The Case About Amy

3. Like Light Pouring Down over Me

Like Light Pouring Down over Me I am trying to talk Amy into talking to me. Amy is listening, reacting or not reacting, depending on the subject. She is at least trying now, not evasive as she was on our first meeting a year and a half ago. But it does not come easily. She will answer direct, highly specific questions as best she can, but ifI am not referring to a specific event that she remembers, she is vague. What does she remember about the last grade she attended in Furnace Woods? She smiles and shrugs. Does she ever hear from her old friends back in the fifth grade? She shakes her head. What she does best, always gracefully and with fun in her eyes, is to change the subject. 'What were your favorite things to do in camp?" Amy asks me. "Goofing off," I say, wondering if this slang will register with a deaf, thirteen-year-old (or with a hearing thirteen-year-old in 1985, for that matter). "Eluding the camp authorities, hiding out." She grins conspiratorially, message received. Amy's parents and I are getting ready to drive her from Mountain Lakes up to Pennsylvania to summer camp for a week with a hundred other deaf children. The drive is uneventful if a bit hard on my nerves. I am in the front seat so that I can lean back and talk with Amy and whichever parent is sitting in the back seat or talk directly across the front seat to the driver. The effort is to make things easier for me, but it also raises complications. IfNancy is driving and I am talking with Clifford and Amy in the back seat, Nancy is cut offfrom the conversation. If this seems a trivial matter, try to imagine a family chat Copyrighte@Material Like Light Pouring Down over Me in which you are privy only to every fourth or fifth line of dialogue-literally , try it, and you will learn how useless scattered sentences can be even when you know the words perfectly well. So when I speak to Amy and get a reply, Clifford has to communicate this exchange to Nancy, a process which requires her turning her head back to him for a few instants to read his lips and signs. We are, after all, driving along at 65 miles per hour. I find myselfglancing in panic from the face ofthe driver, turned back to the rear, to the vanishing roadside in front and the cars ahead and speeding by. The effect is scarcely less hair-raising when I talk with Nancy, for she must study my face and lips closely and to do so she must take her eyes, however briefly, from the road. I find myself biting off my lines, keeping my questions or comments anxiously brief. I am fascinated with the skills required here. But most of all, I am impressed with the enormous effort that is expended in what would be, for hearing people, a relaxed morning drive. Because they are left out of so much ofwhat goes on in the hearing world, the deaf are at exacting pains to communicate with one another. Observing how much work this takes among three family members in the relatively close confines ofan automobile , I get a glimmer ofwhat it must have been like for Amy in those Furnace Woods classrooms, with children talking on all sides, from the front and behind, asking and answering questions, developing language. And for all her youthful insouciance, Amy's concentration on what is being said among us in this car is intense, both wonderfully and, at the same time, woefully adult. I have an image of her from that trip, slouched across the right rear seat, chin cupped in her hand, those luminous eyes in their eager comprehension somehow conveying the impression ofhyperactivity. Later, on the trip back from camp with Clifford driving, I learn the long, restful nighttime lull ofthe deafon the road, when it is impossible to read lips and too dark to read finger signs. At the camp, it is anything but quiet. For the first time in my life, at camp headquarters in a rustic shack built to accommodate a single, large room, I am with more than three deafpeople at once: fifty or more people clustered in groups, some speaking, almost all signing, many doing both. Clifford and Nancy are doing their best to keep me from feeling left out- "He's...