Page 37 of The Sign for Home

“It’s called an SBC for short,” Arlo said via my voicing. “It writes braille automatically. Suppose there is no interpreter around and a sighted-hearing person wants to have a long chat. Going back and forth with the Magic Marker and paper gets boring and can give me a headache if my eye starts to hurt. With the SBC I can talk for a long time. It works this way: the sighted person just types on the keyboard and their words instantly become braille. Then I will type back and my words appear on a little screen for the hearing-sighted person.”

“That’s very cool!” Hanne exclaimed. “Could we try?”

“Hanne,” I said, interpreting simultaneously. “Arlo has his ride home coming, and besides, it’s not like he’d be carrying it around with him—”

“Not true,” Arlo interrupted. “I have SBC in backpack. Always. Also, van won’t come long time. Always thirty or forty minutes late. If she wants, I can show now.”

“Yay!” Hanne clapped. “Yes please! I really want to try.”

“Um,” I stammered, realizing there was no way out. Then, without signing, I said through my teeth: “Hanne, please remember he comes from a really conservative family and this is making me really nervous.”

Hanne looked at me in that way she does, like she was seeing inside me.

“Cyrilje,” she said, in a voice an enlightened mother uses with her child who is having a tantrum. “I completely understand, and we can absolutely go if you really think that’s the right thing to do, but didn’t you once tell me about how some interpreters can act like babysitters around Deaf people? And didn’t you once say how your job is to just interpret the message accurately so the Deaf person can make their own choice?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I am being a little paternalistic, but…”

“Also,” Hanne added, “aren’t you supposed to be interpreting everything that’s being said in front of him?”

Infuriating as it was, Hanne was right again.

I gently pushed Hanne out of the way so I could interpret, but I gave her a warning look that saidDon’t say anything stupid. Without voicing for Hanne, I told Arlo everything Hanne had just said, including the part about Hanne wanting him to feel her face, and her saying I was acting like a babysitter and even her calling me out about not interpreting. Arlo laughed, which made me feel a little better. I then described Hanne’s appearance, explaining that she was very smart and pretty and could be a little flirty and crazy. When I told him that Hanne thought he was handsome, the briefest of blushes tinted his face. Again, Arlo strained to locate Hanne’s face.

“I have an idea,” Arlo signed. “Maybe we three can go cafeteria? Sitand chat? Typing on table with SBC more comfortable. Maybe Hanne and me talk, you can read my essay? Tell me if good?”

“What did he say?” Hanne asked.

Before I could even tell her, Arlo started walking back toward Hudson Hall and waved for us to follow him.

“He wants us to go to the cafeteria to show you the SBC and talk,” I said, shaking my head. “But please, let’s just keep it short and sweet, okay?”

You sit in the college cafeteria with Cyril’s friend named Hanne. From the texture and thickness of her skin, you can tell she’s not really a girl but a woman. She must be younger than Molly, but still older than you. Cyril says she has hair that is dark blond, gray-green eyes, a thin build, pretty. But her hands are not very beautiful. The flesh of her knuckles bunches under your touch, the bones protrude obscenely on her thumb, her cuticles are bitten and rough. When Cyril says “pretty,” he means her face. To you, who can barely see the shape of a face anymore, a head has become an abstract object of mere bone and flesh. An ill-shaped bowling ball in a soft leather bag. You suspect she is a sinful woman, and if someone from church saw you, you’d get in trouble. But talking to a sinful woman excites you, so you teach her how to use the SBC and ask Cyril to read your essay so you can be alone.

Red star.

Hanne tells you she’s a painter and was born in a country called Belgium. She also says she studies nursing at the community college. She is married and has a child, but, despite this, her knee bumps into your leg under the table every so often when you are typing. Maybe she doesn’t like her husband anymore, maybe her child has grown and gone away. Maybe she’s very lonely like you.

You feel the braille bumps of Hanne’s words leap beneath your fingertips like a millipede running across the refreshable display. Hanne tells you a secret, that she doesn’t like living in Poughkeepsie, and that she’s not sure shewants to become a nurse, and that she would prefer to go to New York City to make art. You like hearing this other person’s dreams. It is the first time in a very long time you had another person talk to you like this. When she asks you your dream, you say it is to become a pioneer at the Kingdom Hall and go to a very far-away country called Ecuador to preach to Deaf and DeafBlind people and teach them about Jesus and Jehovah God. To offer them eternal salvation. She types, “That’s interesting,” but you sense she can see on your face that you aren’t telling the whole truth. Out of nowhere she asks you if there is anyone you are in love with. This is a very personal question, and maybe this is what Cyril meant about her being “a little crazy.” But you don’t want her to stop talking with you, so you type:

“No. You in love?”

“Yes,”she types.“With my husband and my son, of course.”

Then she asks an even more personal and private question, about if you’re a virgin or not. This makes your face feel hot, and you feel a strange kind of nervousness, which isn’t entirely unpleasant. You don’t type anything for a while, but something about this woman makes you trust her even though you know you shouldn’t. The thought suddenly occurs to you that Hanne may be a witch or sorceress. JWs believe in witches. The Bible teaches us that we must be on the lookout and avoid them. A witch could force you to reveal all your secrets. You clench your hands in a fist in front of the keyboard. You think of Jesus, and of your desire to go to heaven someday. You must resist the witch. Then you type:

“I not virgin. Shh. Secret. Please no tell. Shh. Please.”

“Don’t worry,”she says.“I won’t say anything. I promise.”

For twenty-five minutes, while Arlo and Hanne typed back and forth on his unusually old-looking SBC equipment, I read over the rough draft of his essay. I immediately recognized the familiar grammatical errors of a Deaf person who struggles with English: tenses a mess, incorrect use ofprepositions, defaulting to ASL structure, etc. It is pretty common for Deaf folks who didn’t have access to proper sign language (or any language) until they started school. But still, his ideas were great, and it was obvious he yearned to do a good job. Even though it is definitelynotthe responsibility of the terp to correct a student’s paper—ethically wrong, in fact—I still made some notes about errors he might want to check with the teacher, writing them large enough that he might be able to see them with his magnifying glass. Every few minutes I craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of the SBC screen to see what they were discussing, but it was useless. So I pretended to go to the bathroom, walking behind Hanne to get a clear view of the display. I was only able to see two sentences on the screen:

Arlo: Never.

Hanne: Never? You’re kidding me!

I hovered for a moment more, waiting, but Hanne gave me a dirty look and positioned her shoulders so I couldn’t see the screen. Whatever they were discussing, Arlo didn’t seem to mind. After a rather long exchange where they both typed back and forth several times, I saw Hanne suddenly look overcome with emotion. She typed something back, causing Arlo to appear both sad and disturbed. I left to continue my false toilet run but wanted to get back to them as soon as possible.

Hanne stops typing for a long time, like she’s thinking. Then she asks:

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