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148 Christopher Jon Heuer The Church Interpreter and My Sex Life: Adventures in Parent-Child Communication Somehow Mom found out that Karen and I were planning to move in together. That’s how I came to meet the five-dollar-per-hour church interpreter she hired to talk me out of it. Let me quickly say here that my mother is a good woman. This all happened ten years ago. We had our private Communication War long before this incident, which culminated in my finally putting my foot down and pointedly looking away whenever she tried to get me to read her lips. But I never went so far as to not use my voice whenever I went home for visits. She, in turn, stopped using my girlfriends to interpret for her when I brought them along. She would write on notepads instead. Holidays became less tense, Thanksgiving turkeys were consumed in peace, and everyone was happy. So when I got a letter from her one day telling me to please come home that weekend—she needed to tell me something and had hired an interpreter—I was understandably freaked out. I immediately called her through the Relay to see if anyone was dead, but nobody was. “What, then?” I typed, trying to pry an answer out of her. “Just come home,” the operator typed back. “Three o’clock Saturday afternoon. (Person hung up. Would you like to make ano . . .” I hung up as well, upset. It wasn’t like her. I didn’t like this. Karen and I didn’t even have our plans sorted out, so far as I knew. She lived an hour and a half north in Fond du Lac. I still lived in my rat trap apartment in Milwaukee with two other guys. Our idea of wallpapering was ceiling to floor stacks of empty Budweiser cans pasted together with spaghetti left over from food fights. Somehow I couldn’t see myself living in Fond du Lac. . . then again I also didn’t really think Karen would go for my apartment’s particular style of décor. What to do? We talked about maybe getting a place on the Lower East Side in the summer when our respective leases were up, but that was a question of whether or not she wanted to quit her job. . . In any case, how could my mother have possibly known about this? I spent the whole drive home not even thinking that it could be related to Karen. Mom only met her twice. . . once at my brother’s wedding and once during Christmas after that. Hardly enough time to get a chummy relationship going—certainly not the kind Reprinted with permission from DeafEcho, (online journal) March 1, 2007. Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 148 3/28/2012 10:24:53 AM Christopher Jon Heuer 149 where you’re going to let it slip that you’re moving in with her son. You have to understand my mother. Old School German Lutheran all the way. Grace at every lunch and dinner, a light slap across the mouth every time someone swears in the house. She doesn’t thump Bibles or anything, but . . . The five-dollar-per-hour church interpreter was seated at the dining room table when I walked in. I learned she was a church interpreter soon after I learned that she could barely fingerspell. She admitted that she wasn’t licensed . . . she taught signing classes at St. John’s down the highway, and that’s where she and my mother had met. And yes, she really was only making five bucks an hour. Mom actually slipped her a ten before we all started talking. “I don’t want you two kids to move in together,” Mom said, getting right to the point. The Church Interpreter laboriously fingerspelled all this out. I wondered if Mom would have enough funds to cover the amount of time this meeting was obviously going to require. I had to laugh. “Ma, c’mon . . . What is this?” “w-h-a-t i j-u-s-t s-a-i-d,” the Church Interpreter fingerspelled. “You can’t bring an interpreter in here to talk about this kind of stuff!” “Why not?” Mom asked, not altogether unreasonably. Is it fair for your son to make you scribble out everything you want to say on miles of yellow notepad paper? At five bucks an hour, church interpreters were cheaper than anti-inflammatory medication for her arthritis. Which would you...

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