Bitter in the Mouth (10 page)

I experienced something new that morning too. It was both pleasurable and uncomfortable. There was a sensation at the back of my head as if someone were holding his hands close to my hair but never quite touching. I turned around and Wade smiled at me. He had handed me a note as the school bus had pulled up to our stop that morning. This act alone told me that the orange sherbet boy was no longer the same. What the note said confirmed it. The piece of notebook paper, folded into a triangle, sat inside my purse until third period, when I went to the bathroom and into a stall to read it. “I missed you,” Wade had written.

Others in our eighth grade class had also time-traveled that summer. Some of the girls had even caught up with Sally Campbell. “Their bra sizes are now one half of their IQs,” Kelly wrote in letter #594. Their lips were shiny and their golden hair was curled on their shoulders just so. They wore their newfound beauty as a right, never doubting that they deserved the attention that went with it. These girls and Sally instantly formed a clique and immediately began to exclude and oppress. This act was as natural as breathing to them. As Kelly and I watched these girls, we thought about the fish that climbed out of the primordial pool all those eons ago and how they never looked back. During the first few hours of a very long school year, Kelly and I already understood that we were the fish still swimming in circles. I was wondering when I would develop a nice set of lungs. Kelly was thinking about how to call attention to hers.

Among the boys in our class, four of them had had growth spurts and were equal to Wade in height, but they had achieved it in awkward ways. They flailed their spindly arms and ropey legs like some deep-sea cephalopod. Their heads were too small and out of proportion with their newly extended bodies. None were beautiful. They acknowledged their deficiencies in body and in grace by becoming even better friends with Wade. They punched him in the arm and grabbed him by the shoulders because they wanted to touch him. They talked football, basketball, and baseball with him to feel the vicarious surge of adrenaline that some of them would later realize was a stand-in for sex and war. But at the age of thirteen, they were expected not only to watch but to play these organized games, and they acted out their enthusiasm with a mixture of hope and bravado. Subconsciously, most of them were looking forward to the time when their aging bodies could no longer act on these expectations. As with sex and war, they would prefer to watch. The pressure of performance and the imperative for victory could then be transferred onto other men. For now they had Wade to project their desires and fears upon. Nature had elected him their king. They weren’t equipped to dethrone him, and so they followed him. All of this took place on the first day of eighth grade. No wonder we were collectively tired and dazed on our bus ride home.

Travel also made Wade fearless. He grabbed my hand even before the bus had pulled away that afternoon.

“Did you
cannedgreenbeans
read
potatochips
it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So?”

I turned away and I ran.

Wade stood there and watched me. I knew because I had that feeling again, the hands almost touching the back of my hair.

I ran because I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to release all the pressure that had so suddenly built up in my limbs. I wanted to touch him, and if I had stayed I wouldn’t know how.

The next morning I told my father that I had menstrual cramps, and I asked him to drive me to school. He did so without saying a word and with a worried look in his eyes. He had an early meeting that morning so I was at school a half hour before everyone else, but I was glad to be there and not at the
SLOW CHILDREN
sign. Before we left the house, my father had asked DeAnne to pick me up after school. She did. I told the same lie for the rest of the week. I saw Wade in our classes, but there he wore his new crown and was surrounded by his knights and supplicants. In this realm, I was a serf. Kelly, of course, was worried and wrote expanded editions of the
Wade Daily News
so that I wouldn’t miss anything that happened. In letter #598, I told Kelly that all week long I felt like I had a toothache, except that it was in my entire body. That part was true.

The problem with a menstrual excuse was that it had a natural shelf life, viable for about five to seven days per month. To try to extend it beyond this would mean a visit to our family physician, Dr. Peterman. That following Monday I knew that I had to walk out of my front door and face the king. I was prepared. I had written Wade a note and handed it to him as soon I saw him that morning. The note was folded into a rhombus. He smiled without even reading it. He put it in the back pocket of his jeans, and then he told me the names of skateboarding tricks—Ollie, kickflip, Bert Slide—that he had been practicing all summer long. I told him that if I was a character in
The Lord of the Rings
I would be a hobbit, one of those who stayed at home in the Shire, unidentified by name or deeds but safe and warm.

When Wade unfolded the rhombus, it said, “I missed you too.”

The miracle of our courtship was that it was mutual, simultaneous, and had begun long before we were old enough to be self-aware.

That night I said goodbye to Dill. I opened up the pages of
To Kill a Mockingbird
and read again the sentences that made me adore him: “Summer was our best season: … it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” Our summer had ended. We parted company cordially. Dill said to me that “he would love me forever and not to worry, he would come get me and marry me as soon as he got enough money together, so please write.”

Inside my notebook I wrote,
L+W
. Then I erased it, knowing that it was better to use the name for Wade that I alone knew.

L+OSB
.

T
OUCH WAS A SENSE NOT EXPLORED OR CELEBRATED IN MY FAMILY
. That was why they favored big cars. Cadillac Eldorados, Chrysler LeBarons, Chevy Suburbans. All these models found their way into the garages of the blue and gray ranch house, the green-shuttered colonial, and the Greek Revival. These vehicles allowed the five of us to sit inside them without ever having to touch one another. Our thighs would never rub. Our shoulders would never press. We were buffered from one another by ample elbow and legroom. I believed that this desire to avoid touch was also behind their preference for long-sleeved shirts and modest clothing, their nonconsumption of alcohol, their disdain for dancing (except for Baby Harper, of course), their nondisplay of physical affection, and all the other particulars of our faith. Southern Baptists wanted to feel the Spirit and only the Spirit. A noncorporeal embrace was why we raised our arms up to the Lord every Sunday. I never saw my father kiss my mother. I never saw my mother kiss my grandmother. My grandmother’s lips were used only to purse. My great-uncle’s were used to whistle the greatest hits of Patsy Cline.

When we were eight, Kelly showed me how to blow a kiss. She said that she had seen her aunt, who was visiting from Rock Hill, South Carolina, do it. There were two steps. The kissing of my own palm was a revelation. My lips were warm. They were soft. They could exert pressure. But it was the blowing of the invisible kiss into the air that was magic. In fact, I remembered thinking that I would rather do
this
than pull a rabbit out of a hat or pull a coin from behind someone’s ear or saw a woman in half (how come men never get split in two?). Kelly and I had a good couple of weeks sending kisses to each other via the air until my mother told us that it was unnatural and to cease it. After DeAnne walked out of the room, Kelly and I shrugged our little shoulders. Kelly then asked if I wanted her to kiss me for real, so that I would know what it felt like. I shook my head no and ran away screaming. She ran after me screaming. We were full of joy, throwing kisses at each other and grabbing them from the air.

The orange sherbet boy’s lips didn’t taste like orange sherbet. I didn’t think that they would, but I had hoped. I was somewhat disappointed. As we waited out the last year of our shared conveyance, Wade, beautiful at thirteen, leaned over one morning and kissed me on the lips. “Pressed” was probably the more accurate verb. Yes, he pressed me. Seconds before, we were a boy and a girl standing next to each other. The distance between our bodies was out of habit and not out of a lack of curiosity. His movement was swift and unexpected. I remembered the smell of his clothes—his mom, like mine, must have used Tide—as the first of the atmospheric changes. The second was the instant warming of the air temperature as his breath came near. The third was that it became suddenly dark. As Wade pulled away, he said my name aloud for no one but himself. I opened my eyes, and we were a boy and a girl who had kissed. He had broken an invisible seal around our bodies. A thin covering of skin had peeled away from us, and we were new underneath and tender as a bruise. Seconds later, my grandmother Iris’s words came out of me swift and unexpected. “Don’t tell
brownsugar
any
rice
one
breadandbutterpickles
,” I said.

“Sure
cannedtuna,”
Wade replied, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s no
grapejelly
body’s
cannedmushrooms
business any
rice
way
cannedpears
.”

I didn’t say anything, letting him think that
that
was the reason.

Our minutes were up, and the school bus turned the corner onto Oak Street. Three stops later, Kelly climbed aboard, sat down beside me, taking up three quarters of the vinyl-covered seat, and squeezed my hand to say hello. I squeezed her hand in response. Our thighs rubbed. Our shoulders pressed. We were in the eighth grade and riding toward the end of our years of physical and emotional intimacy. Kelly would soon find that being touched by a boy reinforced the ameliorative and addictive feeling of being desired, a sensation that would be so new to her at the age of fourteen that she could have screamed with delight every time she felt it. She would Virginia Dare one boy after another to kiss her. She would Virginia Dare them to do other things with her too.

From the day that I had received the first of her letters, Kelly was my world. She was my link to such concepts as girlhood, friendship, and intimacy. I loved her more than I loved Wade. I didn’t want this boy to change the love that I had for my best friend. I knew that fact when Wade kissed me. I also knew that I would kiss him again, and that Kelly could never know. What this really meant was that I wasn’t sure that Kelly loved
me
more. I had seen her puffy hearts with the
K+W
inside of them, and there was doubt in mine.

Wade, for his own reasons, kept his promise. He never kissed me again at the bus stop. He waited till we were inside his house. His mother was rarely home, though she didn’t have a job. Wade and I were both blind to what these midafternoon absences could mean. When we walked into the faded-red-T-shirt house, we knew it was ours. We went to his bedroom, and he would shut the door, which had a lock. He would kiss me first. We would touch each other by way of exploration, not of land and river ways or the open seas but of space, the breathless frontier above our heads, of stars and planets, and the possibilities of flight. We were no longer children, but we were teenagers only in our age. When we touched each other, we felt on our skin the recent scars of skinned knees and scraped elbows. When Wade said that he had broken bones, he meant that he had broken bones. He didn’t mean disappointments, heartbreaks, or failures of the spirit. “Euphemism” was a word for a concept that neither one of us was familiar enough with to use.

I soon learned that “touch” was a word that described two types of sensations. To touch was to press down with the skin on my fingertips, the soft soles of my feet. To be touched was to feel the weight of another person on that same skin. My afternoons with the orange sherbet boy taught me that I was fond of both. Wade became silent when either was occurring. His eyes widened and he stared at me as if I would at any moment shatter or run away. Then, when I didn’t, he would reward me with that slow grin of his, the facial equivalent of our southern drawl.

The first time we lay down next to each other, Wade had that grin on his face. We lay on our backs, our hands clasped on top of our T-shirt-covered bellies. We stared up at the ceiling, plain and white (though I thought I saw stars) the way that the walls of his room had been before he covered them with posters of bands and one for an art exhibit that his mother had taken him to in Tampa. Glossy white paper with bold black text that read
T(R)AMPA(RT)
. Below the words were two outlines of a circle, like the number eight lying on its side. Wade told me that this was the hobo sign for “Don’t give up.” He said that he and his mom had gone to the “opening” at a gallery, and the artist was there too. The artist, a young man, didn’t look happy and was drinking a lot of the free wine, but all the people there tried to talk to him anyway. I wasn’t sure I understood why, but from the tone of Wade’s voice I knew that the artist had opened up his world. Then without pause or transition, Wade told me that last summer in Tampa he had kissed a girl.

Something in me froze. If I had to pinpoint what it was, I would say that it was my stomach. It was somewhere in that region, deep and large and vital. I should have asked Wade why he kissed her. Did she ask him to or did he volunteer? Instead, I asked a ridiculous question, one that was apparently hardwired into my female brain: What’s her name? I would find myself asking this question again at other moments in my life. The name of the kissed-girl, the I-had-coffee-with-girl, or the fucked-girl was beside the point. The point was that there was another girl.

Hardwired as well, Wade responded that it didn’t mean anything. He just wanted to see what it was like, you know, to kiss someone on the lips. My stomach relaxed, and I repeated the phrase again in my head.
It didn’t mean anything
. This was also beside the point. The point remained the same. There was another girl.

My first kiss was Wade’s second (or third or fourth). I stared up at the ceiling so white that it was hurting my eyes, making me tear up. Wade, without saying a word, reached for my hand and held it until I stopped. I should have asked him why he told me. I could have lived the rest of my life (or the rest of eighth grade) thinking that I was first, and what harm would that have done him or the kissed-girl, whatever her name was. But if I had asked Wade this question, his answer would have been “I don’t know why I told you.” It wouldn’t have been a lie because he really didn’t know.

In the past few months, we had triggered behaviors and responses within each other that we would recognize and repeat in the years to come. At the time, however, the behaviors and responses were new and puzzling. Often we felt as if we had someone else inside of us and that person did and said things that we hadn’t agreed to and failed to understand the motives for. In this instance, the person inside of Wade was setting up a rivalry between the kissed-girl in Tampa and me, the girl lying next to him on a cold February afternoon in Boiling Springs. The kissed-girl’s existence, now revealed, was a threat, a possibility, a likelihood that she could again be first. Her existence was useful to Wade, though he had only a vague idea why.

Wade and I spent the month of March taking off our clothes. Our sweaters, our T-shirts, our jeans, until a thin layer of cotton covered us from ourselves. We were no longer children, but we looked like children in our modest cotton underwear. His white briefs, my undershirt with a tiny yellow bow at the V-neckline, his socks with the three stripes, blue, red, blue, at the calves. We weren’t afraid of each other, but we were sometimes shy, lying there on top of his bedspread shivering but not cold. I continued to touch. His body was becoming familiar territory to me. His hip bones were sharp. His collar bones formed the edges of two small ponds. His face was as smooth as mine. I closed my eyes and pretended to be blind, seeing with my fingers and hands. So did he. He slipped his hands underneath my undershirt and felt for the circles of skin where my breasts would be. His palms brushed my nipples, and I said his name aloud because I wanted to taste it. He shivered in response.

“April showers bring May flowers” was the first line of poetry I ever learned. It had an internal rhyme. It was prophetic. It was hopeful. It was true. At the end of April, Wade told me that he and his mom were going back to Tampa for the summer. He didn’t even have to bring up the kissed-girl. She entered his bedroom and lay down in between us. I hated her, and I still didn’t know her name. Wade, as if coming out of a fog and seeing her there too, understood why he had told me about her. Wade then asked me to be his first.

“Please
lemonjuice
, Linda
mint,”
he said.

To this day those two words heard in combination will make me see Wade’s face. Teenage girls everywhere have seen that same expression of hope and desire. Simple as a teenage boy.

I wasn’t, but I felt that I was, special. Simple as a teenage girl.

Bobby walked into Wade’s bedroom. The winged monster put a forefinger to his lips, and went, Shhhh. Or he could have been imitating the hiss of a snake. He stood by the window and stared at me. Outside, big droplets of rain were bouncing off the roof of the faded-red-T-shirt house. Inside, Wade and I heard what sounded like a pan of hot oil sizzling and popping all around us. Wade held his breath and I held mine. The only one in the room taking in air was Bobby, and he didn’t even need it. The steadiness of Bobby’s chest going up and down, so assured and so patient, convinced me that Wade would know. Wade would know that he wasn’t first. I let out my breath and I lied.

“I’m not ready
orangejuice,”
I said to the orange sherbet boy.

“Oh,” he replied.