Bitter in the Mouth (11 page)

One syllable with no incoming, a placeholder until a thought came to mind, a guttural sound made at moments of surprise, confusion, frustration, or disappointment, “oh” could also be an indicator of indifference, as in I care so little about what you’ve said to me that I can’t be bothered to respond with a real word. In some instances, “oh” was the sound of a body absorbing rejection.

I sat up, pulled my sweater over my head, put on my jeans and sneakers, and looked around and saw that Bobby was no longer in the room.

“I’ll see you
cannedgreenbeans
tomorrow
breakfastsausage
, Wade
orangesherbet
,” I said, before closing the door of his bedroom on my way out. I pressed my ear to his door and I didn’t move. The person inside of me wouldn’t let me go. She knew that a confession was forthcoming. The confession turned out to be the name of the kissed-girl.

“Please
lemonjuice
, Julie
caramelcandy
.”

Wade was no longer a child. He had a Plan B. The person inside of him had a line, and he was practicing it. The last word of the plea was apparently interchangeable.

The flowers that arrived in May were tiny, red, and frilly. In the mornings I would see them in the whites of my eyes. A splash of water made them bloom more. Eyedrops only made them pink. I hated them for giving me away. I was suffering from an ailment inaccurately known as heartbreak. (A glass breaks. A fever breaks. A ray of sunlight breaks through the clouds. A heart is a muscle and it hurts like one, aches and pulls.) By the end of that month, when the school year ended, I was exhausted, mostly from the inability to understand what had happened to me and Wade.

We had continued to spend our mornings and afternoons together in our usual way. But every time I saw him, I heard his voice in my head saying the kissed-girl’s name. What I never heard again was “Please
lemonjuice
, Linda
mint.”

Wade and I thought that we had till the end of the weekend to say our goodbyes. His mom had told him that they weren’t leaving for Tampa until Monday morning, but sometime after the Harris family returned from their usual Saturday night 5:15
P.M
. dinner at Slo Smoking and before the sunrise on Sunday, Wade’s mom took one of the family cars, two suitcases, and left town without him. The orange sherbet boy woke up and found himself belonging to a broken family. (A family breaks.)

Mrs. Harris’s hairdresser knew before anyone else did. It could be argued that her hairdresser knew even before she knew. There had been the recent change in her hair color, including blond highlights, and then the accessorizing with a headband, a twist of light blue rayon, considered fashionable in Hollywood in 1982 but somewhat slatternly in Boiling Springs. Once the first Monday-morning appointment arrived at Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium, the news about Wade’s mom was set loose. By then, all the drapes were drawn shut at the faded-red-T-shirt house. The house was in mourning. Or its occupants were ashamed. I didn’t know then that there was a one-word encapsulation for those two feelings: “mortification.” Wade’s dad, known to his congregation in Shelby as the Reverend Canon of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, didn’t leave the house that Sunday. On Monday morning, he drove his son, Wade, to the airport to board a flight to Tampa, alone. Before leaving, Wade had knocked on the back door of the blue and gray ranch house. He handed me a note that promised me that he would call when he got to his grandmother’s. He never called, all summer long. Nor was the written word again employed.

Wade’s halo was a product of the sun, a dependent of its rays. The more time he spent outside, the more light his head of hair attracted and trapped, like fireflies in a jar. But during the summer of ’82, his fireflies would all die, and everybody in Boiling Springs knew why. Wade, my orange sherbet boy, had lost his mom. She didn’t pass away. She drove away. Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium buzzed with the news. Beth Anne came home and told it to her husband, Carson junior. Kelly overheard and pretended that she hadn’t. According to Beth Anne, Mrs. Harris had always been too showy with her clingy shirts and above-the-knee skirts. The reverend’s wife, according to her hairdresser, was now living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She had found work as a cocktail waitress in an oceanside hotel. This was the same hotel where she and her husband had stayed just a year before, on their fifteenth wedding anniversary, and where she had met a bartender who gave her free drinks every night after her husband fell asleep at his usual bedtime of 10
P.M
. Everybody knew that Episcopalians liked a cocktail now and then, and this part of the story only confirmed it.

As far as the Southern Baptists were concerned, Episcopalians were third on the list of local religious nonconformists. At the top was the former Miss Feldmann. Second was the small band of Catholics. The talk about them usually centered on how the small band, i.e. the congregation of St. Mary’s, always managed to have enough funds for the upkeep of their church and most recently for the new stained-glass windows (all six depicted a dove emerging from a shatter of blue and yellow triangles, which intentionally or unintentionally created an “explosion of faith” effect when seen from the outside). Papal money was said to have been involved. Kelly wrote in letter #658 that she tuned out of her parents’ conversation at this point because Catholics weren’t half as interesting as her parents made them out to be. Sally Campbell, for example, was a Catholic and she was boring. Kelly also wrote that the lesson to be taken from Wade’s mom’s “escapade” was that we should be very careful what we say to our hairdressers when we have them. The lesson that I would take from it was that we changed when our mothers left us. Our fireflies died.

When I saw Wade on our first day of high school, I assumed from the subdued color of his hair that it must have rained every day while he was in Tampa with his grandmother. Then a vision of his mother basking in the rays of Myrtle Beach with her new hair color and her new life flashed in between us. Bleached and beached, the Reverend Harris’s ex-wife–cum–cocktail waitress had become instantly legendary among the women of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area. She was even more legendary among the men. She was the community’s cautionary tale against beachside hotels, blond highlights, clingy shirts, exposed knees, flirty headbands, and hard liquor. She was the fantasy for all these things as well. Wade returned home to Boiling Springs, a small town made even smaller by its infatuation with this vivid specter of his mother. Wade, as if anticipating this tightening focus, had transformed himself over the summer into the perfect specimen of the all-American teenage boy. He must have seen kissed-girl’s copies of
Seventeen
magazine because he showed up at Boiling Springs High School looking like he had walked off one of its pages. His hair was cut short with a part to the side. He wore a pale blue polo shirt and a pair of khakis. On his feet were penny loafers, complete with pennies tucked into their slits. I walked right past him and didn’t stop until he said my name. I turned around and looked from the linoleum floor up, taking in the copper coins, the neutral-colored pant legs, the pastel torso, the pale face, the brown hair, and saw someone whom I didn’t recognize.

In my junior year of college, when I saw
Rebel Without a Cause
in my film studies class, Filmic Constructions of Masculinity: Boys Don’t Cry But Sometimes They Dance, I realized that Wade, beautiful at thirteen, had looked like a disheveled James Dean. Wade, handsome at fourteen, was more of a Ken doll.

Wade recognized me because I was exactly the same, except that underneath my T-shirt I was wearing a training bra and in my purse I had a packet of Winston Reds. On the outside, though, I hadn’t changed.

The bus stop was now at the
YIELD
sign at the corner of Laurel and Chestnut streets. I hadn’t seen Wade there that morning. I would never see him there. During our freshman year, he got a ride to and from school from three other Ken dolls who were juniors and already had their driver’s licenses. I don’t know when Wade befriended them, how the distance between Tampa and Boiling Springs had been traversed by these boys that summer, but it had. Thanks to them, Wade had a ready-made coterie of friends, older boys who grabbed him by the skin on the back of his neck when they walked past him in the hall. Wade, the former king of eighth grade, was now their prince. In my letters to Kelly, I began referring to Wade as Cadmus, the prince of Phoenecia. Her brain, though, was already so obsessed with real boys that she was forgetting the life stories of the mythical ones. I had to remind her that Cadmus, while searching for a missing female member of his family, was told by an oracle to give up his search and become instead the founding father of the city of Thebes. Cadmus, impatient and resourceful, populated his new city by sowing its virgin soil with the teeth of a dragon, slain by his own hands. From each hard enameled seed sprang a man. Instant, easy, and no females required. Kelly wrote back in letter #661, “Whoa. You’re way overthinking this one. Wade is a hunk, and he’s popular. That’s all.”

Within the first few days of our freshman year, the world for Kelly flattened out and became a wide-open field. She could see straight across this expanse. There were no obstacles, natural or man-made. There was nothing lurking, dangerous, or ulterior. Some on this field were physically beautiful or handsome and would reap the bounty that would come with it. A few were smart and therefore would earn their good graces. The rest were losers who would work for minimum wage and amass nothing. We all deserved what was coming to us. High school was the beginning of our irreversible forced march. Kelly was thrilled with what she saw ahead of her. She was rushing toward it with her new body, her new clothes, and her new empty head.

I occupied my role as the Smartest Girl at BSHS with the intensity and fervor of the newly converted. I had no one to distract me. The orange sherbet boy was lost to me. This time it wasn’t travel that had changed him. It was the coming home that did it. Kelly, my world, was wandering around a dense forest and mistaking it for a grassy meadow. To her great disappointment, though, Cadmus didn’t ask her to be his second (the kissed-girl or some other girl must have been his first, explaining the immediate status bestowed upon him by the gaggle of older but still virginal Kens). Sally Campbell was born with a homecoming queen crown on her head. You can imagine the pain and joy that her mother felt. Sally laid eyes on Cadmus, and slipped her hands into his. By the end of the first week of our freshman year, the match was made public, the coterie celebrated with back slappings, and Sally got a ride home from the Kens.

For the remainder of my four years at BSHS, I disappeared into the walls. If it hadn’t been for the smoke from my cigarettes or the smell of it in my hair, it would have been difficult to find me. In class, I took diligent notes with my head down, raising it only when I raised my hand to ask a question, to the mock groans of my fellow students. At lunchtime, I sat at the edge of the lunchroom until I decided that I would rather be outside smoking with the stoners: Chris Johnson, Tommy Miller, and Susan Taylor. They were always together, charmed by their shared exclusion. They, a Greek chorus, would have objected in unison to the characterization:

Exclusion? No fucking way, Linda!

These three had seen the same field that Kelly saw, and they turned around and walked the other way. Of the three of them, Chris Johnson, who shared the same first and last name as one of the Kens (it hadn’t occurred to me then that it must have meant that they shared a forefather too), and I were the closest to being friends.

“There’s a high
greenLifesavers
way
cannedpears
out of this hole
hushpuppies
, Linda
mint
.” That was the first thing Chris said to me. I thought he was quoting a line from a movie. His non sequitur confused me until I looked into his eyes and understood that he was serious. The highway out of Boiling Springs was a fact that he held on to dearly, and he thought that I should be reminded of it too. I had been smoking with them for about a month by then. They had nodded at me but otherwise ignored me. They traded jokes with one another in the shorthand language of best friends: a couple of words and then convulsive laughter. I enjoyed the concision of their exchanges and didn’t care that they were speaking a language I didn’t understand. Chris was a sophomore, so he and I didn’t have any classes in common. In the hallways, he always managed to see me first, and instead of saying hi he would repeat his favorite fact about our hometown to me. During his senior year, that greeting became downright exuberant. He meant it. He had been saving his money to buy a Greyhound ticket to Philadelphia to go live with his cousin. He said he was getting on that bus as soon as he got his diploma.

Tommy Miller was leaving town too. He was going with Susan Taylor to live in Richmond, Virginia. She had graduated the previous year but had stayed in town, working at the Super 8 motel outside of Shelby, in order to wait for him. I had no idea that they were a couple until one day I noticed that Tommy had placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a couple of quick puffs, and handed it to Susan to smoke. I had to stifle a sigh. I was impressed by how natural Tommy’s gesture was. He saw a need and he filled it, oblivious to the fact that he and Susan weren’t alone. I was fourteen, and it was the most public act of intimacy that I had witnessed in real life. It was akin to the blowing of a kiss.

I
SOMETIMES WOULD CRAVE A WORD
. I
WOULD GO TO BED THINKING
about it, and in my dreams someone would say it. The next morning that word would be the first one in my head. I would go through my day hoping to hear it. For me there was, and still is, an appreciable distinction between hearing the word said and saying it for myself, though both would produce the same incomings. It was the difference between being served a good meal and having to cook one for myself. I would long for the word like it was a spoonful of peach cobbler, the kind that Bridges served only on Saturdays.

Food and taste metaphors were complicated for me. By complicated I mean that they were of no use to me. They shed their figurative qualities, their diaphanous layers of meaning, and became concrete and explicit. They left me literal and naked. The word that made me taste peach cobbler, for example, was “matricide.”

The first time I heard this word said aloud was in a comp lit seminar,
The Oresteia:
It’s a Family Affair. I was always unprepared for a new word’s incoming. I was most startled when a new word had a very familiar taste. I would lose my ability to absorb what was happening to me. My body would respond to the taste, whether pleasant or unpleasant, with a twitch or a tremor, or an expletive would escape from my mouth. College was the most challenging time for me because my vocabulary was expanding by the minute. In my classes, I often had the shakes and exhibited what appeared to be a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. By the end of my freshman year at Yale, there were rumors circulating on campus that I was taking large quantities of speed, never slept, read every assigned page, and aced all my papers and exams, and was therefore responsible for skewing the delicate grading curve in all my classes. Only one of these accusations was true. I was often awake late into the night, but I wasn’t poring over my assigned readings. I was reviewing the new words I had heard during the day. I whispered them to myself. I placed them in order, from sour to sweet. I organized them in descending gradation of saltiness. I saved the bitter ones for last, hoping as I always do to find a match for my first memory. Then there were the guilty pleasures, which I repeated out of gluttony or homesickness. “Matricide,” for example.

According to my great-uncle Harper, my mother was never young. He said DeAnne was born a thirty-five-year-old woman and remained that age until she turned thirty-six, and then she got older like the rest of us. If I was to believe my great-uncle, DeAnne’s first smile gave her laugh lines. The first time she squinted at the sun her forehead wrinkled. When other little girls had freckles, she had age spots. My great-uncle swore that all this was true. I never had any problems believing in DeAnne’s “prema” and “perma” maturity. As a mother, she had the rigidity and the timidity of an old woman. She had a couple of stock reprimands that she had learned from her mother, Iris. When DeAnne used these reprimands against me, she did so with a hesitancy that told me that she didn’t really believe in them. Or she didn’t understand them.
Put on a sweater or you’ll get a
cold!
DeAnne, armed with over forty years of real-life experience, knew that wearing a sweater wasn’t a prophylactic against the common cold. Yet she said it anyway.
Don’t be so selfish!
DeAnne, I was certain, didn’t comprehend the differences among these three words: “selfish,” “self-centered,” and “self.” I accused her of this in a letter written at the end of my sophomore year in college. Our sporadic communication ended with that missive.

From the age of seven to eleven, I loved DeAnne because that was what I thought was natural. On television (when no one was around I would watch it with the volume turned off), I saw children who cried when their mothers died. These same children would then have gauzy flashbacks of hugging their mothers, clinging to their necks or thighs. Because of my secret sense, I have always preferred the stories in the pages of books to those on the screen, but no matter the medium there seemed to be an overriding message: I was lucky to have a mother.

Rapunzel was taken away from her mother at birth. Her mother didn’t even get to name her and probably wouldn’t have chosen the name
Rapunzel
. Snow White and Gretel had stepmothers who plotted their violent deaths while Cinderella’s own stepmother contemplated a slow death for her via the drudgery of housework and the crippling lack of a social life. Girls without their mothers were clearly at risk. Though in most of these stories, the girls eventually did find safety in marriage and lived happily ever after without bickering or marital strife.

Here were the high points of my relationship with my mother:

When I was seven, she brought me to Hudson’s department store and bought me a year’s worth of clothes. The girls’ section was located on the second floor, which wasn’t a full floor but more of very wide balcony with an ornate iron railing. I remembered sticking my head in between the iron curlicues and looking at the glass tops of the perfume and makeup counters down below.

When I was eight, she bought me a box of bright plastic hairpins in the shapes of various tropical fruits for my newly short hair. She had just given me a haircut, and I thought that she was concerned that people would think I was a boy. Bananas, pineapples, and oranges in my hair announced to the world that I was a girl.

When I was nine, she enrolled me in baton-twirling classes. (In letter #157, Kelly explained to me why she wasn’t taking the class too: “I am fat. My mom says that no one wants to see a fat girl twirling a stick.”) I went to baton class every Monday and Thursday after school, marched in the annual Shelby Thanksgiving Day parade, and then was asked not to come back to class after I threw my baton and it hit Sally Campbell in the face. I apologized but my teacher, Miss Wendy, didn’t believe me. I couldn’t help it. Saying, “I’m sorry
glazeddoughnut
” always brought a smile to my face.

When I was ten, she served fresh strawberries for dessert all summer long.

When I was eleven, I went with her to Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium and watched as she got a pretty new hairdo. Miss Cora looked at my hair, which had grown long again, and said to my mother that one of the other hairdressers could give me a China chop. My mother told Miss Cora that my hair was just fine the way it was.

The end.

When DeAnne let Bobby ride in circles around the blue and gray ranch house, I was eleven years old. Before she hired him to cut our lawn that summer, she had gotten her hair styled the same as his. They were both wearing the Dorothy Hamill wedge (though technically the male version should be called the Bruce Jenner). Dorothy wore it in 1976. Bobby and DeAnne wore it in 1979. Our town was the hospice for fads. Trends reached us in Boiling Springs only when they were about to peter out and die. If it had happened now, I would have understood that when a woman changed her hairdo, it was a signal that something else has altered inside. (See Joan of Arc before battle, Mia Farrow before marrying Frank Sinatra, my grandmother Iris after the passing of her husband, Walter Wendell.) But it happened then, so I only thought that my mother looked pretty with her swingy new hairdo. From the way that Bobby smiled at her I thought that Bobby thought that my mother looked pretty too. I didn’t understand that DeAnne was a forty-eight-year-old housewife, and that she would have to change a lot more than her hairstyle before Bobby would consider her worthy prey. All summer long, DeAnne and I would be mistaken about him.

The day before Bobby knocked on the door of the blue and gray ranch house and then pushed himself inside, I was in the car with DeAnne or, as I called her then, my mom. It was the end of the summer of ’79. Kelly had claimed Wade, and I had clung to Dill. The sixth grade was looming. My mom and I were driving to meet Baby Harper at Bridges for dinner. My father was out of town for business, or that was what he told her at the time. My mom had the radio on and was shaking her hair to Peaches and Herb (a duo with a name that I have always thought would make a good and interesting salad).

Reunited and it feels so good
Reunited ’cuz we understood
There’s one perfect fit and, sugar, this one is it
.

I had noticed that since my mom got her new hairdo she had been listening to the radio a little louder. She also switched from station to station more often, as if trying to find a song that matched her mood. I have always equated listening to music with happiness. I assumed she did too.

For me, hearing a song was like watching that trick of a tablecloth being pulled away without disturbing any of its settings. Except in my case, everything on the table disappeared but the cloth, which was left behind, pristine as a blank sheet of paper. Glasses stained with whatever strong liquids they held last, plates and bowls full of bones, peels, seeds, and crumbs, all were cleared away and cleaned with one sweeping gesture. Songs performed that trick for me. Their words, docile and contented to convey meaning and nothing more, brought with them only what I allowed. My will was stronger than theirs. That was one definition of happiness.

I was humming along to the song on the radio. My mom was bobbing her head up and down, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. We were getting nearer to Bridges, to seeing Baby Harper with his napkin already tucked into his shirt collar in anticipation of sauce. I must have felt as if none of that could ever change. In other words, I must have felt safe.

I blurted out as quickly as I could, “Mom
chocolatemilk
, you
cannedgreenbeans
know
grapejelly
what
grahamcracker
tastes like a walnut
hamsteaksugar-cured
? God
walnut
tastes like a walnut
hamsteaksugar-cured
. The word
licorice
God
walnut
, I mean
raisin
, and the word
licorice
tastes—”

“Linda
mint
, please
lemonjuice
don’t talk
cornchips
like a crazy
heavycream
person
garlicpowder,”
my mom said, cutting me off. She did this without taking her eyes off the road, her hands still on ten and two.

I’ll give you all the love I have with all my might, hey-hey
Reunited and it feels so good
Reunited ’cuz we understood
.

Peaches and Herb were still singing on the radio. My mom and I were still on our way to Bridges. My great-uncle Harper would be there waiting for us, his blue eyes gentle as landlocked lakes.

So, I tried again. I said this time slower, “Mom
chocolatemilk
, honest. I mean
raisin
it. Words
licorice
, they have a taste. Mom
chocolatemilk
tastes like chocolate
cannedbeefbroth
milk
Pringles
and—”

“Linda
mint
. Stop
cannedcorn
it! I can handle
FruitStripegum
a lot of things
tomato
. God
walnut
knows
grapejelly
I have had to with you
cannedgreenbeans
. But I won’t handle
FruitStripegum
crazy
heavycream
. I won’t have it in my family
cannedbeets
. Do you
cannedgreenbeans
understand
eggnoodles
me?” my mom asked without really asking.

The song ended and Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” came on. My mom switched to another station. I knew what she thought. Rod Stewart, like Dolly, was trashy. I don’t remember what the other station was playing. It might have been a commercial for used cars. It might have been a news report. I looked over at my mom. Her lips were a straight line. She was done talking now.

But her words—
I won’t have it in my family
—were reverberating inside the car, like the notes of a skipping record. They were getting more insistent with each repetition, drowning out the radio entirely. I knew what my mom meant.
If you want to be one of us, Linda, you hush your mouth
.