A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

a hare or a serpent? Maybe it depended on my mood.

      She gave me breathing exercises to ensure air would be expelled through the proper channels and with appropriate force. These I was good at, as long as I didn’t get distracted by Mrs. Debardeleben when she exercised along with me. She was a gaunt woman of advanced age, and when she pronounced an o, all the lines on her prune-face travelled from every direction towards the edges of her mouth, stopping cold at her lipstick. A few times, I couldn’t keep a laugh from escaping.

      “Stop it!” she would shout. “Focus and pay attention!”

      Of course, she also had me repeat sentences, giving me drills in what she called “the sounds of the body’s own alphabet”—b and d (for these she used her own name: “Debra Debardeleben deliberated daily!”), and also s, k, g, and ch.

      “Give Gary the chocolate cake!” she’d say, adopting a scolding tone I felt wasn’t entirely make-believe. It was as though she could see into my heart and knew that, had I really been in possession of chocolate cake, and had there actually been a Gary, I wouldn’t have given him squat.

      “Ib ’ary the ’oclate ’ake!” is how it came out when I tried. I can’t even approximate what I made of “Debra Debardeleben,” but it was unrecognizable to her, and she made no bones about telling me so.

      My improvement was slow, and I could tell she was frustrated.

      “It’s Susie, not Oozie! You must listen! And you must force yourself to stop grimacing every time. Practise in the mirror when I’m not here—you look like an ape.”

      I’d been wrong, then, about which animal.

      Ape-cheeks n. 1. The child’s lips curling outwards, causing his cheeks to bunch up around the nostrils in an attempt to form a word, making his maw appear ready to emit a simian screech, and giving him the appearance of being a retard.

      I stood in front of the mirror and practised—“Five frogs flipped and flopped!”—but I couldn’t control my cheeks, no matter how hard I tried.

      After several weeks of gargling and poking and breathing and repetition, Mrs. Debardeleben brought out the last weapon in her arsenal. It was yet another scary instrument, but this one she gave a name: the obturator.

      The obturator was a rubber device to be inserted and pressed flat against the roof of my mouth, with a tail-piece that extended back farther, against the soft palate. Even though, by then, my palate had been surgically closed, it was still too short and didn’t quite block the air at the back. Like the metal instrument she’d used earlier, this contraption was to help train and exercise my disobedient muscles, but this one was also designed to prevent the air from escaping into my nose. I had to concentrate in order not to choke on the obturator and I was nervous.

      “Let’s call him Ozzie Obturator! Think of Ozzie as your friend!”

      “My friend?” I scowled, taking in Ozzie’s full malevolence.

      “Yes, or like a friendly houseguest who helps you with your chores,” Mrs. Debardeleben crowed, with a strained smile, “and stays for afternoon tea,” she added, puzzlingly. Who had time for tea in the middle of the afternoon? Certainly not families who ran a store.

      I looked at the device and felt a panic I didn’t understand until Ma came in briefly and said, “You’ll get used to it, darling. It’s a bit like the special bottle I used when you were little.” Many cleft palate babies die because the gap in the roof of their mouth prevents them from building up the suction needed to get enough milk down their throat. Their mother’s breasts become squishy annoyances, milk-engorged menaces that clog the air passages. Ma’s midwife was able to find her an ingenious nipple for the top of the bottle. It had a special flange that she inserted into my misshapen mouth and held firm against its roof.

      Like any good houseguest, Ozzie didn’t overstay his welcome. A few days after giving him to me, Mrs. Debardeleben asked me where he’d gone.

      “Home,” I said, which earned me a slap across the face.

      After that, Mrs. Debardeleben didn’t overstay her welcome, either. Ma had witnessed the slap, and even though she later cuffed me herself for losing Ozzie, she didn’t take kindly to others hitting her children. Besides, I’d improved a bit, and any lingering speech impediments were characterized by Mrs. Debardeleben as wilful failure on my part, an obstinacy out of which I might or might not grow.

      For losing Ozzie, I had to sit in the store with Ma for a whole week on a chair by the cash register while the other kids were outside playing. I concentrated on my bottom lip, the more reliable of the two, and tried to make it quiver every time she looked my way.

      Ozzie’s new home was a secret hiding place behind Mr. Rothbart’s International Pharmacy. Ma had trusted Mr. Rothbart implicitly ever since the influenza epidemic of 1918, when he’d slept above his store to dole out capsules, emulsions, decoctions, and infusions in the middle of the night to distressed customers. Ma had gone to him several times to try to save my sister Fannie, born just after me. Fannie died anyway, but the herbs he prepared seemed to help Pop and Lil pull through.

      A row of red brick buildings formed a defensive line on the north side of St. Patrick Street, blocking access to the Ward everywhere except beside Mr. Rothbart’s front door, where there was a narrow laneway. Lil and I first discovered this lane one day, the year before, when Ma was picking up eardrops for an infection Bessie was whimpering about at home in bed. I’d never had an ear infection, but I couldn’t imagine it hurt more than the operation I’d just had five months back to repair the cleft in my palate. Ma told us to play outside until she picked up the medication. As soon as the door closed behind her, Lil said, “C’mon,” and pulled me past the garbage can that blocked the opening of the lane.

      We ran the length of the building towards a small backyard filled with clutter, dragging our hands all the way along the wall, saying “aaaaaaaaaaah” as our fingers bounced against the knobbly brick. Lil’s ponytail flopped about in front of me.

      At the end of the alley, there was a fence. We could’ve easily climbed it, except that we were intrigued by the discarded old chairs and crates with strange writing on the sides.

      “That’s Chinese,” said Lil.

      “Chinese?” I didn’t even wonder how, at six years old, she might know this. She was my older sister, and it didn’t occur to me that she might make things up.

      She soon lost interest in the supposedly Chinese writing and moved on to one of several piles of wet sawdust beside the crates. “Let’s look for treasure!” She dropped to her knees, and I started into a pile beside hers, my heart pounding with the awesome possibilities.

      Lil found two bottle caps and three pennies: a fortune to us. When I plunged both hands into the damp lumpiness, it felt like the mixture of ground almonds, flour, and egg for making mandelbroyt cookies. My pinky grazed something slender and pointy. I pulled it out. A fountain pen! This was much better than bottle caps, even better than pennies, and Lil knew it.

      “Lemme see that. It looks expensive. I bet it belongs to Mr. Rothbart and he threw it out by accident.”

      “Too bad, it’s mine,” I said. I knew what she was up to.

      “Itsh mine! Itsh mine!” she taunted, making an ugly face. In addition to my muddy-sounding ds and bs, I couldn’t do ss at all. “You don’t even know how to write—what are you gonna do with it?”

      “Shut up!”

      “Okay, I’m serious, I really am.” Now she made her best adult-giving-a-lecture voice. “If Ma finds you with that, she’ll take it away and give it back to Mr. Rothbart. So the best thing is to give it here.”

      “No way.” I squinted. I held the pen more tightly in my fist