A lip reader copes with a masked world
When my mammogram was done, the technician looked at me and smiled. “Nice boots,” she said.
Which was a nice thing to say. Except that because I am hearing-impaired, I didn’t think she said “boots.” Instead, I was certain she said a different word, something that seemed a little more specific to the procedure she had just completed.
I blushed. This examination had just become much more intimate than I expected. “Thank you,” I said, uncertainly.
“Where did you get them?” she asked.
The conversation appeared to be getting stranger. For a long moment I considered the possible answers to this question. Then the penny dropped, and my mouth dropped open. “Oh my god,” I said. “You said, ‘boots.’ I thought you said something else.”
She looked confused. “What word did you think I ….” Then her mouth dropped open too. And we both screamed.
Once, I was a brash and confident person, a fountain of energy, a woman who, by any measure, was absolutely full of beans. Since I lost much of my hearing several years ago, though, I’ve become a lot shyer, a little more melancholy, always a little bit afraid that I’m missing out or misunderstanding whatever it is that’s going on.
Now, in the age of COVID-19, with so many people wearing masks, life has gotten even harder.
I rely on visual clues to get by — reading lips and getting cues from people’s facial expressions. These, alas, are the very things that masks obscure.
I’d much rather live in a world where people are wearing masks than one in which people go without them. On the internet, you can learn how to make a deaf-friendly face mask with a clear plastic insert over the mouth — although, as the novelist Sara Novic wrote in The Washington Post last week, they aren’t a perfect solution, and not only because they can fog up.
The real problem is that it’s hearing people who need to wear them if the goal is to make the lives of people like me easier. And if our collective experience of mask-wearing has taught us anything so far, it’s that asking people to make a sacrifice to help others has not exactly emerged as Americans’ strong suit.
When you refuse to wear a mask, you’re sending me a message as clear as anything in sign language. You’re telling me that you care more about being comfortable than you do about keeping other people alive — let alone going the extra mile to ensure that they’re alive — and — can understand you.
Back in April, the president called masks “voluntary” and added, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” Although he finally wore a mask in public during a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center this month, his attitude — prepare yourself for a shock — continued to be lackadaisical. “I’ve never been against masks,” he said, “but I do believe they have a time and a place.”
This is a president who makes judgments about the world based on superficial appearances. Back in April he said: “I don’t know, somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
Translation: He wasn’t going to wear a mask because he was afraid it would look funny. And now, we’re supposed to believe he’s a convert — even though as late as Tuesday evening he was spotted in a small group at the Trump International Hotel, sans mask.
I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about looking funny, about not fitting in, both as a partially deaf person living in a world dominated by the hearing and as an LGBTQ woman living in a world dominated by straight and cis people. I’m tired of living in a world in which hearing people never think about the rest of us. I’m tired of living in a world in which transgender people constantly have to explain and justify the facts of our existence. I’m tired of living in a world in which, for some white people, the simple statement that Black lives matter is somehow considered radical.
It is not the degree to which we all can resemble the supposed majority culture — straight, abled, cis, white — which ought to determine whether or not we can live our lives with dignity and peace. It is the degree to which we celebrate our diversity, in all its messy abundance.
As I left the hospital after my mammogram, I told the technician where she could get a pair of boots like mine. They were made by a company called Sorel and were called “Cate the Great.” I mentioned another couple of boot companies I liked as well.
“OK,” she said. “Thanks for the tips.”
For just a second, I paused, uncertain. Had I heard her right?
“Tips,” she said firmly. “I said tips.”