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94 Interlude 1 When I do venture out or across, I've been trapped more than once-have talked myself right back into the deaf corner. You see, when I talk, people sometimes wonder. "Where are you from? You have quite an accent," I have heard times too innumerable to count-and usually from near strangers. The question is, I suppose, innocent enough. But my answer apparently isn't. For many years I used to pass myself off as German; it was easy enough since my grandparents were quite German and I, as the child of an army family in the 1950s, was born in Germany. Of course, having grandparents who once spoke the language and having lived there, attached to the U.S. Army, for only the first four years of my life didn't really qualify me as a native speaker, complete with an accent. But my interlocutors didn't need to know any of that; when I said "German," they were satisfied . "Oh yes," they nodded, completely in understanding. But some years ago, as another act of coming out, I stopped answering "German." First I tried out a simple, direct, "I'm deaf." But the result was too startling-it rendered my audience deaf and dumb. They sputtered, they stared at me speechlessly, they went away-fast. It quite unhinged them. So I have softened the blow a bit and begun to respond, "I'm quite hard-of-hearing." To this I get a split response, which probably fits those multiple hyphens in my identity-they will both smile and nod an affirmative, "Oh yes, I understand now" (although I know that they really don't understand the connections between hearing loss and having an "accent"), and they will also back away rather quickly, still reluctant to continue a conversation under these circumstances. I didn't like passing as German, but I'm never sure I like their response to my real answer any better. When I see the fright in their eyes, the "oh-my-god-what-should-I-say-now?" look that freezes their face into that patronizing smile, I feel cornered again. I feel scared, too, for the way it reflects back on the way I saw myself for many years. I wish I had just stayed mute. For all that it frightens me, though, when I get cornered and I see my scared, caught-between-the-hyphens, hard-of-hearing face in the mirror, something comes of it. This happened to me first, and I think most significantly, at my first successful acade- On (Almost) Passing 95 mic conference. I had just finished my first year of graduate school and had journeyed to give a paper at the Wyoming Conference on English. Ihad attended the conference the summerbefore as well, but I had been in my silently passing mode. This year, however, I was animated by everything from a very positive response to my own paper on the first day, to the glitter of the featured speakers, to a headful of theory-stuff mixed near explosivelywith my first year ofteaching college freshman in a university principally composed of minority and Appalachian, firstgeneration college students. I was primed. I was talking a lot. On the third day of the conference we were having a picnic lunch up in the mountains; at a table with one of the conference's biggest stars, I was feeling lit up, I guess by the glitter he was sprinkling on me by showing genuine interest in my own projects and things I had said in earlier sessions. I was telling stories about growing up in western Kansas. Everyone was listening, engaged, laughing. Then a woman across the table, slightly to the left of me, wearing a tag from some small place in Louisiana, I remember, asked me, point-blank, "So, how long have you been DEAF?" (And that word, especially, went echoing off the mountain walls, I swear.) The question did not fallon deaf ears. The table, full of some sixteen people, went silent-awfully, awesomely silent. They waited. "A-a-all my life." Silence again. Eons of silence. Echoes of silence. "Wow," said the star, and he touched my arm-a genuine touch, a caring touch, a you-don't-have-to-feel-bad touch. But I felt plenty bad. I excused myself under pretense of wanting some more potato salad. Instead I went behind a giant pine tree on the other side of the chow table and...

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