Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  Before I could object to his incredibly poor timing, Leo launched into a dizzying speech about how life, despite our best efforts, was impossible to plan for. How he had bought the ring three months ago and had been waiting to propose. How he had already arranged to take time off from the hospital—a full two weeks—so that we could celebrate at his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires. In true WASP code, the “cabin” was a sprawling compound on 110 acres that included a five-bedroom main house, a converted barn for the grandchildren who had yet to materialize, a swimming “hole”—a lake the size of the Wollman skating rink in Central Park—and an apple orchard that required Mr. and Mrs. Benton to hire a local family to harvest it each fall.

  Leo was more animated than usual, which accelerated his already rapid speech pattern. His words were running up against one another as they rushed to leave his mouth. He must have seen the look of confusion on my face and how my eyes kept on darting over to the coffeemaker. Leo poured me a cup and sat down beside me. He explained as slowly as he could that the vacation, which he had negotiated and bargained for and agreed to work the remaining year’s worth of weekend shifts for, was to begin two weeks from now. Proposal, ring, acceptance, vacation, all was to happen two weeks from now, he repeated. The news yesterday about Baby Harper and Cecil’s passing, and my request that we leave immediately for Boiling Springs had forced his hand.

  Did he really say “forced” his hand, I remembered thinking.

  Leo, sensing his momentum dissipating, his pancakes becoming cold pucks, the grease congealing white around the strips of bacon, picked up the pace of his proposal.

  I said yes.

  Leo opened the robin’s-egg-blue box and placed the ring on my finger. It was a diamond solitaire, traditional, multicarat, and expensive. Of course, the ring was a perfect fit. Leo was a planner. He probably had measured my finger while I was asleep.

  Leo kissed me. I closed my eyes and opened them up again. I understood in that brief moment of darkness that the apron was very important to me. Leo seemed younger and more vulnerable in the apron. I needed to see him in it. I smiled. He smiled back at me.

  Leo then requested three things of me. First, we would keep the timing, if not the destination, of his original plan. We would wait two weeks and drive to Boiling Springs. We could stay with DeAnne for all or some of the time, depending on how I felt, he said. Second, I would quit smoking. Third, I would get a full medical checkup before we officially announced our engagement.

  Agreeing to the first stipulation was easier than the second and third.

  It seemed suddenly absurd that I had intended to get in a car that day with Leo and head to North Carolina for some indeterminate amount of time. I hadn’t told anyone at the firm that I was planning to be away. I had a conference call scheduled for later that afternoon. I had a meeting in Detroit the following week. Leo and I didn’t even own a car. We would need to rent one, but by the time that I had remembered this detail the night before, I was too drunk to do anything about it. Also, in all honesty, the idea of seeing DeAnne in two weeks as opposed to two days wasn’t that objectionable to me.

  As for the rest of Leo’s requests, I understood them for what they were. Leo had made me a conditional offer. If the conditions weren’t met, the offer would be void.

  When I arrived at the firm that morning, I telephoned Kelly first and told her that I wouldn’t be back in Boiling Springs for another two weeks. I told her that my work schedule and Leo’s were a tangled mess. I didn’t tell her about Leo’s proposal or whatever it was. She would have asked me the question that we have been carrying within us since we were little girls, waiting for the day when we could answer with an unqualified yes.

  Are you in love, Linda?

  No.

  Will you marry him?

  Yes.

  Why?

  Because the two questions are not one and the same.

  Yes they are.

  How would you know, Kelly?

  It was at the edge of such a chasm that a friendship could meet its untimely end.

  Then I telephoned DeAnne. I didn’t hear the reprimand that I had expected or the word that I thought she would throw at me. “Selfish” had disappeared from her vocabulary. Her voice echoed on the line, as if she were sitting in the middle of an empty room, as if she were the empty room. DeAnne said that she would wait until I came back home before doing or deciding anything. She said that Baby Harper would have wanted it that way.

  At 1:12 A.M. on February 16, 1998, American Airlines Flight 1520 from Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport, en route to Charlotte’s Douglas International, went down minutes after flying over the city of Santa Marta at the edge of the Caribbean Sea. According to the inhabitants of Santa Marta, some claiming that they had seen the moment in their sleep, Harper Evan Burch and Cecil Tobias Brandon and 262 other bodies transformed into birds. The flock, so large that it blocked out the moon, then flew headfirst into the sea. These inhabitants also reported hearing in their sleep a song that they would later identify as Patsy Cline’s “You Belong to Me.”

  Fly the ocean in a silver plane,

  See the jungle when it’s wet with rain,

  Just remember till you’re home again,

  You belong to me.

  Cecil’s last will and testament bequeathed his estate, with one small exception, to his “life companion,” Harper Evan Burch, and if predeceased then to his nephew Clay Tobias Mitchell of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Clay, a thirty-seven-year-old middle school mathematics teacher, immediately quit his job and moved with his own life companion, Gregory Puckett Ames, to Shelby, where the two men saw to it that the Home of Eternal Rest would continue to meet all the needs of the county’s dearly departed. The folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area were comforted by the fact that there was another Mister T to turn to during their time of loss. They welcomed Clay and Gregory to town with an outpouring of Bundt cakes and casseroles, and then they gave them the bodies of their dead to prepare for burial. Trust couldn’t be delineated in a clearer way. These folks also found comfort in reminding one another that it was 1998. What they meant was that life around them had changed. Shelby had a Chinese “bistro” and a Thai restaurant, and Boiling Springs no longer had Gardner-Webb Baptist College but Gardner-Webb University, complete with out-of-state students and even some from overseas, mostly from small Third World countries where the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board was most active. Cleveland County was more cosmopolitan in other ways as well. The county was no longer dry. Beer and liquor were now available for purchase without ever having to cross the nearest state line. I had meant to ask Baby Harper whether that was the real reason Iris had driven to Spartanburg, South Carolina; whether her glass of Dr Pepper had hid a fifth of something stronger.

  Cecil set forth in his will that his body was to be cremated and his ashes kept in a silver urn, which could be found on the mantelpiece in the master bedroom of the Greek Revival. He also wrote that under no circumstance should there be a funeral or memorial service. He’d already been to so many of them, I could almost hear my great-uncle explaining. Cecil long ago had set aside some money—the amount that the average person would spend on a casket, flowers, burial plot, and yearly upkeep of said plot—in a high-interest-bearing account, and he specified that upon his death the interest should be used to fund a yearly scholarship for “any young man or woman from Cleveland County who wanted to study the funerary customs of other countries; travel is most encouraged.” At the time of his passing, the account was worth $1.2 million.

  Kelly wrote in letter #1,297 that when Clay and Gregory came to the Greek Revival to pick up the silver urn, the three of them each did a shot of tequila in Cecil and my great-uncle’s honor. They weren’t sure what liquor Colombians drank, but tequila seemed to be in keeping with that part of the world, she wrote. When I read this, I thought about how much my best friend had changed. The Kelly of our youth would have known that Colombia’s alcohol of ch
oice was aguardiente, a sugar cane–based anisette, because she knew everything worth knowing in the world. The Kelly of our approaching thirties was an assistant financial-aid officer at Gardner-Webb and was distributing Southern Baptist scholarship money to the smaller, poorer, browner countries of the world that she knew nothing about.

  My great-uncle Harper didn’t leave a will. DeAnne was his closest living blood relative. She inherited all that he owned, including the Greek Revival. DeAnne asked Kelly to stay in the house until we could decide what to do with it and its contents: the mourning embroideries, the antique furniture, the one hundred H.E.B.’s, the shelves of books organized not by titles but by the thoughts and emotions that their pages evoked, the silver objects that my great-uncle gave to Cecil for their anniversaries, and the master bedroom that was unbeknownst to us the exuberant heart of the house. According to Kelly, even Clay and Gregory were surprised by its decor. She wrote that the three of them, after a couple more shots of tequila, decided that if Scarlett O’Hara and Carmen Miranda had been lesbian lovers and they had had a baby—via the turkey baster method—and that baby grew up to be an interior decorator, then he would have been responsible for the amalgam of tropical colors, rich velvets, and floppy-straw-bonnet motifs that they found inside Baby Harper and Cecil’s bedroom.

  “In other words, you mean that Baby Harper was the decorator,” I wrote back. “Was anything painted Peony Red?” I asked Kelly in the postscript. I made her promise that she wouldn’t touch a thing until I had a chance to see the room for myself. I was, in fact, more concerned about what DeAnne would do to the room.

  SHOOT ME THROUGH THE HEART. TRANSFORM AND TRANSFIGURE me. Allow me to feel beloved till my last breath. I prayed to you, Virginia Dare, because you too were an orphan. Jesus had a mother and a father and yet another Father. Jesus was lucky. You and He both came to a violent end, were resurrected, and live on now in stories. I found your story, with its inexplicable abandonment and unquestioned adoption, more moving. He lived till the age of thirty-three. How old were you, Virginia, when the arrows pierced your most vital organ? Legend left you lying on the forest floor, leaves and insects underneath your still-warm body. But there were the minutes right before death, unheralded and untold, when you had just fallen, your flesh half animal and half human. Your ears, still that of a doe, heard the footfalls of two men running toward you from opposite directions. Fear fluttered through your body before leaving through your parted lips, already those of a woman, as a barely audible O! Your arms, a stretch of alabaster skin, ended not in hands but in hooves. You used them, clumsy as they were, to touch the two arrows that extended from your chest, like the limbs of a vestigial twin. Pain, a sudden downpour, soaked every inch of your body, which was changing with each labored breath. You believed that this pain had nothing to do with your body, though. You believed that it had everything to do with longing and loneliness. One set of footsteps was coming near. The other had stopped, tangled up in old age and in vines. You glanced down, examining the state of your body, and thought of how you didn’t want O! to see you this way. In between, inchoate. In your last moments of consciousness, you saw the faces of a young man and a young woman who looked so much like you that you shuddered, as if ghosts had emerged from your own body. You heard them saying in soft tones a version of your name. You thought “Mother” and “Father” in a language that you knew but had never said aloud. One of them commanded you to “stay.” The woman and the man then disappeared. In their place, you saw the face of O! as he knelt down beside you and began to rock his body back and forth in the throes of regret and grief. You knew that his body would do this for many more days to come. The pain you felt increased, and you let out another quiet O! He thought you had said his name. In a way, you had. You closed your eyes—both were those of a woman, as was the whole of your body now. Your memories, though, remained a hybrid of animal and human. You faded away to a recollection that belonged to the former:

  You are running through the forest. You smell sunlight, you taste the wind, you feel the buzzing of bees and echoing of bird songs, you see whiffs of honeysuckles and fresh pine sap in the air, you hear blood, salty and thick, rushing into your mouth.

  My first instinct was right. The photo albums that my great-uncle had sent to me were an invitation. Leo looking over my shoulders wasn’t how I had wanted to view their contents, so I had taken them to work with me. There, alone in my office, I got to know Harper Evan Burch. Within the covers of the four unnumbered H.E.B.’s was the incomplete documentation of another life. My great-uncle looked beautiful in these photographs. In the most recent ones, he looked straight into the camera as if he knew this to be a fact. In total, the existence of these albums disproved my long-held beliefs that Baby Harper disliked being photographed, that until Cecil he was always alone when he wasn’t with us, and that he was uncomfortable in his own skin. As it turned out, my great-uncle Harper was uncomfortable only in his day-to-day clothes.

  As a young man—he looked to be around sixteen or seventeen in the earliest of these photographs—Baby Harper, wavy hair and pin-cushion lips, wore a light-colored suit, a button-down shirt, and a striped bow tie. I smiled when I saw him in such familiar attire, comforted by the fact that he had adopted his costume so early on. Baby Harper sat in a high-back chair, his legs crossed. On his feet was a pair of black high-heeled pumps, much too small for him. There was a visible bunching of flesh at the front of the shoes, and his bare heels hovered over the shiny back of theirs. His eyes were downcast, but his back was good-posture straight. The photographer had documented both the resolve of Baby Harper’s upper body and the exuberance of his lower half, one pointy toe aimed toward the camera and the other one up toward the ceiling.

  Baby Harper began with his feet because shoes were easy to slip in and out of, easy to find lying around the green-shuttered colonial that he shared then with Iris and Walter Wendell, and easy to kick underneath the bed if either of them walked into his bedroom without knocking. Perhaps for the same reasons, hats and gloves were the next items to appear in these photographs. The gloves Baby Harper was always careful to hold in one hand or lay over a knee, as their fabric would be sure to stretch and give him away.

  The first time the camera saw Baby Harper in a dress, he hadn’t discovered the importance of a bra or rather a well-stuffed one. The dress was probably Iris’s, which meant that the back zipper must have been left undone, as his sister was only a slender size six back then. The front of the dress, darted and generously cupped, was on Baby Harper’s body both taut and caved in. His lips, a straight line, showed his disappointment. There were two more photographs of Baby Harper in this same dress. Both were unintentionally arty, almost abstract expressionistic close-ups of where the hem of the garment met his bare legs. The dark plane of fabric against the pale skin clearly showed one thing. Baby Harper had taken the important step of shaving his legs. My great-uncle kept them shaved for the remainder of his life, which was why we never saw him in a pair of shorts. He probably shaved the hair on his forearms as well, which meant that his preference for long-sleeved shirts wasn’t a shroud of modesty but of necessity.

  I wished I had been there for him. I wanted to be the one behind the camera. Turn your head to the left, lift your chin, sit up a bit straighter, relax your shoulders, fix the right strap of your dress, deep breath, and now smile. Whoever said these words to Baby Harper never allowed his own face to be photographed, as if that person knew that one day he would run for public office and would want to win. Of course, Wee Willie came to mind first. But whomever the photographer was he eventually departed, and no one was left in the room but Baby Harper. By the second album, I could see in his right hand a cable release, with its long thin cord snaking out of the frame, signaling the presence of a tripod, silent and unhelpful. I was jealous all the same.

  As I leafed through the pages of these albums, Baby Harper transformed himself step by step into a woman, whose wardrobe borrowed less and less from Iris and mo
re from sources who were closer to him in dress and shoe size. His suppliers were probably the revolving roster of nameless “girls” who cooked and cleaned under the watchful eyes and sharp tongue of my grandmother Iris. These cooks were, of course, not girls, but black women in their forties and fifties. Their dresses bordered on the matronly despite my great-uncle’s efforts to add jaunty scarves and decorative brooches, and their shoes were sensibly heeled, made more for housework or churchgoing than for hosting a dinner party. Their wigs, however, became increasingly elaborate. Updos, cascading curls, Betty Boop bangs. My great-uncle, a natural blonde, was by then a raven-haired beauty.

  When he switched from black-and-white to color film (I wondered who had developed all these photographs for my great-uncle and whether he had charged him extra to keep his secret), Baby Harper’s makeup popped into the foreground. His use of eye shadows, monochromatic sweeps of pigment and glitter, reminded me of Kelly’s and my early experimentation with Ocean Lite. His lips were thankfully never Flamingo Paradise, as he gravitated toward more vibrant hues, maraschino-cherry and candy-apple reds.

  Like an artist, Baby Harper had his prolific periods and his fallow times. There seemed to have been many years during which he set his camera aside, no longer interested in the self-portrait. When he finally resumed, he did so as a woman who had discovered the transformative power of mail-order catalogs. His outfits, color-coordinated and secretarial, looked as if they were lifted right from the pages of the JCPenney catalogs that DeAnne had around the blue and gray ranch house in the mid-seventies, with their pages full of cowl-neck sweaters, A-line plaid skirts, and cork-soled wedges. Baby Harper, most likely in his fifties by then, also had a mane of honey-blond hair, layered with windblown curls. He looked like Farrah Fawcett’s older sister. He was finally coming into his own, perched comfortably at the edge of his green velvet divan, blue eyes shining, cable release still caught in his right hand.