Me Talk Pretty One Day (2 page)

“And what exactly are they, State and Carolina?”

“Colleges? Universities?”

She opened a file on her desk, saying, “Yes, you’re right. Your answers are correct, but you’re saying them incorrectly. You’re
telling me that they’re collegeth and univerthitieth, when actually they’re colleges and universities. You’re giving me a
th sound instead of a nice clear s. Can you hear the distinction between the two different sounds?”

I nodded.

“May I please have an actual answer?”

“Uh-huh.”

“ ‘Uh-huh’ is not a word.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay,” I said. “Sure, I can hear it.”

“You can hear what, the distinction? The contrast?”

“Yeah, that.”

It was the first battle of my war against the letter s, and I was determined to dig my foxhole before the sun went down. According
to Agent Samson, a “state certified speech therapist,” my s was sibilate, meaning that I lisped. This was not news to me.

“Our goal is to work together until eventually you can speak correctly,” Agent Samson said. She made a great show of enunciating
her own sparkling s’s, and the effect was profoundly irritating. “I’m trying to help you, but the longer you play these little
games the longer this is going to take.”

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for
whom the word pen had two syllables. Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were
ready — so who was she to advise me on anything? Over the coming years I would find a crack in each of the therapists sent
to train what Miss Samson now defined as my lazy tongue. “That’s its problem,” she said. “It’s just plain lazy.”

My sisters Amy and Gretchen were, at the time, undergoing therapy for their lazy eyes, while my older sister, Lisa, had been
born with a lazy leg that had refused to grow at the same rate as its twin. She’d worn a corrective brace for the first two
years of her life, and wherever she roamed she left a trail of scratch marks in the soft pine floor. I liked the idea that
a part of one’s body might be thought of as lazy — not thoughtless or hostile, just unwilling to extend itself for the betterment
of the team. My father often accused my mother of having a lazy mind, while she in turn accused him of having a lazy index
finger, unable to dial the phone when he knew damn well he was going to be late.

My therapy sessions were scheduled for every Thursday at 2:30, and with the exception of my mother, I discussed them with
no one. The word therapy suggested a profound failure on my part. Mental patients had therapy. Normal people did not. I didn’t
see my sessions as the sort of thing that one would want to advertise, but as my teacher liked to say, “I guess it takes all
kinds.” Whereas my goal was to keep it a secret, hers was to inform the entire class. If I got up from my seat at 2:25, she’d
say, “Sit back down, David. You’ve still got five minutes before your speech therapy session.” If I remained seated until
2:27, she’d say, “David, don’t forget you have a speech therapy session at two-thirty.” On the days I was absent, I imagined
she addressed the room, saying, “David’s not here today but if he were, he’d have a speech therapy session at two-thirty.”

My sessions varied from week to week. Sometimes I’d spend the half hour parroting whatever Agent Samson had to say. We’d occasionally
pass the time examining charts on tongue position or reading childish s-laden texts recounting the adventures of seals or
settlers named Sassy or Samuel. On the worst of days she’d haul out a tape recorder and show me just how much progress I was
failing to make.

“My speech therapist’s name is Miss Chrissy Samson.” She’d hand me the microphone and lean back with her arms crossed. “Go
ahead, say it. I want you to hear what you sound like.”

She was in love with the sound of her own name and seemed to view my speech impediment as a personal assault. If I wanted
to spend the rest of my life as David Thedarith, then so be it. She, however, was going to be called Miss Chrissy Samson.
Had her name included no s’s, she probably would have bypassed a career in therapy and devoted herself to yanking out healthy
molars or performing unwanted clitoridectomies on the schoolgirls of Africa. Such was her personality.

“Oh, come on,” my mother would say. “I’m sure she’s not that bad. Give her a break. The girl’s just trying to do her job.”

I was a few minutes early one week and entered the office to find Agent Samson doing her job on Garth Barclay, a slight, kittenish
boy I’d met back in the fourth grade. “You may wait outside in the hallway until it is your turn,” she told me. A week or
two later my session was interrupted by mincing Steve Bixler, who popped his head in the door and announced that his parents
were taking him out of town for a long weekend, meaning that he would miss his regular Friday session. “Thorry about that,”
he said.

I started keeping watch over the speech therapy door, taking note of who came and went. Had I seen one popular student leaving
the office, I could have believed my mother and viewed my lisp as the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. Unfortunately,
I saw no popular students. Chuck Coggins, Sam Shelton, Louis Delucca: obviously, there was some connection between a sibilate
s and a complete lack of interest in the State versus Carolina issue.

None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains.
“You don’t want to be doing that,” the men in our families would say. “That’s a girl thing.” Baking scones and cupcakes for
the school janitors, watching
Guiding Light
with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing.
In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of
Cosmopolitan
were topped with an unread issue of
Boy’s Life
or
Sports Illustrated
, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received. When asked
what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. “A policeman
or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.” Symptoms were feigned, and our mothers wrote notes excusing
our absences on the day of the intramural softball tournament. Brian had a stomach virus or Ted suffered from that twenty-four-hour
bug that seemed to be going around.

“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along
the lines of
SPEECH THERAPY LAB
, though a more appropriate marker would have read
FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA
. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues. At the beginning of the school year,
while we were congratulating ourselves on successfully passing for normal, Agent Samson was taking names as our assembled
teachers raised their hands, saying, “I’ve got one in my homeroom,” and “There are two in my fourth-period math class.” Were
they also able to spot the future drunks and depressives? Did they hope that by eliminating our lisps, they might set us on
a different path, or were they trying to prepare us for future stage and choral careers?

Miss Samson instructed me, when forming an s, to position the tip of my tongue against the rear of my top teeth, right up
against the gum line. The effect produced a sound not unlike that of a tire releasing air. It was awkward and strange-sounding,
and elicited much more attention than the original lisp. I failed to see the hissy s as a solution to the problem and continued
to talk normally, at least at home, where my lazy tongue fell upon equally lazy ears. At school, where every teacher was a
potential spy, I tried to avoid an s sound whenever possible. “Yes,” became “correct,” or a military “affirmative.” “Please,”
became “with your kind permission,” and questions were pleaded rather than asked. After a few weeks of what she called “endless
pestering” and what I called “repeated badgering,” my mother bought me a pocket thesaurus, which provided me with s-free alternatives
to just about everything. I consulted the book both at home in my room and at the daily learning academy other people called
our school. Agent Samson was not amused when I began referring to her as an articulation coach, but the majority of my teachers
were delighted. “What a nice vocabulary,” they said. “My goodness, such big words!”

Plurals presented a considerable problem, but I worked around them as best I could; “rivers,” for example, became either “a
river or two” or “many a river.” Possessives were a similar headache, and it was easier to say nothing than to announce that
the left-hand and the right-hand glove of Janet had fallen to the floor. After all the compliments I had received on my improved
vocabulary, it seemed prudent to lie low and keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was trying to be a pet of
the teacher.

When I first began my speech therapy, I worried that the Agent Samson plan might work for everyone but me, that the other
boys might strengthen their lazy tongues, turn their lives around, and leave me stranded. Luckily my fears were never realized.
Despite the woman’s best efforts, no one seemed to make any significant improvement. The only difference was that we were
all a little quieter. Thanks to Agent Samson’s tape recorder, I, along with the others, now had a clear sense of what I actually
sounded like. There was the lisp, of course, but more troubling was my voice itself, with its excitable tone and high, girlish
pitch. I’d hear myself ordering lunch in the cafeteria, and the sound would turn my stomach. How could anyone stand to listen
to me? Whereas those around me might grow up to be lawyers or movie stars, my only option was to take a vow of silence and
become a monk. My former classmates would call the abbey, wondering how I was doing, and the priest would answer the phone.
“You can’t talk to him!” he’d say. “Why, Brother David hasn’t spoken to anyone in thirty-five years!”

“Oh, relax,” my mother said. “Your voice will change eventually.”

“And what if it doesn’t?”

She shuddered. “Don’t be so morbid.”

It turned out that Agent Samson was something along the lines of a circuit-court speech therapist. She spent four months at
our school and then moved on to another. Our last meeting was held the day before school let out for Christmas. My classrooms
were all decorated, the halls — everything but her office, which remained as bare as ever. I was expecting a regular half
hour of Sassy the seal and was delighted to find her packing up her tape recorder.

“I thought that this afternoon we might let loose and have a party, you and I. How does that sound?” She reached into her
desk drawer and withdrew a festive tin of cookies. “Here, have one. I made them myself from scratch and, boy, was it a mess!
Do you ever make cookies?”

I lied, saying that no, I never had.

“Well, it’s hard work,” she said. “Especially if you don’t have a mixer.”

It was unlike Agent Samson to speak so casually, and awkward to sit in the hot little room, pretending to have a normal conversation.

“So,” she said, “what are your plans for the holidays?”

“Well, I usually remain here and, you know, open a gift from my family.”

“Only one?” she asked.

“Maybe eight or ten.”

“Never six or seven?”

“Rarely,” I said.

“And what do you do on December thirty-first, New Year’s Eve?”

“On the final day of the year we take down the pine tree in our living room and eat marine life.”

“You’re pretty good at avoiding those s’s,” she said. “I have to hand it to you, you’re tougher than most.”

I thought she would continue trying to trip me up, but instead she talked about her own holiday plans. “It’s pretty hard with
my fiancé in Vietnam,” she said. “Last year we went up to see his folks in Roanoke, but this year I’ll spend Christmas with
my grandmother outside of Asheville. My parents will come, and we’ll all try our best to have a good time. I’ll eat some turkey
and go to church, and then, the next day, a friend and I will drive down to Jacksonville to watch Florida play Tennessee in
the Gator Bowl.”

I couldn’t imagine anything worse than driving down to Florida to watch a football game, but I pretended to be impressed.
“Wow, that ought to be eventful.”

“I was in Memphis last year when NC State whooped Georgia fourteen to seven in the Liberty Bowl,” she said. “And next year,
I don’t care who’s playing, but I want to be sitting front-row center at the Tangerine Bowl. Have you ever been to Orlando?
It’s a super fun place. If my future husband can find a job in his field, we’re hoping to move down there within a year or
two. Me living in Florida. I bet that would make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t quite know how to respond. Who was this college bowl fanatic with no mixer and a fiancé in Vietnam, and why had she
taken so long to reveal herself? Here I’d thought of her as a cold-blooded agent when she was really nothing but a slightly
dopey, inexperienced speech teacher. She wasn’t a bad person, Miss Samson, but her timing was off. She should have acted friendly
at the beginning of the year instead of waiting until now, when all I could do was feel sorry for her.

“I tried my best to work with you and the others, but sometimes a person’s best just isn’t good enough.” She took another
cookie and turned it over in her hands. “I really wanted to prove myself and make a difference in people’s lives, but it’s
hard to do your job when you’re met with so much resistance. My students don’t like me, and I guess that’s just the way it
is. What can I say? As a speech teacher, I’m a complete failure.”

She moved her hands toward her face, and I worried that she might start to cry. “Hey, look,” I said. “I’m thorry.”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “I got you.” She laughed much more than she needed to and was still at it when she signed the form recommending
me for the following year’s speech therapy program. “Thorry, indeed. You’ve got some work ahead of you, mister.”