Paperboy (9 page)

Mrs. Worthington was sitting on her porch swing on Monday of my third week on the route.

I had been hoping for a grown-up conversation with her like the one I had had with Mr. Spiro but she just gave me a plain old Thank-you when I walked up on her porch to hand her the paper.

She did have a smile for me. A sad one. She didn’t act like she was drinking whiskey but I got the feeling she had gobs of stuff on her mind. She looked straight ahead like when your eyes really don’t see anything because your brain is thinking hard about something else.

Cool for July.

I had practiced those three words over and over on the way to her house in case I might see her. My air was so gentle you couldn’t hear it. Mrs. Worthington turned halfway to look at me and nodded. I waited for her to say something but there wasn’t anything else
coming from her and all my practiced words with easy starting sounds were used up. Mrs. Worthington spoke to me after I started back down the steps.

Do I owe for the paper?

She owed two weeks which I figured in my head was a dollar and ninety cents but I didn’t want to take a chance on an
N
sound. On Friday the amount would be two dollars and eighty-five cents which might be easier for me to say.

Wait till Friday.

The
W
and
F
sounds let out their own air without me having to wrestle with them and the
T
sound came out in a whisper but I had spoken two complete sentences to Mrs. Worthington without stuttering. I hoped she could tell how hard I was working on my talking for her.

She went inside her house and closed the door that Mr. Worthington had almost busted the glass out of the week before. Mrs. Worthington didn’t have to say much for me to tell what kind of day she was having. I had already seen her angry eyes. Her happy eyes. Her whiskey eyes. I had just seen her empty eyes.

Mrs. Worthington’s eyes stayed in my head all the way home and that should have been a warning to me that things were going to be bad for the rest of the day.

When I came downstairs from getting cleaned up my mother told me that Mam had asked for the evening off but the worst news was that we were going out to eat at a sit-down restaurant.

I only liked to eat out at cafeterias where you could point to what you wanted but we headed to a fancy Italian restaurant downtown.

The night kept getting worse. My parents ran into some loud-talking people they knew at the restaurant and asked them to join us. Eight grown-ups including my parents ended up at our table which was eight too many grown-ups for me since I was the only kid there.

My mother put her hand on my crew cut and rubbed it like she was trying to wipe something out of my hair.

Our big boy will be twelve soon.

The women clapped and oohed and aahed and one of the men put his hand on my shoulder.

I hear this boy has quite an arm on him. Let’s feel that muscle.

He put his hand around my upper arm.

Yep. Feels solid to me.

I wanted to tell him that big muscles didn’t have anything to do with throwing. That it was the way a person used the muscles that he had. But there was no way I could ever figure out a way to say all those words without using tons of Gentle Air.

The grown-ups drank wine from fat bottles wrapped in little ropes and talked about business and houses and other stuff that didn’t mean anything and they laughed at what the other one said even though it wasn’t funny. They left me alone eating little sticks of hard bread and drinking lemonade that was sour because all the sugar was caked in the bottom. I knew with my parents talking to their friends there was a good chance that they would forget to order for me. I couldn’t stop worrying about it as the waiter went around the table in his white coat with a towel on his arm.

I decided that since my parents were making me eat with all the grown-ups I was going to order something I liked no matter what. Spaghetti.

The
S
sound would be easy enough for starters but the
P
sound that backed it up would give me a problem for sure. Just before the waiter got to me I figured out how I could change Spaghetti to make it come out of my mouth easier. That was a trick I used sometimes when I only had to say one word and when I could feel the word getting stuck in my throat ahead of time. The word would only have to be changed a little to make it come out and that was better than tossing a knife or fork in the air to start my word because somebody could get hurt if I did that.

It was my turn. The waiter stood over me with his pencil and pad.

And what for you, young man?

Shplishghetti.

The word had seemed okay when I was going over the sound changes in my head but it sounded first-grade stupid when I said it out loud.
The waiter smiled like I had told some kind of a joke. The woman at the table sitting next to my mother laughed. Her husband had been lighting cigarettes for her all night like she was too dumb to know how to use a Zippo. When she blew smoke out of her mouth she would lift her head and blow it up in the air like she was proud of herself.

Your son is such a daw-w-w-w-ling.

The woman put extra
Ws
in the word like she was trying to make it up to my parents for laughing at me.

My face felt hot with everybody staring at me like I was Clarabell the Clown on a stage without a horn to honk. The burning in my face and neck wouldn’t go away. The grown-ups finally stopped looking at me and started talking and smoking and drinking their wine like everything would be hunky-dory if they just ignored me.

I didn’t feel like eating when the waiter put the plate of spaghetti in front of me but I figured there wasn’t anything else to do. My face was still burning and I was hoping the spaghetti might calm me down.

The spaghetti didn’t taste good when I put it in my mouth but I kept eating it just so I would have something to do. I started eating more bread sticks and drinking the sour lemonade to get rid of the bad spaghetti taste but it just got worse.

Spaghetti. Wine. Cigarette smoke. Zippo fumes. Perfume. All the smells in the restaurant started to glom together inside my nose. I got dizzy like the night on Mr. Spiro’s porch. The spaghetti wasn’t
going to stay down for much longer and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. My eyes felt it coming.

My mother looked at me like I should do something quick but my mouth jerked open before I could grab the red cloth napkin in my lap. Spaghetti and everything else inside me—the whole shootin’ match as Rat liked to say—was set free with an air that wasn’t the least bit gentle. I let go all over the table.

My parents and their friends jumped up to try to get out of the path of the flying spaghetti. Waiters started running around with towels and mops and my mother began apologizing to everybody and saying they needed to get me home because I probably was Coming Down With Something.

The Something I Was Coming Down With was the same thing I had been coming down with every minute of my talking life.

My parents tried to have a conversation with me on the way home but I didn’t have anything to say. They knew when to give up. I sat in the backseat and watched all the people on the streets of downtown Memphis. At the bus stops. At the train station. Sitting on porch steps. They were all talking. Talking up a storm. I couldn’t get out one simple word without ruining everybody’s night out.

When we got home I went upstairs to brush the bad taste out of my mouth and get in bed even though it was only eight o’clock. It was hard to get the restaurant out of my head and then I started feeling even worse that I had messed up supper for everybody. They hadn’t done anything wrong. My parents and their friends should have been able to eat at a restaurant if they wanted to without getting spaghetti spewed all over them. Even the woman who laughed at me and didn’t know how to use a Zippo.

I decided the right thing to do was to go downstairs and tell my parents I was sorry. I also needed to see if Mam had put anything in the icebox before she left because my stomach was growling and telling me it needed something in it where the big pile of spaghetti should have been.

My mother and father were talking in the breakfast room as I eased down the back stairs. I sat on the landing step to hear what my mother was saying.

His therapist said that stammering is likely generic but no one in my family stammers.

I think you mean
genetic
.

My father was all the time correcting my mother on her words. She would get close to the right one but close doesn’t cut it when it comes to words. And she always had to say that the way I talked was Stammering. Maybe it sounded better to her than Stuttering.

My father spoke again.

I wish he wouldn’t pretend that he doesn’t have a stutter. He needs to realize it’s not something he should be ashamed of.

Do you think his therapist knows what she’s doing?

She came highly recommended from the school, didn’t she? She seems …

I didn’t want to hear any more talk about me.

When I tiptoed back up the stairs I knew I had heard something important but I couldn’t figure out exactly what. I kept going over what my mother said about stammering not running in her family and that made me wonder if stuttering ran in my father’s family. And why he didn’t say anything about that.

My mother said I could have whatever I wanted when I came down for breakfast the next morning but I told her that cereal was fine. She asked me if my stomach was feeling better.

s-s-s-s-It’s o-s-s-s-s-kay. Sorry for s-s-s-s-last s-s-s-s-night.

Don’t worry. Everybody gets a bug now and then.

Stuttering is not a bug. AND I DIDN’T JUST COME DOWN WITH SOMETHING. I screamed the words inside my head but that was where they stayed.

I crunched my cereal as hard as I could so the sound would take the place of the talking in my head. My mother sipped her coffee and turned the pages of the morning newspaper.

They’ve announced the lineup for the Mid-South Fair. It’ll be
here before you know it. I guess you’ll want to go this year again with Art.

I nodded.

I don’t know if I approve of the aurora of the fair … I mean aroma … Oh I don’t know what I mean.

I nodded.

She probably meant the Aura of the fair and I didn’t have any problem with it. I liked to throw balls at the lead milk bottles because I could usually knock them over and get a prize. Rat and I would walk up and down the midway and try to figure out what was in all the sideshows. We stood in line last year to get into the hypnotist’s tent. We were going to tell the Great Something or Other to put me under a spell so I could talk right and then Rat wouldn’t let anybody clap their hands to snap me out of it. But we chickened out when it came time to go in because Rat said the guy might make a mistake and turn me into a barking dog.

After breakfast my mother said she had to go to one of her meetings at the country club and that I should stay in my room and read since Mam was still gone.

s-s-s-s-Where’s Mam?

She called this morning to say she needed a little more time off. She deserves it, don’t you think.