The World Without You by Joshua Henkin Page B

began to blame everything on her hearing loss. She had a slight lisp, which she’d always attributed to an overbite, but now, sitting in the ENT’s office going over the results of her test, she became convinced that her lisp was because she couldn’t hear well. She was listening to the doctor even as she wasn’t listening to him, turning him off as she’d learned to do, and when he asked her if she’d be willing to wear a hearing aid, she said, “Sure,” even as she was thinking, No way I’m wearing a hearing aid, hearing aids are for old people.
    Later, at home, she overheard Clarissa and Lily talking about her.
    “Now are you proud of yourself?” Clarissa said. “Saying, ‘What are you, deaf?’ She’s hard of hearing.”
    “Oh, come on, Clarissa,” Lily said. “She’s faking it.”
    How, Noelle wondered, did Lily know? Although she wasn’t faking it, her hearing loss wasn’t as great as the doctor believed, because when the audiologist tested her she intentionally got some of the answers wrong. It was the same way with school. She wasn’t an A student and would never be one. But if she tried harder she could have gotten B’s. But who wanted B’s? You got B’s and no one noticed you. She would get C’s and D’s. She’d flunk out. She’d get left back.
    Home from the audiologist, she asked her parents to enroll her in a sign-language course. At first they refused, saying she needed to focus on high school, but then they struck a deal with her that if she did better in her classes they’d let her take sign language. And for a time her grades improved.
    Once she saw a group of deaf teenagers on her subway car, and though her signing had gotten better, she still had trouble following them. She watched them, glanced away, then watched them again until, finally, one of them shouted, “Stop staring at us!” her voice as high-pitched as a hyena’s.
    She went to a party sponsored by the New York Association for the Deaf, but not knowing anyone, she stood in the corner sipping a beer, feeling excluded and alone. She would use sex, she thought; she’d make a pass at someone. But she found herself, a hearing person among the deaf, unusually self-conscious in front of the guys, and when she tried to approach one she was convinced all the girls were staring at her, accusing her of trying to steal one of their own when all she wanted was to talk to somebody. Then the dance music came on—everyone danced by feeling the vibrations beneath their feet—but it was so loud she couldn’t tolerate it, and she had to go out onto the balcony. Standing next to the chips and the keg of beer, watching everyone gesture to each other, the beautiful choreography of sign language, she resolved to go back inside and dance, thinking if she exposed her ears to the noise maybe she would really become deaf.
    At home, she tried to facilitate the process. She practiced backflips on her bed, treating the mattress as a trampoline, and she began to do this with Q-tips in her ears, hoping to block out the world of sound, but also thinking what if she slipped and landed on her side, plunging the Q-tip into her ear.
    She learned about someone who had gone deaf at age twelve and could read lips so well you couldn’t tell she was deaf. She was a graduate student at Columbia and taught a section of introductory European history. She could even talk on the telephone; she would be on one receiver and her roommate would be on the other repeating what the person said, and when she spoke there was no lag time. Noelle tracked her down, pretending she was a student studying for her midterm, until, revealing she didn’t know anything about European history, she heard the woman ask who she was, and she panicked and hung up.
    For days after that she felt disgusted by herself. She was always impersonating people: her sisters, her mother, the girls at school. Only in a boy’s arms: that was the one time she felt she belonged, huddled like a