Bitter in the Mouth (14 page)

By the time I was in high school I had come to terms with the fact that my grandmother Iris and I were close in the way that Maine and Hawaii were close. I believed that she was indifferent to me because I looked nothing like her.

I now know that it is no coincidence that the word “favor” is used to denote a physical resemblance. I favor you (your eyes, your chin). You favor me (with love and attention). Favor is a reciprocity based on a biological imperative; it is a primal vanity that has saved the lives of some babies and doomed others:

The floodwater is rising. You have only your two hands. Which child in your brood do you grab on to? The one who is your mirror image or the one who is unrecognizable? (Even though I have no siblings, I have always been thankful that Boiling Springs wasn’t prone to high waters.)

During my sophomore year in college, I learned in my Alienation/Alien Nation seminar, cross-listed under sociology and literature, that a definition of “aberration” was a mirror that failed to produce an exact image. I understood long before this that the body, especially that of an offspring, was best when it was a reflective surface. DeAnne’s, for example, came very close to Iris’s, but there was something lacking in DeAnne’s eyes and the shape of her lips. Iris was therefore looking forward to the next generation. Then I came along, and my grandmother’s hopes died.

Iris tolerated me during my tomboy stage. There was even a mild spasm of interest when my mother made me take baton twirling lessons, a rite of Southern girlhood, which culminated with a march down Main Street in the Shelby Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was nine years old. Iris sat on a folding chair on the courthouse steps. My great-uncle was sitting beside her. When my troupe went by, he stood up and waved a sign:
WE GIVE THANKS FOR LINDA!
I chose to believe that my grandmother was waving at me too and not at Baby Harper to put down his sign.

Iris ignored me altogether when I started growing my hair long again, wearing gloss on my lips, and carrying a purse full of feminine protection. I had disappeared because I had disappointed. That was what I grew up believing.

What happened to Kelly only affirmed what I already knew about physical and emotional reciprocity. For the first thirteen years of her life, Kelly was to her mother, Beth Anne, no more than a disembodied voice. Kelly, who had reluctantly shown me her baby pictures, had been fat from day one. She came out of the womb with three chins and so many folds on her body that she was more Shar-Pei puppy than human baby. Fourteen years later, when Beth Anne finally recognized her pretty self in the being whom she had brought into the world, Kelly was, in essence, reborn. Kelly suddenly had a body, which was pleasing to the eyes and was therefore seen. During our freshman year at BSHS, I often imagined that my best friend had lost all of that weight but what was left of her wasn’t physically attractive. What if inside the fat girl was a thin ugly girl? Or just a plain one? I had assumed a role in high school that came with only one required act. I had to earn straight A’s. Kelly had assumed a role that called for her to be on display, to be chased like prey, to flirt and to tease, and to give in and be touched but never penetrated. Kelly was too smart to play her role successfully. She was too curious.
How does this feel?
She was too egalitarian.
Now you do it to me
. She was too truthful.
I don’t want you to stop
.

Kelly left Boiling Springs in January of 1985. It was the last Saturday of the month. My bedroom was flooded with morning sunlight, but I was still in bed, eyes shut to the dust motes in the air and the whaling vessels at sea. I heard DeAnne calling my name. Then I heard, “Kelly
cannedpeaches
is on the phone
creamcheese
!” I opened my eyes, knowing something was wrong. Kelly and I rarely called each other, and when we did we exchanged verbal telegrams, short, clipped, efficient, and to the point.

“Hello,” I said.

“Linda
mint?”

“Yes.”

“I have to go
boiledcarrots.”

“Where?”

“Rock
rawegg
Hill
driedapricot
.”

“To your aunt’s
cornbread?”

“Yes.”

“How long
grapeNehi
?”

“Nine months
saltinecracker
. Well, eight now.”

“Oh, Jesus
friedchicken
.”

“He had nothing
tomato
to do
grits
with it.”

“You’ll write
Frenchfries
?”

“Yes.”

Click.

“Kelly
cannedpeaches?”

Kelly wrote in letter #822 that she couldn’t be away from Lil’ Skywalker right now because she was breastfeeding him. Besides that, Beth Anne didn’t want her coming back to Boiling Springs until all of her pregnancy weight had been lost. “Otherwise, people would know that I had been, well, you know … fat!” When I read this, I could almost hear Kelly’s quick, sharp laugh in the room. Kelly added that she was getting the feeling that her aunt wanted her out of the house. Her aunt, a forty-year-old ex-hippie–cum–successful cat groomer, had read that breastfeeding for the first year of the baby’s life was good for the baby’s immune system, so Kelly knew that she wasn’t going anywhere soon. In the meantime, the aunt was trying with little success to downplay her growing maternal yearnings and rivalry. Plopping down on the living room couch, her aunt would say, “Well, there you two are!” as if she had no idea that mother and child were just about to engage in the most primitive form of food service. Then her aunt would hold on to some part of Lil’ Skywalker, usually one of his tiny feet, while Kelly breastfed him.

In her previous postcards and letters, Kelly hadn’t shared with me many details about her pregnancy. In #822, she did. She recalled for me how her sense of smell had become hound-dog acute at the beginning of her second trimester. She wrote that she knew what food was cooking two houses away. She discovered that even boiled potatoes or heated-up milk gave off odors that left her nauseated and weak. She wrote that by the end of her fifth month her nose and her ankles ballooned with retained fluids. Her aunt cut all salt from her diet in an effort to relieve the swelling. This only made Kelly crave the taste of it more. She made do by discovering the hidden salt in foods. Tomato juice. Caramel candy. The filling of store-bought apple pie. Instant hot cocoa mix. By the start of her third trimester, Kelly thought that she could hear the sound of her skin stretching. She cried a lot then because she could no longer recognize her own body. She slept twelve to fourteen hours a day because it was the only tranquilizer allowed a pregnant girl. Her aunt, unmarried and anxious to become a single mother, spent her free time knitting a receiving blanket, a bonnet, and a pair of booties. Sometimes Kelly and her aunt would do mothers-to-be activities together, like when they chose the baby’s name. As for the birth itself, Kelly wrote that she had no memory of it.

Kelly ended her letter to me with an ode to Lil’ Skywalker’s fingernails and toenails. They were the color of wax paper and almost as thin, she wrote. They were more insect wings than human body. They grew longer by the hour. They made her understand why we painted our nails with bright polish when we grew older. We were disappointed in what they had become. Thick and ridged, more carapace than human body. Kelly had bought a pair of small, round-tipped nail scissors for Lil’ Skywalker, but her aunt had read that it was better to trim the nails by biting them off gently with your teeth. Kelly wouldn’t do it, so her aunt did it for her. Kelly wrote that when she saw Lil’ Skywalker’s tiny fingers and then his tender toes in her aunt’s mouth, she felt sick to her stomach. She wrote that he was so helpless. What Kelly meant was that she was so helpless.

After Lil’ Skywalker’s first birthday, Kelly was asked to leave the Rock Hill household. Her aunt promised that they would keep in regular contact, and they have. The arrangement was simple. The aunt telephoned Kelly every month. Kelly never telephoned the aunt. These calls, in addition to photographs of Luke on his birthdays and most holidays, except Mother’s Day, were the extent of their interaction. The aunt proposed the following arrangement: If and when Luke asked about his birth mother, he would be told Kelly’s name and contact information. As far as I know, Luke to this day has yet to ask. He doesn’t know, then, that he has a secret middle name, Skywalker, or that for the first year of his life two seventeen-year-old girls exchanged letters referring to him by its diminutive. According to Kelly, he now looks exactly like his father. That was probably why she has never shown me a photograph of Luke. Her secret would be clearly written on his face.

After Kelly’s aunt legally adopted Luke, the cat groomer left the lucrative world of feline fanciers behind to open the first yoga studio in Rock Hill, if not the very first one in the state of South Carolina. She learned hatha yoga through a video correspondence course offered by an enterprising commune in Northern California, located in an area now more commonly known as Silicon Valley. Yoga proved to be an inspired profit-generating enterprise for the commune and for Kelly’s aunt. She and Luke moved into a larger house and took yearly trips to India, where she continued her studies with a yogi, and young Luke learned Hindi as a second language from his native nanny.

Kelly’s aunt, who was Beth Anne’s youngest sister, had never been close to their family. By the time Kelly was fourteen, her aunt was already limiting her appearances at their family gatherings to every other year. Her few visits with them were enough for Kelly to size her up. Her aunt was the only one on her mother’s side of the family who had lived outside of the Bible Belt. Her aunt didn’t have a college degree but did have a vocabulary of multisyllabic and sometimes foreign-sounding words. Kelly was smart enough to know that sometimes her aunt didn’t really understand the meanings of these words but used them anyway. I remembered Kelly describing her aunt to me as “asspirational.” I wrote back to Kelly that I didn’t think that was a word. Kelly responded that it should be one in order to emphasize the dumb ass lurking inside of such people. Nonetheless, when Kelly found herself pregnant, the first telephone call she made was to this woman.

When Kelly’s aunt became Luke’s legal mother, she ceased all contact with their extended family, who were frankly relieved, as the family embarrassment was now harboring another family embarrassment. Two disappearances for the price of one. A bargain, they thought. The family had long made it clear to Kelly’s aunt that they were horrified by all of her life decisions, which they would list by the state followed by a brief description of what she “had gotten herself into” while there. California: commune. New Mexico: Indians. Arizona: cats. South Carolina: cats and yoga. In retrospect, the family realized that cat grooming was by far the most “normal” of the communities that this woman had thrown herself into.

Kelly’s aunt had a name of course, but from the moment that Kelly went to live with her I never wanted to use it. Birth mothers were too often anonymous. I wanted the adoptive mother, for once, to be the nameless one.

As I read Kelly’s letter with its full and detail-rich account of her baby’s life to date, I remembered being infuriated. There wasn’t another word about my father’s passing. I couldn’t believe how her maternity had changed her, dulled her regard for those around her except for the Breastfeeding One, and that she had thought it appropriate to share her lack of consideration with me. These sentiments were collapsed into one rhetorical question: What fucking world is she living in? The borders of my world were clear to me. My father was in an open coffin that was now closed and in the ground. DeAnne was in their bed, alone. My grandmother Iris was an overweight, vengeful diabetic with a taste for fire, and one of these traits would surely make her the next in our family to die. My great-uncle Harper, my dear singing-talker, was speechless with grief. What I needed from my best friend was sympathy, an acknowledgment of my loss, a shoulder to cry on. A baby named Lil’ Skywalker was there instead.

At the farthest edge of the familiar city, there is a blue and gray ranch house. Kelly’s letter waits for me there on the hallway table. Next to it is the ghost of the very first letter that she ever wrote to me. The postmaster general’s sudden absence has left everything at risk of being undelivered and unread. I return there to examine and reexamine the body of letter #822. How many readings did it take before I found within it what Kelly, the new mother, already understood back then? I have lost count. After Iris passed away, I still didn’t see it. Baby Harper, as his last gift to me, had made me see the sentence that Kelly never wrote but that informed her every word: Life trumps death.

The floodwater is rising. You have two hands and one heart (breaking, because you are witnessing your world disappearing). There is a crying baby and a corpse. Which do you embrace and take with you to higher ground? Whether the baby is your blood relation shouldn’t change the answer.

Kelly, the new mother, understood that what had happened to me would happen to her baby much too soon. Because what difference was there between death and absence to the ones who were left behind?

O
N A PLANTATION LOCATED ON THE BANKS OF THE
R
OANOKE
River near the Virginia border but firmly on North Carolina soil, a baby boy was born into slavery. Someone, because we can’t be certain that it was his father or mother, called him George, middle name Moses. The plantation owner who owned him was named William (undoubtedly chosen for him by his own father and mother), family name Horton. Therefore the baby’s last name was also Horton, and it was the first of his shackles. George Moses Horton’s earliest memory was of his mother’s back bent over rows of tobacco as he clung to her, mesmerized by the up-and-down rhythm of hard labor. When George Moses was still a young child, William Horton moved his possessions—the china cabinet, the plantation desk, the silver candlesticks, the slaves, the horses, and the cows—to a parcel of land near the town of Chapel Hill. There, far from the sounds of the river, George Moses grew up and learned that his mother found comfort in the sounds of worship. She taught him the prayers, the hymns, all the words that could float out of their mouths in praise of God. George Moses took them all in, and one day he moved them around in his head and created something new, “Rise up, my soul, and let us go.” He repeated these words to himself and rejoiced in the meaning, clear and stark, of what was to be the first line of a poem, a thing of his own creation that would belong only to him. More words sang themselves inside of his head and the poem was completed. The initial call-to-freedom thrust was by then disguised within a devotional message.

Rise up, my soul, and let us go
Up to the gospel feast;
Gird on the garment white as snow,
To join and be a guest
.

George Moses’s mother had taught him well. Words, he understood, were beautiful because they could reveal the truth and hide it at the same time. George Moses, when he was twenty years old, had a book’s worth of his own poems hidden inside of him. He shared them with no one in order to keep them safe, especially from James Horton, son of William, who owned George Moses now and who would want to own his words too. A product of Horton’s property was his property. Milk from his cows, tobacco from his land, child from his slave. George Moses knew the rules of the plantation. Within its confines he knew the boundaries, the invisible riverbanks, the state lines.

James Horton looked at George Moses one day and saw what he wanted to see, a tall young man with a calm, mild temperament who could be relied upon. George Moses was from then on sent to Chapel Hill on Sundays to sell the plantation’s surplus fruits and vegetables. The Horton family couldn’t possibly consume all those tomatoes and snap peas and strawberries and plums.

Chapel Hill was a sad new world for George Moses. All the same rules applied there, plus new ones that his mother couldn’t have educated him about. The town was home to the University of North Carolina, and its streets were filled with young men George Moses’s age. When these students visited the market, they did so for entertainment and occasionally for the purchase of foodstuff. George Moses was commanded to perform a trick—Come on now! Sing us a song. Dance a little. Your momma taught you a jig, didn’t she?—before they would buy from him. George Moses’s pride gave him away. He opened up his mouth, and a poem poured out. The young men thought it was a fine trick. A slave who had memorized a poem! They slapped their knees and laughed. George Moses’s pride was by now in full bloom. He told them in a low voice that the poem belonged to him. Of course, the moment those words were released into the open air the poem was no longer his.

My great-uncle Harper was sixty-six years old, and he was about to take his first flight. To calm his nerves, he hummed Patsy Cline’s “You Belong to Me” while waiting in the terminal of the Charlotte airport—
Fly the ocean in a silver plane. See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
—until he remembered that Patsy had died in a plane crash. That and the fact that there was no ocean or jungle between the state of North Carolina and the state of Connecticut made him change his tune. Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” then kept him company until the boarding call.
Let’s fly, let’s fly away … Once I get you up there where the air is rarefied. We’ll just glide, starry-eyed
. Baby Harper had thought about driving up to New Haven, but then he decided that he wanted to experience the journey as I had experienced it. He wanted to feel the ground beneath him slipping away, to see North Carolina getting smaller, its fields and towns becoming abstract, and finally disappearing below him. I told him it wasn’t the sense of loss that dominated the experience of flight but the sense of momentum, a lifting up and away. That promise decided it for him.

It was May of 1990 and I was graduating from Yale. Baby Harper was my family, the only member who was there to see me receive my diploma. Baby Harper assured me that my father and my grandmother Iris would be watching from Heaven. He didn’t mention my mother, DeAnne, who wasn’t dead but whom I hadn’t invited.

My great-uncle showed up to my graduation ceremony wearing a white linen suit with a cut that was slim and sharp, which he probably last wore when Eisenhower was first elected, an equally white oxford shirt, and a blue (for Yale) bow tie embroidered with cardinals (for the Old North State). He looked like a mix of Colonel Sanders, Tom Wolfe, and Pee Wee Herman. In other words, he looked like Baby Harper. I smiled widely and openly and without hesitation, something that I hadn’t done during those past four years, when I saw him walking across the courtyard of Pierson, the residential college where I lived at Yale.

As a legacy, I had been assigned to the same residential college as my father and his forefathers. When I first saw Pierson, I had to laugh. Pierson was a green-shuttered colonial, albeit much grander in scale than Iris and Walter Wendell’s house on Piedmont Street. There was often-repeated lore (both false and true, like the rest of the Yale campus) that before the Civil War Pierson was the sole residential college to provide living accommodations for those Southern gentlemen who had brought their property-valets up North with them. It was an apocryphal story. The residential college system at Yale didn’t begin until 1933. That exculpatory fact, however, never explained another fact: why there was a wing of Pierson—whitewashed brick and festooned on the outside with decorative iron railings and stairs—known as the “Slave Quarters.” Perhaps it was the inability to reconcile one true thing, the year of construction, with another true thing, the name of the wing, that made the antebellum myth necessary. A lie to create a more comprehensible truth, as it were. Actual slave quarters could be understood as the bones of history, reluctantly preserved. Fanciful, imagined slave quarters were, on the other hand, a pornography of history. I wondered what my father must have thought when he first saw the Slave Quarters of Pierson, how he must have felt traveling hundreds of miles due north only to be confronted with an ersatz South, and whether it had made him feel even farther away from home.

I glanced down from my great-uncle’s face and suit and saw my father’s shoes walking toward me. Wing tips, brown leather, handsome left heel worn on the outside edge, a deep crease across the charismatic right toe. I knew then that Baby Harper had tried to bring all that he could of Boiling Springs with him.

It had been almost five years since my father’s passing and more than three since my grandmother’s. DeAnne and I hadn’t spoken since Iris’s funeral. The last letter I had sent to DeAnne was at the end of my sophomore year. I assumed the next time I saw her would be at another funeral. I was hoping it wouldn’t be Baby Harper’s. That left us with only one other possibility. So be it, I thought.

Missing Baby Harper was the worst part of not going back to Boiling Springs. We spoke on the phone every week. He did most of the talking. I listened with the receiver pressed close to my ear. Every month, he sent me a check for “incidentals.” That was what he wrote on the check’s memo line. I used the money for cigarettes, which had become the opposite of that for me. “Integrals” were more like it. On my birthday and on every holiday that was printed on his wall calendar, he sent me a box of chocolates. He was partial to Whitman’s Samplers. Me too. Since the fifth grade, I had begun the slow and methodical project of renaming the pieces inside of those trompe l’oeil cross-stitched boxes after the words that triggered their flavors. The Samplers proved to be an eclectic collection of words. I identified Cashew Cluster first, which was from then on “Russia.” Dark Chocolate Molasses Chew turned out to be “Static.” Cherry Cordial was “Neanderthal.” Along with the chocolates, Baby Harper sent me photographs that he had taken in my absence, and they were of people I didn’t know. He said that he had to branch out now, as there were so few of us left.

“Linda Vista!” My great-uncle Harper’s voice reached me before his body did. “Now what have you gone and done?” There was a waver in his voice that I hadn’t heard over the telephone lines.

I reached out and hugged him.

His embrace was awkward and sweet. His arms, as always, were unsure of where to make contact with my body. He smelled like the rooms of his Greek Revival. Witch hazel (his aftershave of choice), burned coffee, and lemon-scented Pledge. I felt a hand gingerly touching my hair. I lifted my face out of his lapel.

“I wanted
saltedbutter
to look more like you
cannedgreenbeans,”
I said. I meant it as a joke, but as soon as the sentence left my mouth I realized that it had sounded mocking, my default tone of voice at Yale.

Baby Harper took a couple of steps back. There was a look in his eyes—a cumulus cloud passing over a midday sun—that made me regret cutting off my hair.

When Baby Harper took me to the Charlotte airport for my first flight, he had with him one of his cameras, a simple point-and-shoot that he had gotten as a gift and rarely used. I remembered being surprised when he handed it to a young woman who was sitting next to us at the gate. He asked if she would take our photo. He then politely asked her to take two more. He knew that he had closed his eyes the first time the shutter closed. I thought that he wasn’t used to the timing of the eyelids, the holding of a smile, the posing for posterity. Four years later, at my college graduation, I still hadn’t seen these airport photographs. When I finally did, the one with his eyes shut made me cry.

As we stood there surrounded by Pierson’s faded red bricks and its green shutters freshly painted for graduation, Baby Harper must have been thinking about the girl in those photographs, the girl who minutes later had turned around to wave goodbye to him before disappearing down a corridor that fed her into a swollen-bodied plane. He liked the way that there was a rhythm in her long hair as she walked away from him. He was looking at me and missing her.

“Well, Vista Girl, I’m deeply flattered by the gesture, then,” Baby Harper said.

I beamed at him, relieved to see that his sense of humor was still the same.