Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  “If you are lucky, you are born not once but many times.” My great-uncle wrote this on the front page of the last of the unmarked H.E.B.’s. The handwriting was his. The sentiment, I assumed, was his too, though I had never heard him say it. I decided that it was a prayer, one that for him had come true. Baby Harper was in love with Cecil. Baby Harper was engaged in foreign travel. Baby Harper had found a different South. The last album was devoted to all three. Cecil and Baby Harper sharing a park bench nestled in a garden of calla lilies. Cecil and Baby Harper sitting at a café table on a terrace overgrown with purple and red bougainvilleas. Cecil and Baby Harper standing in front of a sunset, fishing boats bobbing in the harbor behind them. They always held hands. They smiled into the camera, which adored them right back. The photographer was a stranger, a fellow traveler, or perhaps a native-born. Cecil had on what I assumed was the approved vacation-resort wear for funeral directors, a dark suit with a gray polo shirt. Baby Harper looked like an art history professor from a small liberal arts college east of the Mississippi. In his sixties, my great-uncle had graduated from blond tresses to a shoulder-grazing auburn bob. His dresses—black, dove gray, or beeswax ecru—were loose (to accommodate the weight that he had gained since being with Cecil) but tailored with architectural details. Flying buttress sleeves, quatrefoil buttons, dentil-molding hems. Baby Harper wore necklaces that were large and made a statement, mostly about which South American country he had traveled to most recently. Silver beads, birds and various animal totems rendered in clay and fired in blues and yellows, and bright, sturdy red seeds.

  My great-uncle sent me beautiful postcards of his travels. From Cartagena, he sent me the Iglesia de San Pedro Claver. From Santiago, the Mercado Central. From Montevideo, the Palacio Taranco. From Rio de Janeiro, the wide-open arms of a modernist Jesus. I never thought it unusual that Baby Harper, the family photographer, never once sent me a photograph that he had taken, whether alone or with Cecil. My great-uncle had trained my expectations, crafted for me what was normal, and answered all the questions that I never thought to ask him with plausible assumptions and givens. Most important, once these expectations were in place, he tried never to disappoint me. That was his definition of love.

  Baby Harper must have had doubt in his heart, though. He wanted me to live with these photographs first, he had written, as if his body could ever enter my home as a stranger and that we would grow more comfortable with each other only with time. Maybe he meant just the photographs of young Thomas in New York, but even those faces and those bodies, my great-uncle should have known, would be familiar to me, as he had always been to me.

  I’m coming home. I should have said this to my great-uncle Harper. I said it to DeAnne instead. It was a phone call that took place about six months later than she and I had expected. I hadn’t told her about Leo’s offer, my acceptance, and his rescission. I hadn’t told her about my cancer and my surgery. I hadn’t told her about being taken off the partnership track and shifted onto the “of counsel” one, the dumping ground for competent but undervalued senior attorneys. We think this is a better fit, the partnership committee had said to me. Their statement was vague but also to the point. The firm’s generous medical leave policy apparently had its limits. Or more likely, none of them—lawyers hate to be confronted with their own mortality because they know that most of them are going to Hell—wanted to hear the word “cancer” even if the word “survivor” was attached to it. I was a risky investment, they must have thought. Nor had I told her that I had asked the firm for another leave of absence, this time a mental health one, indefinite and unpaid. In other words, during the months since Cecil’s and my great-uncle’s passing, things had gone back to normal between DeAnne and me.

  I sent information that I wanted DeAnne to know via a conduit. Now that Baby Harper was gone, Kelly reluctantly took on that role for us. Kelly told DeAnne that I had been assigned to a case that was going to the U.S. Supreme Court and that the workload, while overwhelming and unrelenting, was helping me to deal with my great-uncle’s death. Kelly must have gotten that story line from an episode of Ally McBeal. It was a ridiculous lie but one that was plausible enough for DeAnne, who didn’t know—because I hadn’t told her—that I was a trademark lawyer and that never in my five years of practice had I seen the inside of a courthouse.

  Kelly, of course, knew everything. We had resumed our correspondence in earnest and, for me, out of necessity. Without the hourly cigarettes and the daily drinks, I was finding it a challenge again to manage the incomings. I wanted to hear Kelly’s voice on the telephone, but I couldn’t listen to it for very long. My relationship to the spoken word had regressed. I felt as I did in elementary and middle school. I retreated into the pages of books. I watched TV with the sound turned off. When I became lonely for the human voice, I found it in songs. I wrote long letters to my best friend. I wrote to her that I was coming home. Then I wrote that I was bringing Baby Harper and young Thomas back with me. I planned, among other things, to introduce them to DeAnne.

  I hadn’t been on a Greyhound bus since 1986, when Iris had her second heart attack. This time, Kelly had offered to fly up to New York City and drive with me back to Boiling Springs. I considered it, but I didn’t want her to travel all that way only to turn back and head southward again. I thought that I could use the sixteen-hour-and-forty-five-minute bus ride to organize my thoughts. I wanted to prepare myself. I thought that I could be lawyerly about my return home. Approach Boiling Springs as if I were preparing for a meeting with a client or an adversary. Marshal the few facts that I had, formulate my theories, draft my probative questions. In my shoulder bag, I packed a legal pad on which I planned to jot down my notes. In my years of practicing law, I had learned that for non-lawyers, a legal pad was an intimidating item. Its size or rather its unusual length was part of the scare tactic. Its color was talismanic as well. Yellow connoting jaundice. Or perhaps aging. Or the slow passage of time. That was precisely what I wanted to do. Slow down time. Bus travel was the best way I knew how. The frequent stops, the waiting for all the passengers to collect themselves from bathroom stalls, from fast food lines, and from the sirenlike glows of vending machines. I wanted the inefficiencies of traveling en masse and cheaply, of road-tripping with people who collectively had more time than money.

  The smells were the same, I thought, as I climbed aboard the bus at Port Authority. Once I settled into my seat and looked around me, I understood why. The passengers were the same. The teenagers who looked like runaways (because even in the August heat they had too many pieces of clothing on and none of the pieces were clean), the well-dressed elderly black women with shiny purses on their laps, the middle-aged white men with long hair, receding hairlines, and bellies pregnant with beer. The demographics of long-distance bus travel hadn’t changed, except that there were now men from Central and South America, in their twenties, thirties, and forties, who looked uniformly exhausted, as if they knew that every state of the union would be the same for them: New York or North Carolina, apples or tobacco, produce fields or slaughterhouses. Their migration was a peculiar form of travel. Peculiar in that it was travel that took them nowhere. Wherever they landed, it was exactly the same. (Immigration was migration fueled by faith that this wasn’t so.)

  I waited for my body to adjust. Soon the artificial pine scent that came from the onboard restroom would permeate the rest of the bus, eventually masking the stale sweat (men with receding hairlines), the rose-scented hand lotion (elderly women with purses), and the musty cigarettes and pot smoke embedded in denim (teenagers). Somewhere in that mix was also the lime and leather of aftershaves (migrant laborers on their days off). I knew that soon my nose would no longer be able to pick out these scents, their individuality coalescing into one, which my nose would then assimilate and take no notice of for the next sixteen hours, like an eye adjusting to the dark. It would be the last forty-five minutes of the journey that would be the most difficult to tolerate. The bathroom would h
ave been compromised by everyone on board, except for the most experienced riders, who knew how to time their intake of beverages to coincide with the scheduled stops. Then the shuffling of bodies waking from a cramped, light sleep would cause their individual scents to rise again and move up and down the aisle like anxious travelers.

  Hand lotion and aftershave would be reapplied. Some kid in the back of the bus would steal a puff or two from a cigarette that he couldn’t help but light up, though it was grounds for being thrown off the bus. No bus driver would give a shit with only forty-five minutes to go, the kid would think. He would be right. The bus driver would want to get to the destination even more than the passengers. He made this run three times a week. New York City to Gastonia (the closest Greyhound stop to Boiling Springs). Twenty hours and fifteen minutes, if there was a transfer, which there usually was. Or, the “express,” which was the one I was on, could shave more than four hours off that time, but usually didn’t because of the first rule of bus travel: Buses were always late. In light of all this, the bus driver would think, Who has time to throw some stupid kid off the bus? With only forty-five minutes to go, all the passengers would agree. With only forty-five minutes to go, I would pop another piece of gum into my mouth and fight the desire to join the kid with the cigarette at the back of the bus.

  I had thought about making the drive home on my own, but eight years of living in New York City without a car had made me unsure of my driving skills, especially for such a long trip. Also, Dr. Holloway, my OB/GYN, had warned me that my body was more exhausted from the surgery than I would think. Dr. Holloway’s waiting room played Gregorian chants and New Age music that mimicked whale songs. Instead of mints or hard candies, her receptionist’s desk offered a large glass canister of granola, which her patients scooped into paper cups, which they then recycled. I thought her use of “exhausted” was therefore less medical and more self-helpish in nature. At my one-month follow-up, Dr. Holloway said that the removal of any vital organs, and the ovaries, she leaned in and whispered, were of course very vital—my ovaries can’t hear you, doctor; they’re already gone, I almost said aloud—resulted in a trauma that the body could recover from, but afterward the body would continue to grieve for what had been taken from it.

  “Wow, your doctor sounds like she was high,” Kelly wrote in letter #1,301. Kelly and I made a joke of Dr. Holloway’s words, but I knew that we both were thinking about this idea of our bodies grieving. Kelly thought about the absence. I thought about the void. We both had just turned thirty, and we never had imagined our lives in quite this way. To be honest, we never had imagined anything about our thirties. What little girls would? Kelly had thought that by the end of high school she would be homecoming queen or at least one of the homecoming court. When she thought of college, it was only in tableaux vivants of sorority parties and UNC football games and boys who all looked like Wade. (He, like Jesus, remained our male archetype.) I imagined leaving Boiling Springs. After my father died, I imagined New Haven and New York City. I thought these cities would be like Heaven. I would see there all the people whom I had loved. I would see my father, who hadn’t died but, like Wade’s mom, had run away from home to find true love. I would see my great-uncle Harper because I would send him a first-class plane ticket and together we would set up house. I would see Kelly because she never lost her pregnancy weight and instead regained her beautiful, full-figured intelligence. Finally, I would see Wade. But this time, I would recognize the orange sherbet boy first because I would be the one who had changed completely. I used to think about Wade every day. All through college and in law school, I thought about him. Even after I met Leo, I thought about him. Now I thought about Wade only when I caught the cross-town bus or a Greyhound bus home.

  On the other side of the tinted glass window, a green sign with GASTONIA in white letters came into view. The word was rippling in the midmorning heat. I couldn’t remember whether Boiling Springs had its own exit sign off the highway, but it must have. It felt like the world routinely bypassed us, but I know that it really hadn’t. Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino came to Boiling Springs. The Wright brothers and Virginia Dare came to Boiling Springs. Dill and Boo Radley came to Boiling Springs. South American magnolias and JCPenney catalogs came to Boiling Springs. New cars from Detroit and plastic hair barrettes from Taiwan came to Boiling Springs. Flamingo Paradise and Ocean Lite came to Boiling Springs. Ersatz pizzas and all-you-can-eat salad bars came to Boiling Springs. De facto segregation and dead-end jobs came to Boiling Springs. Queers, Jews, Chinks, Japs, and Gooks came to Boiling Springs. On the whole, it was like any other American city, only smaller and duller and with less crime.

  Inside the bus, there was a collective sigh. For every passenger there was a different reason for his or her exhalation: lovelorn, forlorn, war-torn, relief, regret, remorse, resigned, steeled, staved, and staunched. All were released into the stale air, changing for a moment its chemistry, making its odors detectable again to those bodies, like mine, who had adapted and grown used to them. As a group, we might never arrive, but we would get there. The sign on the highway made it seem real, I thought.

  I looked down at the legal pad on my lap. There was yesterday’s date, August 3, 1988, on the first page, followed by a lot of writing, and only two questions at the end. I read them again. I asked myself, Is that all I want to know from DeAnne? I answered, Yes, that is all I want to know.

  ON MAY 25, 1910, THE BISHOP MILTON WRIGHT FLEW. “HIGHER, Orville, higher!” he ordered his youngest son in an excited voice that made the bishop an eight-year-old boy again and not the eighty-two-year-old man that he was. Orville already had taken them 350 feet in the air. Together, father and son flew for seven minutes. Below them, the bishop’s elder son, Wilbur, stood at the edge of Huffman Prairie, among the grazing cows that had been pushed to one side of the pasture for the occasion. Ohio has too many cows, Wilbur thought. Maybe this was why he and Orville had to invent their flying machine. It was their antidote to a life among these lumbering beasts, heavy with milk and steaks. Ohio always made Wilbur feel this way. Dayton, especially, made Wilbur morose. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had made him immortal. Le Mans, France, had made him beloved. Why must a man travel so far from his home to feel these ways? Wilbur wanted to know. The cows offered him no insight.

  “God could have heard him. He was screaming so loudly!” Orville told Wilbur afterward. Orville was still breathless. Their father was already on his way home for a much needed nap. Wilbur nodded his head because he had nothing that he wanted to say aloud. We didn’t even flip a coin, Wilbur thought. I’m the elder son. Why didn’t he trust me? Wilbur wanted to know. Orville stood there smiling broadly, sunlight filtering through his dark hair. Wilbur resented his younger brother for this too. Wilbur’s own full head of hair was by then only a memory. The tips of Orville’s mustache were still perfectly waxed, Wilbur also noted. Dashing bastard, Wilbur thought, and was then remorseful. Wilbur patted his little brother on the back, and together they walked away from their flying machine.

  Of the two brothers, Wilbur was the first to die. He was forty-five years old, and death came to him in the form of typhoid fever. He had traveled to Boston and brought it back with him to Dayton. Boston, Massachusetts, would make him mortal. He suffered all the known symptoms: fatigue, muscle aches, and diarrhea. As Wilbur lay on his deathbed, he could feel every inch of his body as if he had been scrubbed raw with a bath brush. The few hairs that he had left on his head he felt acutely as well, as if someone had just inserted them one by one into his scalp with a needle and thread. For once, he was glad to be balding. He sincerely hoped that Orville would be spared such pain.

  Edith was by his side, the Sarthe River far below them. So was everyone else in the town of Le Mans and in all of France, or so it seemed. Edith smiled at him and clutched on to his right thigh even tighter than before. Her husband would never know, she thought. He was in Le Mans looking up at them. I’m making you famous, Wilbur heard himself saying
to Edith. He knew that this wasn’t a fanciful boast. He wasn’t a prideful man. He was stating a fact. Edith Berg, as he had claimed, would be written into the history books as the first American woman to be a passenger on a flying machine. Edith took her eyes off the ground and looked again into Wilbur’s startling blues. She was thinking about making another kind of flight with him. His voice sounded so strong, confident, and convinced. That was when Wilbur knew that he had been hallucinating. The fever was taking him away.

  By the age of fourteen, I had figured out that I was neither a Chink nor a Jap. In my ninth grade history book, I read the following sentence: “Nguyen Van Thieu was the president of South Vietnam from September 3, 1967, to April 21, 1975.” For a split second, I thought the president’s name was a typographical error, perhaps a missing vowel or an extra consonant tucked into a Dutch name. Then I recognized it as “the unpronounceable part” of my name (that was what Kelly called it). I had never seen “Nguyen” printed in a book before. So while it belonged to me, I didn’t recognize it. My full name had been carefully written at the top of my report cards from the second through the eighth grade in the perfect flowing penmanship of my teachers, so I had known from the start that “Linh-Dao Nguyen” was a part of me as much as the “Hammerick” was.

  In the other four paragraphs about Vietnam in my history book, I learned that the war was still in progress in 1968, the year of my birth, and that it ended for the Vietnamese in 1975, the year of my second birth at the blue and gray ranch house. I filed these facts away. They were connected to me, but I wasn’t connected to them. This pattern would repeat itself as I learned more about Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, the Tet Offensive, the fall of Saigon. I filed these facts away too. All that I learned about Vietnam had to do with war and death and dying. At the time, I had no body, which meant that I was impervious and had no use for such information. If I were my great-uncle Harper, I would have named the file “Not Applicable.”