It's the same with my friendsI get started with...
It's the same with my friendsI get started with something and I can't stopI just get c-c-carried awuh-awuh-awuh-awuh--" It was a while since he'd seen her turn white like that or seen her face contorted like thatShe fought for the word longer than, on that particular day, he could possibly bear"Awuh-awuh--" And yet he knew better than anyone what not to do when, as Merry put it, she "started phumphing to beat the band He was the parent she could always rely on not to jump all over her every time she opened her mouth"Cool it," he would tell Dawn, "relax, lay off her," but Dawn could not help herselfMerry began to stutter badly and Dawn's hands were clasped at her waist and her eyes fixed on the child's lips, eyes that said, "I know you can do it!" while saying, "I know that you can't!" Merry's stuttering just killed her mother, and that killed Merry"I'm not the problem--Mother is!" And so was the teacher the problem when she tried to spare Merry by not calling on herSo was everybody the problem when they started feeling sorry for herAnd when she was fluent suddenly and free of stuttering, the problem was the complimentsShe resented terribly being praised for fluency, and as soon as she was praised she lost it completely--sometimes, Merry would say, to the point that she was afraid "I'm going to short out my whole system Amazing how this child could summon up the strength to joke about it--his precious lighthearted jokester! If only it were within Dawn's power to become a little lighthearted about it herselfBut it was the Swede alone who could always manage to be close to perfect with her, though even he had all he could do not to cry zucca spy fendi bag out in exasperation, "If you dare the gods and are fluent, what terrible thing do you think will happen?" The exasperation never surfaced: he did not wring his hands like her mother, when she was in trouble he did not watch her lips or mouth her words with her like her mother, he did not turn her, every time she spoke, into the most important person not merely in the room but in the entire world--he did everything he could not to make her stigma into Merry's way of being EinsteinInstead his eyes assured her that he would do all he could to help but that when she was with him she must stutter freely if she needed toAnd yet he had said to her, "N-n-no He had done what Dawn would rather die than do--he had made fun of her "Awuh-awuh-awuh--" "Oh, cookie," he said, and at just the moment when he had understood that the summer's mutual, seemingly harmless playacting--the two of them nibbling at an intimacy too enjoyable to swear off and yet not in any way to be taken seriously, to be much concerned with, to be given an excessive significance, something utterly uncarnal that would fade away once the vacation was over and she was in school all day and he had returned to work, nothing that they couldn't easily find their way back from--just when he had come to understand that the summer romance required some readjusting all around, he lost his vaunted sense of proportion, drew her to him with one arm, and kissed her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking him for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for Was he supposed to feel that way? It happened before he could thinkMomentarily it was motorcycle balenciaga frighteningThis was not anything he had ever worried about for a second, this was a taboo that you didn't even think of as a taboo, something you are prohibited from doing that felt absolutely natural not to do, you just proceeded effortlessly--and then, however momentary, thisNever in his entire life, not as a son, a husband, a father, even as an employer, had he given way to anything so alien to the emotional rules by which he was governed, and later he wondered if this strange parental misstep was not the lapse from responsibility for which he paid for the rest of his lifeThe kiss bore no resemblance to anything serious, was not an imitation of anything, had never been repeated, had itself lasted five secondsbut after the disaster, when he went obsessively searching for the origins of their suffering, it was that anomalous moment--when she was eleven and he was thirty-six and the two of them, all stirred up by the strong sea and the hot sun, were heading happily home alone from the beach--that he remembered But then he also wondered if after that day he had perhaps withdrawn from her too radically, become physically distant more than was necessaryHe had only meant to let her know she needn't be concerned that he would lose his equilibrium again, needn't worry about her own natural-enough infatuation, and the result may well have been that having exaggerated the implications of that kiss, having overestimated what constituted provocation, he went on to alter a perfectly harmless spontaneous bond, only to exacerbate a stuttering child's burden of self-doubtAnd all he had ever meant was to help her, to help her heal! What then was the wound? What cartier tank louis cartier could have wounded Merry? The indelible imperfection itself or those who had fostered in her the imperfection? But by doing what? What had they done other than to love her and look after her and encourage her, give her the support and guidance and independence that seemed reasonable to them--and still the undisclosed Merry had become tainted! Twisted! Crazed! By what? Thousands upon thousands of young people stuttered--they didn't all grow up to set off bombs! What went wrong with Merry? What did he do to her that was so wrong? The kiss? That kiss? So beastly? How could a kiss make someone into a criminal? The aftermath of the kiss? The withdrawal? Was that the beastliness? But it wasn't as though he'd never held her or touched her or kissed her again--he loved her Once the inexplicable had begun, the torment of self-examination never endedHowever lame the answers, he never ran out of the questions, he who before had nothing of consequence really to ask himselfAfter the bomb, he could never again take life as it came or trust that his life wasn't something very different from what he perceivedHe found himself recalling his own happy childhood, the success that had been his boyhood, as though that were the cause of their blightAll the triumphs, when he probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his very virtues came to seem vicesThere was no longer any innocence in what he remembered of his pastHe saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to doWhat you said and did made a white prada bag difference, all right, but not the difference you intended The Swede as he had always known himself--well-meaning, well-behaved, well-ordered Seymour Levov--evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his placeHe couldn't disentangle himself from the idea that he was responsible any more than he could resort to the devilishly tempting idea that everything was accidentalHe had been admitted into a mystery more bewildering even than Merry's stuttering: there was no fluency anywhereIt was all stutteringIn bed at night, he pictured the whole of his life as a stuttering mouth and a grimacing face--the whole of his life without cause or sense and completely bungledHe no longer had any conception of orderHe envisioned his life as a stutterer's thought, wildly out of his control Merry's other great love that year, aside from her father, was Audrey HepburnBefore Audrey Hepburn there had been astronomy and before astronomy, the 4-H Club, and along the way, a bit distressingly to her father, there was even a Catholic phaseHer grandmother Dwyer took her to pray at StGenevieve's whenever Merry was visiting down in ElizabethLittle by little, Catholic trinkets made their way into her room--and as long as he could think of them as trinkets, as long as she wasn't going overboard, everything was okayFirst there was the palm frond bent into the shape of the cross that Grandma had given her after Palm SundayAny kid might want that up on the wallThen came the candle, in thick glass, about a foot tall, the Eternal Candle; on its label was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a prayer that began, "O Sacred Heart of Jesus who said, 'Ask and you shall vuitton gold bag receiveNo comments:
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