How I Found My Voice

I didn’t know about other kids’ relative struggles and annihilations and batterings. I became Me and only Me and terrified Me. I kept a diary: “Please I pray that when I have to read aloud in class I won’t ‘famul.’ This naturally would confuse everybody who might wriggle to the depths of my mattress with intentions of discovering my deepest and darkest secret fear. But I also had an index in the back of my diary that explained that famul meant stutter of stammer. Later on in my diary there were lots of code words about sexual matters. Little did I imagine that people were intelligent and would deduce that there might be an index in a book or a diary. Also, I can’t believe I was so self-centered as to imagine anyone would be interested. Hiding was my game. Discovery, my shame.

Those embarrassed years later, my boyfriend, Nick, who loved me, told me one night by a lake in Larchmont, New York, that he loved my stammer (which through a series of trials and errors had been reduced a little). We were young loves. He was a freshman at Harvard and I, sophomore at Riverdale Country School for Girls. After putting it off for six months at least, I accepted an invitation to eat at his parents’ house in the suburbs and very near to Riverdale, where I lived. Meeting someone’s parents when you are of tender stuttering years is definitely going into the den. My mother didn’t even think to coach, prepare, or warn me. How could she? She didn’t know that Mrs. Delbanco, a fiercely intelligent, dark-haired German woman who had raised three brilliant little boys, Tom, Nick, and Andy, would be inspecting me from the line of my stockings to the line of the grammar of my sentences. She was unflinchingly concentrated on me and still had concentration to spare for everything else including her perfect roses which grew tall all over the backyard. Peripheral vision and incisive criticism all in one low to the ground, rosy-cheeked, smart as you please Barbara Delbanco. Nick was her Buddha baby. All three Delbanco boys have not let Barbara nor Kurt, their father, down. They all became eminent. But that would be later. That evening in the peachy glow of back porch terror, she sat me next to her and inspected me like the head of the medical staff. I utilized all of the tricks I had taught myself regarding speech: word exchanges, looking away during a facial contortion, deferring to Nick to answer the question addressed to me and occasionally spewing out the worst of what I had to offer: the hooded eyes going up in the head, the stiff lips, the frozen jaw. There were one or two of those moments, but naturally they didn’t pass the observant eye of Barbara Delbanco. Had they passed by Nick?

After dinner, I said I had to go home and write a paper and therefore truncated the introduction with an excuse that made me look responsible. “Of course of course, Carly. We loved meeting you.” Andy asked if I could go up into his room and see a game called “Go” that he had just acquired and then Nick and I made our entrance out of the front door into the clear and benevolent twilight of the Larchmont evening. I sat rigidly next to him and he caught my tension. He took a turn to the pond and stopped, got out of the car and put the hood down. When he got back in beside me, I was already slumped in the seat.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, maybe just tired. What an experience.”

“You know my mother, on our way out when you were in Andy’s room, she said she thought she detected a stammer in your speech pattern. I said, yes, I had gotten used to it in you.”

Tears were so ready and came first into my closed eyes and then spilled vividly on my upturned—by him—cheeks.

I said: “I know, I do stammer. I’m so embarrassed. I’m so sorry…”