She never forgave DeAnne and Thomas for not giving her a grandchild in the usual way. I think Iris thought often of Walter Wendell and how if her husband had been alive none of this would have happened. Walter Wendell would have made certain that his son-in-law fathered a child like a real man and not via a piece of paper. When Iris looked at me, she was reminded of both the void and the missing. How she could stand to witness my face on a day-to-day basis for the next decade was in its own way a miracle. When I was fifteen (and recently bereft of Kelly and Wade), I accused my grandmother of never liking me. Our family had gone to Moss Lake to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. We had spread our blankets and lawn chairs on a rectangle of grass. My father and Baby Harper had gone back to the cars to get the coolers. DeAnne was saying hello to a friend whom she had spotted a couple of picnic blankets away. Iris and I were left alone with each other, which was when we usually laid our cards on the table. We sat and stared out at the lake ringed by children with water wings and inner tubes. Maybe it was the sight of them, these small beings saved from drowning, that brought forth my allegation.
“That doesn’t stopcannedcorn me from being your grandpotatosaladmother, Lindamint,” was her response.
No, Iris, it never did.
DeAnne was playing a role. When I first became Linda, I wanted to tell her that “Mom” tasted of chocolate milk and that I loved chocolate milk. It quenched my thirst, made me feel full, and tasted like candy. I thought it was a magical potion for doing all three things at once. When I stopped calling her “Mom,” I missed the word. DeAnne, though, was visibly relieved. I no longer caught her being startled by the sound of my voice calling her something that she tried to get used to, but never did.
DeAnne and Thomas were both forty-three years old when I became their only child. Why they never had children of their own was a topic that was also never discussed in my family. (When I think back to all the ellipses that we all nurtured like family pets, I’m amazed that my family had anything left to say to one another.) DeAnne must have thought that the question of children had been already decided by the time I came along.
Now that my own body has answered the question of children for me, I find myself wondering if it was his body or hers that failed them. I would guess it was Thomas. If DeAnne was the infertile one, he would have left her. Men do that. They replace broken women with whole ones. Women replace broken men too, but more often they try to fix them, mend their bones, lick clean their wounds. DeAnne probably agreed to my adoption in order to keep Thomas by her side so that she could continue to do those things for him with the hope that he would become whole again or become so broken that he would have no choice but to stay by her side.
After my surgery, I thought that Leo and I could still form a family. I said to him that we could adopt a child. He said to me that he wanted biological children. Leo said this to me. Those words, unthinking and unfeeling, shot from his mouth.
Kelly wrote that I should be thankful that Dr. Leo was an asshole. She was right. If Leo hadn’t insisted that I have a full medical checkup before we announced our engagement—his physician version of a prenuptial—I would have died. I hadn’t seen an OB/GYN since my freshman year of college, when I went to Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for birth control pills, which soon became an ill-advised method of contraception in the full-blown age of AIDS. In the twelve years since then, I hadn’t gone for my annual exams. The men I had sex with wore condoms. I was young. I felt healthy. I had no family medical history to guide or warn me about the possible future of my body. Leo was visibly disturbed when he heard that I had been so remiss. As it turned out, he was equally disturbed by the fact that I was adopted. To Dr. Leo, I was a twenty-nine-year-old ticking time bomb with my deactivation wires not clearly color-coded. He was right. After my pelvic examination, the OB/GYN ordered a CT scan, which confirmed that there was a mass on one of my ovaries. I was checked into the hospital a week later for an oophorectomy. During the surgery both my ovaries were removed because the surgeon found an abnormality, which hadn’t been visible in the CT scan, on the other ovary as well.
While I was in the hospital, Leo signed a lease for an apartment on the Upper West Side. Three weeks to the day that I came home to the brownstone that he and I shared in Chelsea, he sat down by the side of our bed and said that he was ending our relationship, that the movers were scheduled to come tomorrow from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, and that I could keep the Nelson lamps but that he was taking the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, the Noguchi coffee table, and the Knoll love seat. All of the furniture that Leo had brought with him to the brownstone that we had lived in for the past three years had last names. He was a man fixated on provenance. This was a sign, a blinking neon pig of a sign, that I had ignored. Leo then asked me to give back the extra set of keys to his family’s cabin in the Berkshires. I still thought that he was kidding, so I didn’t even have the wherewithal to ask, “What’s her name?”
I was a senior associate in a large law firm in New York City. I had full health benefits and a generous medical leave policy. I had a retirement fund and an investment portfolio. I owned the first two floors of a brownstone. Leo, before leaving the next day with the movers, listed these facts for me in that order. Then the diagnostician in him concluded, “Lindamint, I knowgrapejelly you’ll be fine.”
Kelly was right. Dr. Leo was an asshole. He saved my life and then he judged it useless to him.
Since leaving Boiling Springs, I was often asked by complete strangers what it was like to grow up being Asian in the South. You mean what was it like to grow up looking Asian in the South, I would say back to them with the southern accent that had revealed to them the particulars of my biography. My tweaking of their question often left them perplexed or annoyed, as if I were playing some irritating semantic game with them. For me, pointing out to them the difference between “being” and “looking” was the beginning, the middle, and the end of my answer. I would rarely offer them more.
I was still taken aback, startled, I suppose, that it was the outside of me that so readily defined me as not being from here (New Haven, New York, New World) nor there (the South). How could I explain to them that from the age of seven to eighteen, there was nothing Asian about me except my body, which I had willed away and few in Boiling Springs seemed to see anyway.
If Boiling Springs had been a larger town, it wouldn’t have been possible. But Boiling Springs wasn’t. The dwindling population there was small and insular enough to behave as one microorganism. These were the adults of Boiling Springs. (Their children, as children always do, had other ideas.) More specifically, these were the white men and women of Boiling Springs. My schoolteachers, until the time I was in high school, were white women. My school-bus drivers from elementary school to middle school were old white men who had retired from some other job. My father’s colleagues from his law firm were all middle-aged white men. DeAnne’s friends were all middle-aged white women. Iris and Baby Harper seemed only to have each other.
There was, of course, a parallel adult world in my hometown that I came into contact with, but only in passing. These black men and women knew of me too, especially the women. When DeAnne would take me with her to the Piggly Wiggly or to Hudson’s department store, the women who worked there looked at me with eyes that always made me uncomfortable. These women actually saw me, and what they wondered about me—why one of my own hadn’t taken me in—made their hearts tender. The lunch ladies, with their hairnets and their plastic smocks, looked at me the same way. As did my father’s secretary who lived on Goforth Road. The school janitors, the old men who pumped gas into my family’s car, the middle-aged ones who cut our lawn before and after Bobby, the mailman. I learned early on not to meet their eyes, dark and deep as a river. If I saw them, I would have to see myself. I didn’t want a mirror. I wanted a blank slate.
The word must have come down from the pulpits. The Southern Baptists, the Episcopalians, and the small ban
d of Catholics were all in on the pact. They vowed to make themselves color-blind on my behalf. That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I became a blind spot in their otherwise 20–20 field of vision. They heard my voice—it helped that I came to them already speaking English with a southern accent, which was the best and only clue that I had about my whereabouts before Boiling Springs—but they learned never to see me. It was an act of selective blindness that was meant to protect me from them, or perhaps it was the other way around. They knew that if they saw my face they would fixate on my eyes, which some would claim were almond-shaped and others would describe as mere slits. If they saw my hair, they would marvel at how straight and shiny it was or that it was limp and the color of tar. If they saw my skin, they would understand why they basked their bodies in the heat of the southern sun, though some would ask themselves how DeAnne could ever be sure that I was washed and clean. If they saw my unformed breasts, the twigs that were my arms and legs, the hands and feet small enough to fit inside their mouths, how many of the men would remember the young female bodies that they bought by the half hour while wearing their country’s uniform in the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, or South Vietnam? Complicit, because they would rather not know the answer to that question, the mothers and sisters and wives of these men looked right through me as well. Instead of invisibility, Boiling Springs made an open secret of me. I was the town’s pariah, but no one was allowed to tell me so. In Boiling Springs, I was never Scout. I was Boo Radley, not hidden away but in plain sight.
The children of Boiling Springs had their own idea of how to welcome me to town. They were never fooled by my new name. “Linda Hammerick” was a mask only until I said, “Here.” Then they would turn around and silently mouth “Chink” or “Jap” or “Gook” at me, so that our teacher wouldn’t hear. Clever monsters, my classmates were, though not original. I had come to the blue and gray ranch house with those epithets already in me, yet another clue of where I had been before. As in the adult realm, the children’s behavior toward me was dictated by some accord deep within them that I didn’t understand until much later in our lives. The black girls in my class never called me a name other than “Linda.” They knew that the other names were meant to insult me, to punch holes into me, and make me fall down.
I understood, without really understanding, that “Chink” and “Jap” and “Gook” were intimately connected to how the children saw my body. I knew because of the gestures that accompanied these words. At recess, when fewer teachers were around, my classmates would pull up the outer corners of their eyes for “Chink” and pull down the corners for “Jap.” Precise and systematic, these children were. There was also a rhyme that they recited that intertwined foreignness with an unclean and sexualized body.
Chinese, Japanese
Dirty knees,
Look at these!
Emily Dickinson, these monsters were not.
Their choreography, albeit communicative, was also pedestrian. They accompanied the second line of their rhyme with fingers pointed at their knees, and with the last line they used their small hands to pull out two tents from their shirts, at the loci of their own nonexistent breasts. Martha Graham, they were not either. But with what glee would they perform this for me.
Bravo, my little children. Who taught you these words? I had to figure it out for myself—because no one in my family ever told me—that your parents must have been your teachers. You, their darling little parrots, had become the mouthpieces for all that these men and women couldn’t say aloud to me or to Thomas or DeAnne or Iris or Baby Harper but were free to say in front of their own children within the high walls of their own houses. If I hadn’t come to Boiling Springs, whom would you have said these words to? You would have had to save up all the “Japs,” “Chinks,” and “Gooks” until another unsuspecting stranger came to town or when you grew up and ventured to metropolitan Raleigh or Charlotte or even farther afield for a job. When hard-pressed, you might have even used these words against a Cherokee, a Lumbee, or a Croatan. But there was no need to misapply the words in that way, because when I came to Boiling Springs the diversity drought was over. What joy I must have given you so early on in your lives. When you think back on your childhood, you must think fondly of me.
High school changed everything. What had begun as an untoward, heightened interest in my physical presence rapidly dissipated into a kind of non-seeing, the kind that their parents had professed to strive for but never achieved. I had no role to play within the romances, the dramas, and the tragedies that my classmates’ hormones were writing for them. I was never considered a heroine, love interest, vixen, or villainess. Even Kelly assigned me the role of secret confidante and then audience member. To be the Smartest Girl in my high school was to be disembodied, which was what I thought I had wanted all along. I was the Brain. Everyone else around me became their bodies. The girls with the large breasts and long dancer legs became cheerleaders and Homecoming Queen. The boys with the throwing arms and the runner’s calves became football players and Quarterback. It was a kind of fate that most of them embraced, including Kelly. I watched it all from a distance, which didn’t give me objectivity or clarity. It just made me lonely.
When we first met, I tried to tell Leo about my childhood in Boiling Springs. He said that these experiences meant that I did know what it was like being Asian in the South. For a soon-to-be psychiatrist, he wasn’t a very good listener. No, Leo, I knew what it was like being hated in the South. Leo would have me equate the two, equate my body with what others have projected onto it. I won’t. (Like my great-grandfather Graven Hammerick, I’m an optimist at heart.) I believed, and still do, that this state of being that I was trying to understand had content and substance separate and apart from what Boiling Springs had taught me.
I’m a Tar Heel born,
I’m a Tar Heel bred,
And when I die
I’m a Tar Heel dead.
I CAN STILL HEAR BABY HARPER SINGING. SOMETIMES HE WOULD sing a hymn. More often, he was singing his version of the blues. The words were worried in his mouth, and then cracked open like melon seeds and made so generous that his whole life story could fit inside each syllable. You should hear what the humble “Tar” could hold within it. He taught me the words to this song but never taught me what “Tar Heel” meant. So at the age of seven, I thought that the lyrics were about a woman wearing some kind of high-heeled shoes. In school I would learn that the song was the unofficial anthem of the state of North Carolina, and that “Tar Heels” was the nickname for the farmers who supplemented their subsistence income by boiling down pine sap to make tar. I also learned that the song was a rousing, thigh-slapping manifesto of statehood and loyalty and specifically of the reputation of these farmers for standing their ground on the battlefields during the Civil War. Baby Harper’s rendition was all about fate.
After a week’s worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the streets of the city were filled with bright yellow cars that you hopped in and out of at will and that would take you wherever you wanted to go. In this city, there were sidewalks overflowing with people from the whole world over who wanted so much to be there. He told me of its neighborhoods, with names like Greenwich Village and Harlem and Chinatown. At the nucleus of these stories was my father, and spinning around him was the city of New York. Long before I would see them in photographs or in real life, my father had given me the white crown lights of the Chrysler Building and the shining needle of the Empire State. His words triggered incomings after incomings, but I was enthralled, finally enchanted by what he was saying to me. His stories rarely had a plot, no character develop
ment to speak of—no one evil or good or beautiful or wicked—and the stories rarely had an ending or any kind of a resolution. My father’s stories were mostly descriptions of people, places, and things. Impressionistic and episodic, they would often begin with a statement of fact, which nonetheless seemed improbable and fantastical to me then. In the city of New York, the trains run underground. My father would then pinpoint a specific memory and offer it to me like a perfectly preserved butterfly so that I could examine the miracle of its wings. Early one morning on the IRT—the train line that ran underneath the west side of the island—I saw an old woman sitting with a wicker basket by her feet. She reached down and took out of the basket a china teapot and a cup, and she asked the young man sitting next to her if he wanted some tea. From the very beginning, I had the feeling that my father and the young man in his stories were one and the same. The young man thought about it for a quick second and then he said yes. She poured him a cup. She handed it to the young man, and he took a sip and said, “Thank you very much.” Of course, no liquid of any kind had come from the pot.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 17
