Bitter in the Mouth (3 page)

I had shared my secret sense with Kelly in letter #26. After she read that her name tasted of canned peaches, she wrote back and asked, “Packed in heavy syrup or in its own juice?”

“Heavy syrup,” I replied in letter #28.

The tiny miracle of our friendship was the question—What does that mean?—that was never asked.

That summer of transformation had us thinking about the suppression of taste. Kelly and I knew that I would never become an A student unless I could stop, or at least minimize, what I called the “incomings.” We considered Big Red chewing gum, Tic Tacs, Lemonheads, and wintergreen Lifesavers. None was strong enough. We then experimented with Skoal. Kelly stole a tin of the dipping tobacco from her father’s car. I threw up. My second try was more successful. I was sick to my stomach and light-headed, but I was able to keep the little pouch of tobacco between my cheek and gum long enough for the tobacco to do its work. To test out its effectiveness, Kelly recited for me the words of our favorite DP song, like it was a poem.

Back through the years
I go wonderin’ once again
Back to the seasons of my youth
I recall a box of rags that someone gave to us
.

The taste of the tobacco—a mouthful of earth, damp and just plowed; dried leaves and apple peels; the kick of turpentine; and the surprise ending of honey—was overpowering every one of the incomings.

As Kelly reached the words of the refrain, I joined the recitation.

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
.

We laughed out loud. At DP’s hard-luck lyrics, at the English accent that Kelly and I faked as we spoke these words from memory, at the drool running down my chin. The brown saliva flooding my mouth made it clear that dipping tobacco, though highly effective, was unsuitable for classroom use. (In college, when I first heard the word “heterogeneity,” I recognized the taste of Skoal, like a heavyweight boxer pummeling the inside of my mouth. In the middle of the lecture hall, a lone female voice was heard profaning, “Shit!” which I, the speaker, experienced as Shit
margarine
!)

After a couple more days of candy trials and some impulsive shoplifting of mouth sprays, Kelly and I decided on cigarettes for both of our transformative needs. We remembered from our eighth grade study packet “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms: With Rights Come Responsibilities” that cigarettes had a dampening effect on the taste buds. From the Virginia Slims magazine ads, we also understood that cigarettes were ideal for losing weight. We knew, of course, that cigarettes could cause cancer. The “could” was because North Carolina led the country in tobacco production, and our civic studies teacher, Mrs. Duke, was a distant but loyal relation of
the
Duke family, whose tobacco fortune gilded the Old North State.

I sneaked six cigarettes from DeAnne’s purse for the experiment. DeAnne smoked half a pack of Winston Reds every time my father went out of town. She chain-smoked them inside the bathroom of the master bedroom with the fan on. The circulation of air, like the sound of running water, hid nothing in our house. I, sniffling from a runny nose or woozy from the mild fever that always accompanied my father’s absences, would find the water-soaked butts carefully wrapped up and thrown into the kitchen garbage. Kelly and I smoked three cigarettes apiece. We coughed out all the smoke from our first ones, but, as with the Skoal, the second try did the trick. All of a sudden we were inhaling like our mothers and fathers. The third cigarettes of our young lives, we smoked in front of the full-length mirror in Kelly’s bedroom. We practiced holding the smoldering wand in between our fingers until we could dangle it just so. We ashed into an empty Pepsi can.

Cigarettes were even better than the dipping tobacco for suppressing the incomings. We decided that I would smoke in between my classes and that the lingering taste of the smoke would easily get me through the hour-and-fifteen-minute-long class periods. The unresolved question was where would I smoke. In the girls’ bathroom hiding in a stall, or out in the open, by the back entrance of the gym?

Kelly and I had the longest conversations that we had ever had in the history of our friendship that afternoon. What we said to each other didn’t really matter. What we enjoyed most was the rare sound of our voices commingling. After the taste of the cigarette smoke faded, we put on a recording of “Coat of Many Colors” and lay on the floor of Kelly’s bedroom. When strapped to music, words fired blanks. This was one of the mystery’s earliest revelations. So as Dolly sang, I experienced no incomings, nothing but a slight lifting sensation in my head, the residual nicotine high, which was taking me up and into the music. “I’ve never felt closer to DP’s voice,” I wrote to Kelly later that night. What I meant was that I have never felt closer to Kelly’s.

Our letter-writing habit would serve us well in high school, as open displays of cross-clique interactions weren’t understood or condoned among the 162 students of Boiling Springs High School. Like most other high schools in America, BSHS was a Byzantine court ruled by a football player and a cheerleader, but because of its diminutive size, its social machination was even more rarefied. There were limited spaces within the top ranks, and a fall from grace could happen at any moment with the speed and force of a knife in the dark. As Kelly soared into the stratosphere of towheaded popularity, she was careful to court the upper-class girls in the inner circle, while their boyfriends circled her like she was a wounded animal. Beth Anne, amazed by her daughter’s relocation from the bottom to the top of the heap, rewarded Kelly with the uniform of popular high school girls circa 1982. Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, Izod polo shirts, and Bass penny loafers—ubiquitously available “designer” labels, more aspiring than elite, form-fitting but never tight, and expensive but affordable at 25 percent off. This was middle-class America’s version of
bon chic bon genre
, and Kelly wore it well.

I smoked my way into an attention span that matched my academic potential. For most of my freshman year at BSHS, I hid in the girls’ bathroom with my packet of Winston Reds until one day I realized that I was behaving like my mother, DeAnne. I then smoked brazenly and with great skill out by the back entrance of the gym—French inhaling, releasing the occasional smoke rings, all with a studied indifference, as though the cigarette were just another finger on my hand. My appearance in the school’s designated “Smoking Area” muddled my social classification. Heretofore I wasn’t just a smart girl, but the Smartest Girl, which meant I wasn’t a girl at all. The walls of my pigeonhole were further weakened by my easy acquaintanceship with three other students who called the Smoking Area their home base. The two guys, both sophomores, and the one girl, a two-time junior, looked me over and nodded at one another. Look at what the nicotine dragged here, was what that gesture meant. I liked them immediately because they made no effort to talk to me. I recognized them as Chris Johnson, Tommy Miller, and Susan Taylor, three kids who had decided to remove themselves from the ass kissing, shameless power grabbing, and half-hidden hypocrisies that walked the halls of BSHS like special-ed students whom everyone saw but no one acknowledged. The stoners, as they were called (though I never saw them smoking anything but cigarettes), wore black concert T-shirts (Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC), Wrangler jeans, and Converse high-tops. They were the closest things to a counterculture that BSHS had to offer.

“I know you think you’re happy,” I wrote to Kelly in letter #742, at the end of our freshman year. “But as your best friend I must tell you that you’re not. There are times in the lunchroom when I want to get up and slap you. I hear you laughing, and I know those guys you sit with aren’t funny. Not even close. You know what’s worse? When I hear you laugh, it makes me feel lonely.”

Our friendship was by then the fourth secret that I had to keep inside of me. Kelly was the only person whom I had shared my secret sense with, and that was secret number one. Secrets two and three (and Bobby, the name of the winged monster who had brought them into our lives) were already so deep within us that Kelly never even counted them. Only I did. When Kelly got pregnant during our junior year in high school, that would be the fifth secret.

Kelly went to live with her aunt in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A year and eight months later, Kelly returned to Boiling Springs with a GED and no baby, a bundle of pink flesh that she left over the state line for her aunt to raise. Kelly then enrolled in Gardner-Webb Baptist College, where all the young men were future deacons of their congregations and all the young women were virgins with a lowercase
v
. I had graduated valedictorian of the BSHS class of 1986 and was already a world away in New Haven.

Our letters have never stopped. Anger, disappointment, and shame at times have slowed their comings and goings, but we understood, without really fully understanding, that the words that we wrote to each other couldn’t have existed in speech. The white paper—we both had switched to thin airmail paper by the age of fourteen—was for us the cover of night. We wished, without knowing it, that we loved each other, that we wanted to touch each other’s bodies. That way we could write to each other all the sweet things that we wanted whispered in our ears by the boys, dumb and cruel, who had so suddenly replaced DP as our beautiful mystery.

M
Y FATHER’S UNHAPPINESS WAS A PIECE OF FINE MESH IN HIS
throat which all of his words had to push past with some care. Because Thomas Hammerick had lived in the South for most of his life, no one around him took notice of the slightly slowed rhythm of his speech. When he was older, people thought of the pauses between his words as evidence of his sound judgment.

What I wanted to know was who placed the scrim there. My father wouldn’t have acknowledged this as a question. He believed that he alone was responsible for the hills and vales of his emotions. That was in part the reason for his unhappiness. The other parts came from his firm belief in the existence of the Reasonable Man. I was introduced to the Reasonable Man (and recognized him immediately as my father) during my first year of law school. The Reasonable Man was a legal standard that was once evoked with much frequency by the courts to weigh the actions or inactions of the rest of us. Would the Reasonable Man sign a contract without ever reading a word of it? Would the Reasonable Man leave a young child at home unsupervised? Would the Reasonable Man kill his wife in the rage of seeing her naked in another man’s arms?

In many ways, the Reasonable Man standard was the juristic analog to the question posed today on billboards and bumper stickers by fundamentalist Christians: What would Jesus do?

Jesus and the Reasonable Man often had the same response. But there were points of divergence, which were dutifully respected, thanks to the constitutional firewall between Church and State. The Reasonable Man, for instance, would have answered, “Hell, yes!” to the third question. Thus, his love-scorned, emasculated rage was at one time acknowledged by many courts as a mediating factor, which would lessen his culpability and his jail time for blowing his wife’s brains to bits. The Reasonable Man, of course, wouldn’t witness a scene of marital betrayal, walk away, and return a couple of hours later with a loaded gun. That would imply premeditation, which would cancel out the value (to him) of a mediating circumstance. A truly Reasonable Man apparently always packed heat, which would be immediately available to him should he be spurned and, in that unthinking instance, commit his crime of passion. When I was first introduced to him, I immediately understood that the Reasonable Man wasn’t an ideal husband.

When I was eight years old, I thought my father was one of the men on TV who met with prisoners in windowless rooms and advised them to “cut a deal,” which I thought was a procedure involving a very large knife. Justice, a small bronze statue on my father’s desk, held a scale. I thought she could have other utensils as well. When I was eleven and reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
, I thought my father was Atticus Finch. That meant I was Scout. That meant my mother was beautiful but dead, and my great-uncle Harper could be my older brother, Jem. When Kelly heard about my new family, she asked me who would be Boo Radley. I shrugged and said he wasn’t kin. That was true, but it didn’t answer her question. Kelly never asked me who would be Dill because we told each other that we didn’t think about boys. Kelly knew that I liked saying this character’s name aloud, though. “Dill” was one of the rare words that was faithful to itself. “Dill” tasted of fresh dill, a bright grassy entryway leading into a room where something faintly medicinal had recently been stored. This happy coincidence of meaning and flavor, however, didn’t leave the word neutralized and without power. The word could still disrupt, dismay, or delight. In this instance, “Dill” was a promise ring. Inside its one syllable was a summer that would bring, along with the fireflies and the scuppernongs, a boy who would kiss me when my brother, Jem, wasn’t looking.

As with the other milestones in our lives, Kelly was the first to know that we had reached one in the summer of ’79. In letter #394, written during this summer before the sixth grade, when we were both freshly eleven, Kelly told me that I had a crush on Dill, which was OK by her, because she had a crush on Wade Harris, whom she pointed out was a “real” boy. This letter was significant for reasons related and unrelated to the idea of physical attraction. It was the first time that Kelly would use the attack-retreat-attack instinct against me. That instinct (as well as the recognition of it) lay dormant in a girl’s body until hormones gave it a good, permanent kick in the ass.

attack: weaken opponent
by identifying an
embarassing truth;

retreat: profess in a casual
way that the truth
wasn’t really an issue
after all; and

attack: deliver in the fewest
possible words the
real reason for putting
the sentence on paper.

Kelly, in other words, had called dibs on Wade Harris.

The real boy lived in the house one over from mine, identical except for the color, his a faded-T-shirt red. The real boy chipped a front tooth in my backyard, going headfirst down the slide. The real boy held my hands from second to fourth grade during the weekly square dances (held during gym class and considered by Boiling Springs Elementary to be both physical education and music appreciation). Before the caller’s voice on the scratchy, banjo-laden record could tell us to do-si-do, shoot the star, and daisy chain, there was Coach Dewey’s voice taking attendance.

“Hammerick
DrPepper
, Linda
mint
.”

“Here
hardboiledegg
.”

“Harris
pecan
, Wade
orangesherbet
.”

“Here
hardboiledegg.”

Alphabetical order was the same as fate at Boiling Springs Elementary. Within its static student body, Harris always followed Hammerick, and Harris always danced with Hammerick (at least until fifth grade, when the principal no longer thought it was a good idea to provide boys and girls with weekly opportunities to touch one another).

Wade, the orange sherbet boy, was now off limits to me.

This too was a function of hormones. This understanding between two best friends who had allowed boys into their lives and into their letters. Wade was now Kelly’s, a part of her sentimental property, a
W
to add to her
K
. I was left with Dill, a boy whose full fictional name was Charles Baker Harris. According to his creator, he was from the Mississippi branch of the Harris family. Kelly suggested that we think of Dill and Wade as cousins.

“No,” I wrote back in letter #395. “They’re twins.”

If writing the letter now, I would add that all eleven-year-old boys are imagined. Or at least their souls are. Eleven-year-old girls construct them out of grinning school photos, Popsicle sticks, and a couple of fallen eyelashes (longer than our own lashes because the males of every species are showoffs).

But back then “they’re twins” only meant that I wanted Kelly to share. One set of fraternal twins for two best friends. Kelly wrote back and agreed. Why wouldn’t she? She got the boy with the hands, warm with matching calluses where his palms had folded over the handlebars of his green Schwinn Sting-Ray, his grip strong and tight. I got the boy who, though fully formed on the page, would never be born.

The introduction of Dill and Wade into our letters marked the beginning of doubt. Before this, Kelly and I had experienced fear. Of the dark. Of being alone. Of monsters (imaginary and real). Doubt, however, scared us in an entirely different way. Kelly and I saw a future (otherwise known as the sixth grade) in which we would remain invisible and unchanged while around us other girls suddenly bloomed. In Kelly’s version, the girls burst, blousy peonies after the first hot summer night. In mine, after seven days and seven nights of rain, these girls became dandelions while we remained green clumps of crabgrass. Kelly and I knew what we needed. Lips that looked pink, wet, and just licked. Sally Campbell’s lips had started to look that way at the beginning of fifth grade. Sally was pretty, and pretty girls were always ahead of the rest of us. Sally’s lips and also her mouth smelled of strawberry bubblegum. Kelly and I were jealous of both the shine and the scent. In order to make us feel better, I told Kelly that the word “Sally” tasted of pumpkin, without the brown sugar or the cinnamon. Just a squash.

Sally, nonetheless, set the example for us. Lips that could be seen from across the classroom we understood were desirable, and gloss for them had to be our first acquisition. Kelly begged her mother, Beth Anne, and then resorted to a promise of future weight loss for a shade of pink called Flamingo Paradise, which Beth Anne picked out for her. Beth Anne, at the time, didn’t pay attention to Kelly. Beth Anne completely ignored the fact that her only daughter had asked her for lip gloss, strawberry-bubblegum-flavored. Flamingo Paradise was lipstick, the kind that my grandmother Iris wore. It went on creamy but soon became cracked and dry. The only flavor it gave to our lips was something that also belonged to Iris: talcum powder mixed with a crushed vanilla cream wafer. Kelly and I hated everything about Flamingo Paradise. We even hated the name. Paradise better have something else in it besides a flamingo, we thought.

By mistake or as an extra incentive, Beth Anne threw in a case of blue eye shadow, Ocean Lite, which Kelly and I immediately tried. The way it sparkled and became almost silver on our lids made us feel trashy. We were old enough by then to know what that word meant, and we didn’t want to be trashy. We were also old enough to know that our idol Dolly Parton had a heavy hand with the makeup brush and shouldn’t be used as a template for our own efforts. We still secretly loved the way she looked in all her photos. She shone. She would become more and more otherworldly with each passing year. She would no longer walk beside us, though (because we were embarrassed by her), a good mother who could help us cross the street or sing us to sleep at night. She hovered above us now, out of sight.

From the start, Kelly and I pooled all of the little tubes and cases of makeup and kept them in her bedroom. Her canopy bed, the yellow eyelet bedspread, the daffodils painted on the white dresser drawers and matching mirror, all said “GIRL!” and they provided the perfect laboratory space for me to become more like one. Kelly had always been a girl. She might have been Beth Anne’s fat daughter in waiting, but from the day she was born she was her father’s princess.

I was my father’s tomboy.

From as far back as I could remember, my room was done up in a plaid of green and blue (Yale blue, as it turned out). The furniture (American Colonial) was dark oak, and the pictures on the walls were of tall ships (whaling vessels). I loved these framed prints, a triptych of the same vessel during three different voyages at sea. I woke up every morning to the waves curling up their hulls, to a lone seagull skimming the water, to clouds pink with the beginning or the end of a day. Until I saw Kelly’s bedroom, it hadn’t occurred to me that other little girls woke up to posters of daisy-sniffing clowns, puppies in wooden crates, or, in Kelly’s case, kittens with unraveling balls of yarn. I never asked my father why tall ships, but I’m sure his answer would have been that ships got you places. He was right. Those ships made me consider the oceans of the world, made me want to learn their names, live on the very edge of them. Planes and cars and trains could get you places as well. So maybe the answer, the less logical one, had something to do with the bodies of water themselves, those difficult-to-navigate expanses in between lands.

Other than the maritime prints, my bedroom was a room with a bed, a desk, a chair, and no toys. My father said that play was something children should do outside in the sunshine. He said play was also about strengthening the body. All the toys he gave me fulfilled both tenets. Bicycle, jungle gym, swing set, Nerf balls, and a trampoline. My hair was cut short to keep it out of my eyes when I jumped up and down. My jeans were Toughskins to keep the knees from ripping when I fell. My skin deepened into a warm brown from all the afternoons of growing strong and tall underneath the North Carolina sun.