Seeds of Disquiet

At the age of seven, after recovering from spinal meningitis, Heppner sat at the piano and noticed something curious: the keys she was plinking ``became hollow-sounding and disembodied, as if I were playing . . . from a great distance.'' The illness had rendered her almost completely deaf. She learned to lip-readsic her teachers; and when their backs were turned, she relieved the silent tedium by reading mysteries concealed in her schoolbooks. Heppner wryly describes an adolescence marred by more than the usual physical inconveniences: ``I felt like a robot. With my hearing aid, glasses, braces and retainer, I was loaded with hardware. When I turned in any direction, something would glitter.'' By college, she was good enough at speechreading and mimicking that she was able to pass herself off as ``normal.'' At 25 she suffered two strokes, one of which destroyed the remaining hearing in her left ear--her good ear. No longer able to deny her deafness, Heppner learned sign language and began to address the hidden anger that she felt about a life without sound. She describes the miscommunication between those who hear and those who don't in painful detail, and shares bitter memories of being laughed at by her peers for her incomprehensible attempts to read aloud. But these misunderstandings go both ways: when President Bush said ``Read my lips, no new taxes'' on television, what Heppern understood him to say was ``gold new glasses'' or ``oh, nude asses.'' Heppner's book is a modest, unasssuming effort to bridge the gap between the silent and the hearing worlds. (June)