Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (4 page)

When the admiral had finished his inspection rounds, more and more of the bed, and the pillow, would be mine again, and safe. “Thank you, Lord,” I’d say, before God-blessing Mommy and Daddy and Lucy and Joey and Peter and Allie. I’d also include Chibie, Uncle Peter, and Uncle Dutch. Then I’d tug my blanket up to cover my poor, salty, shivering body, imagining a celebration and an imaginary back rub given to me by the admiral, a dead ringer for Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.

Daddy also made an effort. Having been told by Mommy that some “Silly Putty therapy” might help me get to sleep, he would come into my bedroom at night and take a seat on the edge of my bed. “Just imagine you are a wad of Silly Putty, all cold and tightly bound together,” Daddy would say in a low, soothing voice. “The Silly Putty comes into your warm bed, and as if by magic, it is you! It is your body. Because it is you and you are it.” He went on like this for a while, closing with, “Now your eyes are getting heavy and want to stay closed, Carly, darling girl, you are so sleepy, just like the Silly Putty, so sleepy…” As Daddy left the room, sometimes I heard the striking of a match outside in the hallway, the sound of his cigarette burning to life. He was just trying to help, but more often than not, having been told by Mommy that cigarettes weren’t good for his health, I’d end up worrying about him instead.

That summer, Joey, Lucy, and I were all cast members in Helen’s production of Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women.
A stage was created at the front of the big red play barn, with three white sheets forming a curtain separating the stage from the Ping-Pong table and scattered chairs for the audience. Jeanie, playing the part of Hannah, the maid, had only one line to say to us Little Women:
Will you have hash or fish balls, girrrls?
I, on the other hand, was playing Amy, my largest speaking part by far in any family play to date: twenty-five lines. The kind of recognition I had dreamed about. It was the coffee table and “Hi” coming to life.

Rehearsals got under way, and costumes were found, assembled, and sewn from scratch. This was real theater, and we tackled it with insouciance. Memorizing our lines had been crazy, effortless fun for the past few weeks, but now Helen called us all onto the stage, no scripts allowed.

We gathered in the barn, barefoot, our wet bathing suits dripping onto the wood, and began our scene. Joey, playing Jo, the main character, said with attitude and precision, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” to which Lucy, playing Beth, replied, “It’s so dreadful to be poor,” followed by me, as Amy, the baby of all the Little Women, saying, “I don’t think it’s fair that some children get so many presents while others get nothing at all.”

As I started to say the line, my throat went into spasm. It was as if a snake, which had been coiled and asleep around my esophagus, had suddenly reared up, strangling the words. “I don’t think it’s—” and as the next word, “fair,” came out, the snake cut off its entrance, suctioned its oxygen. My brain and tongue sprang up, fell back, tried again, fell back again, then, at last, the word tumbled out, ravaged, in need of oxygen.

That was the unhappy, astonishing birth of my stammer, or at least my first conscious awareness of it. If they noticed at all, my sisters and cousins said nothing about the jerking, guttural noises coming from my mouth. Whatever it was, they probably took it to be some temporary, puzzling thing. Surely it would fade and recede, like the scratches, bruises, and sunburns that were part of summer life.

It didn’t, though. As rehearsals went on and my stammer started holding things up, my sisters’ reaction became unsympathetic. “Stop stuttering,” Joey said calmly at one point, as if stopping were as easy as taking off my shoes. Helen said nothing. No doubt she had already consulted with my mother, who, knowing Mommy, had already contacted a leading psychiatrist or speech therapist to find out if stammering was developmentally normal for a little girl. I wasn’t dropped from the play, even though my speech problems were now creating long silences in the script where no silences had existed before.

A week before our first, and I believe only, performance of
Little Women
, I remember climbing my favorite cherry tree, past my usual safe crook, higher than I was supposed to go. My arms and legs found a brittle branch, beyond which no more branches or fruit grew. Beyond me was pure sky. I was half hoping I would lose my balance and fall, breaking both my legs. Or, even more dramatically, that I would shatter every bone in my body and end up in a full body cast, unable to play Amy, or anyone, especially myself. My body cast would show the world I had a visible handicap I couldn’t help, which would be easier than the bottled, twisted one in the back of my mouth that was somehow my fault. My main concern was: Do I have any control over this? Once you stutter, and notice that you do, you stutter a lot more.

On opening night, before the curtain rose, I heard whisperings backstage:
What if Carly stutters? Should we just cut her line? Should someone finish her line for her?
My stutter may have been new, but nothing humiliates stutterers more than to have their words or sentences finished for them. We don’t want to be noticed. Overhearing the backstage murmurings, I heard only one thing: I had an unspeakable aberration that from now on had to be covered over, shushed, camouflaged, lived out in secret. Mercifully, that night a calf had been cast in
Little Women
to play—well—a calf, and when Jeanie led it onstage by a rope tied around its sweet little head, the calf proceeded to urinate on the makeshift stage curtain as it let out a particularly vocal little cow
Moooooo
. The audience laughter completely drowned out my opening line, “I don’t think it’s fair that some children get so many presents while others get nothing at all.” I don’t remember how the rest of the show went, but afterward I ran back into my bedroom and cried until my mother appeared. She didn’t know what to say, but she cradled and soothed me.

If up until that point words and life were easy, and limitless, my stammer made me aware that life could also be tough. There was very little it would not affect about me. All of my future phobias borrowed energy and nerve endings from this thing that, at the time, I understood so little about. Lines were deepening between neurons creating pathways which were like a trench, growing deeper and deeper, more associated with embarrassment and low self-esteem. I waited for the stammer to arrive and almost always it did. I had no idea that over the next decade, all through my grammar and high school years living in Riverdale and then for two years at college, I would face the daily struggle to speak naturally or unself-consciously. I usually failed. During my time in lower school, various classmates would tease me mercilessly, either to my face or behind my back, not just for my stammer, but for the facial contortions and grimaces that accompanied it. Inside, I felt assaulted, broken, consumed with self-hatred.

After school, I would come home and crawl into my mother’s arms and cry for hours. Friends of hers had given her advice about possible stuttering cures. One, which involved filling your mouth with marbles and talking, we never tried. But beginning with
Little Women
, my stammer created a bond between Mommy and me. She was the only one who understood the shame I felt, that was beginning to define me. Almost every day, I huddled in her lap, practicing my words, as she rocked and relaxed me. She also placed a hot-water bottle on my morning stomachaches—“your worry lump,” Mommy called the aching spot—which sometimes made it so hard to swallow I almost gagged. Sometimes, though, a word would roll off my tongue, pushing past my throat guards, undetected, a prison break of sorts. “See, darling, you can do it!” my mother would say, and I felt that my victory was hers. But just as soon as her excitement for me passed, my fearfulness would begin all over again. I had accomplished something. Would I be able to do it again?

My stammer followed no laws or patterns, and it still doesn’t. Some days I could easily say a word beginning with a vowel, like
August
or
owl
, but hit a wall with
comb
or
garden
. Other days I could manage an
s
-word like
store
or
Sunday
, but a
t
-word, like
train
or
toothpaste
, defeated me. The next day, without warning, it was reversed, the
t
-words easy, the
s
-words petrified.
H
was always hard. If the phone rang, I couldn’t even say “Hello,” and so, like a lot of stutterers, I came up with accents, tricks, or techniques to tackle problem words in sidelong ways. One trick involved expelling all my breath as the phone rang and picking up the receiver pushing out a breathless “… ello?” Other days, feeling as though I were cupping a strong, queenly
S
in my throat, I answered the phone with assurance, and delivered a majestic “Simon residence.” No doubt this must have sounded ridiculous, but it gave me a small feeling of pride. Still, I spent every night worrying about the next day, and the range of excuses I could make: I had to blow my nose; I needed to go to the bathroom; a sudden bout of hiccups had come on. My worst fear was that my stammer would ruin my “timing,” and therefore ruin any anecdote I might be telling, or if I were answering a quiz or a problem, everyone would think I didn’t even
know
the answer in the first place.

When I was around seven years old, I started writing a diary, with most of the entries about what I’d eaten that night for dinner. As the years went on, I started making up my own code language to deal with my stutter at school. I wrote once, “Please—I pray that when I have to read aloud in class I won’t famul.”
Famul:
a word I’d invented that meant “stutter,” designed to obscure its actual meaning in case a stranger happened upon the worn leather-backed journal I’d taken to hiding under my mattress, a word helpfully defined in a back-of-the-diary glossary. Locked inside my own apartness, I couldn’t imagine that others might head straight for the glossary, easily deciphering what I meant. What mattered only was that hiding was now my game, discovery my shame.

When I was a teenager, my boyfriend, Nick Delbanco, told me he loved my stammer. It was late at night, and Nick and I were seated in the front seat of his Impala convertible beside a lake in Larchmont, New York. Nick was a sophomore at Harvard, and I was in eleventh grade at Riverdale Country School for Girls. That night wasn’t the first time I’d met Nick’s parents, and I felt at ease with them. Though trial and error had somewhat improved my speech over the years, Nick’s mother had definitely noticed that something was amiss. Had she noticed it before?

Achieving this ease with your boyfriend’s parents is hard enough, even without trying to hide your stutter. This particular evening was intimate and questions were aimed at me. I hesitated a lot, trying to hide my facial contortions. I could not have known that on this night Barbara Delbanco, a fiercely intelligent, dark-haired German woman who had raised a trio of brilliant little boys, would be scrutinizing me from the line of my stockings to the silences surrounding my words. That night, Mrs. Delbanco was unerringly focused on me. Though none of the three Delbanco boys ever disappointed their parents—all would eventually become eminent in their fields as a physician, a scholar, and in Nick’s case a prolific writer—Nick was, to my mind, his mother’s Buddha baby, the handsome, brilliant son who could do no wrong.

At dinner that night, I used all my stammer shortcuts and tricks: word swaps, glancing away during a facial contortion, letting Nick answer questions intended for me. Once or twice I spewed out the worst of what I had to offer: eyes flashing up into my head as I struggled over a word, locked mouth, tensed lips. Those few moments didn’t escape Mrs. Delbanco’s notice. At one point I joined Nick’s brother Andy upstairs—he was showing me a new game he’d just bought—and when I got back downstairs, I was so embarrassed by my performance that night that I told everyone I had to go home and write a paper, neatly cutting short the evening with an excuse that made me sound scholarly and responsible at the same time. “Of course, of course, Carly,” Mrs. Delbanco said. “We loved seeing you.”

Nick walked me out into the limpid Larchmont night, and he and I drove to the lake. Nick cut the engine, got out of the car to take down the top, and retook his seat beside me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I was slumped beside him in the passenger seat. “Nothing. Just tired.” Then, “What an experience.”

Nick was silent. “You know,” he said, “when you were upstairs in Andy’s room, my mother said she thought she detected a stammer in your speech pattern. I told her she was right. I’d just gotten used to it in you. She said she had, too, but it appeared to be more challenging this evening.”

Tears started spilling down onto my cheeks. “I know, I do stammer. I’m so embarrassed. I’m so sorry—”

Nick wouldn’t let me finish. “Stop,” he said. “I know you do. I knew that about you the first time we met.”

The thought horrified me. He knew, but he hadn’t said anything? “Well, why didn’t you tell me that?” I said.

“Because I loved it, that’s why.”

I couldn’t even get the word
stammers
out without stammering. “But … but … b—”

“It’s sexy. It’s part of you. I don’t love you in
spite
of your stammer, I love you because of it.” In the long pause, after I straightened up, drying my wet face with my sleeve, Nick reached for me and just held me there, tightly. “Carly, it’s sexy,” he repeated. “It’s also
charming
.”

Charming:
what an alien idea. I had spent the last ten years doing everything I could to conceal my handicap. Now, in just a moment’s time, my stammer was charming and, even better, sexy. Nick Delbanco, a confident, worldly, literate Harvard boy, had loved away my stutter’s stigma. Just like that, I was exotic, different, and in a positive way, too, and it had only taken ten years!