A Maidens Grave

keep him from lookingaround the room. He spat out, “You . . . word about . . . you’re . . .”
    Delay, stall. Buy time for the twins.
    She frowned and shook her head.
    He tried again, words spitting from his mouth.
    Again she shook her head, pointed to her ear. He boiled in frustration.
    Finally, she leaned away and pointed to the dusty floor. He wrote, Say anything and your dead.
    She nodded slowly.
    He obliterated the message and buttoned his shirt.
    Sometimes all of us, even Others, are mute and deaf and blind as the dead; we perceive only what our desires allow us to see. This is a terrible burden and a danger but can also be, as now, a small miracle. For Bear rose unsteadily, tucked in his shirt, and looked around the killing room with a glazed look of contentment on his flushed face. Then he strode out, never noticing that only four shoes remained in place of the twins and that the girls were gone, floating free of this terrible place.
     
    For a few years I was nothing but Deaf.
    I lived Deaf, I ate Deaf, I breathed it.
    Melanie is speaking to de l’Epée.
    She has gone into her music room because she cannot bear to think about Anna and Suzie, leaping into the waters of the Arkansas River, dark as a coffin. They’re better off, she tells herself. She remembers the way Bear looked at the girls. Whatever happens, they’re better off.
    De l’Epée shifts in his chair and asks what she meant by being nothing but Deaf.
    “When I was a junior the Deaf movement came to Laurent Clerc. Deaf with a capital D. Oralism was out and at last the school began teaching Signed Exact English. Which is sort of a half-assed compromise. Eventually, after I graduated, they agreed to switch to ASL. That’s American Sign.”
    “I’m interested in languages. Tell me about it.” (Would he say this? It’s my fantasy; yes, he would.)
    “ASL comes from the world’s first school for the deaf, founded in France in the 1760s by your namesake. AbbéCharles Michel de l’Epée. He was like Rousseau—he felt that there was a primordial human language. A language that was pure and absolute and unfalteringly clear. It could express every emotion directly and it would be so transparent that you couldn’t use it to lie or deceive anyone.”
    De l’Epée smiles at this.
    “With French Sign Language, oh, the Deaf came into their own. A teacher from de l’Epée’s school, Laurent Clerc, came to America in the early 1800s with Thomas Gallaudet—he was a minister from Connecticut—and set up a school for the deaf in Hartford. French Sign Language was used there but it got mixed with local signing—especially the dialect used on Martha’s Vineyard, where there was a lot of hereditary deafness. That’s how American Sign Language came about. That, more than anything, allowed the Deaf to live normal lives. See, you have to develop language—some language, either sign or spoken—by age three. Otherwise you basically end up retarded.”
    De l’Epée looks at her somewhat cynically. “It seems to me that you’ve rehearsed this.”
    She can only laugh.
    “Once ASL hit the school, as I was saying, I lived for the Deaf movement. I learned the party line. Mostly because of Susan Phillips. It was amazing. I was a student teacher at the time. She saw my eyes flickering up and down as I read somebody’s lips. She came up to me and said, ‘The word “hearing” means only one thing to me. It’s the opposite of who I am.’ I felt ashamed. She later said that the term ‘hard of hearing’ should infuriate us because it defines us in terms of the Other community. ‘Oral’ is even worse because the Oral deaf want to pass. They haven’t come out yet. If somebody’s Oral, Susan said, we have to ‘rescue’ them.
    “I knew what she was talking about because for years I’d tried to pass. The rule is ‘Plan ahead.’ You’re always thinking about what’s coming, second-guessing what questions you’ll be asked, steering people toward streets with noisy traffic or construction, so you’ll have an excuse to ask them to shout or repeat what they say.
    “But after I met Susan I rejected all that. I was anti-Oral, I was anti-mainstreaming. I taught ASL. I became a poet and gave performances at theaters of the deaf.”
    “Poet?”
    “I did that as a substitute for my music. It seemed the closest I could hope for.”
    “What are signed poems like?” he asks.
    She explains that they “rhymed” not sonically but because