Bitter in the Mouth (9 page)

The first time it was out of necessity. I was hungry and the casserole du jour was chicken à la king, my least favorite in DeAnne’s rotation. As she scooped it onto our plates, she announced its name, as if we had never seen this dish before. As usual, there were gray slices of canned mushrooms to which the thick, dun-colored sauce refused to adhere. A repulsion on a molecular level, perhaps. The sauce stuck to the egg noodles and the chicken pieces instead, lending its gluey, spongy texture to both the starch and the meat. I excused myself from the dinner table to go wash my hands, and then I, a skinny eleven-year-old, sat on the edge of the bathtub and blurted out, “Not again
pancakenosyrup.”

There it was. Sustenance. Simple. Without sauce.

Each repetition of “again” was a revelation. The faster I said it, the more intense and mouth-filling the taste became. Each repetition was a restitution for past meals suffered. Each repetition was an inoculation for future meals to be endured. I wanted to see how many times I would have to say the word in order to approximate the feeling of being full. I flipped on the bathroom fan so that no one would hear. Soon a knock on the bathroom door and my father’s voice saying my name in the form of a question made me stop short.

Why hadn’t I stumbled on this simple solution before? I had edged close to it. I had learned that the word could diminish and deflect. DeAnne’s favorite dinnertime rebuke, “selfish
cornonthecob,”
had already taught me that lesson. I was slower to understand that the word could also fulfill and satisfy. But let me ask this question. How old were you when you first touched yourself for the sake of pleasure? Your body and its attendant parts were always there, were they not? But we all have to learn how to use what we were born with for something other than the functional and the obvious. All of our bodies hold within them secret chambers and cells.

When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this “instant” baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn’t a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the Dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn’t bring myself to call what he had made for us “pancakes.” There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon. Leo told me that another word for pancakes was “flapjacks.” I couldn’t bring myself to call them that either, because “flapjacks” sounded to me like a euphemism for an uncircumcised penis (this objection I shared with Leo, which made him laugh and then, in typical male fashion, he asked me how many had I seen). I also didn’t like the word “flapjacks” because it tasted of sauerkraut (this objection I didn’t share with Leo, because how could I?). I settled on “griddle cakes,” two words that had no taste whatsoever. Voids.

Over the course of our almost eight-year-long relationship, Leo would understand that I had a sensitivity to words. He just never would understand why. He thought that I was too attuned to their sounds. Yes and no. He thought that I made too many associations between the words and tangential, wholly subjective concepts (see
flapjacks)
. Yes and no. He thought that I was clinically depressed. Leo thought everyone was clinically something. He was in his last year of medical school and had just finished his psych rotation when we first met. I had learned by then how to control my facial expressions. I no longer winced, for example, when I heard “prune” or “Powell” or “you” or any of the hundreds of words that I found literally distasteful. I couldn’t control, however, the cumulative effect of having to experience their incomings. So on those days when I had encountered too many of them, Leo would find that I was subdued and in search of a dark, quiet room. The opposite, of course, was also true (see
walnut
or
elephant
or
candle
or
jogger)
. My emotional lows and highs were therefore inexplicable and unpredictable to Leo.

Some people were smart like a diamond. Kelly, for example. Reflective, impressive clarity, beautiful to have around. When I was in college and especially in law school, I realized that the people around me were smart like a whip. Scarring, thought-clearing, exhilarating, and best to be avoided. Leo was a whip. He was hyperarticulate. His mouth was never quite able to keep pace with his brain. His gray cells pushed out his words, configured into perfectly constructed sentences, paragraphs, and pages. In this way, he was a variant on the singing-talker, a cappella. And like my great-uncle Harper, Leo chose me.

It was possible that I fell in love with Leo the moment he told me his first name, which tasted of parsnips, a peculiar vegetable, or rather a distinctive one:

A celery and a potato meet and have a love child. The celery departs soon thereafter, and the potato thinks of their fleeting time together with fondness and longing. Skating around the edges of their unlikely love affair is a McIntosh apple, contributing to the tableau all of its faint spiciness but none of its obvious sweet or sour.

Yes, it was very possible that I fell in love with his name first.

“Leo
parsnip,”
I remembered saying back to him and smiling.

The Amtrak train was pulling out of Penn Station. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the train from New York to Boston was packed. He was walking slowly through the crowded car trying to find an available seat. Before sitting down next to me, he said, “Hi
greenLifesavers
, my name
grapes
is Leo
parsnip
. Is this seat
rawcarrots
taken?” Unremarkable, except for the unnecessary volunteering of a first name. Quotidian. Banal. Except to me. My smile must have encouraged him to continue the conversation despite the headphones that I had over my ears. He mouthed, “What are you listening to?”

“Dolly Parton
Sweet’nLow,”
I replied.

He laughed.

I should have lied. I should have answered Bach or U2. I never told the truth about DP. Never. So, why had I without hesitation offered up the Madonna of my childhood to this stranger on a train? Thanksgiving, perhaps. Baby Harper was far away, and my body was moving even farther north. The slight rubbing of a stranger’s coat sleeve against mine. The taste of his name in my mouth. All these things were also possible answers.

I turned off my Walkman, took off my headphones, and Virginia Dared myself to ask him, “What’s
grahamcracker
so funny
cucumber
, Leo
parsnip?”

W
ILBUR
W
RIGHT WOULD REMEMBER THE SOUND OF THE WIND
rushing into him at thirty-one miles per hour as a song written only for him. Even as he was experiencing the sensation of speed—the coldest day in December he could ever imagine, his internal organs lurching forward telling him to go
faster, faster
—he knew the song would soon end. The question was how.

Wilbur, as his younger brother Orville had done just minutes before, was lying flat on his stomach, and above and below him were two flat fabric “wings” stretched tight over a delicate framework of wood. To those in the village of Kitty Hawk who had seen it but didn’t understand it, Wilbur was strapped inside of a giant box kite, a toy that these two well-mannered, well-dressed brothers had come to play with on the shores of the Atlantic, among the sand dunes and the wind gusts of the Outer Banks of the Old North State. This was the fourth time that the Wright brothers had come to Kitty Hawk, and each time they had kept to themselves except for the occasional trips into the village to buy food and supplies. The ladies of Kitty Hawk and their daughters had observed that neither Wilbur, the elder, with the balding, egg-shaped head, nor Orville, the younger, with the dashing mustache, wore a wedding band. The brothers were both a bit slight of build for some tastes, but all of Kitty Hawk were in agreement that these two men must be of independent means to have the time and the money to amuse themselves as they did. The daughters of Kitty Hawk understood, though, that these men had eyes only for the heavens above them. Wilbur, especially, was always looking up. Blue skies with billowy white clouds would make his plain, serious face cavort. He and Orville would exchange a quick, knowing look, and like lovers they were off to the beach. There in a shack, or a “hangar,” as the brothers called it, their true love waited for them. Wilbur and Orville gave every penny they made to her. They gave her their youth. She would make them immortal. She was 745 pounds, had a motor filled with fuel, and was ready for flight.

As Wilbur took in the village of Kitty Hawk from 852 feet up in the air, he thought for one second about the pact that he and Orville had entered into and for another second he felt fear. A third second was devoted to their father, Bishop Milton Wright of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and to his sermons about the Devil and the great and evil deeds that he allowed men to do in his name. This sequence of thoughts left Wilbur with fifty-six seconds remaining to fly unencumbered. He did. All the while, Wilbur was hearing his song.

From sixth to eighth grade, Wade the orange sherbet boy and I continued the conversation that I had started on the first day of sixth grade. We began the moment that we both got to the bus stop in the morning, and we ended five to seven minutes later, when the bus pulled up to the
SLOW CHILDREN
sign. What began with his repertoire of knock-knock jokes grew to include the pros and cons of his favorite arcade games, his thoughts on why basketball was better than football, and what small animals he had spotted while riding his bike around Boiling Springs. I told him about what I was reading, mostly Greek myths and about the constellations that went with them. I drew the stars for Wade on my notebook because when he and I talked they were hidden in the sky. I told Wade that if we had lived long ago we would have used these constellations to remember stories and to find our way home again when we sailed the seas. He said he had been to the Outer Banks and had seen the Atlantic Ocean and that he didn’t like its choppy waters. I said I hadn’t made up my mind, which really meant that I hadn’t seen anything larger than Moss Lake, landlocked and nearby.

Because there was always a known and dependable endpoint to our talks, I was able to enjoy them. I was also fast learning the art of hiding what was happening to me inside. If the incomings were particularly unpleasant—mornings were, and still are, the most difficult time for me as I’m more sensitive after a night of sleep and silence—I would pretend to look at something past Wade’s shoulders, behind me, or down at my shoes.

Later in life, I would find that this technique worked well for other reasons as well. Men would think that I was distracted, uninterested, or bored with them, and they would work even harder to get my attention. I had inadvertently tapped into the shallow recesses of the male psyche and into the instinct known as the Chase. The principles were simple, though many books have been written about them for consumption by lovelorn females. The first principle was that the most coveted Prey was the one that didn’t want to be caught (see such classics as
Catch Me If You Can
and
Foxes & Bunnies)
. The second principle was that the most coveted Prey was the one that was in someone else’s mouth (see
I’ll Have What He’s Having
and
First, You Date His Best Friend
).

Wade and I were precariously close but not yet part of the full-blown pursuit. Our morning exchanges of jokes, declaratives, and minutiae were our way of running around each other and sniffing at each other’s scent. Talking with Wade made me feel like I was dancing fast with my eyes closed. I was learning that I was willing to endure a lot of words to feel this way. My whole body was awake. I heard Wade’s voice, as I heard my great-uncle’s 45’s, with my skin. How Wade felt talking to me wasn’t a question that I had to ask myself or him because doubt, a toxin that entered my body at the onset of puberty, was miraculously absent. On these mornings, Wade and I were in the privacy of a small town with a dwindling population and a low birthrate. We had Oak Street to ourselves.

On the bus, during school hours, and among our classmates, Wade was a boy and I was a girl, indifferent to each other. We were all living through the last days of our gender segregation. Though pretty girls like Sally Campbell and fat ones like Kelly Powell had already divulged to their best friends that integration wasn’t only inevitable it was exceedingly desirable. For now, Wade and I kept to our assigned worlds even as we exited the bus in the afternoons. We were careful, as eyes were on us. We were cautious not to look at each other or to wave goodbye because it would have been a signal to the others.

On the last morning of seventh grade, Wade told me that he and his mother were going to Florida for the summer. His grandmother lived in Tampa, and she was lonely for her daughter and grandson. That was what his mother told him at the time. Then Wade asked me whether my heart was beating fast.

I answered yes. It was true, and it didn’t occur to me to lie.

He said that his was too.

I understood that in the coded language of late boyhood this meant that he was looking forward to seeing me in the fall, to resuming our morning talks, to feeling once again like he was riding his bike down a hill with his arms raised high above his head.

In law school, I would learn that translators, the ones who performed simultaneous translations for the United Nations, for instance, didn’t translate word for word. Instead, the translators would see an image in their heads as they heard language A, and then they would describe that image back using language B. That was what was happening to me. Two years’ worth of five to seven minutes a day, five days a week, had made me fluent in another language. I understood Boy or, at the least, I understood this boy. I smiled at him to let him know.

By the seventh grade, what had begun as the
Wade Report
had become the
Wade Daily News
. Kelly was the editor in chief, and I was the sole subscriber. It was a good and early lesson on why we shouldn’t believe all that we read. Kelly also continued to write
K+W
on all of her notebooks, a constellation with an accompanying myth. I saw it every day but that didn’t make it true. I understood then why the word “crush” was used to describe a one-sided bout of adoration. The object of her desire—her crush—was pressing down on a main artery, cutting off the blood flow to her brain. I was amazed by the degeneration. She was blessed with a lot of gray cells to begin with, so what was happening to her wasn’t as crippling as it could have been. Her fantasy life with Wade was undeniably rich and full and sustaining her through the last years of her invisibility and isolation. Kelly’s letters to me then were lit up with conjectures. He looked at her in the hallway. He dropped a pencil by her desk in math class. He looked happy yesterday on the bus; maybe he was thinking about her.

The flip side of Kelly’s constructed reality was her complete and irreversible silence about her cousin Bobby. She never talked about him, and I in turn had to do the same because she was the only one who knew. Her willed amnesia didn’t keep him from being present in my life. He was there every time I heard the whirr of a lawn mower or saw the wings of a bird spread for flight. Sometimes he was there when I looked at Kelly. That was the unexpected part, the haunting of one body by another body, the transference of culpability from the perpetrator to the one who had knowledge of the crime. Back then, all I understood was that sometimes when I looked at Kelly I felt a flash of hate. The saving grace—besides what Jesus did to Bobby—was that I never saw Bobby in Wade. When I looked at the orange sherbet boy, I never saw the same body. I never recognized the hands, the rise and fall of the chest, each intake quick and sharp.

I would recognize the monster, robber, blade, in plenty of other male bodies, though. My tenth grade algebra teacher, Pastor Reynold, Leo’s older brother—they all would show themselves to me in different ways. Sometimes their confessions were fast and intense and then quickly disappeared. The pastor’s eyes staring not into my soul but at my breasts, for example. More often their confessions were obvious and unrelenting. The algebra teacher’s hand on the small of my back every time I stood at the blackboard had nothing to do with simplifying an equation. Leo’s brother telling me stories from their childhood, ones that always ended with little Leo lying in a puddle of mud or crying, was another example.

When we reconvened at the
SLOW CHILDREN
sign, which was now not only insulting but also inaccurate, on the first morning of eighth grade, I looked at Wade and saw him through Kelly’s eyes. Wade was beautiful. My heart was beating fast even before he smiled. Travel had changed him. The distance between North Carolina and Florida had elongated his body. He was a whole head taller. His hair was sun-bleached from spending every day of the summer at the beach. His tanned skin was the same color as mine. Miraculously, we resumed the rhythm of our morning conversations, with their easy exchanges of unrelated topics and un-prioritized asides.

Over the next few weeks, though, it would become clear to me that the subjects that interested Wade had now changed. He told me about skateboarding, about bands that I had never heard on the radio, and, like my father, he dreamed aloud about New York City. Travel had made Wade worldly. In the parlance of thirteen-year-olds circa 1981, he was cool. He had crossed several state lines and lived in a city with more than one traffic light. He had seen television channels you had to pay for and spent many hours watching one called MTV, where songs had short movies to accompany them. In other words, Wade had time-traveled into the near future.

I had remained the same. I had spent the summer of ’81 reading the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy and
Seventeen
magazine. I understood that the former was a kind of mythology. It took me much longer to understand that the latter was one as well. The Beautiful American Girl was on every glossy page of
Seventeen
. I should have known that the magazine was a poisoned apple, seeing how it was my grandmother Iris who had given me the subscription. I was still the same girl. Kelly was the same girl too.

Kelly got on the bus, and as usual she could hardly breathe. She whispered in my ear, “Oh, my God
walnut
!” She squeezed my arm tighter and tighter as the bus got closer to school. She didn’t dare to turn her head around for her usual glimpses of her intended, who had become so beautiful that he was almost otherworldly.