Writings / Fiction: Dolly Reisman

Summer Lessons

I’m stuck inside with my mother and my sister. We’re at the back of the cottage in a small stifling south facing room with the sun streaming in. The window is wide open, the air stale and still. My sister sits in front of my mother with big earphones on her head, moving her mouth in unusual exaggerated ways as she tries to say door or cat or any other word my mother says. But all that comes out of my sister’s mouth is a stupid sounding grunt.

First, second, third. My brothers are at the lake calling out their waterskiing order.

Mom, I say, I want to go skiing too.

My mother glares at me and says, after the lesson.

My sister Sarah is deaf and my mother is teaching her how to speak. My job is to sit in the room while my mother tries to get a normal sound out of my sister so that she, my mother, can say Sarah’s talking. This is my sister’s daily lesson, and of the five other of us kids, Sarah always wants me to sit in, as if my presence makes her incarceration in this hot haze more palatable.

I’m gonna grow up to hate her, I tell my mother all the time.

Mostly my mother doesn’t respond, but then sometimes she’ll say, if you hate her, then you hate me.

I like you, I say, it’s her that I hate.

Sarah wasn’t born deaf; at least we don’t think so. Joseph our housekeeper discovered her flaw. One weekend morning when Sarah was about one, she was waddling in her too big diapers towards my dad who was shaving – running his razor helter-skelter through the pristine white shaving foam – when out of the corner of his eye he saw Sarah coming towards him.

Joseph was behind her.

Sarah, he said.

No response.

Sarah, he called again, this time louder.

Still, no response.

That was when we knew.

That was when everything changed.

Sarah sits in the hot room as sweat pours off her. She’s big, fat; uses her mouth to eat and not speak. I want to jump in the water.

Mom, I say, it’s hot.

Not much longer, she says.

Sarah, I say.

Nothing.

I touch her arm. Sarah.

She turns and looks at me. Her eyes scan my face and land on my mouth. Hurry up. Speak. Then we can go swimming. I exaggerate each word and move my arms as if they’re plunging into the water, hoping she’ll understand, but I have no idea what goes on inside that brain of hers. At times I wonder if she even has a brain.

After the doctors saw my sister and gave her a formal diagnosis, my mother sat in the sunroom staring out the window overlooking the ravine. It was winter. The trees were bent with the weight of snow. Outside looked peaceful and magical. And, like all places covered in snow, it had the appearance of great silence. My mother sat in that room for what seemed like an eternity. She said nothing. She spent her days staring out into the ravine and its wilderness, watching the occasional animal looking for scraps of food scurry by. I was forbidden to disturb her, so I’d stand at the threshold into the room and watch her, hoping she’d look my way and glimpse me, but she never did.

After a week or so my mother snapped out of her depression and returned to the family. But now she was on a mission. A mission to make Sarah as normal as everyone else. She was going to get Sarah to talk.

My mother holds up a picture of a dog and covers her mouth so Sarah can’t read her lips. She speaks into a small microphone and says DOG. She says it three times, then pauses and waits. My sister’s face is blank. She looks at the picture and looks at my mother who once again repeats, DOG.

I hear the revving of the motorboat and imagine each skier zipping up their life jacket, sliding their skis into the water to wet the rubber boot so their feet slip easily in.

The grass behind the cottage is turning brown; it’s been a hot summer. The shadows are short and I know it’s noon. If I don’t get out of the room soon, I might not get my chance to try and drop a ski today.

Sarah started regular school this year. On her first day kids pointed at her like she was some kind of freak. They called her fatso, stupid and retarded. I walk her to school each morning. The two of us strolling along – me always ten feet in front. The street is curiously empty as if every parent has called their children inside, called them in to come away from the danger of Sarah, as if whatever she had was catchy, as if polio was still a threat.

At school, Sarah stands in the corner watching me play with my friends. She has none. She stands off to the side watching the goings on, oblivious to the names and the stares from the other kids. Sometimes she grunts and laughs and I cringe at the sound that shames me.

My mother has the same picture of the same dog in front of her.

What does the dog say, Sarah? she asks.

Bow, wow. My mother answers her own question.

Bow, wow, she says again standing up and moving rhythmically, up on her toes for BOW, down with bent knees for WOW.

Sarah stands and mimics the moves. She goes up on her toes and loses her balance. She tries again. Her mouth is open until she sees that my mother’s is closed for the explosive sound of the B. Sarah closes her mouth, pulls her lips in and presses them together and as she rises up tall, an explosion of sound comes out of her mouth. It is a beginning.

Sarah and I run outside, we are free. We head for the water. Sarah grabs a big board and with a combination of grunts and groans insists my brothers tie it up to the boat, and they do. Then she insists that I partner with her. We put on our life jackets, slip off the dock and we’re bobbing up and down in the deep end, our jackets almost strangling us. The motor churns and roars. The boat comes around, the surfboard trailing behind it. We grab the board and take our positions: Sarah in front, me in back. We struggle to keep the tip of the board up, and I yell, hit it.

The boat drags us through the water – that high pitched screech of the motor muffled by the water – until it picks up enough speed and we skim along the lake top. We haul ourselves up on the board and turn around so we are riding backwards. We thumbs up the driver and wave our arms in a big circle, signaling him to turn, and tilt our bodies in the same direction, gliding over the wake, then quickly shift our bodies in the opposite direction and skim like a skipped stone across water, bouncing and laughing until our inevitable fall.

The two of us fly through the air, two birds playing on the wind stream squealing. Free.