Sofia tries to look on her newly assigned task of selling yearbook ads as an honor. After all, she is only a junior intern, not even a full-fledged member of the yearbook staff. Ordinarily this would be Jasmine’s duty, but Jasmine, the senior in charge of advertising, is absent today. So, having suddenly noticed that February is upon them, with pages and pages of ads yet to be sold, the yearbook adviser has dispatched Sofia to the local shopping plaza to rustle up some business.
She sets out from school with a copy of last year’s yearbook and a stack of advertising order forms tucked under her arm, her pink quilted jacket unzipped. Winter feels worn through today. A dry Christmas tree lies stripped on the curb across the street, an old plastic jug of antifreeze lolls in the gutter, and the pavement wears a dull coat of patchy white salt. Catty-cornered from the school squats the shopping plaza, its hindquarters huge and daunting with concrete loading docks and slatted metal doors that slide straight up to reveal the gaping bowels of the supermarket. Sofia hurries past a group of men shouting to one another as they unload crates of pineapple from an eighteen-wheeler. Up the block and around the corner, she comes upon the somewhat less forbidding fronts of the shops and reminds herself to bolster her courage.
Lexington’s yearbook staff comprises nine of the brightest, most dynamic senior class members and two junior interns. Sofia knows that being selected as one of the interns is an honor in itself; to be entrusted with her present mission, standing in for Jasmine, is almost too heady for words. In addition to being the advertising editor of the yearbook, Jasmine is cocaptain of the cheerleading squad, a choreographer for the dance troupe, and the senior class secretary. She wears her hair in a studied mane, with lustrous brown waves slopping over one eye. Sofia used to be a little bit intimidated by her: glamorous Jasmine, poised and respected, her Mona Lisa smile radiating a mysterious assurance. Within the context of Lexington, she is formidable. But outside Lexington, from the vantage point of the Jackson Heights merchants, Jasmine is just another deaf girl, just another one of those kids whose speech they cannot understand.
Sofia inherits the task with mixed feelings. Because she knows she has been picked for her capabilities, it is beyond her to think of refusing it. But a twinge of reluctance slows her after she crosses Thirty-first Avenue, stalls her for a moment on the sidewalk. The sky above the shops is a fervent blue. Late-afternoon light glances off the antennas and windshields of parked cars. Wind slaps the ends of Sofia’s long hair against her face, and with tempting abandon it dances leaves and empty potato chip bags down the street. She draws in a sharp cold breath and swings open the door to the laundromat.
A young woman with curly red hair and chapped red hands stands behind the counter counting out piles of change from her apron pockets. She wears a puffy down vest as a guard against drafts and looks up at the cause of this current gust with a long-suffering shiver.
Sofia approaches the counter, mustering her most professional air. “The manager,” she says, and says it again.
Both Sofia and the red-haired woman concentrate hard on Sofia’s articulation. Having no way of gauging how much noise the washing machines may be making, Sofia aims her voice for a moderate volume. Her speech is richly nasal; the edges of the words are loose, elastic.
On the second try the red-haired woman nods—a successful transmission of meaning. “He don’t come in during the day” is her answer, which she delivers in a clipped Queens rattle, simultaneously looking down at her configurations of coins.
Because of the downsweep of the woman’s head, Sofia misses this statement. She tries to guess what was said, cross-referencing the woman’s body language with her own mental list of possible responses, but she does not have enough clues to form a hypothesis. She tries a different tack.
“Would you like to please support Lexington School and yearbook?” she asks, smoothly sliding last year’s yearbook onto the counter. It is opened to a spread of advertisements placed by local shopkeepers. The red-haired woman has not entirely understood Sofia’s words, but scanning the visual information before her, she is able to deduce the purpose of the visit.
“They’re not here,” she tells Sofia again. “The manager’s not here.”
Sofia watches the woman’s mouth closely. The woman does not flinch from such unnerving attention but patiently repeats the message, winding dry, cracked lips around her Queens accent. Sofia understands. She proceeds to phase two, peeling a sheet from her stack of advertising order forms.
“Will you give this to the manager? If he wants to order an advertisement, please to call this number.” Sofia points to the telephone number. Her speech has become incidental; the order form, the prop, relates the story.
“I’ll give this to the manager,” the woman suggests, her curls obscuring her face as she bends over to read the form. Sofia hesitates, not sure what the woman said or whether it constituted a dismissal. Straightening, the woman creases the paper in quarters and sticks it into a rear jeans pocket. “I’ll give it to him,” she repeats, nodding at Sofia, who smiles now, dips her head in thanks, and pushes back through the swinging glass door.
One down, thirteen to go. She will be late getting home again this evening.
It has been a hard week. Sofia has been swamped with schoolwork, studying for midterms and the Regents exams and the Regents Competency Tests. She has been working overtime on the yearbook and putting in her regular hours at the school store, and she has been talking with Louann Katz, her guidance counselor, about life after graduation. The junior class is beginning to take field trips to colleges that have programs for deaf students. Now, just when Sofia has started to feel at home in her class at Lexington, she must begin making plans to leave. With the encouragement of her guidance counselor and teachers, she has set her sights on attending Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts college for deaf students. Sofia is thrilled by the idea of living in an environment where everyone is deaf, but the prospect is scary as well as exciting. All at once the future is impinging on the present. And to make things worse, she has been quarreling with her mother.
Last Friday Sofia stayed at school all afternoon, working on the yearbook. She went home to find her mother bustling about their cramped kitchen, fuming as she prepared the Sabbath dinner. Mrs. Normatov chastised Sofia for staying at school so late and called her selfish for not coming straight home to help.
“I’ll help you now,” Sofia offered, switching into Russian, as she does automatically upon entering the apartment. Wearily, she took up her role of good daughter, shucking her shoes and bookbag by the front door, presenting herself ready for duty. But her mother was already deep in her foul mood, and now it spread to Sofia as well, so that as she carried plates of radishes and stuffed grape leaves to the table set up by one wall of the small living room, a hard seed of indignation was germinating.
Perhaps this seed was what provoked her, during Sabbath dinner, to ask the question that escalated the conflict. She waited until after the little cup of sweet red wine had been passed around. Her father had closed his worn brown Bible and set it next to his plate; he had torn off chunks of bagel, dipped them into the dish of salt, and passed them around to his family members. The rituals thus completed, everyone had been about to begin the meal in earnest when Sofia spoke.
“Mother,” she had asked, pitching her clearest Russian syllables across the table, “when I graduate, will you let me go to Gallaudet?”
“Nyet” came the reply. As flat as that.
“Why?” Her question, charged with frustration, incurred the family’s silent warning: “Hush, Sofia, don’t antagonize Mama, not on the Sabbath.” Anyway, she knew why. Gallaudet University is in Washington, D.C., five hours away by car, too far from the strongholds of the family and the Russian Jewish community. Education is fine with Sofia’s parents inasmuch as it prepares her to be a successful, productive adult in the hearing world. But if she were to go to Gallaudet, if she were to migrate fully into a world of deafness, she would be lost; she would lose her sense of obligation to the family; she would become Other.
The simmering tension between school and home is the crux of this conflict, and has arisen with increasing frequency this year. Last year, while Sofia was still a greenhorn in the high school, she was more available to take on chores at home: cooking, cleaning, tending to her baby nephew and younger sister. But this year she has school commitments virtually every afternoon. She talks freely and passionately about deaf pride, asserts her right to use sign language rather than speech, has even begun to challenge her mother’s expectations of her. Her Lexington friends don’t have so many responsibilities at home; her Lexington clubs and activities demand more of her time; as a deaf person, she is entitled to develop her ties to the deaf community.
The Normatovs have seen Sofia grow calmly but powerfully defiant. Suddenly everything is about Lexington, about deaf culture and her precious new language, ASL. It is difficult for a parent not to harbor some resentment toward the school. The very institution to which Mrs. Normatov has felt such gratitude, such bottomless deference, has become a rival for her child’s allegiance, and now evokes mistrust and jealousy as well.
The tension weighs heavily on Sofia, too. As strident as she appears to her family, she is privately racked with doubt. A tremendous sense of family loyalty and her own emerging identification with deafness ride on her shoulders, pressing into her their respective burdens of guilt and desire. How can she balance a commitment to her family’s culture with the pull she feels toward deaf culture?
During the Sabbath dinner last week, Sofia dropped the subject of Gallaudet and draped herself in silence for the remainder of the meal. Later she cleared the table and washed the dishes with equal taciturnity, not once leaving the din of her own unvoiced thoughts. She was not sulking; she was thinking.
After supper, Mrs. Normatov remained alone at the table, a cup of hot tea and a plate of fruit and almonds set before her on the clear plastic tablecloth protector. With deep contentment she selected apples, pears, and kiwis, first peeling the skins in long coils, then slicing the fruit into disks. These she urged on her husband, her daughters, her sons-in-law, who were playing cards and backgammon on the big gold sofa, browsing through photo albums, and laughing at the baby, who danced with a toy chicken in front of the television. Although they declined, Mrs. Normatov pressed the fruit on them anyway. She smiled in amused vindication when they eventually polished off the treats, a molar shining gold in the back of her mouth.
Sofia was too tired to try to catch on to the conversation or to ask one of her older sisters to explain. She felt torn, split, incapable of reconciling the two portions of her life. She observed the after-dinner fare being passed around, her mother binding everyone together with uncanny will, feeding them what she could offer. Sofia was both shut out and drawn in by the easy banter ricocheting about the room in a blend of Russian and Farsi, incomprehensible to her but familiar just the same. That night the thickness of family feeling seemed a force impossible to resist. She would accept this path, resign herself to the loss of Gallaudet.
Later, after the married sisters had departed and the parents had gone to bed, the little sister followed the big one into the kitchen. The Sabbath candles, left burning on the counter, had melted near the vanishing point, reduced to two soft bits of light floating in pools of wax. On the stove, two tremendous pots sat over low gas flames. One was filled with rice, the other with bahsh, a Bukharan dish of water, potatoes, eggs, and a tea bag to give the food a sepia tone. This is the traditional lunch fare on the Sabbath in Samarkand. The food would cook overnight, as no one may turn the stove off or on during the Sabbath.
The Normatovs follow the no-work rules of Sabbath with some flexibility: Sofia began doing the dishes. She washed them very quietly for a deaf person (deaf people stereotypically being pot-bangers and silverware-crashers), suggesting a conscientiousness born of years of coaching by or admonishments from family members. Irina watched her sister’s hands dip in and out of the hot soapy water. The apartment was dark and still except for here in the kitchen, this spot of warmth. The high window next to the refrigerator was a cube of pitch. Irina stole a handful of rice from the pot on the stove and licked the grains from her palm, waiting for Sofia’s hands to be finished so they could talk.
But Sofia was tired. “All right now, it’s late. To bed,” she ordered after only a minute of chat. One Sabbath candle was out, the other a wan blue filament. She herded Irina toward their bedroom. But nothing with Irina could be this easy, and the younger girl suddenly became churlish. She would do anything to prolong this time together.
“You’re not really deaf,” she accused.
This was an old routine, and Irina was just an immature kid. Why, then, did Sofia let it rile her? “Yes, I am!” she snapped back.
Irina saw that her first strike had hit its target precisely; all she had to do now was aim gentle blows around the edges. “Nooo, you’re only hard of hearing.”
“I am not, I’m deaf!”
“You can hear!” Irina taunted.
“Without a hearing aid I’m deaf! I couldn’t go to Lexington if I wasn’t deaf!”
All her life, Sofia has been taught to use speech, language, residual hearing, and lip reading to compensate for her deafness, to broaden her choices and opportunities in the hearing world. But no matter what level of proficiency she achieves with these skills, they manage to fail her in one way or another. They either fall short of gaining her real access to the hearing world or they distance her from the deaf community, which looks on the too-enthusiastic development of these skills with some suspicion: does she idealize hearing people, is she rejecting her own deafness?
“I don’t believe you,” Irina persisted. “You’re not deaf. You speak too well!”
Later that night, the only one in her family still awake, Sofia, in tears, called a friend. Through a watery blur she watched the words her own fingers typed in electric blue letters across the TTY screen: I FEEL MY NUMBER ONE HOME IS SCHOOL SECOND HOME IS FAMILY I FEEL I GREW UP AT SCHOOL FROM AGE THREE TO NOW I MUST BREAK THE HABIT AND LEARN TO LOVE FIRST HOME THEN SCHOOL.
Sofia’s next stop after the laundromat is Pat and Joe’s, the deli where Lex kids flock after school. It is late enough in the afternoon for it to stand peaceful, nearly deserted. Sofia enters and goes straight to the cash register, her order forms at the ready, her index finger stuck into the yearbook at the page with the advertisement placed by this establishment last year. She decides to show the cashier the material first, without any verbal introduction. The cashier has been snacking from a bag of fried sesame sticks; she licks her fingers and rubs them on her pants before examining the wordlessly offered paraphernalia. Sofia glances idly at the rack of chewing gum and batteries.
“I give to manager,” the cashier determines out loud. She scrapes a waist-length hank of black hair over one shoulder and looks at Sofia for approval. Sofia, sensing this shift in attention, brings her gaze back to the cashier and waits expectantly, oblivious to the response that has already been made. They look at each other, locked in this puzzled stalemate, until the door swings open and the woman from the laundromat breezes in to trade her coins for bills.
“Oh yeah,” she says, assessing the scene. “Just give it to the manager,” she advises the dark-haired cashier, blithely swinging behind the register and clanking her apronful of money on the counter. “Take the form, it’s for their yearbook.” Nodding follows, and multiple exchanges: yearbook for order form, quarters for bills, welcome for thanks. The transaction completed, Sofia leaves Pat and Joe’s without having used a word of English.
Sofia has been practicing the art of translation since she was sent away to the school for the deaf in Leningrad at age three. She is a learned practitioner of the skills of communication, seasoned enough to know that regardless of what means are employed, the interaction is successful if the message gets across. Interpreters (both professional and impromptu), gestures and mime, notes and diagrams, signed and spoken languages—for Sofia there is no hierarchy, no sense in valuing one method of communication more or less than any other. Despite all the haranguing of the hearing and deaf establishments, all the stormy theoretical debates over ASL and English, in real life most deaf people must be agile code-switchers, ready to employ various combinations of all these methods at any given time.
On a recent afternoon, Sofia was fishing around in her jacket pocket for some change to lend to her friend Sheema when she came up instead with the cap to a bottle of Rolaids. Sheema exploded with the mirth produced in many adolescents by any reference to intestinal gas. Her gentle brown eyes narrowed quizzically as she tried to grab the cap from Sofia’s hand. “What’re you carrying around that for?” she gibed, at once teasing and curious.
“Shut up, you,” returned Sofia easily, jamming the red plastic cap back in her pocket and going a little pink. “My sister sent me to the drugstore for it, and I brought the cap from the old bottle to show the guy.”
“Oh!” Sheema nodded in commiseration. ”Wait, let me see it,” she demanded, sticking her hand out for the bottle cap. Sofia retrieved it and plunked it into Sheema’s palm. “R-O-L-A-I-D-S,” fingerspelled Sheema. “Rolaids.” She tested the word orally, found it odd, and made a face. “Better to show the cap,” she agreed, nestling it snugly back in her friend’s pocket.
Now Sofia heads for the bank, whose main doors are already closed. An earnest young man at the walk-up window accepts an order form through the money slot. Sofia hurries on. The Chinese restaurant is next. The early drinkers in overcoats appear rooted to bar stools, and an old cop show plays on the television set mounted over their heads. Sofia wrinkles her nose; cigarette smoke hangs visibly in the air around the bar. She launches her pitch: “Would you please like to sponsor our yearbook?”
The manager comes toward her, wiping his hands on a white cloth and squinting furiously. “Yellow book?” he queries.
She has no idea what he is saying. It is a clash of accents. For all her American speech lessons at Lexington, Sofia still trills her r‘s in the Russian way, giving the word “year” two syllables. The manager of the Chinese restaurant transmutes the r’s to l’s, and once again Sofia finds herself staring, bewildered, at someone who is staring in equal bewilderment back at her.
“Yearrrbook,” she repeats, but as this proves no more illuminating, she extends the book toward the man. The smoke is stale, raunchy. She does not know whether the television sound is on or off, so she cannot modify her voice accordingly. She lets the man discover for himself why she has come, and waits uncomfortably, trying to breathe without exactly inhaling, taking the air in little shallow sips.
Eventually, the manager accepts an order form without making any promises. Sofia is relieved just to be back outside, breathing the cold, gasoliney air of the parking lot.
With ten shops left and the afternoon darkening, Sofia zips her jacket and speeds her step. Some of the managers are in and some are not; some are friendly and some are impatient; some shove pencil and paper at her, refusing to try face-to-face communication. One will make no attempt to communicate at all but shoos her from his beauty parlor as though she were drunk or deranged.
Sofia often gets saddled with tasks such as these because she is so capable and responsible. Her reliability is less remarkable for her deafness than it is for her age. But in tandem with her verbal acuity and relative ease in functioning in the world at large, it makes it easy to forget that she is a teenager, with all the typical growing pains of adolescence. Instead people call on her to perform an unusual array of tasks. Perhaps the most demanding and conflict-ridden of these is the rearing of Irina.
Charming, maddening Irina is Sofia’s special charge, and both sisters know it. Their relationship is unusually close and fiery. The seven years between them are insufficient to guarantee Sofia unchallenged authority, yet their parents have habitually assigned her responsibility for Irina; as a result, a kind of elimination dance has ensued, with the two sisters perpetually retesting their liberties and limits.
When Irina is kept in class during lunch to work on her reading, it is Sofia who takes time from her own day to visit the supervisor’s office and demand, “Are you punishing her for being confused?” And when she is informed, “No, it’s because she’s not doing her homework,” it is Sofia who pushes aside her own homework and works with Irina in the evenings to make sure everything gets done.
When Irina wakes in the night, wanting a snack or comforting because of a nightmare, it is Sofia she goes to, Sofia who cares for her. They communicate in their own silent language, without disturbing the others. It is Sofia whom Irina asks for a poem at bedtime, Sofia who indulges, signing “Moon Near Stars,” the ASL poem she wrote for English class, its liquid rhythms spinning from her fingers like a visual lullaby.
When Irina stays after school to rehearse for the dance show, it is Sofia who waits around to take her home on public transportation. And when Sofia goes out with her deaf friends, it is Irina who increasingly insists on going along, despite Sofia’s efforts at dissuasion. Through her big sister, Irina has glimpsed a portal into the deaf community, and with steel-jawed efficiency she has clamped on, determined not to be left behind.
Sofia’s relationship with her deaf sister is full of implications about her own deafness. To Irina, Sofia is often a hero: Sofia can make herself understood in Russian, can stand up to their mother and articulate for them both. Irina was only eight when the Normatovs emigrated; she never reached Sofia’s level of fluency in speaking or lip-reading Russian. It falls to Sofia, then, to serve as the interlocutor for Irina with the hearing family members.
But if at such times she is Sofia the Hero, she can be Sofia the Betrayer as well. Because of her ability to bridge the gap within the family, the family sees it as Sofia’s duty to do so; therefore, they perceive withholding this service as the worst kind of treason. When she declines to advocate for Irina, when she refuses to assume the duties of a parent, it invariably upsets everyone. Sofia is the only one who can be the bridge, and until she submits to that task once again, the atmosphere around the apartment is thick with grousing and blame. In fact, Sofia has begun to wonder how much of her parents’ objections to her going to Gallaudet actually stems from their anxiety about being left to rear Irina alone.
Last Saturday, in the aftermath of the almost-fight during Sabbath dinner, Sofia raised the question quite bluntly, asking her mother, “What would you do if I left, if I were gone? How would you communicate with Irina?”
Mrs. Normatov responded with equal candor. “Can’t you teach her to be more like you? To have better speech, better Russian, be more mature?”
Sofia considered this and answered truthfully, “No, I can’t. It’s too hard.”
It was a rare exchange, untinged with anger or defensiveness. They had the living room to themselves, and rested there in the bleak gray light that filtered through the curtains, a frothy cream-and-gold fabric drawn against the winter afternoon. In the absence of tension, Sofia felt that the room was charged with possibility.
“Mama, tell me,” she begged, “how did it happen when I was born and you found out I was deaf? How did you find the school in Leningrad? Tell me the whole story.” She already knew bits and pieces, but she had never heard it in full, and she needed it now, all at once, straight from her mother’s lips.
Mrs. Normatov became brusque in an attempt to shake off the request, but Sofia persevered until she relented. She had been sixteen when she wed her uncle Iluysha, a match that was not unusual in their culture. She had hoped for a large family, a great brood of at least eight children. She gave birth to Adalina, her first, when she was eighteen, and Nadezdha two years later—two perfect daughters. Three years later Sofia was bom, and if there was any disappointment over having yet another girl, it was canceled by the blessing of a third healthy baby.
Sofia was two years old when her mother noticed that something was not right. If the baby’s back was turned and Mrs. Normatov called to her, she didn’t respond. She told her husband, who replied, “Nonsense!” and repeated the experiment himself. Perhaps he took a step as he called, sending a vibration through the floorboards; perhaps the baby caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. In any case, that time she responded. “There, you see?” Mr. Normatov soothed his wife. But she would not be comforted.
A visit to a local doctor shortly thereafter proved her right: Sofia had a hearing impairment. However, in Samarkand they could not get access to an audiologist or the technology that would allow for a detailed diagnosis and recommendation for treatment. It was Mrs. Normatov’s grandmother, Mr. Normatov’s mother, who told her what she must do: “Put her in a special school.”
For Jews living in the Asian part of the Soviet Union, this was no easy feat. Fueled by the grief and guilt that most hearing parents first experience upon learning that their child is deaf, Mrs. Normatov sought answers through a labyrinthine series of connections. After months of letter-writing, she finally found someone who would agree to help: the friend of the husband of a sister of a friend. This man was a Jewish doctor, a hearing specialist in Leningrad. Mrs. Normatov left Ada and Nelly with her grandmother and took the baby north, only to be told by the doctor that the best thing would be to leave Sofia in Leningrad, in the oral school, where she would learn to talk.
Mrs. Normatov did as she was told. She returned to Samarkand in a severe depression, feeling tired and aged, defeated, dried up. When Irina was born deaf, seven years later, her mother simply sent her along to join her sister in Leningrad. After that Mrs. Normatov made sure that she would bear no more children.
Sofia received the story from her mother, who cried as she told it, in the muted shadows of late afternoon. For the first time, it included the true, bitter ending, the part of the message that goes “Having no children is better than having deaf children.”
“I don’t blame you” is what Sofia summoned herself to say to her mother after the story was finished. “I don’t blame you. I know you went through a lot. So have I. And I’m proud to be deaf. You need to accept that.”
A few days later, Sofia was in the room when Mrs. Normatov asked Irina to hang her clean clothes on the drying rack. Irina complied, and when she was through, Mrs. Normatov surprised both daughters by signing, “Thank you.”
Irina’s large eyes went round behind her glasses. She leaped toward her mother in amazement and lavished kisses on her cheeks.
Sofia rose and gazed at her mother. “That’s the first time I ever saw you sign!” she marveled. “You did that so beautifully—where did you learn?”
Her mother, pleased and embarrassed by all this fuss, smiled over Irina’s head at the older girl. “From you.”