Interview with a Nonstutterer

	Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home, Davenport, IA. 

In 1939, Mary Tudor, graduate student at the University of Iowa, under the direction of Wendell Johnson, researched his hypothesis that stuttering is a learned behavior. To prove this hypothesis, she told nonstuttering children that they were developing a stutter. She conducted this experiment at the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home in Davenport, IA.

Do your friends know you stutter?

Wha—What? I blink when you ask me
this question again. I start to tell you
I don’t know what you’re talking about,
but my mouth clicks shut. I’m scared
to repeat a sound. Letters stretch
in my mind, elastic and gummy. The longer
I chew on them, the tougher it becomes
to speak. Yesterday, I, when I wanted
to tell my friends we should race
to the playfield, my r floated in my mouth
like a cloud. My friends looked at me,
mouths screwed to the side. Whispers rolled
like distant thunder.

How many days has it been since you last spoke?

My voice crisps away like dried leaves
of a forgotten plant. I asked a friend
once to pass me a fork, but my voice
aired out before I finished Ca—n.
It’s been          four days since I’ve tried            to speak again.

I nod, shake my head,
movements smooth like
when I dust cottage furniture. 

Lazy currents of other voices
churn through the grounds,
conversations thrumming through windows.

Do you like talking to me?

I lay my head on the table as I wait
for this session to end, the scratching
of your pen on notepad filling
this tepid room. When I look
like I may say something,
you dart your eyes over me, as if
you can’t bear watching my lips quiver.
My mouth fears open. Everything stops.

Finish this nursery rhyme. “Mary has a…”

Little invisible sound that passes through me,
We all have fleece white as snow, skin
so easy to shear with words. We jump
onto a candlestick and burst into flame
with our cotton skin. If I lived in a shoe,
I could be tied together again
after my fallen words shatter to pieces.
I wasn’t always eggshell fragile. But
you’ll never put me back together.
I only stutter because of you,
Mary. I am the little lamb that followed you.

---

---