“Pleaselemonjuice, Lindamint,” he said.
To this day those two words heard in combination will make me see Wade’s face. Teenage girls everywhere have seen that same expression of hope and desire. Simple as a teenage boy.
I wasn’t, but I felt that I was, special. Simple as a teenage girl.
Bobby walked into Wade’s bedroom. The winged monster put a forefinger to his lips, and went, Shhhh. Or he could have been imitating the hiss of a snake. He stood by the window and stared at me. Outside, big droplets of rain were bouncing off the roof of the faded-red-T-shirt house. Inside, Wade and I heard what sounded like a pan of hot oil sizzling and popping all around us. Wade held his breath and I held mine. The only one in the room taking in air was Bobby, and he didn’t even need it. The steadiness of Bobby’s chest going up and down, so assured and so patient, convinced me that Wade would know. Wade would know that he wasn’t first. I let out my breath and I lied.
“I’m not readyorangejuice,” I said to the orange sherbet boy.
“Oh,” he replied.
One syllable with no incoming, a placeholder until a thought came to mind, a guttural sound made at moments of surprise, confusion, frustration, or disappointment, “oh” could also be an indicator of indifference, as in I care so little about what you’ve said to me that I can’t be bothered to respond with a real word. In some instances, “oh” was the sound of a body absorbing rejection.
I sat up, pulled my sweater over my head, put on my jeans and sneakers, and looked around and saw that Bobby was no longer in the room.
“I’ll see youcannedgreenbeans tomorrowbreakfastsausage, Wadeorangesherbet,” I said, before closing the door of his bedroom on my way out. I pressed my ear to his door and I didn’t move. The person inside of me wouldn’t let me go. She knew that a confession was forthcoming. The confession turned out to be the name of the kissed-girl.
“Pleaselemonjuice, Juliecaramelcandy.”
Wade was no longer a child. He had a Plan B. The person inside of him had a line, and he was practicing it. The last word of the plea was apparently interchangeable.
The flowers that arrived in May were tiny, red, and frilly. In the mornings I would see them in the whites of my eyes. A splash of water made them bloom more. Eyedrops only made them pink. I hated them for giving me away. I was suffering from an ailment inaccurately known as heartbreak. (A glass breaks. A fever breaks. A ray of sunlight breaks through the clouds. A heart is a muscle and it hurts like one, aches and pulls.) By the end of that month, when the school year ended, I was exhausted, mostly from the inability to understand what had happened to me and Wade.
We had continued to spend our mornings and afternoons together in our usual way. But every time I saw him, I heard his voice in my head saying the kissed-girl’s name. What I never heard again was “Pleaselemonjuice, Lindamint.”
Wade and I thought that we had till the end of the weekend to say our goodbyes. His mom had told him that they weren’t leaving for Tampa until Monday morning, but sometime after the Harris family returned from their usual Saturday night 5:15 P.M. dinner at Slo Smoking and before the sunrise on Sunday, Wade’s mom took one of the family cars, two suitcases, and left town without him. The orange sherbet boy woke up and found himself belonging to a broken family. (A family breaks.)
Mrs. Harris’s hairdresser knew before anyone else did. It could be argued that her hairdresser knew even before she knew. There had been the recent change in her hair color, including blond highlights, and then the accessorizing with a headband, a twist of light blue rayon, considered fashionable in Hollywood in 1982 but somewhat slatternly in Boiling Springs. Once the first Monday-morning appointment arrived at Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium, the news about Wade’s mom was set loose. By then, all the drapes were drawn shut at the faded-red-T-shirt house. The house was in mourning. Or its occupants were ashamed. I didn’t know then that there was a one-word encapsulation for those two feelings: “mortification.” Wade’s dad, known to his congregation in Shelby as the Reverend Canon of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, didn’t leave the house that Sunday. On Monday morning, he drove his son, Wade, to the airport to board a flight to Tampa, alone. Before leaving, Wade had knocked on the back door of the blue and gray ranch house. He handed me a note that promised me that he would call when he got to his grandmother’s. He never called, all summer long. Nor was the written word again employed.
Wade’s halo was a product of the sun, a dependent of its rays. The more time he spent outside, the more light his head of hair attracted and trapped, like fireflies in a jar. But during the summer of ’82, his fireflies would all die, and everybody in Boiling Springs knew why. Wade, my orange sherbet boy, had lost his mom. She didn’t pass away. She drove away. Miss Cora’s Beauty Emporium buzzed with the news. Beth Anne came home and told it to her husband, Carson junior. Kelly overheard and pretended that she hadn’t. According to Beth Anne, Mrs. Harris had always been too showy with her clingy shirts and above-the-knee skirts. The reverend’s wife, according to her hairdresser, was now living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She had found work as a cocktail waitress in an oceanside hotel. This was the same hotel where she and her husband had stayed just a year before, on their fifteenth wedding anniversary, and where she had met a bartender who gave her free drinks every night after her husband fell asleep at his usual bedtime of 10 P.M. Everybody knew that Episcopalians liked a cocktail now and then, and this part of the story only confirmed it.
As far as the Southern Baptists were concerned, Episcopalians were third on the list of local religious nonconformists. At the top was the former Miss Feldmann. Second was the small band of Catholics. The talk about them usually centered on how the small band, i.e. the congregation of St. Mary’s, always managed to have enough funds for the upkeep of their church and most recently for the new stained-glass windows (all six depicted a dove emerging from a shatter of blue and yellow triangles, which intentionally or unintentionally created an “explosion of faith” effect when seen from the outside). Papal money was said to have been involved. Kelly wrote in letter #658 that she tuned out of her parents’ conversation at this point because Catholics weren’t half as interesting as her parents made them out to be. Sally Campbell, for example, was a Catholic and she was boring. Kelly also wrote that the lesson to be taken from Wade’s mom’s “escapade” was that we should be very careful what we say to our hairdressers when we have them. The lesson that I would take from it was that we changed when our mothers left us. Our fireflies died.
When I saw Wade on our first day of high school, I assumed from the subdued color of his hair that it must have rained every day while he was in Tampa with his grandmother. Then a vision of his mother basking in the rays of Myrtle Beach with her new hair color and her new life flashed in between us. Bleached and beached, the Reverend Harris’s ex-wife–cum–cocktail waitress had become instantly legendary among the women of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area. She was even more legendary among the men. She was the community’s cautionary tale against beachside hotels, blond highlights, clingy shirts, exposed knees, flirty headbands, and hard liquor. She was the fantasy for all these things as well. Wade returned home to Boiling Springs, a small town made even smaller by its infatuation with this vivid specter of his mother. Wade, as if anticipating this tightening focus, had transformed himself over the summer into the perfect specimen of the all-American teenage boy. He must have seen kissed-girl’s copies of Seventeen magazine because he showed up at Boiling Springs High School looking like he had walked off one of its pages. His hair was cut short with a part to the side. He wore a pale blue polo shirt and a pair of khakis. On his feet were penny loafers, complete with pennies tucked into their slits. I walked right past him and didn’t stop until he said my name. I turned around and looked from the linoleum floor up, taking in the copper coins, the neutral-colored pant legs, the pastel torso, the pale face, the brown hair, and saw someone whom I didn’t recognize.
In my junior ye
ar of college, when I saw Rebel Without a Cause in my film studies class, Filmic Constructions of Masculinity: Boys Don’t Cry But Sometimes They Dance, I realized that Wade, beautiful at thirteen, had looked like a disheveled James Dean. Wade, handsome at fourteen, was more of a Ken doll.
Wade recognized me because I was exactly the same, except that underneath my T-shirt I was wearing a training bra and in my purse I had a packet of Winston Reds. On the outside, though, I hadn’t changed.
The bus stop was now at the YIELD sign at the corner of Laurel and Chestnut streets. I hadn’t seen Wade there that morning. I would never see him there. During our freshman year, he got a ride to and from school from three other Ken dolls who were juniors and already had their driver’s licenses. I don’t know when Wade befriended them, how the distance between Tampa and Boiling Springs had been traversed by these boys that summer, but it had. Thanks to them, Wade had a ready-made coterie of friends, older boys who grabbed him by the skin on the back of his neck when they walked past him in the hall. Wade, the former king of eighth grade, was now their prince. In my letters to Kelly, I began referring to Wade as Cadmus, the prince of Phoenecia. Her brain, though, was already so obsessed with real boys that she was forgetting the life stories of the mythical ones. I had to remind her that Cadmus, while searching for a missing female member of his family, was told by an oracle to give up his search and become instead the founding father of the city of Thebes. Cadmus, impatient and resourceful, populated his new city by sowing its virgin soil with the teeth of a dragon, slain by his own hands. From each hard enameled seed sprang a man. Instant, easy, and no females required. Kelly wrote back in letter #661, “Whoa. You’re way overthinking this one. Wade is a hunk, and he’s popular. That’s all.”
Within the first few days of our freshman year, the world for Kelly flattened out and became a wide-open field. She could see straight across this expanse. There were no obstacles, natural or man-made. There was nothing lurking, dangerous, or ulterior. Some on this field were physically beautiful or handsome and would reap the bounty that would come with it. A few were smart and therefore would earn their good graces. The rest were losers who would work for minimum wage and amass nothing. We all deserved what was coming to us. High school was the beginning of our irreversible forced march. Kelly was thrilled with what she saw ahead of her. She was rushing toward it with her new body, her new clothes, and her new empty head.
I occupied my role as the Smartest Girl at BSHS with the intensity and fervor of the newly converted. I had no one to distract me. The orange sherbet boy was lost to me. This time it wasn’t travel that had changed him. It was the coming home that did it. Kelly, my world, was wandering around a dense forest and mistaking it for a grassy meadow. To her great disappointment, though, Cadmus didn’t ask her to be his second (the kissed-girl or some other girl must have been his first, explaining the immediate status bestowed upon him by the gaggle of older but still virginal Kens). Sally Campbell was born with a homecoming queen crown on her head. You can imagine the pain and joy that her mother felt. Sally laid eyes on Cadmus, and slipped her hands into his. By the end of the first week of our freshman year, the match was made public, the coterie celebrated with back slappings, and Sally got a ride home from the Kens.
For the remainder of my four years at BSHS, I disappeared into the walls. If it hadn’t been for the smoke from my cigarettes or the smell of it in my hair, it would have been difficult to find me. In class, I took diligent notes with my head down, raising it only when I raised my hand to ask a question, to the mock groans of my fellow students. At lunchtime, I sat at the edge of the lunchroom until I decided that I would rather be outside smoking with the stoners: Chris Johnson, Tommy Miller, and Susan Taylor. They were always together, charmed by their shared exclusion. They, a Greek chorus, would have objected in unison to the characterization:
Exclusion? No fucking way, Linda!
These three had seen the same field that Kelly saw, and they turned around and walked the other way. Of the three of them, Chris Johnson, who shared the same first and last name as one of the Kens (it hadn’t occurred to me then that it must have meant that they shared a forefather too), and I were the closest to being friends.
“There’s a highgreenLifesaverswaycannedpears out of this holehushpuppies, Lindamint.” That was the first thing Chris said to me. I thought he was quoting a line from a movie. His non sequitur confused me until I looked into his eyes and understood that he was serious. The highway out of Boiling Springs was a fact that he held on to dearly, and he thought that I should be reminded of it too. I had been smoking with them for about a month by then. They had nodded at me but otherwise ignored me. They traded jokes with one another in the shorthand language of best friends: a couple of words and then convulsive laughter. I enjoyed the concision of their exchanges and didn’t care that they were speaking a language I didn’t understand. Chris was a sophomore, so he and I didn’t have any classes in common. In the hallways, he always managed to see me first, and instead of saying hi he would repeat his favorite fact about our hometown to me. During his senior year, that greeting became downright exuberant. He meant it. He had been saving his money to buy a Greyhound ticket to Philadelphia to go live with his cousin. He said he was getting on that bus as soon as he got his diploma.
Tommy Miller was leaving town too. He was going with Susan Taylor to live in Richmond, Virginia. She had graduated the previous year but had stayed in town, working at the Super 8 motel outside of Shelby, in order to wait for him. I had no idea that they were a couple until one day I noticed that Tommy had placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a couple of quick puffs, and handed it to Susan to smoke. I had to stifle a sigh. I was impressed by how natural Tommy’s gesture was. He saw a need and he filled it, oblivious to the fact that he and Susan weren’t alone. I was fourteen, and it was the most public act of intimacy that I had witnessed in real life. It was akin to the blowing of a kiss.
I SOMETIMES WOULD CRAVE A WORD. I WOULD GO TO BED THINKING about it, and in my dreams someone would say it. The next morning that word would be the first one in my head. I would go through my day hoping to hear it. For me there was, and still is, an appreciable distinction between hearing the word said and saying it for myself, though both would produce the same incomings. It was the difference between being served a good meal and having to cook one for myself. I would long for the word like it was a spoonful of peach cobbler, the kind that Bridges served only on Saturdays.
Food and taste metaphors were complicated for me. By complicated I mean that they were of no use to me. They shed their figurative qualities, their diaphanous layers of meaning, and became concrete and explicit. They left me literal and naked. The word that made me taste peach cobbler, for example, was “matricide.”
The first time I heard this word said aloud was in a comp lit seminar, The Oresteia: It’s a Family Affair. I was always unprepared for a new word’s incoming. I was most startled when a new word had a very familiar taste. I would lose my ability to absorb what was happening to me. My body would respond to the taste, whether pleasant or unpleasant, with a twitch or a tremor, or an expletive would escape from my mouth. College was the most challenging time for me because my vocabulary was expanding by the minute. In my classes, I often had the shakes and exhibited what appeared to be a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. By the end of my freshman year at Yale, there were rumors circulating on campus that I was taking large quantities of speed, never slept, read every assigned page, and aced all my papers and exams, and was therefore responsible for skewing the delicate grading curve in all my classes. Only one of these accusations was true. I was often awake late into the night, but I wasn’t poring over my assigned readings. I was reviewing the new words I had heard during the day. I whispered them to myself. I placed them in order, from sour to sweet. I organized them in descending gradation of saltiness. I saved the bitter ones for last, hoping as I always do to find a match for my first memory. Then there were the gui
lty pleasures, which I repeated out of gluttony or homesickness. “Matricide,” for example.
According to my great-uncle Harper, my mother was never young. He said DeAnne was born a thirty-five-year-old woman and remained that age until she turned thirty-six, and then she got older like the rest of us. If I was to believe my great-uncle, DeAnne’s first smile gave her laugh lines. The first time she squinted at the sun her forehead wrinkled. When other little girls had freckles, she had age spots. My great-uncle swore that all this was true. I never had any problems believing in DeAnne’s “prema” and “perma” maturity. As a mother, she had the rigidity and the timidity of an old woman. She had a couple of stock reprimands that she had learned from her mother, Iris. When DeAnne used these reprimands against me, she did so with a hesitancy that told me that she didn’t really believe in them. Or she didn’t understand them. Put on a sweater or you’ll get a cold! DeAnne, armed with over forty years of real-life experience, knew that wearing a sweater wasn’t a prophylactic against the common cold. Yet she said it anyway. Don’t be so selfish! DeAnne, I was certain, didn’t comprehend the differences among these three words: “selfish,” “self-centered,” and “self.” I accused her of this in a letter written at the end of my sophomore year in college. Our sporadic communication ended with that missive.
From the age of seven to eleven, I loved DeAnne because that was what I thought was natural. On television (when no one was around I would watch it with the volume turned off), I saw children who cried when their mothers died. These same children would then have gauzy flashbacks of hugging their mothers, clinging to their necks or thighs. Because of my secret sense, I have always preferred the stories in the pages of books to those on the screen, but no matter the medium there seemed to be an overriding message: I was lucky to have a mother.
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