I was twelve, washing my mother's car in anticipation of my first trip to the beach, when I noticed the young man walking up our driveway. When he began to speak, I froze. Instantly I identified him as a stutterer, a severe stutterer, his speech characterized as much by its strained silences as by the repeated and forced sounds. I had never met anyone else like him -- like me -- in my life. The few "stutterers" I had met were folks who sometimes repeated syllables or words, folks who had no idea how it felt to block, to open one's mouth and be rendered mute for interminable seconds, even minutes.
I was terrified, excited, so anxious I was dizzy. The only clear thought I had at the moment was that I was afraid to answer him -- what if I stuttered and he imagined I was mocking him? He was asking to speak with my mother or father. I smiled, managed a few fluent words about going to get my mom, and raced to the house to find her.
Once I had found her and told her there was a man outside wanting to see her, I hid in the living room beneath the picture window, trying to hear their conversation over the pounding of my heart.
This, I knew, was big. Something was going to happen. Something had to happen. My mother would surely have to say something about the man, about his stutter . . . about my stutter. She would have to acknowledge my pain.
My speech at home was rarely as severe as it was at school. At home, I jabbered with my parents and my brother, not quite fluently, but with little inhibition. At school, however, every time I was called on during class, it was a struggle to answer. After I had answered a question or read aloud, my stomach muscles would often be as sore as if I had done a hundred sit-ups. I was often unable to speak my own name, to respond to my name during roll call, to tell the cafeteria workers whether I wanted white or chocolate milk. Nearly every time I opened my mouth to speak, I struggled. And each struggle wounded my psyche. I survived by stepping outside myself, turning off my mind, my feelings, watching from a distance until the encounter was over. The wounds didn't come so much from the struggles themselves as from the understanding that I was struggling alone. In fact, my battle wasn't even acknolwedged. Everyone was doing such a great job of not drawing attention to my stutter, as a well-meaning speech therapist had suggested, that they were behaving as if it didn't exist. So here I was choking on my own breath daily, and all these people stood around pretending I didn't need air.
My mother was one of those people. I understand she didn't know what to do, didn't know how to save me. But would it have killed her to call out to me, to speak tenderly to me once in a while, to tell me she knew I was strong enough to survive -- or, if she didn't believe that, at least to tell me she was sorry I was suffocating? She never did. When I stuttered, she didn't see me; when I was in the most pain, I became invisible.
But, surely, this man who was stuttering a more severe stutter than my mother had ever heard, would elicit a response from my mother. I saw him. He was real. He wasn't invisible at all. She couldn't pretend he was.
I waited and waited under the picture window, unable to hear much except muffled sounds set to the unsteady rhythm of that male voice and, occasionally, to the smooth cadence of my mother's. Finally, the conversation ended and my mother came into the house.
At first she said nothing.
"What did he want?" I asked, trying to hide my real question: Did you hear him? Did you see him? Do you see me?
"He was selling magazines," she began.
Here it comes, I thought. We'll get this out in the open, we'll talk about how I hate to talk, how I'm drowning and how I feel like nothing and how I think it's my fault and how, since no one seems to see what's happening to me, I've begun to believe that all of this must be in my head and that there must be something, something terribly wrong with me.
My mother continued, a look of disgust growing across her face, "I finally bought one because I just couldn't stand to listen to that anymore."
Somewhere, I saw, a girl who had been treading water stopped kicking. She let herself go, felt her body sink. The muscles of her stomach, which had been tense for some time, relaxed. Relief was instant. She opened her mouth to the depths and was consumed.
