He hadn’t noticed the grey skies when he’d gone in but when he came out it was pouring. The car remote stopped working in front of the meter that Ben had overpaid - only needing a nickel of time, only having quarters. Stuck outside of the truck Ben looked at the umbrella behind the seat. After a minute fumbling with the grocery bags in his hands and the key in the lock he got in his truck. He awkwardly lifted the bags over his lap and under the steering wheel, dropping them onto the floorboard next to him. He tried not to let water drip from the plastic bags onto his textbooks in the passenger seat. Ben called his wife, saying he was just checking in, but with little explanation aside from his tone, she could tell he was soaked.
“Be careful on the roads,” she said, “and put your books in a grocery bag before you go in.” She was protective of him in these ways. Since they’d had their daughter a few years ago she would slip sometimes, talking to him the same way she lectured her daughter. Lessons on how to do mundane things better. Ben turned on the wipers and put his hands at ten and two, driving off carefully for her.
His class was held in the teacher’s conference room of the school for the deaf. Most of Ben’s classmates were parents too, but a few were younger, studying for their jobs. Everyone needed to be there. The teacher gave handouts on green or blue paper, always words, never diagrams. Ben practiced finger-spelling large sentences from the latest handout. His fingers were thick and stubby, perfect for making a fist but proving difficult for the precise movements of making fingers into letters and words.
That night the teacher taught fallbacks. What to do if you didn’t understand, how to slow someone down, and what to do with limited vocabulary. The vocabulary was gained slowly but would come. It was the concepts that the teacher focused on - ordering of words, a new syntax, the combinations changing the meaning.
It was the idea of tone that Ben hadn’t expected when he started. The sound the hands make moving together, a facial expression makes the meaning of the same movement different, a question mark indicated by a change in the shape of your face. There was pace and attitude that Ben tried to communicate to his hands. His hands speaking their own dialect. His hands with their own short staccato movements, far from the fluidity he was attempting.
That night was the third week of his course and the night of the high school dance. At the class break on the way to the vending machines Ben was surprised to hear music. He had assumed without thinking that the deaf world was a silent one. The music was loud enough for the kids to feel the beat through the floor, using different parts of their bodies as entry points for the sound waves. He focused on two kids dancing and wondered why the chaperones hadn’t seen them dancing a little close to each other and to the speaker. He didn’t think that they were old enough to be tangled up like that. Hand to hip, hip to hand, hand to shoulder, shoulder to hand, hand to hip, hip to hand, hand to speaker, music through hand. Ben was happy to have seen this; now he wouldn’t be surprised in sixteen years when he would chaperone his daughter’s high school dance. Also he would remember to invest in quality earplugs.
Ben walked back down the hall for the second half of class. Not speaking until he was almost two Ben had always preferred to stay silent. Never having been comfortable in his first language, learning to sign had seemed to him like an easy pursuit. But in class Ben struggled to put sentences together, not being allowed to speak with anything other than motions. Later a question came up - because everyone had been holding umbrellas when they came in - of what to do with one hand full, Ben couldn’t understand the half answer given. It all seemed to him to be more questions than things understood.
When Ben walked in the door he threw the grocery bags on the counter to make his arms available for his little girl running towards him. His wife had just given her a bath so the smell of baby shampoo was fresh. Ben carried his daughter to bed, his arms full of her. She was like this every night, fitting the top of her head into his neck. She used her left hand to push down the two center fingers on her right hand to sign I love you. Ben put her in her bed and put his two center fingers down signing I love youback. Then he kissed her, turned on the nightlight, and turned out the big light.
When he came back to the kitchen he found his wife looking through the bags.
“Where’s the laundry soap?”
He needed his clothes cleaned for work the next day. The grease from his fingers had rubbed into them throughout the day and the lingering rainwater was still in the seams. So with a barely audible sigh she led him to the bathroom. He watched as she washed the clothes with baby shampoo in the sink. He liked watching her hands moving in the suds so quickly, working the soap in and then rinsing it out.
His wife’s hands were slender and elastic, a perfect contrast to his when they held hands. They had taken their first course together. She understood, that was all she needed and he would need to keep attending classes. When it was time to sign up again she filled out the forms for him. She had tried not to be nagging or demanding – two things she hated but found necessary sometimes and that he had always kept it from reaching audibility. They both knew she was just trying to be supportive. She handed the clothes to him to hang up in the shower and dried off her hands.
In bed that night Ben and his wife talked about the day for a few minutes and also about the weather without needing to look at each other. She picked up a new novel from her side table. Ben flipped through the TV channels. Eventually she fell into reading and his mind went back to the question from class - how to create meaning with one hand behind your back. It was hard enough without problems like this. He was already afraid that he wouldn’t be able to communicate with his daughter. The class was supposed to calm his nerves but it seemed to make them worse sometimes.
He flipped through the circuit of channels a third time in search of something he could take in mindlessly. He found a rerun of a show he’d watched afternoons doing his homework in middle school. As he thumbed the rubber buttons of the remote Ben’s thoughts drifted to his childhood. The things he could bring back to have again with his daughter; pizza parties, trips to the zoo, and the itsy bitsy spider.
Ben remembered it better than any of the other kindergarten games and thought the interlacing of fingers was an amazing thing to teach a child. The rhyme was something Ben remembered singing on car trips or whenever an adult wanted to settle him down. He had had to stick out his tongue to get it when he was little. It had been a great accomplishment for him to put thumb to pointer, pointer to thumb, and twist. Like skipping. Step, hop, step, hop. Twisting his fingers and singing the song, standing on one foot and then hopping before stepping onto the other and hopping again. The trick was in the coordination of the hand movements matching the song lyrics and not combining the skip into a jump from one foot to the other.
Ben looked down at his hands grown large and callused from work and age. He wouldn’t be able to sign the itsy bitsy spider song – the hand movements taking up the space needed for the lyrics. His hands taken up with the movement, needing the space for explanation. He turned off the TV and the light, saying goodnight to his wife. She had already put her book down but took a deep breath when he said I love youand interlaced her legs between his in the form of a reply. Knee to thigh, thigh to thigh, ankle to calf.
That night was slowly turning into morning but his thoughts kept him up. He could never fall asleep on nights after the class with the stirred up worries of a parent exasperated by deficiency. Lying in the dark Ben interlaced his hands touching pointer to thumb, thumb to pointer. It reminded him that his body wasn’t symmetrical, forcing one of his fingers to shift. But the question of how to explain the rhyme to his little girl when his hands were full with the motions, thumb to pointer, pointer to thumb, was just another question he couldn’t grasp. He felt like he started as a parent, a mile behind, like he had more to learn than anyone. His daughter would be fine, would learn fast, and would not notice the difference. His wife, twisted up in bed next to him, could already sign clearly, talking to other moms, making play dates. This was his struggle; all the questions he couldn’t answer on top of the questions he couldn’t communicate.
Lying awake in bed Ben practiced new signs from class and tossed trying to find a way to sleep. Not being able to lay just right he signed to one hundred in place of counting sheep. His hands twisted until three fingers touched thumb to pointer, thumb to pinkie, pinkie to pointer, left and right intertwined. The center two fingers on each hand pushed down. Pointer to thumb, pinkie to thumb, pointer to pinkie; two I love you’sintertwined.
Maybe someday, Ben thought, this sign he’d made-up lying there in bed could be his improvised explanation to his daughter of what it meant to make love. Two hands, two bodies twisted up in I love you. This discovery was enough to let him fall asleep that night. One thing he’d have ready for her, when she woke-up in sixteen years for her high school dance.