MEMORY IS A CURSE. I WASN’T THE FIRST TO SAY THIS, BUT I WAS proof of it. My memory was sharp. A thorn, a broken water glass, a jellyfish in a wave that crashed into me and reached back for more. My secret sense, which I have come to understand as my condition, gave me a way to encode information that was immediate and long-lasting, an inborn mnemonic device.
The ancient Greeks had a mnemonic device that called for thinking of a path, say through the streets of a familiar city, and depositing along the way the information that they wished to retain. At the corner of the Street of Wine Merchants, they would place fact number one; continuing ahead twenty paces to the Fountain of Bacchus, they would place fact number two; turning right onto the Street of Pleasure Houses by the front door of the Pavilion of Virgins (the name was ironic because even back then virgins were rare and mythical beings), they would place facts number three through ten (because it was there among the rare and mythical beings that they wanted to linger); and in that way their journey would continue on. To retrace this path in their mind was to gather up the facts again, easy and showy as red roadside poppies.
My own mnemonic device worked in similar fashion, but instead of a path there was a multicourse meal prepared by a mad scientist who knew and cared nothing about food. To revisit the dishes and their chaotic juxtaposition of flavors was to recall with precision those facts, from the trivial to the significant, that I have acquired, via the spoken word, during the course of my life.
I recited in the fourth grade that the “WrightFrenchfries brothers’ firstPepto-Bismol flightcantaloupe was on Decembervanillaicecream seventeenthketchup, 19whitebread03,” and I would never forget this date that is—forgive me, Wilbur and Orville—not all that useful to me in my day-to-day life. During my first year of law school, I met a young man on a train from New York to Boston, and the moment he sat down next to me and said, “HigreenLifesavers, my namegrapes is Leoparsnip,” I could never forget this man’s name, even after I wanted to. When I was seven, I heard a word that made me taste an unidentifiable bitter, and I never forgot flames cutting through the seams of a trailer home, the sound of footsteps on gravel, then darkness. Not of nighttime, which it must have been, but of closed eyelids or a hand held tight over them.
But the example of the trailer home was out of order. It should have been listed first. Also, the example of the trailer home wasn’t the same as the previous two. The difference was fact versus the absence of fact.
The Wright brothers existed in history. A man named Leo existed in my personal history. All three were documented by words and photographs and, in the case of Leo, also by a pair of his shoes, which emerged from the back of the bedroom closet after he had gone. Leather, the color of a cube of caramel, slip-ons, and brand new. They were pieces of his carefully constructed exoskeleton that he must have regretted leaving behind. A benign household shadow, maybe that of a puffy winter coat, had hid them for weeks, and then one day they were pushed into the light. I had seen the backyard of the blue and gray ranch house behave in the same way. Underneath a pin oak tree there was a patch of earth where no grass would grow. That skirt of soil would periodically offer up pieces of blue and white pottery and shards of dark-colored glass, as proof that others had been there before.
The trailer on fire might not have existed. There were no photographs and no history, official or anecdotal. There was only my memory: coffee left too long on the burner, an uncoated aspirin caught in the throat, how a drop of mercury might taste on the tip of the tongue. I have come close to identifying that taste of bitter, but close isn’t good enough for a mnemonic device. As for the word that triggered it, the usual trailhead of my memories, it remains lost to me.
My great-uncle Harper, a sixty-two-year-old man, and I, an eighteen-year-old girl, sat holding each other’s hands. On a late-August night in Boiling Springs, we confessed and we revealed. Spinning around us was more than one circle of grief. Like the rings of Saturn, the circles weren’t solid and were composed of many shattered things. Baby Harper told me of his affection for my father, Thomas, and how it had allowed him, belatedly, to love my mother, DeAnne. I told Baby Harper the facts of a rape. I didn’t understand then that facts were sharp and should be wrapped in asides or separated by deep breaths. I thought that the best way to deliver bad news was to deliver bad news.
This was what I told him. It was the end of the summer of ’79. I was eleven. I didn’t scream. I didn’t struggle. I was motionless. When it was over, I stood in the shower for a long time. The water went from hot to lukewarm to cold. I didn’t see the bruises on my thighs until the next morning. That was when I cried.
This was what I didn’t tell my great-uncle Harper. There were also bruises around my neck. Bobby had pushed himself into my vagina and into my mouth, in that order.
I asked Kelly in letter #427 why her cousin Bobby had done these things to me. What I meant was why had he treated me so differently. When Kelly was ten, Bobby had held her hand, forced it into the crotch of his pants. Why was that not enough for him when he found me?
When Bobby knocked on the front door of the blue and gray ranch house and asked me if he could use the bathroom, I should have slammed the door shut and locked it. DeAnne had gone to pick up a cake for my father’s forty-seventh birthday, which we would celebrate later that night. Before she had gotten into the car, she had stopped to talk to Bobby. She smiled and flipped her hair. He smiled and flipped his hair. He sat on the riding mower, and she touched its steering wheel. All summer long I had seen these movements. I thought these movements meant that I was invisible and that I was safe.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Bobby.
Bobby who?
Bobby, monster, menace, blade.
Kelly in letter #428 wrote only three words: “Don’t tell anyone.” She was including herself. That was when I first understood that anyone was a big movie theater of a word with the lights turned down low. You never knew who was sitting inside.
I didn’t tell.
For my father’s birthday dinner, I wore a brown plaid skirt and a white turtleneck with pink roses appliquéd around the neck. I helped my father blow out the candles on his cake. I puckered my lips and pretended that I was pushing air past them. I smiled for my great-uncle Harper’s camera. My grandmother Iris said I should have another piece of cake. A second helping offered by a fat person was a foreshadowing of what your own body would become if you accept. My grandmother was the one who taught this to me.
I smiled and declined. My grandmother Iris smiled and ate the last piece for me.
All night long I watched DeAnne to see if she would flip her hair. She didn’t.
The following morning DeAnne placed a new purse—a Bermuda bag with a cover embroidered with green turtles—on my bed and a box of maxi pads. Next to these two items was a pair of my underwear, washed and neatly folded into a square. I had twisted them, crotch stiff with blood, inside a sheet of newspaper and thrown them away. This and other moments in my life have taught me that the trash was where you placed what you wanted to be found, whether you knew it or not. If you wanted a thing to disappear entirely, you burned it.
The thing about grass was that it grew back.
The thing about rapists was that they would do it again.
The thing about fate was that it often looked like the handiwork of a vengeful God.
Before Bobby was scheduled to return to the blue and gray ranch house, his car hit a telephone pole along Highway 150. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He died on impact. The Shelby Star ran a front-page article along with a yearbook photo of the deceased, smiling. The tire marks, according to the reporter, showed that the driver had swerved abruptly. To avoid a small animal, perhaps a rabbit, suggested the reporter. (The dead are too often imbued with good intentions.)
Kelly, being family, went to the funeral. DeAnne, being careless, was also there. The funeral was closed-casket because Bobby’s head had gone through the windshield.
I love you Jesus! because you took away his face, his hands, his hips, the warm breath from his body.
I forgive you Jesus! for not doing it sooner. I know you must have tried.
By the time I left Boiling Springs for New Haven, I understood that my great-uncle, Harper Evan Burch, if he could have chosen, would have inhabited a body different from the one that God had given him. His body wasn’t his temple. It was his shroud. He would rather not be a witness to it. Even on the muggiest of summer days, he never wore shorts and never rolled up his sleeves. If he had lived in an earlier era, he would have worn gloves and a hat every day. If he had lived in a big city, he would have worn dark sunglasses. As far as I knew, he had only one mirror in his Greek Revival. The mirror, the size of a small envelope, hung above the bathroom sink. His house had been built during a time when one bathroom, large and spacious with two windows and a claw-foot tub, was thought suitable for a household of means. No master baths, no his and her baths, no half-baths, and no guest baths. Somewhere along the way, between the Greek Revival and the blue and gray ranch house, these additional toilets and sinks came to signify a kind of necessary plenty, a promise of never having to relieve yourself in the same room as another member of your household, and an emblem that declared to the world that we had freed ourselves from such unwanted intimacies.
When I was young, I could stand on a chair and see most of my face in this mirror. When I was older and had grown almost as tall as Baby Harper, I realized that the placement of the mirror allowed him to see only his mouth and his chin, probably for the purpose of shaving. The rest of his face was a white wall. This shunning of his own reflection coupled with his penchant for picture taking and never picture-taken led me to the simple conclusion: My great-uncle was a book that found itself inside the wrong cover. What this meant I thought I understood. I was wrong. Baby Harper was just beginning to reveal himself to me. He threw down the first of his cards after he heard about Bobby.
My great-uncle said that there was no shame worse than silence. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told anyone about Bobby. What he meant was why hadn’t I told him. He mourned for what had been stolen from me. The crime for him (and me) wasn’t the loss of my virginity. The use of “loss” here suggested, inappropriately, a button on a shirt that could be found or replaced. The crime was the taking away of my right to choose. Included in this grief was Baby Harper’s right to choose. He lived through my body in many ways. He had wanted for me (and him) a moonlit night, a crushed prom corsage, a slow dance, the backseat of a car. I never had these experiences. Nor did Baby Harper. I had other experiences. As did Baby Harper. He mourned that there was a part of my life that I had kept from him. He realized for the first time that there might be others. Included in this grief were the hidden rooms of his life. He told me that hurt was bad enough and that I should never add loneliness to it. That’s why we get together and dance, he said. I didn’t understand until then what my great-uncle had been teaching me since our earliest days together. We got together and moved our bodies because it exorcised our pain.
In a voice that I had never heard coming out of him, my great-uncle then said in a slow, precise cadence that God. may. have. taken. Bobby’s. life. but. God. can’t. give. you. your. life. back.
He told me to follow him into the garage. There, on a set of shelves along the back wall, he picked up a can of house paint. PEONY RED, the label said. Then he grabbed a flashlight and two paintbrushes and placed them inside of a plastic shopping bag. We climbed into his car and he drove to the Sunset Cemetery. Why Baby Harper had Peony Red house paint when all the walls of his house were eggshell white and why he knew exactly where Bobby was buried among the cemetery’s 152 trees was how I knew that I had only a wallet-size photo of my great-uncle’s life.
The headstone was pale granite, and it glowed in the light of a partial moon. We didn’t need the flashlight to see what was carved into it. BELOVED. For the third time that night, my great-uncle reached out for my hands. Crickets chirped at our feet, the who-who of an owl was above us, and whiffs of honeysuckle played hide-and-seek with the summer night air. Baby Harper told me to take the front, and he would take care of the back. I couldn’t move. I understood what he was saying to me, but I didn’t understand the man. He dipped a brush into the paint and let the excess drip back into the can. He painted the word RAPIST down the length of the headstone. We stood there and looked at it. Then I did the same to its back. A summer night, honeysuckles, crickets, an owl, a moon. All stunned witnesses to what we had done. We got back into the car, and we left them all behind. My great-uncle’s hands on the steering wheel. The broken line dividing the two-lane road. The trailer homes in the side-view mirrors. The water tower, a mushroom cloud over a pinprick of a town. Everything glowed that night. Less like stars and more like bleached bones.
After my father had passed away, I spent every weekend with Baby Harper. That Saturday night was no different, except that we cleaned our hands and underneath our fingernails with turpentine before saying good night. Baby Harper’s guest room (he said that I was his one and only, and I believed him) held an antique sleigh bed and his collection of mourning embroideries. I preferred the whaling vessels on my bedroom walls to these faded, silk-flossed scenes of weeping-willow trees, Grecian urns, and young ladies draped upon them in grief, but the sleigh bed more than made up for their presence. Baby Harper had bought the bed from a widower down in Greenville, South Carolina. Baby Harper said that widowers were the best sources for reasonably priced antiques. Men, in grief, discarded the trappings of their past. Women, in grief, hoarded. Or they embroidered, Baby Harper said, hiccupping. In spite of the bed’s provenance, I liked it. The curved cherry-wood frame lifted me high off the floor. A matching step stool sat beside the bed and allowed me to ascend onto it as if to a stage or a cloud. As I drifted off to sleep that night, I had no idea what my great-uncle was thinking as he lay in his own bed, his eyes closed, his breathing steady and slow. He had become a beautiful mystery to me.
Early the next morning Baby Harper drove me to the blue and gray ranch house. I had had my suitcases, both new because I had never needed suitcases before, packed a week ago. They were waiting for me in the living room. DeAnne, dressed for church, was drinking coffee at the kitchen table. She and Baby Harper exchanged good-mornings. I poured myself a glass of juice and sat down across from DeAnne. Baby Harper pulled out a chair, looked at us both, slid the chair back into its place, and said that he would be back at noon to take me to the airport. His voice lifted when he reached that last word. He pronounced it aiROport.
Baby Harper had never been on an airplane then, nor had I. The excitement he felt on my behalf was palpable. He had an image of air travel that belonged to the early days of commercial aviation, when passengers dressed in their best outfits, and everyone onboard, including the stewardesses, wore hats, as if they were all going to church. Maybe because in those days air travel did feel like being closer to God because it still felt like a miracle to them, albeit one that they could buy a ticket and be a witness to. Baby Harper weighed in a bit differently. He said that the passengers thought that they could die, and no one wanted to show up in Heaven in dungarees and a T-shirt. Both explanations, we decided, were true. Baby Harper promised me that he would give me something “special” to wear when the day came for my first flight.
We had spent the whole summer getting ourselves ready. For the most part, our preparations were the silent ones, the internal ones, the cataloging away of a moment or an act as we realized that it could be for the last time. Baby Harper took a lot of photographs of me that summer. He took them of my bare feet, my hands, my eyes. His favorite parts of me, he told me. If he had let me, I would have photographed his ears, his wrists, the thin band of skin between the cuff of his pants and his socks, visible only when he sat down and crossed his legs. My favorite parts of him that I could see.
The one-year anniversary of my father’s death was that following month. I was re
lieved that I would be in New Haven by then. What would we have done together, DeAnne and I? Sung a hymn. Held hands. Placed a bunch of carnations on my father’s grave, then seen from the far corner of our eyes the white granite tombstone of BELOVED, the one whom she really mourned. She could do that on her own, I thought.
Since my father’s passing, DeAnne and I had let ourselves be ourselves. We lived in a silent house. Conversations were no longer necessary, not because we understood each other’s thoughts but because we didn’t want to know what the other was thinking. Family meals were no longer obligatory. DeAnne ate in front of the television. I ate in my bedroom in front of a book. We ate the foodstuff of women living alone. Cans of tuna fish. Yogurt. Dried fruits. Salads splashed with bottled dressings. The smell of lit cigarettes, a habit that DeAnne no longer hid from me, was more pervasive now than the smell of her casseroles. A small blessing.
Baby Harper was the greatest blessing. He was a conduit and a haven. He had told DeAnne what colleges I was applying to and wrote the checks for my application fees when she forgot. He had told her that I had no intention of going to the prom and added that, in his opinion, no boy in Boiling Springs was good enough for me. He had offered his guest room to me on the weekends so that I wouldn’t have to spend them with DeAnne and Iris, who had widowhood in common with her daughter now and liked her more because of it.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 12