DeAnne had been reading a self-help book entitled Mothers Who Don’t Know How to Mother, and she was pages away from the last chapter, “Aging and the Inevitability of Kindness.” Upon hearing her mother’s self-diagnosis, DeAnne must have gone up to the second-floor bathroom of her childhood home, turned on the faucets, and cried. (I was very familiar with DeAnne’s belief that the sound of running water could hide grief.) After that was when DeAnne had called me and told me to take an airplane home.
I found DeAnne’s book—a dog-eared page told me where she had stopped reading—in the kitchen garbage. (I was also familiar with DeAnne’s belief that the trash could make things disappear.) The book was waterlogged, as if DeAnne had tried to drown it. She might have. Or she might have just dropped it, her hands clumsy from grief, into the overflowing tub. I knew that she was ashamed that she had bought the book in the first place. My father would have told her it was rubbish. No one can tell you how to live your life, DeAnne! Personal accountability was my father’s religion. Southern Baptist was just his social circle. When my father had passed away, my great-uncle Harper and I thought that DeAnne would turn into another Iris. But so far, there had been no change in hairstyle, no weight gain. On the outside, DeAnne had stayed exactly the same.
On a bright February morning, I stood with DeAnne and Baby Harper by Iris’s bedside. Is this all, my grandmother must have asked God as she looked up at our three faces. DeAnne, widowed. Alone. Baby Harper, never married. Alone. Linda … and that was when my grandmother said the last thing that she would say to me, her only grandchild. Iris’s words—What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two—slipped out of her mouth, uncontrollable and unstoppable, like how all those fried pieces of glazed dough had slipped into that same hole.
My grandmother died the following morning. Valentine’s Day would never be the same for us, the two Hammericks and the one Burch who remained. The red puffy hearts that decorated the shop windows and the Hallmark cards would remind us of the seventy-four-year-old one that had constricted and failed. For us, the fourteenth of February was from then on Iris’s Day, and she wasn’t even a saint.
About a month after my grandmother’s funeral, I was in the middle of a freshman literature seminar, Dysfunctionalia: Novels of Misspent Southern Youths and Their Social Context, 1945 to the Present, and I was trying to focus on the discussion of the lesbian subtext in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, when the tears began to fall. I was crying not out of regret for what I had said to my grandmother but for not staying longer by that old dying woman’s bedside. Another minute and her lids would have opened and her lips might have followed. Another minute and a little skeleton key might have fallen out of her mouth, rejected at last by a body ridding itself of what it didn’t want to take to the grave. But now several feet of Carolina dirt and an air-locked coffin had turned that minute into something immeasurable.
I excused myself and walked out of the seminar room. The room was an aviary-like space in a Gothic Revival tower, one of many architectural pretensions that lent a sense of history to the Yale campus. The other eleven students and the visiting professor all saw the wet streaks on my face, and I knew each of them wondered who had brought me to tears. Making another student cry, while in a class, that is, with a particularly brilliant or cutting comment was a badge of honor on that campus. One of the rules of the game was that one couldn’t self-congratulate. Credit for the act had to be bestowed and acknowledged by those who were present in the classroom, usually with a casual lifting of the chin.
As I walked down the spiral of stone steps that led from the crenellated tower to the vaulted main floor of the building, I thought about my father and how he had wound his body up and down those same stairs. Two generations of Hammerick men had preceded Thomas at Yale, and now there I was, a modern, slightly modified representative of the family.
I pushed open a set of heavy wooden doors and faced the month of March in New Haven, Connecticut. My head dropped and my neck retracted into my coat and scarf. My grandmother Iris had told me that the weather up North was going to break my spirit. She said that it would feel like wearing a wet wool coat during the winter months and the rest of time like sitting in a Turkish bath. I knew that she had never been to New Haven, never worn a wet wool coat, and never even seen a Turkish bath. But, of course, what Iris Burch Whatley had said was no lie. My grandmother also told me that I couldn’t leave my family behind like a pair of shoes that no longer fit. What’s wrong with going to Gardner-Webb Baptist College, she had asked. I remembered hearing a single hiccup after she said this to me, but I didn’t remember my great-uncle Harper being in the room.
I walked to my room on Old Campus and climbed into bed. When I pulled the sheet and blanket over my head, it was only half past three in the afternoon. In that artificial darkness, I said a word softly to myself. I drew out the “Ham,” lingered on the “me,” and softened the clip of the “rick.” I repeated the word, and with every slow joining of its three syllables, the fizzy taste of sweet licorice with a mild chaser of wood smoke flooded my mouth. A phantom swig of Dr Pepper. This one’s for you, Iris. I closed my eyes and said goodbye to my grandmother, who seemed for a moment not so far away.
MY FIRST MEMORY WAS A TASTE. FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I HAVE carried this fact with me not as a mystery, which it still is, but as a secret. The mystery had two halves. The halves had within them other chambers and cells. There was something bitter in the mouth, and there was the word that triggered it.
I’ll begin on the side of taste:
It was bitter in the way that greens that were good for us were often bitter. Or in the way that simmering resentment was bitter.
I have not yet found a corresponding flavor in food or in metaphor. But such a “match,” even if identified, would only allow me the illusion of communication and you the illusion of understanding. I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we all haven’t tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feel not so alone in the world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to one another, “I know exactly what you mean!”
The other side of the mystery is the word:
For me, the few words that didn’t bring with them a taste were sanctuaries, a cloister in which I could hear their meanings as clear as my own heart beating. The rest of my vocabulary was populated by an order of monks who had broken their vows of silence and in this act had revealed themselves to me. Not their innermost feelings of sadness or ecstasy. Not the colors that they wore underneath their robes. But what they last placed in their mouths.
When I first moved to New York City, I wrote to Kelly that I had made a mistake. That I should have gone back to North Carolina for law school, that I missed her, missed Baby Harper, even missed Boiling Springs, our emphatically named hometown. That was in the fall of 1990, when email was just beginning its takeover of personal communication, starting with university campuses nationwide. The e. e. cummings of the written word was only months away, but Kelly and I hadn’t and wouldn’t succumb to the lowercase, the off and on punctuation, nor the flights of fancy spelling and syntax. From the earliest days of our friendship, we have relied on carefully written letters to keep each other informed of our inner lives. We behaved like characters in a Jane Austen novel long before either one of us knew what that meant. Kelly sent the first one, dated July 11, 1975.
“My name is Kelly. I am seven years old. I live in the red brick house. Welcome to Boiling Springs!”
The letter wasn’t particularly elegant or inviting of a response, and at the time I didn’t understand what she meant by the last sentence. But I admired her use of the exclamation mark. Worse letters of introduction have been written by hands much older than Kelly’s and on stationery not nearly as pink. A red strawberry at the four corners of the sheet.
Kelly was advanced for her age in many ways. She too
k to grammar, capitalization, and punctuation early on. Her mother, Beth Anne, told her kindergarten teacher that no one taught Kelly these rules and regulations and that her daughter had picked them up from reading the newspapers. When asked who taught Kelly how to read the Shelby Star at such an early age, Beth Anne had replied that Kelly was born knowing how. In the first grade, Kelly memorized the contents of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. She also committed to memory the “Forms of Address” chart at the back of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, handy for anyone planning to write a letter to a foreign ambassador or to a chancellor of a university, for instance.
At age seven, Kelly was also awkward, fat, and shy. These traits, as much as her intellectual precociousness, accounted for her chosen form of communication. I, also seven years old, showed her letter, which I had found on our hallway table, to my father. I had nominal reading and writing skills for my age, so I needed an older pair of eyes to guide me. My father asked me if I wanted to write back. If yes, he would deliver my letter. The omission of a last name and “the red brick house” being the closest thing to a mailing address would have stumped some fathers, but not mine.
Kelly’s father, Carson Powell, Jr., worked for my father, Thomas Hammerick. I didn’t know this back then. Nor did I know that these two men, lawyers by day, had just begun their second jobs as postmaster general and mailman for a very small country. The only other address in this land was “the gray and blue ranch house.” The colors I provided, and my father contributed the architectural classification. For the first dozen or so letters, the correspondents were Kelly, my father, and me. I listened and nodded as he spelled the words out for me so that I could slowly print them—my vowels three times as large as my consonants—onto the sheet of paper. Pale yellow with a red and black ladybug at the upper right corner. Restrained design choice for a girl of seven, my father must have thought. He had taken me to Hudson’s department store in Shelby so that I could choose my own box of stationery. His was plain and white, watermarked to show its quality, and DeAnne’s had pink spray roses on it. Neither was suitable for a girl of seven.
That summer of letter writing—Kelly and I wrote to each other every day—made an impression on my father. He told my great-uncle Harper that he would never forget how I had answered the first question that Kelly sent to me. In letter #3, Kelly asked, “What is your favorite color?”
Fire, I told my father, was my answer.
He asked me if I understood the question.
Yes, she asked what color I liked—
And your answer is “fire”? Do you mean the color red?
I like red and yellow and orange and blue.…
I listed for him all the colors that I had seen in a flame and that I knew the names for. My father understood then the response as I had meant it. Another child, with similar preferences, might have said a “rainbow,” but I had never seen a rainbow in real life.
According to my great-uncle Harper, my father also never forgot that I showed to him the first letter that I had ever received. That the receipt of something sealed, meant only for my eyes, was shared with him, unsolicited and unprovoked.
At the end of that summer, my father suggested that we invite this “Kelly Powell” girl over to the house for a sleepover. The look in my eyes made him stop talking in midsentence. I hadn’t told him about my secret sense. When I heard or said the word “Kelly,” I tasted canned peaches, delicious and candy-sweet. This, however, was the first time I had heard anyone say “Powell.” The word was a raw onion, a playground bully with sharp elbows shoving all other flavors aside. Luckily for our friendship, little girls didn’t often call each other by their full names.
“I’m the one still here in Boiling Springs,” Kelly began her letter back to me. “You didn’t make a mistake. I did. At the risk of sounding like a DP song, I’ve made so many mistakes in the past few years that it’s now a habit I can’t kick,” she continued. Kelly wrote that she had even thought about overnighting her letter to New York City, given the forlorn tone of my five pages to her. But she didn’t. The main reason we both loved this ritual of pen, paper, and stamps (the philatelic design announced the writer’s mood: My letter had been posted with two Grand Canyons, and Kelly’s response featured a Niagara Falls) was the waiting and the eventual receipt. It was one of the few examples in our young lives of patience rewarded.
The “DP” in the fourth sentence of Kelly’s letter was a reference to our mutual childhood obsession, one that we now laugh and swear never to tell another living soul about. From the time we were eight, Dolly Parton has been our Madonna (the original one, not the “Like a Virgin” one who would be made famous in our teens by MTV), but being Southern Baptists, we didn’t fully understand the role that Dolly was playing in our lives. She was a beautiful mystery to us. Her voice. Her hourglass figure. Her white-blond tresses. Her glossy teeth, ringed by her glossier lips. Each of her outfits was a rhinestone miracle to us. We wrote fan letters to her and sent them to each other to read. We thought that if we ever met her in person she would recognize our inherent goodness and take us home with her. We weren’t sure where she lived, but we thought it was probably near the Grand Ole Opry. We cut her pictures out of TV Guide and cried when her specials came on past our bedtimes. When my mother found the hagiography (all three of us thought of it then as merely a scrapbook) that Kelly and I had made out of construction paper and masking tape, she told us that Dolly Parton had a beautiful voice but that she was trashy. My mother didn’t have a knack for speaking with children. The first question that tumbled out of our small mouths was always “What does that mean?” DeAnne, unsure most of the time of what she meant, never stayed around long enough to answer. She was an actor with one line to deliver and then exited stage left. Such a performance left Kelly and me to make up our own meaning for trashy: a thing that is thrown away for no good reason, as in undervalued. Kelly and I vowed to be trashy, which to us also held the promise of a Cinderella-like redemption, when we grew up.
Kelly kept her promise. She lost weight during the summer before high school and never looked back at those thirty pounds or her first thirteen years of life. Even in a town as small as Boiling Springs, where the same kids tormented one another from kindergarten to grave, one summer could change everything. In how many backyards lay the molted skins of girls who vowed to no longer be fat, awkward, and shy? In Boiling Springs, during the summer of ’82, there was only one. America wide, that figure was being closely monitored by the ad sales department of Seventeen magazine. There was money to be made from such tenderness and desperation. I stayed the same that summer, except for the cigarettes and my bra size, which came into existence at a 32-A. Kelly had been a 36-C since the seventh grade, but none of the boys had noticed because the rest of her was also large. A summer of Weight Watchers frozen dinners supplemented with frequent doses of Ex-Lax would carve away the adolescent fat and make those breasts pop. A high school girl’s social life could be made with perfect skin, nice hair, and a pretty smile or with so-so versions of all the above and an impressive set of knockers. No one taught Kelly these rules and regulations either. She followed the example set by our Madonna. Kelly and I had already started to refer to Dolly Parton as “DP” by then, just in case anyone got hold of our letters. Ever since DP’s co-starring role—Kelly and I didn’t like to call it a “comeback performance”—in the movie 9 to 5, we were very protective of our longtime association with her. That summer I was beyond DP’s benevolent guidance, and Kelly knew it.
“I’m totally freaked out about us,” Kelly wrote. “You’ve got to choose before you walk into the halls of Boiling Springs High School what sort of girl you want to be. So far, I think you’ve got only one option: smart. But I’m not sure how you’re going to pull that off!”
Together Kelly and I would achieve her goal for my classification. Throughout grade school and middle school, I had been a C student. Standardized test scores, however, showed that my reading comprehens
ion skills were well above average. My math scores were also consistently high. The problem was my inability to concentrate in class.
When my teacher asked, “Linda, where did the English first settle in North Carolina?” the question would come to me as “Lindamint, where did the Englishmaraschinocherry firstPepto-Bismol settlemustard in Northcheddarcheese Carolinacannedpeas?”
My response, when I could finally say it, I experienced as “Roanoke Islandbacon.”
Many of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste—unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into my mouth. On my report cards, my teachers conveyed this undetected fact to my parents as “your daughter’s unwillingness to pay attention in class.”
I had shared my secret sense with Kelly in letter #26. After she read that her name tasted of canned peaches, she wrote back and asked, “Packed in heavy syrup or in its own juice?”
“Heavy syrup,” I replied in letter #28.
The tiny miracle of our friendship was the question—What does that mean?—that was never asked.
That summer of transformation had us thinking about the suppression of taste. Kelly and I knew that I would never become an A student unless I could stop, or at least minimize, what I called the “incomings.” We considered Big Red chewing gum, Tic Tacs, Lemonheads, and wintergreen Lifesavers. None was strong enough. We then experimented with Skoal. Kelly stole a tin of the dipping tobacco from her father’s car. I threw up. My second try was more successful. I was sick to my stomach and light-headed, but I was able to keep the little pouch of tobacco between my cheek and gum long enough for the tobacco to do its work. To test out its effectiveness, Kelly recited for me the words of our favorite DP song, like it was a poem.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 2