Bitter in the Mouth (18 page)

DeAnne didn’t join Baby Harper and Cecil at their holiday table until Thanksgiving of 1990. I think her change of heart had to do with Baby Harper flying away earlier that same year, to my college graduation in May, then to Cartagena in August. DeAnne must have been as shocked as I was at Baby Harper’s full embrace of air travel. Perhaps she was more shocked at being truly alone in Boiling Springs.

Did it feel like gravity was no longer the law of the land, DeAnne? How the forested hills and the cultivated fields no longer held you to them. Their history and memories were no longer yours, which made your body so light that you floated and drifted, which wasn’t the same as flying and soaring. Did you want to hold on to someone’s hand so that Boiling Springs would come back into view?

Baby Harper’s description of their first Thanksgiving together made me wish that I had been there for him. Cecil had attempted a new recipe that called for deep-frying the turkey, which when done improperly made the twenty-pound bird shrivel up to the size of a roasted chicken. DeAnne didn’t talk to Baby Harper or Cecil for most of the meal, except when Cecil brought out his usual spread of three kinds of pie: the traditional pumpkin, a pecan (a nod to his late mother’s Texas roots), and his personal favorite, a lemon meringue. It was the lemon meringue that finally brought words out of DeAnne’s mouth, and they weren’t kind. According to Baby Harper, DeAnne was channeling Iris that day. As Cecil presented her with the third of her dessert options, DeAnne said, “Oh, my, I had no idea we were celebrating Easter today.”

That did it.

Cecil placed the antique silver pie server, which Baby Harper had bought for him as a third-anniversary present, down on the table and calmly walked himself and his lemon meringue right out of the dining room of the Greek Revival. Cecil sat in the kitchen and ate the entire pie by himself while Baby Harper drove DeAnne home. She was only fifty-eight years old then, but her eyesight was that of a much older person. Her degenerative night blindness had made her dependent on Baby Harper that evening and, she knew, for many more evenings to come, which didn’t help to lighten her mood.

In the car, there was silence.

Baby Harper walked DeAnne to the front door of the blue and gray ranch house. Before going inside she gave him a note, which he said looked as if it had been held tightly in her hand the whole day.

“I forgive you,” DeAnne had written.

For what, Baby Harper wondered as he read those three words by the light above his rearview mirror. He could think of more than one thing that he had done in his life that would merit forgiveness in her eyes. He decided that it didn’t matter. He told me on the telephone that the note was DeAnne’s way of calling a truce. Baby Harper tore up the piece of paper and threw it confetti-like out of his car window as he drove home to the Greek Revival, where he would apologize long into the night and all through the weekend to Cecil.

In 1990, I, unlike DeAnne, had again declined my great-uncle’s invitation to join him and Cecil for Thanksgiving. I told my great-uncle that I needed to stay in New York City to study, that if I didn’t, my first year of law school might be my last, and that I would call him again soon to see how it all went. I had changed our routine from a call once a week to a call twice a week because seeing him in person in New Haven had told me something that his voice on the telephone hadn’t—that Baby Harper was getting old.

I then caught a train to Boston because I didn’t want to be in the dorms with the foreign students and the handful of American ones, the strangers and the estranged. I had made a reservation at the Lenox, a hotel in downtown Boston that had a grand lobby with promising historical details and tall arrangements of fresh flowers and autumnal leaves, but whose rooms, at least the ones that I could afford, looked as if the life had been beaten out of them. I cried when I opened the door of my hotel room. I was thinking about Kelly’s most recent letter to me and about her addiction to making life-changing mistakes. “It’s now a habit I can’t kick,” she wrote. I hadn’t thought about my refusal to return to Boiling Springs as a habit, but it was. Like biting my fingernails or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, the act of not returning home had an ameliorative effect on my psyche. It had begun with the idea, new and fizzy in my eighteen-year-old brain, that family was a choice and not fate. If that were true, then I chose not to have a family. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not to.

Four years of choosing “not to” had brought me to that hotel room with its faded floral bedspread and carpeting the color of cigarette ash. I pulled down the covers and climbed into bed. There, in the dark, I said this in lieu of a prayer:

I miss my great-uncle Harper and his chosen family, Cecil.
I miss Kelly, closer to me than a sister.
I miss my father. For every reason and every thing.
I even miss my grandmother Iris
.

I added Iris because I, at the age of twenty-two, had just begun to understand how rare it was to have someone in my life who would never lie to me. DeAnne I didn’t miss because I knew so little about her. There it was, the full listing of the members of my family, and they were all in Boiling Springs, two of them already beneath its soil by then.

In the moment before sleep, I thought about the young man who had kept on finding another thing to say to me until the train pulled into South Station, when he asked for my phone number before saying goodbye. “Leo
parsnip,”
I said aloud to my hotel room. Then, as easy as taking another breath, I said it again.

The following November, I returned to Boston for the first of the seven Thanksgivings that I would spend with Leo and his family. We ate bland, hearty New England food together, and never did I see a deep-fried turkey or a lemon meringue pie on their table. I once made Leo livid by calling his mother “Goody Benton.” Not to her face, of course, but still I had crossed some sort of invisible WASP line with him. I tried to make it up to him by saying complimentary things to his mother, about her homemade cranberry sauce and her silver gravy boat. I picked out that vessel for commendation because “Benton” tasted of gravy, not the under-salted, defatted turkey gravy that Goody Benton served every year, but the milk gravy thick with crumbled pork sausage that southerners poured over our biscuits. I kept this factoid to myself and focused my comments instead on the curve of the handle and the gleam of the silver. Leo told me afterward that the gravy boat was a “sauceboat” and that it had been made by Paul Revere. Goody Benton probably thought that I was coveting her family heirlooms.

I decided that none of it mattered to me. Leo’s family was his and not mine. Mr. and Mrs. Benton—I wasn’t sure that even Leo knew their first names—were unfailingly polite but never enthusiastic toward me. Their older son, Collin, was enthusiastic enough for all of them. Collin was an investment banker who had spent a couple of years working and living in Hong Kong. He thought that meant that he and I would have an instant rapport. We had nothing in common. He, nonetheless, liked to touch the small of my back when guiding me through the rooms of his parents’ house. He always made sure to help me with my coat so that he could stand too close behind me. When we first met, Collin said that I reminded him of someone he used to date. After a couple of minutes in his company, I began to feel sorry for that unfortunate young woman.

In order to take Thanksgiving off as a long weekend every year, Leo the intern and then Leo the resident had to work on Christmas Eve and Day. Perhaps that was another reason I loved him. Leo’s restrictive schedule provided me with a convenient and deflected excuse for not going back to Boiling Springs for the holidays. My own school and then work schedule, that of an associate trying to make partner in eight years, kept me in New York City for the rest of the calendar year.

Baby Harper never gave up, though. At the beginning of every November, he would send me a Hallmark card—overflowing cornucopias, dimpled pumpkins, nonchalant turkeys—inviting me to “fly South” for Thanksgiving. So in 1997, when the box with the H.E.B.’s and the photographs of young Thomas arrived, I thought that my great-uncle was just trying a new tactic. He, of course, also included a greeting card, which I read first. When I took it from its bright orange envelope, I could hear my great-uncle hiccupping. The card featured a pudgy, round-faced little Native American girl holding hands with a pudgy, round-faced little Pilgrim boy.

Inside the card was a sheet of lined notebook paper on which Baby Harper had written on both sides. His letter began with the fact that he had finalized his travel plans (and reading list) for the upcoming year. From mid-January to mid-February of 1998, he and Cecil would be going to Buenos Aires, Argentina (Manuel Puig’s
Kiss of the Spider Woman)
, and then to Bogotá (Gabriel García Márquez’s
Love in the Time of Cholera)
, which would be a second trip to Colombia for my great-uncle and a first with Cecil. I knew that Baby Harper’s main frustration with Cecil was his unwillingness to leave the Home of Eternal Rest in the hands of his assistant director and travel more often. The length of their planned trip and the two destinations must have been quite the coup for Baby Harper. In the next line of his letter, my great-uncle explained how the tug of wills had been won. He wrote, “I said to Cecil, ‘Darling, your customers are already dead. What’s the worst that could happen to them?’”

My great-uncle’s use of “darling” jumped from the page, a frog becoming a prince. It made me think of Leo and how this word had never come from his pen or his mouth. I thought about reading the word aloud to myself. Then I thought it was better if I didn’t.

“Cecil gets highly disturbed,” my great-uncle continued, “when I insist on referring to his bread and butter as his ‘customers.’ CLIENTS, he’d correct me with all the indignity that he had suffered on their behalf. Then it dawned on me. Why have I been fighting with the dead when I should have been enlisting them as my allies? I let the topic drop until after dinner. Then, as we were sipping our decafs, I said to him, ‘You’ve got to see the world
for them
, Cecil.’”

That did it, according to my great-uncle Harper.

That sentence freed Cecil, or rather gave him another mission in life. His Home of Eternal Rest was the funeral home of choice for Cleveland County because Cecil, a.k.a. Mister T, possessed a profound empathy for the dead. He understood that their needs were different now. That what their surviving relatives wanted for them wasn’t what they would want for themselves. Those clients with very specific desires would write him a detailed letter and pay him in advance for their caskets, flowers, and burial plot so that the living couldn’t interfere. Cecil knew the lockets that women wanted buried with them—around their necks but tucked discreetly underneath their dresses—because the lockets held the memories of men who weren’t their husbands. He knew the creased photographs that men wanted placed inside their suit jackets, right-hand-side chest pockets, because that was where these faces—strangers to the rest of the families of the deceased—had long resided. Cecil knew of the flawed and stunted and secreted-away lives of his clients, and he knew that Baby Harper was on to something. These people would want to see a greater world than what they had known all their lives. He would see it for them.

Baby Harper ended his letter with a few lines about the contents of the box. “I’ve sent along some photographs,” he wrote. “I think we should go through them together. (Your divan or mine, Vista Girl?) I want you to live with them first, though.”

I spoke to my great-uncle Harper eight more times on the telephone. We never discussed the unnumbered H.E.B.’s or the photographs of young Thomas. Out of deference to my great-uncle, I was waiting for a time when we would both be in the same room again. I should have just said what was in my heart, which was, I love you more and more.

F
OR THE LOVESICK AND THE LOVELORN OF
C
HAPEL
H
ILL
, G
EORGE
Moses had a remedy. For twenty-five cents, he would reveal it to them. First he would feel the coolness of their coins in the palm of his hand. He would close his eyes to intensify the sensation. Freedom would feel like this, he told himself. Then George Moses opened his eyes and asked, “Is the gentleman ready?” The young man nodded his head, his pen and paper in hand, waiting for the spell that would make his beloved’s heart beat as fast as his. George Moses knew the beloved’s first name, the color of her hair but rarely the color of her eyes. Love was fallen into from afar, back then. With what he was given, George Moses composed a poem. The letters of the beloved’s name began each line:

Joy, like the morning, breaks from one divine—
Unveiling stream which cannot fail to shine.
Long have I strove to magnify her name
Imperial, floating on the breeze of fame.
Attracting beauty must delight afford.…

The young man’s pen flew across the piece of paper. He asked George Moses to repeat the poem so that he could be certain that he had copied down every word. George Moses did as he was asked. After the second recitation, the young man stifled a sigh. Later that night, he transcribed George Moses’s poem onto a piece of fine stationery, which would be discreetly delivered to the beloved. The young man marveled again at how the slave, who could neither read nor write, had captured the ecstatic rhythm of his heart. He wondered how the slave knew that her name came to him with the dawn. That when she entered his thoughts his body felt bathed in sunlight and immersed in rushing water all at once. That in those moments she enjoyed complete dominion over him, erasing from his memory all other smiling faces but her own. The young man, for a brief instance, felt jealousy. The slave
knew
his Julia. The thought came to him, then left him embarrassed by his own irrationality. The slave was a slave. He couldn’t possibly know his Julia.

That night George Moses placed the coins into his master’s palm. George Moses was allowed to keep only the five-cent piece. Tomorrow would bring him closer to his own beloved, George Moses thought. His work wasn’t done, though. Before sleep came for him, he composed a poem for another young man’s palpitations. Lucy was the cause. George Moses knew something that this young man didn’t. It was the third poem this week that George Moses had been paid to compose for the same Lucy. George Moses wondered which one she would care for best, which one she would read to herself at night, blushing deeply from her forehead to her bosom, and which one would free her heart.

In February 1998, I picked up my phone and heard my secretary’s voice saying, “Mrs. Hammerick
DrPepper
is on line one
breadandbutterpickles.”
I didn’t hesitate because I must have known. As DeAnne’s voice began to tell me about the telephone call that she had just received at the blue and gray ranch house, my fingers instinctively found their way to my computer’s keyboard. I clicked onto the CNN website, and there, in the terse wording of a developing news story, dateline February 16, 1998, was a plane crash over the coast of Colombia, all onboard feared dead.

“Linda
mint
, are you
cannedgreenbeans
there
applejuice?”
DeAnne asked.

I nodded my head.

“Linda
mint?”
she asked again.

“I’m still
sourcream
here
hardboiledegg,”
I said.

“There’s
applejuice
no
grapejelly
body
cannedmushrooms
, Linda
mint
. What am I supposed
gingerale
to do
grits?”

It took me a moment to understand what DeAnne was asking me. Her question was childlike and far from existential. After the passing of her husband and her mother, DeAnne knew what was required of her. The funeral arrangements gave her something concrete to do, even if in the case of Iris it only meant sitting by Baby Harper’s side as he made all the necessary calls. But now Baby Harper had gone and flown and none of him had made it back to Boiling Springs. What’s a funeral without a body or even a cup’s worth of ashes, was what DeAnne was asking me. She would have asked Mister T this question, but he had flown too.

We still have each other, was what I was thinking. I didn’t say it aloud because I wasn’t sure whether it answered DeAnne’s question and whether she would take it as a blessing or a curse. I wasn’t sure how I understood it either. So, instead, I said to her that I would get on a plane tomorrow and we would figure it out together.

“Linda
mint
, no
grapejelly!”
DeAnne said, her voice raised. “Please
lemonjuice
don’t take a plane
greenbellpepper
. For my sake
applepie
, drive
cannedbakedbeans
home
Pepsi
.”

“I’ll try
coleslaw
to get ahold of Leo
parsnip
. Maybe he can come
applebutter
with me. I’ll call
Doritoschips
you
cannedgreenbeans
right
Frenchfries
back
watermelon,”
I said.

“Please
lemonjuice
do
grits.”

Click.

“Mom
chocolatemilk?”
I said aloud for the first time in years.

DeAnne and I had last spoken to each other eleven years ago. That fact was less remarkable to me than the fact that we just had a conversation and the reason for it.

I didn’t want to call Leo at the hospital. I didn’t want to have to say the words to him. I picked up the phone and called Kelly instead. I tried the number at the Greek Revival first. I knew that she was house-sitting for Baby Harper and Cecil. I hoped she would be there because I didn’t know the phone number at her office or her apartment. She didn’t have any of my numbers either. We hadn’t thought about expediency. We hadn’t imagined that one day we would need to hear each other’s voice immediately, when even a letter, overnighted, would be too late. The phone rang five times, and then I heard her voice.

Dear friend, I thought.

I said the words to her. We sat there, 691 miles from each other, but as close as two human beings could hope to be. I heard her begin to cry, and I knew that meant I could begin too. I didn’t have to say that I was coming home. She knew that I would, and in between sobs she asked, “When?”

“As soon
Tang
as I can,” I replied. “DeAnne
cannedcranberrysauce
wants
saltedbutter
me to drive
cannedbakedbeans
. It’ll take a couple
friedokra
of days
hardboiledeggyolk.”

“Leo
parsnip?”
Kelly asked.

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“You
cannedgreenbeans
should
instantblackcoffee.”

“I will. Kelly
cannedpeaches?”

“Yes.”

“Baby
honey
Harper
celery
was in love
Nestea.”

“Your great
cannedtomatosoup
-uncle
dates
was luckier than most.”

“Amen
grapefruitjuice.”

Silence.

“Kelly
cannedpeaches,”
I said, “I better go
boiledcarrots
. I’m at work
NillaWafer
still
sourcream
. I’ll call you
cannedgreenbeans
as soon
Tang
as I know
grapejelly
more.”

I hung up the phone and I waited.

How long—a minute, an hour, the rest of day—before I would call Leo with the news of my great-uncle’s passing? What I was waiting for was the need to tell him. I sat at my desk until my secretary knocked on my door to ask if I wanted anything before she went home for the day. I sat there until the woman who came at night to empty the wastebaskets and vacuum the carpet knocked on the same door. I waved her in, wished her a good night, and headed out into the hallway. When I came back to my office, the message light was blinking on my phone. It was Leo. He had called from the hospital to ask when I was coming home tonight and whether I could stop by the drugstore and buy him some shampoo. The day-to-day enterprise of living together Leo and I did very well. We took care of each other, which I had thought was the same as saying we cared for each other. I called his cell phone.

“Linda
mint?”
Leo answered.

“It’s me,” I replied.

“Hi. I can’t talk
cornchips
for long
grapeNehi
. I just needed a couple
friedokra
of things
tomato
from the store
brancereal—”

“Baby
honey
Harper
celery
and Cecil
boiledshrimp
are dead
molasses
. Their
applejuice
plane
greenbellpepper
went down today
oatmeal.”

“Oh, my God
walnut
.”

God had nothing to do with it, I thought.

“DeAnne
cannedcranberrysauce
wants
saltedbutter
us to drive
cannedbakedbeans
to Boiling
parsley
Springs
lemonJell-O,”
I said.

“When?”

“I want
saltedbutter
to leave tomorrow
breakfastsausage.”

“Tomorrow
breakfastsausage?”

“Yes. Come
applebutter
with me.”

“Let me ask. But, Linda
mint
, I highly doubt
instantvanillapudding
it. I’m scheduled every
Ritzcracker
day
hardboiledeggyolk
for the next week and a half
brownie.”

“Right
Frenchfries.”

“Linda
mint?”

“Yes, Leo
parsnip.”

“I’m sorry
glazeddoughnut
for your loss
fruitcake.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll see you
cannedgreenbeans
tomorrow
breakfastsausage
morning
Hardee’scheeseburger
. We’ll figure
collardgreens
it out
strawberryjam
. OK?”

“OK.”

Leo was an attending psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s Hospital by then. He no longer had to work the twenty-four-hour shifts that he did as a resident, but he was still obliged to cover an overnight shift at least several times a week. On those days, he usually got home from the hospital by 7:40
A.M
. This gave us a half hour together before I left for the firm. We would sit at the kitchen table and trade bits of information about our lives. The state of the quart of milk in our fridge: sour, almost empty, we should try fat-free. The status of the dry cleaning: drop off, pick up, they lost two of your shirts. We would take out our calendars and find the next night when we would both be home for dinner and consider our options: order in, make a reservation somewhere, I’ll buy some steaks. We rarely had a disagreement. This wasn’t the same as we often agreed. Simply put, we had only a half hour, and a half hour wasn’t long enough for a fight. These were the metes and bounds of our committed relationship. We should proceed to the next step, we thought. We had to consult our calendars first, though.

The morning after Baby Harper and Cecil’s passing, I woke up with a pounding headache caused by the bottle of two-hundred-dollar Scotch that I had swallowed the night before in order to coax sleep. (Anyone who claims that expensive alcohol doesn’t cause a hangover is someone who hasn’t had enough of it to drink.) I opened my eyes, and the first words that came to me were “I’m sorry for your loss.” How could Leo have said this to me? Goody Benton probably taught him that corseted, bloodless expression of condolence. If I married Leo, wouldn’t I be Goody Benton too/II? For that brief moment when my mind drifted from Baby Harper to Leo, I felt a jolt of shame. My great-uncle had been dead for only a day, and I was already planning for a life without him.