Bitter in the Mouth (26 page)

Kelly wrote back that she was glad to know that stoner Chris was rich and most likely experiencing periods of happiness. She wanted to know about the other two stoners, the girl and the guy who dressed and looked like each other.

I sent her this:

“Susan Taylor put herself through night school and became a registered nurse. Tommy Miller joined the army and was given an honorable discharge. He is now an insurance executive. The high school sweethearts, who have both recently quit smoking, are now married and living in a two-bedroom condominium in Richmond, Virginia.”

In letter #1,313, Kelly asked me if that was true. “That one didn’t seem like a joke,” she wrote.

“I have no idea what has happened to Susan and Tommy,” I wrote back. “I just wanted for them a comfortable life unmarked by chronic unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, domestic violence, prolonged drug use, or the indignity of having to pump gas or clean house for a former homecoming queen.”

“Sally wasn’t as bad as all that,” Kelly wrote. “You just never got to know her, Linda.”

I let that topic drop. Kelly was right and wrong. I never knew Sally or the three Kens. Kelly, likewise, never knew Chris, Susan, or Tommy. BSHS was like a one-room schoolhouse. How we managed to avoid one another was an example of the highly choreographed dance that still kept us apart, a mystery to one another.

Of course, I knew it was significant that Kelly hadn’t included Wade in her BSHS Who’s Who. I waited patiently, reading about people whom I hadn’t thought about since graduation and would never think about again. I waited, with less and less patience, making up the lives of those about whom Kelly had no information to keep myself amused and to pass the time. I waited till Kelly’s silence finally confirmed what we had long known.

On a park bench in the first hours of the first day of fall, Kelly reached for my hand. We are going to get arrested for sure, I thought. Open displays of same-gender, transracial affection was certainly a misdemeanor of some kind. Kelly laughed, quick and sharp, when I said this to her. She took out of her purse a photograph and placed it on my lap. She also took from her purse a tiny flashlight, which she shone on the image: Luke, thirteen years old, tall and lanky, with a mop of disheveled hair, blond like his father’s was when he had spent his days in the sun.

“He’s such a beautiful
cherrycoughsyrup
boy, Kelly
cannedpeaches,”
I said, touching the photograph lightly with my fingertips.

“I told you
cannedgreenbeans
he looks just like his father,” Kelly said, smiling.

“Has Wade
orangesherbet
met him?”

“No
grapejelly
, I haven’t been in touch
cannedvegetablesoup
with Wade
orangesherbet
since he graduated from college.”

“Really
popcorn?”
I asked.

“Really
popcorn.”
Kelly replied.

“Where did Wade
orangesherbet
graduate from?”

“I thought you
cannedgreenbeans
knew
peanutbutter
. He went to UNC at Chapel Hill
driedapricot
for a year. Then he transferred to Cooper
ambrosiasalad
Union in New
peanutbutter
York City. You
cannedgreenbeans
know
grapejelly
, it’s free
ChipsAhoy!cookie
tuition there
applejuice
and all, so his father couldn’t stop
cannedcorn
him. I’d no
grapejelly
idea
Swisscheese
Wade
orangesherbet
was interested
sloppyJoe
in art. Did you
cannedgreenbeans—
”

“Yes,” I said, interrupting her.

If this were a movie, then this would be the moment with the sounds of crickets chirping.

“I’m sorry
glazeddoughnut
, Linda
mint,”
Kelly said.

“For
Triscuit
what
grahamcracker?”
I asked. What I meant was for which thing was she most sorry. Sleeping with Wade or for not telling me about it until now.

More crickets. Cue leaves rubbing themselves against the starlit dome of the sky.

“I didn’t tell
brownsugar
you
cannedgreenbeans,”
Kelly continued, “because I never
bubblegum
told Wade
orangesherbet
. He knew
peanutbutter
that I was pregnant. I just never
bubblegum
told him that he was the father.”

“Why the fuck
limesherbet
not?” I asked.

“Because—I’m sorry
glazeddoughnut
about this too—he didn’t mean
raisin
that much to me. We were together only once. You
cannedgreenbeans
know
grapejelly
, what
grahamcracker
I mean
raisin?”

“No
grapejelly.”

Crickets, leaves, the wings of bats disturbing the air above our heads as they flew from water oak tree to water oak tree.

“I think it’s time
cottagecheese
to go
boiledcarrots,”
I said.

“No
grapejelly,”
Kelly replied.

“What
grahamcracker
?”

“I said no
grapejelly
. We’re go
boiledcarrots
ing to sit here
hardboiledegg
until you
cannedgreenbeans
for
Triscuit
give me, Linda
mint
.”

“Well, you
cannedgreenbeans
better make yourself comfortable then.”

Crickets, leaves, bat wings, and the sounds of our breaths going in and out of our bodies.

“Did you
cannedgreenbeans
know
grapejelly
about Wade
orangesherbet
and me?” I asked finally.

“Yes,” Kelly replied.

We sat on the park bench until the stars faded, until the birds began their songs, until cars began making their way slowly up and down the streets, their drivers still drowsy, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Kelly fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I sat there, my eyes on the statue of the soldier, my ears full of the steady breathing of my best friend. I knew that she wasn’t the cause for what I was feeling. Wade, the orange sherbet boy, had traveled to the city of our dreams. He had left this place and its people behind. So had I, I thought. The truth was that I believed that it was this place and its people who had kept the orange sherbet boy and me apart. That if Wade and I had grown up elsewhere, we would have become high school sweethearts, gone to the prom together, broken up during our first year away at different colleges, found each other again after graduation, and moved in together, living happily for at least some time. The truth was that the locus of our failure lay elsewhere. Our geography was only partially to blame.

A
LL FAMILIES WERE AN INVENTION
. S
OME FAMILIES WERE MACHINES
. Some were gardens, full of topiaries or overgrown with milkweeds. Others were Trojan horses or other inspired works of art. Sinister or a thing of beauty, we often couldn’t tell because we were too close to them to see. We created them with our bodies or with our will. We had children because they could be had. Biological or adopted, they were helpless and had little to say in how they would fit into the larger body. All children learned to adapt and thrive, or they died. Their first lessons of survival were learned within the home. Some children never grew up. Some hid within their own skin. Some shone like the sun or glowed cool like the moon. We added to our selves—we built our machines, tended to our gardens, created our objets d’art—because we desired, above all things, to outlive our bodies. We knew that when we died, our families—if no one else—would remember our faces and repeat our names. In that way, we lived on. But we failed to acknowledge our selfish desires. We spouted grandiose assessments of what we had done.
We gave you life
, we said to our children.
We saved your life
, we said to the children of other people whom we took into our homes. Both statements were true. Both statements were the beginning of the story and not the story itself.

On the last night of summer, DWH had stayed home to host a dinner party of her own. She had her women over and they had me on their minds. I had been in Boiling Springs for almost two months by now, and DWH and I still hadn’t gotten to the heart of the matter. Together, the women would come up with a plan.

On my first day of law school, a professor, all white hair and dark bow tie and pinstripes, had stood at the lectern of an arena-like classroom and declared that the Law was a spiderweb. He meant that there was no easy and obvious starting point. Everything about the Law was interconnected, interdependent, interwoven. I had thought of the professor’s words every morning as DWH and I had inched closer to the center of our web with a question and then retreated again to its edge with a response.

I had asked DWH what it was like for her when Thomas passed away. Her response was an example of our progress and non-progress. She began by reminding me that they had been married for almost twenty-five years. She missed waking up to the sounds of him getting dressed in the morning. She missed the smell of his shaving cream in the bathroom. She missed the half a piece of toast that he left uneaten every morning. She missed the sound of his car door purposefully opening and closing, the bookends to her day. She missed seeing him at the head of the dinner table. She missed the easy chair with his newspapers neatly arranged at its feet. She missed hearing him snoring beside her in the middle of the night. DWH paused, took a deep breath, and confessed that after a couple of months of feeling this way she realized that it wasn’t the same as missing
him
. I sat at the kitchen table, coffee cup in hand, on my plate a grapefruit half, emptied of its pulp, and I was speechless. DWH had become her mother’s daughter. DWH had inherited the mantle of family truth teller. To claim that I wasn’t unnerved by it would be a lie.

DWH and the women decided that if it was too difficult for her to begin at the beginning then she should begin at the end. The elegant symmetry of their reasoning took them by surprise. They celebrated by helping themselves to seconds of the homemade desserts that they had brought to the potluck dinner. They looked up to DWH, but none of them were foolish enough to allow her to cook for them. They feasted on spoonfuls of banana pudding, made with a meringue topping because it was for a party, after all. They sliced another wedge of lemon icebox pie, a summertime favorite because who wanted to turn on the oven at this time of the year? They were grateful, though, that Beth Anne had made the effort to bake, as her red velvet cake melted in their mouths and disappeared in the instant after DWH had thoughtfully set aside a slice for me to have for breakfast.

When Kelly dropped me off at the blue and gray ranch house, the sun had already risen. DWH was already in the kitchen with coffee brewed and waiting. The wedge of cake, sheathed in its tight plastic wrap, beckoned. I sat down and gave thanks for women like Beth Anne, who practiced the endangered art of baking (one day “baked from scratch” may sound as archaic and faraway as “alchemy”). I ate the cream cheese frosting first, and then as I tucked into the garnet sponge of the cake, DWH asked me whether Baby Harper had sent me the photographs. I concentrated on the moist crumb of the cake. I thought about how its flavors—butter, cocoa, and vanilla—had no relationship to its flamboyant color. Red was a decoy, a red herring, and with each bite there was a disconnect between expectation and reality. That was the main source of the cake’s charm.

“Linda
mint
, did you
cannedgreenbeans
hear
hardboiledegg
me?” DWH asked.

I nodded my head.

“I’d asked Baby
honey
Harper
celery
to send them to you
cannedgreenbeans
,” she continued.

My heart was in my ears. Its beats were almost drowning out DWH’s voice.

“Thomas
orangeNehi
loved
Nestea
her. I know
grapejelly
he did. That’s why you
cannedgreenbeans
came to be with us,” DWH began.

The story of my life, according to DeAnne Whatley Hammerick, began in the fall of 1955, thirteen years before I was born. Young Thomas, twenty-three years old, was in his third and last year of Columbia Law when he met a young woman named Mai-Dao. She was twenty years old and a senior at Barnard. She was a rare bird in his eyes. Young Thomas told her that he was from the South. She told him that she was from the South too. He, unlike many Americans at the time, knew that her country had been partitioned into North and South just the year before. Well, I would have never known; you don’t have even a trace of a southern accent, he replied in his leisurely drawl. Then, he fell in love right there on the steps of Low Memorial Library, while the corridor of trees, which led from the street into the wide plaza before them, turned colors. He fell in love, even though Mai-Dao had told him that she was engaged to a young man back home. The school year ended, and she returned to her hometown and young Thomas to his. Before she left New York City, she gave him the photographs of their time together. What she couldn’t say to him was that she couldn’t keep the photographs. These things, if kept, were always found. They traded their mailing addresses, and he, like a teenage girl, promised to write. He did. He wrote to her many times after he returned home to Charlotte, once after he moved to Shelby, and one more time in 1960, on the day that he moved into the blue and gray ranch house in Boiling Springs with his new bride. Mai-Dao, like a teenage boy, didn’t reply.

Over the years, as the name of Mai-Dao’s country became a household word even in Boiling Springs, Thomas couldn’t see the news of her country’s civil war, the deployment of U.S. troops there, and the body bags that returned without thinking of her. In 1968, the year that she gave birth to me, though he didn’t know that back then, he thought of her as he watched her hometown—it was the southern capitol, so he thought that it would keep her safe—exploding on his television set. He hoped that she was far away from there. He imagined her back in New York City. He tried to imagine how her world had changed. He tried not to think about her, a married woman, as he was a married man.

On April 30, 1975, Thomas and DeAnne sat riveted in front of their television set as Dan Rather announced that Saigon was “now under Communist control.” DeAnne remembered her husband closing his eyes and keeping them shut as he listened to the reporter announcing that Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The letters addressed to Thomas began arriving at the blue and gray ranch house soon after. They were postmarked Chapel Hill, so DeAnne wouldn’t have paid much attention to them, except for the foreign name in the return address.

Then came the telephone call on the night of July 5. It was 11:30 p.m., and DeAnne and Thomas were already side by side in bed. Thomas hung up the receiver and ran out of the house, still in his pajamas. DeAnne heard her husband’s car door slam shut. When she heard his car door open, it was 4
P.M
. the following day. She went to the front door of the blue and gray ranch house, and I was asleep in his arms.

Thomas had to tell DeAnne the story of my birth mother’s life, or what he knew of it. That was DeAnne’s precondition for agreeing to my adoption. DWH, the truth teller now, told me that she, in fact, didn’t feel like she had a choice. Thomas had already made up his mind. She might as well get the whole story in the process, DeAnne thought. She also thought that it would be better (for her) if she made the decision then and there to believe that what her husband, Thomas, was telling her was true.

DeAnne asked to see the photographs. Then she asked to see the letters. She told Thomas that he had to throw everything away. He promised her that he would. He didn’t. After he passed away, she found the photographs in his office. The letters she didn’t find there. DWH said that when Thomas showed the letters to her she couldn’t bring herself to read them. The handwriting was all curves and delicate loops, and all she could imagine was the body of the woman who wrote the words. DeAnne made Thomas read the letters aloud to her. So as I slept in the guest bedroom of their house, Thomas and DeAnne sat at the kitchen table and talked for the remainder of the day.

Mai-Dao wrote her first letter to Thomas on May 1, 1975, one day after the fall of Saigon. Mai-Dao had been in Chapel Hill for almost a year already. Her husband, Khanh, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Saigon, was a postdoctoral fellow at UNC, and after much bribing and string-pulling back in Saigon, she and their six-year-old daughter had been able to join Khanh in September of ’74. Mai-Dao took with her to Chapel Hill the last letter that Thomas had sent to her in Saigon. Since the first day of her arrival in his home state, she had been taking mental notes of what she liked about his South, so that she could share them with him. Then she reread his letter, dated December 10, 1960—
he’d written to her on our wedding day, Linda
—and the letter reminded Mai-Dao that she knew nothing about his life in the fourteen years since then. Thomas must be a very different man now, Mai-Dao thought. So she set aside the idea of writing to him and tried as best as she could to settle into her new temporary home, a trailer that Khanh had rented for them in order to make the most of his small monthly stipend. She thought it was a storage shed when they first drove up to it. The interior was the size and width of a corridor in the three-story villa that her father had given to them as a wedding present back in Saigon. Khanh reminded her of how lucky they were to be here and not there.

That became her mantra in the months to come: lucky to be here and not there. She enrolled her daughter in the first grade and was amazed at how quickly a young child could pick up a new language, like it was just a shiny new toy. Mai-Dao audited classes in the art history department of UNC and thought often about traveling up to New York City and seeing the Metropolitan Museum of Art again and, of course, her beloved Central Park. Khanh told her that there was no money for such a pleasure trip. She looked at her husband, amazed at how the young man who had shown up for their dates in a chauffeured car had changed. She couldn’t have imagined that he would become so serious and practical, with worry lines cut deep into his forehead. Lucky to be here and not there, she reminded herself. She went to the library and checked out a cookbook—the first one she had ever read—and fed her husband and daughter American-style meals, which the cookbook author, Betty Crocker, assured her were both economical and nutritious. Mai-Dao wasn’t a very good cook, so every once in a while she and her daughter would go to the supermarket and indulge in the American snack foods and sodas that she had missed so dearly when she was in Saigon. “Thomas, did you know that there is a soda in Vietnam that tastes exactly like Dr Pepper?” Mai-Dao asked, in the first of her eight letters to him.
I don’t know why, Linda, but that always stuck in my head. Maybe because of your grandma. You know how she drank that stuff like water
.