Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  The question came from a place so deep within me that I hadn’t anticipated its formation. I was taken by surprise, but Kelly wasn’t. She kept on driving, hands at ten and two. Her response came slowly but fully formed, as if she had been thinking about it for a long time.

  When my grandmother had her third heart attack in February of ’87, Kelly was already back in Boiling Springs and enrolled at Gardner-Webb. During that week in between Iris’s passing and her funeral, when we were all waiting for magnolias in the freezing cold, I didn’t see or hear from Kelly. At Iris’s funeral, I saw Kelly’s mother, Beth Anne, and her father, Carson junior, but I didn’t see her. I returned to New Haven, and after several months of not writing I sent Kelly a letter with the newspaper clipping of me smoking in front of Sterling Memorial Library. I never brought up my best friend’s absence, nor did she.

  Kelly made the correct turns now. The kudzu-covered trees and telephone polls were becoming a blur. We were finally heading with intention and speed into Boiling Springs. By the time that we pulled into the driveway of the Greek Revival, Kelly told me that she had been ashamed.

  “Ashamedcannedchickennoodlesoup? Of whatgrahamcracker?” I asked. “Youcannedgreenbeans meanraisin of Lukegreenbeancasserole?”

  “Nograpejelly,” Kelly replied, shaking her head. “Lukegreenbeancasserole says higreenLifesavers, by the waycannedpears—”

  “Youcannedgreenbeans two have been in touchcannedvegetablesoup?” I blurted out, interrupting her.

  “I was goboiledcarrotsing to tellbrownsugar youcannedgreenbeans but—” Kelly began.

  “Jesusfriedchicken, Kellycannedpeaches!” I said, interrupting her again. “Whatgrahamcracker the hell have youcannedgreenbeans told me? What fucklimesherbeting else hasn’t been in your letters?”

  “Don’t get angryjellydoughnut with me, Lindamint. Youcannedgreenbeans knowgrapejelly that when your grandpotatosaladmother passed awaycannedpears, everyRitzcrackerthingtomato was alreadyorangejuice so differentListerine for me. Are youcannedgreenbeans readyorangejuice to goboiledcarrots in now?” Kelly asked.

  “Nograpejelly,” I replied.

  “All rightFrenchfries,” Kelly said. “It’s cooler in herehardboiledegg than in the housefreshpeaches anyricewaycannedpears. I can’t believe your greatcannedtomatosoup-uncledates neverbubblegum installed anyrice air-con—”

  “Tellbrownsugar me why youcannedgreenbeans were ashamedcannedchickennoodlesoup, Kellycannedpeaches. I just don’t understandeggnoodles,” I said.

  “Lindamint, youcannedgreenbeans may have forTriscuitgotten this, but youcannedgreenbeans had gone off to Yaleavocado. I was stuck at Gardner-Webbcannedfruitcocktail. Do youcannedgreenbeans rememberbutterpecanicecream whatgrahamcracker we used to call it? The IntellectualBLT Pimplehoneydewmelon of the Carolinascannedpeas,” Kelly replied.

  “We did not!”

  “We did, Lindamint.”

  “Jesusfriedchicken—”

  “Yeah, well, I’m prettygrilledcheesesandwich surecannedtuna Jesusfriedchicken wouldcandiedapple call it that too,” Kelly said, followed by a familiar sound, a spastic little intake of air.

  This time I knew. Baby Harper was there, welcoming me home, mind over body.

  We stepped inside the Greek Revival and were met by the smells of witch hazel, burned coffee, and lemon Pledge in the air. Or more likely, these smells were in the upholstery and the curtains. Baby Harper had lived in this house since he was thirty years old. Back then, young men of his age had wives and children and a mortgage. But before moving to the Greek Revival, Baby Harper was living in the green-shuttered colonial, the house where he had been born. His sister, Iris, and his brother-in-law, Walter Wendell, weren’t really sad to see him go, seeing how he was just going down the street from them. His niece, DeAnne, probably counted the days, on her fingers and toes, till his departure. When Baby Harper moved into the Greek Revival, he had his cameras, his photo albums, his books, his records, his record player, his clothes, his wigs, and a set of pots and pans that Iris had given him for his thirtieth birthday. He lived in the Greek Revival without furniture until he acquired the pieces one by one with the help of the classified ads in the Shelby Star. The first piece of furniture that he purchased was a divan, which doubled as his bed for a while. The divan was covered in a faded peach-colored damask, which Baby Harper said looked like the color of sadness itself. He replaced the damask with a rich green velvet and began to build a life around it. He was living alone or as a “confirmed bachelor,” as men like him were known back then. He told himself that he wasn’t afraid of such words. He put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” on the record player, and he danced until sweat rolled down the side of his face. That was in 1954, when he had no idea what the rest of his life would have in store for him.

  “Dogrits youcannedgreenbeans wantsaltedbutter to see it?” Kelly asked, her body already headed upstairs toward Baby Harper and Cecil’s bedroom.

  Ever since Kelly wrote to me about it, I had wanted to see Cecil and Baby Harper’s bedroom with my own eyes. When I was growing up, I never thought to see it. Why would I? It was only where my great-uncle slept at night. I didn’t know that his bedroom was an Easter egg, a Fabergé egg, the yolk of an egg, the surprise center of this dear man.

  “Has DeAnnecannedcranberrysauce seen it?” I asked.

  “Nograpejelly.”

  “Reallypopcorn?”

  “Reallypopcorn. She comesapplebutter over herehardboiledegg everyRitzcracker week, but only for a cupmacaroniandcheese of coffee and to bring me a casserolepoundcake—”

  “Reallypopcorn?” I asked, amused by Kelly’s weekly exposure to the curse of my childhood.

  “Reallypopcorn.”

  “I’m so sorryglazeddoughnut, Kellycannedpeaches,” I said, laughing out loud.

  “Me too,” she replied. “I keepHardee’shamburger tellbrownsugaring your momchocolatemilk that I’m a vegetariangarlic, but she keepsHardee’shamburger on bringing over this stuffpigsinablanket that tastes like beef.”

  “Beefy macaronilemonmeringuepie?” I asked.

  “Oh, my Godwalnut, yes! Beefy macaronilemonmeringuepie.”

  We were both laughing so hard by now that Kelly was making snorting noises and I was tearing up.

  As so many of my letters to Kelly had been devoted to the terrible things that DeAnne did to food in our kitchen, Kelly had done everything that she could to avoid DeAnne’s cooking. Our sleepovers at the blue and gray ranch house always began after the dinner hour. Our sleepovers at the Powells’ red brick house, on the other hand, always began precisely at the dinner hour. For all of her shortcomings as a mother, Beth Anne Powell was very respectable in the kitchen, as was evident by the size of her husband and her daughter (before the age of fourteen). Because the food at their dinner table didn’t repulse or bore them, the Powells had the habit of lingering over their evening meals. The Powells ate a lot, and they ate it slowly. They weren’t messy, crumbs-falling-from-their-mouths kind of people. Most of the time, like my family, they didn’t talk. There was only a steady chewing, and sometimes Carson junior would let out what sounded a lot like a moan. He was a man who enjoyed what was happening in his mouth. When I first ate dinner over at the Powells’, I was embarrassed for Kelly’s father for these noises that came rolling out of his mouth whenever he would open it up to fork in more food. Then I understood that these noises meant that he was happy.

  “Your momchocolatemilk thinks that she’s imposingpepperoni by having me stay herehardboiledegg,” Kelly continued. “I’ve told her that the rent on my placeroastturkey is cheapapricotnectar, and the rent herehardboiledegg is, you knowgrapejelly, freeChipsAhoy!cookie. But she keepsHardee’shamburger on bringing over the casserolespoundcake anyricewaycannedpears. To thank me, I think. And, like I’ve said, she usually has some coffee and then she goes. She reallypopcorn hasn’t shown anyrice interest in seeing the restTwinkie of the housefreshpeaches.”

  Curiosity has never been a strong suit of DeAnne’s, I t
hought, and then decided not to say it aloud. Because making fun of DeAnne’s cooking was one thing, but making fun of her intellect seemed to me suddenly cruel.

  Standing there in the entryway of my great-uncle’s house, a staircase away from his and Cecil’s bedroom, I had another revelation. Their bedroom was a bedroom, just a part of their day-to-day life together. It was a museum now. It could wait.

  “Kellycannedpeaches, could youcannedgreenbeans drivecannedbakedbeans me homePepsi now?” I asked.

  GEORGE MOSES WAS ALREADY KNOWN IN CHAPEL HILL FOR HIS poems when Professor Ma’am, as George Moses called her, taught him how to read and write. She thought it only right that someone teach the alphabet to the slave-poet so that he could write his poems down for himself. She began their lessons with the Bible, but it soon became clear to her that George Moses already knew the Book of Genesis by heart. She turned next to the secular Genesis of America: the Declaration of Independence. George Moses thought that this document had a lot of good ideas in it. Professor Ma’am explained to him that the ideas were, in fact, the ideals of their country. George Moses thought Professor Ma’am was addled or perhaps just a wishful thinker. That night, though, George Moses cried himself to sleep, thinking about the beautiful words that Professor Ma’am had read to him. At their next lesson, she showed George Moses a book about the history of this Declaration. She read, pointing to each word so that he could follow along, about the signers of the Declaration and about its first public reading in the city of Philadelphia on July 8, 1776, when a great bell had rung out beforehand. George Moses didn’t know it, but he would see this bell for himself.

  One day Professor Ma’am showed George Moses a publication entitled Liberty. Its frontispiece featured an illustration of the bell, which had by then become a symbol for another kind of freedom. George Moses said those three words aloud and recognized in them the beginning of a poem. Professor Ma’am then announced to the slave-poet that she, along with like-minded folks in Chapel Hill, were going to buy him his freedom and send him to a free state to live. They would do it by publishing his poems in a book, the proceeds of which surely would be enough to satisfy his master’s asking price. George Moses kept silent as his benefactress detailed the plan that, if successful, would separate him from everyone whom he had ever loved. His mother. His brother. His sisters. George Moses’s heart was heavy with grief and desire.

  George Moses’s book, The Hope of Liberty, was published and sold. When all the funds were collected, the amount wasn’t enough for George Moses’s master. James Horton wasn’t a greedy man. He was a spiteful man. Spite, George Moses should have known, was worth more to those who possessed it than any amount of money. Professor Ma’am, who didn’t know such things about the world, cried when she told the slave-poet that his master had refused to sell him even though the governor of North Carolina himself had spoken on George Moses’s behalf. George Moses thought that this was the end of the story, that he would die as he had lived, a slave in the slave state of North Carolina.

  War changed everything.

  Fates fell on the battlefield. Masters became men again. Property became men and women and children again too.

  George Moses, a sixty-nine-year-old poet, packed what he had, which was a couple of books and a wool suit for the colder clime, and headed for Philadelphia, where the Liberty Bell had rung for him at last. He waved goodbye to his loved ones in Chapel Hill and said, “Come and visit me!”

  And they did.

  I met DeAnne Whatley Hammerick for the first time when she was sixty-six years old. I knocked on the front door of the house where I grew up, and she answered it. She had lived there all along, and now she lived there all alone. She had had ash-blond hair, so it was difficult for me to tell, especially in the strong light of the afternoon sun, that her hair had turned completely white. She wore it short, which made her look a bit like the British actress Judi Dench. She had on a pink and white gingham shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and white slip-on tennis shoes. From head to toe, she appeared to be what she was, an upper-middle-class white woman, comfortable and at home.

  You’re here early, Linda! Come on in. You’re letting all the cold air out. That was what DeAnne would have said to me.

  You’re here early, Linda! Come on in. We’re letting all the cold air out. That was what the woman who answered the door of the blue and gray ranch house said to me.

  The first difference was in the pronoun used. “We” never existed between DeAnne and me. She avoided it as assiduously as she avoided the word “mom.” She called me “Linda,” and “you”; once, when I was fifteen and had just dyed all my clothes black, she called me “your daughter.” My father slowly said these two words back to her to remind her that she had signed the adoption papers as well. The second difference was the intonation. DeAnne’s would have been surprised followed by accusatory. This woman’s tone was surprised followed by a touch of humor. The third difference was in her eyes. DeAnne’s were blue glass. This woman’s eyes were like Iris’s in the years before she passed away, fog rolling over a lake. The fourth difference was that DeAnne would have smelled of cigarettes. This woman had the scent of someone familiar to me. It was witch hazel. My great-uncle was here too, I thought.

  I pulled my suitcase into the hallway. The table with the three spindly legs was still there, on it a stack of incoming mail awaiting attention. To my left was the dining room table, where our family had so suddenly stopped eating our dinners together, and the sideboard, where the store-bought cakes and pies had sat in their paper boxes. To my right was the living room couch, where Baby Harper and Iris had sat when we first met, and the easy chair, where my father had watched the evening news. The curtains, the carpeting, the paint on the walls, the bones and skins of the house were all the same. It was possible that I had missed this house more than the one occupant who remained. I knew the house better.

  DeAnne Whatley Hammerick and I got to know each other the same way that any two strangers who meet in a foreign city would have. We asked each other questions and we answered them. We did so slowly and methodically and with a sense of purpose because we understood, without having to say so, that when we parted company we wouldn’t see each other again for a very long time.

  We began in front of the TV. I played for DeAnne Whatley Hammerick the tape of the PBS program about synesthesia. I asked her to pay special attention to Mr. Roland. I knew that we had to begin there in order to set the pacing of our conversations to come. Otherwise, how would she understand the hourly breaks that I would need or the days of silence that would interrupt us and sequester me inside my bedroom?

  Long after I had gone to bed that night, DeAnne Whatley Hammerick stayed up. I found her asleep the next morning in the easy chair. I made some coffee for us, and then I woke her. She said that she had watched the program four times. I nodded my head to acknowledge that fact. I had no idea what that fact would mean for us. Then she asked me whether it hurt. I explained again to her that I didn’t experience shapes and textures the way that Mrs. Ostorp did. DeAnne Whatley Hammerick shook her head and said that wasn’t what she was asking me. What she wanted to know was how much did it hurt me not to be believed.

  DeAnne Whatley Hammerick told me that when she was a young girl she tried to tell her mother about these little pieces of paper with writing on them that she found in her bed. Every morning, she would find a new one. Every morning, she would try to show it to Iris, but by the time that she got her young mother’s attention the note would have disintegrated into a ball of pulp. Iris then would scold her for being unkempt and scrub her tiny hands clean of their bits of paper and ink stains.

  We sat at the kitchen table staring into our cups of coffee. Outside, Boiling Springs was about to earn its name, as it did on most August days. We felt the heat and the humidity pushing themselves into the house, past the windows and the doors, as strong and blustery as any winter storm. We felt lucky to be inside. We looked forward to September, when the outside temperature
and the inside one would begin to switch places. We would embrace the warm air then and beckon it to our sides, pushing the cold drafts out into the open.

  This was how we began all our mornings together. I would wake up first and make us a pot of coffee. DeAnne Whatley Hammerick would join me in the kitchen and make us a breakfast that involved no cooking. Bowls of milk and cereal, tubs of yogurt, halves of a grapefruit. Then we would begin to talk. At first, her words were tentative and shy. She tried to use the fewest possible words to convey her thoughts. She was conscious of how she had only partial control over their effect on me. She was self-aware and self-editing almost to the point of silence.

  I reminded her that I had lived with my condition for as long as I could remember, and what that meant was I knew when to say when. (It was like knowing when to close my eyes at the scariest moments in a movie or when to walk away from the all-you-can-eat buffet.) I tried to assuage her concerns by sharing with her words with incomings that I adored and craved. I told her “mom” tasted of chocolate milk. DeAnne, when she had heard this fact, had told me to hush my mouth. DeAnne Whatley Hammerick looked at me and asked low-fat or whole.

  We missed Baby Harper. He was our next topic of discussion. She said that she had started using witch hazel as a toner on her face every morning so that the scent of him would be in the house still. I told her I thought it was a good idea, and I started doing the same, which made his presence seem even stronger in the recirculated air of the air-conditioned house. We knew that we wanted to give him a memorial service and that he wouldn’t mind that it was many months late. I told her about his filing system and about the folder labeled “The End,” which we would need to consult to make the arrangements. Of course, we would use the Cecil T. Brandon Home of Eternal Rest. The new owners, Clay and Gregory, when they first moved to Shelby, had stopped by the blue and gray ranch house to pay their respects. Clay looked exactly like a younger version of his uncle Cecil, so much so that DeAnne Whatley Hammerick said that she screamed when she opened the front door. Gregory ran toward their car, which was parked on the street in front of the house. Clay just stood there, calm as clover, because this had happened to him before. Folks in the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area were so taken by the family resemblance that some even joked that Mister T didn’t pass away—he just went to South America and came back with a facelift. DeAnne Whatley Hammerick let out a quick, sharp laugh after she told me this. Kelly at the age of thirteen and smart girls everywhere would have recognized this woman as one of their own. DeAnne wouldn’t have found that joke the least bit amusing. For a second, I wasn’t sure that I found the joke amusing either. Then I laughed out loud.