Singing Hands (2 page)

Mother rarely used her voice in public. So my sisters and I froze in surprise at lunch that afternoon when she decided to speak up and ask the waitress for Worcestershire sauce. Her words came out sounding two octaves too high, and garbled, like her mouth was full of marbles. Of course, we Davis girls could understand Mother perfectly. We were used to deciphering her speaking voice, but the waitress looked completely baffled.

She turned to Margaret. "What'd she say?" she asked flatly.

But Mother didn't wait for Margaret to answer. She was angry.

Usually there was no problem at Britling's. In fact, Mother always chose the cafeteria for Sunday lunch because you barely had to ask for a thing. You lined up at the gleaming stainless-steel counter and chose from a selection of roast beef or fried chicken or turkey with all the trimmings. Then you found your seat, and waitresses in spotless starched aprons scurried by with pitchers of iced tea and water.

But our waitress today must have been new. I didn't recognize her, and Margaret and I had already reminded her twice to bring us iced tea, and Nell was missing a fork from her set of silverware. Then, to make matters worse, the condiments—the usual spicy relish, the ketchup, the Tabasco and Worcestershire that Mother loved—weren't on the table.

"Worcestershire sauce," Mother said again, her voice creeping higher and louder. "Worcestershire sauce!" A strange collection of consonants bubbled out of her mouth. The other diners around us were turning to stare.

Mother looked stricken. She was always so dignified, especially on Sunday mornings, outfitted in her best brown silk dress with white polka dots, and her dark hair brushed into neat waves under her hat, But now I could see a flicker of panic in her eyes and a flush spreading over her powdered cheeks.

The waitress put her hands on her hips and said loudly, "Ma'am, I truly have no idea what you're saying. So you can just stop shouting at me whenever you're ready."

Mother closed her mouth, pressing her lips together tightly. She dropped her gaze down to the roast beef and gravy congealing on her plate. It was Nell who hurried to her rescue first. "She said she would like some worsh ... some woo-chester—" Nell couldn't say it, either. The waitress rolled her eyes.

Right then I hated that waitress more than anyone I had ever hated in my life. I hated her brassy blond hair and the lipstick stuck in the creases of her mouth and the way she kept tapping her pointy pink fingernails on her hips. It wasn't Mother's fault she couldn't speak well. She had lost her hearing long before she ever learned to talk.

I couldn't keep quiet anymore. "She
said,
" I yelled across the table, "she wants some steak sauce!"

All at once, the dining room fell completely silent.

"Well, my Lord," the waitress muttered, rolling her eyes again. She spun on her heel, snatched up a bottle of the sauce from a nearby table, and brought it down in front of Mother with a loud thunk. None of us moved until she had sashayed off.

"You shouldn't have yelled at her, Gussie," Margaret said under her breath. Two spots of red still flamed on her cheeks.

"No. Gussie was right," Nell said. "We should complain to the manager."

But Mother shook her head hard, which meant the subject was closed. For a while we sat quietly, trying to eat. Mother didn't touch the Worcestershire. She cut a small, perfect square of meat. Then, after forcing a bite into her mouth, she patted her lips with her napkin and signed that she was going to the ladies' restroom.

Ordinarily I couldn't wait for dessert at Britling's. But now the thought of my usual slab of the chocolate cake with fudge sprinkles or the cherry cobbler topped with whipped cream turned my stomach. I felt as if people were still gawking, and, sure enough, when I glanced at the table where the waitress had fetched the steak sauce, a pair of plump twin girls sat calmly examining us.

I kicked Nell under the table. When she looked up at me, I waggled my fingers and smiled. Nell knew immediately what I was planning.

I signed slowly and elaborately to make sure she would get every word. "There are two girls behind you.... Twins.... They can't stop staring. Poor things. Not too smart. And they look just like their father. Same red hair. Same frog eyes.... But wait. Their brother is very handsome. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Looks like he has his eye on Margaret."

"Please stop, Gussie," Margaret whispered. "Haven't you embarrassed us enough for one day?"

But of course I wouldn't stop. It wasn't so long ago that Margaret had played the game along with us. Actually, Margaret had been the one to invent the Poor Deaf Girl Game. Together we had spent hours at Morgan's corner drugstore, sitting at the soda fountain, signing dramatically to one another. The object was to see how many people we could fool, how many gullible folks we could trick into pitying us. "Look at those poor deaf-mutes," they would say, or, "See them just a-talking away on their fingers. Wonder what they're going on about."

Then, if we were really feeling devious, we would stop signing and strike up a regular conversation in loud voices, jabbering away over our malted milk shakes, just to let all those people know we had heard every word they said.

But now that she was in high school, Margaret felt as if she had outgrown our old game. "Should I go get Mother?" she threatened quietly.

Nell ignored her. "Does the boy have red hair, too?" she signed back to me.

I swooped my head back and forth. "Oh, no. Black as coal. And eyes as blue as big, fat blueberries." I didn't know the signs for coal and blueberries, so I made a big show of fingerspelling.

Over Nell's shoulder, the girls were still staring, whispering about us behind their cupped hands. I was just getting ready to give Nell another report when I noticed a man at the next table watching me. My heart fluttered in my chest. I recognized him. He was the man from church, the tall one with the striped bow tie. I remembered him talking with Daddy and suddenly realized that, for the last five minutes, I had been signing about the frog-eyed twins and their cute brother, and he must have been reading my signs all along.

"Oh, no," I croaked, reaching for my water glass.

"What is it?" whispered Nell.

"It's the man."

"What man?" Margaret asked, craning her neck over her shoulder.

"Don't look now," I ordered under my breath.

But to my horror, the man was already rising to his feet and coming toward us. He reached our table just as Mother returned from the bathroom. She had powdered her face and composed herself again.

The man touched Mother's shoulder, stopping her before she sat down. "Pardon me," he signed. "I wanted to introduce myself. I was at your husband's service this morning."

Mother smiled and nodded, making a small, pleasant noise in her throat. Then the man began to speak as he signed. His voice didn't sound nasal or muffled—not at all like a deaf person's voice. "I've heard so much about Reverend Davis and followed his work over the years. Today I finally came to see Saint Jude's for myself and ask for your help."

Then he looked directly at me and said, "I've sat through many church services in my time, but never one quite like today's.... The musical solo was especially impressive."

My humming days were over.

By the time I heard the back screen door bang shut when Daddy came home that afternoon, the truth about what I had done was out. I didn't move. I had spent the last two hours sprawled across my bumpy chenille bedspread, still in my church clothes, waiting for the fan to blow in my direction and for bits of news from downstairs. Nell had been running up with reports every twenty minutes or so.

Now she practically skidded into our bedroom in her sock feet. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, still huffing from taking the back steps two at a time.

"Daddy's home," she announced ominously.

"I know. I heard the door."

"Mother hasn't told him yet. They're arguing about Daddy's traveling again."

I sat up in bed hopefully. "Really?"

Nell nodded. "Mother says she doesn't care how rich that Mr. Snider from Britling's is or how much money he gives to Saint Jude's. She says Daddy can't possibly add another mission to his list. The church will just have to get somebody else."

"Good." I flopped back on my pillow. Then I popped up again. "But didn't she mention anything about the new car Mr. Snider offered? If Daddy had a car, he wouldn't have to take the train everywhere."

Nell frowned down at me. "I left before they got to that."

I saw her catch a glimpse of her face in the mirror that hung over the dresser between our twin beds. She licked her finger and rubbed at the crease that had appeared between her delicate eyebrows. Then, still gazing at the mirror, she turned her head sideways and fluffed up the light brown curls that swung around her cheeks.

"Stop primping and go see what else they're saying.... Please?"

Nell sighed and reluctantly turned from the mirror. "Oh, all right. But you owe me two nights of dish duty for this."

I snorted impatiently. "Fine."

After Nell had gone, I scooted to the edge of the bed and plucked my wrinkled blouse away from my damp back, then refastened my barrettes. Maybe Mother would be so upset thinking about Daddy's schedule that she'd forget all about my humming.

What wife wouldn't be upset? Daddy was home only one full week a month. The rest of the time he was ministering to deaf people in nine states across the South. Gadsden, Alabama ... St. Augustine, Florida ... Meridian, Mississippi ... Morganton, North Carolina ... I couldn't even remember all the towns where my father preached. And whenever he was away, it was Mother who had to run things at Saint Jude's.

And now Mr. Moneybags Snider in his striped bow tie wanted Daddy to add
another
town to his list: Macon, Georgia, way off near the middle of the state. Mr. Snider was the son of deaf parents, he had told us right in the middle of Britling's. But even though they were deaf, they had raised him well, he said—so well that he now owned a chain of top-of-the-line furniture stores spread across Georgia and Alabama. He wanted to repay his parents by helping to start a church for the deaf in Macon. "Oh, how my dear mother would love to see that deaf choir signing 'Nearer, My God, to Thee'!" Mr. Snider had exclaimed with tears spilling down his cheeks.

I stepped in front of the mirror and tried to puff my dark hair around my face like Nell's, but it fell in lank clumps to my shoulders. I sighed. I had planned for a transformation in my appearance to occur before I started South Glen Junior High School in the fall. But time was running out. Although I diligently applied Vanish Freckle Fading Creme every night, my freckles hadn't seemed to fade one bit, and my eyebrows were hopeless, stretched out in a fuzzy caterpillar line straight across my brow. Every time I asked Margaret if she would help me tweeze them into pretty arches like hers, she would smirk and say something like, "I'll have to put that on my calendar. Those monsters are gonna take two or three hours,
at least.
"

I leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting more carefully. At least I didn't have eyebrows like our upstairs renter Mrs. Fernley. Hers were so sparse she had to fill them in with a brown pencil that left her with two sharp arcs across her brow and a permanent look of surprise. I cocked my head up at the ceiling, listening. She was playing her opera again, just as she had on Sunday afternoons ever since Mother and Daddy had decided to take in roomers last year. I was sure Mrs. Fernley had chosen our house because my parents were deaf and she could play records on her phonograph as loud as she wanted.

Besides being an opera lover, Mrs. Fernley was a divorcee—another fact that made us all a little suspicious, although she was at least fifty and never entertained gentlemen callers. "I enjoy my freedom," I had heard her tell Daddy firmly when she first came to see the room. "The ability to come and go as I please is a luxury that was not possible during my years of marriage."

I couldn't help making fun of the way Mrs. Fernley talked. She spoke as if she might aspire to have a British accent instead of the Southern drawl the rest of us had. At first I thought she spoke in that prim way to help Daddy with lip reading. Then, after several months of listening to her careful enunciation, I decided she was just plain prissy.

She dressed just as carefully as she spoke. Every morning she tip-tapped down our front walkway at eight-twenty to catch the streetcar for downtown Birmingham, where she worked as the chief millinery buyer for Blach's department store. I was fascinated that an adult could have such a job—picking out hats for eight hours each day, week after week. Whenever I could, I rushed to peek out Margaret's window just to see the smart hats or tailored suits Mrs. Fernley wore to work each day.

Then there were the strange odors that wafted down from upstairs whenever she cooked on her hot plate—smoky, musky smells of exotic spices that clung to our clothes and reminded me of the time I stuck my nose in the clove jar when Mother was baking a ham for Christmas.

Mother had a bird-dog sense of smell, and if Mrs. Fernley happened to be cooking, she knew it immediately, even if she was all the way down in our kitchen at the back of the house. She crinkled up her nostrils and pursed her lips with distaste. "Curry!" She spelled out the letters harshly with her fingers, then swept her hands through a scornful combination of signs. "She must have foreign blood."

Just as I was getting ready to apply another layer of freckle-fading cream to the bridge of my nose, Nell burst through the door again.

"Mother told him."

I cringed. "What'd he say?"

"Not much ... that is, until they called Margaret in and Daddy asked her to tell him the names of all the songs you've ever hummed in church."

"All of them?" I moaned.

"Yep. She even told him about that time you hummed 'Happy Birthday' during the nativity play at Christmas when Mary put Baby Jesus in the manger."