Free Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong Page A

brown. When I was younger, the perforated pattern on the toe caps of my father’s shoes made me think of the tops of Ritz crackers, and later those same tiny holes made me think of constellations in the night sky. Through the years, the only thing that had changed about my father’s footwear was that he tied a more secure knot. When he passed away, in his closet were four pairs of shoes, exactly the same. The left heels were worn along the outside edge, and the right toes had a deep crease across them. DeAnne gave them to my great-uncle Harper because he wore the same size.
    In the official photographs from “the courting years,” as my great-uncle called them, DeAnne and Thomas never touched. Here was another confession. DeAnne always looked at Thomas and never at the camera. She was twenty-five years old, the same age as her beau, but she looked a decade older than he. Our family, my great-uncle told me, was afraid that DeAnne’s “window” was about to close.
    Now when I think about this euphemism, this aperture of feminine viability, I think of Rapunzel locked in her tall tower, staring down at the world, waiting for the plea that one day would change her life.
    DeAnne had graduated from Gardner-Webb Baptist College and was working two days a week in the alumni office. Iris thought it would be a good way for her daughter to meet eligible men, but the only men DeAnne met there were those old enough to donate large sums of money to their alma mater. One by one, June after June, DeAnne’s friends married the sons of these men and were now into their second pregnancies. On her days off, DeAnne went to visit these new mothers in their houses and hold their babies. When she looked at Thomas, that must have been what she saw. When Thomas looked straight ahead into the camera, he saw a small dark hole.
    The other details of their courtship were lost to me because they were lost to my great-uncle Harper. When Thomas and DeAnne began driving off in the Bel Air right after dinner, not even waiting for the dessert, there was nothing that Baby Harper could do but have another cup of coffee. My great-uncle must have felt a lot of things sitting there nursing that second cup that he knew would keep him awake, pacing the halls of his Greek Revival. One of them was this. Baby Harper was anticipating the one-word epithet that Iris would spit at all of us before she died. As Thomas drove DeAnne along a moonlit road, never pushing past twenty-five miles per hour in a vehicle built for speed, DeAnne was thinking of the same two syllables. As Iris climbed into the four-poster bed that her parents had shared, like their fiery deaths, she said a prayer that she and Walter Wendell would never suffer its biting cold, alone.

    When Thomas asked for DeAnne’s hand in marriage, he and Walter Wendell were in the living room of the green-shuttered colonial. Baby Harper was in the dining room. Baby Harper overheard Walter Wendell say, “Counselor, I was going to have you disbarred if you’d waited a day longer!” There was laughter, and then there was a hush as Walter Wendell got right down to business. His daughter, DeAnne, was going to make it possible for him to keep the promise that he had made when he too had joined the family.
    Like Thomas, Walter Wendell had joined the firm of Fletcher Burch first, though it didn’t take him three years to marry the boss’s daughter. He married Iris in three months. Fletch Burch had called him “Whirlwind Walter” while slapping him repeatedly on the back on the day of the wedding. Everyone knew that young Walter Wendell, bridegroom, was also now the firm’s newest partner. Fletch’s management philosophy was simple. Family first. No one had predicted that in a matter of days Whirlwind Walter would again earn his name.
    Walter Wendell knew that Fletch understood ambition. Fletch, however, also believed in a man keeping his word. Walter Wendell handing over the law firm, if only temporarily, to a