The Silents

2

CHAPTER 2 SOMETIMES, WHEN my parents' fingerspelling and lipreading made me feel too different, I pretended I belonged to someone else. Lying sleepless in my bed next to Adelaide, I willed the bed to rise and lift me into the air, through the ceiling and out the hard brick of our apartment building and across the dark sky, like a magic carpet, until it landed in a pink-and-white bedroom. A gentle voice would come through the white painted door. "Honey, will you look in on the girls and see ifthey're finally asleep?" said the mother. The father replied, "Don't fret, dear, they're as snug as a bug in a rug." Then he'd say, "Goodnight, my honeys," or something equally enchanting. I filled in the details with scenes from whatever movie I had last seen. I usually included Adelaide in my magic carpet rides, but when her personality aggravated me too much, I abandoned her in my dreams-left her hanging onto the edge of the bed, hoping she would fall into the great darkness below. But morning would come, and 1'd know that Adelaide-her face a mirror image of mine with her straight black hair and dark eyes-belonged to me and we belonged to this family who walked down Washtenaw Avenue, listening to people say, "Here come the Silents." Sometimes their Yiddish would come tumbling out, and they'd call us the "Shtimmers," which was Yiddish for "silents," but for a long time I didn't know that and thought they were calling us some awful name. I suppose it was just their way of identifYing us, but it was 12 always on the tip ofmy tongue to say, "I'm not deaf and neither is my sister." But the truth was, we were all deaf in a sense because that's the way it is when you live with deaf people. You talk like them and open your eyes wide to take in their fingers, and you st~nd straight and tall because you know everyone's looking. Every shrug, every flick ofyour hand, every bat ofyour eye takes on meaning. Nothing goes to waste. And everything's got to show. We showed everything. Adelaide and I pretended we didn't care. We waved, grinned, and pulled our faces up and down and sideways. When we ventured outside that world, riding the streetcar where nobody knew us, we played our deaf game, pretending to be deafuntil, finally, the lady (there was always some lady hanging onto the strap) turned to another passenger and said, "Will you look at those adorable girls? Pity they're deafl" Then we'd giggle and speak real words, and Marna would yank my hair so hard I thought I would faint. She didn't like our fooling other people. But Papa would grin, get up, and offer his seat to the embarrassed lady, hmning all the while. The lady would smile back in thanks, puzzled by his little noises. Papa's gentlemanly ways made Marna puff up like the queen on a playing card. So impressed was she with my father's manners that she would forget our impudence, stick her nose three inches higher in the air, and move her primly gloved fingers delicately as she spoke to Papa. She kept her mouth shut because it would have spoiled the mood for strangers to hear her monotonous drone. Sometimes we would ride past the Loop, transferring to the South Side streetcar, to visit Mr. and Mrs. Epstein and their son, Bobby. We ate fried chicken and cole slaw and lifted our fingers in talk, stopped to eat, and lifted our fingers again. And when our stint with the grownups was finished, we'd rush to Bobby's bedroom , cross our legs Indian fashion, and talk a blue streak as ifall normal talking had been stored up for ages. I3 I felt sorry for Bobby because he was an only child. I wanted to ask him, "Doesn't it drive you crazy not to have anyone to talk to or hear you?" but we never discussed our deaf mothers and fathers. It was an unspoken bond between us, and, although I knew from the way Bobby stared at me that he was baffled, too, we never said, "So why do you think this happened to us?" We'd go home late at night...