I’d also see Rianne around the neighborhood. She’d update me on Dean and Brenda and the mommy-and-me class. She was infectiously enthusiastic, just like she had been in high school.
Then Helene saw her one afternoon while they were racing around the neighborhood, strollers in front of them. Rianne was uncharacteristically solemn. She said she was worried about Dean’s vocabulary, that he didn’t seem to have enough words, and that those he did have were hard to understand. She thought we might want to have him checked out by a specialist.
Helene called me at work, nearly crying. Of course, we were not hearing that our child was terminally sick, or had a lifetime of physical or mental struggle in front of him—parents who get that kind of news, and I’ve known a few, get up every morning to face the unspeakable, and I don’t know how they do it; they are surely stronger than I’ll ever be. No, our problem was one that we knew could be overcome with a little work and a little love, but still, it was a problem, a real one, and it made us angry at ourselves.
Dean seemed so lively, so aware, that we never worried about the fact that he called trucks “uck”—we thought it was cute. I guess we should have worried that he used this word for milk, too. Or that limousine was lim-o-leen. Or that bus was “bah,” or that he couldn’t pronounce the letter “c” at the beginning of a word or that he gave his own name as “Nean” or “Neannie.”
We didn’t notice that other children were ahead. Part of it might have been that, with me watching Dean during the days before going to work while Helene worked at home, we spent so much time with him that we understood every word no matter how it sounded. A parent who worked all day at the office might have noticed it sooner: progress, or the lack of it, stands out after a little time apart. We told our parents and friends about Rianne’s observation, and they agreed: they had been worried, too. This made us even angrier—why hadn’t they said something?
I’m sure it made Rianne uncomfortable to tell us this, and I’m forever grateful that she did, but it was a little awkward that the first person who told us our child was not 100 percent perfect, was not well ahead of the game, was an ex-girlfriend of mine, even though high school was fifteen years in the past. The night after we got the news I detected an unmistakable hint of tension in the air as Helene and I lay in bed; if I could just drift off, I thought, I’ll be fine. But the more I thought about it, the more awake I became. The tension seemed to be coming from the other side of the mattress. I felt it rising. I gave up on sleep and tensed for whatever was coming.
“You know,” Helene said, finally, “I don’t need your ex-girlfriend telling me how to raise my child!”
The next day, not very rested, we got to work: we arranged for early-intervention counselors from the city to come interview us and evaluate Dean. I took him to an ear specialist, where he sat alone in a soundproof booth to have his hearing checked, raising his finger with each low tone.
Three young women soon crowded into our apartment. They interviewed us first, asking about Helene’s pregnancy, about Dean’s first steps. They paused while we described the day the World Trade Center came down.
I’d accidentally let Dean see the whole thing. We went to our window with its view of the harbor and downtown Manhattan after the first plane hit, and as I ran around and got dressed to go to work, he and his mother watched the endless smoke plume grow, and the ticker-tape parade of paper that swirled past our window, mixing in the breeze with the wails of a thousand sirens. I’d wondered as a child what would happen if a plane hit the buildings, but I’d never imagined two. When the second one roared out of the sky, in front of all of our eyes, I pulled my hair with both hands and shouted, “Holy shit!”
Dean imitated me doing this for days, although the words he used were indecipherable.
The counselors listened hard. “That might have something to do with it,” one of them said.
Then they sat down with Dean. They asked him to stack some blocks (he got to eleven—the best they’d seen) and say all the words he knew. Here he didn’t do so well. As they left, they explained that for the city to give Dean speech therapy, free, they’d have to make a determination that he was 33 percent behind where he was supposed to be. They offered to exaggerate his condition to get us the help, and we thanked them. But now I think they were just being nice when they said that: Dean was clearly 33 percent behind.
The report that came in the mail a few weeks later was filled with graphs and charts and written evaluations, all of which praised us as parents while complimenting the “nurturing” environment in the apartment, and said Dean was clearly able to understand everything being said to him. But in their conclusion, the Kind Speech Witches agreed that he needed help. They recommended speech therapy three times a week.
I couldn’t help but feel that all the stuff about us being good, nurturing parents was added at the last minute as a consolation, to soften the blow.
Help soon arrived in the form of Elizabeth, a young therapist who was not herself a parent. Low-key, even dull, she tried to engage Dean but he didn’t want anything to do with her. He was a different boy from the one he’d been when the evaluators were here, when he smiled and laughed, stacked those blocks and tried, really tried, to talk. Now he just wanted to go into his room.
Elizabeth grew annoyed, finally lecturing Helene that when a mother said no to her child, she had to mean no. Maybe she was right, but giving parenting tips wasn’t why she was coming into our apartment, and she was promptly fired, joining the carcasses of Dr. Deutsch (“Oh, let him cry!”) and Olga the fortnightly cleaning lady (“Your breast milk is no good!”) on the smoldering ash heap of dismissed child-rearing and home-care specialists whose own words did them in.
It took the city a while to send a replacement, but when it did, all the crimes of honesty and omission committed by Rianne, Elizabeth and our friends and family were forgotten.
Corinne, a mother of three, was filled with energy and didn’t care what made Dean talk as long as he did. M&M’s, Hershey’s Kisses—whatever was needed was offered. She lit up his bedroom like a bright light. She used a lollipop to show him where his tongue should touch his teeth, an effective method even if it eventually led to minor dental problems. She zipped through the neighborhood on her bicycle and was always in a rush, rarely staying more than fifteen minutes. But she never left without a hint of progress, and Dean loved her so, and wanted to impress her so, and wanted more chocolate so, that he gave it his best.
Corinne would close the door to his room; they’d work in private. Helene and I would sit in the living room, nervously, and practically swap high-fives when we heard her shriek and clap with delight—obviously, Dean had just gotten something right.
She told us what she was doing, and what the problem was. Dean had picked up some bad habits with the way he played his tongue against the top or bottom of his mouth, or behind his upper or lower teeth. I tested all of this myself in front of a mirror, seeing that speech is actually quite complicated if you break it into separate parts. She reassured us that Dean had plenty of intelligent thoughts in his head, it was just his ability to put them into words, and the creation of those words themselves, that needed work.
She told us we had done nothing wrong.
Dean ceased being Nean and started being Dean. Then “truck” and “bus” and “milk” came along, and “roro” became “water.” Corinne was as thrilled as we were.
“You are my miracle child,” she’d say to him as she strapped on her helmet and walked her bicycle to the elevator. Dean would push the button. Then we’d watch her from the window, rocketing down the street beneath pear trees just starting to bloom white and thicken with the coming spring.
By the time that fall when Dean started nursery school—where we saw, on the first day, girls de-coating the helpless boys—he was pretty damn understandable.
We weren’t completely done: Corinne stayed with us for the rest of the year, and then said it was up to us, we could either quit w
ith the therapy or have the city reevaluate him. We quit—we didn’t see the need to have him checked out all over again. But it was a mistake: we had to pick up speech therapy two years later when his pronunciation problems had a brief relapse.
To me, the speech problems, and the relatively simple solution to them, exemplified this endless struggle in my head, of my desire not to compare my children to others, as hard as it can be. If I’d paid attention to the other children, then I might have heard that Dean wasn’t speaking clearly.
But the biggest moral of all—besides the fact that it’s not a bad idea to stay on good terms with the pretty girls you dated in high school—is that these problems come up when you are a parent, and it’s nothing to be crushed by or to blame yourself about. I’ve been doing this fatherhood thing for only seven years, but one thing I’ve learned is that things seem to even out with a little time.
Think of all these comparisons—weight, walking, speech, writing, head circumference, toilet training, knowledge of the planets—and then take a ride on the subway or go to the mall and look at the crowds of people. They were all infants once. Now how many of them are wearing diapers, have unlaced shoes, can only crawl, are sobbing uncontrollably, are speaking incoherently, don’t know the alphabet, don’t know what Venus is, flip their coats up in the air, have giant heads and weigh 12.5 pounds?
Probably only a few.
Dean was sad when Corinne stopped coming by. “Where’s my friend?” he’d ask, almost clearly. And when he said this, I realized she’d given us an even bigger gift than we’d realized. Because now that he could talk, he could do more than just describe what he saw or let us know what he wanted to eat or drink. He was three, and he’d been looking around for a while, unable to express himself. He’d seen a lot of things since getting here, and now he wanted explanations.
And so the questions began.
“What does ‘from the horse’s mouth’ mean?”
—DEAN
James Lipton, host of Inside the Actors Studio, author of An Exaltation of Larks (Penguin, 1993; reprint edition), which traces the history and meaning of certain English expressions, and an experienced horseman:
“‘From the horse’s mouth’ is a bettor’s term. It has to do with horse racing, because people always want to know everything they can before they put their money on the horse. And ‘from the horse’s mouth’ means, quite simply, that somebody has inside information, and as close as you can get to the source is the horse’s mouth. In other words, the horse himself has confided in you. I don’t think it’s the least bit metaphorical, it’s just a plain horseman’s way of saying, ‘I know this for a fact and this is the real McCoy.’ There is one caveat: anybody who has spent a lot of time around horses knows they are singularly uncommunicative animals. They are not very talkative, unless they are Mr. Ed.”
“Why do doctors have very messy writing?”
—ELLIOT APPLEBAUM, age six, La Jolla, California, after receiving a gift from his uncle, a doctor, accompanied by a note that no one in the family could read
Richard Orsini, forensic document examiner and handwriting expert, Jacksonville Beach, Florida:
“One word: impatience. They do not like having to write and sign lots and lots of documents during the day; they’d rather spend the time treating their patients. That’s why a lot of the time their impatience shows in their handwriting; that’s why they write illegibly, with lots of speed, because they want to get it over with. Sometimes you actually find doctors taking classes on how to write more legibly. It will come back to bite them if a pharmacist has a hard time interpreting their writing and gives the wrong medicine for a prescription, which has happened before. I had a case where a doctor was contending that a letter in a pharmacy prescription was an ‘e’ versus an ‘i.’ I said it was an ‘i’ and I showed an ‘i’ dot above it. It made a difference between someone taking a medicine four times a day versus once every four days. So that’s what happened, and the individual lost his leg.”
“What is the difference between joking and lying?”
—ARENAL GERSON HAUT, age four, Baltimore, Maryland
Jack Trimarco, expert forensic psychophysiologist, who ran the FBI polygraph (lie detection) unit at the Los Angeles field office from 1990 until 1998:
“A joke is aimed at making people laugh, and a lie is a self-serving misrepresentation whose purpose is to get out of trouble or minimize the seriousness of a situation.”
ME: “I guess people don’t joke too much when you strap them in.”
“Sometimes they do, but it is a nervous reaction, such as ‘Boy, I feel like I’m in the electric chair.’ Well, that’s not a good sign: they are supposed to see the polygraph as a savior that is going to get to the truth, and not as the executioner that is going to get to the truth.”
“How does a joke register on the chart?”
“To understand how a polygraph works: there are only ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers—‘Did you rob the Bank of America?’ Everything that you ask them is going to be reviewed with them beforehand, it won’t be a surprise, and there is no room for humor once the test begins. If they want to joke about it, well, that’s okay, but once the chart paper is rolling the only thing that they are going to say to me is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the previously reviewed questions.”
“Let’s say a person is born deaf and uses sign language and reads lips. When they think, do they think in words or in signs?”
—HANNAH BACHER, age nine, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Beth S. Benedict, Ph.D., a faculty member at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., who was born deaf:
“It depends. If I think about things that are concrete, then I think in objects. If I think about people having a conversation, I see them signing—unless that person is hearing, then I see that person moving lips. If I think about things that are abstract, I see them in words.”
“Who decides to name things? Like spoon, table, pencil, chair?”
—AVA GOLDEN, age five, Brooklyn, New York
Linda Picard Wood, senior editor, Merriam-Webster, Inc., Springfield, Massachusetts:
“People do. But no one knows for sure who first uttered the word ‘spoon’ or ‘table.’ Long ago, when people were trying to find ways to communicate, they put together sounds to form words. Eventually everyone in the group would come to use and understand a word to mean the same thing. This might happen in your own family. For example, in my family we sometimes use ‘shake cheese’ for grated Parmesan cheese (because you shake it out of the container). Each of us knows what we mean by ‘shake cheese,’ but no one really ‘decided’ that ‘shake cheese’ should be used for Parmesan cheese. It just happened over time.
“Words can change slowly. The word people used to mean ‘spoon’ a long time ago sounded a little different from our word ‘spoon’ today. Some words change a lot. And many words are taken from one language and used in another language, often a little differently. For example, our word ‘table’ goes way back to the word ‘tabula’ from Latin.
“Once in a while it does happen that a particular person gives something a name. For example, there’s a number called a ‘googol’ that is a one with a hundred zeros after it. It was named a ‘googol’ by a little boy whose uncle was a mathematician who was working on math problems that involved the number. He asked his nephew what name to use for it, and his nephew told him to call it a ‘googol.’”
“Why are Democrats donkeys and Republicans elephants?”
—ALEKS SIEMASZKO, age eight, Montclair, New Jersey
United States Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-West Virginia:
“The history of the donkey and elephant as the symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties goes back quite a long ways. The first time that the donkey was used in a political campaign for a Democratic candidate was in 1828, when Andrew Jackson used it on his campaign posters. During President Jackson’s administration, the donkey represented the president’s steadfast focus (some would say stead
fast stubbornness). That donkey made its first appearance in a newspaper cartoon in 1837, and the symbol has stayed with the Democratic Party ever since.
“As for the Republican Party’s symbol of the elephant, it was another cartoonist, Thomas Nast, who penned a cartoon in 1874 that really cemented the link between the party and the pachyderm. In that cartoon, Nast showed an elephant representing Republican voters supporting a possible third term for President Ulysses Grant. The link was formed, and the elephant continues to represent the Republican Party to this day.
“Interestingly, while the Republican Party has officially adopted the elephant as its party symbol, the Democratic Party has never officially done the same with the humble donkey, though the image has been used for more than a century in various party designs and publications.”
“How did the pineapple get its name?”
—SYDNEY DURDEN, age five, Menlo Park, California
Dan Nellis, operations director, Dole Food Company Hawaii, Wahiawa, Oahu:
“On one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to America, to the Caribbean Sea area, to some of the islands, his sailors came upon an empty village of the Carib Indians and there was fruit piled up on the ground that had been picked, and they took it and sampled it. And it resembled the pinecone and had a sweet taste and crunchy texture like an apple, and that’s where the name came from. Of course it was in Spanish, so I don’t know how it translated into English. Pina is what they call it in Spanish because it has the resemblance to the pinecone. It is a native fruit to South America and the Caribbean islands; it is not native to Hawaii, it was brought to Hawaii. Originally, Spanish sailors had it with them.”
Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Page 10
