American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  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

  didn’t help, Dawn didn’t help, not even the light, crisp enunciation of Audrey

  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

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  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.”

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  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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