A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

to her eager, childless arms, and my grandmother, always critical of Ma’s housekeeping, insisted I was pointing to the mop.

      My other sister, Bessie, was only seven, but she was already looking out for me. She said I was asking for help.

      FOR A LONG TIME, A SIMPLE BREATH could pack terror into the spongy expanse of my lungs, because I couldn’t hold it forever, and so much depended on what happened next. They said that cleft lip and cleft palate didn’t always afflict the same child, but I had the bad luck to be born with a split that wasn’t satisfied remaining either outside or in—it ran down my upper lip and all the way to the back of my mouth’s roof.

      If I simply exhaled, if I allowed that breath to flow freely, barely a sound was made. That was the perilous decision I had to make as a boy: having no voice or using the one I was given. If, on the other hand, the air I exhaled passed by the vocal cords, and if those cords were allowed to vibrate, voicing was produced.

      Voice isn’t really what I’m talking about, of course, except metaphorically. Voicing is animalistic, feral, instinctive. It’s what chimpanzees, or hyenas, or even small infants do: they groan, they screech, they cry. It’s saying “ahhhh” when the doctor prods with his tongue depressor.

      Speech, on the other hand, is a phenomenon not as much produced as it is shaped. Each word is a small sculpture.

      Any person can squish a lump of clay through his fingers (provided he has fingers to begin with) and produce a random form, determined only by grunting pressure, how much or how little, and what oozes out here and there. Fashioning that shape into something recognizable or useful requires more than a haphazard neural impulse and a contraction of the muscles.

      When a word is spoken, air first travels up the vocal tract, but then it must be directed, through either the nose or the mouth, depending on the action of the soft palate and the velopharyngeal valve. By the time the word reaches our ears, many instruments have had their chance with it: cords, valves, palates, tongue, teeth, lips. Obviously then, having good tools is essential to proper enunciation. I can work soft clay free of the spinning wheel if I apply strength and temper that force with measured restraint, but it’ll take me time, and in the process of dislodging, I’ll squash the bowl I’ve worked on. A wire passed underneath will do it swiftly and cleanly each time.

      Problem was, I was handed defective tools.

      Hare-lip n. 1. A separation of the skin of the upper lip running right up to the nose, making the child’s face look like a bunny rabbit. Meant to be adorable. Mildly offensive.

      I had only a partial separation of the skin, slightly to the right of centre as you took in my face, and the nostril on that side was a little flattened and askew. In that respect, I wasluckier than some, who had a double cleft, or whose deformity was bad enough that their nose was a piece of cauliflower. In my case, “hare” didn’t really fit me. I had an indent rather than a split, making my upper lip a bracket tipped over. A pointed, grammatical bracket calling attention to the tip of my tongue, which just sat there because I hadn’t grown teeth yet and my tongue had nowhere to hide:

      Here! Just down here is the tip of Herman’s tongue!

      A neighbour told my mother that if there was any animal to compare me to, it might be a serpent. She said she hoped for my sake that my teeth grew in properly because everyone knew from the story of Adam and Eve that a serpent wasn’t to be trusted.

      Serpent-tongue n. 1. The child’s tongue, resting there in the opening of the malformed mouth, appearing ready to dart out at any moment and test the air to see if the climate is right for treachery.

      When I was six years old, Ma decided I needed speech lessons. Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children had one therapist then, but her time was stretched thin and she worked mostly with kids who had lisps or stutters. There was a long waiting list and my parents were advised that time was slipping by. Fearing that if I didn’t soon have lessons, I might never speak properly, they hired an elocutionist who had experience with cleft palate children.

      She had a body that was thin and extremely long from bottom to top, which is how I first took her in. Our house consisted of a kitchen, a stockroom at the back of the store, and a dining room stuck on the rump end of the living room. Also, there were three bedrooms and the bathroom above. I was chasing after Lil, playing a game of tag, and we’d just thundered down the wooden stairs and turned the corner through the dining room/living room. Lil had darted past the new obstacle, but as I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I ran smack into it, right into its long, scratchy wool skirt. I stared up. The lady’s perfume made my nostrils twitch, and her face reminded me of a prune. Did people make fun of her too? Did she have older sisters who teased her, called her prune-face when her mother wasn’t looking?

      “Hello,” she said. Lil bolted outside, eager to avoid the company, and I made a move to follow her, but Ma came back into the kitchen from hanging the lady’s coat near the back door and thwarted my escape with a scoop of her arm. She stilled my kicking legs by putting me down in front of the prune-lady.

      “This is Mrs. Debardeleben, darling. She’s going to help you learn to speak normally.”

      Debardeleben. I couldn’t believe it. Two sets of alternating ds and bs—it was a cruel joke. The measure of a successful student must have been one who could finally pronounce her name.

      Mrs. Debardeleben said, “I need a pitcher of water, a glass, and a wash basin,” and when Ma produced these for her, she took me into the living room. She moved the lamp onto the floor and placed the pitcher, glass, and basin on the small table beside us. I glanced to see if Ma was watching, but she’d returned to the kitchen. You rearranged furniture at your peril.

      Mrs. Debardeleben sat in Pop’s wingback chair and propped me upright on the ottoman. She poured a glass of water and said, “Gargle for thirty seconds and then spit into the basin. This will exercise the throat muscles.”

      I took the water into my mouth and tried to gargle, but it wouldn’t stay in the back of my throat. Some of it drib-bled out my nose and the rest of it seeped back down my air passages. I started coughing and choking until I hacked and spewed into the basin and onto Mrs. Debardeleben’s scratchy skirt. Her lips pursed.

      After a few attempts that produced much the same result, she declared, “We will leave that exercise for now. Next, I want you to concentrate on the back of your throat and make it move without making any sound at all.”

      This was a feat I could no more do than wiggle my ears. Neither Lil nor I could wiggle our ears, but Bessie could. I thought if Bessie had a cleft palate, she would manage it better. That was the first time I remember questioning why I’d been born the way I was. It was also the first time I wished that my sisters had been born that way instead of me. This thought came with surprisingly little guilt and even carried a syrupy satisfaction that coated my tongue. I imagined what it might be like to tease Bessie, who fooled Ma and Pop into thinking she was a goody two-shoes, or Lil, who was hot and cold, one minute my best buddy, the next my tormentor.

      After a few weeks, Mrs. Debardeleben decided we’d try different exercises.

      “Place your fingers in your mouth to stretch the muscles of your palate.”

      I tried, but when it was clear my fingers were too short to reach far enough back, she drew from her bag a scary metal instrument that she said should do the trick. She prodded it into my big, gaping maw.

      Those were the words she used. “Open up, now. I want to see a big, gaping maw!”

      The first time she said it, I stared at her goggle-eyed until she explained that my maw was not the same thing as my mother.

      “A maw—m-a-w—is