Boys in the Trees: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

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