Seeds of Disquiet: One Deaf Woman’s Experience

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----12Fred was offered a position as a phannaceutical representative for Pfizer Laboratories in a territory that covered the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and parts of West Virginia and Maryland. Pfizer had experienced problems keeping that sales position filled, and the district manager encouraged us to visit the area before making a decision. We'd heard the valley was beautiful but had never seen it. We drove to Winchester , Virginia, the central point of the territory, to find out what it was like. We fell in love with Winchester immediately. It was much bigger than Woolrich but smaller than the West Nyack area of New York in which Fred had been raised. We liked the treelined streets and the hospitality of the people we met. It didn't take long for Fred to accept the job and send for our things in Rhode Island. We rented a ranch house, with an option to buy if things worked out. While Fred studied medical texts and terminology, I hunted for a job again. At the local Employment Commission office, I learned about an opening for part-time work at the Virginia Book Company. My job turned out to be largely indexing and typing, but it was a start. Stuart Brown, a studious and courtly country lawyer, owned the company, which published 79 Seeds of Disquiet histories and genealogies. Later I began to type and edit manuscripts for his wife, who wrote children's books and stories. The work didn't keep me busy, but the owner of our house put me in touch with the vocational rehabilitation office. I went for an interview and was assigned to a counselor who seemed eager to help me. He looked first for a good match for my writing and editing skills, but came up empty-handed. Eventually he was able to arrange for a temporary job at our local public library under the federal CETA program. The pay was less than minimum wage. My first boss at Handley Library was Anne Lee, the technical services director. She told me up front that I was overqualified for the job, and she tried to find challenging things for me to do. I loved being around books all day, and several times Anne had to insist that I leave, or I'd have stayed at work all night as well. As the person who processed new books, I was one of the first to see everything that came in. I developed a whole slew of new interests from the books that passed my desk, and it was a rare day that I didn't go home with one or two to read. I saw the first evidence of failed mental health policies at the library, after deinstitutionalization planted the seeds of what would later become a large population of homeless persons . At the library, there were people who had no place to go. They would come early in the morning and stay until we locked up. I never knew where they went when we closed. Colorful local characters were as much in abundance as books. A thin, quiet woman in her early twenties came to the library often, always with the same question, "What do you have about Elvis?" She eventually discovered science fiction, but not before I had fantasized that she'd fall hopelessly in love with our Elvis look-alike. He was another frequent visitor of about the same age. He didn't wear sequined jumpsuits, but he had his hair done in a passing imitation of the famous ducktail. Only his makeup and scent spoiled the effect. We knew in80 Seeds of Disquiet stantly when our Elvis clone was in the library. The reek of his cologne traveled faster than the speed of light. We had slashers, too, but of a different sort. For weeks before he was caught, a mild-mannered gent neatly cut the stock reports from our newspapers with a razor blade. And we saw a slight, middle-aged man in sloppily laced hightop sneakers sneak around stealing the scrap paper and golf course pencils we placed near the card catalog. The town fathers and the library board had haggled for years over an addition to the crowded library building, reaching agreement about the same time I was hired. Until the addition was built, there was only one place I could work-in the children's room. The library had...