Burn Down the Ground Page 2

  When the bowling was finished, my parents’ night was just getting warmed up. Every night out to a Deaf event ended the same way. My mom and dad stood gathered in a circle of deaf family and friends for what seemed like an eternity while I did absolutely nothing, waiting impatiently to go home. Drink after drink crossed the bar—more Coors Light for Dad, Seven & Sevens for Mom—as Deaf community gossip was dished with a flurry of hands.

  Unlike other kids absorbing adult chatter, my “listening in” required eyes and dedicated attention. I was tired and desperately wanted to go, but getting a deaf person to leave any social engagement was harder than eating spaghetti with a knife.

  Hoping my parents would notice, I made a dramatic production of pushing together three plastic chairs to serve as a makeshift bed. I draped Dad’s denim blazer over me and waited for them to call it a night. I almost wanted to walk up to the alley manager and tell him to flick the lights on and off, the best way of telling a group of deaf people it was closing time. Although I was too big to be carried around like a baby, when my father roused me, I pretended to be fast asleep. He scooped me up and carried me to the car. I buried my face in his neck and breathed in his trademark scent of Jovan Musk and beer and nicotine. My parents, never extravagant with accommodations, unloaded us at a roadside motel for the night.

  The next afternoon, a local news reporter arrived at the bowling alley to cover the final day of the tournament, creating a buzz. A slim strawberry blonde, my mother was easy on the eyes. For the first few years of her life, she could hear without the help of hearing aids. This meant she could speak more clearly than most of her hearing-impaired peers, making her the unofficial ambassador to the hearing world. Naturally, the reporter chose to interview her.

  Mom was scheduled to close the annual ceremony by performing several songs in ASL, accompanied by a live band. More thrillingly, however, the concert was going to be shown on television.

  There weren’t many occasions for Mom to get gussied up, so when the opportunity presented itself she went full glitz. Seeing her leave the motel room dressed in three-inch heels and a shiny, short-sleeved maroon wrap dress that clung to her tan skin and showcased her enormous breasts, you’d have thought she was headed to New York’s Studio 54 instead of a run-down bowling alley. At thirty-one, she was in the prime of her life and the center of attention. She loved every minute of it.

  The reporter chatted with my mother, who was standing near the band, two guitarists and a drummer, who were setting up their instruments at the far end of the establishment. The cameraman turned on the bright spotlight and with a quick toss of her head and flash of a smile, Mom was “on.” Before the reporter could even ask a question, Mom declared, “We are deaf not dumb.”

  To this day, the phrase “deaf and dumb” is the most offensive insult to a deaf person. Mom wanted to make it clear that just because a person couldn’t hear didn’t mean they lacked intelligence.

  I stood directly behind the cameraman and admired how proudly she stood, with both shoulders back. Even now, as a woman in her sixties, she carries herself with the same poise and grace at a backyard barbecue as at a wedding. She gestured to a table of merchandise like a TV game show model presenting an item up for bid. The table had items available for purchase, assorted T-shirts and handcrafted buttons proclaiming, “Deaf and dumb SMART.” They rested alongside an abundance of crocheted knickknacks, jewelry, and assorted keepsakes decorated with hands in the shape of the ASL sign for “I love you.”

  The reporter nodded politely. “You are performing a concert tonight. How can deaf people enjoy music?”

  “Even though we can’t hear, we can feel the vibration.” She simultaneously signed as she spoke. “We dance to the beat of our own drummer.” She flashed a wide smile that revealed two rows of straight, white teeth, perfect except for a chip in the front from a childhood spill on a tricycle.

  “Deaf people enjoy music. They just don’t hear the lyrics,” Mom explained. That’s where she came in.

  My mother loved music and incorporated it into every aspect of her life. Deafness ran in her family. She was born to two profoundly deaf parents, and had a younger deaf sister named Carly and a few deaf aunts and uncles. By having some hearing ability, it was as if she were determined to hear enough music for all of them and listened to it with a junkie’s fervor. Anything would do. Hard-rocking Led Zeppelin played alongside the kooky, light pop of Captain & Tennille.

  Mom collected hundreds of vinyl records. She also subscribed to Billboard’s Hot 100 and music magazines that published lyrics so she could understand the words. Every Sunday afternoon, she piled a thick stack of 45s onto the hi-fi console turntable, the most impressive piece of furniture we ever owned, cranked the volume, and cleaned house while singing to her favorite songs. Mom couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But it didn’t matter: Our weekend ritual was so much fun with Mom vacuuming and David and me sharing the dusting duties.

  I plopped down cross-legged, front row and center, in the crowd that formed in a semicircle around Mom and the band. I slapped my hand over my puffed-up chest as they began to play the national anthem.

  I mouthed along with her signing as the song swelled to its triumphant end, majestically demonstrated by Mom’s sweeping movements, “… and the home … of the … BRAVE!” I applauded wildly while the Deaf showed their approval by raising their arms and wiggling their fingers as if they were tickling God’s belly. No one could sign a song in ASL like Mom could.

  Mom accepted the praise with a curtsy and thank-you before she continued. “This next song is my favorite. It’s called ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac.” The music started and stirred within her. She grooved in place to the opening chords.

  Now here you go again,

  You say you want your freedom …

  Mom was flushed from the heat of the spotlight, the thrill of performing, and the few cocktails she’d been drinking. Dad leaned against a wall in the back of the crowd, sipping a fresh Coors Light. He smiled with a slight smirk as his wife relished the limelight. I shared his thought: She was beautiful.

  From where I sat, my mother was the envy of anyone in that stale Tulsa bowling alley. But the truth was, this trip to Oklahoma should have been our last as a family. Dad had cheated on Mom again—this time on New Year’s Eve—and pretty much everyone there knew it except for David and me. Fed up with his philandering, Mom was leaving him. She’d hastily packed everything we owned into a rented storage space and in the days before we set off for Tulsa, she had checked us into an apartment in the bad part of Houston that charged by the week.

  David and I didn’t know the purpose of our trip to Tulsa. We were unaware that Mom was going to break the news to her parents about her plans to divorce Dad. By participating in the bowling tournament, she was also fulfilling her obligations to the Deaf community. She was the reigning women’s singles champion, after all.

  My father was just along for the ride to see his friends and keep up appearances for Mom, though he had a hard time staying on the straight and narrow. He couldn’t help but party hard and flirt, assuring anyone who questioned his antics that he was going to be single soon.

  “Christy left me,” he told one woman. “She wants a divorce,” he told another. He wasn’t lying, but his comments resulted in something Dad hadn’t anticipated. He had set the rumor mill swirling and several women approached Mom with the same blunt question: “Are you and Ted getting a divorce?” One thing Mom passed down to me was her disdain for the malicious gossip that seemed to infect their circle of friends in the Deaf community, as if there was some sort of perverse satisfaction in circulating the misery of another. Being married to my father made her hypersensitive to the damage that whispers could cause.

  “Who told you that?” Mom defiantly responded.

  “Ted,” they answered.

  She confronted Dad with the gossip. “Why did they ask me that?”

  “They’re jealous of you,” he signed. “They don’t wan
t to see us together.”

  “But they said you told them I left you.”

  “No! They lie. They’re trying to break us up and cause problems.” My father could spin shit into gold. Once he told a lie, he committed to it, and with each retelling it became his truth. He grabbed Mom by her waist and smothered her neck and cheeks with kisses, smiling as he cooed in his softest voice, “I luh yooo, Chrisseee. I luh yooo.” There was his dimple again.

  Some kids might have been embarrassed at seeing their parents be affectionate, but I never was. I loved watching them kiss and cuddle. I was too young to understand my father’s motives and see that he was playing upon Mom’s weakness: her determination to appear strong, in control, and poised like the woman her fans adored. That night, her pride got in the way—she knew he was a cheater, but by staying with him she could prove the nay-saying gossips wrong. So she took him back, on one condition.

  MONTGOMERY HILLBILLIES

  Mom pointed to a red star she’d drawn on our tattered Texas road atlas and said, “That’s where we’re moving.” It was nowhere near the spiderweb-like clusters of routes and inter-states. Boars Head, the spot where we were set to live, wasn’t even on the map.

  “We’re gonna start a whole new life,” she said. “It’ll be like a long camping trip.” We had just returned home from the bowling tournament when Mom delivered her sales pitch. She made the move from our industrial neighborhood in the outskirts of Houston to the wild woods of Montgomery sound like an adventure from Little House on the Prairie. She left out the part about my father cheating on her again. For Dad, moving to the woods was meant to be his penance and keep him far away from smoky nightclubs and fast women.

  If we had owned a doghouse, my father would have been in it. We weren’t rich, so buying Mom’s affection with fancy jewelry was out of the question. Instead, Dad would restore his marriage and his wife’s faith by building her the home she dreamed of on this little patch of land in the woods. Hard labor was to be my father’s sentence. Not his first and, as it turned out, not his last.

  David and I knew the spot. We’d been out there a handful of times to scope out the heavily wooded property that Dad had bought a year earlier on a whim after a long drive in the country with a friend.

  My father was raised on a farm in Oklahoma and owning a piece of nature was a lifelong dream of his. The five and a half acres didn’t cost much and Mom agreed it was a good investment. During the good times, they both liked to talk about building a two-story dream home where they could enjoy their retirement.

  Dad was a construction worker during the height of the population explosion in Texas in the late 1970s, when people flocked to Houston to find work in the booming oil industry. He worked on shopping malls and skyscrapers, impressing everyone with his natural talent. His handiwork decorated the homes of our extended family—dressers, cabinets, you name it. During a visit to one relative, Mom pointed out a wooden sideboard filled with china and said, “Your daddy made that.”

  Our family’s furniture was so beautiful that I couldn’t imagine my father crafting it with his own hands. As a young boy, he built a rabbit hutch from scratch and showed it to his father, who replied, “Where did you buy that thing?”

  Conveniently, he didn’t need to hear to work in construction; when jackhammers and power saws are in action, everyone is deaf. My father was the best of the best, so he was made a foreman on many sites, put in charge of his hearing colleagues. His skills were in constant demand in Houston’s expansion, although he didn’t earn enough money to allow my mother to stay home and raise her kids.

  Mom had been working on an assembly line since graduating from high school and was highly skilled at putting together intricate electronic panels and devices. She had wanted to attend Gallaudet University, the nation’s largest college for the Deaf, located in Washington, D.C., but her father convinced her that a higher education wasn’t necessary. He thought she was better off getting married and staying close to home. She was the only one in her immediate family with any kind of hearing ability. Therefore, she was their lifeline to the hearing world.

  Before we moved to Houston, we had lived across the street from my mother’s parents in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mom had a full-time job at Century Electronics when my brother was born in 1967, so my grandmother became his primary caregiver. She was almost as much of a mother to him as Mom was. She and my brother rarely left the house, and because she wasn’t able to communicate orally with him, David learned to speak at a slightly slower pace than the other kids. Although she could say his name and make noise to get his attention, she relied on ASL to interact with him.

  When I was born on June 22, 1971, Mom quit work to stay home and raise us. My mother and grandmother talked, sang, and read books to me in both spoken English and ASL.

  As a child with deaf parents, commonly referred to in the Deaf community as Children of Deaf Adults (CODA), I am frequently asked, “How did you learn to talk?” The query is often delivered with astonishment, as if having deaf parents should have shriveled my vocal cords. I learned to speak orally the way any hearing child does: by listening to the world around me. I had Mom, television, music, neighbors, and people in stores. Other deaf parents, worried that their hearing children wouldn’t learn to speak as well as their peers, would expose them to media to the point of overstimulation. Keith Wann, a popular CODA comedian, tells an anecdote of how his deaf mother required him to listen to the radio, not realizing the only sound being emitted was static.

  My first ASL word was “Daddy,” signed at five months old. Days later, I spoke the word “Mama.” By eighteen months old, I was using ASL and could speak English better than other toddlers my age. I liked to entertain my father by performing my favorite nursery rhymes in both sign language and song. Dad even built a “stage” for me around our mod red freestanding fireplace. I’d sing into my mother’s hairbrush as if it were a microphone and put on a show. “Watch me, Daddy, I’m going to sing for you,” I would sign. “I’m going to be a movie star when I grow up.”

  Dad would grin and sign, “Okay, I’m watching,” then made a big production of putting away the paper so I knew he was obeying me.

  Mom didn’t return to work until I entered kindergarten. I could never tell if she was unhappy with her decision to forgo college. She seemed to like her factory job and was always getting promotions. When we moved to Boars Head, she quit her job at Welex Jet Services because it would be too far to travel to, but my father planned to keep working and commute the two hours each way to and from Houston five days a week from our land on Boars Head. But moving out there with only an uninhabitable cabin and a ramshackle outhouse seemed to be ill advised, and I wasn’t sure how this plan would work. My only experience “camping” was draping sheets over a clothesline in the backyard and having Kool-Aid and popcorn delivered by Mom. However, the idea of living without modern conveniences, like Laura Ingalls, sounded thrilling to a seven-year-old girl like me. This camping trip included kerosene lanterns and my own nylon sleeping bag, which reversed to blue or red depending on which way I zipped it. I practiced rolling and unrolling, zipping and unzipping, and sleeping in it on the floor.

  With only the bare necessities piled in the back of our baby blue 1966 Chevrolet pickup, we reinvented ourselves as modern-day pioneers.

  David and I rode in the bed of the Chevy, sitting on our own wheel wells as we sped north on Interstate 45 toward Montgomery. Pamie, our one-year-old Chihuahua mix, wasn’t as lucky; she had to ride in the cab on Mom’s lap.

  Situated sixty-five miles northwest of Houston on the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest, Montgomery began as an Indian trading post in 1826, making it the third-oldest settlement in Texas. It is considered the official birthplace of the Lone Star flag because the man credited with its design, Charles B. Stewart, was a resident. The fact is debatable, but the city of Montgomery still holds it as its claim to fame.

  The city officially measured one square mile, with a population
just shy of 250 people, though outlying communities boosted that tally. The center of town consisted of a single intersection: a four-way stop that led to a post office depot, convenience store, gas station, or cemetery depending on which way you turned.

  The longer we drove, the less inhabited things got. Shopping centers dwindled down to roadside markets that soon disappeared altogether. The roads got narrower and bumpier as we rumbled by pastures of grazing cattle and fields of bluebonnets until we were so deep in the middle of nowhere there were no traffic signs, fire hydrants, streetlights … nothing.

  While we’d moved a number of times during my seven years, my life to date had been spent in cities where houses were in subdivisions and convenience stores occupied every corner. I was a typical latchkey kid. Why would parents bother paying for a babysitter when they could tie a key around their kids’ necks with a piece of yarn and let them watch cartoons for an hour or two until they got home from work?

  As I sat in the back of the Chevy watching civilization vanish, I began to worry. I thought of the 7-Eleven where my friend stole wax candy while I served as a decoy. Where will I get candy now? I had a slew of friends in Houston, so many they couldn’t all fit into our dining room during my last birthday party. Montgomery was so deserted I couldn’t imagine humans lived there, much less kids.

  I was jerked out of my troublesome thoughts when a tree limb scraped the roof of the Chevy. David and I held on tight to the truck’s metal edges, made hot by the Texas sun, ducking and dodging to avoid getting knocked over the side. Frightened, I waved in the rearview mirror to get my father’s attention and signed, “Daddy! Slow down!” I threw myself around to show him how I was being tossed like a rag doll. He broke into a big smile, then pumped the brake and jerked the wheel, causing us to slide like we were riding the Scrambler at a carnival.