When she was younger, it was easy to be angry about their relationship and all the ways her mother misunderstood her. But recently Charlie had been finding herself seized by moments of empathy for her mother. In flashes, she’d see herself as her mother must have—a tomboy stamping through her mother’s beauty queen aspirations, torn jeans and grass stains and pockets full of rocks that clogged the dryer vent, fighting her on wearing a dress to her grandparents’ house until one of them cried. Her mother was slender, fine-featured, perky whether or not she was actually happy. She had been the kind of girl that was popular at Jefferson, the kind of girl that would pick on Charlie. It occurred to Charlie that before she’d come along, no one had challenged her mother on anything in quite a long time.
One thing they did share was a tendency toward repression, and this was usually the defining feature of their interactions, but it had all come to a head in a good old-fashioned mother-daughter blowout last year, in the mall no less. It was around Christmastime and Charlie couldn’t remember what they’d been bickering about, but the body odor and department store perfume and cinnamon pretzels and the screams radiating out of Santa’s photo station had all served as accelerants, and her mother had blurted out:
You don’t know what it’s like to have made a human who hates you!
Then, when she realized her shouting had drawn attention from other shoppers, she ran across the food court and into the bathroom.
Charlie had been stunned. Her mother never left the house without a thick lacquer of Debutante—hair and teeth brushed and bleached, French manicure, a bag that matched her shoes. Even through years of her parents’ shouting matches, Charlie had never seen her mother lose it in public. Charlie had gone into the bathroom and stood in front of the stall under which she spied her mother’s sensible loafers.
I don’t hate you, she’d said to the door.
But she had no idea what to do after that. They hadn’t been to the mall since.
So when her mother messaged and asked if she wanted to go school shopping, Charlie wished she could say no. She wanted to stay at her father’s and finish sorting her stuff, not trek out to the suburbs to fight with her mother about whether they should enter through the Old Navy or the HomeSense. But now that they no longer lived together Charlie felt guilty—was she even allowed to decline? And also, RVSD had just emailed a list of school and dorm supplies she did not currently own. This was how she found herself standing beside her mother outside a behemoth H&M, her mother sporting obviously false excitement about Charlie’s new school and going on about first impressions. Her mother’s bathroom outburst hadn’t been all wrong: it was difficult to imagine that the two of them had ever been a single entity.
You could reinvent yourself! said her mother.
Charlie considered telling her mother that she had not yet invented herself a first time. She had co-opted a certain style at Jefferson, some amalgam of punk and mod that meant she got to wear a lot of dark clothes and scowl as part of her aesthetic. Her commitment was lukewarm (gone completely if she overslept), but the look did offer a certain visual armor. It was a nod of solidarity to the other rejects, and suggested to the popular kids that perhaps she wasn’t a total weirdo, just into art, or something else they didn’t understand. As a perk it pissed off her mother, rankling her school-days nostalgia for white sneakers and pleated skirts.
Charlie had low hopes for the outing as they ventured into the mall’s main pass, but after a while they struck a rare harmony with one another. At Boscov’s they bought extralong sheets and a laundry bag, a caddy for toiletries, a pair of towels. And while their fashion senses were irreconcilable, her mother was a seasoned professional in the search for jeans that wouldn’t gap at the waist. They even shared a laugh at some point—something about the audacity required to wear a button fly.
Finally fatigued by their looping course and each other’s company, they found themselves at the food court.
Should we get some frozen yogurt? said her mother.
O-k.
Her mother was still for a moment, and Charlie worried she’d angered her. She hadn’t meant to do it. Every night since that first sign class, she’d sat in front of the computer looking up new signs before bed; during the day she wandered around her father’s apartment, fingerspelling the names of random household objects to practice her alphabet. Now, though part of her was proud that she’d successfully encoded these two letters into her muscle memory, she folded her hands tight in her lap.
Show me, said her mother softly.
Charlie modeled the letters, then took her mother’s hand and helped her shape the k.
They got two cones of orange swirl and sat at a table. Charlie’s scar was feeling sore again but she didn’t want to bring it up. Her mother’s face, too, looked pained, like she was trying to work a math problem out in her head.
So, her mother said after a while. Do you just have to spell everything?
No, said Charlie, careful to keep her expression neutral, nonjudgmental. It wasn’t like she had known any better just days before. You really don’t spell much at all.
Then whole words are—
Words and concepts have their own signs. They’re not related to English.
Her mother nodded, looked down at her cone with regret. Charlie realized it would be quite a splurge from her mother’s normally strict diet.
You know, Charlie said after a moment. You can come to ASL class, too, if you want.
Maybe, said her mother, in the way that meant no.
Now Charlie’s cone was growing soggy, and she watched the orange cream drip onto the table. There was something buzzing, horsefly-like in her head, more a feeling than a sound, and she didn’t know if it was her implant or an unkind thought.
spelling doesn’t count
THE ASL MANUAL ALPHABET: FINGERSPELLING DO’S AND DON’TS
Use fingerspelling for proper nouns, like people, places, and brand names borrowed from English or other languages. Many people and places have sign names, too—introduce these words by spelling first, then signing. The signed name can be used thereafter.
Use your dominant hand and try not to bounce. While reading fingerspelling, learn to look at the overall shape of the word instead of individual letters.
Don’t conflate knowledge of the manual alphabet with fluency in ASL. Spelling is a very small part of any ASL interaction, and is used mainly for vocabulary borrowed from elsewhere.
Don’t use fingerspelling as a shortcut back to English syntax or vocabulary. Try thinking of a synonym instead.
DID YOU KNOW? Sign languages aren’t universal. They weren’t “invented” by any one person—instead they grew organically out of Deaf communities. They’re grammatically unrelated to spoken language, so countries that have the same spoken language may have different signed ones. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are very different—they even use different manual alphabets! ASL’s closest linguistic relative is French Sign Language (LSF) because of Deaf teacher and Frenchman Laurent Clerc’s role in founding the American School for the Deaf.
though it always arrived before she was ready, February relished the first day of school. It was an unpopular sentiment, she was reminded when she attended the districtwide meeting. Not at her school—she made sure of that as best she could, though the job was largely self-selecting. Most of her teachers were Deaf and propelled, if not by a love of children, then at least by a devotion to the community. From an administrative standpoint she was lucky; fewer things were more motivating than a fear of one’s own extinction, and Deaf people were already on the verge. It was the loss of a culture war some members of her faculty simply referred to as “The End.”
Nine out of ten deaf kids had hearing parents, and those parents held Deaf fate in their hands—the fate of their own children, of course, and the future of the Deaf community at large. Problem being, most parents understood deafness only as explained to them by medical professionals: as a treachery of their genes, something to be drilled out.