Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  Baby Harper had arrived in New Haven late on Sunday night, entirely missing that day’s Baccalaureate in Woolsey Hall, Class Day on Old Campus, a Whiffenpoofs concert back at Woolsey Hall, and the Commencement Ball in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, not to mention all the other self-congratulatory, circle-jerking (ah, there’s my bilious vocabulary acquired while at Yale) events that had already taken place on Friday and Saturday. He checked himself into the Holiday Inn on Whalley Avenue, while a couple of streets away I was in my room in Pierson getting drunk with a boy whom I wanted to touch. We did. Until we were sore.

  Here were two more useful things learned during my four years of higher education: Alcohol and sex made the incomings barely noticeable. Alcohol, like nicotine, gauzed the incomings. I could still taste them, but they were muted and manageable, like how the words of a heated argument coming from deep within a house would sound to a passerby on the sidewalk. Sex overrode the incomings entirely. The multiple and multiplying sensations of the body demanded all of my attention. But indifferent, lazy, annoying, is-it-over-yet? sex had the opposite effect. My brain, apparently as bored by the proceedings as my body, would intensify the tastes of the cliché words, cribbed from porn films and old issues of Penthouse, that served as the limited male vocabulary for these kinds of encounters. The truly perverse thing was that these stupid, uninspired words were often delicious. Cockbuttermilkbiscuit, fucklimesherbet, pussytoastedalmond, babyhoney, comeapplebutter, daddystrawberryJell-O, suckcheesegrits. I could go on, and I did.

  When Kelly was younger and still reliant on food for her happiness, she suggested that I counter the effects of the incomings by eating more. She thought that I could supplant and overwhelm the phantom tastes with the “real” flavors on a very full plate. It was a reasonable hypothesis, especially coming from a fat girl, but a flawed one for reasons too complicated for me to understand back then. In the years since, I have pieced together the following:

  While it is true that I experience every incoming as a taste in my mouth, it is my brain alone that is at work. The brain is a willful, dictatorial processor, and unless it is diverted (good sex) or chemically manipulated (nicotine or alcohol), the brain prevails over the tongue, that lesser, subservient organ, and easily trumps all of the sweets, salts, sours, and bitters that I could load onto it.

  I didn’t see Baby Harper until noon on Monday, when he came to Pierson for the final event of my graduation, the Presentation of the Diplomas. I knew that he had been on Old Campus earlier that morning waiting for a glimpse of me in my academic regalia, what other schools called cap and gown. At 9 A.M., graduates university-wide had gathered in the courtyards of their respective residential colleges and graduate schools and prepared to converge en masse in front of Sterling Memorial Library for a procession to Old Campus for the University Commencement Exercises. The graduates were led by our professors, their doctoral hoods lined with colorful velvets, while above them plane trees provided a canopy of spring green leaves. A professor at the head of the procession carried a mace and perhaps another carried a scepter, further gilding the mythology of a university with medieval bones. I had seen the Commencement Procession before, three times before, in fact. While my classmates had rushed off to begin their summers elsewhere, I had stayed in New Haven. While they had interned or traveled, I had worked at Sterling Memorial. It was my favorite building on campus, and as it was a library it was by its very function a quiet space.

  Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was “as near to modern Gothic as we dared” according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word “dare” always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library’s design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l’oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference.

  Light and Truth, indeed.

  Of course, the story wasn’t true. The truth wasn’t nearly as scandalous, or perhaps it was thought more so and had to be covered up with a falsehood. The money for the library came from John William Sterling, Class of 1864, a lawyer who left the majority of his vast fortune to Yale. When Sterling passed away, in 1918, he also left behind his live-in companion of almost fifty years, James Orville Bloss. If James had been a Jane, John would have married his beloved in a church or perhaps a Gothic cathedral. If James had been a Jane, John would have left his estate to his devoted spouse and not to his alma mater. James hadn’t been a Jane, and Sterling Memorial, a Gothic folly in more ways than one, was constructed and became the heart of the Yale campus, holding within it silences of many kinds.

  The individual wasn’t the point of the Commencement Procession or the University Commencement Exercises. The Class of 1990 was the point. I knew that Baby Harper would never find me in the sea of black and blue caps and gowns, so I skipped it all—the parade and the spectacle—and slept in. When I saw him later that same day at Pierson, my great-uncle neither said nor did anything that indicated he had suspected my absence. We couldn’t suspect what we couldn’t imagine. My great-uncle Harper would never have thought of allowing me to stand alone in a crowd or to cheer for an empty seat. As I hugged him for the third time in three and a half years, it occurred to me that he might have even made a sign for me: LINDA, CLASSIEST IN THE CLASS OF ’90!

  Around us families were beginning to claim the rows of wooden folding chairs set up at one end of the Pierson courtyard. I took Baby Harper by the hand and led him to a seat that I had saved for him in the front row. I had left my cap and gown there, still stuffed inside of the plastic bag that they came in. I quickly put on my second costume of the day, smoothing out the wrinkles as best as I could, and I took my place with the other graduates. There were eighty-eight of us. After days of carefully orchestrated events in grand and soaring architectural spaces, the outdoor setup for the Presentation of the Diplomas had the feeling of a gospel revival in a small southern town. Handing out the diplomas within the respective residential colleges was an effort, an obvious ploy, I thought, to assure parents that their children had enjoyed a personalized, nay, “intimate,” educational experience at Yale. The master and dean of each residential college could take the occasion to share heartwarming anecdotes and reveal something amusing or, at the very least, specific about their charges before bestowing upon us the most expensive pieces of paper that we would ever touch. In preparation for these final speeches, I had come with earplugs. For the next half hour, I watched Baby Harper’s face as it registered and transmitted the pride that he felt. Then his hands came together, as did those around him, clapping out a rousing congratulatory one-two beat.

  I could tell by the moving bodies around me that the roll call of names had begun. I waited till I saw Heather Garrison come forward to receive her diploma. Then I bowed my head slightly and removed the earplugs, and the cascade of incomings arrived, interrupted by spates of clapping, and the click-click of cameras. I was unaffected, or rather I was under-affected. Before leaving my room, I had smoked three cigarettes and drunk a shot of vodka for good measure. I was fixated now on Baby Harper’s glowing face, taking in all that I had denied him on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

  “Calebpear Arthurmayonnaise Gruenfeldmaplesyrup, cum laude, Historycherrypiefilling.

  Saschacurrypowder Kay Haddleydriedbasil, Americanbabyaspirin StudiesColgatetoothpaste.

  Linh-Dao Nguyen HammerickDrPepper, summa cum laude, Literatureroastbeef.”

  Not until I heard my name did I see that there was something different about B
aby Harper. He had no camera with him. He just sat there smiling, his hands a beautiful blur.

  THERE WERE TWO KINDS OF ABSENCES: THE VOID AND THE MISSING. The void was the person, place, or thing that was never there in the first place. The missing existed but was no longer present. One was theoretical loss. The other was actual. Which was worse? I never had a child. Or, I had a child but she was no longer mine. Either way, there was a hole. Only DeAnne was left to answer the question for me now. She still lived in the blue and gray ranch house. I knew this was true because in a fit of optimism, a form of mental illness in its own way, I had sent her a Christmas card, short and polite, along with a photograph of Leo and me. Leo was an example of both kinds of absences. He left me four months and three days after I posted that card in a red envelope with a Kwanzaa stamp. The stamp’s design was my idea of a joke. I wondered if DeAnne would think that I had sent the card from some faraway country. DeAnne wrote back, short and polite, that we should come to Boiling Springs for a visit, as she would like to meet Leo.

  When I first came to the blue and gray ranch house, I couldn’t sleep. I was a seven-year-old with insomnia. Thomas and DeAnne must have been worried for me and for themselves. They had considered the question, and they—or at least Thomas—had answered that a void was worse. Thomas, whom I soon called Father, tried to soothe me with bedtime stories. For the first few weeks, he read fairy tales to me from a book so brand new that each page that he turned cracked its thick spine. I tried my best to hide my face. The only story that I could tolerate was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The rest contained too many sour words that made me agitated and kept me up long into the night. “Snow” was a dill pickle, a prolonged kind of tartness, like an endless amble down a long narrowing hallway. “Cinderella” was a shot of white distilled vinegar, the taste equivalent to the brightest, most direct incandescent light. Sour-tasting words were like caffeine to me. I don’t know what Thomas must have thought, sitting there next to a child with her face underneath the covers but who was clearly wide awake. Thomas wasn’t a very good storyteller. He never tried to read in different voices. Every character was a middle-aged man with a deep voice who read every sentence as a declarative, even when it was a question. After lightly touching the top of my head, the only part of me left uncovered, he would turn off the light, and the door to the room would click shut.

  To pass my hours in the dark, I taught myself a game. I imagined not having different parts of my body. Left leg, right eye, both ears, a big toe. It was less macabre than it might sound. It was a cartoon version of dismemberment. There was no blood or pain, and I could reattach the parts again with a snap of my fingers, which meant that it was very important never to wish away the middle finger and thumb on my right hand. The point of the game, or perhaps it was more of an exercise, was to list the things that I could no longer do because of the missing part. Another point of the game was to rejoice in the things that I would again do, upon the reattachment. If it hadn’t been 1975 or Boiling Springs, North Carolina, I would have been a seven-year-old in therapy.

  Like Athena, I was born to my father, Thomas, fully formed. I had no writhing snakes but a ponytail of long black hair. Athena was born clad in full armor. I was born with the English language already in my mouth and a sixth sense but with no memory of my first six years of life. I was born to DeAnne this way too, but I always knew that I was more of my father’s child. This was the story of my birth to Thomas, and to a lesser extent, DeAnne:

  If the sky before a tornado could be bitten into and swallowed, then it might have the bitter taste that was my first memory. My second, third, fourth, and fifth memories following in quick succession were a flash of light, a trailer home with windows of flames, gravel crunching underneath feet, but they weren’t my own, then darkness. What I remembered next was waking in a bed that didn’t have my scent. There were too many blankets on top of me, and there were the faces of a man and a woman hovering above me. They tried to smile at me as if there was joy in their hearts. I saw their lips stretched and the whites of their teeth, but I didn’t see joy. I began to cry. The woman tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear, and without saying a word she turned around and left the room. The man pushed his black-framed glasses higher up the bridge of his nose, leaned down, and softly stroked my hair.

  “Linh-Dao, Linh-Dao,” he said, almost whispering, as if he didn’t want anyone but me to hear.

  I didn’t recognize the man or his words, so I closed my eyes again. My chest was heaving the spastic, irregular rhythm of grief. For what and whom, I didn’t know.

  “Linh-Dao,” he repeated, this time louder.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was a stranger to me, but I didn’t feel fear toward him. Wasn’t that the beginning of love?

  “Can youcannedgreenbeans hearhardboiledegg me?” he asked.

  I nodded my head.

  “Linh-Dao, welcome to your newpeanutbutter homePepsi.”

  I shook my head because I understood his words, but his sentence made no sense to me.

  “Linh-Dao, can youcannedgreenbeans tellbrownsugar me whatgrahamcracker happened lastblackpepper nightbanana?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Youcannedgreenbeans don’t rememberbutterpecanicecream, Linh-Dao? Or you don’t wantsaltedbutter to tellbrownsugar me?”

  It was, in retrospect, very lawyerly of Thomas to recognize that silence can hold within it different meanings and that he needed to identify which one I had in mind. His professional instinct was simply kicking in, but I thought that the shift in his tone of voice, from soothing to alert, meant that he was angry with me.

  I was silent because I was scared. I was beginning to understand that this man was calling me by a name that he thought was mine. I began to cry again. This time I knew the source of my grief. I was lost, which was another way of saying that I had no memory of where I had been.

  The man took off his eyeglasses and sat down on the floor, resting his back against the side of the bed. I could no longer see his face, but I could see his shoulders slowly rising and falling. He was taking the deliberate, steady breaths of a man attempting to calm himself. I didn’t understand these movements back then, so I thought he was crying. I stopped my own tears because I thought it would stop his. Wasn’t this the beginning of love?

  Heal thyself! and Pray! were as close to mental health care as my family ever got. Thomas, my father, was partial to the first prescription. Self-reliance and reliance on God seemed like overkill to him. Another word for “pray” was “wish,” and only children wished. Men accomplished. Women acted, with all the negative connotations that the word “act” could carry with it. My father never sat me down and shared these guiding principles with me, but I could discern them from everything that he did. He believed in analytical thinking. He didn’t believe in analysis. In this case, the Reasonable Man and Jesus both commanded their flocks, “Don’t look back!” Lot’s wife was Exhibit A of the consequences of clinging to a catastrophic past and the dire repercussions of regret. I assumed that these were the reasons Thomas and everyone else in the family never spoke of how I came to be his daughter. In our small brood, no one wanted to be Lot’s wife but for very different reasons.

  Baby Harper’s reasons were the easiest for me to understand. From our first moment together as great-uncle and grandniece, we were in love. About a week after I woke up in the blue and gray ranch house, he and Iris came to meet me. I was already answering to the name “Linda,” which DeAnne told me was pretty when she gave it to me. What she meant was that it was prettier than the name that Thomas called me by. It didn’t matter to me. Neither name was familiar to me. “Linda” was the void. “Linh-Dao” was the missing. “Linda,” though, had a flavor that was so assertive that I almost spit when I first heard DeAnne say it. It wasn’t the artificial, mellowed-out mints of toothpaste and chewing gum. I would soon identify the taste as mint leaves fresh from the garden, warmed by the sun, their aromatic oils primed a
nd intensified. But when I first heard “Linda,” I had no memory of having ever tasted a sprig of fresh mint, but I must have. I had no memory of tasting any of the other flavors that accompanied the English words that were already a part of my vocabulary, but I must have as well. Thomas never liked the name that his wife gave me, so he would often shorten it to “Lin,” which, like “Linh-Dao,” triggered no taste whatsoever. He also never legally changed my name, except to add his family name to it.

  My great-uncle winked at me when Thomas brought “Linda” into the living room to meet the other half of the family. I hadn’t mastered the wink yet, so I reciprocated with a slow blinking of both my eyes.

  My great-uncle hiccupped.

  I closed and opened my eyes again.

  He laughed out loud.

  To recount the days and the years before this moment would mean that Baby Harper would have to acknowledge that there was a time when his love for another human being wasn’t fully reciprocated. Baby Harper would rather forget those years. By the time that he became my great-uncle, he was a man who had lived fifty-one years of life with a kind of imposed aphasia. The singing-talker could wax lyrical about everything except the impulses of his heart and those of his groin. That part of his vocabulary was lost to him in Boiling Springs. I wish I could say that my presence in his life gave these words back to him. But that would be a lie or a wish that hadn’t come true.

  Iris was sitting next to Baby Harper on the living room couch. When DeAnne’s tentative hands scooted me in front of her, Iris extended her right hand to me. As always, Iris was telling her family the truth. In this instance, she didn’t even need to use words—a handshake would do. Linda, the new addition to the family, was a business transaction. As with all contractual dealings—my grandmother had been married to a judge, after all—she understood that she was now under an obligation. As a grandmother, she had the duty to protect me from harm, to teach me right from wrong (or rather the acceptable from the unacceptable), and to endure, on her part, the questioning stares of her neighbors and friends without ever once opening up her mouth. Because if she did, she would have to admit that her family wasn’t like theirs. As Iris had done with her own flesh and blood (a grown brother whom she still called Baby), she would see of me what she wanted, and she would ignore the rest. For Iris, “the rest” included most things about me, especially who I was before I became a Hammerick.