Wade began with the past five years.
“I tellbrownsugar her jokescornflakes,” he replied.
“Whatgrahamcracker?” I asked, even though I had heard him. Every word. I just wanted him to say them again because of what they were doing to my mouth.
He did. This time he added, “EveryRitzcracker morningHardee’scheeseburger.”
“Whatgrahamcracker was it todayoatmeal?” I asked.
“Knockpeanutbrittle knockpeanutbrittle,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, moving my eyes from ASTEROIDS up to the street sign, in anticipation that our exchange was coming to an end. But Wade wasn’t finished. He wanted to tell me about that morning.
“Say, ‘Who’s thereapplejuice?’” he said.
“Who’s thereapplejuice?”
“Wadeorangesherbet.”
“Wadeorangesherbet who?”
“Wadeorangesherbet who? Wadeorangesherbet who?! Momchocolatemilk, I’m your soncinnamon. Jeez, don’t youcannedgreenbeans rememberbutterpecanicecream me?”
I laughed out loud.
Wade looked amazed.
“That was dumbcannedspinach,” I said.
“I knowgrapejelly,” he said, grinning, as the school bus pulled up and opened its door.
I sat up front, and Wade went to the back, same as in previous years. When the bus pulled up to Kelly’s stop (three after ours), I turned around and caught a glimpse of him. He was staring out of the window. There was a W written onto the pane. On the tip of his right index finger must have been an oval of dust.
Kelly squeezed in next to me and whispered, “Cutemashedpotatoes.”
I thought she meant my new purse, a Bermuda bag like hers. My father had finally given in after DeAnne took him aside during a recent Sunday dinner and whisper-yelled to him that my MONTHLY CYCLE had started and that I would need something to carry my FEMININE HYGIENE PRODUCTS in. DeAnne, just like her mother, Iris, had perfected the art. She yelled the embarrassing parts and whispered the rest. My grandmother, whose sense of humor was barbed like her tongue, leaned across the dinner table and asked if I knew why a woman’s monthly cycle was called her “period.” Iris smiled before quickly answering her own question: Because when a woman mentions it to a man, that’s the end of their conversation. My great-uncle Harper lowered his eyes, picked up his fork, and pushed the food on his plate into four equal quadrants. My great-uncle called this move “the cross of avoidance.”
When my father returned to the dinner table, his face was flushed. DeAnne’s wasn’t. Iris was right. My father never brought up the purse or its function again.
Kelly stole a quick glance over her shoulder, and I knew. She hadn’t meant the green turtles stitched across the cover of my Bermuda bag but Wade, the orange sherbet boy.
If Kelly and I were a suspension bridge (and we were, or at least our friendship was), this was the moment when our steel cables began to snap. I had had the entire summer to prepare, and still the moment took my breath away.
Kelly had spent that summer—what I called the summer of Dill and Wade but for her it was mostly the summer of Wade—writing very long letters to me. I wrote to her too, but my missives became shorter and shorter. I had less and less to say. As she was the one who had declared a crush on a real boy, she became the heroine of our lives and our letters. I became a mirror or an echo. Every Saturday night, Kelly wrote her weekly Wade Report. Kelly and her parents had their weekly dinner out at Slo Smoking. Barbecue was as great a divider as religion, greater if you believed my great-uncle Harper. Slo Smoking and Bridges were parallel universes, where Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, and the small band of Catholics (this was what the adults in our lives always called them, which at first made me think that the Small Band of Catholics were a musical group, something along the lines of the Partridge Family), though never the former Miss Feldmann (who didn’t eat pork, the only meat worth barbecuing in the Old North State), could bury their differences in paper napkins soaked with sauce and then separate again along two distinct lines. We were a Bridges family, and Kelly knew it. Where you consumed your pulled pork and coleslaw was another form of fate in the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area.
Every Saturday, the Powells arrived at Slo Smoking at 5 P.M. sharp, and Wade and his folks came in fifteen minutes later. I had never been inside of Slo, so I didn’t know if they had booths or tables. Kelly didn’t provide me with such useful details. She was interested only in Wade. What he had on (always Levi’s and a T-shirt); what soft drinks he ordered (7UP); what he may have been thinking (there’s that nice girl from homeroom!) when she and her folks walked by his family on their way out. Kelly never gave up on the exclamation mark. She was very optimistic for a fat girl. Maybe she knew all along that fat wasn’t an immutable characteristic. Fat wasn’t fate.
My response to the Wade Report was not to submit one of my own. That summer, I saw the orange sherbet boy every day, except Sundays, riding his new ten-speed up and down our street. I missed the green Schwinn Sting-Ray. The new bike, with its multicolored metallic finish, looked fast, and he rode it fast. About a week before the beginning of school, Wade had stopped his bike in front of the blue and gray ranch house and watched as our jungle gym was being hauled onto the back of a pickup truck. I was standing in the front doorway of the house, also witnessing the final stage of its removal. DeAnne wanted the space in the backyard for a rose arbor, and she declared that I was too old now for that-jungle-thing anyway. She had called it that-jungle-thing from day one. Wade and I looked at each other as the pickup truck pulled away. He waved to me. Kelly, all summer long, was never able to include those four words in her reports.
The look of Kelly’s letters changed that summer. She no longer dotted her i’s with an anatomical heart. The ventricles receded into the organ. The muscle puffed and took on the symmetrical shape of its most common misrepresentation. It was fitting that she signaled her abandonment of reality in this small way.
On the bus that first morning of sixth grade, I knew that nothing had changed between Kelly and Wade. She was still an invisible fat girl, and he was a beatific boy, a body that she had dragged into her life by the sheer force of her will. In the years that followed, Kelly would join the ranks of the beautiful and the popular, but nothing, I thought, had changed between the two of them. The orange sherbet boy and I, though, we were in for a transformation. As the school bus turned in to the short driveway that led to our middle school, I turned my head for another glimpse of Wade.
“Cutemashedpotatoes,” Kelly whispered again into my ear.
The word that shot out of my mouth surprised her. I knew because she pulled her hand away from the row of turtles marching across my new purse. This time she wasn’t talking about Wade, but I was.
“Mineapple,” I said.
ON THE TENTH DAY OF HER LIFE, VIRGINIA DARE WAS TAKEN FROM the arms of history and placed on legend’s lap. Unfortunately for her, legend was a man. Legend wasn’t dirty and old, but mean and probably love-scorned in light of his treatment of her. Dare’s years as a sticky-faced toddler, a quiet adolescent, and an acne-prone teen were altogether ignored and forgotten. When Dare reemerged after her disappearance, she did so fully formed, Athena-like from the foreheads, or was it Diana-like from the groins, of the men who called North Carolina home. The women, on the same shores, wouldn’t have imagined Dare’s life in quite the same way. Around the campfires and by the hearths, a story of physical beauty, male envy, naïve love, and violence-as-antidote was born. This story was given Virginia Dare’s name. As this was an American legend, it also included Indians and a brief and unsettling mention of Queen Elizabeth.
Legend had it (because he willed it and made it so) that Virginia Dare was raised by kindly Indians, who were charmed and perhaps civilized by her mere presence. Why and how Virgin—that was how the Indians had truncated her name, thus revealing her true narrative essence—became an orphan was never addressed. That sort of information would have given her character too much psy
chological depth and nuance. Virgin, as far as legend was concerned, was a young woman of startling beauty, and she attracted the attention of a handsome Indian brave named O-kis-ko. She called him “O!” for short. Virgin and O! were very happy together, as attractive couples often are in legends, and this enraged another Indian man named Wanchese, an evil magician whom we can assume was also lonely and ugly. Wanchese cast a spell and turned Virgin into the White Doe, which as a species was known for its attractive tail. The White Doe could be released from the evil spell only if shot through the heart by an arrow made from oyster pearl. O! possessed such an arrow. Unfortunately for O!, Wanchese possessed an arrow made of sterling silver, given to him by Queen Elizabeth. Legend unwisely left the connection between the Indian magician and Queen Elizabeth to our imagination. On the day of a big hunt, O! and Wanchese saw the White Doe, and they shot their arrows at the same time, if you know what I mean. They pierced the animal’s heart at precisely the same moment. The White Doe was transformed back into a beautiful young woman by the oyster-pearl arrow, and she died, pierced through and through by the silver one.
I dare you. I double dare you. I Virginia Dare you. That was the progression, the upping of the ante that Kelly and I devised for ourselves. A Virginia Dare meant different things to us at different times in our girlhood, but it was always an invocation of a danger that mystified us.
We were both eight years old when we first read about Virginia Dare in the pages of North Carolina. Kelly and I thought that the story about the first child of our state was a warning about how being too beautiful could get us killed. It was already a common hazard in the other stories of our youth. Snow White, too beautiful and poisoned. Cinderella, too beautiful and condemned to domestic hard labor. Beauty, eponymously too beautiful and given up to a Beast. So when Kelly and I first evoked Virginia Dare’s name, the challenge was this: to not brush our teeth for a week. We figured that neglecting our mouths and what was inside of them would be the easiest way to ensure that being too beautiful, a potentially deadly fate, wouldn’t happen to us. From all the toothpaste and mouthwash commercials on TV, which always ended with the girl and the guy getting their mouths too close to each other, we knew that white teeth and fresh breath were essential for beauty. We didn’t want any boy to get too close to us. It was a dare that we both thought up and accepted.
I gave up on not brushing after three days. The bits of food stuck in between my teeth made the incomings even worse, like being served food on an already dirty plate. Kelly lasted the whole week. She was a natural faker. For seven mornings and seven nights, she went into the bathroom and squeezed a bit of toothpaste into her hands, which she would then wash with warm water, leaving the bathroom and herself smelling minty fresh. She would also wet her toothbrush and smear a dot of toothpaste onto the basin of the sink, leaving it there as a false residue. Kelly wrote in letter #64 that it was also very important not to smile. How Beth Anne didn’t notice that her only child hadn’t brushed her teeth or smiled for a week were questions that we didn’t think to ask back then.
When we were eleven and we Virginia Dared, the lurking fear was that the love of an ugly man would turn us into an animal. Being ugly, we understood by then, was the same as being evil. Jesus, for instance, was a very handsome man. That was why we adored Him. He was our first crush. Kelly had a poster of Him up in her room. I thought of Him before I went to bed every night. This was called worshipping and praying, and we were encouraged to do both. This time Kelly came up with the dare and it was this: to go to bed naked. No nightgown. No underwear. Kelly, already a B-cup, had forgotten all about her cousin Bobby. I hadn’t forgotten. He had asked her if she slept that way. He had whispered the question, and the words had tickled her ear. He then whispered nothing as he forced Kelly’s hand. Bobby was only months away from riding in circles around the blue and gray ranch house. The winged monster hadn’t found me yet, but he would.
I wrote to Kelly that sleeping without clothes on was a sin. Jesus, I was certain, was never naked.
“Then how did Jesus take a bath?” Kelly wrote back, double-daring me.
“Jesus didn’t have to take a bath because he was always clean,” I replied, Virginia Daring her.
Kelly accepted. We agreed that she would do it the next time I slept over. Even though “it” was a sin, I felt that I had to be present for verification purposes.
A week later, we climbed into Kelly’s canopy bed and got under its yellow eyelet covers. It was a Saturday night, and we had spent most of it eating junk food and putting the final touches on our scrapbook devoted to Dolly Parton. By bedtime we were stuffed with potato chips and images of our idol, which made us greasy and glowing. Our soundtrack that day and every day of 1979 was Dolly’s album Heartbreaker. We liked the title song best. “Heartbreaker … sweet little love maker … couldn’t you be just a little more kind to me.” We really liked what Dolly wore on the album cover. A pink dress with a hemline that was higher in front than at the back and silver high-heeled shoes. Her hairdo looked to us like a swirl from the top of a lemon meringue pie. When we looked at her picture, we felt a vibration all around our bodies. This was the effect of experiencing pure joy. We would miss this sensation in the years to come.
Kelly wiggled out of her nightgown and then her undershirt and panties and handed them to me. I placed the bundle on the night-stand on my side of the bed. She whispered that the sheets felt “slipperymilk,” and I gulped, breathless for a second. I reached up to turn off the bedside lamp, and the eyelet covers lifted up with me. A faint smell of sweat and baby shampoo rose up from the bed. I reached for Kelly’s hand and we closed our eyes. We thought that holding hands would allow us to have the same dreams. It never happened that way, but it did give us the feeling of being closer.
We Virginia Dared for the last time when we were fourteen. Kelly flipped through my well-worn copy of North Carolina and gave it one final incisive read. She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous. Most of these girls, Kelly included, then adopted that slow, bubbling giggle that put boys at ease. It was the kind of laughter that said, “I’m stupid. You can take off my shirt, if you want.” Kelly, who had understood subtext long before she knew that there was a word for it, asked me if I understood what this Dare story was really about. Not waiting for my answer, Kelly told me that the White Doe was a warning about arrows. Be careful of a man’s arrow, or maybe the warning was even more specific. You don’t know if a man is good or evil until you see his arrow. Another quick, sharp laugh. I blushed. Kelly then proposed the last Virginia Dare of our youth. “Speaking of penetration” was how she indelicately began.
It was the summer before high school, and Kelly and I had just reached the watershed decisions to diet and to smoke. I understood the need for our transformation, but I didn’t understand where our transformation was going to lead us. Kelly understood. Again, she called dibs. Wade was to be her arrow. I would be left to find mine among the other young males in Boiling Springs. According to the thesaurus, a book that would become increasingly invaluable to me for reasons that Roget couldn’t have imagined, another word for “arrow” was “shaft.” According to the dictionary, another meaning of “shaft” was to treat unfairly.
As Kelly spoke the words I dare you, I double-dare you, I Virginia Dare you (when she said “you,” she usually meant “us”) to lose your virginity before the end of the year, she knew that I had already lost mine, by force and not by choice. Yet she said the words anyway, banishing from my experience and hers all the hidden dangers of our shared girlhood. As far as Kelly was concerned, both of us could still choose who would approach us first with a bow and arrow.
My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway,
“My periodblueberrymuffin startedunsaltedbutter todayoatmeal.” This was a comforting sentence for me. Or rather the words triggered a sequence of comforting flavors for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: “walnut, elephant, candle, jogger.” These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it’s icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.
Growing up with DeAnne for a mother, I could count on one hand the times that I have had a really good meal like that. Every once in a while an ingredient would slip past DeAnne’s fingers unspoiled. Fresh strawberries, for example. During the summers, my great-uncle Harper and I would go to the pick-your-own farms in the nearby town of Kings Mountain, and the berries that we brought back were so red, perfect, and fragrant that even DeAnne left them alone. That was perhaps my favorite memory of my mother, her walking out of the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl full of strawberries. A bowl of Cool Whip would be waiting at the table for them, but I never touched the stuff, not after Baby Harper called it edible shaving cream.
I didn’t understand until I had left Boiling Springs and specifically the sphere of influence of DeAnne’s kitchen why so many of the incomings of my childhood were mildly unpleasant, bland, or unremarkable at best. The reason was disarmingly simple. The experiential flavors had to come first. Once the memories of them—of the canned, the frozen, the surprised, the à la king—had lodged themselves in my brain, then and only then could these tastes attach themselves to the words in my vocabulary, without cause or consideration for the meanings of the words.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 7