most effective.”
Her stuttering diary. When she sat at the kitchen table after dinner writing the
day’s entry in her stuttering diary, that’s when he most wanted to murder the
psychiatrist who had finally to inform him—one of the fathers “who can’t accept,
who refuse to believe”—that she would stop stuttering only when stuttering was
no longer necessary for her, when she wanted to “relate” to the world in a
different way—in short, when she found a more valuable replacement for the
manipulativeness. The stuttering diary was a red three-ring notebook in which,
at the suggestion of her speech therapist, Merry kept a record of when she
stuttered. Could she have been any more the dedicated enemy of her stuttering
than when she sat there scrupulously recalling and recording how the stuttering
fluctuated throughout the day, in what context it was least likely to occur,
when it was most likely to occur and with whom? And could anything have been
more heartbreaking for him than reading that notebook on the Friday evening she
rushed off to the movies with her friends and happened to leave it open on the
table? “When do I stutter? When somebody asks me something that requires an
unexpected, unrehearsed response, that’s when I’m likely to stutter. When people
are looking at me. People who know I stutter, particularly when they’re looking
at me. Though sometimes it’s worse with people who don’t know me….” On she
went, page after page in her strikingly neat handwriting—and all she seemed to
be saying was that she stuttered in all situations. She had written, “Even when
I’m doing fine, I can’t stop thinking, ‘How soon is it going to be before he
knows I’m a stutterer? How soon is it going to be before I start stuttering and
screw this up?’” Yet, despite every disappointment, she sat where her parents
could see her and worked on her stuttering diary every night, weekends included.
She worked with her therapist on the different “strate-
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gies” to be used with strangers, store clerks, people with whom she had
relatively safe conversations; they worked on strategies to be used with the
people who were closer to her—teachers, girlfriends, boys, finally her
grandparents, her father, her mother. She recorded the strategies in the diary.
* * *
She listed in the diary what topics she could expect to talk about with
different people, wrote down the points she would try to make, anticipating when
she was most likely to stutter and getting herself thoroughly prepared. How
could she bear the hardship of all that self-consciousness? The planning
required of her to make the spontaneous unspontaneous, the persistence with
which she refused to shrink from these tedious tasks—was that what the arrogant
son of a bitch had meant by “a vindictive exercise”? It was unflagging
commitment the likes of which the Swede had never known, not even in himself
that fall they turned him into a football player and, reluctant as he was to go
banging heads in a sport whose violence he never really liked, he did it,
excelled at it, “for the good of the school.”
But none of what she diligently worked at did Merry an ounce of good. In the
quiet, safe cocoon of her speech therapist’s office, taken out of her world, she
was said to be terrifically at home with herself, to speak flawlessly, make
jokes, imitate people, sing. But outside again, she saw it coming, started to go
around it, would do anything, anything, to avoid the next word beginning with a
b— and soon she was sputtering all over the place, and what a field day that
psychiatrist had the next Saturday with the letter b and “what it unconsciously
signified to her.” Or what m or c or g “unconsciously signified.” And yet
nothing of what he surmised meant a goddamn thing. None of his great ideas
disposed of a single one of her difficulties. Nothing anybody said meant
anything or, in the end, made any sense. The psychiatrist didn’t help, the
speech therapist’s strategies didn’t help, the stuttering diary didn’t help, he
Hepburn made the slightest dent. She was simply in the hands of something she
could not get out of.
And then it was too late: like some innocent in a fairy story who
· 99 ·
has been tricked into drinking the noxious potion, the grasshopper child who
used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every
available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—
she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and
combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school
and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries,
pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream
with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became
large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall,
nicknamed by her schoolmates Ho Chi Levov.
And the impediment became the machete with which to mow all the bastard liars
down. “You f-f-fucking madman! You heartless mi-mi-mi-miserable m-monster!” she
snarled at Lyndon Johnson whenever his face appeared on the seven o’clock news.
Into the televised face of Humphrey, the vice president, she cried, “You prick,
sh-sh-shut your lying m-m-mouth, you c-c-coward, you f-f-f-f-filthy fucking
collaborator!” When her father, as a member of the ad hoc group calling itself
New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, went down to Washington with the
steering committee to visit their senator, Merry refused his invitation to come
along. “But,” said the Swede, who had never belonged to a political group before
and would not have joined this one and volunteered for the steering committee
and paid a thousand dollars toward their protest ad in the Newark News had he
not hoped his conspicuous involvement might deflect a little of her anger away
from him, “this is your chance to say what’s on your mind to Senator Case. You
can confront him directly. Isn’t that what you want?” “Merry,” said her petite
mother to the large glowering girl, “you might be able to influence Senator
Case—” “C-c-c-c-c-c-c-case!” erupted Merry and, to the astonishment of her
parents, proceeded to spit on the tiled kitchen floor.
* * *
She was on the phone now all the time, the child who formerly had to run through
her telephone “strategy” just to be sure that
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when she picked up the phone she could get out the word “Hello” in under thirty
seconds. She had conquered the anguishing stutter all right, but not as her
parents and her therapist had hoped. No, Merry concluded that what was deforming
her life wasn’t the stuttering but the futile effort to overturn it. The crazy
effort. The ridiculous significance she had given to that stutter to meet the
Rimrock expectations of the very parents and teachers and friends who had caused
her to so overestimate something as secondary as the way she talked. Not what
she said but how she said it was all that bothered them. And all she really had
to do to be free of it was to not give a shit about how it made them so
miserable when she had to pronounce the letter b. Yes, she cut herself away from
caring about the abyss that opened up under everybody’s feet when she started
stuttering; her stuttering was no longer going to be the center of her
existence—and she’d make damn sure that it wasn’t going to be the center of
theirs. Vehemently she renounced the appearance and the allegiances of the good
little girl who had tried so hard to be adorable and lovable like all the other
good little Rimrock girls—renounced her meaningless manners, her petty social
concerns, her family’s “bourgeois” values. She had wasted enough time on the
cause of herself. “I’m not going to spend my whole life wrestling day and night
with a fucking stutter when kids are b-b-b-being b-b-b-b-b-bu-bu-bu roasted
alive by Lyndon B-b-b-baines b-b-b-bu-bu-burn-‘em-up Johnson!”
All her energy came right to the surface now, unimpeded, the force of resistance
that had previously been employed otherwise; and by no longer bothering with the
ancient obstruction, she experienced not only her full freedom for the first
time in her life but the exhilarating power of total self-certainty. A brand-new
Merry had begun, one who’d found, in opposing the “v-v-v-vile” war, a difficulty
to fight that was worthy, at last, of her truly stupendous strength. North
Vietnam she called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a country she spoke of
with such patriotic feeling that, according to Dawn, one would have thought
she’d been born not at the Newark Beth Israel but at the Beth Israel in Hanoi.
‘“The
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Democratic Republic of Vietnam’—if I hear that from her one more time, Seymour,
I swear, I’ll go out of my mind!” He tried to convince her that perhaps it
wasn’t as bad as it sounded. “Merry has a credo, Dawn, Merry has a political
position. There may not be much subtlety in it, she may not yet be its best
spokesman, but there is some thought behind it, there’s certainly a lot of
emotion behind it, there’s a lot of compassion behind it… .”
But there was now no conversation she had with her daughter that did not drive
Dawn, if not out of her mind, out of the house and into the barn. The Swede
would overhear Merry fighting with her every time the two of them were alone
together for two minutes. “Some people,” Dawn says, “would be perfectly happy to
have parents who are contented middle-class people.” “I’m sorry I’m not
brainwashed enough to be one of them,” Merry replies. “You’re a sixteen-year-old
girl,” Dawn says, “and I can tell you what to do and I will tell you what to
do.” “Just because I’m sixteen doesn’t make me a g-g-girl! I do what I w-w-
want!” “You’re not antiwar,” Dawn says, “you’re anti everything.” “And what are
you, Mom? You’re pro c-c-c-cow!”
Night after night now Dawn went to bed in tears. “What is she? What is this?”
she asked the Swede. “If someone simply defies your authority, what can you do?
* * *
Seymour, I’m totally puzzled. How did this happen?” “It happens,” he told her.
“She’s a kid with a strong will. With an idea. With a cause.” “Where did this
come from? It’s inexplicable. Am I a bad mother? Is that it?” “You are a good
mother. You are a wonderful mother. That is not it.” “I don’t know why she’s
turned against me like this. I don’t have any sense of what I did to her or even
what she perceives I did to her. I don’t know what’s happened. Who is she? Where
did she come from? I cannot control her. I cannot recognize her. I thought she
was smart. She’s not smart at all. She’s become stupid, Seymour; she gets more
and more stupid each time we talk.” “No, it’s just a very crude kind of
aggression. It’s not very well worked out. But she is still smart. She’s very
smart. This is what teenagers are like. There are these very turbulent sorts of
changes. It has nothing to do with you or me.
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They just amorphously object to everything.” “It’s all from the stuttering,
isn’t it?” “We’re doing everything we can for her stutter. We always have.”
“She’s angry because she stutters. She doesn’t make friends,” Dawn said,
“because she stutters.” “She’s always had friends. She has many friends.
Besides, she was on top of her stuttering. Stuttering is not the explanation.”
“Yes, it is. You never get on top of your stutter,” Dawn said, “you’re in
constant fear.” “That’s not an explanation, Dawnie, for what is going on.”
“She’s sixteen—is that the explanation?” asked Dawn. “Well, if it is,” he said,
“and maybe an awful lot of it is, we’ll do the best we can until she stops being
sixteen.” “And? When she’s not sixteen anymore, she’ll be seventeen.” “At
seventeen she won’t be the same. At eighteen she won’t be the same. Things
change. She’ll discover new interests. She’ll have college—academic pursuits. We
can work this out. The important thing is to keep talking with her.” “I can’t. I
can’t talk to her. Now she’s even jealous of the cows. It’s too maddening.”
“Then I’ll keep talking to her. The important thing is not to abandon her and
not to capitulate to her, and to keep talking even if you have to say the same
thing over and over and over. It doesn’t matter if it all seems hopeless. You
can’t expect what you say to have an immediate impact.” “It’s what she says back
that has the impact!” “It doesn’t matter what she says back. We have to keep
saying to her what we have to say to her, even if saying it seems interminable.
We must draw the line. If we don’t draw the line, then surely she’s not going to
obey. If we do draw the line, there’s at least a fifty percent chance that she
will.” “And if she still doesn’t?” “All we can do, Dawn, is to continue to be
reasonable and continue to be firm and not lose hope or patience, and the day
will come when she will outgrow all this objecting to everything.” “She doesn’t
want to outgrow it.” “Now. Today. But there is tomorrow. There’s a bond between
us all and it’s tremendous. As long as we don’t let her go, as long as we keep
talking, tomorrow will come. Of course she’s maddening. She’s unrecognizable to
me, too. But if you don’t allow her to exhaust your patience and if you keep
talking to her and you don’t give up on her, she will eventually become herself
again.”
· 103 ·
And so, hopeless as it seemed, he talked, he listened, he was reasonable;
endless as the struggle seemed, he remained patient, and whenever he saw her
going too far he drew the line. No matter how much it might openly enrage her to
answer him, no matter how sarcastic and caustic and elusive and dishonest her
answers might be, he continued to question her about her political activities,
about her after-school whereabouts, about her new friends; with a gentle
persistence that infuriated her, he asked about her Saturday trips into New
York. Sh
e could shout all she wanted at home—she was still just a kid from Old
Rimrock, and the thought of whom she might meet in New York alarmed him.
* * *
Conversation #1 about New York. “What do you do when you go to New York? Who do
you see in New York?” “What do I do? I go see New York. That’s what I do.” “What
do you do, Merry?” “I do what everyone else does. I window-shop. What else would
a girl do?” “You’re involved with political people in New York.” “I don’t know
what you’re talking about. Everything is political. Brushing your teeth is
political.” “You’re involved with people who are against the war in Vietnam.
Isn’t that who you go to see? Yes or no?” “They’re people, yes. They’re people
with ideas, and some of them don’t b-b-b-believe in the war. Most of them don’t
b-b-b-believe in the war.” “Well, I don’t happen to believe in the war myself.”
“So what’s your problem?” “Who are these people? How old are they? What do they
do for a living? Are they students?” “Why do you want to know?” “Because I’d
like to know what you’re doing. You’re alone in New York on Saturdays. Not
everyone’s parents would allow a sixteen-year-old girl to go that far.” “I go in
… I, you know, there are people and dogs and streets …” “You come home with
all this Communist material. You come home with all these books and pamphlets
and magazines.” “I’m trying to learn. You taught me to learn, didn’t you? Not
just to study, but to learn. C-c-c-communist …” “It is Communist. It says on
the page that it’s Communist.” “C-c-c-communists have ideas that aren’t always
about C-commu-nism.” “For instance.” “About poverty. About war. About injustice.
They have all kinds of ideas. Just b-b-because you’re Jewish doesn’t
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