Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  Every Saturday, DeAnne and Iris went to the movies, and then they went out for Iris’s favorite dinner. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, followed by a slice of coconut cream pie. Grease, carbohydrate, and sugar. Iris, the diabetic, really knew how not to live. Iris injected insulin to control her blood sugar, and the sight of her drawing up a syringe full, shooting herself in the thigh right through the fabric of her pant leg, and then reloading because one syringe wasn’t enough, was the silent prayer that preceded all of our meals together.

  Every Sunday, the two widows went to church with Baby Harper and prayed in the more usual way. On their feet, hands raised, palms tilted skyward, eyes closed, waiting for the Spirit to move them. Pastor Reynold demanded from his pulpit, Can you FEEL it? Can you FEEL it?

  The last time I went to church with them I stood there and wondered if Can-you-feel-it? was the question that Mrs. Reynold heard when she and the pastor had sex. Which led to my follow-up question. Is Pastor Reynold fucking all of us right now? DeAnne and Iris, their eyes closed, swaying their bodies, waiting for IT. Baby Harper, eyes wide opened and body transported, waiting for IT.

  No, Pastor Reynold, I don’t feel a thing.

  That was all it took. A question asked. A truthful response given. A decision made.

  When I told DeAnne that I would no longer be going to church with them, she cried. My grandmother Iris accused me of never having been a true Christian in the first place. My great-uncle Harper sat at the dinner table speechless.

  I said the first thing that came into my head, “I wishBombPop my father was stillsourcream herehardboiledegg.” We all knew what I meant. I meant that my grandmother would have never said those words to me if my father was still alive.

  “Well, he isn’t, and whose faultboiledham is that?” Iris snapped back. “It surecannedtuna isn’t God’swalnut faultboiledham, little girlsalt.”

  DeAnne sobbed into her napkin. My great-uncle Harper got up from the table and led her out of the room. After my father’s passing, I had seen DeAnne treated like a blind person on more than one occasion.

  My grandmother Iris and I remained seated at the dinner table. The casserole was still warm, a store-bought peach pie sat in its paper box on the sideboard, and my great-uncle’s napkin was on the floor, where it had fallen.

  I looked at the empty chair at the head of the table and thought about my father coming home again.

  MY FATHER WAS IN LOVE. I SAID THIS TO HIS COFFIN AS IT WAS lowered into the ground. I was seventeen when he died. He was fifty-three. I thought my grandmother Iris would be the first to go. So did she. Once the news of his death had made the rounds of Boiling Springs and Shelby, and then Charlotte with one quick phone call to the Hammericks there, who acknowledged his death by sending a small jade plant in a wicker basket to the funeral home, I knew that Iris wished that she had been first. Iris saw the small potted plant sitting among the wreaths exploding with roses and lilies, and she saw it for what it was: an insult, anchored to rich soil and meant to grow with each passing day. After Iris read the names on the card, she asked Baby Harper to take the plant and its basket and put it inside his car. That night, after all the mourners had left the blue and gray ranch house, where they had gathered after the burial to deposit their offerings of casseroles and Bundt cakes (food for the dead, as I had always suspected), Iris took the plant out of the car and into the backyard, where she set fire to its basket.

  For about a minute, an intense and unexpected light source threw Iris’s shadow onto an exterior wall of the garage, where she appeared as a shapeless mountain. I wondered who these people in Charlotte were who thought that a jade plant could cause injury to a woman like Iris. I knew little about them, and it didn’t occur to me then that they knew anything about me. The insult, like everything after a death, was intended for the living.

  Iris was very much alive, and she made sure that the plant wasn’t. Once the blaze died down, there was nothing left of the basket, and what was left of the jade plant had turned gray and mushy. Succulents didn’t burn. They steamed. My great-uncle and I looked at each other, silently acknowledging that we learned something new every day. We were sitting at the kitchen table. DeAnne had already turned in for the night. When Baby Harper had seen Iris with the plant in her hands, he had reached for his camera. It was hanging around his neck as we sat there watching her. We had an unobstructed view through the screen door of Iris and her bonfire. He didn’t touch the camera again, and he didn’t say a word even after the flames had disappeared.

  Baby Harper hadn’t been saying much in those days right after my father’s death. The singing-talker had given me that little prayer, written on a slip of paper. “Thomas was in love,” the note said. Baby Harper and I were in the front seat of his car, and DeAnne and Iris were in the back. We were on our way to the funeral home. Baby Harper had meant it as a plea to God for mercy. That was how I had meant it as well when I said it to my father’s coffin. A prayer should always have the word “love” in it. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  While Baby Harper was suffering from a loss of words, DeAnne and I were forgetting to do basic things for ourselves. Maybe that was why mourners brought food to the family of the deceased—if we didn’t see it on our kitchen counters and in our refrigerator, we would forget to eat. DeAnne forgot to lock the doors of the house at night. I forgot to take out the trash. DeAnne forgot to turn on the lights. I forgot all about the mail. On the morning of the funeral, DeAnne forgot to zip up the back of her dress.

  My grandmother Iris, Baby Harper, and I were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her. When DeAnne walked into the room, Iris and I saw the V of skin on her back at the same time. Iris got up and, without saying a word, guided her daughter out of the room as if she were blind. I mouthed to my great-uncle, “Can you believe she forgot?” He shook his head no. At the time, I thought he meant no, he couldn’t believe it. But he meant no, she hadn’t forgotten. How could I have known then that twenty-five years of marriage meant twenty-five years of having someone to help you with the zipper that began at the small of your back?

  The day of my father’s funeral has become my familiar Greek city. Each hour was a street or a path. Each minute was a temple or a fountain. I revisited the city not to remember facts but to see them anew.

  When I see that morning now, I see the faces around the kitchen table, and I see DeAnne’s dress. Most clearly, I see the exposed skin, so pale against the black fabric of her dress, and I see there not a lapse in memory but the persistence of it. I feel anger, adult and reasoned, toward my lovesick father for squandering something valuable for something fleeting. I feel something nearing affection for DeAnne again.

  At the end of his life, Thomas Hammerick wasn’t a Reasonable Man. He was only a man, with a weak heart. He was in his car, parked in a driveway of a small A-frame house on Goforth Road. That was where the police officer and EMS workers had found him, slumped over the steering wheel like a drunk, his heart already a stone.

  DeAnne and I had sat at the dinner table that night waiting for him, until the telephone rang. My father opened the front door of the blue and gray ranch house every weeknight at 5:30 P.M. We were seated around the table by 6 P.M. My father was always punctual. His schedule was firm, like his handshake. DeAnne and I had sat at the dinner table looking down at our place settings, thinking that we had both come to the table too early, that all the clocks in the house were running fast. The telephone rang and DeAnne went into the room to answer it. I heard her say hello. Then silence. I walked into the room just as she was hanging up the receiver. I followed her into the kitchen, where she turned off the oven. Inside a casserole had been drying up in the low heat. I followed her as she went back into the dining room. She turned around and looked at me, startled to see another person in the house. DeAnne thought of the casserole before she thought of me. My father had left me in this woman’s care.

  Goforth Road was where my father’s twenty-two-year-old secretary lived. His
car was parked in the driveway of her rented house. Long ago, when that road was named, it must have been someone’s idea of a joke, as Goforth was a dead-end street. But the joke was now on us, the two Hammericks, the one Whatley, and the one Burch who remained.

  News traveled fast in Boiling Springs, as there wasn’t very far for it to go. The tight bundle of words, written up in a report at the police station, went home with the sergeant and was handed over to his wife. The next day the bundle, now an exaggerated whisper, arrived at the town’s main switchboard, Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium, where it was distributed within the first fifteen minutes to two perms and one updo. The paths that the whisper, now a bona fide bit of juicy gossip, took to get to Iris and Baby Harper were different but of equal speed. Iris immediately telephoned DeAnne. Baby Harper kept it to himself. Three days later, I received a letter, #821, from Kelly, who was living in Rock Hill, South Carolina, by then. She didn’t want me to hear about it from someone else. “Or knowing your family,” Kelly wrote, “they’ll try to keep it from you, which I know would be worse.” In her hand, the news about my father again became a tight bundle of words:

  At 7:42 P.M. on Wednesday, October 30, 1985, Thomas Hammerick was found dead in his car, parked in the driveway of 133 Goforth Road. Hammerick appeared to be fully clothed, with his head resting facedown on the steering wheel. The two EMS workers who examined him found that the deceased had on no underwear. After being questioned, Carrie Betts, the occupant of 133 Goforth Road, handed over the deceased’s undershirt and boxers. Betts stated that Hammerick, in his rush to leave her house, must have forgotten to put them on. At which point, the EMS workers and the one police officer on the scene looked at one another and smiled.

  On the day of my father’s funeral, another letter from Kelly, #822, was waiting for me in the blue and gray ranch house. I didn’t see the stack of mail on the hallway table until Baby Harper had left to drive Iris home that night. He or someone else must have taken in the contents of our overflowing mailbox for us. In lieu of attending the funeral, Kelly had sent me a long letter, posted with a folk-art duck decoy stamp.

  Since leaving for Rock Hill to go live with her pregnancy and her aunt, Kelly’s correspondence to me had consisted of a couple of lines scribbled on the backs of postcards, usually about how much weight she had gained. The subtext here was painfully clear, even to me. Her mistake was growing larger with every passing day, and she felt like a visitor within her own body. Some of her old self came back, both in substance and in style, in #822. Kelly wrote that she and her aunt had decided on the name Luke for the baby. Her aunt liked the name because of Luke and Laura from General Hospital. Kelly liked it because of Luke and Leia from Star Wars. “Just between us,” Kelly wrote, “‘Skywalker’ is the baby’s middle name.” Kelly thought that the baby should have a secret name because he was a secret and because his father, like Skywalker’s, wasn’t going to be around much. I had avoided the topic of the baby’s father because the one and only time that I had asked Kelly about him she wrote back that she didn’t know who he was. Kelly knew everything. That was her way of saying she didn’t want to tell me, and I didn’t want to know why. A friendship, we were quickly learning, could be based on what we shared and on what we allowed each other to keep to ourselves.

  My letters to Kelly during those same months had been about everything except the one topic that was consuming my thoughts. The crowning moment in the life of a high school overachiever, the college application season, was fast approaching. I was a Hammerick. We went to Yale. That much of the family history I knew. Grade point average? Check. A pack a day had very successfully kept the incomings away. Community service? Check. I volunteered five hours a week at Boiling Springs Elementary School, reshelving books in their library. My great-uncle said that I could call it “organizing and distributing reading materials to underprivileged southern youths.” We both understood that the youths were underprivileged because they were living in Boiling Springs, not because they were economically down and out. Letters of recommendation? Check. Uncheck. Then check again. Shortly before my father passed away, he had arranged for a letter from William Hoyle, a member of the U.S. Congress from our district, who then bowed out of his promise in light of my father’s “lackapplesauce of moralnutmeg characterpickledwatermelonrind.” That elected bastard’s secretary actually said this to me on the phone two weeks after my father’s funeral. I hung up on her. When I told my great-uncle Harper about the phone call, he said that he would rather lack moral character than a heart, but that I was in luck because Congressman Hoyle lacked both.

  I received another phone call from the congressman’s secretary. This time she said that a recommendation letter was being sent on my behalf and that the congressman wished me continued success. My great-uncle Harper hiccupped when I told this to him. When I pushed him for his role in changing the congressman’s mind, Baby Harper claimed that he had done nothing except mention to Iris what Wee Willie Hoyle thought of her deceased son-in-law. That was the first time I had heard anyone refer to the congressman as “Wee Willie.” I was full of questions, but my great-uncle had nothing more that he wanted to say.

  I turned to my grandmother Iris, who was more forthcoming. She told me that when Willie Hoyle and Baby Harper were young they were inseparable friends until she found them one day naked from the waist down trying on her girdles and stockings. Willie pointed a finger at Baby Harper and said that it was all his idea. That was when Iris began adding the editorialized “Wee” to the future congressman’s first name. I was smiling at the thought of two mischievous little boys getting caught by an angry Iris, until she, the family truth teller, whisper-yelled at me that Baby Harper and Wee Willie were SIXTEEN years old when she found them half dressed in her clothes.

  My grandmother, the plant arsonist, was also a petty extortionist. Just hearing her voice on the telephone must have made Congressman Hoyle change his mind and sign my recommendation letter. Wee Willie knew his constituents, and he knew that in their eyes his youthful indiscretion was worse than a lack of moral character. It was a sin that would render him unelectable. I assumed Iris burned and extorted for the same reason, to assuage her own wounded pride. Her little brother may have been a lacy-under-garment enthusiast, her son-in-law a philanderer who died without his boxers on, and her granddaughter a physical letdown in a training bra, but we all belonged to her. In her orbit, we were the pitted and scarred moons. Without us, she would have never needed to shine so brightly.

  By the time I was in high school I had come to terms with the fact that my grandmother Iris and I were close in the way that Maine and Hawaii were close. I believed that she was indifferent to me because I looked nothing like her.

  I now know that it is no coincidence that the word “favor” is used to denote a physical resemblance. I favor you (your eyes, your chin). You favor me (with love and attention). Favor is a reciprocity based on a biological imperative; it is a primal vanity that has saved the lives of some babies and doomed others:

  The floodwater is rising. You have only your two hands. Which child in your brood do you grab on to? The one who is your mirror image or the one who is unrecognizable? (Even though I have no siblings, I have always been thankful that Boiling Springs wasn’t prone to high waters.)

  During my sophomore year in college, I learned in my Alienation/Alien Nation seminar, cross-listed under sociology and literature, that a definition of “aberration” was a mirror that failed to produce an exact image. I understood long before this that the body, especially that of an offspring, was best when it was a reflective surface. DeAnne’s, for example, came very close to Iris’s, but there was something lacking in DeAnne’s eyes and the shape of her lips. Iris was therefore looking forward to the next generation. Then I came along, and my grandmother’s hopes died.

  Iris tolerated me during my tomboy stage. There was even a mild spasm of interest when my mother made me take baton twirling lessons, a rite of Southern girlhood, which culminated wi
th a march down Main Street in the Shelby Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was nine years old. Iris sat on a folding chair on the courthouse steps. My great-uncle was sitting beside her. When my troupe went by, he stood up and waved a sign: WE GIVE THANKS FOR LINDA! I chose to believe that my grandmother was waving at me too and not at Baby Harper to put down his sign.

  Iris ignored me altogether when I started growing my hair long again, wearing gloss on my lips, and carrying a purse full of feminine protection. I had disappeared because I had disappointed. That was what I grew up believing.

  What happened to Kelly only affirmed what I already knew about physical and emotional reciprocity. For the first thirteen years of her life, Kelly was to her mother, Beth Anne, no more than a disembodied voice. Kelly, who had reluctantly shown me her baby pictures, had been fat from day one. She came out of the womb with three chins and so many folds on her body that she was more Shar-Pei puppy than human baby. Fourteen years later, when Beth Anne finally recognized her pretty self in the being whom she had brought into the world, Kelly was, in essence, reborn. Kelly suddenly had a body, which was pleasing to the eyes and was therefore seen. During our freshman year at BSHS, I often imagined that my best friend had lost all of that weight but what was left of her wasn’t physically attractive. What if inside the fat girl was a thin ugly girl? Or just a plain one? I had assumed a role in high school that came with only one required act. I had to earn straight A’s. Kelly had assumed a role that called for her to be on display, to be chased like prey, to flirt and to tease, and to give in and be touched but never penetrated. Kelly was too smart to play her role successfully. She was too curious. How does this feel? She was too egalitarian. Now you do it to me. She was too truthful. I don’t want you to stop.