Bitter in the Mouth (8 page)

“Cute
mashedpotatoes,”
Kelly whispered again into my ear.

The word that shot out of my mouth surprised her. I knew because she pulled her hand away from the row of turtles marching across my new purse. This time she wasn’t talking about Wade, but I was.

“Mine
apple
,” I said.

O
N THE TENTH DAY OF HER LIFE
, V
IRGINIA
D
ARE WAS TAKEN FROM
the arms of history and placed on legend’s lap. Unfortunately for her, legend was a man. Legend wasn’t dirty and old, but mean and probably love-scorned in light of his treatment of her. Dare’s years as a sticky-faced toddler, a quiet adolescent, and an acne-prone teen were altogether ignored and forgotten. When Dare reemerged after her disappearance, she did so fully formed, Athena-like from the foreheads, or was it Diana-like from the groins, of the men who called North Carolina home. The women, on the same shores, wouldn’t have imagined Dare’s life in quite the same way. Around the campfires and by the hearths, a story of physical beauty, male envy, naïve love, and violence-as-antidote was born. This story was given Virginia Dare’s name. As this was an American legend, it also included Indians and a brief and unsettling mention of Queen Elizabeth.

Legend had it (because he willed it and made it so) that Virginia Dare was raised by kindly Indians, who were charmed and perhaps civilized by her mere presence. Why and how Virgin—that was how the Indians had truncated her name, thus revealing her true narrative essence—became an orphan was never addressed. That sort of information would have given her character too much psychological depth and nuance. Virgin, as far as legend was concerned, was a young woman of startling beauty, and she attracted the attention of a handsome Indian brave named O-kis-ko. She called him “O!” for short. Virgin and O! were very happy together, as attractive couples often are in legends, and this enraged another Indian man named Wanchese, an evil magician whom we can assume was also lonely and ugly. Wanchese cast a spell and turned Virgin into the White Doe, which as a species was known for its attractive tail. The White Doe could be released from the evil spell only if shot through the heart by an arrow made from oyster pearl. O! possessed such an arrow. Unfortunately for O!, Wanchese possessed an arrow made of sterling silver, given to him by Queen Elizabeth. Legend unwisely left the connection between the Indian magician and Queen Elizabeth to our imagination. On the day of a big hunt, O! and Wanchese saw the White Doe, and they shot their arrows at the same time, if you know what I mean. They pierced the animal’s heart at precisely the same moment. The White Doe was transformed back into a beautiful young woman by the oyster-pearl arrow, and she died, pierced through and through by the silver one.

I dare you. I double dare you. I Virginia Dare you. That was the progression, the upping of the ante that Kelly and I devised for ourselves. A Virginia Dare meant different things to us at different times in our girlhood, but it was always an invocation of a danger that mystified us.

We were both eight years old when we first read about Virginia Dare in the pages of
North Carolina
. Kelly and I thought that the story about the first child of our state was a warning about how being too beautiful could get us killed. It was already a common hazard in the other stories of our youth. Snow White, too beautiful and poisoned. Cinderella, too beautiful and condemned to domestic hard labor. Beauty, eponymously too beautiful and given up to a Beast. So when Kelly and I first evoked Virginia Dare’s name, the challenge was this: to not brush our teeth for a week. We figured that neglecting our mouths and what was inside of them would be the easiest way to ensure that being too beautiful, a potentially deadly fate, wouldn’t happen to us. From all the toothpaste and mouthwash commercials on TV, which always ended with the girl and the guy getting their mouths
too
close to each other, we knew that white teeth and fresh breath were essential for beauty. We didn’t want any boy to get too close to us. It was a dare that we both thought up and accepted.

I gave up on not brushing after three days. The bits of food stuck in between my teeth made the incomings even worse, like being served food on an already dirty plate. Kelly lasted the whole week. She was a natural faker. For seven mornings and seven nights, she went into the bathroom and squeezed a bit of toothpaste into her hands, which she would then wash with warm water, leaving the bathroom and herself smelling minty fresh. She would also wet her toothbrush and smear a dot of toothpaste onto the basin of the sink, leaving it there as a false residue. Kelly wrote in letter #64 that it was also very important not to smile. How Beth Anne didn’t notice that her only child hadn’t brushed her teeth or smiled for a week were questions that we didn’t think to ask back then.

When we were eleven and we Virginia Dared, the lurking fear was that the love of an ugly man would turn us into an animal. Being ugly, we understood by then, was the same as being evil. Jesus, for instance, was a very handsome man. That was why we adored Him. He was our first crush. Kelly had a poster of Him up in her room. I thought of Him before I went to bed every night. This was called worshipping and praying, and we were encouraged to do both. This time Kelly came up with the dare and it was this: to go to bed naked. No nightgown. No underwear. Kelly, already a B-cup, had forgotten all about her cousin Bobby. I hadn’t forgotten. He had asked her if she slept that way. He had whispered the question, and the words had tickled her ear. He then whispered nothing as he forced Kelly’s hand. Bobby was only months away from riding in circles around the blue and gray ranch house. The winged monster hadn’t found me yet, but he would.

I wrote to Kelly that sleeping without clothes on was a sin. Jesus, I was certain, was never naked.

“Then how did Jesus take a bath?” Kelly wrote back, double-daring me.

“Jesus didn’t have to take a bath because he was always clean,” I replied, Virginia Daring her.

Kelly accepted. We agreed that she would do it the next time I slept over. Even though “it” was a sin, I felt that I had to be present for verification purposes.

A week later, we climbed into Kelly’s canopy bed and got under its yellow eyelet covers. It was a Saturday night, and we had spent most of it eating junk food and putting the final touches on our scrapbook devoted to Dolly Parton. By bedtime we were stuffed with potato chips and images of our idol, which made us greasy and glowing. Our soundtrack that day and every day of 1979 was Dolly’s album
Heartbreaker
. We liked the title song best.
“Heartbreaker … sweet little love maker … couldn’t you be just a little more kind to me.”
We really liked what Dolly wore on the album cover. A pink dress with a hemline that was higher in front than at the back and silver high-heeled shoes. Her hairdo looked to us like a swirl from the top of a lemon meringue pie. When we looked at her picture, we felt a vibration all around our bodies. This was the effect of experiencing pure joy. We would miss this sensation in the years to come.

Kelly wiggled out of her nightgown and then her undershirt and panties and handed them to me. I placed the bundle on the night-stand on my side of the bed. She whispered that the sheets felt “slippery
milk,”
and I gulped, breathless for a second. I reached up to turn off the bedside lamp, and the eyelet covers lifted up with me. A faint smell of sweat and baby shampoo rose up from the bed. I reached for Kelly’s hand and we closed our eyes. We thought that holding hands would allow us to have the same dreams. It never happened that way, but it did give us the feeling of being closer.

We Virginia Dared for the last time when we were fourteen. Kelly flipped through my well-worn copy of
North Carolina
and gave it one final incisive read. She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous. Most of these girls, Kelly included, then adopted that slow, bubbling giggle that put boys at ease. It was the kind of laughter that said, “I’m stupid. You can take off my shirt, if you want.” Kelly, who had understood subtext long before she knew that there was a word for it, asked me if I understood what this Dare story was
really
about. Not waiting for my answer, Kelly told me that the White Doe was a warning about arrows. Be careful of a man’s arrow, or maybe the warning was even more specific. You don’t know if a man is good or evil until you see his arrow. Another quick, sharp laugh. I blushed. Kelly then proposed the last Virginia Dare of our youth. “Speaking of penetration” was how she indelicately began.

It was the summer before high school, and Kelly and I had just reached the watershed decisions to diet and to smoke. I understood the need for our transformation, but I didn’t understand where our transformation was going to lead us. Kelly understood. Again, she called dibs. Wade was to be her arrow. I would be left to find mine among the other young males in Boiling Springs. According to the thesaurus, a book that would become increasingly invaluable to me for reasons that Roget couldn’t have imagined, another word for “arrow” was “shaft.” According to the dictionary, another meaning of “shaft” was to treat unfairly.

As Kelly spoke the words I dare you, I double-dare you, I Virginia Dare you (when she said “you,” she usually meant “us”) to lose your virginity before the end of the year, she knew that I had already lost mine, by force and not by choice. Yet she said the words anyway, banishing from my experience and hers all the hidden dangers of our shared girlhood. As far as Kelly was concerned, both of us could still choose who would approach us first with a bow and arrow.

My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway, “My period
blueberrymuffin
started
unsaltedbutter
today
oatmeal.”
This was a comforting sentence for me. Or rather the words triggered a sequence of comforting flavors for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: “walnut, elephant, candle, jogger.” These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it’s icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.

Growing up with DeAnne for a mother, I could count on one hand the times that I have had a really good meal like that. Every once in a while an ingredient would slip past DeAnne’s fingers unspoiled. Fresh strawberries, for example. During the summers, my great-uncle Harper and I would go to the pick-your-own farms in the nearby town of Kings Mountain, and the berries that we brought back were so red, perfect, and fragrant that even DeAnne left them alone. That was perhaps my favorite memory of my mother, her walking out of the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl full of strawberries. A bowl of Cool Whip would be waiting at the table for them, but I never touched the stuff, not after Baby Harper called it edible shaving cream.

I didn’t understand until I had left Boiling Springs and specifically the sphere of influence of DeAnne’s kitchen why so many of the incomings of my childhood were mildly unpleasant, bland, or unremarkable at best. The reason was disarmingly simple. The experiential flavors had to come first. Once the memories of them—of the canned, the frozen, the surprised, the à la king—had lodged themselves in my brain, then and only then could these tastes attach themselves to the words in my vocabulary, without cause or consideration for the meanings of the words.

I too had to disregard the meanings of the words if I wanted to enjoy what the words could offer me. At first, the letting go of meaning was a difficult step for me to take, like loosening my fingers from the side of a swimming pool for the very first time. The world suddenly became vast and fluid. Anything could happen to me as I drifted toward the deep end of the pool. But without words, resourceful and revealing, who would know of the dangers that I faced? I would be defenseless. I would drown. Maybe all children felt this way. We grabbed on to words because we thought they could save us. “Momma” got us a pair of hands, a bosom to hide our faces in. “Papa” got us a lift skyward, a perch on a shoulder. Maybe our first words all had the same meaning: Save me! A plea that, if answered, reinforced our desire to acquire more, to amass a vocabulary that could be our arsenal against the unknown terrors of life. To let go of meaning was to allow for the possibility that words didn’t hold within them this promise of salvation. Or, because of my misuse of the words, I alone wouldn’t be saved. Of course, I was afraid.