Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  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 sorryglazeddoughnut” 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, “Momchocolatemilk, youcannedgreenbeans knowgrapejelly whatgrahamcracker tastes like a walnuthamsteaksugar-cured? Godwalnut tastes like a walnuthamsteaksugar-cured. The wordlicorice Godwalnut, I meanraisin, and the wordlicorice tastes—”

  “Lindamint, pleaselemonjuice don’t talkcornchips like a crazyheavycream persongarlicpowder,” 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, “Momchocolatemilk, honest. I meanraisin it. Wordslicorice, they have a taste. Momchocolatemilk tastes like chocolatecannedbeefbroth milkPringles and—”

  “Lindamint. Stopcannedcorn it! I can handleFruitStripegum a lot of thingstomato. Godwalnut knowsgrapejelly I have had to with youcannedgreenbeans. But I won’t handleFruitStripegum crazyheavycream. I won’t have it in my familycannedbeets. Do youcannedgreenbeans understandeggnoodles 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.

  We pulled into the Bridges parking lot. I saw my great-uncle’s car parked by the front doors. He was fond of saying that he and Bridges were meant to be because he always got the best parking space there, never fail. He was the first person I knew who thought that available parking was a way to divine one’s fate. He wouldn’t be the last. Parking spaces, tea leaves, playing cards, the lines on our palms. We all want a way to know where we should be in the world.

  Before my mom got out of the car, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror and she fixed her perfect hair.

  I never loved DeAnne the way I loved my father. His entrance into a room comforted me. I trusted that he would protect me from the animal noises in the night, the common cold, the deep end of the pool. He wasn’t a physically demonstrative father—his favored gesture of affec
tion was rubbing the top of my head and gently tousling my hair—but I didn’t need him to be that. I only needed him to be physically near.

  Girls without their fathers were also at risk. I didn’t learn this from the fairy tales of my youth, because in those stories the fathers were present in the castles and in the cottages. The fairy-tale fathers, however, were unforgivably weak and always thinking with their groins. These men would rather sacrifice their daughters than risk harm to themselves. Rapunzel’s father loved her mother so much that he stole for the woman. When he was caught, he was a coward, and instead of paying with his own life he promised away their unborn child. Gretel was very much alive, as was her brother, Hansel, when their father tried to do away with them. Three times he tried. (“Abandonment in the forest” was a bloodless euphemism for attempted murder.) Of course, there was Beauty. Was she not the poster child for daughters of men who dodged their responsibilities and used their female offspring as human shields?

  Fairy-tale fathers were also criminally negligent. Where was Cinderella’s father when she was being verbally abused and physically demeaned by her stepmother and stepsisters? Perhaps he was so besotted, his wits so dulled by his nightly copulation with his new wife, that he failed to notice the degraded condition of his daughter. Snow White’s father, a king no less, was equally negligent and plainly without any power within his own domestic realm. Under his very roof, his new wife plotted the murder of his child, coerced one of his own huntsmen to carry out the deed, then ate what she thought was the girl’s heart. This king was no king. He was a fool who left his daughter woefully unprotected.

  When I first heard these stories, I assigned to these men no blame because they wore the solemn and adored mantle of “father.” I understood them to be, like my own father, men who went to work every day, who returned home exhausted and taciturn, and who fell asleep in their easy chairs while reading the newspaper. I assumed that they, like my father, would have protected their daughters if only they had known of the dangers their girls faced during those dark hours after school and before dinner.

  Under my father’s own roof, his wife hired a predator, lusted after him, trusted him to be alone with her daughter, and when the evidence of the predator’s crime emerged, sought solace and explanation in the body of the victim. Menstrual blood was normal, a byproduct of a girl’s body coming of age. Buy the girl a box of protection and a purse to hide it in. Blood from the torn hymen of an eleven-year-old would have been a crime, the subject of tragedies from the time of the ancient Greeks to the American South. Wash clean the undergarments with Tide and rest assured that there will be no stain.

  When I had questions about our family, my great-uncle Harper had the answers. He had the evidence that we existed. He would pull out the appropriate H.E.B.’s and the stories would begin. I remembered asking him why my father had married DeAnne. I was fifteen years old at the time, and what I really wanted to know was why DeAnne’s heart hadn’t been smashed to bits like mine. My great-uncle didn’t know about Wade and me. He did know that my first year of high school hadn’t been my finest or happiest. Baby Harper, by way of a greeting, had taken to asking me, “Where’s the funeral today, Vista Girl?”

  His sister may have been the one named Iris, but my great-uncle was the seer in the family. I had been in mourning for most of the school year. Kelly. Wade. All those damn fireflies. Now that the summer—dull, restorative, and hopefully transformative—was finally here, I decided that I might as well make my grief public.

  Finding black clothing in the young-miss section at Hudson’s department store was impossible. It was always Easter Sunday in the South. Peach-blossom pink, forsythia yellow, spearmint green were always in style and readily available. So instead, I bought a box of black Rit dye and threw every item of clothing I owned into the washing machine. With one rinse cycle, I became a widow. My father thought it was a catastrophic laundry mistake and asked me if I needed money to buy some new clothes. I told him that black was my favorite color.

  With his usual unflappability, my father said, “Dearfishsticks Heart, I thought that firesweetenedcondensedmilk was your favoriteHawaiianPunch color.”

  I knew what he meant, and I couldn’t help but smile. I was pleased that my father had remembered the first question that Kelly had ever sent to me and the answer that I had given. DeAnne didn’t have a clue of what her husband meant and asked him, “What on earth are you talking about, Thomas?”

  DeAnne then stared at me, and I stared back at her.

  When my father employed sarcasm, which was 84 percent of the time, a known hazard of the legal profession, he called me “Dear Heart.” When I first heard that term of endearment, I thought my father was saying “deer” heart. I had just read the legend of Virginia Dare, and the image that came into my eight-year-old head was that of a dying animal with its heart split in half. Homonyms always had the same incomings. So whether it was “dear” or “deer,” I experienced the same taste: fish sticks, complete with the metallic aftertaste of freezer burn. “Heart” had no incoming. Maybe my father did mean “Deer Heart.” Now that he is gone, everything about him has become so unclear to me. Not like an image that has been smudged or blurred. But one that may have never existed.

  That summer when I was fifteen, the question I had wasn’t whether my father loved DeAnne but why he loved her. That was when Baby Harper told me about DeAnne being born thirty-five years old. I laughed until he showed me proof. We looked at photographs of her as a baby, and she looked like all other babies. In other words, DeAnne looked like an old man. Then, at about the age of four, DeAnne Whatley began to resemble a female dwarf, approximately thirty-five years of age. Baby Harper pointed out that it had little to do with her face but, rather, it was the way that she carried her little body, the set of her shoulders, the bend of her neck, and the slight hunching of her upper body, as if someone had just pushed her into a corner. We looked at these photographs of her as a young child, and we marveled at how her blond curls, her pinafores, her Mary Janes all had lost their ability to connote youth. On her, these Shirley Temple affectations were inappropriate and verging on the grotesque. When DeAnne was sixteen, she looked like Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, a curtain of bangs drawn tightly shut across her forehead, the rest of her hair pulled back into bundles of curls on either side of the nape of her neck. That look actually suited DeAnne. Baby Harper pointed out that Mildred Pierce had come out in 1945, and these photographs of DeAnne were taken in 1948. A lag time of three years was what he wanted to impress upon me, and that DeAnne, even back then, wasn’t “oh current.” In her mid-twenties when she began dating Thomas, she tried out Audrey Hepburn’s look in Funny Face, but the wispy bangs and the loose ponytail—so fresh and insouciant on Audrey—made DeAnne look like she was wearing a wig. This was the DeAnne whom Thomas met when he first went to dinner at the green-shuttered colonial.

  “Linda Vista, you’re trying to understand what Thomas could have seen in DeAnne,” Baby Harper said. “The answer is more obvious than that, Vista Girl. You should look at these courting-days photographs and see what is there. An age-appropriate female, blond, medium build, all limbs present and accounted for, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Linda Vista, that’s all you need to know,” he concluded, closing the cover of H.E.B. Twenty.

  My great-uncle didn’t hiccup after he said this, but I was certain he was joking. At the age of fifteen, I couldn’t imagine that the decision to marry someone could be based on such shallow things. I opened up H.E.B. Twenty again, and I looked at my father and DeAnne’s wedding photographs. On December 10, 1960, the day she became DeAnne Hammerick, she was au courant, wearing her hair in a First Lady–Elect Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant. The top of DeAnne’s head looked like a day-old balloon, soft and about to deflate. She should have stuck with the Mildred Pierce. According to Baby Harper’s photographs, DeAnne didn’t smile once on her wedding day. She looked straight at the camera, and her expression was one of concentration, as if sh
e were trying to stay awake or walk a very thin line. Standing beside her, Thomas wasn’t wearing the thick, black-framed eyeglasses that he soon would wear until the day he died.

  My great-uncle Harper didn’t have to point it out to me. Not in one of these photographs was DeAnne looking at Thomas. Their gold bands, her grandmother’s silverware, a complete set of new china, including a soup tureen, a cut-glass punch bowl encircled by matching cups, and a church full of people were all present and accounted for. She had them and Thomas by her side. This man wasn’t going anywhere, was what she must have thought.

  “Doesn’t Thomas look handsome in his tuxedo?” Baby Harper asked. “He and DeAnne were both twenty-eight. Well, he was twenty-eight. DeAnne was her usual age of thirty-five. Miss Vista, you know what the saddest thing about that day was? Your grandma Iris looked more beautiful than DeAnne. It wasn’t right. I told Iris to let DeAnne have her day. To try to wear something, you know, matronly. Iris couldn’t and wouldn’t do it. Iris wore a pale pink gown and looked like a June bride at her daughter’s December wedding. Iris could never be kind to that girl. Now you know what they say, Linda Vista. Beautiful women never love their daughters. Either too pretty and competition or too ugly and an embarrassment. Now, I don’t know about that. Most things attributed to what ‘they say’ are usually wrongheaded. But this one, I must say, Linda Vista, there seems to be some truth in it.”

  I continued to flip through the pages of the H.E.B., hoping to find something else, something that was definitive, surprising, or exceptional about this man and this woman. I asked Baby Harper where they honeymooned. Moss Lake, he replied. Moss Lake, I repeated. That’s not a honeymoon; that’s a day trip. My great-uncle knew that was what I was thinking, and he nodded his head in agreement. Then he got up from the divan and went into the kitchen. I knew he would return with two glasses of iced sweet tea garnished with fresh mint sprigs that grew by the back door of his house. It was as if he knew, and those aromatic leaves, tucked among the ice cubes, were a coy reference. But my great-uncle, the singing-talker, never knew the taste of my name. I never told him because my secret sense wasn’t an issue when I was with him. As he would say, I was right as rain when I was with him. When we were together, he was right as rain too. That was a better definition of happiness.