by Dave Reidy
She was still standing over me. I stood up to shake Janice’s hand. And as I walked out of her office, I thought, That’s it. Simon will either stop stuttering on his own, or he will stutter his entire life, like his father has. And his little brother will talk circles around him at home, at school, everywhere they go together, until one or both of them decide they will not go anywhere together anymore.
This stutter will cut Simon off from the whole world.
•••
THAT SAME SUMMER, I enrolled Simon in real music lessons. My hope was that music was a kind of communication he might still master.
Frank had been right about one thing: we didn’t have a piano, and we couldn’t afford one. At the supermarket, I saw a posted ad for guitar lessons. I imagined Simon playing the guitar and smiled, but my face fell when I envisioned him trying to sing along with his playing and gagging on a song’s first word. So I ruled out guitar. I wanted music to be Simon’s refuge from any expectation he would use his voice. I wanted an instrument he would have to put in his mouth.
Mr. Shaughnessy, the band director at Leyton High, offered private clarinet lessons. For the same forty-five dollars per week I’d spent on speech lessons, I secured a rental clarinet and lunch-hour lessons twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday. Thumbing through a magazine in Mr. Shaughnessy’s living room, I’d listen while Simon played airy, squeaky notes in the studio across the foyer. Every question Mr. Shaughnessy asked Simon could be answered with a nod or a headshake, and doing as the teacher instructed required no words, only music. Simon could not yet play the clarinet, but the lessons were achieving some of what I’d hoped they would.
At the end of every lesson, Mr. Shaughnessy would emerge from his studio smiling, but looking slightly exasperated. Simon was not a natural.
“He needs to practice every day,” Mr. Shaughnessy would say.
“I’ll make sure he does,” I’d answer. “Thank you.”
Then I’d take Simon home.
With the frame of our Ford four-door rattling as the engine idled in our side yard, I would remind Simon that he needed to practice his scales for at least an hour before I returned home from work.
“O— o— Okay,” he would say.
He would practice both Saturday and Sunday—I know, because I’d sit with him in his room while he did. Weekdays were a different story. My mother’s addiction to soap operas and game shows made it easy for her to watch television-obsessed Connor, but Simon was left to his own devices.
Upon arriving home, I’d go straight to Simon’s room. Seeing me at his bedroom door, Simon would turn the volume of his radio down just slightly—not a meaningless courtesy, coming from a six-year-old.
“Did you do your scales?” I would ask.
Yes, Simon would nod.
“For a full hour?”
Simon would nod again.
“Good. And how did it go?”
“F— f— fine,” he would say.
I believed him. What else could I do? Once, I asked my mother as she was leaving if Simon had practiced his clarinet.
“His what?”
“His clarinet.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sure he did.”
That meant she had no idea if he had or not.
There was only one weekday I knew for certain that Simon had practiced. I had gone grocery shopping and had the oil changed in our car after work. By the time I got home, Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Connor spoil his appetite with a plate of cookies.
“I th— th— thought S— Simon was t— taking p— p— piano lessons,” Frank said to me.
“He didn’t take to the piano,” I said.
“H— he’s not t— taking to th— this, either. S— s— sounds terrible.”
Connor, chewing another cookie, laughed. “You’re funny, Daddy.”
Frank smiled with the kind of pride a grown man should never take in a compliment from a four-year-old.
“He’s learning,” I said. “You should be proud of him. He’s trying to improve himself.”
I hoped Frank heard my suggestion that he’d stopped trying to get better at anything a long time ago. I was thinking only about myself—what I had hoped for and stopped hoping for in married life—when I said that to Frank. If I’d been thinking about Simon, I might not have said anything. Telling a man that he doesn’t stack up to his son does the son no favors.
It was after work on a Thursday in the middle of August, the day after one of Simon’s lessons, when I got into my car after work and saw Simon’s clarinet case sticking out from underneath the passenger seat. I pulled the case out from under the seat and opened it. Each piece of the instrument was nestled into the velveteen-lined mold that matched its shape.
When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s bedroom door and opened it, keeping the clarinet case behind the wall, out of his sight.
He was sitting on the bed with his clock radio tuned to some commercial or other. He turned the volume down and stared at me.
“Hi, Simon,” I said.
He waved.
“How are you?”
He nodded, which meant, Good.
I nodded back and raised my chin and eyebrows, asking him to say the word.
“G— g— good.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Did you do your scales?”
Yes, he nodded.
“For a full hour?”
Simon nodded again.
I brought the clarinet case into the room. Simon only blinked. It seemed that lying to me about his practicing had become so routine that he had gotten used to the idea that he would be caught in the lie, eventually. And in that moment, I realized that all my suppositions about my son’s diligence and willingness to better himself were wishful thinking. All I knew for certain was that I’d been wasting my Monday and Wednesday lunch hours and forty-five dollars a week, and that Simon, right then, looked very much like his father.
I pulled the radio out of his hands and turned it off. The look on Simon’s face was one I might have expected to see if I strangled a rabbit before his eyes. He sat up on his knees and reached for the radio. I held it away from him, over the foot of the bed.
“You’ve been lying to me, Simon.”
“M— Mom—” he said.
But I wasn’t finished, and this time, I decided, Simon would wait for me to finish speaking.
“I’ve been driving you all over town on my lunch hour for weeks! Do you know how upsetting it is to find out you’re not practicing? So you can listen to commercials?”
I held up the radio in front of him. Simon eyed it. I think he thought I was going to take it away from him. I let him believe that I would.
“You could have music, Simon!” I said. “Music! You could make music speak for you if you would practice!”
Then, like a hungry cottonmouth, Simon lunged toward the radio with his entire body. I pulled the radio away from him, and Simon’s momentum carried him over the foot of the bed. I dropped the radio and grabbed for him, but only changed the angle of his fall for the worse. His shoulder and head hit the floor with a thud that made the room shudder, and his thin neck bent strangely to one side as it bore his weight for an agonizing instant. When he came to rest on his back, Simon looked up at the ceiling. By the time he let out his first cry, with his mouth and eyes wide open, I was on the floor, holding him in my arms. I stroked Simon’s head and rocked him back and forth while he waited for the pain and fear to go away.
“Is he okay?”
Connor’s question was barely audible over Simon’s moans and my softly spoken comforts. Connor stood in the doorway, nervously poking the corner of his closed mouth with his finger. The sight of his big brother crying on the ground had robbed my four-year-old boy of his bold tongue.
“Simon fell off the bed,” I said, reassuring the boys and myself. “He had a fright, but he’s fine now.”
Connor said nothing.
“Go back to the living room now and watch TV,” I said. “We’ll
be out in a minute.”
When he had stopped crying, Simon sat up and scooted out of my arms. Sitting on the floor, he looked at me, waiting for me to hand down some punishment or leave. When I did neither thing, he picked up his radio and turned it on. The plug had been pulled out of the wall in the commotion, but the batteries I’d loaded into the black plastic underbelly months ago, at Simon’s request, powered the radio’s single speaker. Simon drew the tuner past music and static until he found a speaking voice, a woman’s. She told me how hard it is to be the working mother of an infant, and how much easier my life would be if I’d only use her same brand of formula. I pictured a woman shaking her head with a sympathy she didn’t really feel, and her face breaking into an empty smile.
“M— M— Mom,” Simon said.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Th— this is m— myoo— music.”
The commercial was not music. It was chattering nonsense. But I buried this opinion deep inside me, alongside the very next thought I’d had: If there is any music in this, Simon, it’s a kind of music you’ll never make.
•••
AFTER SIMON GAVE up on the clarinet, I focused my energy on something I could control. My boys would never be equal in every way that mattered, but I could do everything in my power to show them they were equal in my love.
For example: if, at dinner on Monday, I asked Simon about his day before asking Connor about his own, I made sure to ask Connor the same question first on Tuesday evening. If I read a book to Connor, I’d listen to the radio with Simon for the same number of minutes I’d spent reading. Chores were doled out in pairs—one for Simon, one for Connor—and if one boy’s chore proved easier than the other’s, he was made to help his brother finish his job.
“You start together,” I’d say, “and you end together.”
All of this came naturally because I loved my boys equally. But even my demonstrations of equal love would join speech therapy and clarinet lessons on my list of failures.
Connor’s fifth birthday was August 25th, two weeks after Simon’s seventh. That night, when the cake plates and empty milk glasses had been cleared away, I sat the boys down at the kitchen table to show them two receipts. The first was for the gift we’d just given to Connor, a year’s subscription to TV Guide. The second was for the Matchbox cars Simon had received as his present—what do you get the boy who already has all he wants in a radio older than he is?
I pointed to the total on each thin, wrinkled piece of paper.
“Do you see these numbers?”
Connor and Simon knelt in their chairs and leaned in for a closer look.
“Connor’s birthday gift cost fifteen dollars and thirty-two cents,” I said. “Simon’s birthday gift, including tax, cost fifteen dollars and thirty-four cents.”
The boys looked up at me, seeming confused about what to make of the numbers.
“I want you to see that, although your gifts are different, your father and I spent the same on each of you for your birthdays. Neither gift was more expensive than the other.”
That was good enough for Connor. “Okay!” he said, sliding off his chair. “Can I go watch TV now, Mommy?”
“Yes, you may,” I said.
Having made my point, I went back to the sink, picked up the gray sponge, and dipped my hands into the dishwater, which was now lukewarm. It was another minute or so before I saw that Simon was still at the table, staring at the receipts.
“What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.
Simon glanced in my direction without meeting my eye.
I dried my hands on the towel hanging over the oven-door handle and sat next to Simon, leaning forward until my head was on the same level as his. “Tell me.”
With his eyes still on the receipts, Simon licked his lips. “W— w— w— we’re n— not th— the same.”
“Who isn’t the same?”
“M— me and Connor.”
I tilted my head and smiled. “Honey,” I said over a laugh, “everyone is different from everyone else. And the ways that you and Connor are different don’t matter to me.”
It was this afterthought of a phrase—“to me”—that betrayed the truth about the differences between Simon and Connor, a truth that Simon seemed to confirm for himself as he stared right through me. The ways in which Simon and Connor were different would matter very much. They mattered already. And my attempt to minimize the truth had only proven to Simon that his mother’s love—impartial though it was—had no power to change it.
•••
Through it all, I tried to show Simon that he was loveable, even with his stutter. Part of the way I showed this was by trying to love Simon’s father.
Frank responded by refusing the little courtesies I paid him in front of Simon, from the cream I offered to pour in his coffee to the kisses I tried to plant on his cheek before he left for work. And when he and I were alone, he ignored me. In short, Frank proved to me that his gut feeling had been right all along: he didn’t deserve my love. Even so, I kept trying to love Frank. I refused to let Simon believe that inheriting his father’s stutter meant that Simon, too, was unworthy of love and incapable of loving as he should.
I might have been able to do without Frank’s love if he’d loved Simon as well as I wanted him to. But their shared stutter came between them. Frank saw too much of himself in Simon. When he stuttered, Simon could not help but hold up a mirror to his father. Because he had never really liked himself, Frank could not love Simon enough. He couldn’t even see Simon’s boyish adoration for the blessing it was.
Frank courted Connor’s love in a way he had never courted mine. Connor was still four when I first understood how Frank saw him: as his belated chance to win over the fast-talking boys who’d teased Frank when we were at Leyton Elementary and Leyton High, boys who were now the kings and court jesters of the union hall and the bar in town and the break room at the Caterpillar plant. While I plotted to find speech therapy for Simon, Frank refashioned himself from a quiet, hard-working loner into a sitcom stereotype. He made a throne of his easy chair and sat Connor alongside him, drinking beer and barking his disapproval at the televised mistakes of men who were ten times the ballplayer he’d ever been. Frank made himself worthy of Connor’s love, in his own mind, by ensuring that the man Connor loved was hardly recognizable, to himself or anyone else, as the Frank we knew. As his father transformed before his eyes, Simon was made to feel his love was not enough. And because I had known Frank as the wounded, vulnerable stutterer he was, my love was discounted even as it died.
•••
THE OCTOBER AFTER he turned seven, Simon went completely silent.
At first, I thought he might still have been recovering from a sore throat that had kept him out of school the past Friday. By Wednesday of the following week, I supposed that Simon was just tired of hearing his stuttered sentences finished by his little brother. But Wednesday night, at dinner, I noticed Simon staring across our Formica table at his father with wet, wide-open eyes. His food was untouched, but the muscles of Simon’s jaw were flexed in front of his ears. Frank fixed his eyes on his plate, which he guarded with his elbows as if someone might try to stab his half-eaten slice of meatloaf and run off with it. While asking Connor various questions about his day at school, I glanced at Frank several more times. He never met Simon’s glare.
I knew then that something had happened between Simon and his father, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t believe that asking either Frank or Simon about it would do anyone any good. So I waited and listened. And Simon stayed silent.
On Thursday, I got a call from Simon’s teacher, Ms. Wells.
“I’m sorry to bother you at work,” she said, without sounding the least bit sorry.
Speaking to Ms. Wells, who was probably ten years older than me, I had to fight the feeling that I was seven again and speaking to my own teacher.
“Oh, not at all,” I said. “Is anything wrong?”
“
I’m calling about Simon,” Ms. Wells said. “He hasn’t been speaking all week.”
“Well,” I said, sighing, “I appreciate you telling me. Simon hasn’t said a word at home, either.”
“He hasn’t,” she said.
“No.”
“Is he ill?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, Mrs. Davies, as you surely know, dealing with Simon’s stutter requires patience from me and his classmates, and my patience is running out. This silence amounts to insubordination. It is disrupting my classroom.”
My mouth hung open until I felt the heat rising in my face. “I’m sure this has been very hard for you.”
“It has, yes,” Ms. Wells said. “And I’m concerned for Simon, of course.”
“Oh, your concern for Simon is coming through loud and clear.”
“Well,” she said, clipping the word. “I’ve said what I called to say.”
“All right, then.”
I wallowed in my irritation with that silly, self-important witch for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, though, I worried only for Simon.
We sat down, the four of us, to a dinner of fish sticks and mashed potatoes. While Connor jabbered away about his playground adventures, Simon baited Frank with his eyes, and Frank ignored the baiting, looking only at Connor.
When the boys had gone to bed, I walked over to the television and turned the volume all the way down.
Reclining in his chair, the balls of his feet aimed up at me, Frank said, “W— w— w— what i— is it?”
His four attempts at “what” reminded me that Frank was smashed—his stutter got worse when he drank—but I couldn’t wait for him to sober up.
“Simon isn’t speaking,” I said.
I’d been wondering if Frank would pretend not to notice—he didn’t. But he tried dismissing my concern with a wave of his hand.
When he got uncomfortable with my standing there, staring at him, demanding an explanation, Frank said, “I— I— I— d— did the s— same th— th— thing w— when I was a kid. He— he— he’ll s— s— snap out of it.”