Thumbsucker (2 page)

“It’s hot. I’m taking my shirt off,” I announced. It was a bold act for me. At fourteen, I had the physique of a sperm: an enormous oval head trailing a skinny, tapering body that, unless I started lifting weights as Mike was always badgering me to, would probably just drop off someday.

“Go ahead, take it off,” Rebecca said, scanning a pasture with binoculars. “Look: a red-winged blackbird!”

“You take yours off, too,” I said.

“My stomach will get a sunburn that my dad will see. He’ll ask me what I’ve been up to.”

“Your father looks at your naked stomach?”

“He checks my body for wood ticks. Doesn’t yours?”

“With me it’s Audrey, my mother,” I admitted. “It’s fine, though. She’s a nurse.”

Rebecca lowered her binoculars. “Why do you call your folks by their first names?”

“Mike says when I call him ‘Dad’ he feels old and I sound like a child. When he hears me call Audrey ‘Mom,’ then
she
seems old to him.”

Finally, I got Rebecca to take her shirt off. Her bra straps made red nicks in her pale shoulders and I saw how the cups were cradling real weight. The sight thrilled me, but in bed that night, when I thought of Rebecca’s father, a burly contractor, inspecting her body for ticks, I got anxious. When I opened my eyes in the morning my thumb was snugly seated in my cheek and the retainer was sitting on my pillow, staring back at me like an odd little sea creature. I never put it in my mouth again.

On the Fourth of July, as half the town looked on, Mike lost a kayak race to Perry Lyman. Mike finished a distant second, which might have been a close second if he hadn’t flung away his paddle when he saw he wasn’t going to win. That night, as he and Audrey and Joel and I sat on a blanket in the Lions Park and watched the volunteer firemen shoot fireworks, he suddenly clamped his hand on my right wrist and yanked out my thumb. It made a popping sound.

“You look like a baby,” Mike said. “You’re pathetic. When are you going to cut this out? My God.”

On its own, it seemed, my thumb slipped right back in.

“You don’t even
try
to stop,” Mike said.

“I do, too, try,” I mumbled with my thumb in.

“Well, I’m going to help you try a little harder.”

Mike’s first idea was Suk No Mor, a cayenne-pepper preparation whose label showed a throbbing thumbtip radiating jagged lines of pain. I sat at the kitchen table reading a
Modern Nursing
magazine as Audrey dabbed the liquid on my thumbnail using the plastic wand from the bottle. As always when she was treating my aches and pains—soothing poison ivy with pink lotion, removing earwax with a rubber bulb, extracting a splinter with an open safety pin—her face had a rich, focused beauty that made me blush. As stunning as any woman in a magazine, with eyes that were all bottomless black pupils and skin the color of a milk-dipped gingersnap, she seemed to come from another planet, my mother—one with a lighter atmosphere, less gravity. The men in our family were no match for her, not even Joel, whom all the girls called cute, and sometimes I wondered why she stayed with us.

“How much do you like this Rebecca?” she asked me, starting a line of questioning I found personal. “Have you tried to kiss her on the lips yet?”

“It says in here to inject adrenaline for severe reactions to insect stings.”

“You can tell me, Justin. I won’t be angry.”

“Why would you be angry if I kissed someone?”

“I wouldn’t be angry, I told you that. So
have
you?”

“I bet a shot of adrenaline feels good.”

I spent the rest of that day by the river with Rebecca. Whenever she wasn’t looking, I sneaked a quick lick of the Suk No Mor. She caught me once and I pretended I was biting my nail. The first hot, peppery shocks were followed by numbness, and by the time we turned to walk back home I’d licked the stuff clean off. I sensed Rebecca waiting for me to hug her or slide my hand up the front of her shirt, but I couldn’t relax enough to risk the chance that once I had what I’d waited so long for, my thumb wouldn’t drift to my lips from sheer relief. I had begun to be vigilant again.

“It’s time we were honest and open,” Perry Lyman said. We were sitting face-to-face: me in the dental chair, wearing a paper bib, and he at his little prescription-writing desk, his restless right foot playing with the pedal of his trash can. “The retainer won’t work if you never wear it, and your father won’t pay for braces,” he said. “It’s time to confront the underlying issue. I know what your problem is. I can help you stop.”

I watched the trash-can lid flap up and down.

“It’s an understandable habit,” Perry Lyman said.

“In fact, what’s strange is that people ever quit. It’s nature’s substitute for the female breast.”

I knew this, but somehow it didn’t help to hear it.

“How were you fed as a baby? From a bottle?”

“Might have been,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

“Any tension at home? Anxiety?”

I nodded. “Plenty.”

“Any bad memories?”

There were so many that it was hard to pick one. There was the time I quit the Peewee hockey team, complaining of bruised ribs after a check, and Mike reached over my shoulder on the drive home, stopped the car, opened my door, and pushed me out. Or the time when he picked up a shotgun in his store after a daylong argument with Audrey over her purchase of an antique mirror and warned me that he’d blow his head off someday if “you people don’t come down to earth.” Then there was the disaster of Camp Overcome, a summer program run by Woody Wolff, Mike’s beloved football coach at the University of Michigan, that was designed to treat bed wetters, stutterers, and thumbsuckers like me. After two weeks of midnight mile runs, skimpy breakfasts of prune juice and cold oatmeal, and grueling four-hour lectures on self-mastery, my habit came back worse than ever. Intense. Unshakable.

I avoided my dentist’s eyes. “No conscious ones.”

“We never remember the big things anyway. The psyche is formed in the bassinet, the stroller. A cat drops
a chewed mouse inside your crib and at seventeen you’re a hand-washing fanatic. Some dimwit baby-sitter holds your mouth shut so she can watch her soap operas in peace and at forty you wonder why you can’t stay married.”

The conversation fascinated me. “What about the chromosomes? The genes?”

Perry Lyman glanced up at his wall clock. “Genetics, psychology, morality. The terminologies change, the problems don’t. I’d like to try hypnosis, Justin.”

“Hypnosis?”

“God knows it’s better than essence of red pepper. Was that your father’s idea?”

I said it was.

“I see he’s entered the Labor Day bike race.”

“He trains every day before work,” I said. “Twenty-one miles.”

“No kidding? What’s his time?”

“He hasn’t told me. Hypnosis, huh?”

Perry Lyman slowly let the lid down. “I think it can help you kick this thing. I do.”

Because of a white-water rafting trip to Oregon, Perry Lyman couldn’t perform the hypnosis right away. Each morning during my week of waiting, Mike used a pen with purple ink to print his initials, MFC—Michael Forrest Cobb—on the pad of my right thumb. He gripped my wrist to steady my hand, and my fingers
went numb. At night he checked for fadedness and smearing. He promised me a portable TV if I managed to go a whole month, but I knew from experience he’d forget the deal if I succeeded in keeping up my end of it. He had a way of forgetting the bargains we struck.

“You
swear
?” I said the second night, after Mike inspected my thumb. “You swear it won’t be like the Honda and the chin-ups?” Two years ago, Mike had promised me a dirt bike if I won the President’s Physical Fitness certificate. I’d missed the award by two chin-ups and gotten nothing, a bitter reminder that a deal’s a deal.

“What Honda? When?” Mike said.

I couldn’t believe this. “I want you to buy that TV tomorrow morning and keep it in its box with the receipt.”

One afternoon Rebecca startled me by asking what the writing on my thumb was. She had a chest cold and was at her house, wrapped in an electric blanket. She shared her codeine cough syrup with me. Her wet brown eyes looked drugged and trusting, and for a light-headed moment or two I considered telling her the truth. I felt the confession slowly rising inside me like a bubble in honey.

Then I panicked.

“MFC,” I said. “ ‘Motherfucking cocksucker.’ ”

Tears came into Rebecca’s staring eyes. Her line on me had always been that I was afraid of mature conversation, unwilling to share my fears and weaknesses. She
assured me that doing this would bring us closer, but I noticed that she expected me to go first.

“Why do you have to act so tough?” she said. “Have I done something to hurt you? Don’t you trust me? What’s the point of spending time together if it doesn’t lead to openness?”

“Motherfucking cocksucker,” I said.

I shut my eyes and let my shoulders fall as music featuring harp, piano, and birdsong drifted from the tape player on Perry Lyman’s desk. His voice was low and smooth. “Safety surrounds you. Peace pervades your being. Security such as you’ve never known descends.” He circled me as he spoke, stirring currents in the Lysoled air. The sticky, peeling sound of his crepe-soled shoes made me wonder how often he mopped his floors.

“Imagine yourself on a path,” he said after a few more minutes of warm-up. “You’re deep in the forest. You glimpse a clearing. In its center, a shaft of yellow light shines down, illuminating a wild animal.”

I wondered if I was “under” and concluded that if I could be wondering this then I wasn’t. Perry Lyman’s voice, annoyingly smooth and aware of its own resonance, kept on about the animal, calling it my “power animal” and urging me to see it in detail. Eventually, I managed to picture a deer. Seen straight on and
eye-to-eye, it had the face of Ned Lesser, the diaper boy, but when it looked away it was a deer again.

“When you feel like sucking your thumb,” said Perry Lyman, “call your power animal for help. It will comfort you and give you strength. Call it to you now.”

“Come here,” I whispered.

“Do it in your
mind
.”