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itself into my mind, however, and which captures the isolation, is the family dinner, which we ate together every night until we all were grown and out of the house. We're seated around the table, talking on top of each other—the females of the family, that is—and then there's Steve sitting there, watching. He's unable to follow anything we're talking about and is involved only in the mechanics of passing food, eating. But until he changed, I believed he was really there, part of the family, just like the rest of us, except he couldn't hear.
A memory of his being forced to speak makes me quiver. Steve wasn't excused from confession. The deaf were given no special dispensation, although the routine was somewhat different for them since they couldn't whisper their sins through the screen in a darkened confessional. Before the regular confessions began, my brother (and any other deaf Catholic in town) would meet with the priest at the front of the church, in a small room off to the side. There he'd present his sins, which he literally checked off on the sin list. The priest would indicate what his penance would be and then motion for Steve to recite the Act of Contrition.
Maybe if you were familiar with the ritual, you could identify the prayer. If you stumbled into the church unknowing, you'd hear eerie sounds echoing through the house of the Lord. Since he'd never heard sound, Steve couldn't modulate the volume or tone of his voice. It wasn't that he was yelling, but somehow the combination of the peculiar pitch and tone resulted in his prayer reverberating off the walls of the church.
Perhaps my brother felt nothing but joy at being freed of his sins, because he certainly had no idea about the sound. Sitting in the back of the church, however, waiting for his torturous prayer to end, I'd be in agony. How much was for him and how much was about my own embarrassment, I honestly don't know.
But so much for the philosophy of forcing the deaf into the “real” world of the hearing. The first time I saw Children of a Lesser God, a movie about an angry young deaf woman fighting for the right to express herself as a deaf woman, not as a hearing woman might, I sobbed through much of the film.
Once, some years later, I cried throughout most of a weekend after watching it. Twice. Guilt induced masochism? Unfortunately, the book I was reading at the time, about the life experiences of children born completely deaf, didn't provide escape and instead underscored the depth of the sadness I was feeling.
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One thing Steve and I had in common as kids was that we both were terrified of the Soviet Union and the nuclear threat. I first learned about nuclear bombs at Green Street School. We were part of what is now known as the “duck and cover” generation.
During emergency tests, we'd have to get under our desks and curl into a near-fetal position. Our legs had to be tucked into our chests, our arms wrapped tightly around our legs, and our heads on our knees, to be ready in case the bomb ever fell. Sometimes we'd file into the gym and line up against the walls in the same curled-up position. Because the gym didn't have any windows, the idea was that it would be harder for the bomb blast to reach us. Right. Have you ever been to Hiroshima?
I don't know who developed these fabulous exercises in “nuclear safety,” but we felt anything but safe. The possibility of nuclear war felt like much more than just an unpleasant thing to worry about. Fear seeped deep into the marrow of my bones.
At that time in my very young life, if I wished that my family had tons of money, it wasn't so that I could have lots of beautiful clothes that matched, and toys, and a fabulous house with a built-in swimming pool. What I wanted was our own bomb shelter in the backyard so we might really be safe. I tried hard to focus on the fantasy of the security a bomb shelter offered, and not on what the world would be like once we dared emerge from it. I especially wished we had one when Russia tried to put nukes in Cuba.
The image of President Kennedy on the television screen during the Cuban Missile Crisis is seared into my brain. Young and handsome, yet presidential and somber, he spoke to the nation about the possibility of war because the Soviet Union was threatening our hemisphere with nuclear weapons in Cuba. America was demanding their immediate removal. Each day of the crisis was more tense than the last, until finally we were told the Soviet Union had backed down. The world had edged away from the nuclear abyss.
Though I had just turned twelve at the time, I was furious at Khrushchev and “the communists.” I had visions of storming into the United Nations and addressing the General Assembly, where I'd get Khrushchev to “admit” that he was indeed a communist. Somehow, through the force of my eloquence, and before the world, I'd convert him into a freedom-loving democrat who would then return to the Soviet Union and liberate all its citizens.
I should be embarrassed at the memory. My only defense is that I was young and obviously had an unsophisticated understanding of the world. At least I knew about the United Nations, even if I did embrace the fantasy that it was a world body where people actually put aside national interests and worked together to resolve issues for the good of us all.
Once the crisis had passed and stability in the Cold-War world was restored, my U.N.-peacemaker fantasy passed as well. Little did I know how much the UN. and weapons would feature in my adult world.
CHAPTER THREE
Claude, Casey, and the Corvair Convertible
In the last days of summer in 1967, I fell in love with Claude. It was an August afternoon before the start of our senior year in high school when we first noticed each other. I was sixteen. Everybody was at the bowling alley. I hated bowling, but it was a place to hang out when the day wasn't nice enough to spend at the lake. So there I was at the Brattleboro Bowl with a bunch of girls, watching the boys watching us back.
Claude and I had seen each other in school over the years and never given each other a thought. That afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere, I became viscerally aware of him as he played pool. I knew he was feeling something, too, because, when I'd try to glance surreptitiously in his direction, he would be looking right back at me. The air felt charged.
The attraction I felt that day wasn't a figment of my hyper-stimulated imagination. Shortly after the bowling alley, we had our first date and then became inseparable—until the trauma of my going off to college a year later. Until then, it was Claude and me and his turquoise-and-white Thunderbird.
The car was an older model with fins sweeping up in back. Its interior was more beat-up than the exterior and had great tears in the upholstery that continuously spewed foam stuffing, which clung tenaciously to anything it touched. Janet, eight at the time, apparently was mortified by the car and its stuffing, and when she rode with us she tried to hide in the backseat so no one would see her. I never noticed. From my perspective the car was a blessing and a curse. Claude drove my siblings and me to and from school every day, but the Thunderbird was also a convenient place for the possibility of “sin” followed by shame and confession angst.
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By the time Claude and I were kissing in the Thunderbird, I was visiting the confessional less and less frequently. At seventeen, I found that the underpinnings of my faith were collapsing after years of questioning.
One night a few years earlier, when I was thirteen and sleeping over at a friend's house, we were lying in sleeping bags on the attic floor. Through the windows, I could see stars spread across a broad expanse of the sky, layer after layer, from the brightest to mere pinpricks of light. I started trying to imagine the expanse of the universe. Struggling to grasp infinity and where it all came from made my brain feel like it was hyperventilating. The correct answer, of course, was God, who had created heaven and earth. But that night, for the first time, the rote answer didn't feel right.
Maybe the universe existed simply because it existed. Maybe God was the creation of humans and not the other way around. This wasn't original, breakthrough thinking, but that night it was for me, and it excited and scared me in equal measure. As those excommunication-worthy thoughts crystallized, I panicked. According to the faith, and as in many other religions, its adherents are the chosen ones. If you choose to deny the existence of God, you're damned to hell for all eternity.
Eternity and infinity were equally incomprehensible, but the hellfire that plagued my mind for years felt very real.