Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  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.

  During the summer when Kelly and I were only eleven and already painting our faces with Paradise and Ocean hues, my father must have sensed that there was change in the air. His response was preemptive in nature. He began to tell me that my cheeks were pink like apple blossoms. That my eyes were the shape of hickory nuts. That the color of my hair was that of a river at nighttime. He didn’t know that my great-uncle Harper had been telling me things like this for years.

  The appearances of Dill and Wade in our letters also marked the beginning of reticence. That word wasn’t part of my vocabulary yet. So, instead, I thought I was being selfish. The result was the same, a withholding.

  In America, a country of abundance, in North Carolina, a state of plenty, children were expected to share. Most childhood misbehaviors could be traced to a refusal to do so, and parents and teachers hurled reprimands accordingly. Stop being selfish! Why are you so selfish? Selfish children don’t go to Heaven! No dessert for the selfish! This last one was a favorite of my mother. She had learned from her mother that food was both reward and punishment. Considering what came into and out of my mother’s kitchen—the unnecessarily canned vegetables, the shaken and baked, the hamburger helpmeets, and so on—the food at our table was always punishment. The last word of my mother’s mealtime threat, though, was for me an antidote. The word “selfish” brought with it the taste of end-of-the-summer corn on the cob. Not the kernels but the juice at the honeycombed core after everything has been gnawed away. Poor DeAnne—she had no way of knowing why her rebukes always brought a smile to my face.

  This was my silent mealtime prayer:

  Say it again.

  Tell me I’m selfish.

  Please, help me get the taste of your dinner out of my mouth.

  The nightly cross that I had to bear was dependably one of the following casseroles: chicken à la king, tuna noodle, beefy macaroni.

  Consistency was the strongpoint of my mother’s kitchen. Variety meant never having the same casserole two nights in a row. Variety also meant that the casserole’s crispy topping was a rotation of bread crumbs, crushed saltine crackers, broken potato chips, or Durkee’s fried onions (the last only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other special occasions). For a brief time in the mid-eighties, right before my father passed away, when DeAnne was experimenting with “exotic” flavors, her weekly menu also included a three-layer taco casserole (one of the layers was the contents of a small bag of corn chips) and a chow mein surprise casserole (the surprise was several hot dogs cut into matchstick-size strips, which, when cooked, would curl up into little pink rubber bands). No matter the recipe, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, the all-American binding agent of disparate foodstuff, was mixed in. The Great Assimilator, as I call it now, was responsible for the uniform taste of all of DeAnne’s casseroles. Whether à la king, tuna, or beefy (different from beef itself), these casseroles also shared the same texture, as if all their ingredients had been made to wear a sweater. I have since learned that foods named for the pot or pan that they were cooked in probably had little else going for them. Meat loaf or a Bundt cake, for example.

  As I grew older and as my affection for DeAnne didn’t, I began to throw her words back at her in the form of a question. “Nograpejelly dessert for the selfishcornonthecob?” I would ask her, as if she had admonished me in a foreign language that I couldn’t quite understand. The act of repeating her words, of course, served multiple purposes.

  According to DeAnne, I was being selfish because I hadn’t finished my dinner; there were starving children in Africa (which she thought of as one big country); and my serving of casserole could have been sent to feed them. At the dinner table, I was being selfish to save my life and, though they didn’t know it, also the lives of my African counterparts, and it felt good.

  In letter #395, I was being selfish and it felt bad. A wasp sting, a blow to the face, a skinned knee. In the four years that Kelly and I had been writing to each other, I had never kept a thought from her. We were the twins, conjoined at the foreheads, our thoughts silently traveling back and forth through hidden circuitries. Until Kelly claimed Wade in letter #394, he had never made an appearance in my letters because he was a part of my life in the way that a neighbor’s dog or a mailman was. Wade was a constant, dependable, and not-unpleasant presence. He first came around to the blue and gray ranch house because of the slide in the backyard, but after he chipped his tooth he kept to the swing set. He then came around for the newly installed jungle gym. If I was playing on it, he would join me with no more than a “Hi” spoken to the lawn. If I was inside the blue and gray ranch house, he would climb onto the bars and hang upside down by his knees from the highest rung, his hair a suspended crown of hay. He was unremarkable, except for the taste of his name. In letter #395, I could have told Kelly that “Wade” was orange sherbet in my mouth. I didn’t. I wanted that part of him for myself. I was the wasp, the fist, the gravel road.

  Before the summer of Dill and Wade, Kelly and I had traded letters about another boy, her cousin Bobby, but he didn’t count. Bobby was older than us. He was in high school when we were still in the fifth grade. His hair was parted down the middle, and the feathered sides were held in place with hairspray. He had a permanent shadow above his upper lip. It looked to us like he hadn’t washed his face properly.

  In letter #329, Kelly wrote that Bobby had made her touch his privates. Kelly and her cousin were in the basement of the red brick house. He sat down next to her on the couch. He picked up her hand and placed it in between his legs. She wrote that it felt warm and then hard. Bobby closed his eyes, and his head fell backward, an invisible pair of hands pulling on the wings in his hair. Bobby told her not to tell anyone. I began letter #330 with “Gross!” written over and over again. Each time the word meant something different. I should have just written, “Tell your father!”

  Bobby continued to cut the grass for the Powells all through that spring and summer of ’79. Kelly’s mother, Beth Anne, disliked the sound of the riding mower and made her appointments at Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium on the afternoons when her nephew came to the house. When she had hired Bobby, Beth Anne had told him that he was always welcome to come inside for a soft drink and to wash his hands once he was done. Kelly learned not to go into the basement when Bobby was circling the house. Next she learned that she neede
d but didn’t have a way to lock her bedroom door. Kelly then told her mother that the sound of the riding mower hurt her ears too and asked to be dropped off at my house when Bobby came around. The problem was solved until my mother hired Bobby to cut our lawn. That was when she became DeAnne to me. A mother would have known better. The summer of Dill and Wade would end for me with Bobby. Kelly’s cousin was no longer a boy. He was a monster. He was a menace. He was the half-hidden blade of the lawn mower. He wasn’t how we had imagined the boys in our lives to be. Forced hands, eyes shut, blood.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT MY FAMILY WAS THAT WE DISAPPOINTED ONE another. When I heard the word “disappoint,” I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words “disappear” and “point,” as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down.

  Small children understood this better than adults, this irreparable diminution of the self that occurred at each instance, large and small, of someone forgetting a promise, arriving late, losing interest, leaving too soon, and otherwise making us feel like a fool. That was why children, in the face of disappointments, large and small, were so quick to cry and scream, often throwing their bodies to the ground as if their tiny limbs were on fire. That was a good instinct. We, the adults or the survivors of our youth, traded in instinct for a societal norm. We stayed calm. We swallowed the hurt. We forgave the infraction. We ignored that our skin was on fire. We became our own fools. Sometimes, when we were very successful, we forgot entirely the memory of the disappointment. The loss that resulted, of course, could not be undone. What was gone was gone. We just could no longer remember how we ended up with so much less of our selves. Why we expected nothing, why we deserved so little, and why we brought strangers into our lives to fill the void.

  On the eve of a departure, confessions and revelations were bound to occur. On August 23, 1986, my great-uncle and I engaged in both. I was leaving the next day to go to Yale—a plane flight to New York City and then a bus ride to New Haven. I thought that I was leaving Boiling Springs for good. I had failed to factor in the magnetic pull of funerals. I was eighteen years old and full of rage. DeAnne, no longer my mother, was the reason. That was what I wanted my great-uncle Harper to know that night.

  Baby Harper and I were having dinner together, as we had done every Saturday night for close to a year by then. We went into Shelby and sat in our usual booth at Bridges Barbecue Lodge. We each ordered a pulled pork sandwich, a side of coleslaw, fries with an extra order of barbecue sauce for dipping, peach cobbler (only available on Saturdays), and a bottle of Cheerwine, a cherry-flavored cola bottled in nearby Salisbury, which my great-uncle said brought out the “fruit” in Bridges’s sauce. Bridges Barbecue Lodge had two things going for it, which was more than I could say for the other dining options in town, Pizza Inn, Waffle House, Arby’s, Roy Rogers, and Hardee’s. In the mid-eighties the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area attracted only the B-list fast-food chains. Bridges was in a league of its own. The first thing that made Bridges special was that, even by the standards of North Carolina barbecue, Bridges’s sauce was extraordinarily vinegary, which meant it was extraordinarily good. (I have a fantasy that someday I’ll hear the word that makes me taste Bridges’s sauce. In this fantasy, I die happy, knowing what my last word on earth will be.) The merit of sauce was often debated in this part of the state, with some folks coming down on the side of Slo Smoking Steakhouse & Bar-B-Que on E. Dixon Boulevard. “Fools,” my great-uncle always said under his breath whenever we would drive past Slo’s parking lot. He would check out the parked cars, making a mental note of their license plates, their makes. The same way that a minister would drive by a strip club, if there had been one in Cleveland County. Second, Bridges had a great sign. Four pink neon pigs all in a row. Baby Harper and I liked it when the sign flickered on and off, sending a pig in and out of the void of the night sky. Often a pig would go unseen for a couple of months before the sign could be fixed. When I was younger, my great-uncle Harper would say that the unlit pig was the one that went to market. That night, he said that the unlit pig was the one we were eating, and then he hiccupped. My great-uncle was a charming man even with sauce on his chin.

  Baby Harper, bless his heart and the rest of him as well, was the family photographer. His albums—there are one hundred of them if you don’t count the ones that he sent to me in New York City in a box marked HANDLE WITH CARE—were a testament to his lifelong need to be present and not present. He received his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie Special, in 1940, when he was sixteen years old. At the start, he was a bad photographer or an accidental artist. The first album was mostly of the backs of heads, blurred torsos, and shoes in mid-stride. He called them “candidgraphs,” but after his sister, Iris, saw what she looked like with a fork in her mouth and a lock of hair in her eyes, she told him to quit taking bad photographs of good-looking people. I wouldn’t have imagined that my grandmother Iris was ever good-looking, but, thanks to my great-uncle, I didn’t have to.

  H.E.B. Two (a typed label with my great-uncle’s initials and a number was taped on to every album’s spine) showed an Iris—twenty-seven years old, married, and mother to an eight-year-old named DeAnne—with the face of a Hollywood starlet. Eyebrows plucked and shaped, lips dark with lipstick, Iris was from this album on always ready for Baby Harper. Or rather, Baby Harper was from this album on always made to wait for Iris. He still managed now and then to take an unposed photograph of her. There was a series of them at the end of H.E.B. Four. Each one was a close-up of some detail of Iris’s attire. A glove with three pearl buttons, the last one freed from its loop. A silk organza hibiscus, complete with quivering (thus blurry) stamens, perched atop a hat. A high-heeled shoe with a shiny oval buckle. When Baby Harper first showed these candidgraphs to me, I felt like looking the other way. I didn’t understand why I didn’t want to see them; why the images made me feel so sad. How could I have known then that what I was feeling had little to do with what was being photographed and everything to do with the photographer and the longing of his gaze?

  Baby Harper was always there to document us, but because he never allowed anyone to take his place behind the camera nor bothered with a tripod, he was never documented. (The few photographs of him from his childhood were the exceptions. He couldn’t exercise his will back then.) In this clever way, my great-uncle hid from the official history of our family. By excluding himself, he ensured that our history was a false one. Or, at the least, an incomplete one. He never hid that fact from me. My great-uncle always suggested that his photographs weren’t to be trusted, that the real points of interest were elsewhere. When we looked through the “before you were with us” albums, he would stop at each photograph and tell me about the occasion and the faces present (mostly the same ones, except some no longer looked the same, were no longer alive, or for other reasons were no longer a part of our lives), and then he would tell me what I couldn’t see. He would say, “Well, Linda Vista, you know how your grandma Iris gets at Christmastime. Right before this one here was taken, she was doing that whisper-yelling thing that makes me break into a sweat. The girl working for us at the time—here, see, that’s the corner of her apron. The rest of her was hurrying as fast as she could to get back to the kitchen, but I caught her. Well, part of her. Poor thing had been passing around a tray of those little biscuits and Virginia ham things that no one makes anymore. Well, she dropped some. Just slid right off the tray. Girl might as well have dropped a crystal vase. Who knew biscuits could explode like that? Poor girl picked up what she could, but those biscuits were made right, and by that I mean they were made by someone other than your grandma. Well, Iris crossed the room, leaned into that girl, and whisper-yelled something that scared her white, which was saying something. It’s a shame that the trusty Kodak wasn’t fast enough to get the girl’s face. But if you look real close, you can see the crumbs still on the carpet there by I
ris’s pumps. That girl didn’t last long. Gone by the New Year, I think. But, the notable thing here, Linda Vista, is that smile on your grandma’s face.”

  Baby Harper liked to talk, and he liked to call me Linda Vista. The first of these inclinations would suggest that he was an unsuitable companion for me. But when he got started, it was like a claim that you would hear in a car commercial: “from zero to sixty miles per hour in ten seconds.” As his words gained velocity, they acquired a rhythm. As his words acquired a rhythm, they took on a melody. In that way, Baby Harper sang to me, a cappella. In that way, I was able to hear his words without the usual incomings. We were each other’s ideal companion in other ways as well.

  Why he called me Linda Vista wasn’t as easy to explain. Every time I asked him, he gave me a different answer. Because names are like socks—they should be changed now and then. Because without you, there would be no other vistas in Cleveland County. Because, on its own, “Linda” is a name for a forty-year-old woman who smokes a pack a day. Because no one calls you Linda Vista but me. My great-uncle Harper was full of reasons, which I now know made him the antithesis of the Reasonable Man, he who never has more than one reason (that being the right one) for his actions. I think that was why Baby Harper loved my father so much. We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves. And sometimes we loved our opposites because rejection was better than a void.

  Our attraction was mutual and immediate. Even within our own family, we chose. I was the only grandchild in the family. Baby Harper was the only singing-talker. There were worse reasons to fall in love. What was it like for a person like me to be with a singing-talker like him? Kelly had asked me. I had no way to explain it to her until I was in New Haven and had experienced the first heavy snowfall of my life: