Bitter in the Mouth

Linda first arrived at Thomas and DeAnne’s blue and gray ranch house when she was seven years old. Thomas initially tries to read fairy tales to Linda, but “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” is the only story with words that she can largely tolerate. After Thomas leaves her at night, she plays a game where she imagines herself losing and reattaching various body parts, in part in order to “rejoice in the things that I would again do, upon the reattachment” (162).

Linda believes that her family’s reluctance to discuss the past is the reason no one ever spoke about hers, or how she came to the Hammerick family. She and Harper hit it off immediately, when he attempts to wink at her and she, unable to wink, blinks slowly with both eyes; it helps that Harper is a “singing-talker,” which, for Linda, means that she experiences fewer incomings when conversing with him. Iris, meanwhile, understands Linda’s arrival as a kind of business transaction—she doesn’t have to like Linda, but Linda is now part of the family and, therefore, Iris was now under obligation to her.

DeAnne and Thomas were both forty-three when Linda became their child; Linda doesn’t know why they never had children prior to her, and she believes that Iris never forgave them for not giving her a naturally born grandchild.