Page 27 - WTP Vol. IX #8

rupt when I’m not understanding; if I simply let it go, or made something up, or just carried on as if it were roger-that-full-speed-ahead.
I used to think it was Deaf people’s fault when I didn’t understand them; they sign too fast, or too sloppily, or they omit important information, like the subject of the sentence, and it’s hard to know what someone is talking about when you don’t even have the subject of the sentence. But then it dawned on me: Deaf people understand each other just fine. So
it must be me. I must be the reason I’m not under- standing. Of course, Deaf people will occasionally interrupt each other, too, to ask for clarification or repetition. After all, everybody does that, hearing and Deaf alike. That’s just part of the give and take, the ebb and flow, the come-again and the go, go, go
of normal everyday conversation. But sometimes
I think I do it more than most. I think it’s just the
way I’m wired. I have this tendency to space out and daydream. I’m always thinking about something else, something a little off the point, fantasizing about love or fame, or eating or fucking, or the lines of poems
I would like to be writing. But it’s not okay to space out when Deaf people are signing and their vouloir dire is happening on my watch.
In my defense, though, sometimes the subject of the sentence is understood, which means it’s not explic- itly stated. It’s implied. We have that in English, too. Like the implied you in “Be quiet.” Or the implied I in “Thank you.” And there are things like the pas- sive voice and the impersonal, and it’s true that subjects in sentences in other languages can be as cagey as they sometimes seem to be in ASL. Some- times it feels like there are all these silent letters in ASL—things that are there even though you can’t hear them. Which is actually a bad analogy, since ASL isn’t about hearing; it’s about seeing. But it
sometimes feels to me as though there are all these diacritics in ASL that Deaf people seem to infer and take for granted and don’t need to see spelled out. Like they’re there even if you can’t see them. Like the wind. Quick as the wind, invisible as the wind. Now you see it, now you don’t. Yes, ASL is like the wind and the weather and I’m like the meteorologist who sometimes gets it wrong.
~
As Marina sat down in the dentist’s chair, the hygien- ist taped the paper bib to her shoulders, adjusted the headrest, the overhead light, then filled the cup of water on the edge of the little porcelain cuspidor. I was seated across from her on a small stool wedged into the corner, thinking about Holyoke: Not only
was Holyoke Marina’s hometown, as she had told me, it was also where Emily Dickinson went to school. “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all.” That’s what Marina was doing.
She was singing the tune without the words, her signs flashing and flying like a thing with feathers. No words on her lips at all now as we chatted some more in that small, cramped space, waiting for the dentist to come.
“I grew up in Holyoke,” she said, “so the Clark School for the Deaf, over in Northampton, just ten miles away, was the inevitable choice. Even though it wasn’t my choice, really. It was my parents’ choice. But I’m grateful to Clark because they gave me a fine educa- tion.” I wanted to ask her how that could be, how it was possible that she got a good education at Clark when sign language was totally forbidden in the classroom. But that’s when the dentist walked in, greeting us warmly and taking his seat at Marina’s right side. When he asked her how she was doing,
she replied, close-mouthed as ever, “Everything’s fine, thank you, can’t complain. And how about my par- tials? I hope they’re ready. Are they?”
The sign for partial denture is a bent-L handshape at the level of the mouth, and it could easily be mistaken by a novice interpreter for any number of lexical items, including night guard or pizza slice. Which is one of the reasons why interpreting at the dentist can be challenging. First of all, on the lexical level, there
is all that specialized vocabulary relating to teeth and gums: bicuspids, incisors, third molars, gingivitis, mandibular anteriors—the names of things that live in the mouth, any mouth, even a mouth that doesn’t
(continued on next page)
20