If a Tree Falls (8 page)

Toting Sophia in her infant seat, we toured the Clarke preschool. The classroom was cheery and bright, and the children were playing—really playing. They had a make-believe lemon tree and a lemonade stand. They were squeezing, tasting, puckering, sugaring, stirring, pouring. They were buying and selling. They were talking!

“You want lemonade?”

“Yes. Ooh. That sour.”

“Want sugar?”

“Yes! I pour it myself. Here my money.”

We observed the preschool for over an hour. From within the observation booth, we listened in with headphones to the wondrous sound of deaf children talking! Some more advanced than others; some in need of intense prompting. But all of them talking, and all of them
playing
. Afterward, we drove around Northampton’s neighborhoods with a real estate booklet. We gawked at turn-of-the-century houses that we could actually afford, then ate decent
Tandoori at an Indian restaurant while Sophia slept in her infant seat under our table.

We returned to the Clarke School to meet with Jan, the director of the parent-infant program I had spoken to by phone. Jan had a light in her eyes even brighter than the fuschia hair ribbon she wore to dazzle her young charges. She greeted us warmly and spoke with enthusiasm about child development, parental bonding, and play. She led us through the school, founded in the 1860s, before even Nellie was born. Jan, herself, had worked at Clarke for almost thirty years.

By now Sophia was wide awake. We settled ourselves on the floor in Jan’s office and played with Sophia as we had grown accustomed. We sounded off toys by rattling maracas, squeaking a rubber cat, or pressing a fuzzy duck for its quack, then made a big show by widening our eyes, pointing to our ears, and proclaiming “I hear it” in response to each sound. Jan watched us for a long while. Eventually, she spoke up:

“Sophia is going to be fine, no matter what school or what communication method you choose. You may decide to come here. But you needn’t move all the way from California. Sophia is alert and engaged. Above all, you are connected—you are an intact family.”

I felt my body relax into the floor as Jan spoke. Her
words loosened the muscles that had knotted in my guts, and I breathed deeply for the first time in three months. Jan had worked with deaf children and their families her entire professional life. Child development was her life’s passion. She said Sophia was going to be fine.

On the plane ride back to California, Bill told me he had decided not to apply for the commissioner position. Sophia was the priority now. We talked about moving to Northampton. We agreed that if we were in the right place to raise Sophia, the other facets of our lives would work out. The Clarke School, and Northampton, felt promising to both of us. We decided to launch job searches in western Massachusetts, and when at least one of us found sustainable employment, we’d move.

When we arrived home from the Northampton trip, one of the messages waiting on our voicemail system was from my cousin Valerie. I dialed her back before we had lugged the last of our bags into the entryway. Bill shot me an annoyed look. I motioned to Sophia, fast asleep in her infant car seat, a justification for returning the phone call now rather than later.

“Jennifer, I think I found a death record for Judith Fleischer.”

I was struck, silent.

“Jennifer, are you there?” Valerie asked.

“Are you sure it’s
our
Judith Fleischer?” I sputtered.

I hadn’t known until that moment how desperately I had hoped to meet her, possibly my one remaining deaf ascendant. How I had placed my hopes for understanding my family’s deaf past—and for navigating my family’s future—on the stories I believed she alone could tell me.

That night, I sat at my desk and tried to finish writing a philosophy paper that I had started before Sophia was born. For over an hour, while Bill and Sophia slept, I stared at my computer screen and tried to make sense of my now incomprehensible academic writing. I rifled through reference books and related philosophy articles. I turned arguments over and over in my head. It was no use.

I reached for a new novel, one I had bought the same day as I’d bought the blank journal.
The River Midnight
, by Lilian Nattel, about life in an imaginary shtetl called Blaszka. Part of my new research program.

 

“Time grows short at the end of a century, like winter days when night falls too soon. In the dusk, angels and demons
walk. Who knows who they are? Or which is which. But there they are, sneaking their gifts into the crevices of change ...”

 

I moved myself to the living room couch and spread a fleecy blanket on top of me. In no time, I was lost in the jabber of the market square, the heat of the tavern, the swallows of mushroom soup that kept December’s early chill at bay.

Bill and I started our job searches. I bypassed the official, academic job market and instead had my dossier sent to the five colleges in the vicinity of Northampton—Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and UMass Amherst. During Sophia’s nap time, I typed up cover letters, trying to sound engaged and committed to my scholarly work.

Surrounding me on all sides, our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held tome after mighty tome of the great Western philosophers. In graduate school, I revered these books. I believed that they spoke to me. But now, they were silent. Just theoretical musings for minds detached from the reality of new babies, of my baby. Some were worse than silent:
disparaging of the languageless deaf, deemed incapable of thought.

When I had started graduate work, I had fixed on the riddles that went to my core: the metaphysics of nothing, the empty set—did it not swell, like a wet cardboard box, full with its emptiness? And skepticism, the question of whether you can ever know another mind, or be known by another? If the holes, generations-deep, wouldn’t fill, I could at least stare them down into abstractions.

Bishop Berkeley’s phrase:
esse est percipi
(to be is to be perceived) had brought me to my knees. Not because of an enchantment with idealism. It stirred me like poetry, ratifying my sense of a tenuous existence, of having grown up largely unperceived.
Esse est percipi
. It transported me back to my mother’s bathroom countertop, my little-girl thighs sticking to the cold yellow tile. Rows of wicker baskets brimming with compacts, lipsticks, curling pins. The smell of hairspray. I watched my mother lean into the mirror, rail thin and powdery, her frantic eyes chasing after a vanishing girl. Looking too long. Longing.

“Mom?”

Her mascara-coated eyelashes made short black streaks on the glass.

If my mother saw me, it was through her reflection, her
projection. I was fractured, as if by a prism, or a multi-fold mirror, and the parts of me that failed to match her self-image were cut away from view, unseen. I tried my best to become like her, to garner the light of her gaze, with dress, with song.

When I first started taking voice lessons in New York City, my mother sometimes accompanied me. We’d order the French onion soup at O’Neals’ Balloon. Then we’d stroll along the Lincoln Center streets, and I’d sing to her.

“
Ah fors’e lui che l’anima
”—my favorite aria from
La Traviata
, it often felt like my best chance for connection with my mother. From the time I was fifteen until the time I left for college, my singing of its lines—“
A quell l’a mor, quell l’a mor ch’e palpito, del l’universo, del l’universo intero
”—could render my mother focused and attentive, her eyes huge, her lips quivering. Her heart unburied.

The last lines, the song’s climax, became my deepest regret. My mother’s attentions would flicker, and I would again be prone to the intermittencies, the inconsistencies, that marked my childhood and destabilized me. My prized creations—a lopsided pot of colored clay, a woven lanyard bracelet, pages of schoolwork marked “excellent”—celebrated, then discarded in the trash. A birthday one year filled with fanfare, the next, nearly forgotten. A question, unanswered. Unheard.

As I left home for college—I went to Columbia, planning to continue with my voice lessons on Sixty-sixth Street—I wavered uncertainly, a chalk mark on the verge of being erased. Along with singing, philosophy became my way to cast myself, to hurtle myself into the world. What are the elements essential for identity, for personhood, for perception and existence? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I met Bill in the law library on a damp April evening during my junior year. He was a first year law student. We talked and talked—first in the library, then at a pub, then on Columbia’s main steps—Bill’s eyes holding me securely in his gaze all the while. When we parted that night at the huge iron doorway to my building, I loved him already. His eyelids crinkled around his soft blue eyes and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled at me through the grated window. My belly fluttered as I weaved up the six flights of stairs to my dorm room, and fell, joyously, into sleep.

That summer, swimming together in a lake, Bill lifted me up with his strong forearms and swished me around, weightless. We made up silly rhymes about New York Mets baseball players—Jesse Orosco, Dwight Goodin, Gary Carter—and I sang him snippets of songs from
The Fantasticks
in between dives that I took from off his broad shoulders. Toweled and warmed by the sun, we sat with
our legs still dangling in the water and passed a container of coffee ice cream back and forth. Bill’s tee shirt smelled like the corn plant that flowered in his apartment, and I nestled my face into his shoulder. When he swept me up in a hug, I could hardly breathe for the strength he brought, his arms braced tight around me.

Over the next twelve years, we’d move to northern California, I’d pursue my PhD, we’d marry, have a baby. Bill’s steady eyes held me, even now. But I quivered still. To be is to be perceived. I questioned whether I had presence enough for him, for Sophia.