Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  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!

  These days, I stammer when I’m tired, when I’m nervous, or, more rarely, for no good reason at all. I still can’t tell a joke that requires “timing.” Whenever I read aloud, I sound halting and unconvincing, and all at once I’m brought back to the old red barn of my childhood, Little Women, and the stop-start fickleness of my own throat. I sometimes think about and savor the night in Larchmont when a boy I adored told me he found my stammer charming. But acceptance has helped me speak around it. When my children were young, I made up stories for them at night, in the dark, and they seemed to love them, no matter how I sounded.

  * * *

  Besides the orchard, my refuges during that summer of Little Women and the debut of my stammer were tennis and swimming. Every day I spent hours in the pool, with my little bathing cap on, trying to perfect my swan dives and jackknifes. Swimming, and the freedom I felt in the water, was maybe what I hoped my speech might someday become: smooth, fluid, without any boundaries. But the moment I remembered that I stuttered, my stutter would reappear. Still, something else happened that summer that changed things for me. My family was at the dinner table one night, and I was trying to say “Pass the butter.” For some reason I forgot to change pass to ass or “send the butter over.” My stammer became frantic, and as usual, Joey or Lucy helpfully finished my sentence for me, a gesture that made me all the more aware of my speech handicap.

  Then Mommy tossed me an idea that would change my life. “Carly, darling—try singing it.”

  Not surprisingly, I couldn’t, not at first. It felt too strange, the transition too daunting. I sat back in my chair instead, exhausted. Joey and Lucy tried to encourage me by singing “Pass the butter” to whatever melody they could think of, but that only made me feel more on the spot. My little brother Peter laughed at me, which actually made me feel relaxed.

  “Try tapping your foot,” Mommy said, and I did, halfheartedly at first, then speeding up the tempo. She went on: “Try saying ‘Pass the butter,’ but as if you were singing it. Make believe it’s a note.”

  I began hitting my thigh with a steady 4/4 beat. I had an instinctive ability to say the words on the offbeat, on a syncopation of the 4/4. The result even made it swing. From there, it was an easy step to add a little melody—C, B flat, E flat—at which point the whole table, including Sula, our cook, joined in, a heavenly choir jamming to “Pass the Butter.” We used the table and the tableware for percussion. It became a mode we naturally lapsed into when stuttering wasn’t even the catalyst.

  It was a release, though one with the slightest, most cutting edge of shame about it. At last I had a technique that worked, but I also thought, Oh my God, I’m someone who needs a technique. Still, I’ve never forgotten that moment. It was a turning point. I had a way, suddenly, of handling my stammer, at least when I was at home. Naturally, at school or at a friend’s house or inside a department store, I couldn’t sing what I wanted to say, but did that really matter? A melody now existed inside my head. It helped me. Not completely—there were years to go, unnumbered D’s and T’s and S’s to face down—but I’d just been handed a crucial new piece of ammunition. I could sing it instead. Maybe I would be a singer!

  “Pass the butter.”

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  frunzhoffa

  When I was about eleven, it became clear that my stutter was getting worse and even affecting my grades at school, since I did everything possible to avoid talking in class. Mommy set up an appointment for me with an experimental music therapist. She may have had other worries about me, too, based on something I’d told Joey and Lucy, who, in turn, had told Mommy. In retrospect, I think Mommy was handing that “something” over to a professional so she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

  Dr. Frunzhoffa was a German speech therapist with a mustache and straight gray hair parted in the middle. It was Dr. Frunzhoffa’s idea to use the melody and pulse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to help me deal with my speech impediment. At one point during our appointment, he put on a record and asked me to dance with him. The two of us stood there, a few inches apart, clasping hands, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. His heavy, scratching shoes emphasized his lack of grace as he carried out his mission of distracting me so I would answer his questions.

  Then he finally asked it (or rather sang it): “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire,” he crooned. “Has a man ever touched you down there?” Another lyric followed. “Has a man had his way with you? Tell me, tell me if it’s true?” I sang: “Daddy loves me, Mommy too, they live hap’ly in the zoo.”

  “You’re a smart one, Carly,” Dr. Frunzhoffa encouraged me in his German accent, “so you can make up ze next line. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t rhyme. Vot matters is ze truth.”

  We started all over again with the Fred and Ginger line: “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire … Has a man touched you down there?” To which I responded, “I stood so tall and he did stare / then he sat me on his chair.” Hah! I was invested in keeping the secret I was holding, believing myself clever enough to outmaneuver my therapist. Across from me, Dr. Frunzhoffa’s eyebrows were raised in ecstasy. He must have thought he’d made a brilliant discovery, piercing all my secrets as I circled around them, already learning how to compartmentalize my emotions. No doubt Frunzhoffa was reeling over his certainty that he’d discovered some new form of treatment that would rival psychoanalysis: Music unblocks the unconscious! “Zat’s it, Carly!” he exclaimed. “Now let’s stay with ze same melody! Did he touch you in ze chair?” and as Dr. Frunzhoffa made a half turn around the room, I answered him almost immediately: “Yes, he touched me right down there.”

  “Are you quite sure he touched you dere?”

  “Quite sure, quite sure, in the chair!”

  What Dr. Frunzhoffa would never know was that I would protect my secret attachment at all costs. Love: forever more light and lovely than lurid and sad, even in the face of a late-night shower stall and a boy named Billy.

  When Mommy first brought me to see Dr. Frunzhoffa,
the nights with Billy inside the pool house and the swimming pool had been going on for several summers in a row. The trouble I was in hung in the air like the single note of a violin, a note that got imperceptibly higher every second. Still, a week after my appointment with Dr. Frunzhoffa, it seemed Billy and I were safe and in the clear. I was protecting our relationship and in fact would continue taking whatever Billy wanted to give me.

  I was around seven when my “interludes” with Billy started. Like a lot of kids, I’d first discovered sex alone, and by accident. I was five, lying on my narrow five-year-old-kid’s bed. My hand slipped underneath my torso and landed three inches or so below my belly button, and I began moving my body back and forth, very gently, against my own hand.

  Nor were naked bodies unfamiliar to me. Spending Augusts on the Vineyard from the age of five on, I’d been exposed all my life to Windy Gates, a nude beach in Chilmark with high dunes, where the more “artistic” grown-ups hung out alongside children, pets, picnic baskets, and books. The scene there was both innocent and feral. Preadolescent girls and boys ran and leapt like bronzed wildlife down the powdery dunes, all bones and sinew, hair stiff from the salty waves, their most sensitive naked parts on sunlit parade. Bodies, beautiful, homely, and everything in between, bounced, jiggled, sprang, and strutted from the waves. Everyone was there, wearing nothing at all, from Joey and Lucy and their friends to my parents and their friends, with their cucumber sandwiches and martini shakers.

  You would never see me naked at Windy Gates. The idea of letting my own towel fall, and exposing myself with everyone else, felt like an unimaginable torment. I felt ashamed of something, likely something having nothing to do with my nudity. Still, when my family returned to Stamford from the Vineyard, leaving behind the warm brown bodies of Windy Gates, I was vulnerable, maybe, to some of what I’d been seeing and sensing.