Bitter in the Mouth (12 page)

We pulled into the Bridges parking lot. I saw my great-uncle’s car parked by the front doors. He was fond of saying that he and Bridges were meant to be because he always got the best parking space there, never fail. He was the first person I knew who thought that available parking was a way to divine one’s fate. He wouldn’t be the last. Parking spaces, tea leaves, playing cards, the lines on our palms. We all want a way to know where we should be in the world.

Before my mom got out of the car, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror and she fixed her perfect hair.

I never loved DeAnne the way I loved my father. His entrance into a room comforted me. I trusted that he would protect me from the animal noises in the night, the common cold, the deep end of the pool. He wasn’t a physically demonstrative father—his favored gesture of affection was rubbing the top of my head and gently tousling my hair—but I didn’t need him to be that. I only needed him to be physically near.

Girls without their fathers were also at risk. I didn’t learn this from the fairy tales of my youth, because in those stories the fathers were present in the castles and in the cottages. The fairy-tale fathers, however, were unforgivably weak and always thinking with their groins. These men would rather sacrifice their daughters than risk harm to themselves. Rapunzel’s father loved her mother so much that he stole for the woman. When he was caught, he was a coward, and instead of paying with his own life he promised away their unborn child. Gretel was very much alive, as was her brother, Hansel, when their father tried to do away with them. Three times he tried. (“Abandonment in the forest” was a bloodless euphemism for attempted murder.) Of course, there was Beauty. Was she not the poster child for daughters of men who dodged their responsibilities and used their female offspring as human shields?

Fairy-tale fathers were also criminally negligent. Where was Cinderella’s father when she was being verbally abused and physically demeaned by her stepmother and stepsisters? Perhaps he was so besotted, his wits so dulled by his nightly copulation with his new wife, that he failed to notice the degraded condition of his daughter. Snow White’s father, a king no less, was equally negligent and plainly without any power within his own domestic realm. Under his very roof, his new wife plotted the murder of his child, coerced one of his own huntsmen to carry out the deed, then ate what she thought was the girl’s heart. This king was no king. He was a fool who left his daughter woefully unprotected.

When I first heard these stories, I assigned to these men no blame because they wore the solemn and adored mantle of “father.” I understood them to be, like my own father, men who went to work every day, who returned home exhausted and taciturn, and who fell asleep in their easy chairs while reading the newspaper. I assumed that they, like my father, would have protected their daughters if only they had known of the dangers their girls faced during those dark hours after school and before dinner.

Under my father’s own roof, his wife hired a predator, lusted after him, trusted him to be alone with her daughter, and when the evidence of the predator’s crime emerged, sought solace and explanation in the body of the victim. Menstrual blood was normal, a byproduct of a girl’s body coming of age. Buy the girl a box of protection and a purse to hide it in. Blood from the torn hymen of an eleven-year-old would have been a crime, the subject of tragedies from the time of the ancient Greeks to the American South. Wash clean the undergarments with Tide and rest assured that there will be no stain.

When I had questions about our family, my great-uncle Harper had the answers. He had the evidence that we existed. He would pull out the appropriate H.E.B.’s and the stories would begin. I remembered asking him why my father had married DeAnne. I was fifteen years old at the time, and what I really wanted to know was why DeAnne’s heart hadn’t been smashed to bits like mine. My great-uncle didn’t know about Wade and me. He did know that my first year of high school hadn’t been my finest or happiest. Baby Harper, by way of a greeting, had taken to asking me, “Where’s the funeral today, Vista Girl?”

His sister may have been the one named Iris, but my great-uncle was the seer in the family. I had been in mourning for most of the school year. Kelly. Wade. All those damn fireflies. Now that the summer—dull, restorative, and hopefully transformative—was finally here, I decided that I might as well make my grief public.

Finding black clothing in the young-miss section at Hudson’s department store was impossible. It was always Easter Sunday in the South. Peach-blossom pink, forsythia yellow, spearmint green were always in style and readily available. So instead, I bought a box of black Rit dye and threw every item of clothing I owned into the washing machine. With one rinse cycle, I became a widow. My father thought it was a catastrophic laundry mistake and asked me if I needed money to buy some new clothes. I told him that black was my favorite color.

With his usual unflappability, my father said, “Dear
fishsticks
Heart, I thought that fire
sweetenedcondensedmilk
was your favorite
HawaiianPunch
color.”

I knew what he meant, and I couldn’t help but smile. I was pleased that my father had remembered the first question that Kelly had ever sent to me and the answer that I had given. DeAnne didn’t have a clue of what her husband meant and asked him, “What on earth are you talking about, Thomas?”

DeAnne then stared at me, and I stared back at her.

When my father employed sarcasm, which was 84 percent of the time, a known hazard of the legal profession, he called me “Dear Heart.” When I first heard that term of endearment, I thought my father was saying “deer” heart. I had just read the legend of Virginia Dare, and the image that came into my eight-year-old head was that of a dying animal with its heart split in half. Homonyms always had the same incomings. So whether it was “dear” or “deer,” I experienced the same taste: fish sticks, complete with the metallic aftertaste of freezer burn. “Heart” had no incoming. Maybe my father did mean “Deer Heart.” Now that he is gone, everything about him has become so unclear to me. Not like an image that has been smudged or blurred. But one that may have never existed.

That summer when I was fifteen, the question I had wasn’t whether my father loved DeAnne but
why
he loved her. That was when Baby Harper told me about DeAnne being born thirty-five years old. I laughed until he showed me proof. We looked at photographs of her as a baby, and she looked like all other babies. In other words, DeAnne looked like an old man. Then, at about the age of four, DeAnne Whatley began to resemble a female dwarf, approximately thirty-five years of age. Baby Harper pointed out that it had little to do with her face but, rather, it was the way that she carried her little body, the set of her shoulders, the bend of her neck, and the slight hunching of her upper body, as if someone had just pushed her into a corner. We looked at these photographs of her as a young child, and we marveled at how her blond curls, her pinafores, her Mary Janes all had lost their ability to connote youth. On her, these Shirley Temple affectations were inappropriate and verging on the grotesque. When DeAnne was sixteen, she looked like Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce
, a curtain of bangs drawn tightly shut across her forehead, the rest of her hair pulled back into bundles of curls on either side of the nape of her neck. That look actually suited DeAnne. Baby Harper pointed out that
Mildred Pierce
had come out in 1945, and these photographs of DeAnne were taken in 1948. A lag time of three years was what he wanted to impress upon me, and that DeAnne, even back then, wasn’t “oh current.” In her mid-twenties when she began dating Thomas, she tried out Audrey Hepburn’s look in
Funny Face
, but the wispy bangs and the loose ponytail—so fresh and insouciant on Audrey—made DeAnne look like she was wearing a wig. This was the DeAnne whom Thomas met when he first went to dinner at the green-shuttered colonial.

“Linda Vista, you’re trying to understand what Thomas
could
have seen in DeAnne,” Baby Harper said. “The answer is more obvious than that, Vista Girl. You should look at these courting-days photographs and see what is there. An age-appropriate female, blond, medium build, all limbs present and accounted for,
and
she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Linda Vista, that’s all you need to know,” he concluded, closing the cover of H.E.B. Twenty.

My great-uncle didn’t hiccup after he said this, but I was certain he was joking. At the age of fifteen, I couldn’t imagine that the decision to marry someone could be based on such shallow things. I opened up H.E.B. Twenty again, and I looked at my father and DeAnne’s wedding photographs. On December 10, 1960, the day she became DeAnne Hammerick, she was au courant, wearing her hair in a First Lady–Elect Jacqueline Kennedy bouffant. The top of DeAnne’s head looked like a day-old balloon, soft and about to deflate. She should have stuck with the Mildred Pierce. According to Baby Harper’s photographs, DeAnne didn’t smile once on her wedding day. She looked straight at the camera, and her expression was one of concentration, as if she were trying to stay awake or walk a very thin line. Standing beside her, Thomas wasn’t wearing the thick, black-framed eyeglasses that he soon would wear until the day he died.

My great-uncle Harper didn’t have to point it out to me. Not in one of these photographs was DeAnne looking at Thomas. Their gold bands, her grandmother’s silverware, a complete set of new china, including a soup tureen, a cut-glass punch bowl encircled by matching cups, and a church full of people were all present and accounted for. She had them and Thomas by her side. This man wasn’t going anywhere, was what she must have thought.

“Doesn’t Thomas look handsome in his tuxedo?” Baby Harper asked. “He and DeAnne were both twenty-eight. Well, he was twenty-eight. DeAnne was her usual age of thirty-five. Miss Vista, you know what the saddest thing about that day was? Your grandma Iris looked more beautiful than DeAnne. It wasn’t right. I told Iris to let DeAnne have her day. To try to wear something, you know, matronly. Iris couldn’t and wouldn’t do it. Iris wore a pale pink gown and looked like a June bride at her daughter’s December wedding. Iris could never be kind to that girl. Now you know what they say, Linda Vista. Beautiful women never love their daughters. Either too pretty and competition or too ugly and an embarrassment. Now, I don’t know about that. Most things attributed to what ‘they say’ are usually wrongheaded. But this one, I must say, Linda Vista, there seems to be some truth in it.”

I continued to flip through the pages of the H.E.B., hoping to find something else, something that was definitive, surprising, or exceptional about this man and this woman. I asked Baby Harper where they honeymooned. Moss Lake, he replied. Moss Lake, I repeated. That’s not a honeymoon; that’s a day trip. My great-uncle knew that was what I was thinking, and he nodded his head in agreement. Then he got up from the divan and went into the kitchen. I knew he would return with two glasses of iced sweet tea garnished with fresh mint sprigs that grew by the back door of his house. It was as if he knew, and those aromatic leaves, tucked among the ice cubes, were a coy reference. But my great-uncle, the singing-talker, never knew the taste of my name. I never told him because my secret sense wasn’t an issue when I was with him. As he would say, I was right as rain when I was with him. When we were together, he was right as rain too. That was a better definition of happiness.

M
EMORY IS A CURSE
. I
WASN’T THE FIRST TO SAY THIS, BUT
I
WAS
proof of it. My memory was sharp. A thorn, a broken water glass, a jellyfish in a wave that crashed into me and reached back for more. My secret sense, which I have come to understand as my condition, gave me a way to encode information that was immediate and long-lasting, an inborn mnemonic device.

The ancient Greeks had a mnemonic device that called for thinking of a path, say through the streets of a familiar city, and depositing along the way the information that they wished to retain. At the corner of the Street of Wine Merchants, they would place fact number one; continuing ahead twenty paces to the Fountain of Bacchus, they would place fact number two; turning right onto the Street of Pleasure Houses by the front door of the Pavilion of Virgins (the name was ironic because even back then virgins were rare and mythical beings), they would place facts number three through ten (because it was there among the rare and mythical beings that they wanted to linger); and in that way their journey would continue on. To retrace this path in their mind was to gather up the facts again, easy and showy as red roadside poppies.

My own mnemonic device worked in similar fashion, but instead of a path there was a multicourse meal prepared by a mad scientist who knew and cared nothing about food. To revisit the dishes and their chaotic juxtaposition of flavors was to recall with precision those facts, from the trivial to the significant, that I have acquired, via the spoken word, during the course of my life.

I recited in the fourth grade that the “Wright
Frenchfries
brothers’ first
Pepto-Bismol
flight
cantaloupe
was on December
vanillaicecream
seventeenth
ketchup
, 19
whitebread
03,” and I would never forget this date that is—forgive me, Wilbur and Orville—not all that useful to me in my day-to-day life. During my first year of law school, I met a young man on a train from New York to Boston, and the moment he sat down next to me and said, “Hi
greenLifesavers
, my name
grapes
is Leo
parsnip,”
I could never forget this man’s name, even after I wanted to. When I was seven, I heard a word that made me taste an unidentifiable bitter, and I never forgot flames cutting through the seams of a trailer home, the sound of footsteps on gravel, then darkness. Not of nighttime, which it must have been, but of closed eyelids or a hand held tight over them.

But the example of the trailer home was out of order. It should have been listed first. Also, the example of the trailer home wasn’t the same as the previous two. The difference was fact versus the absence of fact.

The Wright brothers existed in history. A man named Leo existed in my personal history. All three were documented by words and photographs and, in the case of Leo, also by a pair of his shoes, which emerged from the back of the bedroom closet after he had gone. Leather, the color of a cube of caramel, slip-ons, and brand new. They were pieces of his carefully constructed exoskeleton that he must have regretted leaving behind. A benign household shadow, maybe that of a puffy winter coat, had hid them for weeks, and then one day they were pushed into the light. I had seen the backyard of the blue and gray ranch house behave in the same way. Underneath a pin oak tree there was a patch of earth where no grass would grow. That skirt of soil would periodically offer up pieces of blue and white pottery and shards of dark-colored glass, as proof that others had been there before.

The trailer on fire might not have existed. There were no photographs and no history, official or anecdotal. There was only my memory: coffee left too long on the burner, an uncoated aspirin caught in the throat, how a drop of mercury might taste on the tip of the tongue. I have come close to identifying that taste of bitter, but close isn’t good enough for a mnemonic device. As for the word that triggered it, the usual trailhead of my memories, it remains lost to me.

My great-uncle Harper, a sixty-two-year-old man, and I, an eighteen-year-old girl, sat holding each other’s hands. On a late-August night in Boiling Springs, we confessed and we revealed. Spinning around us was more than one circle of grief. Like the rings of Saturn, the circles weren’t solid and were composed of many shattered things. Baby Harper told me of his affection for my father, Thomas, and how it had allowed him, belatedly, to love my mother, DeAnne. I told Baby Harper the facts of a rape. I didn’t understand then that facts were sharp and should be wrapped in asides or separated by deep breaths. I thought that the best way to deliver bad news was to deliver bad news.

This was what I told him. It was the end of the summer of ’79. I was eleven. I didn’t scream. I didn’t struggle. I was motionless. When it was over, I stood in the shower for a long time. The water went from hot to lukewarm to cold. I didn’t see the bruises on my thighs until the next morning. That was when I cried.

This was what I didn’t tell my great-uncle Harper. There were also bruises around my neck. Bobby had pushed himself into my vagina and into my mouth, in that order.

I asked Kelly in letter #427 why her cousin Bobby had done these things to me. What I meant was why had he treated me so differently. When Kelly was ten, Bobby had held her hand, forced it into the crotch of his pants. Why was that not enough for him when he found me?

When Bobby knocked on the front door of the blue and gray ranch house and asked me if he could use the bathroom, I should have slammed the door shut and locked it. DeAnne had gone to pick up a cake for my father’s forty-seventh birthday, which we would celebrate later that night. Before she had gotten into the car, she had stopped to talk to Bobby. She smiled and flipped her hair. He smiled and flipped his hair. He sat on the riding mower, and she touched its steering wheel. All summer long I had seen these movements. I thought these movements meant that I was invisible and that I was safe.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Bobby.

Bobby who?

Bobby, monster, menace, blade.

Kelly in letter #428 wrote only three words: “Don’t tell anyone.” She was including herself. That was when I first understood that
anyone
was a big movie theater of a word with the lights turned down low. You never knew who was sitting inside.

I didn’t tell.

For my father’s birthday dinner, I wore a brown plaid skirt and a white turtleneck with pink roses appliquéd around the neck. I helped my father blow out the candles on his cake. I puckered my lips and pretended that I was pushing air past them. I smiled for my great-uncle Harper’s camera. My grandmother Iris said I should have another piece of cake. A second helping offered by a fat person was a foreshadowing of what your own body would become
if
you accept. My grandmother was the one who taught this to me.

I smiled and declined. My grandmother Iris smiled and ate the last piece for me.

All night long I watched DeAnne to see if she would flip her hair. She didn’t.

The following morning DeAnne placed a new purse—a Bermuda bag with a cover embroidered with green turtles—on my bed and a box of maxi pads. Next to these two items was a pair of my underwear, washed and neatly folded into a square. I had twisted them, crotch stiff with blood, inside a sheet of newspaper and thrown them away. This and other moments in my life have taught me that the trash was where you placed what you wanted to be found, whether you knew it or not. If you wanted a thing to disappear entirely, you burned it.

The thing about grass was that it grew back.

The thing about rapists was that they would do it again.

The thing about fate was that it often looked like the handiwork of a vengeful God.

Before Bobby was scheduled to return to the blue and gray ranch house, his car hit a telephone pole along Highway 150. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He died on impact. The Shelby
Star
ran a front-page article along with a yearbook photo of the deceased, smiling. The tire marks, according to the reporter, showed that the driver had swerved abruptly. To avoid a small animal, perhaps a rabbit, suggested the reporter. (The dead are too often imbued with good intentions.)

Kelly, being family, went to the funeral. DeAnne, being careless, was also there. The funeral was closed-casket because Bobby’s head had gone through the windshield.

I love you Jesus! because you took away his face, his hands, his hips, the warm breath from his body
.

I forgive you Jesus! for not doing it sooner. I know you must have tried
.

By the time I left Boiling Springs for New Haven, I understood that my great-uncle, Harper Evan Burch, if he could have chosen, would have inhabited a body different from the one that God had given him. His body wasn’t his temple. It was his shroud. He would rather not be a witness to it. Even on the muggiest of summer days, he never wore shorts and never rolled up his sleeves. If he had lived in an earlier era, he would have worn gloves and a hat every day. If he had lived in a big city, he would have worn dark sunglasses. As far as I knew, he had only one mirror in his Greek Revival. The mirror, the size of a small envelope, hung above the bathroom sink. His house had been built during a time when one bathroom, large and spacious with two windows and a claw-foot tub, was thought suitable for a household of means. No master baths, no his and her baths, no half-baths, and no guest baths. Somewhere along the way, between the Greek Revival and the blue and gray ranch house, these additional toilets and sinks came to signify a kind of necessary plenty, a promise of never having to relieve yourself in the same room as another member of your household, and an emblem that declared to the world that we had freed ourselves from such unwanted intimacies.

When I was young, I could stand on a chair and see most of my face in this mirror. When I was older and had grown almost as tall as Baby Harper, I realized that the placement of the mirror allowed him to see only his mouth and his chin, probably for the purpose of shaving. The rest of his face was a white wall. This shunning of his own reflection coupled with his penchant for picture taking and never picture-taken led me to the simple conclusion: My great-uncle was a book that found itself inside the wrong cover. What this meant I thought I understood. I was wrong. Baby Harper was just beginning to reveal himself to me. He threw down the first of his cards after he heard about Bobby.