Boys in the Trees: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

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
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    W hen 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