There is a misconception in the hearing world that deaf people are quiet. If the Waterses’ neighbors hadn’t realized the inaccuracy of the stereotype before, they were certainly disenchanted of the notion on February’s birthday, when her mother screamed so loudly Mr. Callhorn came running across the street and straight through the front door, sure that someone was being murdered.
Her mother always got a kick out of telling this story on Feb’s birthday, complete with her transformation into Mr. Callhorn in the way that only ASL allowed, the assumption of his bulk and posture as he stalked into the bedroom, and the look of horror on his face when he realized what was happening.
For him, seeing all that was probably worse than murder!
She said this every year, too, and though February had now grown wary of repetition as a sign of her mother’s worsening condition, she was grateful for this particular story.
February had taken the afternoon off to have lunch with her mother, a birthday tradition that felt almost urgent to her this year. As she drove them down into Colson, she glanced sidelong at her mother, who in turn looked out the window, watching the city pass. Lately February had found herself wanting to know everything about her parents’ childhoods, their courtship, her own early years, before it was consumed by the dementia. What had Colson been like when they’d moved there? Was the North-South trolley, which February had only heard spoken of like a fairy tale, running then?
Colson had changed so much even in February’s lifetime, things shifting in the jagged, undulant way of the Rust Belt. Once flanked by industry—GE on the west end and Goodyear in the east—the city had spent the last several decades shrinking, burning, rising from those ashes.
Today, GE’s plant was still limping along against someone’s better fiduciary judgment. People at headquarters over in Cincinnati probably felt a southern Ohio allegiance, February thought. That same solidarity had sent Colson up in flames in 2001, when Cincinnati police murdered nineteen-year-old Timothy Thomas over some traffic tickets. February had been a doctoral student in Cincy, and had marched peacefully that afternoon. But when Cincy’s protests turned violent, so did Colson’s—she had returned to her apartment after a night class and switched on the TV to find East Colson on fire.
Amid the ruin, Goodyear found the excuse they’d been looking for to cease operations. The unrest lasted only four days, but the plant never reopened. The higher-ups went back to Akron, the contracts to Brazil, and Colson’s laborers languished in the aftermath. The city cried bankruptcy when it came time to rebuild, and while it was true Colson’s tax revenue would take a hit without the tire giant, February knew better than to think the reticence wasn’t tethered to East Colson’s working-class demographic. Next time, she thought, they should hold the protest downtown, see if the city had money to rebuild then.
There had been a round of white flight, and afterward city officials promptly defunded all they could. So the neighborhood’s potholes went unmended and the streetlamps’ dead bulbs unchanged. The public middle school was shuttered, the building sold to a charter who’d folded after four years. Anyone who could moved in toward the city center, or out to the burbs. But her parents had stayed in the little blue house, and even after February had grown and moved out, East Colson remained her heart’s home. She loved it with the kind of territorial ferocity characteristic of overzealous sports fans.
Twenty years on, some pharmaceutical offshoot occupied a wing of the old tire building, and a few artisanal ventures were cropping up on the fringes, but much of East Colson remained hollowed out. When the Southeastern Ohio Regional Transportation Authority cut the trolley’s Goodyear and Vine Street stops, the joke was that public transport was simply living up to its acronym—does it run through East Colson? SORTA! The neighborhood earned the nickname “the No Fly Zone,” one February found both unoriginal and problematic, though she didn’t really have any grounds for judgment—she hadn’t been there in months either, not since her mother had moved in with her.
But on the inner edge of East Colson, just as the neighborhood gave way to downtown, was February’s favorite lunch spot: the Chipped Cup. It was an unfussy luncheonette where the mugs were mismatched, the coffee was strong, and servers were armed with copious refills. More than that, it had what February considered to be the most important indicator of good food—a 3:00 p.m. closing time. If they could make their living off only breakfast and sandwiches, safe bet it was going to be a good sandwich.
February fed the meter and helped her mother from the car, got her situated in a booth by the front window. Mel liked to sit farther back, but February and her mother liked to people-watch. The inside of the Chipped Cup was vintage, all vinyl and Formica, but not in a way that was trying to be cute. More like the owners just couldn’t be bothered to change it. While her mother perused the menu, a waitress came by and poured coffee automatically, as if no customer had ever declined. Her mother lifted her mug and they clinked.
Cheers! she said. And don’t forget, I’m buying.
No way. My treat.
It’s your birthday.
But you did all the work.
Her mother laughed, a deep-gullet sound totally uninfluenced by what the world decided laughter should be.
I guess that’s true.
Tell me again about how you and Dad met, said February after a while.
And her mother put down her mug and told her the story.
charlie was aware from a tender age that she was not the daughter her mother wanted. It wasn’t, she was starting to realize, the fact of her deafness （though that wasn’t helping her case）。 It was an ordinary clash of personalities, and that made it all the worse.
When she was younger, it was easy to be angry about their relationship and all the ways her mother misunderstood her. But recently Charlie had been finding herself seized by moments of empathy for her mother. In flashes, she’d see herself as her mother must have—a tomboy stamping through her mother’s beauty queen aspirations, torn jeans and grass stains and pockets full of rocks that clogged the dryer vent, fighting her on wearing a dress to her grandparents’ house until one of them cried. Her mother was slender, fine-featured, perky whether or not she was actually happy. She had been the kind of girl that was popular at Jefferson, the kind of girl that would pick on Charlie. It occurred to Charlie that before she’d come along, no one had challenged her mother on anything in quite a long time.
One thing they did share was a tendency toward repression, and this was usually the defining feature of their interactions, but it had all come to a head in a good old-fashioned mother-daughter blowout last year, in the mall no less. It was around Christmastime and Charlie couldn’t remember what they’d been bickering about, but the body odor and department store perfume and cinnamon pretzels and the screams radiating out of Santa’s photo station had all served as accelerants, and her mother had blurted out:
You don’t know what it’s like to have made a human who hates you!
Then, when she realized her shouting had drawn attention from other shoppers, she ran across the food court and into the bathroom.
Charlie had been stunned. Her mother never left the house without a thick lacquer of Debutante—hair and teeth brushed and bleached, French manicure, a bag that matched her shoes. Even through years of her parents’ shouting matches, Charlie had never seen her mother lose it in public. Charlie had gone into the bathroom and stood in front of the stall under which she spied her mother’s sensible loafers.