Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  The Terre Haute baker must have thought the same thing because he agreed to an interview but not to scans or tests. According to the transcript, he introduced himself to the interviewer as “Cornelius Henry Harrison, but my friends call me Corny.”

  I imagined that he looked straight into the camera when he said this, because a man who admitted that his nickname was “Corny” had nothing to hide, I thought.

  “Mr. Harrison,” the interviewer began, “‘color hearing,’ as it’s sometimes known, is the form of chromesthesia that you claim to possess. It’s one of the most common forms of synesthesia—”

  “Common, huh? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that was how God made me,” the baker said, interrupting the interviewer.

  “I’m far from disappointed, Mr. Harrison. I’m quite honored to meet someone with your condition. My favorite composer, Olivier Messiaen, also had color hearing. If I may, I’d like to read to you a quote of his and see—well, I don’t mean see—but rather to get your reaction.”

  The interviewer was finally becoming self-conscious of her language. The uncomplicated verb see was tripping her up, becoming thick and multilayered and cumbersome, holding on to meanings that weren’t her own but that she had to acknowledge were there anyway.

  “I don’t know who that guy is, but go right ahead,” Corny replied.

  “Messiaen was a French composer known for compositions that were deeply influenced by his Catholic faith, by Eastern mysticism, and by his synesthesia. According to him, what he saw were, and I quote, ‘musician colors, not to be confused with painter’s colors. They’re colors that go with music. If you tried to reproduce these colors on canvas it may produce something horrible. They’re not made for that.… What I’m saying is strange but it’s true.’”

  “Strange but true. That pretty much sums it up,” Corny said.

  The rest of the interview proceeded in a similar manner. A kind of verbal sparring was occurring between them. The interviewer was ultimately unsuccessful in her efforts to elicit from Corny anything but a matter-of-fact response to what she called his “gift.” She ended by asking Corny why he became a baker.

  “Because that was what the army taught me to do,” Corny replied.

  God and the army made him that way, I thought. Case closed, lady!

  “But, Mr. Harrison, did you never consider a career in music or, perhaps, as a visual artist?” the interviewer persisted.

  “I have a high school diploma. Guys like me, we don’t consider careers. We get a job,” Corny said.

  You’re asking him the wrong questions. Ask about the sound of granulated sugar being poured into a stainless-steel bowl, the whirring motor of an electric mixer, or his fist punching down bread dough. A flat, B minor, or C sharp? Or did he prefer music made by others when he worked? If yes, then ask what songs and colors moved this man to make the lightest cakes, the chewiest cookies, breads with tender crusts?

  The interviewer’s career-counseling advice, ignored and shrugged aside by the Tuscaloosan and Corny, were validated at the end of the program, in a closing segment about famous “synesthetes” who were all writers, composers, or painters. There was Vladimir Nabokov, who, like Ms. Cordell, saw the letters of the alphabet in colors. Nabokov, fluent in Russian, English, and French, made a distinction between the long English a and the French a. The English one had “the tint of weathered wood” while the French was “polished ebony.” The transcript was silent about Nabokov’s synesthetic relationship to the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. Nabokov wrote both in Russian and in English, but the latter was defined as a “foreign” language to him because it wasn’t his mother tongue. But what if English was more familiar or felt more like home to Nabokov for reasons that his readers have never considered?

  I, fluent in only one language, tasted foreign words only when they sounded to me like a word in English. Beau, the French word for “handsome,” for example, shared the same incoming as the English word bow (as in a decorative knot made of ribbons, not what you would do in front a king). Both words brought to my mouth the taste of MoonPies, one of the better-tasting store-bought delights of my childhood.

  I turned the transcript’s page and read about Nabokov’s “alder-leaf f, the unripe-apple of p, and pistachio t.” I longed to see them. I vowed to reread Lolita, keeping in mind that every time Nabokov wrote her name it ended with a dollop of pistachio green and a starless night.

  There was the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who, like Corny, saw colors when he heard music. But unlike the no-nonsense baker from Terre Haute, the opposite was also true for Kandinsky. When the painter saw colors, he heard musical notes and sounds. Kandinsky, an avid cellist, claimed that the cello was the musical instrument that produced for him the deepest blues.

  There was Alexander Scriabin, yet another composer, whom Corny would have no qualms admitting that he had never heard of. I, on the other hand, felt a distinct sense of embarrassment and loss that I had never heard of Scriabin, as if I had failed to meet a member of my own family, an uncle who lived just over the state line or a half brother I should have recognized because we have the same eyes and nose. According to the transcript, the program featured a recording of Scriabin’s composition Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, as the credits rolled.

  I have read and reread the transcript of the program, which was entitled “Synesthesia: Sense Something Different?” (Even PBS couldn’t resist the easy puns that littered the landscape of this topic.) I preferred reading the transcript to watching the tape of the program, because with the transcript I could forget about the interviewer’s facial expressions and the voiceover’s irritating tones and concentrate instead on the specific and intimate worlds that were evoked by each of the synesthetes. I have looked to the transcript for an alternative family tree. I have e-mailed the program’s producers asking for the real names and addresses of the piano tuner from Manchester, the instruction-booklet writer from Tuscaloosa, the baker from Terre Haute, and even the two surviving daughters of the flutist from Hamburg. I explained to the producers that I too had synesthesia. My implied message was that privacy surely couldn’t be an issue among us. I received an e-mail back that stated that the producers would forward my name and contact information to the subjects of the program, thanked me for watching, and would I consider making a contribution to my local PBS station. None of the individuals who were profiled in the program have contacted me. So much for that tunnel of light. It should have been no surprise to me that recognition, like so many other things in life, was subjective. I told myself it was good enough to know that these people existed. I was disappointed all the same.

  I have been more successful in getting to know the famous and deceased synesthetes profiled in the program. I have used the transcript as a road map for further research on the lives that they lived. I read Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, and pieced together the beginning of Lolita. According to Nabokov, the two l’s were “noodle-limp” white, and the o was an “ivory-backed hand mirror.” As for the i, Nabokov uncharacteristically left it as a vague member of the family of “yellows.” I saw Kandinsky’s paintings with names like Opposing Chords, Funeral March, and Fugue and searched them for the cello’s plaintive notes. In Fugue, they were in the upper-right-hand corner of the canvas, two fillips of intense blue, perhaps the very notes that Kandinsky described as “calling man towards the infinite.” I heard performances of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a chamber piece for clarinet, cello, violin, and piano. Though the composer specified that the Quartet’s second movement had “blue-orange chords,” followed by “blue and mauve, gold and green, and violet-red, with an overriding quality of steely grey,” these colors remained invisible to me. But what I heard made my heart feel as if there was another heart inside of it, a world within a world. Finally, I read about Scriabin’s clavier à lumières, an instrument that he invented for Prometheus. The clavier featured a color-coded keyboard and was played like a piano. Though when the keys were pressed, no mus
ical notes came from the instrument. The clavier instead produced a projection of colored lights. I had a recurring dream that I was in the audience at Carnegie Hall in 1915 when the clavier successfully premiered. I had another dream that during this New York performance of Prometheus I was by the composer’s bedside as he lay dying in Moscow. Around him were his friends and family who had gathered for an intimate performance of the same composition, complete with a child-size clavier. Scriabin, I dreamed, died hearing and seeing.

  WHEN BABY HARPER WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, THERE WAS a great snowstorm that covered most of the American South. It was remembered as a region-wide state of emergency by the adults of Boiling Springs and treasured as a pageant of fairy-tale-like scenes by their children, who woke up to a world covered in marshmallow fluff and rock candy crystals. These children thought of the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” except that they felt not a modicum of fear. Because, unlike those abandoned siblings, these children awoke to find their fathers at home on a weekday and their mothers making hot cocoa. Best of all, they awoke to the prospect of not having to go to school that day and for days to come. So many of their dreams had come true all at once.

  Baby Harper, still more boy than man, braved the cold and stumbled through the streets of Boiling Springs marveling at the buildings and houses and how they looked like cakes covered in seven-minute frosting and coconut flakes. When he saw that every branch of every tree was encased in ice, he thought of Cinderella’s toes and how they were visible through her perfect-fit glass slippers. Boiling Springs was shut down for days, not a car moving on any of the snow-covered streets. There were only children running and screaming and laughing. It was January 29, but these children all thought of it as another Christmas Day, when their world, wrapped in a thick blanket of white, was a gift.

  For the next five days, Baby Harper went out every morning before these children awoke, and he took photographs of the transformed Boiling Springs. He later entered one of his photographs into the Shelby Star’s “Blizzard Contest.” Entitled Ice Debutantes, the black-and-white image was of a grove of trees with their branches so weighed down by snow and ice that they appeared to be gracefully bowing. His photograph lost to one of a snowman in a top hat, which was entitled Snowman in a Top Hat. During the longest, hottest days of August, Baby Harper would always show me the photographs that he had taken of the blizzard of 1951. It was my great-uncle’s way of practicing mind over body.

  The Greyhound bus pulled into Gastonia’s Union bus station on August 4, 1998, an hour and twenty-five minutes late. The bus’s tinted windows couldn’t hide the fact that it was almost noon outside, and the rooftops of the cars, sitting unprotected in the station’s parking lot, were radiating waves of heat. The moment I stepped off the bus, I saw Kelly. She was sitting inside her car, its motor idling. The windows were rolled up, and I could see from the movements of her bangs that the air-conditioning was turned up to high. She waved. I waved back and motioned for her to stay. I remembered how she hated the heat, how it gave her rashes in the folds of her stomach and along her inner thighs. She popped open the trunk as I approached the car, and I placed my suitcase inside. The last photograph of herself that Kelly had sent to me was from her college graduation from Gardner-Webb. That was seven years ago, and that was the mental image that I had of her: long blond hair parted to the left, her body a perfect size six, her mother beaming proudly (thinking that the worst was over). The woman waiting for me in the car wasn’t the Kelly in that photograph, but the grown-up version of the fat girl who was my dearest friend. Kelly leaned over and gave me a hug. I held on to her for longer than she probably expected, but she didn’t pull away. Kelly had omitted from her letters that she had gained back all of her pre–high school weight. Her hair was also no longer bleached and was again the warm strawberry-blond shade that I had combed my fingers through and braided when we were ten, when love was nothing we ever thought of falling into but was something we felt all around us, like the temperature of the air, whenever we were together.

  “I can’t believe youcannedgreenbeans recognizedRCCola me,” Kelly said, her voice muffled against the side of my neck.

  “Youcannedgreenbeans look greatcannedtomatosoup,” I said, letting her out of my embrace.

  “My momchocolatemilk hatesNutterButtercookie it,” Kelly said, as she looked into the rearview mirror before backing her car out of its parking space. What she meant was that her mother hated her, again.

  “That’s all rightFrenchfries ’cause I hateNutterButtercookie your momchocolatemilk,” I said.

  Kelly let out a quick, sharp laugh. That was what we used to say to each other in the face of maternal neglect and stagnant unpopularity, as if one of us hating back was a force field that could negate and reverse the sting. Sometimes hating back worked and sometimes it didn’t. That afternoon, the incantation from our youth lifted Kelly’s mood, and she looked over at me and smiled before asking, “Where to firstPepto-Bismol, Lindamint HammerickDrPepper?”

  “I was thinking of BridgescreamcheeseDanish for lunchunripebanana,” I replied. “But whatgrahamcracker timecottagecheese dogrits youcannedgreenbeans have to headcorndog backwatermelon to workNillaWafer?”

  “I don’t,” Kelly said. “I took the dayhardboiledeggyolk off in your honorboiledcabbage. Also, I’d nograpejelly ideaSwisscheese when your bus wouldcandiedapple actuallystrawberryyogurt get herehardboiledegg. Don’t youcannedgreenbeans wantsaltedbutter to stopcannedcorn by your mom’schocolatemilk placeroastturkey firstPepto-Bismol?”

  “I told her I was on a laterpimentocheese bus. So I’m not duegrits in till tonightbanana,” I said.

  “Lindamint, I knowgrapejelly she’s been reallypopcorn looking forTriscuitward to your visit,” Kelly said. “She called me twicespaghettisauce lastblackpepper nightbanana to reminddeviledegg me to pickM&M’s youcannedgreenbeans upFrootLoopscereal. Youcannedgreenbeans knowgrapejelly she can’t drivecannedbakedbeans at nightbanana now, rightFrenchfries?”

  “That’s why I told her I wouldcandiedapple be arriving at nightbanana. I didn’t wantsaltedbutter her pickM&M’sing me upFrootLoopscereal.”

  “Wow.”

  “Whatgrahamcracker?”

  “Youcannedgreenbeans haven’t changed,” Kelly said, swallowing a small somersaulting sound.

  “Kellycannedpeaches? Did youcannedgreenbeans just hiccupmeatloaf?” I asked.

  Kelly didn’t tell me until I had placed my order for a pulled pork sandwich, coleslaw, fries, extra sauce, and Cheerwine that she had been a vegetarian for the past four years. There were three items on the Bridges menu that a vegetarian could eat: hushpuppies and the aforementioned slaw and fries. Kelly ordered all three and a diet 7UP. I asked her in jest whether she had become an atheist too. Renouncing pork was the equivalent of renouncing God in our part of the country. She laughed that off, and we ate the rest of our lunch in silence. I was eating too quickly to talk, making loud, appreciative noises that prompted the two elderly men in the booth in front of us to turn around and stare. Kelly was silent because she knew that I had quit smoking, which meant that the incomings were unmitigated and that I would appreciate a break from talking. After my last bite, I wiped sauce from the corners of my mouth, and Kelly asked me whether I wanted to stop by the liquor store before heading over to Baby Harper’s.

  “I haven’t had a drinkEskimoPie since the surgerybottledItaliandressing,” I said.

  “Youcannedgreenbeans don’t mindapple if I drinkEskimoPie, dogrits youcannedgreenbeans?” Kelly asked.

  “Youcannedgreenbeans didn’t mindapple that I ate porkTabcola in frontgrapejuice of youcannedgreenbeans, did youcannedgreenbeans?” I replied.

  We drove to the liquor store, and Kelly came back to the car with a bottle of tequila, a bottle of gin, and two bottles of bourbon. They were having a sale, she told me, as she placed the bag on the backseat. My best friend was an overweight, thrifty, vegetarian lush, I thought. Kelly had failed to mention these developments in her letters to me
. I expected that there would be other revelations as well.

  The twenty-minute drive from Shelby to Boiling Springs felt eternal, which was different from feeling like an eternity. Eternal was the feeling that the journey was ongoing and would continue whether you were along for the ride or not, that there was no hurry to reach your destination because your destination would patiently await you. The occupants in a car heading toward the ocean often experienced this feeling, which coincided with the moment when the salt air reached their nostrils. They knew then that the ocean was there but not yet in sight. Their anticipation would relax into inevitability, and their journey would become for them the reason for the drive. The ocean, they knew, could wait. Boiling Springs could wait as well. Kelly may have missed a turn or two, taking us in a wide loop around Shelby, along roads that were bordered on either side by fields of sweet potatoes, their heart-shaped leaves levitating low to the ground. The speed at which we were traveling may have slowed, tractors passing our car on the two-lane roads. We began to shiver in the car’s circulated air, which hovered at sixty-eight degrees, while outside the black-tarred roads softened under the August sun. Kelly was behind the wheel, and I was riding shotgun. The moment seemed eternal and familiar, but it wasn’t. Because by the time that Kelly had gotten her driver’s license, our friendship in high school was strictly that of two pen pals. We were no longer by each other’s side, in each other’s physical company. Kelly and I were now reenacting these lost summers of our teens, the summers that we would have driven on these same roads, the car radio blasting, as opposed to the silence that we found ourselves in now.

  “Kellycannedpeaches?” I asked.

  “Yes, Ms. HammerickDrPepper,” Kelly replied, a smile on her face.

  “Why didn’t youcannedgreenbeans comeapplebutter to my grandpotatosaladmother’s funeral?” I asked.