The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

15. Shattered

161 15 Shattered My sleep grew frantic, billowing with dreams that tossed me back onto the morning shore, feeling ragged and bewildered. Confrontations with belligerent hearing people.Reunions with my childhood deaf friends. Journeys by buses and trains that never took me to where I was seeking to arrive. Lost with a burden of suitcases in English villages and scattered Australian suburbs.I often woke drenched in perspiration,and I wondered what was happening to me. A few weeks before Christmas, Damian invited me to meet him for coffee at an inner-city bookshop-cafe. It had been some months since we had seen each other, and I was excited by his invitation. Damian’s pleasure on the day was evident too. I looked up from flicking through the pages of a book in time to see his face light up when he saw me; it was as if a switch had been thrown. He sprinted through the bookshop’s aisles and, on reaching me, clasped my arms and beamed down at me. We found a table and ordered our coffees, and he chatted about his work and his children. Everything was going well for him, he said. I saw that he was happy to see me, to be with me. Our conversation ebbed and flowed in the usual way of such conversations between a man and a woman caught up in the dance of anxiety and uncertain feelings. We laughed; we spoke 162 Part Three seriously; we swapped stories and gossip; we even dared to reveal some of our worries. When Damian asked me how my “deaf project” was coming along, I mentioned two memoirs I had just read, both written by Frances Warfield, an American journalist.The first was Cotton in My Ears, published in 1948, and the second was Keep Listening, published in 1957. The memoirs bear the hallmarks of Frances Warfield’s journalistic skills as she converts the incidents of her life into anecdotes filled with the tension of the diagnosis of hearing loss, the drama of adapting to her hearing impairment, the grief of disappointment, self-deprecatory humor as she stumbles from mishap to mayhem, and even a Hollywood-style happy ending in each memoir—a marriage proposal in the first one and the restoration of her hearing through surgery in the second one. Warfield writes of her shame at being deaf, her attendance at lipreading classes, her assessment of the classes, her panic at what being deaf would mean to her life, and her flirtation with a man in the corridor outside the classroom while hiding the fact of her deafness from him. She shows the power of words to carry an emotion beyond their intended meaning: “In the normal hearing world, deaf was still a four letter word. Impaired hearing in 1948 remained as it was in 1933 when I began my revolt: It wasn’t quite nice.” Here, I caught a glimpse into what it must have been like for my parents to discover my deafness in late 1957, almost three years after my birth. The delayed click of life’s chance meant that I was not snapped into an earlier time of a segregated life, but was caught at the margins of a modern time—a time of oralism, integration, mainstreaming, and all the other possibilities of a deaf-hearing life. She also writes with the activist’s desire to educate the reader, born of her keenness to share her insights with as many people as possible about the benefits of managing her hearing loss: Perhaps that was the chief thing I learned, during the 1930s, from lip reading. To hold my head up. It made a lot of difference. I was beginning to like myself a little bit better. I was beginning to like other people, for a change, instead of tying myself into knots trying to make them like me. Shattered 163 My face grew hot as my words rushed ahead of my thoughts. In my haste to impress on Damian the significance of my discovery of this writer, I struggled to string my words together in the right order. I tried to tell him how reading Frances Warfield’s memoirs of her deaf life was like reading the letters of a much-loved aunt. Her spirit shone from the pages. I did not share her distaste for being deaf—she did not even like the word...