Two
KK was not one of this world’s better-adjusted stutterers, who are somehow able to maintain their social equilibrium despite their impediment. His stutter was severe, and over the years he had learned to get by on the bare minimum verbally – a nod instead of a greeting, a raised eyebrow rather than a question, anything to avoid the burden of the spoken word.
It was like being locked in a cage where the key fit the lock, but usually wouldn’t turn. The conscious I, the indwelling soul, was totally fluent. His words and phrases appeared in his brain with complete clarity, but somewhere between the conception of the thought and its utterance the system derailed, the speaking I totally helpless and unable to foster the intellectual, the transpersonal, nor the social being, all of whom relied on speech as their primary currency.
His field was computers. It was the obvious choice for someone who was afraid of people and social situations, and he was good at his work. A few years back while living in Colorado, just after the height of the tech boom, he and his partner sold some proprietary chat software to a larger company and made almost enough to retire before the age of thirty. He sold everything and bought in Westchester, to be near his Bubbe. His father had moved to South Jersey years ago, and there was no one else within radius.
So in a townhouse far too big for one person he spent his days fixing people’s computers, listening to music, reading and watching movies, and taking care of his plants and his dogs. His last girlfriend had walked out months ago, and visitors were rare. One day bled into another behind a veil of isolation, punctuated by only the most mundane errands and the occasional visit to Hillcrest.
His typical day began with a walk in the gray early light to the dog park, where the dogs, off their leashes, would enjoy their morsel of freedom, and KK would drink in the last of the morning silence before the commuters began their daily pilgrimage. In that silence he was god’s equal, and until he opened his mouth, he would remain so.
* * * * *
After reheating last night’s leftovers for lunch, KK jumped in the car and took a long overdue drive. Out in Colorado, before he had made his money, he had bought an orange-and-cobalt Volvo station wagon for a song and named her Nadine. Back there in the Rockies, he had vowed to drive her until she dropped, and with a third of a million miles, she hadn’t dropped yet. In the Westchester traffic, the four-mile journey took almost twenty minutes.
Hillcrest is the nightmare of the health insurance industry crossed with the nightmare of old age, and the results are not pretty. The food is mass-produced and atrocious, the halls are eerily quiet, but the nurses and staff are dedicated, and elderly care could be much worse.
On the grounds, attendants walked or wheeled the residents, some alert, some withered, around the manicured lawns. KK tried not to look at anyone too intently as he made his way to the front desk.
“Can I help you?” asked a black woman of indeterminate age.
Signaling with his hands for a pen and paper, he pointed to his throat and shook his head. Better to save the paralytic gesticulation for when it really mattered. The woman looked at him a bit strangely but handed him both. He scribbled quickly. I’m here to see Lottie Kocher. I’m her grandson, Kenneth.
“Hi Kenneth, I’m Geraldine,” she said, too sweetly, as if speaking to a child. “I’ll take you to her room.”
He could have gotten to her room himself, but it was easier than responding. She must have been a new employee because KK had been there a hundred times and had never seen her. Geraldine knocked on the door. A faint “Come in” rattled from the room, and she pushed the door open. Bubbe was sitting on a chair facing a window with a needlepoint in her lap. “Kenneth!” she cried, “What a surprise! Come in. Thank you, miss. I’ll call you if I need anything.” Geraldine nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her.
“It’s great to see you,” Bubbe said in her clipped, still-Yiddish accent. “I love surprises, and I just can’t seem to get started with this needlepoint.” She threw it on the bed. “How long since you’ve been here?”
The left side of his face began rippling into spasms, the eye opening and closing and the muscles of the jaw and neck twitching and dancing, and all that came out was a fusillade of /t/ sounds. After fighting for a few seconds more to push through the block, he gracelessly spit out “^^T-t-two weeks.”
“My, it seems longer.” She was ignoring the obvious.
“~I’m having a ~^b-b-bad ^d-day. I’m ssssso sick of not ^^b-b-being able to talk.”
“Oh, Kenneth, I’m sorry. What happened?”
“Nothing special,” he said. “I j-just want to live a normal life. I ^t-t-try so hard and I never seem to make any ~p-^p-progress.”
“But you have! As a child you were much worse. Now you just hit minor bumps in the road.”
“Minor? Thanks for the ‡compliment, ^b-b-but it’s not true. I went to ^b-b-buy J-j-jeremy a ^g-g-gift today and I felt like a moron.”
“You’re too hard on yourself. Calm down or you’ll never speak clearly.” She put her hand on his and squeezed lightly.
“~Iiii’ve ^g-got to find a ~^better way.”
“Look at you, so serious. It’s not lung cancer or polio. Why can’t you just laugh about it?”
“Are you serious?”
“What’s the other option, to let it strip you of your dignity?”
“That happens anyway.”
“Only when you let it.”
“I wake up every morning and ^p-p-pray that I’ll make a little ^p-p-progress. Then I go out into the world and I ‡can’t say a ^g-g-goddamned thing.”
“You sound okay to me.”
“You’re always too kind. But okay isn’t good enough. Every day is exactly the same. I’m exhausted.”
“Like how?”
“Mentally and physically, living like a hermit enclosed in a ^b-.” He hit the /b/ in bubble and again his vocal folds slammed shut involuntarily, and again he jerked and twitched, helpless in the stutter’s embrace.
She reached out and touched his head, above his left ear, where the neurological storm was centered. “Calm down. Please. You’re getting agitated.”
“Wouldn’t you?” he shouted. “Every time I talk, the same damn thing happens!”
She laughed. “No stuttering there, darling. Maybe you just need to let out your anger. Maybe your emotions are stifling you.”
He threw up his hands in surrender. “Maybe they are.”
“No job, no kids. You’ve got no real problems. You just have to learn to live with yourself. Take me out to brunch,” she said. “This room is depressing.”
He held out his hand and helped lift her from the chair. “You know you ‡can live wwwith me anytime you want. I’ll even ‡cook for you.”
“We’ll talk about that another time.”
They walked to the front desk, where she signed herself out, and then slowly to the car. She got in gingerly and he closed her door for her.
“Where to?” he asked, buckling the seat belt.
“You know where, love. To the diner.”
“Of course. ^J-j-just making sure.” He turned off the music so they could hear each other, but she seemed content in the silence, looking out the window at a landscape that had grown and changed immeasurably, even in the few years that she had been at Hillcrest. Every semi-rural area in New York was being gobbled up by developers, and this little corner of Westchester was no exception.
Gustav was still the maître d’ after all these years. He recognized Lottie from another era and gave her a ceremonious kiss on the cheek. KK remembered Gustav from childhood, but his stooped appearance, wrinkled face, and graying hair was a stark reminder of how old Bubbe truly was.
She walked on Gustav’s arm to her favorite booth, and he trailed behind them, trying not to imagine living another half century with this ridiculous stutter.
Gustav returned quickly with the pickles and coleslaw and placed them on the table. The diner hadn’t given away free pickles and coleslaw for fifteen years, but Lottie Kocher hearkened from a different era, and Gustav was a man who respected tradition. She reached for a sour dill and chewed it slowly, her face puckering in delight as if she were a little girl.
“They don’t make kosher dills like this at Hillcrest. Thank you for coming today.”
“I missed you too, ^B-b-bubbe. Thanks for ‡calming me down.”
“You’re doing okay, but you don’t realize it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you live with yourself every day. I’ve been listening to you over the years, and I see a marked improvement.”
He took a pickle himself. “Thanks for lying. It makes me ^fffffeel ^better.”
She was indignant. “I am not lying. I have been listening to you forever, and I can hear the difference.” The waiter came with the coffee and quickly left.
“Why can’t I hear it?”
“You’re choosing not to.”
“How ‡can that ^b-be? All I’ve ever wanted is to speak ‡clearly and fluently.”
“We always want what we can’t have, love, that’s what makes us human. The question is whether you are making the best out of what you have. What have you been doing with yourself? You don’t seem quite right to me.”
Bubbe had always been able to see the obvious, so there was no sense in trying to skirt the issue. “I’ve ^b-been spending a lot of time alone.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes,” he said, sensing a block embedded in the /d/ in difficult and reaching for an easy substitute, “the stuttering is t-t-too hard. Sometimes when I ^d-don’t want to fight it, it’s easier to just stay home.”
“You stay home too much already.”
“I just need some ^down time, Grandma. I’ll be okay.”
She looked at him with penetrating hazel-green eyes. She despised his weakness, and she would wait for him to acknowledge it.
“^^~Wah-wah-what ^d-d-do you want me t-to do?” he asked her after a few seconds. “^~Ahh-I’ve ^b-been living with this ah-my whole life, and some days I ^d-don’t want to fight it.”
She munched on the pickle disapprovingly. “Have you been seeing any young women?”
KK loved the arcane way his grandmother used the word ‘young’. “Nnno young ladies. The only llllady I’m seeing is you.”
She laughed. “I’m flattered. A handsome devil like you.”
“I wwwas wwwith someone for a llllittle wwhile lllast year.”
“Was she Jewish? Why didn’t I hear about her?”
“I knew it wwasn’t ^g-going anywhere, so why get your hopes up?”
“Who was she? What happened?”
“She was a ‡client. I fixed her computer. Her name was Rhonda ^^B- Bah-B-baum.” “She wwas a little older than me, ^d-divorced, no ‡kids.”
“What went wrong?”
“She took on my stuttering as a ^p-personal ^p-p-project without really understanding its underlying nature.”
“Oh, my.”
“Exactly. I got ^tired of ^b-being psychoanalyzed by an amateur, and she got tired of not seeing any results.”
“That’s cynical, darling.”
“That’s how it felt, ~^B-b-bubbe.”
“Then she’s not the one for you.”
“I agree.”
“And now?”
“And now, what?”
“Anyone new?”
“I’m not really looking. The ~stu-stu-stuttering has been making me ^d-depressed. I’m not good ^b-boyfriend material right now.”
“Boyfriend material? Kenneth, that is ridiculous. I will not stand for you sitting there and feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a healthy young man with his whole life ahead of him. If you insist on being a bore, I request that you take me home immediately.”
He laughed, but she remained firm.
“There’s one other option that I’ve ^b-been researching, ^b-b-but I’m still not sure….”
“What is it?”
Without boring her with the details about delayed auditory feedback and frequency alteration, he told her that there was a machine on the market that was reported to reduce stuttering. It looked like a hearing aid with a wireless microphone. He was considering trying it as a last resort.
“I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “Blind people use a walking stick, deaf people use a hearing aid. Is it expensive?” She had escaped to New York from Lithuania before Hitler closed all the doors, living in the tenements on less than nothing, and her undying practicality was part of her charm.
“Very,” he said, “and from what I’ve read, sssome ^-p-p-people find it more effective than others. Other ^p-people say that the effects wear off in time.”
“Well, you can afford it. And you can’t afford to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself,” she said with a sparkle in her eye. “You’ll never meet a woman that way. I won’t live forever, you know.”
“You still want to marry me off. Some things never change.”
“As a long-term goal, yes.” She scooped some coleslaw off the plate and held it in her fork. “For now, a woman in your life, friends, a social life. As much as I love you, you’ve got to have someone in your life who can be honest with you. And honestly, I don’t like what I’m seeing. You seem nervous and withdrawn.”
“Maybe it’s ^b-b-because I’m ^getting older. I’m watching my life fly by, and I feel like I’m not making any ^progress.”
“But you are. I told you that.”
“It ^d-doesn’t feel that way.”
“This is what I’m talking about. If I were a young woman, I would turn and run the other way!”
He laughed at the image of his grandmother as a young woman. “You’re right, as always. ^B-b-but I’m allowed to have my ~d-down ~d-d-days, aren’t I?”
“Days, yes. Weeks and months, no. Why don’t you try the internet?”
“What do you know of the internet?”
“My friend Sally said that her grandson met his wife on the internet. There are even Jewish dating services! You can find someone that way, and you don’t even have to talk at the beginning, you can just write letters!”
He just stared at her, too stunned to speak, his eighty-six year-old grandmother giving him dating advice!
“You know I’m right darling,” she said in the intervening silence. “But you’d rather sit and feel sorry for yourself.”
Just then the waiter came and saved KK the indignity of recounting his pathetic forays into internet dating. She ordered a Reuben with extra sauerkraut. He poised himself to order a tuna melt, but the /t/ in tuna tied him in knots. He pushed against his vocal folds, but they had slammed shut and no air was getting through. He inhaled and tried again with no success. Finally after a full fifteen seconds, which is much longer than it seems (just measure the duration of an earthquake), he inhaled jerkily and spit out “~^ch-ch-chicken salad on rye.”
Dejected, he slumped into his chair and didn’t say a word until the food came. His grandmother cast a disapproving look but let him sulk. When the food finally came, it was terrible, and as he sat there and picked at the sandwich that he didn’t really want in the first place, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Bubbe was right. He was giving the stuttering too much power, and somehow he needed to break free.
When his grandmother called a week later and told him about a therapy program in Mahnattan that had worked wonders for the grandson of one of the other women at Hillcrest, KK balked at the idea. Like many people who stutter, he had been in speech therapy in elementary and middle school, pulled out of class for one session weekly with a group of kids who had a range of speech problems from a sibilant S to a lazy L. Of course, these sessions never eased the stammer a bit, and his patterns of muscular and neurological fixation simply deepened over time. Buying a machine felt more like giving a man a fish, but in therapy maybe he could actually learn to figure it out for himself.