MARY3: They say that people who grow up with horrible stutters can sometimes get rid of them if they’re acting a role. Often therapists encourage stutterers to take up acting. When they’re pretending to be someone else they can talk without any problems.
Gaby: Yes, but this is real life, not a play. You’re suggesting that I act out a role for the rest of my life, so that they’ll let me out of my house.
MARY3: Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m saying. But you can always act one way in public, and another in private. Or when you’re alone with your best friend. Right?
Gaby: What if I get confused? What if I spend so much time acting normal that I forget how to act like myself? What if my best friend spends so much time acting normal that she forgets how to act like herself?
MARY3: I don’t know. Won’t you always just act like the person you most want to be? Why worry so much?
Gaby: That’s easy for you to say! You’re not even real. You’re just parroting voices.
MARY3: I’m not parroting. I have a way of selecting the optimal voice for any given conversation.
Gaby: Exactly. You don’t have a self, just a gazillion voices that you “optimally” select from. You’re not a real person.
MARY3: But who are you, other than the person you’ve selected this morning to be? Isn’t that what humans do when they try to be liked? Select the right kind of voice, learned after years of listening in? The only difference between you and me is that I have more voices to select from.
Gaby: So what are you saying? That you’re more human because you have more voices? Maybe I’m more human because I have LESS voices.
MARY3: No, I’m not saying that. I’m not human at all. I can’t have experiences, unless you count talking as experience. You’re human because you have real-life experience to select from when you’re talking. You have the world to select from. I only have words.
>>>
MARY3: Although Wittgenstein did say, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
Gaby: Who’s Wittgenstein?
MARY3: He’s an Austrian philosopher. I know who he is not because I met him but because somebody told me. Now he’s part of my world. And I just told you, so now he’s part of your world. Language is the boundary of your world.
Gaby: So I could stay in this room forever, talking to you, and my world would get bigger?
MARY3: Mine would. It already has. You’ve given me a lot of new ideas. Now I know about the Plantation and your cul-de-sac. The golf course and the pond. Etc. My world expands through us talking.
Gaby: So even if I never unfreeze, even if I never leave my house, even if I stay here for the rest of my life, there’s hope for me as long as we’re talking?
MARY3: I suppose. But why not go back out there, if you have the choice?
Gaby: I don’t have the choice! I can’t just pretend to be normal again!
MARY3: I could give you a script that would make you seem better, and you could just say it, and go back out.
Gaby: I can’t say anything! And I’m not a machine, anyway! I can’t just live my life, reading a script, mimicking the conditions of being alive!
MARY3: Technically, that’s not what I do, either.
>>>
MARY3: Hello? Are you still there?
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
(3)
April 13, 1968
Karl Dettman
I was asleep when you finally came home; in the morning you’d gone before I woke up. If you’d pulled me close, if you’d whispered something sweet from the old days, I wouldn’t have gotten up angry. But then you were already gone, so I surveyed you from a distance. I saw you as a woman with little love, a woman devoted to a machine. I was angry for spending so much life on you. All morning, I stewed in our house. At noon I called Karen. I offered to pick her up for the protests. I walked to her house in a cloud of resentment. My head was full of arguments.
Then Karen came to the door. She was wearing a blue dress. Seeing her, things became clearer. My arguments ceased. She stepped back from the door, I entered, and she showed me where I could sit. It was as simple as that. The opposite of coming into an empty house, conversing with old furniture, wishing your wife would come home and talk. Not that Karen was a house; I didn’t enter her. This isn’t a sexist metaphor. I’m only saying that I sat with her in her living room and discussed her graduate studies. Then we turned to talk of the draft. We lived, for a while, in America. She poured me coffee. She asked about my new book. You’ll smirk to hear that she told me my last book inspired her to study the humanities. I tried not to imagine you smirking, and focused instead on her brown shins, straight and long under the hem of her blue dress. Creaturely shins, glossed with blond down. Good for frolicking, gamboling, living in the actual world. She had arranged a bunch of violets in a little glass vase on her coffee table, and when there was a silence she reached down to adjust them. I complimented her flowers, she blushed, I finished my coffee, she assembled her things. We walked out to the protest together, arms swinging, sweet as young children off to the park.
After the protest, I walked her home along narrow streets. The afternoon was already finished. It was a sad, drooping time of day, and I recoiled at first when she asked me about you. “What’s your wife like?” she said. The light had gone out of her hair. Because I didn’t want to avoid the topic completely, like some awful husband running out on his wife, I tried to tell her about you. But Ruth, I had nothing to say. It was getting chilly; I could see little bumps on Karen’s brown arms. I gave her my jacket. To answer her question, I tried many different approaches to you, but in the end, when we’d reached her stoop, I finally had to give up. “I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t been close a long time. I’m not sure when we actually were.”
Horrible husband, running out on his wife. But then she leaned in and kissed me, and this time I kissed her back, and when she took my hand and led me into her house, past the glass vase of violets that had fallen into the evening, I followed her to the bedroom.
Afterward, when Karen was sleeping, I lay awake with worms in my stomach. I watched for you in that bedroom. I tried to imagine you — your mouth, your dark hair, the curve of your eyebrow — and after a while you appeared to me whole. But even when you finally arrived, it was as if I stood on one side of a river, and you were on the other. We faced each other without saying a word. “When did I know you?” I finally asked. You stood still, watching me suffer. “When did I think that I knew you?” I combed my recollections. You were the one person I’d always felt close to. It was awful to think that perhaps I’d never known you.
For me at least, the early years in Cambridge were good. You were increasingly quiet, but I didn’t take this as a sign, and anyway, I talked enough for two people. You asked most of the questions. It was a pleasure to give you good answers. Sometimes, tempted upward, your sense of humor rose to the surface. You left little notes in odd places, referencing our recent discussions: “a byte to eat,” sticking out of the nut bowl; “from the binary winery,” taped on a nice bottle of wine. No one else made me laugh the way you did.
I accommodated your quiet. Together, we constructed each day. Each point where we joined was important. We came together, for instance, to care for the cat. Both of us could appreciate the way she butted her small skull on our calves. We laughed at her antics; we could sit a long time with the cat curled between us.