Inside the Grimké house, the door to the library was open. The room was empty, so I went in and spun the globe. It made a screech sound. Like a nail on a slate board. Binah said that sound was the devil’s toenail. I looked over all the countries on the globe, round the whole earth. Denmark wasn’t next to France, it was up by Prussia, but looking at it, I knew why mauma chose him. He’d been places, and he was going places, and he set her alight with the notion she’d go places, too.
Sarah
Nina came up with the idea that my speech infirmity might be cured by kneading my tongue, a process typically applied to dough. The child was nothing if not pioneering. She’d listened to my tortured sentences throughout the summer and into the fall and came to believe the ornery protuberance in my mouth could be molded in a way that caused words to plump and rise as effortless as yeast. She was six and a half.
Once Nina was seduced by a problem, she wouldn’t give up until she’d improvised a solution and acted on it, and these solutions of hers could be outlandish, but also wondrously imaginative. Not wishing to dampen this fascinating proclivity of hers, I stuck out my tongue and allowed her to grasp it with what I hoped to be a clean drying towel.
This experiment was being performed on the second-floor piazza—me, sitting on the swing, neck craned, mouth open, eyes bulging—the vision of a voracious baby bird awaiting her worm, though to any observer, I’m sure it appeared the worm was being extracted rather than deposited.
An autumn sun was climbing over the harbor, spilling like yolk onto the clouds. From the corner of my watering eye, I could see the sheen of it angling sharply toward Sullivan’s Island. Mr. Williams and I had cantered along that island’s shoreline on horseback in what had turned out to be a sullen affair. Fearing my freshly returned stammer would cause him to abandon the courtship, I’d barely opened my mouth. Nevertheless, he’d continued to call—there’d been five occasions since I’d returned from Belmont last June. I expected each one to be the last. The boundary of feeling between Nina and me was permeable to a fault, and I believe my fear had become Nina’s. She seemed uncommonly determined to cure me.
Grasping my tongue, she pressed and pulled. In return, it flailed like the tentacle of an octopus.
She sighed. “Your tongue is being implacable.”
Implacable! Where did the little genius get these words? I was teaching her to read, as I’d once taught Handful, but I was sure I’d never introduced the word implacable.
“And you are holding your breath,” she added. “Let it out. Try to loosen yourself.”
Very bossy she was, too. Already she possessed more authority and self-assurance than I. “. . . I’ll try,” I said, though perhaps what really happened was an accidental not-trying. I closed my eyes and breathed, and in my mind, I saw the bright water in the harbor and then the image of Handful’s bathwater streaming over the side of the piazza like a falling ribbon, and I felt my tongue unknot and grow tranquil beneath Nina’s fingers.
I don’t know how long she persisted with her efforts. I quite lost myself in the flow of water. Finally she said, “Repeat after me: Wicked Willy Wiggle.”
“Wicked Willy Wiggle,” I said, without a trace of stutter.
This odd interlude on the piazza brought me not a cure, but the nearest thing to a cure I would ever find, and it had nothing to do with Nina’s fanciful tongue kneading. It had somehow to do with breathing and repose and the vision of water.
So it would be from now on—whenever my stints of stammering came, I would close my eyes and breathe and watch Handful’s bathwater. I would see it pouring down and down, and opening my eyes, I would often speak with ease, sometimes for hours.
In November my nineteenth birthday came and went without acknowledgement except Mother’s reminder at breakfast that I’d reached a prime marriageable age. There were weekly dress fittings in preparation for the winter season, providing practically the only contact I had with Handful. She spent her days sewing in Charlotte’s room in the cellar or beneath the oak when the weather was mild. Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn’t seem the least bit shamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who’d risen to her full measure. During the fittings, Handful sang as she pinned me into half-made dresses. Standing on the fitting box, turning slow rotations, I wondered if she sang to avoid conversation. Whatever motivated her, I was relieved.