How I Found My Voice

As rehearsals progressed and my stutter interrupted the flow, the girls’ reaction was somewhat less than sympathetic: “stop stuttering” they requested as if it was as simple as taking off my shoes. Helen decided not to notice it. She had most likely talked to my mother, and my mother had probably already talked to a leading psychiatrist or speech therapist to ask if this was “normal.” How should she handle a stuttering little girl?

I was not dropped nor replaced in the show, even though the timing of certain all-important lines was at stake. How could tension be built, if tension was what I was all about? The problem was only slightly less when I was off stage going about my business: playing with dolls with Jeanie and Lolly Yardley and learning to make braids in my hair with my sisters. I could talk to my dolls as long as I was alone in my room, but as soon as another flesh and blood child or grown-up came into the picture, the problem would reappear. I knew the words but there was no transportation available to them. Like a nightmare where you have to run, but have huge invisible weights attached to your ankles. I remember before the opening night curtain, hearing rumblings: ‘What if she stutters? Should we just cut her line? Finish her line for her?’ There is nothing more humiliating for a stutterer than to have their word or sentence finished for them. I didn’t have names for these fears. I just had the symptom. It was so new, and why?

Now, these apprehensions on the part of my fellow actors were confided out of my presence but not totally out of earshot, therefore I concluded that I must have an unspeakable aberration and I began a massive cover-up.

I don’t remember how the play went. Oh for the cherry tree days! Cherry trees! About a week before the first and I believe the only performance of Little Women where there was a small audience of our extended family—and for some reason, James Thurber—I remember climbing past my safe crook in my favorite cherry tree. I climbed higher than I was allowed. I climbed to a weak, brittle branch after which no branches grew. I hoped I’d fall and break my leg or my whole body and be laid up in a cast, unable to play Amy. I would have a palpably visible, unashamed handicap. I couldn’t admit that I couldn’t admit. I was six and locked up in the throat.

I ran back to my room after the performance of Little Women and cried and cried until my mother came and didn’t know what to say, but cradled me and soothed me.

This was the first awareness that life was going to be tougher than I had thought. I didn’t know that over and over again I would have to face the inability to speak with any fluidity for at least the next 10 or 12 years, through my grammar and high-school years, and then to a slightly lessening extent from then on.

For at least the grammar school and high-school years, there was merciless teasing, graduating by about eighth grade to a less beastly imitation and “behind the back of me” fun. In the early years, I was beaten into states of self-hatred and begging to go “home.” Home plate. Please let me go home. To my mother. I was assaulted, bruised, battered, and broken. I knew the answers in class and couldn’t raise my hand. I had to learn that the first devastating lesson was to learn to have the courage to face life.

My mother and I had the closest of times a child and mother can have. I would sit on her lap and we would practise the words. Any word. She would rock me and relax me. Sometimes a word would roll off my tongue, perfectly, passing the throat guards undetected and my mother would say: “See darling, you can do it!” Still there were the facial contortions accompanying the stammer that I couldn’t hide. The gods played tricks and sometimes I could say a word that started with a vowel and other times I could say words beginning with an “S” and not a “T” and other days it was just the opposite. I couldn’t say “hello” if the phone rang. I devised a technique of expelling all my breath on the other side of the room where the phone was ringing and as I was heavily exhaling, I’d move further and further to the phone and as I picked it up, I would, completely out of breath, get out an “….ello.” It was complicated. There were days I felt I held a really strong “S” in my hands and I would answer the phone assuredly and deliver a perfect: “Simon’s residence”. This of course, was absurd to the caller, but gave me a sense of job well done and I could go up and do 5 times 12 with a sense of dignity.