Thumbsucker Read online

  walter kirn

  thumbsucker

  Walter Kirn is the literary editor for GQ and a contributing editor to Time and Vanity Fair. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, New York, and Esquire. He is the author of the short story collection My Hard Bargain and the novels She Needed Me, Mission to America, and Up in the Air. He lives on a farm near Livingston, Montana.

  Also by Walter Kirn

  My Hard Bargain

  She Needed Me

  Up in the Air

  Copyright © 1999 by Walter Kirn

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Originally published in the United States by Broadway Books in 1999

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Portions of Thumbsucker in slightly different form have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ and Allure

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kirn, Walter, 1962–

  Thumbsucker a novel / by Walter Kirn

  p cm I Title

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82990-0

  PS3561 I746T48 1999

  813′ 54—dc21 99-13328

  Designed by Terry Karydes

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  For Maggie and Maisie,

  in memory of

  Rear Admiral Robert Knox

  contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I Mouth to Mouth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II Hyper

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part III Kingdom Come

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along.

  — SHERWOOD ANDERSON,

  Winesburg, Ohio

  mouth to mouth

  1

  It was the one thing I’d always done. Even breathing did not go back to the womb. Being part of a circle of shoulder, arm, hand, mouth, connected me to myself. This circle is what they tried to break the summer I turned fourteen.

  The appetite was neither thirst nor hunger but seemed to include them both. It could come at any time: while I was waiting in winter darkness for the school bus, fretting about Marcel, the French exchange student who sat behind me in social studies class and liked to rap his knuckles on my skull. Or I’d be walking past the downstairs bathroom, humming and pressing my hands against my ears to block out the sound of Mike, my father, singing high and tunelessly about the suppliers to his sporting goods store: “Oh, Orvis, you sons of bitches, get off my back,” or “Give me a break, Smith & Wesson, just one small break.” Or maybe I was downtown at Wayne’s Cafe, watching my ravenous little brother, Joel, spread so much butter on an English muffin that his teeth left disgusting clifflike marks.

  The effect when my thumb touched my lips was subtle and encompassing. Because I sometimes watched myself in a mirror, doubling my sense of self-communion, I knew how I looked at the moment of closure. Above my greedily flexing cheeks, my eyes would shine as though I’d just put drops in. My forehead would relax and lose its lines. From the rhythmic bullfrog swelling of my throat and the pulsing muscles along my jaw, it appeared I was actually taking nourishment. I believed I was.

  When Mike began his campaign against my habit, the idea of it didn’t seem to anger him. With his chewing gum and cigars and Red Man chewing tobacco, it’s possible he even sympathized; he was a person who liked his mouth full, too. What riled him was that I’d developed an overbite and he was getting the orthodontist’s bills. One night, when he was grouching about them, I said, “I thought your insurance paid for everything.” We were in the TV room watching Ronald Reagan, whom Mike had given money to and voted for. Mike still had a Reagan sticker on his Ford, nicked and shredded from my mother’s attempts to scrape it off with a razor blade.

  “You people must think insurance is free,” Mike said. He spat brown tobacco juice into a beer can he was holding against his lower lip. “In point of fact, Justin, my entire store is paying for what you’re doing to your teeth.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m dumb sometimes.”

  Mike gazed at Reagan’s square, tanned face and sighed. “Insurance just spreads the costs, it doesn’t erase them. Can’t you people get that through your heads?”

  That was what Mike called our family: you people. It made me feel like an intruder in his life.

  Our dentist was a man named Perry Lyman. He worked in the northern suburbs of St. Paul and commuted from our little town of Shandstrom Falls. Before outsiders started moving there, in the early seventies, the town had been a sleepy trading center for hog and dairy farmers, but its large, inexpensive Victorian houses and proximity to the St. Croix River—a government designated “wild river” that people said you could drink from, though I wouldn’t—attracted a stream of out-doorsy young professionals. They brought with them new, exotic sports that hadn’t yet spread across the Midwest: cross-country skiing, bike touring, kayak racing. Rallies and meets were held every month or so, announced by flyers posted at Mike’s store. Mike competed in all these events. He held his own, but the first-place trophies always seemed to go to Perry Lyman.

  I could see why. Perry Lyman was steady, cool, and able to pace himself, while Mike’s approach of clenched ferocity burned him out midrace. Perry Lyman seemed to take pleasure in sports, while Mike’s interest in them was Spartan, almost survivalist, as though he were in training for the day when modern civilization would collapse and men would have to paddle and ski great distances, gathering food and supplies. Mike’s experience playing college football (only a senior-year knee injury had kept him from going pro) had taught him, in the words of his old coach, that “winners treat every practice as a game.” The saying decorated Mike’s business cards and hung in a gold frame inside his store.

  Perry Lyman took a softer approach. He was a kind of hippie, a social dropout, though with short, mossy hair and normal clothes; he sometimes wore a bracelet of tiny seashells but always removed them before touching patients’ mouths. He smoked pot—I saw a scorched hemostat on his desk one day while he was adjusting my retainer, and I knew what it was from the sheriff’s antidrug booth at the county fair. He was a hippie in other ways, too. He preferred hypnosis to anesthetics and liked to prescribe simple exercises for the correction of minor malformations. The year before he gave me a retainer, he’d actually had me using my fingers to push my top teeth back. I pushed for an hour each night after supper and gave myself low-level headaches.

  Though Perry Lyman knew the real reason, he pretended to blame my overbite on an odd nocturnal tongue motion supposedly common in boys my age. In explaining these spasms he introduced me to the term “subconscious pressure” and the idea of involuntary behavior. I instantly recognized the all-purpose excuse I’d been seeking all my life.

  “So if people can’t help things they do,” I said, “why punish them?” I was thinking of John Hinck
ley, who’d shot Reagan.

  “It has nothing to do with changing the offender,” Perry Lyman said. “It’s merely society working out its rage.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s a group subconscious, too. It’s complicated.”

  “It makes sense to me.”

  The day of my retainer fitting, I sat in Perry Lyman’s padded chair and gazed around at rainbow-colored posters reminding me that “A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever” and “If You Love Something, Let It Go.” While I struggled to breathe through a stuffy nose, Perry Lyman packed my mouth with gray mint-flavored putty, then had me bite down to make an impression. Two weeks later he gave me my “appliance,” a pink plastic, crab-shaped object ringed by wires and ridged on top to match my wrinkled palate.

  I was supposed to wear the thing all night and as much as possible during the day. I did this for two weeks, despite some problems. Its wires seemed too tight and made my gums sore. It caused me to speak with a lisp, which people made fun of. Also, the retainer smelled bad, collecting a fizzy yellow scum between its lifelike creases. It did have one important virtue, though: by heightening my awareness of my mouth, the retainer seemed to reduce the chance I’d forget myself in public.

  This was a crippling, ever-present fear. Ned Lesser, a skin-and-bones foster child with digestive problems, had been hounded into switching schools when our eighth-grade class found out he wore a diaper underneath his jeans. I expected similar bullying if I lowered my guard. I’d learned that the trick was never to relax. Whether sitting alone in the lunchroom with a yogurt, trying to look noble in my unpopularity, or idling in right field during a softball game, wishing I shared my little brother’s athletic skills, I had to maintain a vigilant alertness.

  The person I had to be most careful around was Rebecca Crane, my first great crush. Far ahead of me mentally and physically, practically a woman at fourteen, Rebecca had long, brown, center-parted hair and a narrow, foot-shaped face. Like me, she rarely smiled, though it had nothing to do with her teeth, which happened to be perfect, straight and white. Rebecca was a dark and serious girl, devoted to endangered species. She wrote poems about the baby seal, using words such as “holocaust,” and once got a warning from the principal for circulating petitions at school. Watching her fierce hazel eyes flash as she lectured me on the plights of porpoises and auks stirred my blood and absorbed my whole attention; I’m sure I would have forgotten myself in front of her without the retainer’s irritating presence.

  One day Rebecca and I went bird-watching along the Soo Line railroad tracks. Around us were hayfields mowed into stripes. My idea was to get her alone, outdoors, in nature, where our gaping social inequality wouldn’t be so noticeable. With the retainer snug against my palate, I felt secure, protected against a slip, and I let myself relax completely—one of the first times I’d ever dared.

  “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 tha
t 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.”