my Grampa Ralph. He was strong, confident, and didn't suffer fools lightly. He laughed as easily and quickly as he angered. Once the anger passed, also quickly, he didn't think about it again.
I have Ralph's jaw and my dad's blue eyes. I didn't understand how much I identify with my father's lifelong concern for the everyman. Part of that is what helped shape me into the grassroots activist that I am today. That, and trying to protect my brother.
CHAPTER TWO
A Special Place in Hell
When they took increasing pleasure in harassing Steve, I became certain Billy and Bobby, the boys who lived next door, merited a special place in hell. Certainly their souls must be dark if they could act like that toward my handicapped brother. He hadn't chosen to be deaf. He couldn't help it if he couldn't talk. The brothers morphed from simply irritating next-door neighbors into nasty nemeses we'd escape only with our move away from Poultney.
Billy and Bobby etched themselves into my memory on a day that started out innocuously enough when Steve and I set out for a bike ride. We pedaled away from our house on Norton Avenue toward the hill at the end of the street, which seemed immense at the time. There, we turned left at the corner where our cousins lived and continued around the block and back to the front of the house. One spin around that small block was never enough, but we weren't allowed to venture farther into the wild reaches of Poultney; my mom could conjure up too many potentially dangerous scenarios. So we often went round and round the block until we got dizzy.
That afternoon, as we rounded the corner for the third or fourth time and rode along the side of the hill, Billy and Bobby came charging at us from behind thick bushes. Running along the hillside above us, they rained down stones and empty tin cans on us. We were either too shocked or too stupid to swerve out of their range before a can caught Steve in the head, cutting a long gash in his scalp. Yelping as blood poured down his face, he managed a shaky U-turn and pedaled home as fast as he could, certain I was right behind him.
If he'd looked back, he'd have seen my bike in the middle of the street, its front wheel spinning madly. Instead of my mousy self standing mutely by, shaking in my sneakers while they picked on my brother, righteous indignation overpowered my fear and I went after them, screaming like a banshee. I wanted to catch them and beat the crap out of them and make them pay for hurting Steve.
It didn't occur to me at the moment I'd be the one who'd likely get the beating, but that was irrelevant anyway. Before I even reached the ambush site, they were crowing at me from the top of the hill. Panting, bathed in tears of frustrated impotence, I watched them disappear. As their voices faded away, I picked up my bike and, exhausted and deflated, pushed it home.
Mom was standing in the front yard hugging Steve tight, pressing a towel to his head. She was looking at me as if some other kid had taken over my body. When I was young I never raised my voice. Mom swears that when I was a baby, I almost never cried. I was such a good girl growing up that I drove rebellious Mary Beth mad. She saw me as the boring, brownnosing, goody-two-shoes of the family. But I remember myself that day as a girl transformed.
Once we'd left Poultney, the bullies next door became just a very unpleasant memory, less and less important with time and distance. Maybe my feeble attempt to defend my brother had been a once-only, out-of-body sort of episode, and now that he was safe and secure I'd never have to worry about coming out of my quiet shell again.
· · ·
I'd just begun second grade when our Poultney bubble burst. Dad sold the grocery store and our house, and right before my seventh birthday, we'd be moving to Brattleboro, Vermont. By Poultney standards, Brattleboro, ten times its size with a population of about twelve thousand, was a megalopolis. At least my mother viewed it that way. She also acted like we were moving to the ends of the earth rather than ninety miles southeast of Poultney.
None of us wanted to move, but Steve needed to go to school, and the Austine School for the Deaf, in Brattleboro, was the only one my parents could find where he could be a day student. Most schools for the deaf at the time required students to live at the school. My family had already suffered through one such fiasco with Steve, and Mom and Dad weren't about to make him or any of us relive the experience.
Just before Steve turned six, they'd started looking for schools for him. They'd decided against the Austine School at the time. Back then, it consisted of one ancient building that looked like something out of Dickens, and its headmaster, nearly as old, didn't exude any apparent love for his calling. With few options, my parents finally settled on a boarding school in Connecticut.
The first time they dropped him off at that school, Steve broke loose from the people holding his hands and tried to claw his way over its eight-foot-high chain-link fence. That unsuccessful attempt to get back to my parents as they slowly drove away marked the beginning of the complete disaster that the boarding school experience was, not only for my brother but also for the rest of us.
As Mom's endless novenas to Saint Jude made their way toward the heavens, Steve showed no signs of settling in. In their equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, my parents decided that every Friday they'd drive the pre-interstate, two-lane roads to Connecticut to see him. Sometimes they'd stay there, and other times they'd bring him home for the weekend. Either way, I felt unsettled by the constant comings and goings of my always-tense parents. It's probably then that Mary Beth started sucking the middle fingers of her left hand while pulling out her already sparse hair with the right. Even with the end of those torturous trips, she didn't spare her hair.
Steve was wasting away. At school he'd barely eat, and everyone was concerned about his deteriorating health. Already a slight kid, he began to look ever more waiflike. He became extremely pale and totally passive. My brother no longer had the energy or spirit to fight, a result of the medications he'd been prescribed to calm him enough to adjust to the school.
Mom's novenas continued wafting upward, but apparently no one heard them. The intolerable situation came to an end when everyone agreed it was in Steve's best interests that he return home. He'd not even made it to Christmas vacation. Boarding school was not his solution.
Once he knew he was home to stay and the meds washed out of his system, my brother was a boy transformed. I have a black-and-white studio photograph of him, Mary Beth, and me taken not long after the Connecticut misadventure. My sister looks under two, I'd have been three, and Steve six; it must have proved too much of an effort to try to include infant Mark in the shot. Actually we have no pictures of Mark until the requisite grade-school photographs.
Wearing a white shirt with a bow tie, Steve shines handsomely in the picture, and his huge smile reveals no vestiges of the Connecticut nightmare. Mary Beth looks out, pathetically appealing with her slightly crossed eye and ragged hair. She was born anxious, and her anxiety had only been exacerbated with the dramas of Steve's time away at school. As a kid she was string-bean skinny. I, on the other hand, was born round and topped with a bald pumpkin head like Charlie Brown's. I also had an eye that moved about on its own terms. I sucked my thumb until I was nine, but kept my hands out of my hair. This was a good thing, because I've never had much.
By the time this photo of the three of us was taken, Mom either hadn't discovered home permanents or had decided I wasn't old enough to have one yet, because my white-blond hair is in a little flip. She'd already started attacking my bangs, however. In that picture I have raggedy bangs chopped so short that they almost didn't exist. But at least to my own eyes, the bangs and my new horn-rimmed glasses in no way diminish my round cuteness.
With Steve's return home and familial harmony restored for the time being, my parents found a tutor for him who used mailorder guides to teach the deaf at home. By the end of three years, she'd reached the limits of what she could teach him. Mom and Dad had to renew the search for a school
