Page 8 of The Sign for Home

5LEAVING HOME

Just after you finished eating a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich for lunch, you are surprised when Molly walks into the kitchen of Brother Birch’s house. You can instantly recognize her propulsive, angry footsteps, which tap the floor like the end of a wooden broomstick. Molly rarely comes over to interpret without you knowing first.

A minute later you find out why.

“You never should have made a decision about the interpreter without consulting me,” Brother Birch says, via Molly’s interpreting. “You put us in a very awkward situation. Didn’t you know Molly had already told her friend she had the job?”

You explain that Mrs. Shuster was the one who said it was better to have a male interpreter voicing for you to reduce confusion when you speak. This is a lie.

Red star.

“But we know nothing about this man,” Brother Birch says. You can tell he is getting aggravated by the way Molly is interpreting. “You know how much I care for you, Arlo. You’ve done so well over the last several years. But remember: The Devil will find every opportunity to corrupt our hearts. We don’t want a repeat of what happened before.”

Brother Birch doesn’t finish his thought. You ask Molly to repeat her interpretation in case you missed something. She says:Doesn’t matter.Then you remember. Even talking about what happened five and a half years ago at the Rose Garden School is forbidden. It lives in phrases like “before” or “doesn’t matter” or in the dangling stillness at the ends of sentences.

You lower your head, squinching your eyebrows so you look very sad that you disappointed anyone. Then you tell Brother Birch that you can write Mrs. Shuster in the morning and ask that they hire Molly’s friend instead. Molly’s hands pause and you feel her shift in her seat. You know they won’t be able to do this, because Mrs. Shuster explained that canceling interpreters at the last minute isvery expensive. But you pretend not to know this.

Ha! You got them!

“Unfortunately, we’re stuck with him now,” Brother Birch says. “Luckily Molly will be there to make sure he’s a good fit.”

Smiling is the worst thing to do at this moment. To prevent yourself from smiling you tilt your head downward and suck in your lips, crushing the smile inside your face. Brother Birch asks you if something is wrong. You tell him you have a headache.

“Get a glass of water and then go prepare for Bible study tomorrow. I need to speak with Molly alone right now.”

While Brother Birch and Molly tell secrets, you and Snap walk down to your bedroom in the hot basement. You sit at your desk. Snap lays her warm body at your feet and licks your pant leg to remind you she loves you. You turn on your computer. You go to the website JW.org and try to readThe Watchtower–Study Edition. The question is:How Can You Safeguard Your Heart? How Satan Tries to Infect Our Heart.Your left eye immediately becomes tired, so you stop reading. You let yourself think about the new college class on Tuesday with Cyril, the new male team interpreter working with Molly. A new interpreter who will interpreteverything. This makes your body rock back and forth, and you allow your face to smile. It’s not often that something new happens in your life lately. Other than visitsto the ophthalmologist and the Abilities Institute for training, the last several years have been about one thing: becoming aspiritually strongyoung man. Being spiritually strong means preparing for and going to the Kingdom Hall for Public Talk, Watchtower Study, Theocratic Ministry School, Bible study, and, if you want to keep your auxiliary pioneer status, a minimum of seven and a half hours of field service a week standing at the mall or going door-to-door with Brother Birch. It’s exhausting. A big portion of your free time is spent alone in your room reading JW.org, trying to avoid being tempted by forbidden websites, thinking about committing red star sins, praying not to commit them, and, more often than not, committing them and then praying for forgiveness. Every single other moment, when you’re not sleeping, bathing, or eating, you get lost in the fantasy place inside your mind. And, to be totally honest, even when you’re doing most of the other activities, you still spend much of the time in your fantasy place. The outside world can be tedious, but in the fantasy place you can time travel, and remember forbidden things, and pretend things are different than they are.

But starting Tuesday, for three hours a day, your outside life will be different. You will learn to improve your writing, and there will be new people sitting right next to you in class. Being friends with worldly people is forbidden, but it’s okay if you witness to them. How many of the other students will be your same age? How many will be men and how many will be women? Inside your fantasy place you imagine a young woman who will be shorter than you, who will sit right next to you. You will be surprised to learn that she knows sign language too, and is a spiritually strong JW with smooth, soft, dry fingers that say funny things. Her wrists will be thinner than yours, and her skin will smell of baby powder and body odor and when no one is looking she will let you…

Red star.

Your eyes focus again on the big white letters on the black screen:Satan.You switch the screen from JW.org to the search engine, and tryto remember what the male interpreter told you today about the… what was it? A-D-A law? It meant the America… Disable… something. ADA. Why has no one ever told you about this law before? You type the lettersADAand the wordlawinto the search bar and press Enter. Suddenly the page fills with selections. The first link your vision settles on says:What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990?That was it! That’s what the interpreter called it: the Americans with Disability Act.

In the middle of reading the page about the ADA you feel someone coming down the steps to the basement. The footsteps are of moderate weight and irregular. It’s Mrs. Brother Birch, who is always trying to reduce her weight to take the pain off her arthritic knee. If she catches you not preparing for Bible study, she will snitch to Brother Birch. Your hands are shaking as you switch back to the JW.org page and start to nod your head thoughtfully in case she’s looking. A moment later thethump-womp-thumpof the dryer vibrates through the floor, followed by Mrs. Brother Birch’s uneven footsteps clomping back up the steps until they are gone. You are safe.

Sniff.

The laundry machine: wet metal, soiled clothes, and soap.

The dryer: electric fire and…

Sniff sniff.

Your mind attaches to something else: orange-smelling fabric softener. A memory flashes across your brain: A dark room. A chilly morning. Folded clothes piled on the bed. A suitcase?

“MAMA? What?”You signed into the darkness.

That chilly morning you first went away to school. Early September? Late August? Your mama’s living room. Ten years ago. You were thirteen. The dim light rendered you totally blind, but you could smell her scent: coffee and milk, the orange blossom perfume she’d buy at the Walgreens because she knew you liked it. Something was wrong. You could read your mama’s moods by the pulse of her blood, the flick of her finger, her breath. She was the Earth; you were her moon.

“Mama? What?”

You waved your hands in the air in front of you. Your knowledge of real ASL was still limited, but your mother’s was almost nonexistent. She never studied sign language, so your entire relationship was contained within the boundaries of homemade gestures, bad lipreading (when you could see better), and a handful of signs she had learned from the interpreters at the Kingdom Hall:want,toilet, bad, good, boy, girl, where, please, sorry, when, now, later, hamburger, tomorrow, eat/food, Jehovah, God, Jesus, funny, thank you, Mama,and your name sign.

Mama’s real name was Alma Dilly. Because you knew her before you lost most of your vision, her face remains one of the only ones you can still see clearly with your mind’s eye. Her eyes were hazel. Her face was very pale. When she smiled, one side of her mouth went higher than the other, and she smiled at you often. But that morning you couldn’t see her face. It was far too dark. You could only feel her body walking back and forth across the room, first to the bureau, then the bed. You chased her vibration.

“What do?” you begged, forcing your fingers into her face. “Me red star? Me bad boy?”

She said nothing.

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