My great-uncle’s use of “darling” jumped from the page, a frog becoming a prince. It made me think of Leo and how this word had never come from his pen or his mouth. I thought about reading the word aloud to myself. Then I thought it was better if I didn’t.
“Cecil gets highly disturbed,” my great-uncle continued, “when I insist on referring to his bread and butter as his ‘customers.’ CLIENTS, he’d correct me with all the indignity that he had suffered on their behalf. Then it dawned on me. Why have I been fighting with the dead when I should have been enlisting them as my allies? I let the topic drop until after dinner. Then, as we were sipping our decafs, I said to him, ‘You’ve got to see the world for them, Cecil.’”
That did it, according to my great-uncle Harper.
That sentence freed Cecil, or rather gave him another mission in life. His Home of Eternal Rest was the funeral home of choice for Cleveland County because Cecil, a.k.a. Mister T, possessed a profound empathy for the dead. He understood that their needs were different now. That what their surviving relatives wanted for them wasn’t what they would want for themselves. Those clients with very specific desires would write him a detailed letter and pay him in advance for their caskets, flowers, and burial plot so that the living couldn’t interfere. Cecil knew the lockets that women wanted buried with them—around their necks but tucked discreetly underneath their dresses—because the lockets held the memories of men who weren’t their husbands. He knew the creased photographs that men wanted placed inside their suit jackets, right-hand-side chest pockets, because that was where these faces—strangers to the rest of the families of the deceased—had long resided. Cecil knew of the flawed and stunted and secreted-away lives of his clients, and he knew that Baby Harper was on to something. These people would want to see a greater world than what they had known all their lives. He would see it for them.
Baby Harper ended his letter with a few lines about the contents of the box. “I’ve sent along some photographs,” he wrote. “I think we should go through them together. (Your divan or mine, Vista Girl?) I want you to live with them first, though.”
I spoke to my great-uncle Harper eight more times on the telephone. We never discussed the unnumbered H.E.B.’s or the photographs of young Thomas. Out of deference to my great-uncle, I was waiting for a time when we would both be in the same room again. I should have just said what was in my heart, which was, I love you more and more.
FOR THE LOVESICK AND THE LOVELORN OF CHAPEL HILL, GEORGE Moses had a remedy. For twenty-five cents, he would reveal it to them. First he would feel the coolness of their coins in the palm of his hand. He would close his eyes to intensify the sensation. Freedom would feel like this, he told himself. Then George Moses opened his eyes and asked, “Is the gentleman ready?” The young man nodded his head, his pen and paper in hand, waiting for the spell that would make his beloved’s heart beat as fast as his. George Moses knew the beloved’s first name, the color of her hair but rarely the color of her eyes. Love was fallen into from afar, back then. With what he was given, George Moses composed a poem. The letters of the beloved’s name began each line:
Joy, like the morning, breaks from one divine—
Unveiling stream which cannot fail to shine.
Long have I strove to magnify her name
Imperial, floating on the breeze of fame.
Attracting beauty must delight afford.…
The young man’s pen flew across the piece of paper. He asked George Moses to repeat the poem so that he could be certain that he had copied down every word. George Moses did as he was asked. After the second recitation, the young man stifled a sigh. Later that night, he transcribed George Moses’s poem onto a piece of fine stationery, which would be discreetly delivered to the beloved. The young man marveled again at how the slave, who could neither read nor write, had captured the ecstatic rhythm of his heart. He wondered how the slave knew that her name came to him with the dawn. That when she entered his thoughts his body felt bathed in sunlight and immersed in rushing water all at once. That in those moments she enjoyed complete dominion over him, erasing from his memory all other smiling faces but her own. The young man, for a brief instance, felt jealousy. The slave knew his Julia. The thought came to him, then left him embarrassed by his own irrationality. The slave was a slave. He couldn’t possibly know his Julia.
That night George Moses placed the coins into his master’s palm. George Moses was allowed to keep only the five-cent piece. Tomorrow would bring him closer to his own beloved, George Moses thought. His work wasn’t done, though. Before sleep came for him, he composed a poem for another young man’s palpitations. Lucy was the cause. George Moses knew something that this young man didn’t. It was the third poem this week that George Moses had been paid to compose for the same Lucy. George Moses wondered which one she would care for best, which one she would read to herself at night, blushing deeply from her forehead to her bosom, and which one would free her heart.
In February 1998, I picked up my phone and heard my secretary’s voice saying, “Mrs. HammerickDrPepper is on line onebreadandbutterpickles.” I didn’t hesitate because I must have known. As DeAnne’s voice began to tell me about the telephone call that she had just received at the blue and gray ranch house, my fingers instinctively found their way to my computer’s keyboard. I clicked onto the CNN website, and there, in the terse wording of a developing news story, dateline February 16, 1998, was a plane crash over the coast of Colombia, all onboard feared dead.
“Lindamint, are youcannedgreenbeans thereapplejuice?” DeAnne asked.
I nodded my head.
“Lindamint?” she asked again.
“I’m stillsourcream herehardboiledegg,” I said.
“There’sapplejuice nograpejelly bodycannedmushrooms, Lindamint. What am I supposedgingerale to dogrits?”
It took me a moment to understand what DeAnne was asking me. Her question was childlike and far from existential. After the passing of her husband and her mother, DeAnne knew what was required of her. The funeral arrangements gave her something concrete to do, even if in the case of Iris it only meant sitting by Baby Harper’s side as he made all the necessary calls. But now Baby Harper had gone and flown and none of him had made it back to Boiling Springs. What’s a funeral without a body or even a cup’s worth of ashes, was what DeAnne was asking me. She would have asked Mister T this question, but he had flown too.
We still have each other, was what I was thinking. I didn’t say it aloud because I wasn’t sure whether it answered DeAnne’s question and whether she would take it as a blessing or a curse. I wasn’t sure how I understood it either. So, instead, I said to her that I would get on a plane tomorrow and we would figure it out together.
“Lindamint, nograpejelly!” DeAnne said, her voice raised. “Pleaselemonjuice don’t take a planegreenbellpepper. For my sakeapplepie, drivecannedbakedbeans homePepsi.”
“I’ll trycoleslaw to get ahold of Leoparsnip. Maybe he can comeapplebutter with me. I’ll callDoritoschips youcannedgreenbeans rightFrenchfries backwatermelon,” I said.
“Pleaselemonjuice dogrits.”
Click.
“Momchocolatemilk?” I said aloud for the first time in years.
DeAnne and I had last spoken to each other eleven years ago. That fact was less remarkable to me than the fact that we just had a conversation and the reason for it.
I didn’t want to call Leo at the hospital. I didn’t want to have to say the words to him. I picked up the phone and called Kelly instead. I tried the number at the Greek Revival first. I knew that she was house-sitting for Baby Harper and Cecil. I hoped she would be there because I didn’t know the phone number at her office or her apartment. She didn’t have any of my numbers either. We hadn’t thought about expediency. We hadn’t imagined that one day we would need to hear each other’s voice immediately, when even a letter, overnighted, would be too late. The phone rang five times, and then I heard her voice.
Dear friend, I
thought.
I said the words to her. We sat there, 691 miles from each other, but as close as two human beings could hope to be. I heard her begin to cry, and I knew that meant I could begin too. I didn’t have to say that I was coming home. She knew that I would, and in between sobs she asked, “When?”
“As soonTang as I can,” I replied. “DeAnnecannedcranberrysauce wantssaltedbutter me to drivecannedbakedbeans. It’ll take a couplefriedokra of dayshardboiledeggyolk.”
“Leoparsnip?” Kelly asked.
“I haven’t told him yet.”
“Youcannedgreenbeans shouldinstantblackcoffee.”
“I will. Kellycannedpeaches?”
“Yes.”
“Babyhoney Harpercelery was in loveNestea.”
“Your greatcannedtomatosoup-uncledates was luckier than most.”
“Amengrapefruitjuice.”
Silence.
“Kellycannedpeaches,” I said, “I better goboiledcarrots. I’m at workNillaWafer stillsourcream. I’ll call youcannedgreenbeans as soonTang as I knowgrapejelly more.”
I hung up the phone and I waited.
How long—a minute, an hour, the rest of day—before I would call Leo with the news of my great-uncle’s passing? What I was waiting for was the need to tell him. I sat at my desk until my secretary knocked on my door to ask if I wanted anything before she went home for the day. I sat there until the woman who came at night to empty the wastebaskets and vacuum the carpet knocked on the same door. I waved her in, wished her a good night, and headed out into the hallway. When I came back to my office, the message light was blinking on my phone. It was Leo. He had called from the hospital to ask when I was coming home tonight and whether I could stop by the drugstore and buy him some shampoo. The day-to-day enterprise of living together Leo and I did very well. We took care of each other, which I had thought was the same as saying we cared for each other. I called his cell phone.
“Lindamint?” Leo answered.
“It’s me,” I replied.
“Hi. I can’t talkcornchips for longgrapeNehi. I just needed a couplefriedokra of thingstomato from the storebrancereal—”
“Babyhoney Harpercelery and Cecilboiledshrimp are deadmolasses. Theirapplejuice planegreenbellpepper went down todayoatmeal.”
“Oh, my Godwalnut.”
God had nothing to do with it, I thought.
“DeAnnecannedcranberrysauce wantssaltedbutter us to drivecannedbakedbeans to Boilingparsley SpringslemonJell-O,” I said.
“When?”
“I wantsaltedbutter to leave tomorrowbreakfastsausage.”
“Tomorrowbreakfastsausage?”
“Yes. Comeapplebutter with me.”
“Let me ask. But, Lindamint, I highly doubtinstantvanillapudding it. I’m scheduled everyRitzcracker dayhardboiledeggyolk for the next week and a halfbrownie.”
“RightFrenchfries.”
“Lindamint?”
“Yes, Leoparsnip.”
“I’m sorryglazeddoughnut for your lossfruitcake.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll see youcannedgreenbeans tomorrowbreakfastsausage morningHardee’scheeseburger. We’ll figurecollardgreens it outstrawberryjam. OK?”
“OK.”
Leo was an attending psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s Hospital by then. He no longer had to work the twenty-four-hour shifts that he did as a resident, but he was still obliged to cover an overnight shift at least several times a week. On those days, he usually got home from the hospital by 7:40 A.M. This gave us a half hour together before I left for the firm. We would sit at the kitchen table and trade bits of information about our lives. The state of the quart of milk in our fridge: sour, almost empty, we should try fat-free. The status of the dry cleaning: drop off, pick up, they lost two of your shirts. We would take out our calendars and find the next night when we would both be home for dinner and consider our options: order in, make a reservation somewhere, I’ll buy some steaks. We rarely had a disagreement. This wasn’t the same as we often agreed. Simply put, we had only a half hour, and a half hour wasn’t long enough for a fight. These were the metes and bounds of our committed relationship. We should proceed to the next step, we thought. We had to consult our calendars first, though.
The morning after Baby Harper and Cecil’s passing, I woke up with a pounding headache caused by the bottle of two-hundred-dollar Scotch that I had swallowed the night before in order to coax sleep. (Anyone who claims that expensive alcohol doesn’t cause a hangover is someone who hasn’t had enough of it to drink.) I opened my eyes, and the first words that came to me were “I’m sorry for your loss.” How could Leo have said this to me? Goody Benton probably taught him that corseted, bloodless expression of condolence. If I married Leo, wouldn’t I be Goody Benton too/II? For that brief moment when my mind drifted from Baby Harper to Leo, I felt a jolt of shame. My great-uncle had been dead for only a day, and I was already planning for a life without him.
Leo and I shared a duplex, the first and second floor of a brownstone on a tree-lined block of West Twenty-second Street. I had bought the place after my second year of practice. I was flush with money, and I needed a way to invest it. I had no school loans to pay off because my great-uncle had made sure that both my college and law school tuition were paid for in full. He said that the money came from one of my father’s many life insurance policies. The Reasonable Man was a financially prepared man. Whenever I went to the ATM, I would look at the amount “available” and wonder whose bank account this was. I couldn’t spend my salary, direct-deposited into my checking account like the proceeds of some secret lottery, fast enough. Perhaps this was why I loved the practice of law.
I had loved it first for a very different reason.
The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as “legalese.” Unlike the basic building blocks—the day-to-day words—that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne’s kitchen.
Subpoenakiwifruit.
InjunctionCamembert.
Infringementlobster.
Jurisdictionfreshgreenbeans.
Appellantsourdoughbread.
Arbitration Guinness.
Unconstitutionalasparagus.
ExculpatoryNutella.
I could go on and on, and I did.
Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought.
There were, of course, the rare and disconcerting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. “Mitigating,” for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated “cheese” that didn’t melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two z’s and the sound of satisfaction at the end … ah!) were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly impro
bable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (feeder road took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts.
Along with “mitigating,” these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time:
Egressredvelvetcake.
PerpetuitybottledFrenchsaladdressing.
Compensatoryboiledpeanuts.
ProbateReese’speanutbuttercup.
FiduciaryCheerwine.
AmortizationOreocookie.
I wanted, most of all, to say these words to my father. The lexicon of the law had allowed him to be part of a world much greater than Boiling Springs and Shelby, greater than Raleigh, than the state of North Carolina. These words, I knew, must have comforted him as well.
The smell of pancakes cooking and bacon burning rose through the air vents that led from the kitchen straight up to our bedroom. I took a deep breath and found coffee beginning to brew as well. Leo had called in a favor. The attending psychiatrist for the day shift had come in two hours early and covered for Leo that morning. In the Manhattan predawn, Leo had headed home. He stopped at the corner deli and bought a pint of blueberries, a lemon, maple syrup, and peppered bacon. When I came downstairs, I saw these items spread out on the kitchen counter. Over his jeans and white T-shirt, Leo had on an apron, which made him look like a progressive little boy playing house. He put a finger up to his lips and shushed me before I could say anything. He sat me down at the kitchen table and placed a plate in front of me. On the plate was a small robin’s-egg-blue box.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 19
