But the similarities between her old high school and River Valley ended at their shared stone, and even that seemed different here. Where Jefferson was cold and utilitarian, RVSD seemed warm, well-worn in a way that looked loved rather than deleterious. From the outside, everything she’d heard about River Valley had been negative: its students were low-achieving, it was a last resort for those who couldn’t make it at the regular school. But now, in the reddish evening light, the place took on an almost magical cast, like the grounds of a castle. Charlie wanted to stay and drink in the landscape, to marvel as the sun slipped behind that big building where they’d met the headmistress—what was that one called? Clerc? But it would have to wait. Her father was holding the crumpled map they’d been given at her intake meeting far out in front of him, like a magnet that might pull them to the correct classroom if he gave it enough leeway, and she had to jog to catch up with him.
Finally, they came to Cannon Hall and were relieved to find the door unlocked. Inside, though, their map was no longer helpful, and they peered into one empty classroom after another.
Can’t you hear anything?
Her father shook his head. They found the class through the last door on the left. Inside, the other students were already there, an odd mix of adults who looked out of place in a classroom, some visibly uncomfortable squeezed into their tablet-armchair desks. Though Charlie could identify no discernible teacher, the students had begun practicing something, hands already in motion and buoyed by varying degrees of confidence. It was quiet.
The desks were arranged in a semicircle so everyone could see one another—it made sense, but walking into the crescent felt like she was imposing on some kind of group therapy. A man who looked not unlike a clean-shaven Santa, complete with red-tipped nose and potbelly, arrived soon after and launched immediately into some kind of story, though Charlie could grasp only its most iconic bits: person checking watch, running, breathing heavily, cup, spill down the front of a shirt. If the teacher could hear or speak, he let evidence of neither slip.
Their class was supposed to be for beginners, but it was clear everyone there was ahead of Charlie. She knew the alphabet, but that was only thanks to an internet cram session in the hours before class, and one that turned out to be less useful than she’d imagined. The alphabet was a shortcut back to English, and Charlie watched her fellow students lean on it, tortuously spelling and redoubling strings of words to one another. But the teacher never spelled anything, not even when students looked at him in wide-eyed terror, like Charlie and her father were doing now. If blank stares became the majority, he reversed course and performed a deft pantomime of whatever he’d said: there he was, getting on a bus, giving his seat up to an old man with a cane, standing the rest of the way, hanging on to the strap handle for dear life when the bus took a sharp turn. The atmosphere lightened. Maybe she could figure this out after all.
The teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote, How are you?
He tapped the “how” with his chalk, then signed:
How.
A twisting motion, like taking something apart to see how it works on the inside.
He tapped the “you.”
You.
Easy enough—point at the person.
He tapped the question mark, then pointed to his eyebrows, which he’d raised.
How + you + eyebrows
When it came time to respond, Charlie just gave a thumbs-up.
The teacher repeated the process, writing What’s your name? and demonstrating corresponding signs, though this time they were out of order:
You.
Name, one set of pointer and middle fingers tapped twice on top of the other set.
What, almost like the gesture, hands up and out like a shrug.
Eyebrows again, down this time.
You + name + what—eyebrows
Here the alphabet did come in handy, and Charlie was grateful that she could at least spell her own name.
Me name C-h-a-x-l-i-e, she said.
The teacher shook his head, pointed to his own hand.
C.
He pointed to Charlie.
C.
H.
H.
A.
A.
R.
Dammit.
R, she copied.
He gave her a thumbs-up.
Again, he said.
Everyone waited, watching her.
Me name C-h-a-r-l-i-e.
The teacher nodded and continued around the circle. Once everyone had a turn, he returned to the board and wrote, Deaf, Hearing, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, then pointed to each and signed its equivalent:
Her fellow students introduced themselves. Most of them were parents or relatives of younger River Valley kids:
Me hearing. My son deaf.
Some seemed either accepting of or resigned to their child’s deafness, while others were openly enduring a crisis, though they were all leagues ahead of her parents, or at least her mom, in the grieving process—that is, they were all in the room. There was one girl who looked like she might be in high school:
Me hearing. My sister deaf—
but from what she could tell, Charlie was the only actual River Valley student there. Because, when you thought about it, it was kind of ridiculous—a deaf kid at a Deaf school who didn’t know sign language.
Me deaf, she said when it came her turn.
The teacher winked. Her father said his piece, eyeing Charlie as he practiced the amalgam of root words girl + baby that meant daughter, and she was pleased and embarrassed by the tenderness with which he produced the sign. But as Charlie watched the other students, she found something about the phrases unsettling. Something was missing. Where was the verb “to be”？ How are you? What is your name? Maybe it was too complicated for beginners.
They spent the rest of the class pointing at objects around the room and learning what they were called, but this only exacerbated Charlie’s curiosity—what might the noun for “being” be, and did the answer to her missing verb lie there? She wanted to ask the teacher, but didn’t have any of the words to form the question. That night she stayed up searching online ASL dictionaries, endless scrolls of GIFs and line-drawn bald men frozen in sign. She looked for the sign for “to be” and found several sites confirming that it did not in fact exist, but no satisfying explanation for its absence.
february had been born on the edge of East Colson in her family’s blue clapboard house, in the back bedroom that would later become her own. Once the contractions were six minutes apart, her mother had sent her husband into the city to retrieve her sister Mae while she paced the kitchen and tried to swab the amniotic fluid from the linoleum with a dish towel under her foot. TTYs, clunky electromechanical typewriters wired up to landlines, had made an early form of text messaging possible since the sixties, but they were still expensive. At the time, February’s mother had deemed the splurge unnecessary when most of their family lived just a few minutes farther into town. Those moments laboring alone in the late August swelter must have made an impression, though—one of February’s earliest memories was playing at the keyboard of the family’s TTY.
February’s mother was slight and asthmatic and would have certainly benefited from some medical oversight during labor, but she had long made up her mind to have the baby at home. It would be much scarier, even dangerous, to give birth in a place where no one knew sign language. The Deaf community was replete with hospital horror stories, particularly of the labor and delivery variety. Her mother’s friend Lu had been wheeled into the OR without anyone telling her that she was about to have a cesarean; a woman down in Lexington had died from a blood clot after nursing staff ignored the complaints of pain she’d scrawled on a napkin. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which would mandate that hospitals provide accommodations to deaf patients, was still more than a decade away. So February’s mother wasn’t taking any chances—if she couldn’t have an epidural, at least she would know what the hell was going on.