What that? she signed, pointing to one boy’s lunch tray.
Pizza, someone said.
What i-s that? she said. She fingerspelled emphatically, question-marked her eyebrows. Austin understood first. With a flash of recognition, he scrunched up his face and gave her a scolding finger wag.
I-s. Finger wag, he said.
Charlie was disappointed – so ‘is’ and ‘am’ and ‘are’ just . . . weren’t?
How could a language exist without so fundamental a concept? Perhaps, she thought grudingly, her mother and doctors were right about the limitations of signing. Could you have a real language without the notion of being?
But Austin just pointed to Charlie’s hand, then made his own gesture, sweeping up from his stomach out into an arc across the room. Charlie copied the sign, but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. She stared.
Me, said Austin, pointing to himself.
He patted his chest, then his arms, then held out his hands, flexed his fingers before her.
You, he said.
He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood – her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn’t yet, all in perpetual existence in her fingertips.
Something was missing. Where was the verb ‘to be’? How are you? What is your name? Maybe it was too complicated for beginners.
They spent the rest of the class pointing at objects around the room and learning what they were called, but this only exacerbated Charlie’s curiosity – what might the noun for ‘being’ be, and did the answer to her missing verb lie there? She wanted to ask the teacher but didn’t have any of the words to form the question. That night she stayed up searching online ASL dictionaries, endless scrolls of GIFs and line-drawn bald men frozen in sign. She looked for the sign for ‘to be’ and found several sites confirming that it did not in fact exist, but no satisfying explanation for its absence.”
Chopping Potatoes 