Compassion, Michigan

Numbers Six and Seven-2

You didn’t know how blessed you had been with such silky hair. It glowed in the sun, and the white of your scalp showed through where your hair was parted. You played with your braids, and sometimes you loosened them. You whirled around on the grass, your hair petal-like from the unbraiding, until your head turned into a flower whizzing on the wind. I spun around too and ran after you. When we fell giggling from so much dizziness, dandelion whiskers rocketed off around us and caught the breeze. We watched them drift away before we got up again and spun again. Vicky was usually annoyed when you entered the house, your hair undone, but not for long. There was always something new to try from the book of braids.

When it rained outside, you and I played tic-tac-toe and hangman on scrap paper. Then you and I played card games on the living room floor. You and I made up rules and changed them all the time. You and I won and lost, and played again. You and I played double solitaire, gin rummy, and old maid.

Then you began to watch our siblings come and go out of our house. I had to wave for your attention and ask where they said they were going.

What was happening to the story of us?

EVERY SATURDAY WE sat in front of the television and watched Minnie Pearl, Lawrence Welk, and Carol Burnett. We took turns in the tub, where we had our weekly baths. We felt like newborns in our pajamas, which had been washed earlier that day. The TV filled our living room with a radiance of color and tinny applause coming from its one speaker. You nudged me with a tap on my arm when you caught puzzlement on my face during Hee Haw. I turned to you, and you repeated some of the things the folksy comedians had said. I didn’t laugh and you didn’t either, probably because you hadn’t grasped their humor, but you repeated them to the best of your ability anyway. When Lawrence Welk came on, we linked hands and danced around the room whenever we saw people on the ballroom floor. But I rarely needed help with Carol Burnett. She was so easy to lipread, and her facial expressions and body language told the whole story. Whatever words she said were quite beside the point.

Our house had a dining room, but we rarely ate there. All nine of us ate around a big table in the kitchen. I sat by the largest window where the light from outside fell on their faces for easier lipreading. Our words turned into a cacophony of conversation that dove around each other like sparrows. Laughter would suddenly puncture my eardrums, but I never caught what had been so funny. Sometimes they would be laughing so hard that they cried. I was the only one who never laughed nor said a word, the only paragon of silence who wanted to scream, “I’m here!”

But you caught my eye. You pointed with your eyes to this or that sibling, and you mouthed a summary of what they’d just said. I turned to them and grasped more of the words on their lips. When they shifted gears, I turned to you.

You pointed again to someone else around the table, and mouthed what they said.

Each time when I was lost at the table, I turned to you.

I didn’t understand that you needed me because you were lost too. You were then too young to participate in the banter. I was simply grateful.

I was your number six, and you were my number seven.

Do you remember that? I still do.

DAD WORKED LONG hours at the last factory in town. He was responsible for mixing recipes of certain color dyes for the thick burlap fabric later turned into stiff backpacks and tents. This was years before it went out of business after a new breed of nylon was developed elsewhere into something stronger, thinner, lighter, and completely waterproof. We rarely saw him. We knew his presence when he came home late. He rarely spoke, and when he did, we listened. He told us terse stories about the times he used to live on a farm north of the town where we lived. He took us there once and introduced us to the new owners who had taken over the place and made it a hobby farm. They seemed amazed that he had so many kids. We didn’t think we were a big deal. We never questioned how we came to be so many. We were named after aunts and uncles, but we were too busy to hang around with them when they drove long distances from California and Nebraska and Illinois to visit with us.

After we watched from the front stoop of our house the July Fourth fireworks that exploded high above the community college parking lot a few miles away, Dad opened a big brown box. He had bought fourteen boxes of sparklers, and we would get a pair of boxes each. We took turns running up and down the street with the sharp gray sparklers flickering in our faces, calling out to our parents to look at us, look at me, look at this! It seemed that even with the mosquitoes trying to nibble at our necks and arms and legs, nothing else mattered. The sparks of white burned slashes across the front of our eyes, and it seemed to take a good fifteen minutes before the burned images would fade from the inside of our eyelids.

I watched you write my name in the air. Your signature scorched my eyes.

I wrote your name in the air. It felt like magic.

We laughed.

It was the first pure family joke that I got without needing a backstory.

Our faces shimmered as we waved the sparklers in front of us. We kept writing each other’s names.

We took turns for Dad to light us a new one.

Mom leaned toward him, and they whispered to each other on the stoop.

It seemed the night would never end, but when the last sparkler went out, the bats careened out of nowhere. We screamed at the bats fluttering and making X’s under the streetlamps while moths flocked, trying every which way to break through to the hot glass bulbs. We didn’t know that some of them would lose their wings and die. We couldn’t stop watching their madness, but once the bugs multiplied around us, we had to go inside.

The true stories I remember of us are so far and few.

THEN CAME A new girl who moved into a house three blocks away. You were ten years old, and I was thirteen. My body had begun to change.

Her house on Spruce Street, having been long vacant, suddenly looked different with white paint with yellow trim and new double-paned windows. A new one-car garage was built with its driveway smoothly paved in pitch black. Her father wore baggy Carhartt pants, and it seemed that a cigarette was never far from his mouth. I watched him sit on his riding mower, going up and down each row on his ridiculously small lawn. I never understood why he couldn’t use a regular lawn mower. But I didn’t know that he had taken a new job at the burlap factory. He was an Ironwood boy who had pined to return ever since he left for the Army and met a woman who wanted to stay on in her big shot city. When he lost his job of ten years there, he called up his old buddies and snagged a job at the factory.

Then I saw her mother struggling to get out of the car. She was portly and wide-assed in a muumuu that hung like curtains around her body, and she wore bright orange ball earrings. She waved hello at us when I walked past with you. We were on our way to play at Norrie School.

She said, “Why hello there! Are you from around here?”

You nodded, so I nodded.

“I know someone you should meet.” She turned and yelled at a second-floor window above the driveway. “Ava! Come on outside.”

That was the first time you saw the girl who would change your life.

As Ava walked toward you, she wore her long hair with curls only at the end and her nails were painted a pearly white. Her thin-knitted top had a white collar. She looked poised with pearl earrings and designer jeans. As she came closer, she rolled her eyes at you, as if to say that her mother was so embarrassing. Even though she was ten years old, she seemed much older.

You told her your name and pointed to me. “She’s my sister. She’s deaf.”

“Hi, Ava,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

She only giggled.

I looked around. Nothing was different. I didn’t see anything that could be making a funny sound. I looked up at the sky. Maybe a bird was making a weird noise. Nothing. It took me a long time before I realized she had found the sound of my nasal voice funny.

By then I had come to hate Ava McKeen.

BY THEN THERE weren’t a we anymore. We as a single organism had splintered once Patty followed Vicky by leaving Norrie for Ironwood Catholic High School on the other side of town. It seemed our siblings were disappearing one by one, and suddenly you and I were the only Foresters left at Norrie.

I felt more isolated when my classmates began to divide into cliques. Even though I was told I was an excellent lipreader, I was never sure what the girls by the brick wall talked about. I sensed they were talking about boys. Or music. Or movie stars. They gave me sneers of what-you-lookin’-at every so often.

I looked at myself in the mirror every day. My face was riddled with pimples. Each pimple I squeezed felt like a bullet hole. I found the presence of hair growing right out of my own body a bit creepy. I hadn’t quite understood the s*x education classes because they showed slides with no text. I couldn’t lipread Mr. Whitman in the dark, but I could hear the titters when he showed simple drawings on the slide and continued in his dreary voice. I did not see a v****a or p***s on the screen. Just general outlines of the male and female bodies.

I didn’t notice the changes in you at first.

You began to spend more and more time at Ava’s house, but you always came home right before dinner. You were learning to wear makeup.

Mom noticed. “You’re not Cleopatra. Take that stuff off right now.”

You rolled your eyes at her before you went into the bathroom.

Then one day you showed up in a blouse that was almost too tight. I saw the beginning of your breasts, and the soft clefts in your shoulders from your b*a straps.

Mom said, “That’s way too tight. Change into something else.”

When you came back, dinner had already started. I scooped out the mashed potatoes and a medley of beans onto your plate, and waited for you to say something about the conversations whizzing about our heads.

But you said, “Thank you,” and you turned your attention to the banter.

When they erupted into laughter, I turned to you.

You were laughing, too, but you ignored the puzzlement on my face.

I said, “What?”

You rolled your eyes at me and said, “Later.”

I was furious. You had turned out to be just like everyone else in our family.

Then someone cracked a joke. I never knew what was so funny, but I watched you laugh. You weren’t laughing like before. Your laugh was strangely hollow, full of grown-up fakery. The carefree laughs you had shared with me were gone.

That was a story I wasn’t prepared to read.

YOU AND MOM fought long and hard about Ava’s influence, but the damage was already done. Even Dad forbade you from doing another sleepover at her house.

You permed your beautiful hair without warning anyone, and it so damaged your hair that you couldn’t wear it long like before.

I straightened my posture and clipped my body hearing aids away from my breasts to my belt.

You took up smoking on the sly.

Library books became my best friends in high school; they were easy to lipread.

You hung out with teenage boys over at the McDonald’s by the highway.

I graduated from high school and left for college out of state. Mom and Dad were upset that I’d chosen a deaf college, but I didn’t care.

You graduated from high school.

I didn’t show up for your commencement. I had become a broke college student, but I had learned that I wasn’t the only deaf orphan abandoned by a hearing family. I became fluent in the mother tongue of my chosen family, who signed. Mom and Dad turned cold once they saw how much light I emanated from within. I was worthy. I had friends who loved me as I was. I was happy being Deaf.

You dropped out of community college and took one babysitting job after another until you met Bob, a divorced mechanic, in a bar on Aurora Street.

With only one look at him, I knew you were f****d. He oozed braggadocio about how much money he was making all the time, and yet he had nothing to show for it.

But I didn’t say anything. I knew you’d just roll your eyes at me and give that fake laugh.

You married him.

I didn’t show up at your wedding. I didn’t want to see Ava as your maid of honor. I don’t think Mom and Dad did either.

You had two kids with Bob.

I didn’t show up for their baptisms either.

You eventually found out that he had been cheating on you all these years.

When Dave proposed to me, we did not tell our hearing families about the wedding. We wanted our special day to be Sign-only. We moved to a suburb in northern Virginia where we raised four hearing kids. I got along well with my co-workers and worked my way up as an accountant at the Pentagon. I managed to write enough stories on the side for a collection that eventually got published, but no one in our family bought a copy. That hurt.

You divorced Bob, but it took you a court order or two to make him pay alimony. You became a full-time beautician and a part-time babysitter. Your older boy had become a chronic troublemaker; you had to pay bail for him twice. Your younger girl was quiet like me. I knew that one day she would blossom like me.

I didn’t return to Ironwood until Dad died. Everyone in our family and others at the funeral remarked on how sharp I looked in my blouse and skirt. I said, “Thank you,” but I didn’t know what else to say for a return compliment. They had grown fat. I also hadn’t thought to ask for an ASL interpreter until it was too late; Ironwood didn’t have any Deaf people. I had been overwhelmed with arranging the logistics of flying my family in for the funeral. As my kids sat and listened to the service, I interpreted for Dave discreetly in the pew while trying to lipread the new priest, who clearly didn’t know Dad at all. My interpreting was crappy, but Dave’s eyes were full of gratefulness.

Afterward, I caught the look of envy in your eyes when you surveyed the clothes on my kids. You asked about my salary, and my answer shocked you. I was making far more money than any of our siblings.

As I watched how well my kids behaved with everyone and signed with me, I felt pleased to see that they’d learned from my example. You exclaimed at their politeness.

I beamed. “Thanks. Say, whatever happened to Ava?”

You rolled your eyes. “Don’t ask. We’re not friends anymore.”

This time you didn’t laugh.

I wanted to say, “Serves you right,” but I didn’t. You averted your eyes when I gave you a look instead that shouted what only Deaf people growing up alone in hearing families often dream of saying out loud to their families but share only with each other: You hearing people always think of us Deaf people as nothing. Oh, no no no. No more of that crap. We’re equals worthy of respect!

I’d like to change the ending of our story, but I won’t. You can write the rest of the story on your own.