"The Speech Pathologist" by Pearl Cooper
I did not know I had a lisp until I was seven years old, when the speech pathologist took me out of my second-grade classroom and made me read to her from a spiral bound easel pad that squeaked when the pages turned. The speech pathologist had a small mouth and a tight, pinched face. When she spoke, she enunciated each word with aggressive precision. She kept flipping back to a page full of cartoon stars, kept asking me what I was looking at. Stars. Stars. Stars. I was old enough to know that stars didn't look like they did in the illustration—that they don’t have five points, and that some of them aren't even yellow.
I saw the speech pathologist for one hour, twice a week, until I was twelve years old. At first, I used a tongue depressor (like the kind you might find at a doctor’s office, only blueberry flavored) to restrain my tongue in an effort to produce the desired sound: a clean, sharp ssss like the blade of a knife, one that might slice over the microphone during the morning announcements, making everyone cover their ears. The speech pathologist would read a word out loud, and there would be a pause while I clenched my jaw, pulled my tongue into position, and tried to repeat it back to her, the wood crunching between my teeth, digging into the soft skin of the roof my mouth, the powdery blueberry flavor choking my senses, making me salivate.
Even when I graduated from the tongue depressors, I could never get my S’s to sound natural. They went on for too long at the beginning of the words, lingered at the end. Too often, I would choke on my tongue, spit the words back out, have to start over. Sometimes, the speech pathologist would snap on a bubble-gum flavored rubber glove, run her finger along the ridge just behind my front teeth, trying to show me how close I was (one millimeter, maybe two) to getting it right.
At my last speech therapy session, I did not look the speech pathologist in the eye. I looked down at my backpack—the new one I had picked out for middle school, kicked the bottom of my chair with my heels. “If you do not learn to speak properly, no one is going to want to be your friend,” the speech pathologist said. “When you grow up, no one is going to want to hire you.” Spit pooled in the back of my throat. When I swallowed, I tasted blueberries. I did not say anything. I picked up my backpack and walked out. I knew that any strained, incorrect sound I made would have only illustrated her point.
Outside the speech pathologist’s office, my footsteps echoed off the walls of the wide, empty hallway, and the straps of my backpack dug into my shoulders. I would learn, later, that stars are formed when huge clouds of dust give into their own gravitational pull, collapse in on themselves, and start spinning, and that nobody knows how many stars are in the universe. The number is too large to even be thought of, much less contained to a word and spoken.
Pearl Cooper is a senior at Allegheny college, majoring in English. Her work is forthcoming in the Allegheny Review.