American Pastoral (15 page)

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."

And so, hopeless as it seemed, he talked, he listened, he was reasonable; endless as the struggle seemed, he remained patient, and whenever he saw her going too far he drew the line. No matter how much it might openly enrage her to answer him, no matter how sarcastic and caustic and elusive and dishonest her answers might be, he continued to question her about her political activities, about her after-school whereabouts, about her new friends; with a gentle persistence that infuriated her, he asked about her Saturday trips into New York. She could shout all she wanted at home—she was still just a kid from Old Rimrock, and the thought of whom she might meet in New York alarmed him.

Conversation #1 about New York. "What do you do when you go to New York? Who do you see in New York?" "What do I do? I go see New York. That's what I do." "What do you do, Merry?" "I do what everyone else does. I window-shop. What else would a girl do?" "You're involved with political people in New York." "I don't know what you're talking about. Everything is political. Brushing your
teeth
is political." "You're involved with people who are against the war in Vietnam. Isn't that who you go to see? Yes or no?" "They're people, yes. They're people with ideas, and some of them don't b-b-b-believe in the war. Most of them don't b-b-b-believe in the war." "Well, I don't happen to believe in the war myself." "So what's your problem?" "Who are these people? How old are they? What do they do for a living? Are they students?" "Why do you want to know?" "Because I'd like to know what you're doing. You're alone in New York on Saturdays. Not everyone's parents would allow a sixteen-year-old girl to go that far." "I go in ... I, you know, there are people and dogs and streets..." "You come home with all this Communist material. You come home with all these books and pamphlets and magazines." "I'm trying to
learn.
You taught me to
learn,
didn't you? Not just to study, but to
learn.
C-c-c-communist..." "It
is
Communist. It says on the page that it's Communist." "C-c-c-communists have ideas that aren't always about C-commu-nism." "For instance." "About poverty. About war. About injustice. They have all kinds of ideas. Just b-b-because you're Jewish doesn't mean you just have ideas about Judaism. Well, the same holds for C-c-communism."

Conversation #12 about New York. "Where do you eat your meals in New York?" "Not at Vincent's, thank God." "Where then?" "Where everybody else eats their meals. Restaurants. Cafeterias. People's apartments." "Who are the people who live in these apartments?" "Friends of mine." "Where did you meet them?" "I met some here, I met some in the city—" "Here? Where?" "At the high school. Sh-sh-sh-sherry, for instance." "I never met Sherry." "Sh-sh-sh-sherry is the one, do you remember, who played the violin in all the class plays? And she goes into New York b-because she takes music lessons." "Is she involved with politics too?" "Daddy, everything is political. How can she not be involved if she has a b-b-b-brain?" "Merry, I don't want you to get into trouble. You're angry about the war. A lot of people are angry about the war. But there are some people who are angry about the war who don't have any limits. Do you know what the limits are?" "Limits. That's all you think about. Not going to the extreme. Well, sometimes you have to fucking go to the extreme. What do you think war is? War is an extreme. It isn't life out here in little Rimrock. Nothing is too extreme out here." "You don't like it out here anymore. Would you want to live in New York? Would you like that?" "Of c-c-c-course." "Suppose when you graduate from high school you were to go to college in New York. Would you like that?" "I don't know if I'm going to go to college. Look at the administration of those colleges. Look what they do to their students who are against the war. How can I want to be going to college? Higher education. It's what I call lower education. Maybe I'll go to college, maybe I won't. I wouldn't start p-planning now."

Conversation #18 about New York, after she fails to return home on a Saturday night. "You're never to do that again. You're never to stay over with people who we don't know. Who are these people?" "Never say never." "Who are the people you stayed with?" "They're friends of Sh-sherry's. From the music school." "I don't believe you." "Why? You can't b-b-b-believe that I might have friends? That people might like me—you don't b-b-b-believe that? That people might put me up for the night—you don't b-b-b-believe that? What
do
you b-b-b-b-b-b-b-believe in?" "You're sixteen years old. You're to come home. You cannot stay over in New York City." "Stop reminding me of how old I am. We all have an age." "When you went off yesterday we expected you back at six o'clock. At seven o'clock at night you phoned to say you're staying over. We said you weren't. You insisted. You said you had a place to stay. So I let you do it." "You let me. Sure." "But you can't do it again. If you do it again, you will never be allowed to go into New York by yourself." "Says who?" "Your father." "We'll see." "I'll make a deal with you." "What's the deal,
Father?
" "If you ever go into New York again and you find it's getting late and you have to stay somewhere, you stay with the Umanoffs." "The
Umanoffs?
" "They like you, you like them, they've known you all your life. They have a very nice apartment." "Well, the people I stayed with have a very nice apartment too." "Who are they?" "I told you, they're Sh-sherry's friends." "Who are they?" "Bill and Melissa." "And who are Bill and Melissa?" "They're p-p-p-people. Like everyone else." "What do they do for a living? How old are they?" "Melissa's twenty-two. And Bill is nineteen." "Are they students?" "They were students. Now they organize people for the betterment of the Vietnamese." "Where do they live?" "What are you going to do, come and get me?" "I'd like to know where they live. There are all sorts of neighborhoods in New York. Some are good, some aren't." "They live in a perfectly fine neighborhood and a perfectly fine b-b-b-b-building." "Where?" "They live up in Morningside Heights." "Are they Columbia students?" "They were." "How many people stay in this apartment?" "I don't see why I have to answer all these questions." "Because you're my daughter and you are sixteen years old." "So for the rest of my life, because I'm your daughter—" "No, when you are eighteen and graduate high school, you can do whatever you want." "So the difference we're talking about here is two years." "That's right." "And what's the b-big thing that's going to happen in two years?" "You will be an independent person who can support herself." "I can support myself now if I w-w-w-w-wanted to." "I don't want you to stay with Bill and Melissa." "W-w-w-why?" "It's my responsibility to look after you. I want you to stay with the Umanoffs. If you can agree to do that, then you can go to New York and stay over. Otherwise you won't be permitted to go there at all. The choice is yours." "I'm in there to stay with the people I want to stay with." "Then you're not going to New York." "We'll see." "There is no we'll see.' You're not going and that's the end of it." "I'd like to see you stop me." "Think about it. If you can't agree to stay with the Umanoffs, then you can't go to New York." "What about the war—" "My responsibility is to you and not to the war." "Oh, I know your responsibility is not to the war—that's why I have to go to New York. B-b-b-because people there do feel responsible. They feel responsible when America b-blows up Vietnamese villages. They feel responsible when America is b-blowing little b-babies to b-b-b-b-bits. B-but you don't, and neither does Mother. You don't care enough to let it upset a single day of yours. You don't care enough to make
you
spend another night somewhere. You don't stay up at night worrying about it. You don't really care, Daddy, one way or the other."