“No, I don’t think so.”
“Denver then. How about Denver? Catch some spring skiing out there.”
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
“Are you a good skier?”
“So-so,” Lissie said. “My parents used to take me a lot when I was little.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Bromley, Stratton, Mount Snow. Like that.”
“But never out west.”
“No.”
“Me, neither,” Jenny said. “Be great to do some skiing out there, wouldn’t it?”
“Be terrific.”
“You think your parents would let you go?”
“Oh, sure,” Lissie said.
“Trouble is, we’d need a car.”
“My parents have two cars.”
“And somebody to drive it.”
“Why couldn’t I drive?”
“You mean you have a license?”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What kind of cars?”
“My dad has a Corvette. Mom drives a station wagon.”
“Think she’d let us use it?”
“You mean to go to Denver?”
“Yeah. Well, to Aspen. If we’re gonna ski, we should go to Aspen.”
The waitress came back to the table with their meals.
“Plates are very hot,” she said, “be careful. Would you care for more wine?”
“Yes, please,” Jenny said.
“Uh-huh,” Lissie said, and nodded.
“What we could do,” Jenny said, “is you could pick me up in New York, and then we’d take the tunnel to Jersey, and head across through Pennsylvania and Ohio...”
“Then Indiana,” Lissie said, “and Illinois...”
“Like the fuckin’ pioneers,” Jenny said, and laughed.
“Across Iowa to Nebraska...”
“And then into Colorado...”
“And on to Denver!”
“We’d have to check out all those states,” Jenny said, “make sure your license is good there.”
“Oh, sure,” Lissie said. “How many miles you think it’ll be?”
“Maybe two thousand, something like that.”
“How long do you figure? To Aspen, I mean.”
“Let’s say we average sixty miles an hour, okay?” Jenny said. “You’d need, say, six, seven hours’ sleep a night...”
“So what does that come to?”
“Seventeen hours of driving every day...”
“We’d better make it six teen,” Lissie said, “just in case I need eight hours a night.”
“No, you can do it on seven,” Jenny said.
“Well, just in case.”
“Okay, sateen hours a day times sixty miles an hour...”
“Better make it fifty,” Lissie said. “Let’s say we’ll average fifty.”
“Okay, sixteen times fifty is eight hundred miles a day. Divide that into two thousand miles, and we get... let’s see... about two and a half days to Colorado. Let’s say three days to play it safe.”
“Three days, right,” Lissie said. “So we’d leave when?”
“The twentieth.”
“Right, which would get us to Aspen on the twenty-third.”
“Jesus, it sounds terrific! You think your mom’ll let us have the car?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“When will you ask her?”
“When I get home Wednesday.”
“The day before we leave?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“That’s too late, Liss.”
“It’s just I wanted to ask her face to face.”
“Yeah, but we can’t wait till the day before...”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t we call her right now?”
“Now?” Lissie said.
“Sure, what’s wrong with now?”
“Well...”
“Let’s,” Jenny said.
There were three eight-year-olds in Connie’s last class at the rehab center. All three were stutterers (“Experiencing dysfluency problems,” as Connie might have put it to a colleague), all of them exhibiting only primary characteristics, none of them having yet been submitted to the terrible advice of teachers or parents to “stop and think so it comes out right.” She had tested each of the three individually for diagnosis using the Goldman-Fristoe articulation test, and then had asked the center’s audiologist to run an audiometer test on each of them. None of the three had any hearing problems.
Today, she was playing with the children a card game in which she’d dealt four picture cards to each of them and herself, the idea — premised on Go Fish — being to call for a card in another player’s hand, and if the player could not match that card, to keep drawing cards from the deck until the correct matching card appeared. She was using the So Sorry deck for the game, the cards showing pictures only of words beginning with the S sound — sun, saw, seal, sack, soap, sink, sign, socks, suitcase, sailboat, scissors and saddle. She had deliberately chosen this deck from the many Go-Mo speech materials available because both Mercy and Mark sometimes experienced difficulty getting the S sound out without a stutter, but primarily because she wanted to encourage Sean to forget the difficulties he was having with his “th” for “s” substitution.
“D-d-d-do you h-h-h-have a soap?” Mercy asked Mark, stumbling on the “d” and the “h” but getting out the “s” without a trace of hesitation.
“So... s-s-s-sorry,” Mark said.
Mercy fished in the deck until she found the card picturing a bar of soap. It was Mark’s turn.
“Do you have a... s-s-s-sink?” he asked Sean.
Sean shook his head.
Connie did not press him for an answer. He was avoiding the N sound, with which he’d been having surprising difficulty during the last several sessions. Mark fished in the deck until he found a “sink” card. It was now Sean’s turn. He looked at Connie.
“Do you have a thailboat?” he asked.
“It’s... s-s-s-sailboat,” Mark said.
“I know what it is,” Sean said.
“Then say it right,” Mark said.
“He’s trying to say it, aren’t you?” Connie said.
“Yeth,” Sean said.
“You mean yes,” Mercy said.
“In fact, I do have a sailboat,” Connie said, and handed Sean the card.
“Thee?” Sean said. “She d-d-did have one.”
“She had a sail b-b-b-boat,” Mercy said, “n-n-not a thail b-b-boat.”
“Do you h-h-have a thissors, too?” Sean asked.
“I have a scissors, too,” Connie said, handing him the card. “Would you like to try saying it again for me?”
“Thissors,” Sean said.
“Scissors,” Connie said.
“Thissors.”
“Well, we’ll try it again later, okay? What card would you like next?”
“Why c-c-can’t he say s-s-scissors?” Mercy said.
“It’s just a word that gives him trouble,” Connie said. “We all have words that give us trouble. I can never say antidisestab... see what I mean? I always trip on it.”
“That’s not even a word!” Mark said, laughing.
“If Mrs. C–C-Croft said it, then it’s a w-w-w-word,” Mercy said.
“She d-d-didn’t say it. She only t-t-tried to say it.”
“Antidisestablishmentarianism,” Connie said in a rush. “There, I got it!”
“See?” Mercy said. “She g-g-got it.”
“That’s some... w-w-word, all right,” Mark said, shaking his head.
At the end of the session, little Sean came to her and said, “Mrs. Cwoft, I f-f-feel so b-b-bad I can’t get it,” and she hugged him close and said, “No, darling, it’ll come in time. I promise you.”