Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (16 page)

As for
secret
signs, far and away the best one was the graphic sign for
defecate.
The right thumb is grasped in the fist of the left hand. Then quickly—or as the case may be when somewhat constipated, with exquisite slowness—the thumb is drawn down from the enclosed right fist. Faster would be the case if you had been eating prunes.

The children loved it! Now every kid in the neighborhood could say
shit
in sign.

Finally the day arrived as scheduled. The presenting of the projects began.

Eve and I sat through the most boring displays and incomprehensible explanations of why fireflies light up (which they absolutely refused to do in their jelly jar homes, being otherwise occupied sucking on the grape jelly under the lid); where mosquitoes go to die after biting you (this display featured ten dead mosquitoes lying peacefully on a bed of leaves at the bottom of an airless jar whose lid a kid had neglected to puncture with a nail); and how a moth turns into a butterfly (this one we didn’t believe for a minute). Then it was our turn.

We stood at the front of the class. The idea was that Eve would position herself somewhat to my rear, where I couldn’t see her, and she would hold up—in her right hand, of course—a drawing of the sign I was supposed to perform. When she called out the word for the sign, I would, from memory, execute it, in a kind of visual spelling bee.

When the teacher introduced us, half the class made the sign for
shit.
The other half nearly fell out of their chairs laughing. The teacher stood, dumbstruck, not having a clue as to what was going on. The room was a bedlam of hands in motion.

Shit, shit, shit
signs flew through the air, were flung through the air. It was a hailstorm of shit. A tornado of turds.

It took quite a while for the teacher to restore order.

Once again she introduced Eve and me, with the warning that any further outburst, whatever the heck it was about, would be rewarded with a trip to the principal’s office.

We began. Eve called out “penguin.” I dropped both my hands, palms facing downward, fingers held together, to either side of my waist. Then, hunching up my shoulders, I alternately raised and lowered each shoulder. To emphasize this sign, I lurched forward, stiff-legged, mimicking the lumbering gait of a penguin as it traversed an ice floe. The class applauded.

Eve asked for “deer.” Now I made what I imagined was the face of a startled deer, possibly caught in the headlights of a car on Flatbush Avenue, placing both my open hands above my head, all ten fingers splayed and shooting outward into stiff antler appendages. These I wiggled convincingly, as the class broke into a cheer.

“Elk?”

I was an elk.

“Moose?”

I was a moose.

The class loved it. “More. More!”

“Elephant?” My right hand formed a cup with its back resting against my nose. My hand moved gracefully, ponderously, out from my nose, curving downward, and while it turned under, seeking peanuts that were now visible to the imagination, on the dirt floor of the circus ring of our minds.

The class erupted in shouts of glee. My signs were killing them. This had to be better than ten dead mosquitoes and a bunch of fireflies that would not light.

Eve took me through a jungle of animals and a zoo full of exotic birds.

Then she began a list of the more complex signs that we had agreed upon.

The first sign was for a concept we were both familiar with. “What is the sign for
embarrass?
” she asked.

I made the sign for
red,
as in blood, moving my index finger up and down my red lips; then both my palms cradled my face, moving slowly upward, as if the red blush of blood were rising up, suffusing my entire face in a blossoming blush of mortification.

The class was fascinated.

Then Eve asked, “What is the sign for
discard?
” I drew a blank. I stood mute.

Eve prompted again: “
Discard?
”

I stood there at the front of the class, all eyes focused on me, my hands at my sides, defeated, a genuine blush of embarrassment now flooding my face; somehow I had completely forgotten this sign.

Eve realized that there was no use in asking me again to sign this concept.

She dropped the cards and rushed to my side to rescue me.

Discard
is a sign that requires both hands to execute.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she withdrew her left hand from her pocket and positioned it in the air for the entire class to see. Palm open and facing the class, pinky finger crooked in its permanently twisted position, with her open “normal” right hand she drew her fingertips across the palm of her hated left hand toward her pinky.

Suddenly she closed her right hand, as if clasping something, and swiftly withdrew it from her left palm, as if she had discovered a loathsome object there, and with a forceful motion she flung it to the floor, all the while making an expression of such distaste that the class fully expected the obscene object to leap up and scurry out of the room.

The audience was stunned into silence at her performance. The children fully understood what Eve had done, what her sign had signified—for her.

No one laughed.

Suddenly the class erupted in shouts of approval. Now Eve blushed, not in embarrassment, but from pride.

From that day on she never hid her hand again.

And at that moment I fell genuinely, not calculatingly, in love with Eve.

10

Tales Told

O
ne afternoon after school was out, a sudden drenching downpour drove all of the kids on my block back into their apartments. As was her habit whenever she saw me house-bound and at loose ends, my mother pulled me into the kitchen, sat me down at the table, and proceeded to cook me something to eat. I loved to watch her cook: throw in a little bit of this, a little bit of that, then a pinch of something else (never consulting a recipe, never measuring), mix, turn up the flame on the stove, and then wait until the mouthwatering concoction was done, which she always knew intuitively, without once looking at the clock.

Setting before me a fresh batch of matzoh brei, she watched me eat, with the strangest expression on her face.

“You know, your father was not my first choice for a husband,” she signed.

As good as the delightful mix of crumbly eggs and cracking-crisp matzoh was, I stopped eating.
What in the world,
I thought,
is this all about?

“I want to tell you a story,” she signed. “I want you to understand me.”

I put down my fork and concentrated on my mother’s hands and face and body. And I listened to her voice as she signed. My friends could not understand my mother’s speech, but I understood every word.

“When I was a girl, as you know, I loved going to the beach in Coney Island. It was my favorite place in the whole world, outside of my school. I was a naughty girl. I liked boys. I was
crazy
about boys. And they were
crazy
about me.”

My mother and her friends at Coney Island

There are many signs for
crazy,
but the one she used to indicate how she loved those young boys involved her kissing the back of her closed hand. Over and over she kissed her hand, indicating clearly the strength of her feelings, her need for acceptance, her desire for attention.

To convey to me the power she had over them, she shaped her hand in a claw and shook it back and forth in front of her face, indicating that they were
crazy/dizzy/nuts
for her.

Then she told me the story of her great lost love.

“My big love was a hearing boy. I loved him, and he adored me.”

Describing this Coney Island Adonis, long since consigned to the mists of memory, but re-created in her mind this day as vividly as if he still waited for her on Bay 6, she spoke of him lovingly and in great detail. He had a golden tan, she said, the result of repeated exposures to the summer sun, aided by the hourly application to his skin of a concoction of chicken fat, virgin olive oil, and iodine. “When I looked at him,” she signed, a faraway look in her eyes, “his skin glowed, and I saw his body covered in a golden light.”

Apparently he lifted weights, for she told me he had muscles all over his body, even in places she didn’t think boys
could
have muscles. When she said this, I could swear, she blushed.

“My father hated him,” she signed. “He had heard about this boy from a neighbor, who told my father that this boy was touching me and kissing me under the boardwalk. This was not true. But I knew he wanted to do that, if I’d let him. I was a flirt. I was a tease. I was naughty. But I was a good girl.” She smiled, no doubt picturing in her mind the beautiful, fresh, innocent young girl she had been so many summers ago. Then her face darkened.

“One day when I came home from the beach, my father slapped me across the face. I was shocked. My father had
never
hit me. My father, Max, was a Gypsy, you know. My mother told me that his family lived in the forest in the old country. ‘They lived like animals,’ she said. I don’t think my mother ever loved my father.

“Though he was free with his hands with my brothers, he had always spoiled me. We had no money, and he had no steady job, but what little he had, he would spend on me, buying me small treats. I think he felt sad all of his life that I was deaf. He didn’t know why, but he blamed himself. He felt guilty.

“It was only after he slapped me that I found out the reason for his anger. The boy I was crazy for didn’t have a job. And didn’t have a trade. And he was
not
deaf. Just like baseball, three strikes and you’re out.

“My father forbade me to see the boy ever again. And the next weekend he went to Bay 6 and confronted the boy, muscles and all. When the boy laughed in my father’s face, at his arm-waving and screaming, my father, who was strong as an ox, socked him.

“From then on the boy paid no attention to me. I was heartbroken, especially when I saw him flirting with another deaf girl. I don’t know if I really loved him or not, but what I needed, I realized later, was the attention he gave me. Attention from a hearing person, which no other hearing person had ever shown me.”

I was amazed at this story. I knew next to nothing about my grandfather Max. The idea that he was a Gypsy fascinated me, especially since the only Gypsies I had ever seen were the ones in the movie
The Wolfman.
And in that movie they were a strange, evil-looking people, rattling around in the forest in their horse-drawn wagons. And of course the idea of my mother as a young girl, in love with someone other than my father, was almost inconceivable to me.

My mother continued her story. “My father then put out the word in the deaf community of New York:
Find me a deaf man for my deaf daughter. I only ask that he have a trade. That he have a job. That he is not a bum.
And he added,
A union card would be a plus.
”

I couldn’t help but wonder who I would have been if my mother had married that hearing boy. What would it have been like, I thought, to have lived in a home divided right down the middle by one silent and one hearing parent? I simply could not imagine such a thing and was glad that my grandfather, Max the Gypsy, had socked the boy with the golden skin all these many years ago. Besides, I loved my father and could not for a minute imagine having any other one but him.