poultney; my mom could conjure up too many potentially dangerous scenarios. So we often went round and round the block until we got dizzy.
That afternoon, as we rounded the corner for the third or fourth time and rode along the side of the hill, Billy and Bobby came charging at us from behind thick bushes. Running along the hillside above us, they rained down stones and empty tin cans on us. We were either too shocked or too stupid to swerve out of their range before a can caught Steve in the head, cutting a long gash in his scalp. Yelping as blood poured down his face, he managed a shaky U-turn and pedaled home as fast as he could, certain I was right behind him.
If he'd looked back, he'd have seen my bike in the middle of the street, its front wheel spinning madly. Instead of my mousy self standing mutely by, shaking in my sneakers while they picked on my brother, righteous indignation overpowered my fear and I went after them, screaming like a banshee. I wanted to catch them and beat the crap out of them and make them pay for hurting Steve.
It didn't occur to me at the moment I'd be the one who'd likely get the beating, but that was irrelevant anyway. Before I even reached the ambush site, they were crowing at me from the top of the hill. Panting, bathed in tears of frustrated impotence, I watched them disappear. As their voices faded away, I picked up my bike and, exhausted and deflated, pushed it home.
Mom was standing in the front yard hugging Steve tight, pressing a towel to his head. She was looking at me as if some other kid had taken over my body. When I was young I never raised my voice. Mom swears that when I was a baby, I almost never cried. I was such a good girl growing up that I drove rebellious Mary Beth mad. She saw me as the boring, brownnosing, goody-two-shoes of the family. But I remember myself that day as a girl transformed.
Once we'd left Poultney, the bullies next door became just a very unpleasant memory, less and less important with time and distance. Maybe my feeble attempt to defend my brother had been a once-only, out-of-body sort of episode, and now that he was safe and secure I'd never have to worry about coming out of my quiet shell again.
· · ·
I'd just begun second grade when our Poultney bubble burst. Dad sold the grocery store and our house, and right before my seventh birthday, we'd be moving to Brattleboro, Vermont. By Poultney standards, Brattleboro, ten times its size with a population of about twelve thousand, was a megalopolis. At least my mother viewed it that way. She also acted like we were moving to the ends of the earth rather than ninety miles southeast of Poultney.
None of us wanted to move, but Steve needed to go to school, and the Austine School for the Deaf, in Brattleboro, was the only one my parents could find where he could be a day student. Most schools for the deaf at the time required students to live at the school. My family had already suffered through one such fiasco with Steve, and Mom and Dad weren't about to make him or any of us relive the experience.
Just before Steve turned six, they'd started looking for schools for him. They'd decided against the Austine School at the time. Back then, it consisted of one ancient building that looked like something out of Dickens, and its headmaster, nearly as old, didn't exude any apparent love for his calling. With few options, my parents finally settled on a boarding school in Connecticut.
The first time they dropped him off at that school, Steve broke loose from the people holding his hands and tried to claw his way over its eight-foot-high chain-link fence. That unsuccessful attempt to get back to my parents as they slowly drove away marked the beginning of the complete disaster that the boarding school experience was, not only for my brother but also for the rest of us.
As Mom's endless novenas to Saint Jude made their way toward the heavens, Steve showed no signs of settling in. In their equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, my parents decided that every Friday they'd drive the pre-interstate, two-lane roads to Connecticut to see him. Sometimes they'd stay there, and other times they'd bring him home for the weekend. Either way, I felt unsettled by the constant comings and goings of my always-tense parents. It's probably then that Mary Beth started sucking the middle fingers of her left hand while pulling out her already sparse hair with the right. Even with the end of those torturous trips, she didn't spare her hair.
Steve was wasting away. At school he'd barely eat, and everyone was concerned about his deteriorating health. Already a slight kid, he began to look ever more waiflike. He became extremely pale and totally passive. My brother no longer had the energy or spirit to fight, a result of the medications he'd been prescribed to calm him enough to adjust to the school.
Mom's novenas continued wafting upward, but apparently no one heard them. The intolerable situation came to an end when everyone agreed it was in Steve's best interests that he return home. He'd not even made it to Christmas vacation. Boarding school was not his solution.
Once he knew he was home to stay and the meds washed out of his system, my brother was a boy transformed. I have a black-and-white studio photograph of him, Mary Beth, and me taken not long after the Connecticut misadventure. My sister looks under two, I'd have been three, and Steve six; it must have proved too much of an effort to try to include infant Mark in the shot. Actually we have no pictures of Mark until the requisite grade-school photographs.
Wearing a white shirt with a bow tie, Steve shines handsomely in the picture, and his huge smile reveals no vestiges of the Connecticut nightmare. Mary Beth looks out, pathetically appealing with her slightly crossed eye and ragged hair. She was born anxious, and her anxiety had only been exacerbated with the dramas of Steve's time away at school. As a kid she was string-bean skinny. I, on the other hand, was born round and topped with a bald pumpkin head like Charlie Brown's. I also had an eye that moved about on its own terms. I sucked my thumb until I was nine, but kept my hands out of my hair. This was a good thing, because I've never had much.
By the time this photo of the three of us was taken, Mom either hadn't discovered home permanents or had decided I wasn't old enough to have one yet, because my white-blond hair is in a little flip. She'd already started attacking my bangs, however. In that picture I have raggedy bangs chopped so short that they almost didn't exist. But at least to my own eyes, the bangs and my new horn-rimmed glasses in no way diminish my round cuteness.
With Steve's return home and familial harmony restored for the time being, my parents found a tutor for him who used mailorder guides to teach the deaf at home. By the end of three years, she'd reached the limits of what she could teach him. Mom and Dad had to renew the search for a school for the deaf that would accept him as a day student. And that was how we ended up moving to Brattleboro.
The choices were still discouragingly few, but my parents had heard positive things about changes at the school they'd first visited in Brattleboro before the doomed Connecticut decision. New classrooms and a gymnasium had been built at the Austine School, and they'd also hired a dynamic, innovative headmaster. After long discussions with him and much deliberation at home, my parents agreed that Austine was the place for Steve and we'd be moving to Brattleboro.
· · ·
We couldn't manage to leave Poultney without drama. Since we were moving right before my birthday, Mom planned my party early so my friends and cousins could help me celebrate. It was a grand birthday and good-bye party all rolled into one. Everyone was caught up in high-energy, sugar-fueled excitement.
As I was blowing out the candles on the cake, five-year-old Mary Beth jumped out of her chair and began teasing Mark, who was a few months shy of four. He had a sourball in his mouth, and my sister was dangling the bag of hard, round candies over his head, just out of his reach. As he looked up and stretched to grab the bag, he inhaled the sourball.
Clutching at his throat, Mark immediately began coughing and choking, but gasping for breath only lodged the candy more firmly in his throat. The festive party atmosphere dissolved instantly. Mom started slapping his back to try to dislodge the candy. It didn't work. She flipped him upside down and shook him by the heels. That didn't work either. Turning him right side up again, she slapped his back another time. No luck, and Mark was turning a distinct shade of blue.
Desperate, my mother stuck her finger as far down his throat as humanly possible and managed to get the edge of her long, beautiful, red fingernail under the candy and flip it free. By that time, Mark's eyes had rolled back in his head and he wasn't quite conscious, but at least he started breathing again.
Through it all Mom wept in fear, but she never stopped trying to get that damn candy out of her son's throat. The rest of us were her hysterical chorus. When the town's doctor arrived, Mark was lying on the sofa, still dazed. By then his normal color had been restored, and he was declared sound. Not long ago Mary Beth told me that once Mark had started choking, she'd fled and taken refuge under our bed, trying not to cry out loud. Long after the event, she continued to feel upset and guilty because she'd “almost killed her brother.” None of us had ever noticed her part in the drama.
Mark's near-death experience frayed whatever resolve Mom might have had to try to make our move to Brattleboro as smooth as possible. Instead, it was sheer hell. My mother was immediately and totally miserable, and every single weekend without fail we'd pile into the family's blue-and-white Ford and drive home to Poultney to stay with my grandparents. In between those trips, Dad would continue his search for a job.
The two-hour ride was mostly a nightmare. My stressed-out parents took turns hollering at the four of us in the back seat to “behave” or “be quiet” or, in desperation, “shut up or we'll stop this car and spank you.” The threats were idle, but sometimes Mom would completely lose patience and make weak efforts to slap at us over her shoulder while Dad focused ever more intently on driving.
Much of our misbehavior in the car, if that's what it was, was a battle for space. Sometimes one of us would lie down in the rear window, above the back seat. Another would get on the floor and try to find comfort stretching out over the hump in the middle. That left the two others vying for the back seat itself. And somebody was always carsick. The worst case was when Mary Beth lurched forward to be sick on the floor, only to throw up on sleeping Mark's face. His mouth happened to be open at the time.
Just as it seemed like the road trips from hell were never going to end, they did. Unfortunately, it wasn't because the family had happily adjusted to Brattleboro. We no longer went to Poultney, because my mother couldn't. She couldn't get out of bed. In the terminology of the time, Mom had a complete nervous breakdown.
· · ·
After half a year without work, my father had finally found a job as a salesman for General Electric and would cover a three-state area. This meant he'd be traveling all week, leaving the house early Monday mornings and not getting back home again until late Friday evenings. While it was a huge economic relief that Dad finally had a job, my mother felt completely abandoned while trying to cope with four kids in an alien town, with no friends or support network. My father had to take their only car, which left her feeling further trapped. Mom was angry at my father and envious at the same time. He'd get to hop in the car and drive off for five days of peace and quiet while she struggled to manage everything alone.
If I'd been in my father's position, I'd have been thrilled to drive away from that distressed, chaotic house. If I'd been in my mother's shoes, I would have been a raging maniac. Mom didn't have the energy to rage. Instead she descended into a profound clinical depression, where she lingered for about a year. It was a no-win situation.
Dad couldn't stop working, so he hired a woman to stay with us while he was gone. Mrs. Day must have been competent enough and not unpleasant, because I have no bad memories of her. I think of her in shades of gray. The rest of life around that time is sepia colored. If my mother emerged from her bedroom at all, I don't remember it. The only clear memory I have of her from that year is watching her sleep when Dad would let me tiptoe into the room to look at her and make sure she was still there.
I don't know how my mother pulled herself back from her abyss. She had no antidepressants, and they couldn't afford counseling. Even if they could have, at that point in my parent's lives, help of that kind, outside the family, would have been out of the question. Probably her acute depression just ran its course as most do, helped along by the fact that, for my mother's sanity and the sake of the family, my father stopped working for General Electric.
Dad found a job in town with a local vending company that provided food machines for factories in town and at some of the ski lodges around Mount Snow. They also had jukeboxes and pinball games. A few years later, my father bought the business, which he owned for the next three decades.
As far as I could see, he wasn't around all that much more than when he'd been a traveling salesman. Along with his full-time work with Brattleboro Vending Corporation, Dad held a variety of part-time jobs on the side. He sold used cars; and he sold mobile homes, which we were never supposed to call trailers but did anyway. Just to poke fun, which he didn't find funny at all.
My father was an insurance investigator once and, later, a bartender. At one point he owned his own bar, until my mother told him it was the bar or her. There were too many late nights there, after he'd worked all day, and too many women interested in hanging around the handsome bartender.
Dad's long workdays weren't only a result of our puritanical New England work ethic; he cobbled jobs together to make ends meet. He was gone by the time we got up for school, and he often worked late into the night. But he was always home for the family dinner at 5:30 every night.
Only recently has my mother finally recognized that what she lived through was acute clinical depression. Curiously, despite the move to Brattleboro and its terrible impact on my mom, I've always considered her to be the rock of stability in the family. I was never one of the kids who hid things from her. To the contrary, there were many times throughout my life she wished I wouldn't share my adventures with her. Sometimes when I'd start to tell her something she didn't want to hear, she'd stick her fingers in her ears and start humming. I'd just wait her out. I always wanted her to know the entire me, not just the good parts.
Mom was always deeply embarrassed about her nervous breakdown, even though no one seemed to resent her for it, covertly or openly. It wasn't until we were young adults that we could try joking with her about it. Sometimes she could laugh, but usually she'd end up describing all of the factors that had contributed to the breakdown—as if we hadn't lived them ourselves.
And even though having four young kids was part of what had crushed her ability to cope, it was just on the other side of her depression that she became pregnant with Janet, who was born about six months before I turned nine. We all think getting pregnant again helped bring her back. She was totally excited. We moved to a bigger and nicer apartment just up the street, where there'd be more room for the baby. And when Janet arrived, we were all overjoyed. A new sister. Mom was happy again, finally. Dad smiled because Mom was smiling. We didn't know it was a brief interlude, and that not too long after Janet was born, Steve would begin his long descent into insanity.
· · ·
When we moved to Brattleboro, I started going to Green Street School. It was just down the hill from the rented apartment where we lived. Despite my being a good student, school was sometimes an anxiety-provoking proposition. Like so many kids, I never felt I was smart enough, and I worried about it all the time. I fretted about the possibility of bad grades, but more than that I worried about looking stupid. Fourth grade arithmetic with Miss Larkin (although my friend Judy insists it was Miss Lawrence not Miss Larkin) was especially torturous. When it came to memorizing the multiplication tables, I was bound in knots of misery. We'd work on them in class, study them at home, and work on them more in class.
Miss Larkin's favored technique was to randomly call on students to stand up and recite whichever table she dictated: “Wally, recite the 7s table for us.” Or “Joyce, the 9s table.” The lucky ones got the 2s or 3s. She'd stand at the front of the class, stout and gray-haired, peering at her victims through steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
Most would try to avoid her eyes, hoping she'd call on someone else. Sooner or later Miss Larkin would get to everyone, and you'd be the one standing up—a deer in the headlights of her piercing eyes. How I hated that part of class with its potential for public humiliation. Not surprisingly at all, I hate math. However, I do remember my times tables.
Miss Larkin made a lasting mark on me and looms large in my psyche. To this day there are times when I'm asked a direct question and I go into deer-in-the-headlights mode and blank out. Most recently, this happened when I was part of a small editing team working on an annual landmine report with my husband, Steve Goose, who created the report and, for its first six years, served as its editor in chief.
Once I'd finish editing a chapter, he'd go over it, peppering me with questions: “How do you know this is correct?” “What's the source of this fact?” “This paragraph actually makes sense to you as it's written? You left it like this?”
At first frustrated and then angry as the questions kept coming, I could sometimes answer them and sometimes not. After all, I wasn't the researcher; I was just helping edit. But Goose's machinelike dissection of the issues and command of the information produced an endless barrage that would send me over the edge. My face would flush and I'd start to sweat.
Suddenly, in the midst of one such editorial inquisition, a vision of Miss Larkin popped into my head. And I started to laugh. Goose wasn't particularly amused when I first explained the comparison. Now when I feel like I'm being harangued with questions on any topic, I give him my fish-eye look of disdain and call him “Miss Larkin.” He doesn't miss the point.
· · ·
During the year of Miss Larkin, a new kid moved to town. Michael was an especially pathetic specimen of gawky grade-school youth. His ears stuck straight out from his head like those of Dumbo the flying elephant, or like Mary Beth's when she was young. The poor kid was also so pale he was nearly translucent, was incredibly skinny, and had no redeeming athletic abilities whatsoever. No one ever wanted to get stuck on a team with Michael during recess. He was the kind of kid who always got picked last.
David, on the other hand, was the blond, blue-eyed stud of Green Street School. He was the biggest, most athletic, smartest boy there. It's likely that every girl in grade school had a crush on him, and maybe even I did too, but that's not why I remember him.
He lorded it over everyone on the playground. Self-appointed king of recess, David was always team captain no matter what the game, and he chose the best players for his own team. He played to win. Not a gracious winner, he was likely an even worse loser. But who'd know? David never lost at anything.
One day, our class was making a large circle in order to play kick ball. As Michael shuffled his way into line, David, with a dash of machismo tinged with nasty, jumped in front of him. He chortled as his chest bump sent Michael out of the circle, arms swinging wildly as he tried to keep his balance. Michael's head was already hanging in shame, and he seemed to get even smaller as he backed farther away without a word.
I wasn't a friend of geeky Michael, but I couldn't stand to watch David humiliate him so brazenly. I wanted Michael to defend himself. He could talk! But he wouldn't. And why did we let David get away with it, sheep in the presence of the big guy's power, which we conceded to him by doing nothing?
That we all stood mute and watched his obnoxious behavior said as much about us as it did about him, and it made me sick. Suddenly I knew if I did nothing, I'd feel like less of a human being, even if I couldn't put it that way at the time. All those catechism lessons—do for others what you would want them to do for you—must have taken root.
Quivering with anger and fear, in unequal proportion, I stepped in front of David. Struggling to control my voice, I asked why he bullied people who couldn't stand up to him. I expected a barbed-tongue response, but David surprised us all when he backed down without protest. He opened up the circle and waved Michael back in.
My insides trembled for the rest of recess, but David seemed to take it in stride. He never harassed me for defending Michael, and he didn't treat him unfairly again. I began to wonder how many others could be helped as easily if people had the courage to stand up to their own fear and take action when they knew it was the right thing to do. It took a long, long time but eventually I recognized that each time I did it, it was easier the next time. (Just for the record, David peaked in grade school.)
· · ·
Not long after I'd conquered my times tables, Steve started to complain about school. The other kids were mean, or they were stupid, or they pushed him during basketball—pretty much the normal complaints of many kids in school. But my brother began losing his unique sense of humor that had developed after the boarding school fiasco. As humor retreated, anger filled its space.
Much of his rising fury was focused on Mom. After all, he thought, it was clearly her fault that he was deaf. “Why me?” he'd sign while yelling at her. “Why can all the rest of your kids hear and talk and not me"? As his anger and complaints increased, he began trying to avoid school.
Steve would come into the kitchen as Mom was rushing to fix us breakfast and make sure we were ready for school. Knowing she was too busy to pay close attention, he'd start signing that he didn't feel well. She fell for it a few times before realizing it was his get-out-of-going-to-school strategy. When Mom began to ignore his complaints and make him go to school, he got more dramatic. He'd come into the kitchen, feign a swoon, and drop to the floor.
Mom would continue whatever she was doing, walking around him or stepping over him without acknowledging him on the floor. The first couple of times he did it, the rest of us thought it was funny and laughed at him. But when she continued to ignore him, he'd jump up and gesticulate furiously, using our family's homemade signing, “Didn't you see what just happened? Didn't you see me faint? Can't you see that I'm sick?” Then we'd sit at the table, trying to be invisible while eating breakfast and hoping his bomb wouldn't go off.
It sounds kind of amusing now, but then there was nothing funny about it. Each time Steve didn't get what he wanted, his outbursts became a little louder and more frightening. He'd get in Mom's face and scream. By the time we moved to our new house at 10 Chapin Street, he'd started threatening my mother physically. He was fifteen and crazy strong.
Nobody could understand why Steve turned from the relatively normal-seeming kid into the raging teenager he'd become. We believed he was an angry deaf kid who'd outgrow it sooner or later. But as time went on, his thwarted attempts to avoid school were not all that enraged him, and we could never be sure what would be the trigger.
Two topics—divorce and communism—could really set my brother off. He was a Catholic true believer, primarily because Catholicism taught him that the disabled would be whole in heaven and he was counting on it. Since Elizabeth Taylor was the divorce queen of the era, and divorce is a mortal sin, few things could throw him into a frenzy like fresh news of her love life. If it wasn't her, then some transgression by the godless Soviets or Cubans would make him fly into a rage.
“Why does he care what Elizabeth Taylor does?” I'd wonder aloud during his outbursts. Or: “Why does he care about the communists?” I started standing behind him and chanting provocative responses at him that he couldn't hear anyway. Perversely, it made me feel better.
Whether it was communism, Elizabeth Taylor, or high school, when Steve blew up, Mom was his target. At least once he tried to strangle her with the telephone cord. Another time, as she was trying to call my father for help, he ripped the telephone off the wall. The chain lock Dad put on their bedroom door didn't provide the refuge Mom sought. Steve simply kicked the door open.
With his new volatility, it was impossible to predict how quickly his rage would pass and he'd be the same old Steve, begging my mother's forgiveness for being a “bad boy.” He'd mouth the words bad boy over and over as he gave the family sign for bad, which was a light slap at his rear end—sort of mimicking a parent spanking a misbehaving child. He was as bewildered by the mood swings as we were.
Steve and I began to have our own run-ins too. Once I reached high school, I started to challenge his outbursts. Making fun of him behind his back wasn't enough anymore. I was carrying around my own pent-up anger and frustration because no one “stood up to him.” I was ready to try.
One time when I was around sixteen, we were both in the living room, and he was sitting where he always did, on an ottoman just inches from the TV screen. We never understood why he sat so close; maybe he was trying to lip-read. More likely it was because he knew it irritated everyone else when he sat in their line of sight like that. Often he'd also turn the sound off. If he couldn't hear the TV, nobody was going to. No fan of the medium, I didn't care about the shows themselves. It was the principle.
That particular day I was ironing behind him. The ironing board didn't live in the TV room, but since Mom always ironed in front of the television, that was where I did it. It was Pavlovian. Every time I set the iron down on the ironing board, he could feel the vibration, and it was getting on his nerves. After a while, each time the iron hit the board, he'd holler and sign at me to stop ironing. Finally, I flipped him a furiously shaking bird and told him to buzz off because I was working and had to get it done.
Within seconds he was standing on the other side of the ironing board, bellowing at me, just inches from my face. I signed for him to back off and threatened to slap his face. Instead of moving away, he furiously egged me on: “Slap me, slap me, slap me.” Suddenly, without thought, I surprised both of us and obliged him. Mom ran into the room just as he wound up and slapped me right back, hard, across the face. I did see stars as I staggered but managed not to fall, and Mom yanked on Steve's arm. The shock of it all snapped him back to normal, and again he was sorry. Bad, bad, bad.
· · ·
My brother had the great misfortune of being born in 1947, when the guiding philosophy in teaching the deaf was to force them into the hearing world. Since they live in a hearing world, the theory went, they must learn how to operate in it. If allowed to live in an insular world of sign language, which so few people spoke, how could they ever function in the “real” world? That meant reading lips, learning how to talk.
Families of the deaf were discouraged from learning sign language, because that would only serve to isolate the deaf family member. We somehow managed with a rudimentary, homemade sign language and signing the alphabet. Mom was the best at it, and Mary Beth and I did okay. My father was always clueless about signing, and Mark and Steve couldn't really communicate with each other before they were adults. In the early years, Janet was so young and afraid that all she wanted to do was hide from Steve.
When I try to think about my brother's world of minimal communication with the most important people in his life, our family, my mind closes down. It loses the ability to tread that path. I can't handle imagining his existence and don't want to try to put myself there now. All that does is stir up memories I don't want to relive, since I can't change a thing.
One image that frequently forces itself into my mind, however, and which captures the isolation, is the family dinner, which we ate together every night until we all were grown and out of the house. We're seated around the table, talking on top of each other—the females of the family, that is—and then there's Steve sitting there, watching. He's unable to follow anything we're talking about and is involved only in the mechanics of passing food, eating. But until he changed, I believed he was really there, part of the family, just like the rest of us, except he couldn't hear.
A memory of his being forced to speak makes me quiver. Steve wasn't excused from confession. The deaf were given no special dispensation, although the routine was somewhat different for them since they couldn't whisper their sins through the screen in a darkened confessional. Before the regular confessions began, my brother (and any other deaf Catholic in town) would meet with the priest at the front of the church, in a small room off to the side. There he'd present his sins, which he literally checked off on the sin list. The priest would indicate what his penance would be and then motion for Steve to recite the Act of Contrition.
Maybe if you were familiar with the ritual, you could identify the prayer. If you stumbled into the church unknowing, you'd hear eerie sounds echoing through the house of the Lord. Since he'd never heard sound, Steve couldn't modulate the volume or tone of his voice. It wasn't that he was yelling, but somehow the combination of the peculiar pitch and tone resulted in his prayer reverberating off the walls of the church.
Perhaps my brother felt nothing but joy at being freed of his sins, because he certainly had no idea about the sound. Sitting in the back of the church, however, waiting for his torturous prayer to end, I'd be in agony. How much was for him and how much was about my own embarrassment, I honestly don't know.
But so much for the philosophy of forcing the deaf into the “real” world of the hearing. The first time I saw Children of a Lesser God, a movie about an angry young deaf woman fighting for the right to express herself as a deaf woman, not as a hearing woman might, I sobbed through much of the film.
Once, some years later, I cried throughout most of a weekend after watching it. Twice. Guilt induced masochism? Unfortunately, the book I was reading at the time, about the life experiences of children born completely deaf, didn't provide escape and instead underscored the depth of the sadness I was feeling.
· · ·
One thing Steve and I had in common as kids was that we both were terrified of the Soviet Union and the nuclear threat. I first learned about nuclear bombs at Green Street School. We were part of what is now known as the “duck and cover” generation.
During emergency tests, we'd have to get under our desks and curl into a near-fetal position. Our legs had to be tucked into our chests, our arms wrapped tightly around our legs, and our heads on our knees, to be ready in case the bomb ever fell. Sometimes we'd file into the gym and line up against the walls in the same curled-up position. Because the gym didn't have any windows, the idea was that it would be harder for the bomb blast to reach us. Right. Have you ever been to Hiroshima?
I don't know who developed these fabulous exercises in “nuclear safety,” but we felt anything but safe. The possibility of nuclear war felt like much more than just an unpleasant thing to worry about. Fear seeped deep into the marrow of my bones.
At that time in my very young life, if I wished that my family had tons of money, it wasn't so that I could have lots of beautiful clothes that matched, and toys, and a fabulous house with a built-in swimming pool. What I wanted was our own bomb shelter in the backyard so we might really be safe. I tried hard to focus on the fantasy of the security a bomb shelter offered, and not on what the world would be like once we dared emerge from it. I especially wished we had one when Russia tried to put nukes in Cuba.
The image of President Kennedy on the television screen during the Cuban Missile Crisis is seared into my brain. Young and handsome, yet presidential and somber, he spoke to the nation about the possibility of war because the Soviet Union was threatening our hemisphere with nuclear weapons in Cuba. America was demanding their immediate removal. Each day of the crisis was more tense than the last, until finally we were told the Soviet Union had backed down. The world had edged away from the nuclear abyss.
Though I had just turned twelve at the time, I was furious at Khrushchev and “the communists.” I had visions of storming into the United Nations and addressing the General Assembly, where I'd get Khrushchev to “admit” that he was indeed a communist. Somehow, through the force of my eloquence, and before the world, I'd convert him into a freedom-loving democrat who would then return to the Soviet Union and liberate all its citizens.
I should be embarrassed at the memory. My only defense is that I was young and obviously had an unsophisticated understanding of the world. At least I knew about the United Nations, even if I did embrace the fantasy that it was a world body where people actually put aside national interests and worked together to resolve issues for the good of us all.
Once the crisis had passed and stability in the Cold-War world was restored, my U.N.-peacemaker fantasy passed as well. Little did I know how much the UN. and weapons would feature in my adult world.
