Free If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner

Why should she advertise her monthly cycles, marked out by her trips to the bath house? God knows she is trying to be a good wife, a good mother. So, why? She begs God to tell her, why this curse of daughters who cannot hear?
    At the market, in the upstairs galley of the shul, at the river to collect water, Pearl watches other mothers with their children, and she knows it is different for them. They sing to their young ones in breathy whispers, in octave-leaping coos. They invent stories, and the children’s eyes grow wide. A calf in an imaginary flower-drenched meadow takes its first wobbly steps. A silvery fish breaks through a lake’s shimmering surface to speak in magical tongues. A ball of yarn mysteriously
appears in an old peddler’s basket. Stories Nellie and Bayla will never hear.
    Pearl falters in fits and starts, in a confused pantomime, trying to understand and meet her little girls’ most immediate needs and desires. Bayla cries and Pearl offers her more to eat, hands her a doll to play with, and then sees — oh! — her little finger is red and swollen, it must have gotten pinched in the slats of the crib.
    Nellie’s hungry eyes devour everything in their sight. Yet, Pearl can see that the patterns of days and weeks do not compose a familiar rhythm for Nellie. Routine events — the frenzied buying on market day, the lighting of the braided Havdalah candle — come as a surprise, a new enchantment to Nellie week after week after week. Pearl’s fears mingle, then, with the thrill of her girl’s endless, childlike wonder. At least with Bayla’s arrival, Nellie no longer sits alone, hours on end, in the nook beneath her bedroom windowsill. She rushes about the house and cares for Bayla. She helps Pearl bathe her. She strokes her fuzzy scalp. She fusses over her clothes. Pearl watches from the kitchen as Nellie gently rocks Bayla in her crib, its wooden rails suspended from strong ropes that run from the ceiling. Nellie gestures and points, makes faces and whole body movements. Her face is alight, like a well-lit house on a dark night.

Massachusetts, May 2001
    SOPHIA WAS TEN MONTHS OLD when we arrived in Northampton. Light flooded into our house through the huge, wavy glass windowpanes. Bill and I arranged for modest home renovations: we had the busy wallpaper removed and each room painted in a deep, historic color.
    In the spirit of my superstitious forebears, I hung a chamsa , a “protecting hand,” from the iron doorknob in our front entryway. Sophia ran her little fingers over the glistening hand, molded in shiny copper and bejeweled in brilliant turquoise, the “eye” in the center meant to ward off evil. Despite our modernity, the strategy of averting trouble through an ancient stare down still held its appeal.
    Jan came to our house from the Clarke School the first week, and every week from then on. She brought huge tote bags filled with toys and visual props to accompany songs to sing and books to read: itsy bitsy spiders and water-spouts, five little monkeys and doctors and beds, a plastic
Humpty Dumpty egg, a stuffed toy rat and a sack of malt, and the house that Jack built.
    Together with Jan, we sat on the floor of our living room and engaged in “auditory-play therapy” with Sophia. We set up a toy car on a track, and as it ran we said “go!” We tucked a doll into a miniature bed, then nudged it and called out, “ Wake up, baby!”
    Jan taught us to narrate everything we were doing, and to take extra care to prepare Sophia for what was happening with both visual and auditory cues. Before a car ride we were to bring our keys to Sophia, show them to her, and jangle them near her ear. Before a bath, we were to carry Sophia to the tub, show her the running water, and let her hear it. It might be typical for all babies, especially those who nap often, to expect the unexpected, or else to be beset by confusion: they fall asleep, they wake up in the supermarket; they fall back asleep, they