Chapter 22

Ms. Funnel and I entered Mrs. Joyce Campbell’s office—the nameplate outside the office door said so. Mrs. Campbell was going to be my interpreter. Her office was kind of small. Her desk sat by a window where the shades were drawn. In addition to the desk, she had some filled bookshelves and, in the center of the room, a round table with four chairs.

I smiled and extended my hand. “Hello.” We clasped hands.

I felt funny signing in front of people I didn’t know. It made me uncomfortable. Part of it was, I guessed, because I didn’t think I was good enough at signing. The other part was that, every time I signed, I was admitting the truth to myself: I would never hear again.

Mrs. Campbell nodded and began signing. Oral is good. Like Ms. Funnel, she signed slowly. Visual is good. Signing is good. We’ll work more on all of this.

She told me she was a retired city school teacher and worked at RSD as an interpreter because she was fluent in American Sign Language. She mostly worked with students who were four and five years old. I’m not sure why she was assigned to me. As long as I didn’t get treated like a baby, I guess it didn’t matter.

Mrs. Campbell was shorter than Ms. Funnel, but still pretty tall. She was thin, too. She wore her gray hair short and her glasses on a beaded necklace dangling in front of her. Her skin was dark, as if she’d spent all summer tanning under the sun.

It looks like you’re in good hands, Marco, Ms. Funnel signed. I’ll be going back to my office, but if you need me, you know where I sit. We shook hands goodbye.

Thank you. I watched Ms. Funnel leave. I placed an arm across my stomach as the muscles there tightened. I longed to be home. I thought I might get sick. It had only been five minutes and already I missed my family. How could this work? How could I ever learn to speak with my hands the way everyone else around here did?

You’ve been taking classes? Mrs. Campbell signed.

Yes, I signed back. She wore a constant smile, as if always reassuring me that this would all work out just fine. I wasn’t sure I believed her. But right now she seemed to believe it. So I just went with that—taking as much comfort as possible from her smile.

You are doing very well.

Thank you. I practice a lot.

She nodded. Ready to begin lessons with me?

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t, but what would be the point in telling her? I nodded as I signed, Yes.

She handed me pages that looked like they were photocopied from a book. Each page was split into two sections. The top had ten sentences in English. The bottom had ten sentences written out in ASL. At a glance, it looked like twenty completely different sentences.

She folded my sheet of paper in half, showing me only the sentences in English. She asked, Sign these sentences in ASL.

The first sentence in English was:

You played football in the morning, and played soccer in the afternoon, and now you are sick?

This was a fairly complicated sentence for me. There were a bunch of ASL rules I tried to remember in order to twist that sentence from English into ASL. One had to do with time.

Time comes first.

I signed, Morning, you football played, afternoon you soccer played, now sick you?

Mrs. Campbell smiled. Very good. Okay. Try sentence number two.

I read: I watched the swimming competition.

This one did not contain time. But the topic was swimming, and the topic was to come first.

In ASL I signed: Swimming competition me watch.

Close. She wrote something on a piece of paper and then showed it to me.

“When something is past tense,” I read aloud, “like watched, or words ending in ‘-ed,’ you need to end your sentence with the sign, ‘finish.’” I looked up from the paper. “Using finish makes a word past tense?” I asked, not sure I understood.

She nodded. Again.

Swimming competition me watch finish, I signed.

Good. She smiled.

I thought about the next sentence, putting together everything I’d learned. You can place the time, Saturday, first or the subject, movie, first. Or, you can put the question, want you, at the beginning or at the end of the sentence.

I pursed my lips tight, and sighed through my nose as I shook my head.

This wasn’t her fault. But it was kind of crazy. Why couldn’t I just sign in plain, old regular English?

Just before noon she folded her hands and smiled. She placed the fingertips of her right hand near her lips. Eat, she signed, placing her right elbow on the palm of her left hand, keeping her right arm up, as if saying hello. Noon, she spelled.

She had been doing this all morning. Signing, spelling, and asking me to figure out what was going on. She called this a compound sign: two separate words used to make up one word. Eat and noon. “Lunch?” I asked.

Lunch, Mrs. Campbell signed, obviously pleased. Company, or alone?

I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t want to eat lunch alone. Being in a room with deaf kids who could communicate easily with one another would be no different than if I’d gone to junior high back home. I’d still be left out, isolated. Still, I couldn’t imagine taking a teacher with me to lunch.

It’s okay, she signed. If I were you, I’m not sure I’d want me tagging along, either.

I raised my eyebrows, silently asking if she was sure.

Enjoy, she signed. Be back before one.

I held up a finger and shook it gently back and forth. Where?

Forrester Hall, she spelled. She used her finger like a voice, and gave me directions—moving it in the directions I needed to take to get to Forrester Hall.

Go out, go right, go straight, go right.

Thank you. I walked down the hall, toward an exit. Class might have gone fine, but I was feeling sick to my stomach about going to the cafeteria.