Bitter in the Mouth (21 page)

I sent information that I wanted DeAnne to know via a conduit. Now that Baby Harper was gone, Kelly reluctantly took on that role for us. Kelly told DeAnne that I had been assigned to a case that was going to the U.S. Supreme Court and that the workload, while overwhelming and unrelenting, was helping me to deal with my great-uncle’s death. Kelly must have gotten that story line from an episode of
Ally McBeal
. It was a ridiculous lie but one that was plausible enough for DeAnne, who didn’t know—because I hadn’t told her—that I was a trademark lawyer and that never in my five years of practice had I seen the inside of a courthouse.

Kelly, of course, knew everything. We had resumed our correspondence in earnest and, for me, out of necessity. Without the hourly cigarettes and the daily drinks, I was finding it a challenge again to manage the incomings. I wanted to hear Kelly’s voice on the telephone, but I couldn’t listen to it for very long. My relationship to the spoken word had regressed. I felt as I did in elementary and middle school. I retreated into the pages of books. I watched TV with the sound turned off. When I became lonely for the human voice, I found it in songs. I wrote long letters to my best friend. I wrote to her that I was coming home. Then I wrote that I was bringing Baby Harper and young Thomas back with me. I planned, among other things, to introduce them to DeAnne.

I hadn’t been on a Greyhound bus since 1986, when Iris had her second heart attack. This time, Kelly had offered to fly up to New York City and drive with me back to Boiling Springs. I considered it, but I didn’t want her to travel all that way only to turn back and head southward again. I thought that I could use the sixteen-hour-and-forty-five-minute bus ride to organize my thoughts. I wanted to prepare myself. I thought that I could be lawyerly about my return home. Approach Boiling Springs as if I were preparing for a meeting with a client or an adversary. Marshal the few facts that I had, formulate my theories, draft my probative questions. In my shoulder bag, I packed a legal pad on which I planned to jot down my notes. In my years of practicing law, I had learned that for non-lawyers, a legal pad was an intimidating item. Its size or rather its unusual length was part of the scare tactic. Its color was talismanic as well. Yellow connoting jaundice. Or perhaps aging. Or the slow passage of time. That was precisely what I wanted to do. Slow down time. Bus travel was the best way I knew how. The frequent stops, the waiting for all the passengers to collect themselves from bathroom stalls, from fast food lines, and from the sirenlike glows of vending machines. I wanted the inefficiencies of traveling en masse and cheaply, of road-tripping with people who collectively had more time than money.

The smells were the same, I thought, as I climbed aboard the bus at Port Authority. Once I settled into my seat and looked around me, I understood why. The passengers were the same. The teenagers who looked like runaways (because even in the August heat they had too many pieces of clothing on and none of the pieces were clean), the well-dressed elderly black women with shiny purses on their laps, the middle-aged white men with long hair, receding hairlines, and bellies pregnant with beer. The demographics of long-distance bus travel hadn’t changed, except that there were now men from Central and South America, in their twenties, thirties, and forties, who looked uniformly exhausted, as if they knew that every state of the union would be the same for them: New York or North Carolina, apples or tobacco, produce fields or slaughterhouses. Their migration was a peculiar form of travel. Peculiar in that it was travel that took them nowhere. Wherever they landed, it was exactly the same. (Immigration was migration fueled by faith that
this
wasn’t so.)

I waited for my body to adjust. Soon the artificial pine scent that came from the onboard restroom would permeate the rest of the bus, eventually masking the stale sweat (men with receding hairlines), the rose-scented hand lotion (elderly women with purses), and the musty cigarettes and pot smoke embedded in denim (teenagers). Somewhere in that mix was also the lime and leather of aftershaves (migrant laborers on their days off). I knew that soon my nose would no longer be able to pick out these scents, their individuality coalescing into one, which my nose would then assimilate and take no notice of for the next sixteen hours, like an eye adjusting to the dark. It would be the last forty-five minutes of the journey that would be the most difficult to tolerate. The bathroom would have been compromised by everyone on board, except for the most experienced riders, who knew how to time their intake of beverages to coincide with the scheduled stops. Then the shuffling of bodies waking from a cramped, light sleep would cause their individual scents to rise again and move up and down the aisle like anxious travelers.

Hand lotion and aftershave would be reapplied. Some kid in the back of the bus would steal a puff or two from a cigarette that he couldn’t help but light up, though it was grounds for being thrown off the bus. No bus driver would give a shit with only forty-five minutes to go, the kid would think. He would be right. The bus driver would want to get to the destination even more than the passengers. He made this run three times a week. New York City to Gastonia (the closest Greyhound stop to Boiling Springs). Twenty hours and fifteen minutes, if there was a transfer, which there usually was. Or, the “express,” which was the one I was on, could shave more than four hours off that time, but usually didn’t because of the first rule of bus travel: Buses were always late. In light of all this, the bus driver would think, Who has time to throw some stupid kid off the bus? With only forty-five minutes to go, all the passengers would agree. With only forty-five minutes to go, I would pop another piece of gum into my mouth and fight the desire to join the kid with the cigarette at the back of the bus.

I had thought about making the drive home on my own, but eight years of living in New York City without a car had made me unsure of my driving skills, especially for such a long trip. Also, Dr. Holloway, my OB/GYN, had warned me that my body was more exhausted from the surgery than I would think. Dr. Holloway’s waiting room played Gregorian chants and New Age music that mimicked whale songs. Instead of mints or hard candies, her receptionist’s desk offered a large glass canister of granola, which her patients scooped into paper cups, which they then recycled. I thought her use of “exhausted” was therefore less medical and more self-helpish in nature. At my one-month follow-up, Dr. Holloway said that the removal of any vital organs, and the ovaries, she leaned in and whispered, were of course
very vital
—my ovaries can’t hear you, doctor; they’re already gone, I almost said aloud—resulted in a trauma that the body could recover from, but afterward the body would continue to grieve for what had been taken from it.

“Wow, your doctor sounds like she was high,” Kelly wrote in letter #1,301. Kelly and I made a joke of Dr. Holloway’s words, but I knew that we both were thinking about this idea of our bodies grieving. Kelly thought about the absence. I thought about the void. We both had just turned thirty, and we never had imagined our lives in quite
this
way. To be honest, we never had imagined anything about our thirties. What little girls would? Kelly had thought that by the end of high school she would be homecoming queen or at least one of the homecoming court. When she thought of college, it was only in
tableaux vivants
of sorority parties and UNC football games and boys who all looked like Wade. (He, like Jesus, remained our male archetype.) I imagined leaving Boiling Springs. After my father died, I imagined New Haven and New York City. I thought these cities would be like Heaven. I would see there all the people whom I had loved. I would see my father, who hadn’t died but, like Wade’s mom, had run away from home to find true love. I would see my great-uncle Harper because I would send him a first-class plane ticket and together we would set up house. I would see Kelly because she never lost her pregnancy weight and instead regained her beautiful, full-figured intelligence. Finally, I would see Wade. But this time, I would recognize the orange sherbet boy first because I would be the one who had changed completely. I used to think about Wade every day. All through college and in law school, I thought about him. Even after I met Leo, I thought about him. Now I thought about Wade only when I caught the cross-town bus or a Greyhound bus home.

On the other side of the tinted glass window, a green sign with
GASTONIA
in white letters came into view. The word was rippling in the midmorning heat. I couldn’t remember whether Boiling Springs had its own exit sign off the highway, but it must have. It felt like the world routinely bypassed us, but I know that it really hadn’t. Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino came to Boiling Springs. The Wright brothers and Virginia Dare came to Boiling Springs. Dill and Boo Radley came to Boiling Springs. South American magnolias and JCPenney catalogs came to Boiling Springs. New cars from Detroit and plastic hair barrettes from Taiwan came to Boiling Springs. Flamingo Paradise and Ocean Lite came to Boiling Springs. Ersatz pizzas and all-you-can-eat salad bars came to Boiling Springs. De facto segregation and dead-end jobs came to Boiling Springs. Queers, Jews, Chinks, Japs, and Gooks came to Boiling Springs. On the whole, it was like any other American city, only smaller and duller and with less crime.

Inside the bus, there was a collective sigh. For every passenger there was a different reason for his or her exhalation: lovelorn, forlorn, war-torn, relief, regret, remorse, resigned, steeled, staved, and staunched. All were released into the stale air, changing for a moment its chemistry, making its odors detectable again to those bodies, like mine, who had adapted and grown used to them. As a group, we might never arrive, but we would get there. The sign on the highway made it seem real, I thought.

I looked down at the legal pad on my lap. There was yesterday’s date, August 3, 1988, on the first page, followed by a lot of writing, and only two questions at the end. I read them again. I asked myself, Is that all I want to know from DeAnne? I answered, Yes, that is all I want to know.

O
N
M
AY 25, 1910
,
THE
B
ISHOP
M
ILTON
W
RIGHT FLEW
. “H
IGHER
, Orville, higher!” he ordered his youngest son in an excited voice that made the bishop an eight-year-old boy again and not the eighty-two-year-old man that he was. Orville already had taken them 350 feet in the air. Together, father and son flew for seven minutes. Below them, the bishop’s elder son, Wilbur, stood at the edge of Huffman Prairie, among the grazing cows that had been pushed to one side of the pasture for the occasion. Ohio has too many cows, Wilbur thought. Maybe this was why he and Orville
had
to invent their flying machine. It was their antidote to a life among these lumbering beasts, heavy with milk and steaks. Ohio always made Wilbur feel this way. Dayton, especially, made Wilbur morose. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had made him immortal. Le Mans, France, had made him beloved. Why must a man travel so far from his home to feel these ways? Wilbur wanted to know. The cows offered him no insight.

“God could have heard him. He was screaming so loudly!” Orville told Wilbur afterward. Orville was still breathless. Their father was already on his way home for a much needed nap. Wilbur nodded his head because he had nothing that he wanted to say aloud. We didn’t even flip a coin, Wilbur thought. I’m the elder son. Why didn’t he trust
me?
Wilbur wanted to know. Orville stood there smiling broadly, sunlight filtering through his dark hair. Wilbur resented his younger brother for this too. Wilbur’s own full head of hair was by then only a memory. The tips of Orville’s mustache were still perfectly waxed, Wilbur also noted. Dashing bastard, Wilbur thought, and was then remorseful. Wilbur patted his little brother on the back, and together they walked away from their flying machine.

Of the two brothers, Wilbur was the first to die. He was forty-five years old, and death came to him in the form of typhoid fever. He had traveled to Boston and brought it back with him to Dayton. Boston, Massachusetts, would make him mortal. He suffered all the known symptoms: fatigue, muscle aches, and diarrhea. As Wilbur lay on his deathbed, he could feel every inch of his body as if he had been scrubbed raw with a bath brush. The few hairs that he had left on his head he felt acutely as well, as if someone had just inserted them one by one into his scalp with a needle and thread. For once, he was glad to be balding. He sincerely hoped that Orville would be spared such pain.

Edith was by his side, the Sarthe River far below them. So was everyone else in the town of Le Mans and in all of France, or so it seemed. Edith smiled at him and clutched on to his right thigh even tighter than before. Her husband would never know, she thought. He was in Le Mans looking up at them. I’m making you famous, Wilbur heard himself saying to Edith. He knew that this wasn’t a fanciful boast. He wasn’t a prideful man. He was stating a fact. Edith Berg, as he had claimed, would be written into the history books as the first American woman to be a passenger on a flying machine. Edith took her eyes off the ground and looked again into Wilbur’s startling blues. She was thinking about making another kind of flight with him. His voice sounded so strong, confident, and convinced. That was when Wilbur knew that he had been hallucinating. The fever was taking him away.

By the age of fourteen, I had figured out that I was neither a Chink nor a Jap. In my ninth grade history book, I read the following sentence: “Nguyen Van Thieu was the president of South Vietnam from September 3, 1967, to April 21, 1975.” For a split second, I thought the president’s name was a typographical error, perhaps a missing vowel or an extra consonant tucked into a Dutch name. Then I recognized it as “the unpronounceable part” of my name (that was what Kelly called it). I had never seen “Nguyen” printed in a book before. So while it belonged to me, I didn’t recognize it. My full name had been carefully written at the top of my report cards from the second through the eighth grade in the perfect flowing penmanship of my teachers, so I had known from the start that “Linh-Dao Nguyen” was a part of me as much as the “Hammerick” was.

In the other four paragraphs about Vietnam in my history book, I learned that the war was still in progress in 1968, the year of my birth, and that it ended for the Vietnamese in 1975, the year of my second birth at the blue and gray ranch house. I filed these facts away. They were connected to me, but I wasn’t connected to them. This pattern would repeat itself as I learned more about Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, the Tet Offensive, the fall of Saigon. I filed these facts away too. All that I learned about Vietnam had to do with war and death and dying. At the time, I had no body, which meant that I was impervious and had no use for such information. If I were my great-uncle Harper, I would have named the file “Not Applicable.”

What I wanted to know about myself I never read in a book in high school, college, or law school. I saw it on television. Three years ago, in 1995, I saw myself, or rather my doppelgänger. He was a British man in his late thirties with thinning blond hair. I had just turned on the television and was about to turn off the sound, but I didn’t because of this man’s speech pattern. He was fighting with his words. Some were jumping out too quickly and he was trying to impede their progress. Others were reluctant to emerge, and he had to spit them out with deliberate force. As I listened to him, I realized that his speech pattern was in fact no pattern at all. The only things rhythmic about him were his eyes. He blinked them in rapid succession as he paused, stalled, recoiled, and unspooled his words. I lit a cigarette, inhaled, and turned up the volume.

“Mr. Roland, would you say that living with synesthesia has been disruptive to your to day-to-day life?”
the interviewer asked, her own cadence broadcast-smooth.

“Would you say that living with your sense of smell or your eyesight has been disruptive to your day-to-day life?”
Mr. Roland asked the interviewer, in lieu of a response.

The camera cut to the interviewer’s face as she attempted to process what Mr. Roland had just posed to her. Hoping to make her case in another way, she then asked, “
Can you describe for me the tastes that you experienced as you said those words?”

“Certainly. Mashed peas, dried apples, wine gum, weak tea, butter unsalted, Walkers crisps.…”
Mr. Roland replied.

What I was experiencing at that moment wasn’t an out-of-body experience. It was an in-another-body experience. Everything but this man and me faded into darkness. He and I were at the two ends of a brightly lit tunnel. We were point A and point B. The tunnel was the most direct, straight-line route between the two points. I had never experienced recognition in this pure, undiluted form. It was a mirroring. It was a fact. It was a cord pulled taut between us. Most of all, it was no longer a secret.

I don’t remember getting up, but I must have. I do remember kneeling in front of the TV. I touched the image of Mr. Roland’s face as his words jumped, swerved, coalesced, attacked, and revealed. As the interview continued, he became more comfortable with the interviewer, and his facial tics and rapid blinking lessened. He masked what he couldn’t control by taking long sips from a glass of water (or perhaps the clear liquid was gin). He also turned his head slightly and coughed into his left hand, which provided him with a second or two of privacy. It soon became clear to Mr. Roland and to me that the interviewer wanted him to perform for the camera. After each question-and-answer exchange, the interviewer would ask him for the tastes of her words and then his. Mr. Roland was oddly obliging, much more so than I would have been in his position. I soon realized that his pool of experiential flavors, in other words his actual food intake, was very British and that he didn’t venture far from home for his gastronomical needs. “Curry fries” was the most unusual taste that this piano tuner from Manchester listed. The word “employment” triggered it, he told the interviewer. I said “employment” aloud and tasted olives from a can, which meant I tasted more can than olives. I felt more than a tinge of envy.

The interview, which appeared to be taking place inside of Mr. Roland’s kitchen, segued to an MRI scan of Mr. Roland’s brain, followed by a series of tables and graphs that documented the blood flow to different areas of his brain as he was experiencing a “state of synesthesia.” The voiceover, a deep male voice more smug than authoritative, defined synesthesia as a neurological condition that caused the involuntary mixing of the senses.

What a poor choice of words, I thought, and one that Mr. Roland surely must have objected to as well. Is your hearing or your eyesight involuntary? They are automatic and, if you’re lucky, always present.

Mr. Roland—not his real name in order to protect his privacy, according to the voiceover—suffered from auditory-gustatory synesthesia. (Suffered? Mr. Roland and I both have dropped dead and are now rolling over in our respective graves. We
suffered
your insult, sir!) The voiceover went on to list other forms of synesthesia—each combination more fantastical than the next, each combination a couplet (and sometimes even a triplet) to the ingenuity of the human brain.

The voiceover promised a baker in Terre Haute, Indiana, who saw colors when he heard music, every note bringing with it a vivid shade on the color spectrum. There was a flutist in Hamburg, Germany, who experienced flavors as shapes and textures. Her favorite was white asparagus, which was a pleasing hexagonal form with smooth bumps all over its surface. There was a writer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who saw all her words in colors because each letter of the alphabet appeared to her in a different hue. According to the voiceover, the name of the writer’s hometown, with its preponderance of vowels, which were jewel tones of reds and oranges and pinks, was her favorite word. The Tuscaloosan wrote instruction booklets for a manufacturer of toasters, blenders, food processors, and other small home appliances. Even the voiceover, insensitive as he was, found this fact worthy of further exploration.

The interviewer appeared again on screen, this time walking up to the front door of a suburban house, a minivan parked in the driveway of its attached two-car garage. It could have been anywhere in America. The camera was peering over the interviewer’s back as a woman in her mid-forties opened the door and asked the interviewer to come inside. I knew that this had to be the home of the Tuscaloosan. The interior of the house—every visible item within it—was white. The sudden disappearance of colors was disorienting. I thought my television was losing its reception. I thought that the voices of the interviewer and the Tuscaloosan had become quieter and suddenly more difficult to hear, as if they were in the midst of a snowstorm. I even turned up the volume on my television set to compensate for the misperceived muffling. The effect was so jarring and complete because both the Tuscaloosan and the interviewer were dressed in white from head to toe. The former was in a white sundress and the latter in a white pantsuit. The interviewer had dressed according to the request of the Tuscaloosan, who found great comfort in and was therefore very protective of the sanctuary that she had created inside of her own home. The written word was visually stimulating enough, the Tuscaloosan told the interviewer. Of course, not all the letters were pleasing to her—the letter
w
was the color of a rusted car fender and
o
was a ring of green phlegm—but she was always “emotionally stirred by them,” as the Tuscaloosan put it. So much so that she often found it overwhelming after a long day of writing and editing at the office to take in the colors of her surrounding world as well. The Tuscaloosan likened it to a butcher who goes home and finds a big piece of steak, a pork loin, and a chicken for dinner every night.

“
The butcher loves what he sells but would rather have tofu on most nights,”
the Tuscaloosan said, smiling shyly at the interviewer.

“
Ms. Cordell, given your chromatolexic synesthesia, the fact that you became a writer seems to me a natural fit. But may I ask why instruction booklets?
” the interviewer asked.