Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Author:Monique Truong
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780679603429
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-05-25T22:00:00+00:00

“Linda Vista!” My great-uncle Harper’s voice reached me before his body did. “Now what have you gone and done?” There was a waver in his voice that I hadn’t heard over the telephone lines.

I reached out and hugged him.

His embrace was awkward and sweet. His arms, as always, were unsure of where to make contact with my body. He smelled like the rooms of his Greek Revival. Witch hazel (his aftershave of choice), burned coffee, and lemon-scented Pledge. I felt a hand gingerly touching my hair. I lifted my face out of his lapel.

“I wantedsaltedbutter to look more like youcannedgreenbeans,” I said. I meant it as a joke, but as soon as the sentence left my mouth I realized that it had sounded mocking, my default tone of voice at Yale.

Baby Harper took a couple of steps back. There was a look in his eyes—a cumulus cloud passing over a midday sun—that made me regret cutting off my hair.

When Baby Harper took me to the Charlotte airport for my first flight, he had with him one of his cameras, a simple point-and-shoot that he had gotten as a gift and rarely used. I remembered being surprised when he handed it to a young woman who was sitting next to us at the gate. He asked if she would take our photo. He then politely asked her to take two more. He knew that he had closed his eyes the first time the shutter closed. I thought that he wasn’t used to the timing of the eyelids, the holding of a smile, the posing for posterity. Four years later, at my college graduation, I still hadn’t seen these airport photographs. When I finally did, the one with his eyes shut made me cry.

As we stood there surrounded by Pierson’s faded red bricks and its green shutters freshly painted for graduation, Baby Harper must have been thinking about the girl in those photographs, the girl who minutes later had turned around to wave goodbye to him before disappearing down a corridor that fed her into a swollen-bodied plane. He liked the way that there was a rhythm in her long hair as she walked away from him. He was looking at me and missing her.

“Well, Vista Girl, I’m deeply flattered by the gesture, then,” Baby Harper said.

I beamed at him, relieved to see that his sense of humor was still the same.

I had cut my hair shorter than his ever was, but in an homage to him, I had my bangs cut asymmetrically so that they would hang over one eye. I had on a black suit that I had bought at the Salvation Army. The pants were full and wide-legged, and the little jacket was nipped at the waist, the narrow shoulders peaked. I had on a pair of crimson (for Harvard) pumps that made me a full three inches taller. My lipstick was a shade darker than my shoes. My eyeliner was liquid and its application was Cleopatra-like. In my four years at Yale I had learned many good and useful things.

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