My Name Is Jody Williams. Jody Williams
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He chortled as his chest bump sent Michael out of the circle, arms swinging wildly as he tried to keep his balance. Michael's head was already hanging in shame, and he seemed to get even smaller as he backed farther away without a word.
I wasn't a friend of geeky Michael, but I couldn't stand to watch David humiliate him so brazenly. I wanted Michael to defend himself. He could talk! But he wouldn't. And why did we let David get away with it, sheep in the presence of the big guy's power, which we conceded to him by doing nothing?
That we all stood mute and watched his obnoxious behavior said as much about us as it did about him, and it made me sick. Suddenly I knew if I did nothing, I'd feel like less of a human being, even if I couldn't put it that way at the time. All those catechism lessons—do for others what you would want them to do for you—must have taken root.
Quivering with anger and fear, in unequal proportion, I stepped in front of David. Struggling to control my voice, I asked why he bullied people who couldn't stand up to him. I expected a barbed-tongue response, but David surprised us all when he backed down without protest. He opened up the circle and waved Michael back in.
My insides trembled for the rest of recess, but David seemed to take it in stride. He never harassed me for defending Michael, and he didn't treat him unfairly again. I began to wonder how many others could be helped as easily if people had the courage to stand up to their own fear and take action when they knew it was the right thing to do. It took a long, long time but eventually I recognized that each time I did it, it was easier the next time. (Just for the record, David peaked in grade school.)
· · ·
Not long after I'd conquered my times tables, Steve started to complain about school. The other kids were mean, or they were stupid, or they pushed him during basketball—pretty much the normal complaints of many kids in school. But my brother began losing his unique sense of humor that had developed after the boarding school fiasco. As humor retreated, anger filled its space.
Much of his rising fury was focused on Mom. After all, he thought, it was clearly her fault that he was deaf. “Why me?” he'd sign while yelling at her. “Why can all the rest of your kids hear and talk and not me"? As his anger and complaints increased, he began trying to avoid school.
Steve would come into the kitchen as Mom was rushing to fix us breakfast and make sure we were ready for school. Knowing she was too busy to pay close attention, he'd start signing that he didn't feel well. She fell for it a few times before realizing it was his get-out-of-going-to-school strategy. When Mom began to ignore his complaints and make him go to school, he got more dramatic. He'd come into the kitchen, feign a swoon, and drop to the floor.
Mom would continue whatever she was doing, walking around him or stepping over him without acknowledging him on the floor. The first couple of times he did it, the rest of us thought it was funny and laughed at him. But when she continued to ignore him, he'd jump up and gesticulate furiously, using our family's homemade signing, “Didn't you see what just happened? Didn't you see me faint? Can't you see that I'm sick?” Then we'd sit at the table, trying to be invisible while eating breakfast and hoping his bomb wouldn't go off.
It sounds kind of amusing now, but then there was nothing funny about it. Each time Steve didn't get what he wanted, his outbursts became a little louder and more frightening. He'd get in Mom's face and scream. By the time we moved to our new house at 10 Chapin Street, he'd started threatening my mother physically. He was fifteen and crazy strong.
Nobody could understand why Steve turned from the relatively normal-seeming kid into the raging teenager he'd become. We believed he was an angry deaf kid who'd outgrow it sooner or later. But as time went on, his thwarted attempts to avoid school were not all that enraged him, and we could never be sure what would be the trigger.
Two topics—divorce and communism—could really set my brother off. He was a Catholic true believer, primarily because Catholicism taught him that the disabled would be whole in heaven and he was counting on it. Since Elizabeth Taylor was the divorce queen of the era, and divorce is a mortal sin, few things could throw him into a frenzy like fresh news of her love life. If it wasn't her, then some transgression by the godless Soviets or Cubans would make him fly into a rage.
“Why does he care what Elizabeth Taylor does?” I'd wonder aloud during his outbursts. Or: “Why does he care about the communists?” I started standing behind him and chanting provocative responses at him that he couldn't hear anyway. Perversely, it made me feel better.
Whether it was communism, Elizabeth Taylor, or high school, when Steve blew up, Mom was his target. At least once he tried to strangle her with the telephone cord. Another time, as she was trying to call my father for help, he ripped the telephone off the wall. The chain lock Dad put on their bedroom door didn't provide the refuge Mom sought. Steve simply kicked the door open.
With his new volatility, it was impossible to predict how quickly his rage would pass and he'd be the same old Steve, begging my mother's forgiveness for being a “bad boy.” He'd mouth the words bad boy over and over as he gave the family sign for bad, which was a light slap at his rear end—sort of mimicking a parent spanking a misbehaving child. He was as bewildered by the mood swings as we were.
Steve and I began to have our own run-ins too. Once I reached high school, I started to challenge his outbursts. Making fun of him behind his back wasn't enough anymore. I was carrying around my own pent-up anger and frustration because no one “stood up to him.” I was ready to try.
One time when I was around sixteen, we were both in the living room, and he was sitting where he always did, on an ottoman just inches from the TV screen. We never understood why he sat so close; maybe he was trying to lip-read. More likely it was because he knew it irritated everyone else when he sat in their line of sight like that. Often he'd also turn the sound off. If he couldn't hear the TV, nobody was going to. No fan of the medium, I didn't care about the shows themselves. It was the principle.
That particular day I was ironing behind him. The ironing board didn't live in the TV room, but since Mom always ironed in front of the television, that was where I did it. It was Pavlovian. Every time I set the iron down on the ironing board, he could feel the vibration, and it was getting on his nerves. After a while, each time the iron hit the board, he'd holler and sign at me to stop ironing. Finally, I flipped him a furiously shaking bird and told him to buzz off because I was working and had to get it done.
Within seconds he was standing on the other side of the ironing board, bellowing at me, just inches from my face. I signed for him to back off and threatened to slap his face. Instead of moving away, he furiously egged me on: “Slap me, slap me, slap me.” Suddenly, without thought, I surprised both of us and obliged him. Mom ran into the room just as he wound up and slapped me right back, hard, across the face. I did see stars as I staggered but managed not to fall, and Mom yanked on Steve's arm. The shock of it all snapped him back to normal, and again he was sorry. Bad, bad, bad.
· · ·
My brother had the great misfortune of being born in 1947, when the guiding philosophy in teaching the deaf was to force them into the hearing world. Since they live in a hearing world, the theory went, they must learn how to operate in it. If allowed to live in an insular world of sign language, which so few people spoke, how could they ever function in the “real” world? That meant reading lips, learning how to talk.
Families of the deaf were discouraged from learning sign language, because that would only serve to isolate the deaf family member. We somehow managed with a rudimentary, homemade sign language and signing the alphabet. Mom was the best at it, and Mary Beth and I did okay. My father was always clueless about signing, and Mark and Steve couldn't really communicate with each other before they were adults. In the early years, Janet was so young and afraid that all she wanted to do was hide from Steve.
When I try to think about my brother's world of minimal communication with the most important people in his life, our family, my mind closes down. It loses the ability to tread that path. I can't handle imagining his existence and don't want to try to put myself there now. All that does is stir up memories I don't want to relive, since I can't change a thing.
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