(Born with congenital nerve deafness, I taught myself how to lip-read long before my hearing-impairment was discovered at age nine, when I was in the third grade. This writing is a phone conversation my mother had with her closest friend, Nora Meade, a school teacher. Even though I was twelve, I often ‘hid’ (this time behind the sofa) and was able to lip-read Mom’s end of the conversation.)
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“That child is going to be the death of me yet.” Mom was only 42 but already gray-haired and with bent, arthritic fingers. She sat on our second-hand, burgundy sofa, nodding. “She’s hiding from me, again, because the youngsters were playing tag around the clothesline and knocked the pole down. Half of the clothes fell low enough on the ground to drag in the mud. She’ll have to wash and hang them all over again.” She paused. “So what if it’s Saturday, all she does in her so-called spare time is sit around and read. What good is book-learning to her? She’s too retarded to become anything!”
Whatever Nora said made Mom laugh. “As if Sue if ever going to attract a man! She’s twelve, has raisins for boobs and hasn’t even started yet! She looks more like a boy than a girl and is ugly to boot.” There was another short pause. “Sue isn’t the least bit sociable, you know, except with a couple of neighbor girls …all but one is fat, the thin one is stupid and the last has a mother with pink eyes!”
“When I told that child about her period, showed her the belt and pad, she just stared at me weirdly. ‘What is it for? How do I use this stuff?’ I kept saying, ‘it’s for your period’ and she had this blank look on her face like ‘what’s that’. I’ve never seen a dumber girl in my life. You have to tell her EVERYTHING!”
“You know her teacher, Mrs. Tyler, told me to get her a training bra.” Mom laughed heartily. “Sue asked me, ‘Why do they have to be trained? Don’t they simply grow on their own?’” Mom slapped the arm of the sofa, cracking up. “She’s got nothing to train!”
Pausing to listen, Mom then shrugged her shoulders. “Your girls’ are both athletic; all of mine are clumsy.” Nodding, “yes, I heard about what she did for Miss Swisher. Isn’t it weird for a child to go up to her principle and say, ‘Your blouse is unbuttoned between your breasts.’ When Eula said, ‘What?’ Sue raised both hands and buttoned Eula’s blouse! What was she thinking? Normal kids don’t do that!”
Again, Nora seemed to be complimentary. “No, she’s not special! If anything, she’s a freak creeping around, hiding and always peering at you with those sharp, piercing eyes.” Another shrug punctuated the pause. “I can’t afford batteries for her hearing-aids when school is out! Yeah, the doctor said she reads lips. Still, Sue creeps me out … always jumping half out of her skin when I touch her. She makes me so mad I often take my belt off, or a break off a switch if we’re outside, and lay into her for that skittering jumpiness. What’s wrong with that freak!”
Mom saw me peering at her, took off her shoe and threw it at me. “It’s her again … staring at me from behind the sofa. I try to keep that girl busy but she’s so fast at everything it’s hard to keep her away from me.”
“Freak!” she yells and I look directly at her. “Go fetch those muddy clothes off the line. They have to be washed again.”
As I stood up and stretched, Mom threw her other shoe and hit me in the head. “Quit looking at me! I HATE that!”

***We all have freedom of speech but not all speech should be freely shared.