Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ Sometimes he became so exercised that he leapt up from his chair and strode around, employing gestures that recalled the elocutionary training of which he was so proud. (He often mentioned that he had won a prize in school for his recitation of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” a conversational turn that I dreaded, for it invariably progressed from pleasurable reminiscence to lamentation that such as he should have spawned such as I—i.e., a tongue-tied nincompoop.)

      When he heard of a new gadget, however dubious or impractical, nothing would stop him from placing an order, and when it came in the mail he would drop everything to read any manuals included with it, to assemble it if necessary, to try it out, and then to show it off. Alas, he did not have any friends to show it to, so he would summon his secretary, the foreman of his factory, and the more trusted and responsible of his skilled craftsmen, and they would all troop into the parlor and sit very silently and awkwardly on our most uncomfortable chairs while my mother poured tea and my father stalked around the device, waiting irritably for her to finish. It was plain to me that these visitors felt uncomfortable in our house and considered the occasion an extension of their work duties rather than a social event, but my father grew flushed and merry and loud and exaggeratedly colloquial in his speech as if to make his low company feel at home (though they themselves were invariably restrained and punctilious in their diction) and reminisced about the event afterward as though it had been a great success. Then he would spend several days in composing a long letter to the manufacturers giving his opinion of the device and suggestions for its improvement and often spoke as if the manufacturers waited eagerly for his letters and were very grateful for his insights and as if he had some sort of official role in the creative process and was indeed practically a co-creator. When I was very young I assumed that this was true and it made me think my father a very important fellow, but later I understood that it was all moonshine and pictured the manufacturers laughing over the letters with which he took such pains or simply dropping them into the trash unread.

      I do not remember all the items he purchased. But here are some that I still possess:

      An Automatic Signal Buoy;

      An Arithmometer, or calculating machine;

      A Magneto-Electric Bell Apparatus;

      A Pocket Telegraph, or portable Morse instrument;

      A Scott’s Electric Hair Brush;

      A Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Shock Therapy Machine.

      My father often spoke of our world as rendered limitless by the ever-extending reach of practical science, and this had its effect on me, for I will not allow death to be an end. But while my father’s scientific cast of mind and the ideas and devices that he brought into the house were a great influence on my later work, I hold them to blame for many tribulations. Although my father was a serial enthusiast who could usually be trusted to move on from any given hobby within a few months, my stutter was a continual vexation and a reminder to him of the unfinished project that was my speech, and so from the pages of his science magazines came an endless succession of ways to torture my mouth: the syllabic exercises of M. Colobat, regulated by his muthonome or orthophonic lyre (a sort of metronome); exercises for the lips, the tongue, the breath; tongue-depressing plates, jaw-spreading pads, obstructions of various kinds—cruel descendants of Demosthenes’ pebbles—like the little gold fork of M. Itard, worn “in the concavity of the alveolary arcade of the inferior jawbone,” i.e., under the tongue; leather collars that buckled around my neck and pressed firmly against my larynx; metal plates that strapped to my teeth and projected between my lips; and a sort of whistle that was held against my palate by a sharp point digging into my tongue. It goes without saying that none of these devices fulfilled their promises to “restore the patient’s usefulness to Society by opening the Floodgates to cogent and mellifluous Speech.”

      I was supposed to be grateful for the trouble my father took over me and to let any setbacks inspire me to greater exertions, so my mother was not permitted to comfort me when I wept. “You have done enough harm, Madam!” he would cry, for my father considered my stutter a sign of the weakness in the maternal line, and never ceased blaming himself for the “temporary venereal intoxication” that had resulted in the “unscientific” and “counter-evolutionary” union of a man of his elevated forebears with a “moral imbecile” from a “line of shopkeepers and petty criminals.” He felt it his duty to correct for the evil effects of his ill-advised marriage on his social class, so when the pages of his monthlies offered no new quackery to inflict on me, he exercised his own ingenuity, pouring all his balked ambition as an inventor into designing novel devices for me to try. No doubt he also calculated that if he could cure stuttering where others had (so obviously) failed, he would make his name.

      Never had a mouth been so stretched, cut, prodded, plungered, braced, cantilevered, wedged, winched, pinched—so Scientific Americaned—so Popular Scienced. These periodicals were possessed of wonderfully detailed etchings of docks, and decks, and dykes, where somber, beautiful, flawlessly geometrical machines enjoyed the anonymous attentions of stiff, tidy men with tapering symmetrical limbs. In my father’s fancy and mine, such was or would be my mouth: a site of modern industry, well-regulated and productive, rolling forth (conveyed by belts and pulleys) a serene procession of die-cut, stainless-steel, copper-bottomed sentiments, accompanied by appropriate gestures.

      When my father fitted me with his contraptions—the only time he touched me except to punish me—his fingers were not ungentle, and I could sometimes mistake the optimism shining in his eyes for tenderness. Even now I ask myself, was there not, perhaps, under his dissatisfaction with me, a love that could be glimpsed in those moments alone, as mute and enduring as an endolith?

      Then I answer, No.

      But in those moments during which I sat, given over to his fiddling, my body softened and a strange knowingness went up my spine. “Sit up strai—damn it!” (A spring snapped loose.) “Open, wider, not so wide, clench your teeth, relax, draw back your lips here, no, here, no, you stupid girl, here.” I complied, with something almost like eagerness, and an optimism of my own. This time, surely, it would work. The intensity of our shared wanting would make it work. I felt my coming fluency as a physical pressure at the root of my tongue, begging for release.

      It never came. My father’s contrivances were beset with misadventures: A spring-loaded cheek-stretcher came uncocked and shot out of my mouth to ricochet around the dining room. A gutta-percha bladder shipped its anchor when I inhaled and lodged in my windpipe, nearly asphyxiating me. A tiny dumbbell that I was, under his stern eye, rolling forward and backward on my tongue, was accidentally swallowed, after which for days I had to bring him the chamber pot that received my excrements and stand at attention while he dissected them with little metal rods like chopsticks. (The object never turned up; I suppose it is inside me still, lodged in my blind gut and slowly poisoning me, for it was made of lead.) For these mischances he naturally blamed me. Perhaps in some recess of his conscience he knew better, however, for he abandoned the most disastrous conceptions without retrial. Though not, I should say, without punishing me as “slothful, obstinate, and recidivistic,” bringing down the ruler once per adjective.

      Then he looks at the white-edged marks on my palm and his face contorts. “I have ruined my life, I will never amount to anything.”

      A strange thing for the most important man in Cheesehill to say, but I know what he means. “Don’t cry, Father,” I say kindly, “Someday one of your inventions will work.”

      He raises the ruler again.

      Sometimes I looked at myself in the maculated mirror above my mother’s dressing table and marveled at my ordinary looks, for my mouth felt bigger, if possible, than the head it was set in, and as violently resistant to socialization as a kraken, strapped to my face in place of a mouth and enjoined to speak.

      That СКАЧАТЬ