I’m thinking it would behoove me to learn some phrases in American Sign Language. Not because I’m deaf in one ear or because I’ve forgotten what little I learned when I was younger and I did a brief stint in speech therapy, but because I need something to say to strangers who try to talk to me but don’t pick up on nonverbal cues like silence and avoiding eye contact and walking away to convey my aversion to their voices.
A long time ago, we used to joke, “No hablo ingles!” as the response we’d use to get out of talking to someone, so I guess I could memorize that phrase in a handful of languages and drop them at random. But in this city, what are the chances that the person I’m trying to put off would speak my ‘other’ language? Good. The chances are good. ASL would be less chancy because it’s just not that common outside of the non-hearing world. Also, it freaks people out. I’ve seen it. Whenever people start signing to each other in a public place, everyone notices and everyone, no matter what language they speak, is surprised.
A smidge of ASL would have been very useful on my way home from work last night. I was reading Maus. I sensed someone looking at me and then this guy sort of oozed into my peripheral vision and across the space between us until he was looking over my shoulder at Vladek the mouse. He said into my left ear, “are you actually reading that or are you just putting up the facade?”
Only, he pronounced it “fack-ade.”
As much as I wanted to say, “Nope, I’m not really reading this, you saw right through my fack-ade,” signing something in ASL would have gotten rid of him a whole lot faster, no matter what I said.
Later, on the Metro-North train, I turned on my laptop and it hummed its single note. The woman next to me paused in conversation on her cell phone, leaned over my left shoulder to say, “could you put that thing on mute or something?” and proceeded with her chatter.
Yeah, I wanted to sign something to her, and it wasn’t “I’m deaf.”
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