Bitter in the Mouth (7 page)

My father dated DeAnne Whatley for three years before they were married, and my great-uncle Harper’s camera was on him from day one. Thomas walking up to the door of the green-shuttered colonial. Thomas standing in the backyard by the dogwood tree with a cigarette in his hand. Thomas sitting inside of his new Bel Air with the windows rolled up. This
here
was the confession. Because this wasn’t how young men posed with their new cars. They stood next to them. They leaned their hips against the doors. They touched the hoods. The photograph of Thomas neatly tucked inside of that two-toned, red and white sedan made it look more like a flashy coffin than a car.

If he weren’t my father, I would say that Thomas Hammerick was a calculating man for dating the boss’s daughter. Though technically, he didn’t ask DeAnne out until Walter Wendell had left the firm to become Judge Whatley. Six months after my father joined the firm of Fletcher Burch, Walter Wendell handed the managing partnership over to Carson Powell, the man who one day would have a granddaughter named Kelly. The courthouse in Shelby, visible from the front windows of Fletcher Burch’s firm, had enough Corinthian columns and domes to strike awe and inspire trepidation in those who entered it. Located in the town’s main square in order to remind us of the centrality of the Law in our everyday lives, the courthouse was surrounded by century-old water oak trees. On the afternoon that Walter Wendell strolled from one side of the street to the other for his swearing-in, he stopped by Thomas’s office and invited him to the house on Piedmont Street for dinner. So, in fact, it was Walter Wendell who asked Thomas out on the first date.

Baby Harper was thirty-three years old when Thomas Hammerick pulled up to the green-shuttered colonial in his red and white Bel Air. My great-uncle already owned the Greek Revival by then, but he came over to Iris and Walter Wendell’s house for dinner on most nights because Iris always had someone new cooking in the kitchen. Baby Harper liked the variety. He said it was like going to a different restaurant every couple of months. These cooks usually left once they had told Iris where she could shove their biscuits to keep them nice and warm.

My great-uncle told me that my father was handsome. That made me blush. I was twelve years old when I began to ask Baby Harper about the mysterious coupling of Thomas and DeAnne. I was just beginning to see my father as a person and a man. I stared hard at the photographs that my great-uncle was showing me, and I tried to imagine how that young man had become my father. That young man had dipped himself again and again into melted wax and was now unrecognizable underneath the accumulated layers. That young man had taken his eyes out and replaced them with a pair of thick glasses. That young man had lost his head of hair. I must have looked disappointed because Baby Harper said, “It’s all right, Linda Vista. Your father, he had his moment in the sun.”

There were three years’ worth of photographs of Thomas Hammerick standing, sitting, and eating meals at the Whatleys’. There was also a set of candidgraphs from this period tucked into the back of one of the H.E.B.’s. Shoes were the recurring theme. Baby Harper had moved away from the blurry mid-strides of his youth. His taste had matured to close-ups of shoelaces untied. It was easy to recognize my father’s shoes in these images. Leather wing tips, dark brown. When I was younger, the perforated pattern on the toe caps of my father’s shoes made me think of the tops of Ritz crackers, and later those same tiny holes made me think of constellations in the night sky. Through the years, the only thing that had changed about my father’s footwear was that he tied a more secure knot. When he passed away, in his closet were four pairs of shoes, exactly the same. The left heels were worn along the outside edge, and the right toes had a deep crease across them. DeAnne gave them to my great-uncle Harper because he wore the same size.

In the official photographs from “the courting years,” as my great-uncle called them, DeAnne and Thomas never touched.
Here
was another confession. DeAnne always looked at Thomas and never at the camera. She was twenty-five years old, the same age as her beau, but she looked a decade older than he. Our family, my great-uncle told me, was afraid that DeAnne’s “window” was about to close.

Now when I think about this euphemism, this aperture of feminine viability, I think of Rapunzel locked in her tall tower, staring down at the world, waiting for the plea that one day would change her life.

DeAnne had graduated from Gardner-Webb Baptist College and was working two days a week in the alumni office. Iris thought it would be a good way for her daughter to meet eligible men, but the only men DeAnne met there were those old enough to donate large sums of money to their alma mater. One by one, June after June, DeAnne’s friends married the sons of these men and were now into their second pregnancies. On her days off, DeAnne went to visit these new mothers in their houses and hold their babies. When she looked at Thomas, that must have been what she saw. When Thomas looked straight ahead into the camera, he saw a small dark hole.

The other details of their courtship were lost to me because they were lost to my great-uncle Harper. When Thomas and DeAnne began driving off in the Bel Air right after dinner, not even waiting for the dessert, there was nothing that Baby Harper could do but have another cup of coffee. My great-uncle must have felt a lot of things sitting there nursing that second cup that he knew would keep him awake, pacing the halls of his Greek Revival. One of them was this. Baby Harper was anticipating the one-word epithet that Iris would spit at all of us before she died. As Thomas drove DeAnne along a moonlit road, never pushing past twenty-five miles per hour in a vehicle built for speed, DeAnne was thinking of the same two syllables. As Iris climbed into the four-poster bed that her parents had shared, like their fiery deaths, she said a prayer that she and Walter Wendell would never suffer its biting cold, alone.

When Thomas asked for DeAnne’s hand in marriage, he and Walter Wendell were in the living room of the green-shuttered colonial. Baby Harper was in the dining room. Baby Harper overheard Walter Wendell say, “Counselor, I was going to have you disbarred if you’d waited a day longer!” There was laughter, and then there was a hush as Walter Wendell got right down to business. His daughter, DeAnne, was going to make it possible for him to keep the promise that he had made when he too had joined the family.

Like Thomas, Walter Wendell had joined the firm of Fletcher Burch first, though it didn’t take him three years to marry the boss’s daughter. He married Iris in three months. Fletch Burch had called him “Whirlwind Walter” while slapping him repeatedly on the back on the day of the wedding. Everyone knew that young Walter Wendell, bridegroom, was also now the firm’s newest partner. Fletch’s management philosophy was simple. Family first. No one had predicted that in a matter of days Whirlwind Walter would again earn his name.

Walter Wendell knew that Fletch understood ambition. Fletch, however, also believed in a man keeping his word. Walter Wendell handing over the law firm, if only temporarily, to a non-family steward wasn’t part of the bargain that Fletch had made with his son-in-law. If only more than a cupful of his ashes had been found, Fletch would have turned over in his grave, knocked a hole through the side panel of his coffin, and headed straight for the courthouse to drag Walter Wendell off the bench. There were probably enough ashes to make a fist, though, and Walter Wendell had dreamed about that fist coming down on his head, a gavel demanding justice.

My father must have known what he was getting himself into. A partnership at Fletcher Burch was like a brand-new Bel Air. He hadn’t earned it. Thomas must have known that DeAnne was the key, and, as was true of all keys, she could open doors and lock them shut.

O
RVILLE
W
RIGHT WAS THE FIRST
A
MERICAN MAN TO FLY
. H
IS
older brother Wilbur was the second. Together they entered history as “the Wright brothers,” equal and two-headed. In the privacy of their sibling rivalry, alone and always one-sided, Wilbur never forgot that Orville was the first to raise himself off the ground and touch it down again with all his limbs intact. The brothers knew that their true achievement wasn’t flight but flight accompanied by a safe landing. Icarus flew. It was how he descended that determined why his story was told and retold.
Icarus flew
. That was what the brothers said to each other by way of a prayer, and as a reminder that flying wasn’t their only goal. Wilbur, till the day he died, would look into Orville’s eyes, which reminded him of his own and of the North Carolina sky, and see there a speck of gray, a plane lifting into the clear blue. When Orville blinked, this reminded Wilbur that the first flight was only twelve seconds long. Between the two of them, there were four successful attempts that day. The last one and the longest in duration belonged to Wilbur: fifty-nine seconds. An appreciable difference that, once their identities became factually entwined, was often overlooked and forgotten. Wilbur flew. He wrote it on a piece of paper and placed it inside his shoe. He did it to assert his personhood and to document the singularity of his achievement.
Wilbur flew
.

I first read about the Wright brothers in the pages of
North Carolina
, and from that moment on I have liked Wilbur better. I cross-stitched his two-word declaration of independence onto a handkerchief that I made in my sixth-grade home economics class. I used periwinkle floss and dotted the
i
with a star. I received a C-minus for my efforts. My stitches were uneven, and the cursive
f
looked more like a
b
. I had intended the handkerchief as a Christmas gift for Kelly. I kept it instead.

From second to eighth grade, Wade and I shared the same school bus stop, located at the front of his house by a
SLOW CHILDREN
sign. We were the only kids who lived on Oak Street. Irony, thankfully, came late to us. We were lucky in that way. On cold fall mornings Wade’s mom would send him out with two paper cups of hot cocoa, the kind with the very small marshmallows included in the mix, so tiny that they threw off our sense of perspective. Looking down at these floating white dots, we felt like giants. The first time Wade handed me a cup, he said, “My mom
chocolatemilk
says this is for you
cannedgreenbeans.”
After that, the handoffs were silent. What more was there to say? Cup, cocoa, giants, wait, cold, bus, school. All the important things between us were already established and understood. I didn’t need another word, and he, being a boy, didn’t know that words were necessary. We left the empty cups at the base of the street sign and climbed aboard the bus, and by the time we were dropped off in the afternoon the cups were gone.

On colder winter mornings, Wade’s mom drove us to school. DeAnne never offered, and my father would have disapproved if he had known. What was he paying taxes for if his daughter was being shuttled to school in a private vehicle? If he was in a joking mood (most people didn’t know that my father had a sense of humor), he would have said, “ … in a private Episcopalian vehicle?” Wade’s mom would have laughed at that. She laughed a lot. She laughed a lot with Wade. In the mornings, when he opened the front door of the faded-red-T-shirt house, I would hear her. That was even better than the cocoa.

Wade’s sense of humor, like my father’s, was dry and difficult to detect. That was how I knew that his mom would have laughed at a line like “Episcopalian vehicle.” There was an absurdist quality about it—that anyone would use “Episcopalian” to modify a car—that she would have appreciated. Also, in light of what became of her, I think she would have enjoyed the critique, tucked in between those two words, of a small town’s proclivity for parceling differences, big and small.

The first time that her son and I had what could be called a conversation, I was the initiator. It was the first day of sixth grade, and Wade and I were, as usual, waiting for the school bus. Wade must have wanted to ride his new ten-speed bike to school instead. He was looking up at the familiar street sign. He looked amused and disgusted at the same time. Irony, an avenging angel, had visited him. Wade’s hands were shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. His T-shirt said
ASTEROIDS
in yellow letters, edged in a ring of red, both colors primary and bold. I was thinking about how an additional
s
could really change the meaning of this word. I was thinking about Kelly writing
K+W
all over her new binders and notebooks. I looked down at the sidewalk, and then my words came out softly, barely audible. I knew because Wade asked, “Huh?”

I repeated my question, looking up not at his face but at the center of his T-shirt. I meant my question to be comprehensive. I wanted to know what his mom was laughing about that morning, and I wanted to know what she had been laughing about for the past five years.

Wade began with the past five years.

“I tell
brownsugar
her jokes
cornflakes,”
he replied.

“What
grahamcracker
?” I asked, even though I had heard him. Every word. I just wanted him to say them again because of what they were doing to my mouth.

He did. This time he added, “Every
Ritzcracker
morning
Hardee’scheeseburger
.”

“What
grahamcracker
was it today
oatmeal
?” I asked.

“Knock
peanutbrittle
knock
peanutbrittle
,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, moving my eyes from
ASTEROIDS
up to the street sign, in anticipation that our exchange was coming to an end. But Wade wasn’t finished. He wanted to tell me about that morning.

“Say, ‘Who’s there
applejuice
?’” he said.

“Who’s there
applejuice
?”

“Wade
orangesherbet.”

“Wade
orangesherbet
who?”

“Wade
orangesherbet
who? Wade
orangesherbet
who?! Mom
chocolatemilk
, I’m your son
cinnamon
. Jeez, don’t you
cannedgreenbeans
remember
butterpecanicecream
me?”

I laughed out loud.

Wade looked amazed.

“That was dumb
cannedspinach,”
I said.

“I know
grapejelly,”
he said, grinning, as the school bus pulled up and opened its door.

I sat up front, and Wade went to the back, same as in previous years. When the bus pulled up to Kelly’s stop (three after ours), I turned around and caught a glimpse of him. He was staring out of the window. There was a
W
written onto the pane. On the tip of his right index finger must have been an oval of dust.

Kelly squeezed in next to me and whispered, “Cute
mashedpotatoes
.”

I thought she meant my new purse, a Bermuda bag like hers. My father had finally given in after DeAnne took him aside during a recent Sunday dinner and whisper-yelled to him that my MONTHLY CYCLE had started and that I would need something to carry my FEMININE HYGIENE PRODUCTS in. DeAnne, just like her mother, Iris, had perfected the art. She yelled the embarrassing parts and whispered the rest. My grandmother, whose sense of humor was barbed like her tongue, leaned across the dinner table and asked if I knew why a woman’s monthly cycle was called her “period.” Iris smiled before quickly answering her own question: Because when a woman mentions it to a man, that’s the end of their conversation. My great-uncle Harper lowered his eyes, picked up his fork, and pushed the food on his plate into four equal quadrants. My great-uncle called this move “the cross of avoidance.”

When my father returned to the dinner table, his face was flushed. DeAnne’s wasn’t. Iris was right. My father never brought up the purse or its function again.

Kelly stole a quick glance over her shoulder, and I knew. She hadn’t meant the green turtles stitched across the cover of my Bermuda bag but Wade, the orange sherbet boy.

If Kelly and I were a suspension bridge (and we were, or at least our friendship was), this was the moment when our steel cables began to snap. I had had the entire summer to prepare, and still the moment took my breath away.

Kelly had spent that summer—what I called the summer of Dill and Wade but for her it was mostly the summer of Wade—writing very long letters to me. I wrote to her too, but my missives became shorter and shorter. I had less and less to say. As she was the one who had declared a crush on a real boy, she became the heroine of our lives and our letters. I became a mirror or an echo. Every Saturday night, Kelly wrote her weekly
Wade Report
. Kelly and her parents had their weekly dinner out at Slo Smoking. Barbecue was as great a divider as religion, greater if you believed my great-uncle Harper. Slo Smoking and Bridges were parallel universes, where Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, and the small band of Catholics (this was what the adults in our lives always called them, which at first made me think that the Small Band of Catholics were a musical group, something along the lines of the Partridge Family), though never the former Miss Feldmann (who didn’t eat pork, the only meat worth barbecuing in the Old North State), could bury their differences in paper napkins soaked with sauce and then separate again along two distinct lines. We were a Bridges family, and Kelly knew it. Where you consumed your pulled pork and coleslaw was another form of fate in the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area.

Every Saturday, the Powells arrived at Slo Smoking at 5
P.M
. sharp, and Wade and his folks came in fifteen minutes later. I had never been inside of Slo, so I didn’t know if they had booths or tables. Kelly didn’t provide me with such useful details. She was interested only in Wade. What he had on (always Levi’s and a T-shirt); what soft drinks he ordered (7UP); what he may have been thinking (there’s that nice girl from homeroom!) when she and her folks walked by his family on their way out. Kelly never gave up on the exclamation mark. She was very optimistic for a fat girl. Maybe she knew all along that fat wasn’t an immutable characteristic. Fat wasn’t fate.

My response to the
Wade Report
was not to submit one of my own. That summer, I saw the orange sherbet boy every day, except Sundays, riding his new ten-speed up and down our street. I missed the green Schwinn Sting-Ray. The new bike, with its multicolored metallic finish, looked fast, and he rode it fast. About a week before the beginning of school, Wade had stopped his bike in front of the blue and gray ranch house and watched as our jungle gym was being hauled onto the back of a pickup truck. I was standing in the front doorway of the house, also witnessing the final stage of its removal. DeAnne wanted the space in the backyard for a rose arbor, and she declared that I was too old now for that-jungle-thing anyway. She had called it that-jungle-thing from day one. Wade and I looked at each other as the pickup truck pulled away. He waved to me. Kelly, all summer long, was never able to include those four words in her reports.

The look of Kelly’s letters changed that summer. She no longer dotted her
i
’s with an anatomical heart. The ventricles receded into the organ. The muscle puffed and took on the symmetrical shape of its most common misrepresentation. It was fitting that she signaled her abandonment of reality in this small way.

On the bus that first morning of sixth grade, I knew that nothing had changed between Kelly and Wade. She was still an invisible fat girl, and he was a beatific boy, a body that she had dragged into her life by the sheer force of her will. In the years that followed, Kelly would join the ranks of the beautiful and the popular, but nothing, I thought, had changed between the two of them. The orange sherbet boy and I, though, we were in for a transformation. As the school bus turned in to the short driveway that led to our middle school, I turned my head for another glimpse of Wade.