Page 26 of The Sign for Home

Professor Bahr winked at Molly and me. It had become her signal that she was ready to begin. After two weeks of classes, despite my gentle clarification, she was still under the assumption that we ASL interpreters were like her co-teachers. (Sadly, a common misunderstanding.)

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Professor Bahr announced, as her golden bees bounced excitedly at her earlobes. “It’s time to begin your first response paper. Five pages, typed neatly, double-spaced. Worth twenty-five points. As you can see from the handout, each prompt involves a famous poem or section of a poem and an idea for you to think about. The point of this is to get you to think and to write personally about your thoughts. This is not a research paper! It’s a response paper. Include your own life experiences. Do you all understand? Now let’s take a look at the poems.”

I caught Molly’s attention and rolled my eyes, mouthing the wordpoetry. She, in return, looked to heaven (or wherever JWs look to) and shookher head. If any struggle could unite ASL interpreters, it was being told we’d have to interpret a poem without any preparation. It was not just the linguistic challenge of turning English into ASL. We also had to interpret the poem—as in analyze and comprehend the meaning of it and then turn it into ASL—the whole time adjusting for whether the Deaf person may or may not have any understanding of sound, meter, rhyme, or most of the hearing-centered metaphors. To do this well on the spot was nearly impossible, and I hated it. There was only one thing worse.

“Can someone volunteer to read the first stanza of the Keats poem aloud?” Professor Bahr announced.

Andthatwas what I hated more: having to interpret a poem recited badly by some mush-mouthed hearing student who read too fast, too quietly, and in a monotone. Of course, I suddenly had to do this in Tactile ASL, which took twice as long given my inexperience. I wanted to die.

The student, a Peruvian ESL speaker, stammered quietly through the stanza:

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

Alone and palely loitering;

The sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Did he say “white”?I glanced at Arlo’s large print-copy of the poem and the word was “wight.”Okay, what the fuck is a “wight”?Then I rememberedGame of Thrones.Zombies? Was he writing about zombies? Maybe he meant a ghost.I used the sign forspirit. But what in the hell did he mean by “sedge”?There wasn’t time to google it, and Molly couldn’t help, since she was equally clueless. I fingerspelled the unknown words and then roughed my way through the rest. It was a disaster. “Palely loitering” I interpreted as “spirit very white. Standing in same place for a long time. Waiting.” My signs felt devoid of meaning, like I might as well just have wiggled myfingers in the air. Of course, most interpreters would have quickly fallen into a lame word-by-word transliteration of the poem. So a metaphor like “a storm within my heart,” which probably could be interpreted as “within myself, emotions, confusion, chaos,” might end up being interpreted by the stressed-out ASL interpreter as: “Rain and wind inside my heart.” Thus, the metaphorical becomes meteorological. And the interpreter ends up staring at the disengaged face of a Deaf or DeafBlind student and vows never to interpret another class that might include poetry.

I felt utterly inept.

“The student had a really thick accent,” I signed to Arlo, explaining the disaster. “Very old language. It’s just so different. Next time I’ll ask the teacher to give us the poems beforehand so we can be better prepared.”

“Other students understand poem?” he asked.

I looked around at the other vacant faces, some sneaking peeks at their smartphones or staring out the window.

“I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it.”

“Okay,” Arlo signed, shrugging.

Arlo had grown used to not understanding, or just to the mediocrity of most poetry interpretations. I looked back at Molly, hoping for another blast of interpreter simpatico. But she quickly looked back down at her copy ofThe Watchtower. That previous glimmer of Nice Molly was clearly an aberration.

The students were given time to look over the poems and prompts to make a choice. Arlo pulled out his big magnifying glass and stared at his handout like he was examining a rare blue butterfly. After what had to be a good ten minutes, Arlo said he had chosen to do Walt Whitman’sLeaves of Grass, section 6. I wondered why he chose it. It wasn’t as bad as Keats’s, but still not as straightforward as I had hoped.

“Are you sure this is the one you want to do?” Molly asked, probably thinking the same thing as me. “There are other poems that would be easier.”

I interjected that there were more contemporary poets on the list thatmight be more relatable, like Sylvia Plath or Langston Hughes. But Molly quickly snatched Arlo’s hands back from me.

“I don’t think either of them are appropriate,” Molly grumbled. “Both, I believe, are very depressing. And Whitman is too hard. What about this poem by Wallace Stevens: ‘?The Snow Man’? That sounds nice.”

Molly knew enough to steer Arlo clear of poems by gay Black men and suicidal feminists, but apparently wasn’t privy to Stevens’s complexity or Big Ol’ Homo Bear Walt’s passionate proclivities. Arlo furrowed his brow. I expected he’d second-guess his choice and cave to one of our suggestions, which neither of us should have been offering. But he didn’t. He tapped the paper and fingerspelled W-A-L-T. No other explanation to either of us. I was proud of him.

It was still hard to figure Arlo out. Other than his comment about the ADA that first day, and his mentioning of his two former best friends, Martin and Big Head Lawrence, he barely talked about himself. Sometimes when there was downtime Arlo would simply stare off into that nothing place. Once in a while, I’d see his eyebrows knit with the slightest look of anguish on his face, as if he were angry at someone inside his head.

“Class is over. It’s time to go,” Molly signed, waking him from his daydream.

“Can Cyril stay few minutes? Interpret poem and assignment for me? Okay?”

Without even asking me, Molly told him that she doubted the Disability Office would pay for any extra time.

“We’ll meet at your house later,” Molly signed. “No need to involve Cyril.”

“Thank you,” Arlo responded, measuring his words carefully. “But… if you don’t mind, I want Cyril to interpret poem. Okay? Molly, you interpret about God and heaven. Expert! But Cyril interprets poetry—wow! Champion!”

I imagined a small explosion of jealousy going off in Molly’s head. Ibroke out in a smile. It wasn’t so much that Arlo was choosing me over Molly, but rather that my disaster at interpreting Keats didn’t sour Arlo on me.

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