American Pastoral (Nathan Zuckerman)

by Philip Roth

  Now it was Audrey Hepburn. Every newspaper and magazine she could get hold of she combed for the film star's photograph or name. Even movie timetables—"Breakfast at Tiffany's, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10"_were clipped from the newspaper after dinner and pasted in her Audrey Hepburn scrapbook. For months she went in and out of pretending to be gaminish instead of herself, daintily walking to her room like a wood sprite, smiling with meaningfully coy eyes into every reflecting surface, laughing what they call an "infectious" laugh whenever her father said a word. She bought the soundtrack from Breakfast at Tiffany's and played it in her bedroom for hours. He could hear her in there singing "Moon River" in the charming way that Audrey Hepburn did, and absolutely fluently—and so, however ostentatious and singularly self-conscious was the shameless playacting, nobody in the house ever indicated that it was tiresome, let alone ludicrous, an improbable dream of purification that had taken possession of her. If Audrey Hepburn could help her shut down just a little of the stuttering, then let her go on ludicrously pretending, a girl blessed with golden hair and a logical mind and a high IQ and an adultlike sense of humor even about herself, blessed with long, slender limbs and a wealthy family and her own brand of dogged persistence—with everything except fluency. Security, health, love, every advantage imaginable—missing only was the ability to order a hamburger without humiliating herself.

  How hard she tried! Two afternoons she went to ballet class after school and two afternoons Dawn drove her to Morristown to see a speech therapist. On Saturday she got up early, made her own breakfast, and then bicycled the five hilly miles into Old Rimrock village to the tiny office of the local circuit-riding psychiatrist, who had a slant that made the Swede furious when he began to see Merry's struggle getting worse rather than better. The psychiatrist got Merry thinking that the stutter was a choice she made, a way of being special that she had chosen and then locked into when she realized how well it worked. The psychiatrist asked her, "How do you think your father would feel about you if you didn't stutter? How do you think your mother would feel?" He asked her, "Is there anything good that stuttering brings you?" The Swede did not understand how it was going to help the child to make her feel responsible for something she simply could not do, and so he went to see the man. And by the time he left he wanted to kill him.

  It seemed that the etiology of Merry's problem had largely to do with her having such good-looking and successful parents. As best the Swede could follow what he was hearing, her parental good fortune was just too much for Merry, and so, to withdraw from the competition with her mother, to get her mother to hover over and focus on her and eventually climb the walls—and, in addition, to win the father away from the beautiful mother—she chose to stigmatize herself with a severe stutter, thereby manipulating everyone from a point of seeming weakness. "But Merry is made miserable by her stutter," the Swede reminded him. "That's why we brought her to see you." "The benefits may far outweigh the penalties." For the moment, the Swede couldn't understand what the doctor was explaining and replied, "But, no, no—watching her stutter is killing my wife." "Maybe, for Merry, that's one of the benefits. She is an extremely bright and manipulative child. If she weren't, you wouldn't be so angry with me because I'm telling you that stuttering can be an extremely manipulative, an extremely useful, if not even a vindictive type of behavior." He hates me, thought the Swede. It's all because of the way I look. Hates me because of the way Dawn looks. He's obsessed with our looks. That's why he hates Us_we're not short and ugly like him! "It's difficult," the psychiatrist said, "for a daughter to grow up the daughter of somebody who had so much attention for what sometimes seems to the daughter to be such a silly thing. It's tough, on top of the natural competition between mother and daughter, to have people asking a little girl, 'Do you want to grow up to be Miss New Jersey just like your mommy?'" "But nobody asks her that. Who asks her that? We never have. We never talk about it, it never comes up. Why would it? My wife isn't Miss New Jersey—my wife is her mother." "But people ask her that, Mr. Levov." "Well, for God's sake, people ask children all sorts of things that don't mean anything—that is not the problem here." "But you do see how a child who has reason to feel she doesn't quite measure up to Mother, that she couldn't come close, might choose to adopt—" "She hasn't adopted anything. Look, I think that perhaps you put an unfair burden on my daughter by making her see this as a 'choice.' She has no choice. It's perfect hell for her when she stutters." "That isn't always what she tells me. Last Saturday, I asked her point-blank, 'Merry, why do you stutter?' and she told me, 'It's just easier to stutter.'" "But you know what she meant by that. It's obvious what she meant by that. She means she doesn't have to go through all that she has to go through when she tries not to stutter." "I happen to think she was telling me something more than that. I think that Merry may even feel that if she doesn't stutter, then, oh boy, people are really going to find the real problem with her, particularly in a highly pressured perfectionist family where they tend to place an unrealistically high value on her every utterance. 'If I don't stutter, then my mother is really going to read me the riot act, then she's going to find out my real secrets.'" "Who said we're a highly pressured perfectionist family? Jesus. We're an ordinary family. Are you quoting Merry? That's what she told you, about her mother? That she was going to read her the riot act?" "Not in so many words." "Because it's not true," the Swede said. "That's not the cause. Sometimes I just think it's because her brain is so quick, it's so much quicker than her tongue—" Oh, the pitying way he is looking at me and my pathetic explanation. Superior bastard. Cold, heartless bastard. Stupid bastard. That's the worst of it—the stupidity. And all of it is because he looks the way he looks and I look the way I look and Dawn looks the way she looks and..."We frequently see fathers who can't accept, who refuse to believe—" Oh, these people are completely useless! They only make things worse! Whose idea was this fucking psychiatrist! "I'm not not accepting anything, damn it. I brought her here," the Swede said, "in the first place. I do everything any professional has told me to do to help support her efforts to stop. I just want to know from you what good it is doing my daughter, with her grimacing and her tics and her leg twitches and her banging on the table and turning white in the face, with all of that difficulty, to be told that, on top of everything else, she's doing all this to manipulate her mother and father." "Well, who is in charge when she is banging on the table and turning white? Who is in control there?" "She certainly isn't!" said the Swede angrily. "You find me taking a very uncharitable view toward her," replied the doctor. "Well ... in a way, as her father, yes. It never seems to occur to you that there might be some physiological basis for this." "No, I didn't say that. Mr. Levov, I can give you organic theories if you want them. But that isn't the way I have found I can be most effective."

  Her stuttering diary. When she sat at the kitchen table after dinner writing the day's entry in her stuttering diary, that's when he most wanted to murder the psychiatrist who had finally to inform him—one of the fathers "who can't accept, who refuse to believe"—that she would stop stuttering only when stuttering was no longer necessary for her, when she wanted to "relate" to the world in a different way—in short, when she found a more valuable replacement for the manipulativeness. The stuttering diary was a red three-ring notebook in which, at the suggestion of her speech therapist, Merry kept a record of when she stuttered. Could she have been any more the dedicated enemy of her stuttering than when she sat there scrupulously recalling and recording how the stuttering fluctuated throughout the day, in what context it was least likely to occur, when it was most likely to occur and with whom? And could anything have been more heartbreaking for him than reading that notebook on the Friday evening she rushed off to the movies with her friends and happened to leave it open on the table? "When do I stutter? When somebody asks me something that requires an unexpected, unrehearsed response, that's when I'm likely to stutter. When people are looking at me. People who know I stutter, particularly when they're looking
at me. Though sometimes it's worse with people who don't know me...." On she went, page after page in her strikingly neat handwriting—and all she seemed to be saying was that she stuttered in all situations. She had written, "Even when I'm doing fine, I can't stop thinking, 'How soon is it going to be before he knows I'm a stutterer? How soon is it going to be before I start stuttering and screw this up?'" Yet, despite every disappointment, she sat where her parents could see her and worked on her stuttering diary every night, weekends included. She worked with her therapist on the different "strate gies" to be used with strangers, store clerks, people with whom she had relatively safe conversations; they worked on strategies to be used with the people who were closer to her—teachers, girlfriends, boys, finally her grandparents, her father, her mother. She recorded the strategies in the diary. She listed in the diary what topics she could expect to talk about with different people, wrote down the points she would try to make, anticipating when she was most likely to stutter and getting herself thoroughly prepared. How could she bear the hardship of all that self-consciousness? The planning required of her to make the spontaneous unspontaneous, the persistence with which she refused to shrink from these tedious tasks—was that what the arrogant son of a bitch had meant by "a vindictive exercise"? It was unflagging commitment the likes of which the Swede had never known, not even in himself that fall they turned him into a football player and, reluctant as he was to go banging heads in a sport whose violence he never really liked, he did it, excelled at it, "for the good of the school."

  But none of what she diligently worked at did Merry an ounce of good. In the quiet, safe cocoon of her speech therapist's office, taken out of her world, she was said to be terrifically at home with herself, to speak flawlessly, make jokes, imitate people, sing. But outside again, she saw it coming, started to go around it, would do anything, anything, to avoid the next word beginning with a b— and soon she was sputtering all over the place, and what a field day that psychiatrist had the next Saturday with the letter b and "what it unconsciously signified to her." Or what m or c or g "unconsciously signified." And yet nothing of what he surmised meant a goddamn thing. None of his great ideas disposed of a single one of her difficulties. Nothing anybody said meant anything or, in the end, made any sense. The psychiatrist didn't help, the speech therapist's strategies didn't help, the stuttering diary didn't help, he didn't help, Dawn didn't help, not even the light, crisp enunciation of Audrey Hepburn made the slightest dent. She was simply in the hands of something she could not get out of.

  And then it was too late: like some innocent in a fairy story who has been tricked into drinking the noxious potion, the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall, nicknamed by her schoolmates Ho Chi Levov.

  And the impediment became the machete with which to mow all the bastard liars down. "You f-f-fucking madman! You heartless mi-mi-mi-miserable m-monster!" she snarled at Lyndon Johnson whenever his face appeared on the seven o'clock news. Into the televised face of Humphrey, the vice president, she cried, "You prick, sh-sh-shut your lying m-m-mouth, you c-c-coward, you f-f-f-f-filthy fucking collaborator!" When her father, as a member of the ad hoc group calling itself New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, went down to Washington with the steering committee to visit their senator, Merry refused his invitation to come along. "But," said the Swede, who had never belonged to a political group before and would not have joined this one and volunteered for the steering committee and paid a thousand dollars toward their protest ad in the Newark News had he not hoped his conspicuous involvement might deflect a little of her anger away from him, "this is your chance to say what's on your mind to Senator Case. You can confront him directly. Isn't that what you want?" "Merry," said her petite mother to the large glowering girl, "you might be able to influence Senator Case—" "C-c-c-c-c-c-c-case!" erupted Merry and, to the astonishment of her parents, proceeded to spit on the tiled kitchen floor.

  She was on the phone now all the time, the child who formerly had to run through her telephone "strategy" just to be sure that when she picked up the phone she could get out the word "Hello" in under thirty seconds. She had conquered the anguishing stutter all right, but not as her parents and her therapist had hoped. No, Merry concluded that what was deforming her life wasn't the stuttering but the futile effort to overturn it. The crazy effort. The ridiculous significance she had given to that stutter to meet the Rimrock expectations of the very parents and teachers and friends who had caused her to so overestimate something as secondary as the way she talked. Not what she said but how she said it was all that bothered them. And all she really had to do to be free of it was to not give a shit about how it made them so miserable when she had to pronounce the letter b. Yes, she cut herself away from caring about the abyss that opened up under everybody's feet when she started stuttering; her stuttering was no longer going to be the center of her existence—and she'd make damn sure that it wasn't going to be the center of theirs. Vehemently she renounced the appearance and the allegiances of the good little girl who had tried so hard to be adorable and lovable like all the other good little Rimrock girls—renounced her meaningless manners, her petty social concerns, her family's "bourgeois" values. She had wasted enough time on the cause of herself. "I'm not going to spend my whole life wrestling day and night with a fucking stutter when kids are b-b-b-being b-b-b-b-b-bu-bu-bu roasted alive by Lyndon B-b-b-baines b-b-b-bu-bu-burn-'em-up Johnson!"

  All her energy came right to the surface now, unimpeded, the force of resistance that had previously been employed otherwise; and by no longer bothering with the ancient obstruction, she experienced not only her full freedom for the first time in her life but the exhilarating power of total self-certainty. A brand-new Merry had begun, one who'd found, in opposing the "v-v-v-vile" war, a difficulty to fight that was worthy, at last, of her truly stupendous strength. North Vietnam she called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a country she spoke of with such patriotic feeling that, according to Dawn, one would have thought she'd been born not at the Newark Beth Israel but at the Beth Israel in Hanoi. "'The Democratic Republic of Vietnam'—if I hear that from her one more time, Seymour, I swear, I'll go out of my mind!" He tried to convince her that perhaps it wasn't as bad as it sounded. "Merry has a credo, Dawn, Merry has a political position. There may not be much subtlety in it, she may not yet be its best spokesman, but there is some thought behind it, there's certainly a lot of emotion behind it, there's a lot of compassion behind it...."

  But there was now no conversation she had with her daughter that did not drive Dawn, if not out of her mind, out of the house and into the barn. The Swede would overhear Merry fighting with her every time the two of them were alone together for two minutes. "Some people," Dawn says, "would be perfectly happy to have parents who are contented middle-class people." "I'm sorry I'm not brainwashed enough to be one of them," Merry replies. "You're a sixteen-year-old girl," Dawn says, "and I can tell you what to do and I will tell you what to do." "Just because I'm sixteen doesn't make me a g-g-girl! I do what I w-w-want!" "You're not antiwar," Dawn says, "you're anti everything." "And what are you, Mom? You're pro c-c-c-cow!"

  Night after night now Dawn went to bed in tears. "What is she? What is this?" she asked the Swede. "If someone simply defies your authority, what can you do? Seymour, I'm totally puzzled. How did this happen?" "It happens," he told her. "She's a kid with a strong will. With an idea. With a cause." "Where did this come from? It's inexplicable. Am I a bad mother?
Is that it?" "You are a good mother. You are a wonderful mother. That is not it." "I don't know why she's turned against me like this. I don't have any sense of what I did to her or even what she perceives I did to her. I don't know what's happened. Who ¿5 she? Where did she come from? I cannot control her. I cannot recognize her. I thought she was smart. She's not smart at all. She's become stupid, Seymour; she gets more and more stupid each time we talk." "No, it's just a very crude kind of aggression. It's not very well worked out. But she is still smart. She's very smart. This is what teenagers are like. There are these very turbulent sorts of changes. It has nothing to do with you or me. They just amorphously object to everything." "It's all from the stuttering, isn't it?" "We're doing everything we can for her stutter. We always have." "She's angry because she stutters. She doesn't make friends," Dawn said, "because she stutters." "She's always had friends. She has many friends. Besides, she was on top of her stuttering. Stuttering is not the explanation." "Yes, it is. You never get on top of your stutter," Dawn said, "you're in constant fear." "That's not an explanation, Dawnie, for what is going on." "She's sixteen—is that the explanation?" asked Dawn. "Well, if it is," he said, "and maybe an awful lot of it is, we'll do the best we can until she stops being sixteen." "And? When she's not sixteen anymore, she'll be seventeen." "At seventeen she won't be the same. At eighteen she won't be the same. Things change. She'll discover new interests. She'll have college—academic pursuits. We can work this out. The important thing is to keep talking with her." "I can't. I can't talk to her. Now she's even jealous of the cows. It's too maddening." "Then I'll keep talking to her. The important thing is not to abandon her and not to capitulate to her, and to keep talking even if you have to say the same thing over and over and over. It doesn't matter if it all seems hopeless. You can't expect what you say to have an immediate impact." "It's what she says back that has the impact!" "It doesn't matter what she says back. We have to keep saying to her what we have to say to her, even if saying it seems interminable. We must draw the line. If we don't draw the line, then surely she's not going to obey. If we do draw the line, there's at least a fifty percent chance that she will." "And if she still doesn't?" "All we can do, Dawn, is to continue to be reasonable and continue to be firm and not lose hope or patience, and the day will come when she will outgrow all this objecting to everything." "She doesn't want to outgrow it." "Now. Today. But there is tomorrow. There's a bond between us all and it's tremendous. As long as we don't let her go, as long as we keep talking, tomorrow will come. Of course she's maddening. She's unrecognizable to me, too. But if you don't allow her to exhaust your patience and if you keep talking to her and you don't give up on her, she will eventually become herself again."