What's That Pig Outdoors? (10 page)

Of course I never made the connection between what I had read and had been told about and the demure young ladies at the ballroom dance classes we all attended every other Friday night in sixth and seventh grades. The white gloves and neckties, curtsies and bows of Miss Pocock's Fortnightly had to do with manners, not morals, and I would have been astonished if anyone had suggested any other relationship. I was having a wonderful time learning to dance, anyway, and I was good at it.

I won't say that the deaf as a group have rhythm, any more than do black people, but most of us can follow a beat as well as the hearing. We can often feel the music through the dance floor, and we also can pick up the tempo from watching others. At the waltz and fox-trot I was nimble on my feet, even graceful, much to the surprise of the parents who chaperoned the Fortnightlies, but my friends—both male and female—seemed to think it an unremarkable accomplishment.
They
were every bit as expert.

I also did my share of snuggling in Saturday afternoon movie-theater balconies, switching partners during intermissions, and played post office and spin the bottle during the boy-and-girl parties we hosted in our basements while our parents uneasily paced the kitchen floor above. It was at one of these parties that the light of lust finally shone upon me, during a long, slow, delicious bunny hug with a girl whose natural endowments surpassed those of her contemporaries.

But along with the rivers of hormones that began to course through my body came trickles of self-doubt, the curse of every adolescent. Some youngsters in the first stages of the condition agonize about their zits, buck teeth, knobby knees, big feet, curly hair, concave chests, and other perfectly normal physical shortcomings, magnifying them in their minds to nightmarish proportions. My particular grotesqueries were my lips and my speech.

I have what romance novelists sometimes call a “generous mouth,” one whose adult dimensions a woman once described as sensual and
desirable. The more I looked at my thirteen-year-old lips in the mirror, however, the more they resembled two slabs of liver hung out to dry. How, I began to wonder in my worst moments of dateless Friday night self-pity, could any girl want to be seen with
that?

Furthermore, in junior high I had become more conscious of my speech. The youngsters I had known since the third grade were quite used to it, but most of my junior high classmates, drawn from all over the northern half of Evanston, were new to me, and there were a great many of them. For the first time I became aware of snickering whenever I spoke in class. It had happened before, but was so infrequent that I could dismiss the gigglers as ignorant louts. This time it seemed, in the self-magnification of the vulnerable young teens, to be happening every day.
And the girls were laughing, too!

In the normal course of teenage events I would have fallen on my sword, writhed in agony for a while, then picked myself up and outgrown all the self-dramatization. But I was unlucky enough for my fears (hitherto confided to the bathroom mirror in absolute privacy) to be confirmed by an outside agency when I was at my most vulnerable.

One afternoon, sitting in my room, a fellow swimmer—one who, incidentally, suffered from a bad case of eczema—and I were talking about the prettier girls in our eighth-grade homeroom. I allowed as how I wouldn't mind going to a movie with Sally, who filled her blouse out to here and reportedly subscribed to a moral code down to there. “She won't go out with you,” Bobby said firmly, doubtless echoing his own fears about
his
peculiarities. “You have big lips and you talk funny.” The stake was driven hard and deep.

But I don't mean to leave the impression that I had been reduced to a sullen, withdrawn jelly of self-pity. Far from it. Between histrionic pangs there were races to be swum, games to be played, subjects to be studied— and lots of friends to do those things with. Concerned with their own adolescent worries, my chums didn't notice mine. At that age, a sudden and occasional shyness is hardly remarkable.

Besides, it wasn't all that apparent, even to me. But at school the more astute teachers soon did become aware that something was amiss. When called upon in class, I'd simply shrug and say, “I dunno—I really do.” I wasn't going to give some smart-ass classmate from the other side of the
city the smallest chance to laugh at my speech. I would, however, give plenty of attention to other students' answers, turning to the teacher and nodding sagely if they were correct. Expressing an intense interest in the subject at hand was enough to deceive everybody for a while, but as every bomber pilot knows, it's foolish to maintain strict radio silence in a swarm of Messerschmitts.

Nevertheless, I tried. On days when I had to deliver an oral report in class, I'd stay home sick. When assigned with another pupil to prepare a report, I'd do all the research and write the paper if the other kid agreed to stand up before the class and deliver it. It was the coward's way out. Had I had the courage, I knew, I could have stood up, spoken out, and stared down the dirty rotten no-goods who dared to snicker. My speech was not unintelligible. If one listened, it was as understandable as good English delivered with a heavy Eastern European accent. There really was nothing to be ashamed of—but how can that obvious truth be conveyed to a youngster who has convinced himself otherwise?

A few teachers took me aside and asked why I wouldn't speak in class, and I told them. They were not trained in the special psychology of the deaf, and I think they were largely nonplussed. They didn't press the issue. Perhaps they thought I'd be like everyone else and outgrow my adolescent fears. Maybe in time I would have, had there not been something else to contend with.

Because I had not grown up among other deaf children, I had managed to avoid acquiring most of the obvious “deafisms”—telltale physical characteristics of the handicap. These include exaggerated facial and bodily expressions, which deaf children brought up together, even in an oral environment, quickly learn in order to help them communicate with others. These often can seem grotesque to hearing people.

Another characteristic that makes the hearing uncomfortable is a tendency of many of the deaf to stand close to them in order to see their lips better, thus invading their “personal space.” Then there is a tendency to shuffle the feet, to walk with heavy, clunky steps, and to drop objects upon tables, not realizing how much noise that makes. And a propensity for emitting what my family once called “funny noises.”

Under stress or in moments of intense concentration, totally deaf people often unconsciously place their vocal cords and diaphragms under
muscular tension while breathing. The result is a high, sometimes very loud nasal keening. We are unaware that we are making these noises, because the vibrations are too high-pitched for us to feel them in our throats. As a child I might occasionally issue a brief “funny noise,” but a sharp glance from my parents or a muttered “Shut up!” from a friend in school would quickly stifle the little noon whistle. Maybe when that happened in class, someone would suppress a giggle, but I never noticed it. Such episodes seemed infrequent and trivial.

Until junior high. All too often I'd feel a punch in the shoulder from the kid across the aisle, look up from my book, and see everyone—
everyone
!—rocking over their desks in laughter, as if an unsynchronized wave of merriment had burst through the windows into the classroom. Up front, at her desk, the teacher would stare at me in puzzled horror. I'd bury myself in my book with sweaty, red-faced consternation. No hole was too deep to hide in. It would be many years before I trained myself out of this perfectly understandable but maddeningly embarrassing habit.

In the meantime, the damage was done. The once utterly open and friendly youngster was still in most ways outgoing, but when cornered by an obligation to speak in public turned shy and wary. Moreover, during my last year at Haven and my first at Evanston Township High School, a new problem surfaced. I was beginning to encounter practical limitations to the art of being a deaf person in the hearing world.

At fourteen, I was suddenly thrust into an unfamiliar situation for which my lipreading experience had not prepared me. Classes were much more formal, almost like lectures. We were now students, not pupils. We spent much less time working silently by ourselves at our desks. More often we would focus our entire attention on our teachers at their desks in the front of the room, droning on with the day's lesson, sometimes for an entire hour.

Hearing students can relax and listen passively, eyes focused in the distance, soaking up auditory information as it washes over them. Lipreaders, however, must concentrate on a small visual point—the teacher's lips—actively hunting for clues to what is being said. “Listening” of this
kind is extremely hard work. We cannot look out the window briefly to rest our eyes or to digest a piece of information; if we do so, we might miss something important and even lose the thread of the discussion. If the teacher suddenly goes off on a tangent, we may flounder helplessly, searching for familiar words to help us get on track. The teacher might stop talking as someone in the rear of the room asks a question. Often I'd turn around, searching for the speaker, who might already have finished and lowered his arm. Quickly I'd whip back to the teacher, but the question would be answered, the subject perhaps changed anew.

But I was not entirely helpless. Early on I learned that many high school teachers of that age parroted the standard textbooks nearly word for word. In the first week of my freshman year, I discovered that my biology honors teacher—the head of the science department—might have been an unimaginative marionette of a lecturer, but he followed the textbook nearly verbatim, a chapter a day. I'd open it, place my finger on the words, and follow closely as he chattered on, page after page. The textbook not only was a “trot” for his lecture but also helped me learn his wooden-lipped way of speaking so that I could follow him more easily during laboratory periods, when the text wasn't of much help.

As the semester wore on, I found it more relaxing to learn the biology text the night before class, then follow the teacher without the book the next day. But that was like listening to the playback of a recording, and before long became boring. Soon, confident that I knew the daily material well enough to be wholly prepared if the teacher sprang a surprise quiz upon us, I started reading popular novels in class, pretending I was following the teacher in the textbook. From time to time I'd glance up as if I were paying attention, then return to
Battle Cry.

Mr. Jones may have been a drudge, but he was no fool. It was not long before he noticed that the little freshman among his mostly sophomore class was engrossed in something having nothing to do with biology. He did not, however, confront me directly. I don't think he quite knew how to deal with the situation; the few deaf students at Evanston High School in those days did not ordinarily take the same classes as their hearing compatriots. He took his case to Mr. Parsons, my homeroom teacher, who called me on the carpet one morning before classes.

“Mr. Jones says you're reading novels in his class,” said Mr. Parsons, a
brisk, businesslike man who believed in getting right to the point. For that reason—and because he was something of a showman, with a mobile face that was extremely easy to lipread—I had liked him from the beginning. “Yes,” I said, “but Mr. Jones is kind of hard to understand. Besides, I'm getting a B plus in his class.” I had been acing the quizzes and exams and doing somewhat less well in the lab work.

“Okay,” said Mr. Parsons, to my utter surprise. He ushered me to the door of his office and in smiling dismissal shook my hand, always a sign of satisfaction with his students. I don't know what went through his mind that morning, but I sometimes think my high school teachers got together one day and decided to let the deaf freshman's academic performance determine how they were going to handle his eccentricities. So long as it was not perceived to be disrespectful, they would overlook my seeming inattentiveness. They were letting me find my own way, and for that I will always be grateful.

This is not to say that the teachers lacked any idea how to treat a deaf student. Most tried to broaden my opportunities for learning, helping me find other strategies to fill in the holes of my understanding. Sometimes I asked the teachers for extra reading because I didn't understand the flow of conversation in class, and they willingly, even eagerly, found it for me.

They also seated me in the front row of the classroom, sometimes in the middle row closest to them, so I would have the best view of their lips. In some classes I'd ask for, and get, the first seat in the row closest to the window so that the glare of daylight would be behind me, not in my eyes, when I turned to watch another student who was talking.

While most held me to the same academic standards as they did other students, my French teachers had to be pragmatic. While American English is spoken largely with the lips, French relies heavily on nasal sounds. While native French lipreaders, steeped in the culture, probably have no extraordinary difficulty, it is almost impossible for the untrained American lipreader to discern the nasal French “n” or the “r” rolled in the back of the throat. Moreover, I had enough trouble producing crisp and clear English speech; to expect me to speak French with any
élan
was obviously impractical. Hence the teachers graded me wholly on my reading and writing of the language and looked the other way when I spoke or attempted to lipread it.