Free If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner Page B

devised fattening recipes for me to try on Sophia, using ricotta cheese and mascarpone. My father collected newspaper clippings, sometimes about deafness or low weight, sometimes about a philosopher or a psychologist whose work I might find interesting. I was glad to be nearer to my parents—I wanted a steady connection with them as much as ever.
    When Bill traveled for work, I would stay over at my parents’ with Sophia. Early on, I would watch apprehensively as my parents interacted with Sophia, fearful that
Sophia’s wide open gaze would go unmet as my parents’ attentions turned to other things—dressing, reading a day’s newspaper, preparing a too-extravagant meal. I would stand by, ready to catch Sophia’s felled gaze in mine. To my relief, my parents played with Sophia attentively. Both my father and my mother doted on her, but my mother communed with Sophia. Calm and focused, she gave Sophia her full attention—attention I had experienced, cherished , only in fleeting, intermittent intervals as a child.
    With Sophia in her lap, my mother compared their hearing aids. She favored Sophia’s soft, rubbery, colorful earmolds to her own hard, plastic, white ones. Once she noticed a red patch where Sophia’s hearing aid had rubbed a raw spot behind her ear. Hurriedly, my mother brought out the baby oil and gently soothed Sophia’s skin there. I watched them bond, eyes locked. Deafness shared. My mother combed Sophia’s hair, tickled her cheeks. She made a high-calorie rice pudding, and Sophia ate it all up.

    As we went about our daily lives in Northampton, we didn’t meet many deaf people. Our hearing lessons with Jan took place in our house, to support our listening practices at home. Bill and I made contact with some Clarke School
parents, but there were no other deaf babies at Clarke then with whom to form a playgroup for Sophia. Most often, the hearing-impaired people we met were octogenarians rattling shopping carts slowly down the aisles of the supermarket. Sophia always noticed and pointed to their hearing aids, even the small beige ones that fit snugly inside their ears.
    On occasion, I would see people Signing. And though we had opted for hearing aids and an oral approach for Sophia, I would find myself crossing streets, nearly jumping buses, in order to get a chance to introduce Sophia and to explain, in my halting sign language, that Sophia was hearing impaired, too. They would fawn over her, signing out her sweetness and beauty. Then they would face her directly and sign to her and she would stare back at them, absorbing their open expressions.
    One day I saw two women, deaf and blind, signing into each other’s hands. My thoughts ran me, then, to the setting sun on the Sabbath, no lanterns lit along the shtetl streets. The dusky shadows would have ended the possibility of further conversation for Nellie and Bayla—unless they took up each other’s hands, as the deaf-blind do, and signed into each other’s palms. I longed, then, to share in the hand language of the Deaf—Nellie and Bayla’s home Sign, their only buffer from utter isolation. And I vowed
to arm Sophia with everything the modern world would allow to make her less isolated, less vulnerable. A TTY system, if she couldn’t talk on the phone. A vibrating alarm clock. A light-up smoke detector.
    Surprisingly, the Deaf people we met didn’t often challenge our decision to try hearing aids. It was the hearing people who subjected me to their questions, opinions, exclamations, and doubts. They stopped me on the street, in the pharmacy, at the coffee shop. “ Why does your baby have hearing aids?” “Will she get better?” “Are you sure she needs those?” “ What’s wrong with her?”
    There were days that I returned home exhausted from fielding questions, angry, and filled with self-doubt. What if Sophia wasn’t really hearing spoken language with her hearing aids? Hearing aids amplified sound, but they did so indiscriminately