Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (5 page)

These days, I stammer when I’m tired, when I’m nervous, or, more rarely, for no good reason at all. I still can’t tell a joke that requires “timing.” Whenever I read aloud, I sound halting and unconvincing, and all at once I’m brought back to the old red barn of my childhood,
Little Women
, and the stop-start fickleness of my own throat. I sometimes think about and savor the night in Larchmont when a boy I adored told me he found my stammer charming. But acceptance has helped me speak around it. When my children were young, I made up stories for them at night, in the dark, and they seemed to love them, no matter how I sounded.

*   *   *

Besides the orchard, my refuges during that summer of
Little Women
and the debut of my stammer were tennis and swimming. Every day I spent hours in the pool, with my little bathing cap on, trying to perfect my swan dives and jackknifes. Swimming, and the freedom I felt in the water, was maybe what I hoped my speech might someday become: smooth, fluid, without any boundaries. But the moment I remembered that I stuttered, my stutter would reappear. Still, something else happened that summer that changed things for me. My family was at the dinner table one night, and I was trying to say “Pass the butter.” For some reason I forgot to change
pass
to
ass
or “send the butter over.” My stammer became frantic, and as usual, Joey or Lucy helpfully finished my sentence for me, a gesture that made me all the more aware of my speech handicap.

Then Mommy tossed me an idea that would change my life. “Carly, darling—try singing it.”

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t, not at first. It felt too strange, the transition too daunting. I sat back in my chair instead, exhausted. Joey and Lucy tried to encourage me by singing “Pass the butter” to whatever melody they could think of, but that only made me feel more on the spot. My little brother Peter laughed at me, which actually made me feel relaxed.

“Try tapping your foot,” Mommy said, and I did, halfheartedly at first, then speeding up the tempo. She went on: “Try saying ‘Pass the butter,’ but as if you were singing it. Make believe it’s a note.”

I began hitting my thigh with a steady 4/4 beat. I had an instinctive ability to say the words on the offbeat, on a syncopation of the 4/4. The result even made it swing. From there, it was an easy step to add a little melody—C, B flat, E flat—at which point the whole table, including Sula, our cook, joined in, a heavenly choir jamming to “Pass the Butter.” We used the table and the tableware for percussion. It became a mode we naturally lapsed into when stuttering wasn’t even the catalyst.

It was a release, though one with the slightest, most cutting edge of shame about it. At last I had a technique that worked, but I also thought, Oh my God, I’m someone who
needs
a technique. Still, I’ve never forgotten that moment. It was a turning point. I had a way, suddenly, of handling my stammer, at least when I was at home. Naturally, at school or at a friend’s house or inside a department store, I couldn’t sing what I wanted to say, but did that really matter? A melody now existed inside my head. It helped me. Not completely—there were years to go, unnumbered
D
’s and
T
’s and
S
’s to face down—but I’d just been handed a crucial new piece of ammunition. I could sing it instead. Maybe I would be a singer!

“Pass the butter.”

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

CHAPTER THREE

frunzhoffa

W
hen I was about eleven, it became clear that my stutter was getting worse and even affecting my grades at school, since I did everything possible to avoid talking in class. Mommy set up an appointment for me with an experimental music therapist. She may have had other worries about me, too, based on something I’d told Joey and Lucy, who, in turn, had told Mommy. In retrospect, I think Mommy was handing that “something” over to a professional so she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

Dr. Frunzhoffa was a German speech therapist with a mustache and straight gray hair parted in the middle. It was Dr. Frunzhoffa’s idea to use the melody and pulse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to help me deal with my speech impediment. At one point during our appointment, he put on a record and asked me to dance with him. The two of us stood there, a few inches apart, clasping hands, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. His heavy, scratching shoes emphasized his lack of grace as he carried out his mission of distracting me so I would answer his questions.

Then he finally asked it (or rather sang it): “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire,” he crooned. “Has a man ever
touched
you down there?” Another lyric followed. “Has a man had his way with you? Tell me, tell me if it’s true?” I sang: “Daddy loves me, Mommy too, they live hap’ly in the zoo
.
”

“You’re a smart one, Carly,” Dr. Frunzhoffa encouraged me in his German accent, “so you can make up ze next line. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t rhyme. Vot matters is ze truth.”

We started all over again with the Fred and Ginger line: “Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire … Has a man touched you down there?” To which I responded, “I stood so tall and he did stare / then he sat me on his chair.” Hah! I was invested in keeping the secret I was holding, believing myself clever enough to outmaneuver my therapist. Across from me, Dr. Frunzhoffa’s eyebrows were raised in ecstasy. He must have thought he’d made a brilliant discovery, piercing all my secrets as I circled around them, already learning how to compartmentalize my emotions. No doubt Frunzhoffa was reeling over his certainty that he’d discovered some new form of treatment that would rival psychoanalysis:
Music unblocks the unconscious!
“Zat’s it, Carly!” he exclaimed. “Now let’s stay with ze same melody! Did he touch you in ze chair?” and as Dr. Frunzhoffa made a half turn around the room, I answered him almost immediately: “Yes, he touched me right down there.”

“Are you quite sure he touched you dere?”

“Quite sure, quite sure, in the chair!”

What Dr. Frunzhoffa would never know was that I would protect my secret attachment at all costs.
Love:
forever more light and lovely than lurid and sad, even in the face of a late-night shower stall and a boy named Billy.

When Mommy first brought me to see Dr. Frunzhoffa, the nights with Billy inside the pool house and the swimming pool had been going on for several summers in a row. The trouble I was in hung in the air like the single note of a violin, a note that got imperceptibly higher every second. Still, a week after my appointment with Dr. Frunzhoffa, it seemed Billy and I were safe and in the clear. I was protecting our relationship and in fact would continue taking whatever Billy wanted to give me.

I was around seven when my “interludes” with Billy started. Like a lot of kids, I’d first discovered sex alone, and by accident. I was five, lying on my narrow five-year-old-kid’s bed. My hand slipped underneath my torso and landed three inches or so below my belly button, and I began moving my body back and forth, very gently, against my own hand.

Nor were naked bodies unfamiliar to me. Spending Augusts on the Vineyard from the age of five on, I’d been exposed all my life to Windy Gates, a nude beach in Chilmark with high dunes, where the more “artistic” grown-ups hung out alongside children, pets, picnic baskets, and books. The scene there was both innocent and feral. Preadolescent girls and boys ran and leapt like bronzed wildlife down the powdery dunes, all bones and sinew, hair stiff from the salty waves, their most sensitive naked parts on sunlit parade. Bodies, beautiful, homely, and everything in between, bounced, jiggled, sprang, and strutted from the waves. Everyone was there, wearing nothing at all, from Joey and Lucy and their friends to my parents and
their
friends, with their cucumber sandwiches and martini shakers.

You would never see me naked at Windy Gates. The idea of letting my own towel fall, and exposing myself with everyone else, felt like an unimaginable torment. I felt ashamed of something, likely something having nothing to do with my nudity. Still, when my family returned to Stamford from the Vineyard, leaving behind the warm brown bodies of Windy Gates, I was vulnerable, maybe, to some of what I’d been seeing and sensing.

From my perspective now, it’s disturbing to look back on what happened to a young girl with a much older boy. The thing is, even though I instinctively knew I couldn’t tell anybody, it didn’t feel shameful at the time but, instead, thrillingly clandestine, and full of naughty fun.

Billy was the teenage son of family friends who were visiting Stamford from Chicago, where his father was a lawyer. They were renting a house in the neighboring town of Westport that summer. One thing about Billy was clear. He made no secret about how much in love he was with my sister Lucy. In fact, the first time I saw Billy, he was spying on Lucy through a window as she made her way to the swimming pool, wearing her sexy black bathing suit.

That summer, on our first walk up the hill to the house after dinner at the pool house, Billy asked me whether Lucy was “developed.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because he added, “I mean, does she have hair down there?” I told him that I didn’t know, but the subject was never far from my mind that summer. Every time Lucy was nearby, Billy mooned over her as if a goddess had favored him with her presence, a rank of deity I could never come close to matching.

A few evenings later, Billy and I found ourselves in the living room after everyone was asleep, talking. Billy told me about a Swedish movie he’d seen recently. He described the two actors, and when he went on to say they were both naked, and touching each other, I couldn’t help myself: what he was saying excited me. Billy was a little beer-drunk, maybe, when he proceeded to tell me how good looking I was. The way I felt didn’t show on my face, but at the same time I found I couldn’t keep still. I felt physically aroused. Then Billy suggested the two of us go swimming.

We walked to the tennis house in silence. It was dark, maybe ten at night, and the air had a hot, saturated feel to it, as if it were about to rain. Inside the tennis house, Billy and I began changing into our bathing suits, Billy in the men’s room, me in the ladies’.

Earlier that night, Billy had asked me if I’d ever skinny-dipped, and I said no. Now he went for the kill. “Carly,” he said, the sound echoing like a signal from a boat in distress, “have you got a quarter?”

“I don’t have a quarter,” I said, my voice sliding across the tennis house’s cement floors and pinewood interior. I slipped on my favorite plaid shirt over my bathing suit. Then, in an attempt to please him, I began poking around in ashtrays and in the pockets of the robes hanging off hooks, where my fingers found a dime. Would a dime be good enough? I called out.

“If you want,” Billy said, as if he were doing me a favor, and then he proposed a bargain: if I brought him my dime, he would give me a quarter in return. I felt even more excited, grown-up, and my heart stepped up its beat.

That night, the only light came from the cocked lights trained on the pool, which cast spooky shadows.

“Come in, and bring the dime,” Billy said again from behind the men’s room door.

Which I did, moving stealthily, sensitive to any and all shadows that moved. I felt scared, less about being attacked by someone or something lunging from the shadow than by the thought that some punishing, responsible adult would barge in on the two of us. I continued to feel physically aroused in a new, unfamiliar way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the sexy Swedish movie Billy had told me about that night, and I entered the men’s room with a mix of confidence, terror, and excitement.

Billy was standing in the center of the room, bare-chested, a skimpy white towel around his waist. At sixteen, he towered over me, and must have weighed twice as much as I did, too. He was handsome, with olive skin and sandy, straight hair like corn silk, almost down to his eyes. Instead of saying hi, or even greeting me, he said only, “Give me your dime and I’ll let you pull the towel off my waist.”