Bitter in the Mouth (17 page)

No, Iris, it never did.

DeAnne was playing a role. When I first became Linda, I wanted to tell her that “Mom” tasted of chocolate milk and that I loved chocolate milk. It quenched my thirst, made me feel full, and tasted like candy. I thought it was a magical potion for doing all three things at once. When I stopped calling her “Mom,” I missed the word. DeAnne, though, was visibly relieved. I no longer caught her being startled by the sound of my voice calling her something that she tried to get used to, but never did.

DeAnne and Thomas were both forty-three years old when I became their only child. Why they never had children of their own was a topic that was also never discussed in my family. (When I think back to all the ellipses that we all nurtured like family pets, I’m amazed that my family had anything left to say to one another.) DeAnne must have thought that the question of children had been already decided by the time I came along.

Now that my own body has answered the question of children for me, I find myself wondering if it was his body or hers that failed them. I would guess it was Thomas. If DeAnne was the infertile one, he would have left her. Men do that. They replace broken women with whole ones. Women replace broken men too, but more often they try to fix them, mend their bones, lick clean their wounds. DeAnne probably agreed to my adoption in order to keep Thomas by her side so that she could continue to do those things for him with the hope that he would become whole again or become so broken that he would have no choice but to stay by her side.

After my surgery, I thought that Leo and I could still form a family. I said to him that we could adopt a child. He said to me that he wanted biological children. Leo said
this
to me. Those words, unthinking and unfeeling, shot from his mouth.

Kelly wrote that I should be thankful that Dr. Leo was an asshole. She was right. If Leo hadn’t insisted that I have a full medical checkup before we announced our engagement—his physician version of a prenuptial—I would have died. I hadn’t seen an OB/GYN since my freshman year of college, when I went to Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for birth control pills, which soon became an ill-advised method of contraception in the full-blown age of AIDS. In the twelve years since then, I hadn’t gone for my annual exams. The men I had sex with wore condoms. I was young. I felt healthy. I had no family medical history to guide or warn me about the possible future of my body. Leo was visibly disturbed when he heard that I had been so remiss. As it turned out, he was equally disturbed by the fact that I was adopted. To Dr. Leo, I was a twenty-nine-year-old ticking time bomb with my deactivation wires not clearly color-coded. He was right. After my pelvic examination, the OB/GYN ordered a CT scan, which confirmed that there was a mass on one of my ovaries. I was checked into the hospital a week later for an oophorectomy. During the surgery both my ovaries were removed because the surgeon found an abnormality, which hadn’t been visible in the CT scan, on the other ovary as well.

While I was in the hospital, Leo signed a lease for an apartment on the Upper West Side. Three weeks to the day that I came home to the brownstone that he and I shared in Chelsea, he sat down by the side of our bed and said that he was ending our relationship, that the movers were scheduled to come tomorrow from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, and that I could keep the Nelson lamps but that he was taking the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, the Noguchi coffee table, and the Knoll love seat. All of the furniture that Leo had brought with him to the brownstone that we had lived in for the past three years had last names. He was a man fixated on provenance. This was a sign, a blinking neon pig of a sign, that I had ignored. Leo then asked me to give back the extra set of keys to his family’s cabin in the Berkshires. I still thought that he was kidding, so I didn’t even have the wherewithal to ask, “What’s her name?”

I was a senior associate in a large law firm in New York City. I had full health benefits and a generous medical leave policy. I had a retirement fund and an investment portfolio. I owned the first two floors of a brownstone. Leo, before leaving the next day with the movers, listed these facts for me in that order. Then the diagnostician in him concluded, “Linda
mint
, I know
grapejelly
you’ll be fine.”

Kelly was right. Dr. Leo was an asshole. He saved my life and then he judged it useless to him.

Since leaving Boiling Springs, I was often asked by complete strangers what it was like to grow up being Asian in the South. You mean what was it like to grow up
looking
Asian in the South, I would say back to them with the southern accent that had revealed to them the particulars of my biography. My tweaking of their question often left them perplexed or annoyed, as if I were playing some irritating semantic game with them. For me, pointing out to them the difference between “being” and “looking” was the beginning, the middle, and the end of my answer. I would rarely offer them more.

I was still taken aback, startled, I suppose, that it was the outside of me that so readily defined me as not being from here (New Haven, New York, New World) nor there (the South). How could I explain to them that from the age of seven to eighteen, there was nothing Asian about me except my body, which I had willed away and few in Boiling Springs seemed to see anyway.

If Boiling Springs had been a larger town, it wouldn’t have been possible. But Boiling Springs wasn’t. The dwindling population there was small and insular enough to behave as one microorganism. These were the adults of Boiling Springs. (Their children, as children always do, had other ideas.) More specifically, these were the white men and women of Boiling Springs. My schoolteachers, until the time I was in high school, were white women. My school-bus drivers from elementary school to middle school were old white men who had retired from some other job. My father’s colleagues from his law firm were all middle-aged white men. DeAnne’s friends were all middle-aged white women. Iris and Baby Harper seemed only to have each other.

There was, of course, a parallel adult world in my hometown that I came into contact with, but only in passing. These black men and women knew of me too, especially the women. When DeAnne would take me with her to the Piggly Wiggly or to Hudson’s department store, the women who worked there looked at me with eyes that always made me uncomfortable. These women actually saw me, and what they wondered about me—why one of my own hadn’t taken me in—made their hearts tender. The lunch ladies, with their hairnets and their plastic smocks, looked at me the same way. As did my father’s secretary who lived on Goforth Road. The school janitors, the old men who pumped gas into my family’s car, the middle-aged ones who cut our lawn before and after Bobby, the mailman. I learned early on not to meet their eyes, dark and deep as a river. If I saw them, I would have to see myself. I didn’t want a mirror. I wanted a blank slate.

The word must have come down from the pulpits. The Southern Baptists, the Episcopalians, and the small band of Catholics were all in on the pact. They vowed to make themselves color-blind on my behalf. That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I became a blind spot in their otherwise 20–20 field of vision. They heard my voice—it helped that I came to them already speaking English with a southern accent, which was the best and only clue that I had about my whereabouts before Boiling Springs—but they learned never to see me. It was an act of selective blindness that was meant to protect me from them, or perhaps it was the other way around. They knew that if they saw my face they would fixate on my eyes, which some would claim were almond-shaped and others would describe as mere slits. If they saw my hair, they would marvel at how straight and shiny it was or that it was limp and the color of tar. If they saw my skin, they would understand why they basked their bodies in the heat of the southern sun, though some would ask themselves how DeAnne could ever be sure that I was washed and clean. If they saw my unformed breasts, the twigs that were my arms and legs, the hands and feet small enough to fit inside their mouths, how many of the men would remember the young female bodies that they bought by the half hour while wearing their country’s uniform in the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, or South Vietnam? Complicit, because they would rather not know the answer to that question, the mothers and sisters and wives of these men looked right through me as well. Instead of invisibility, Boiling Springs made an open secret of me. I was the town’s pariah, but no one was allowed to tell me so. In Boiling Springs, I was never Scout. I was Boo Radley, not hidden away but in plain sight.

The children of Boiling Springs had their own idea of how to welcome me to town. They were never fooled by my new name. “Linda Hammerick” was a mask only until I said, “Here.” Then they would turn around and silently mouth “Chink” or “Jap” or “Gook” at me, so that our teacher wouldn’t hear. Clever monsters, my classmates were, though not original. I had come to the blue and gray ranch house with those epithets already in me, yet another clue of where I had been before. As in the adult realm, the children’s behavior toward me was dictated by some accord deep within them that I didn’t understand until much later in our lives. The black girls in my class
never
called me a name other than “Linda.” They knew that the other names were meant to insult me, to punch holes into me, and make me fall down.

I understood, without really understanding, that “Chink” and “Jap” and “Gook” were intimately connected to how the children saw my body. I knew because of the gestures that accompanied these words. At recess, when fewer teachers were around, my classmates would pull up the outer corners of their eyes for “Chink” and pull down the corners for “Jap.” Precise and systematic, these children were. There was also a rhyme that they recited that intertwined foreignness with an unclean and sexualized body.

Chinese, Japanese
Dirty knees,
Look at these!

Emily Dickinson, these monsters were not.

Their choreography, albeit communicative, was also pedestrian. They accompanied the second line of their rhyme with fingers pointed at their knees, and with the last line they used their small hands to pull out two tents from their shirts, at the loci of their own nonexistent breasts. Martha Graham, they were not either. But with what glee would they perform this for me.

Bravo, my little children. Who taught you these words? I had to figure it out for myself—because no one in my family ever told me—that your parents must have been your teachers. You, their darling little parrots, had become the mouthpieces for all that these men and women couldn’t say aloud to me or to Thomas or DeAnne or Iris or Baby Harper but were free to say in front of their own children within the high walls of their own houses. If I hadn’t come to Boiling Springs, whom would you have said these words to? You would have had to save up all the “Japs,” “Chinks,” and “Gooks” until another unsuspecting stranger came to town or when you grew up and ventured to metropolitan Raleigh or Charlotte or even farther afield for a job. When hard-pressed, you might have even used these words against a Cherokee, a Lumbee, or a Croatan. But there was no need to misapply the words in that way, because when I came to Boiling Springs the diversity drought was over. What joy I must have given you so early on in your lives. When you think back on your childhood, you must think fondly of me.

High school changed everything. What had begun as an untoward, heightened interest in my physical presence rapidly dissipated into a kind of non-seeing, the kind that their parents had professed to strive for but never achieved. I had no role to play within the romances, the dramas, and the tragedies that my classmates’ hormones were writing for them. I was never considered a heroine, love interest, vixen, or villainess. Even Kelly assigned me the role of secret confidante and then audience member. To be the Smartest Girl in my high school was to be disembodied, which was what I thought I had wanted all along. I was the Brain. Everyone else around me became their bodies. The girls with the large breasts and long dancer legs became cheerleaders and Homecoming Queen. The boys with the throwing arms and the runner’s calves became football players and Quarterback. It was a kind of fate that most of them embraced, including Kelly. I watched it all from a distance, which didn’t give me objectivity or clarity. It just made me lonely.

When we first met, I tried to tell Leo about my childhood in Boiling Springs. He said that these experiences meant that I did know what it was like
being
Asian in the South. For a soon-to-be psychiatrist, he wasn’t a very good listener. No, Leo, I knew what it was like
being
hated in the South. Leo would have me equate the two, equate my body with what others have projected onto it. I won’t. (Like my great-grandfather Graven Hammerick, I’m an optimist at heart.) I believed, and still do, that this state of
being
that I was trying to understand had content and substance separate and apart from what Boiling Springs had taught me.

I’m a Tar Heel born,
I’m a Tar Heel bred,
And when I die
I’m a Tar Heel dead
.

I
CAN STILL HEAR
B
ABY
H
ARPER SINGING
. S
OMETIMES HE WOULD
sing a hymn. More often, he was singing his version of the blues. The words were worried in his mouth, and then cracked open like melon seeds and made so generous that his whole life story could fit inside each syllable. You should hear what the humble “Tar” could hold within it. He taught me the words to this song but never taught me what “Tar Heel” meant. So at the age of seven, I thought that the lyrics were about a woman wearing some kind of high-heeled shoes. In school I would learn that the song was the unofficial anthem of the state of North Carolina, and that “Tar Heels” was the nickname for the farmers who supplemented their subsistence income by boiling down pine sap to make tar. I also learned that the song was a rousing, thigh-slapping manifesto of statehood and loyalty and specifically of the reputation of these farmers for standing their ground on the battlefields during the Civil War. Baby Harper’s rendition was all about fate.

After a week’s worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the streets of the city were filled with bright yellow cars that you hopped in and out of at will and that would take you wherever you wanted to go. In this city, there were sidewalks overflowing with people from the whole world over who wanted so much to be
there
. He told me of its neighborhoods, with names like Greenwich Village and Harlem and Chinatown. At the nucleus of these stories was my father, and spinning around him was the city of New York. Long before I would see them in photographs or in real life, my father had given me the white crown lights of the Chrysler Building and the shining needle of the Empire State. His words triggered incomings after incomings, but I was enthralled, finally enchanted by what he was saying to me. His stories rarely had a plot, no character development to speak of—no one evil or good or beautiful or wicked—and the stories rarely had an ending or any kind of a resolution. My father’s stories were mostly descriptions of people, places, and things. Impressionistic and episodic, they would often begin with a statement of fact, which nonetheless seemed improbable and fantastical to me then.
In the city of New York, the trains run underground
. My father would then pinpoint a specific memory and offer it to me like a perfectly preserved butterfly so that I could examine the miracle of its wings.
Early one morning on the IRT—the train line that ran underneath the west side of the island—I saw an old woman sitting with a wicker basket by her feet. She reached down and took out of the basket a china teapot and a cup, and she asked the young man sitting next to her if he wanted some tea
. From the very beginning, I had the feeling that my father and the young man in his stories were one and the same.
The young man thought about it for a quick second and then he said yes. She poured him a cup. She handed it to the young man, and he took a sip and said, “Thank you very much.” Of course, no liquid of any kind had come from the pot
.

I was fascinated by these stories because he, the storyteller, was fascinated by them too. Sometimes Thomas would pause for what seemed like a long time trying to find just the right words. At least that was what I thought he was doing. I don’t know why he stopped telling these stories to me. Maybe he ran out of them. But by the end of our first summer together, my father no longer came to my room at bedtime to lull me, if not to sleep, then to a faraway place, where he was Prince Charming, by the sheer fact that he was there.

Of course, I had an easier time falling asleep after the stories stopped. But I missed them. Missing the storyteller was worse. I made up another game to pass the time between darkness and sleep. I would imagine myself with the young man on the IRT, with him on the sidewalk, both of us staring up at the Empire State Building, with him in a taxi as it navigated us through the streets of a city built of glass. I saw us there clear as day.

Maybe this was why I wasn’t surprised when I saw the photographs. I was surprised by their existence, certainly, but not of the scenes that they depicted. I experienced instead an odd and impossible feeling, as if I were reliving them. Young Thomas, handsome and fresh-faced (by that I mean that he was lit up from within), standing by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, beside him a young woman whom I didn’t know but whom I recognized. Young Thomas, smiling and his hair disheveled, as if he had been running against the wind, sitting on the cascade of steps in front of Columbia’s Low Library, next to him the same familiar woman’s face and body. Young Thomas—this time alone—in his law school graduation gown, a hand resting on the marble and granite base of
Alma Mater
, her outsize, sculpted feet barely visible at the top edge of the photograph. There were only twelve of them, these black-and-white images of another Thomas. They came to me tucked inside of a large envelope that was probably once white but had since ivoried.

In a box, marked
HANDLE WITH CARE
, my great-uncle Harper had also sent me four H.E.B.’s, though these were not numbered on the spines to indicate their place within the chronology of his life. When Leo saw me taking them out of the box, he asked who had sent me their old wedding albums. I had never thought of the H.E.B.’s in that way. In other words, I had never really seen them for what they were. All the H.E.B.’s were white and embossed with doves, and occasionally there were roses. I laughed out loud, thinking of how that must have been Baby Harper’s idea of a joke all along.

Postmarked Boiling Springs, the box arrived in New York City in November of ’97. Leo and I were still living in the brownstone in Chelsea. We were just beginning our discussion, which turned into a negotiation, about getting engaged. We had been dating for almost seven years and living together for two of those years. He was fully Dr. Leo by then, having just completed his residency in psychiatry. (Kelly had dubbed him
that
from the start of our relationship; her coupling of his professional title with his first name turned out to be a succinct and prescient characterization of his ego and his hubris.) Why therapy or analysis wasn’t eventually stipulated as part of our medical prenuptial was a mystery to me. Maybe Dr. Leo thought he was fully capable of making all the necessary mental health assessments for himself. Maybe he thought that the “depression” that silenced me for days could be managed by a prescription or two. That our nights of sleep interrupted by my mumbled cries of “Fire!” would go away with medication as well. And of equal importance to Leo, that the awkwardness that I exhibited in front of his mother and father and older brother would dissipate the next time we gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, just the five of us seated around a table so large that when we spoke to one another we had to raise our voices, as if in anger, in order to be heard.

Leopold Thomas Benton—I may have fallen in love with him for his middle name as well—came from a small family, which was part of his appeal. When I realized that his only brother was unmarried and probably would remain so, given his personality, I knew that there would be no nieces and nephews to scream my name aloud at every family gathering. The fact that both his father and mother were the only children within their families was an heirloom that I couldn’t have foreseen but greatly cherished. This meant that Leo had no cousins with their attendant families milling around his parents’ Beacon Hill home, the place where he was headed when we met on the New York–to–Boston train. Leo grew up in this four-story brick row house that had been in his family since it was built, in 1795, and whose front steps and cornflower-blue painted door were now photographed by straying members of tour groups, who swarmed the streets of Beacon Hill coveting American history, the Boston Brahmin edition. What I hadn’t anticipated was that Leo’s distinguished but sparse family tree meant that he would want to add to it, to make it fuller with new leaves.

Of my family, I had told Leo mostly about Baby Harper, because I loved saying his name aloud. Leo’s eyes flashed brightly when he first learned of my great-uncle’s nickname. Leo said that it was a clear example of how my family had sanctioned and prolonged the infantilization of my great-uncle. I looked at Leo and thought, You had to go to medical school to learn
this?
Of course it was, Dr. Leo. My grandmother Iris had to keep her younger brother a child because if he became a grown man she would have to see whom that man desired and that would have shamed her. Everyone in my family knew this, and none of us were doctors except for the juris doctorate kind. Leo never had a sense of humor when I joked with him about how there were in fact two doctors in our brownstone. Leo said that a doctor in law was like a mother-in-law. What he meant was that both didn’t count for much.

Leo had heard about Baby Harper but had never met him in person because my great-uncle, after his first flight to New Haven, became a traveling man. Sometimes with Cecil but more often on his own, my great-uncle was seeing the world. The world he chose to see surprised me. I thought he would be like my grandfather Spartan and head to Europe for the Western-civilization highlights. Baby Harper went instead to South America. During my first year of law school, I received a postcard sent from Cartagena that said, “You got into Columbia and so did I! But they spell it a bit differently here.” Baby Harper added that he had longed to see this part of the world ever since reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

My great-uncle traveled the way that people used to travel. He would dress in a suit and tie for his airplane flights. I offered to send his fedora back to him so that he could complete his ensemble, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would stay for a month or longer in one city, taking his time to see what was in the guidebooks and what wasn’t. Baby Harper never sent me an e-mail, which gave me the great privilege of opening up a physical mailbox and finding his handwriting floating on the other side of a sandy beach or behind the façade of a church. He claimed that he was too old to learn new languages, so instead he familiarized himself with the literature that had been translated into his own language. The librarian in him came out of retirement and steered him to the English translations of José Donoso’s
The Obscene Bird of Night
before he flew off to Santiago, Chile; to Eduardo Galeano’s
The Book of Embraces
prior to his two months in Montevideo, Uruguay; and to Clarice Lispector’s
The Hour of the Star
before leaving for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Baby Harper was sixty-six years old when he began his life as a traveler in late August of 1990. His subsequent journeys were scheduled from mid-January to the end of August. He preferred to be in Boiling Springs for the beautiful autumn days that North Carolina offered up to its inhabitants as a reward for surviving the summer. He also wanted to be home for the trifecta of American holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. Also, Cecil was unwilling to travel during that time of the year because the Home of Eternal Rest tended to be busiest during the holiday season. Apparently, the following was a classic quip among morticians—people in the funereal business would never circulate a “joke”—that Cecil shared with Baby Harper: “If Thanksgiving doesn’t seal the deal, Christmas will.”

Baby Harper also stayed in Boiling Springs during the holidays to make sure that DeAnne wasn’t alone. When she realized that their roles had reversed—he was in a committed relationship and she was the one on her own—she retreated into the blue and gray ranch house and refused the first of his many invitations to Thanksgiving dinner at the Greek Revival. “Cecil will be cooking” was how my great-uncle Harper came out to his niece in the autumn of 1987. It was a sentence so simple and complicated all at once. Words are like that, I thought, as his voice on the telephone informed me of DeAnne’s reaction. My great-uncle was trying to make light of the situation, but I could tell that he was hurt by DeAnne’s refusal. His voice had the same quality that it had had right after Iris had passed away. It sounded like he had pebbles in his mouth.