5
" Memory is a curse. I wasn't the first to say this, but I was proof of it. My memory was sharp. A thorn, a broken water glass, a jellyfish that crashed into me and reached back for more. My secret sense, which I have come to understand as my condition, gave me a way to encode information that was immediate and long-lasting, an inborn mnemonic device.
The ancient Greeks had a mnemonic device that called for thinking of a path, say through the streets of a familiar city, and depositing along the way the information that they wished to retain. At the corner of the Street of Wine Merchants, they would place fact number one; continuing ahead twenty paces to the Fountain of Bacchus, they would place fact number two; turning right onto the Street of Pleasure Houses by the front door of the Pavilion of Virgins (the name was ironic because even back then virgins were rare and mythical beings), they would place facts number three through ten (because it was there among the rare and mythical beings that they wanted to linger); and in that way their journey would continue on. To retrace this path in their mind was to gather up the facts again, easy and showy as red roadside poppies.
My own mnemonic device worked in similar fashion, but instead of a path there was a multicourse meal prepared by a mad scientist who knew and cared nothing about food. To revisit the dishes and their chaotic juxtaposition of flavors was to recall with precision those facts, from the trivial to the significant, that I have acquired, via the spoken word, during the course of my life. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
6
" 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? "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
7
" The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as "legalese." Unlike the basic building blocks- the day-to-day words- that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne's kitchen.
Subpoenakiwifruit.
InjunctionCamembert.
Infringementlobster.
Jurisdictionfreshgreenbeans.
Appellantsourdoughbread.
ArbitrationGuinness.
Unconstitutionalasparagus.
ExculpatoryNutella.
I could go on and on, and I did.
Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought.
There were, of course, the rare and disconnecting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. "Mitigating," for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated "cheese" that didn't melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two z's and the sound of satisfaction at the end... ah!) were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly improbable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs-Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (feeder road took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts.
Along with "mitigating," these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time:
Egressredvelvetcake.
PerpetuityFrenchsaladdressing.
Compensatoryboiledpeanuts.
ProbateReese'speanutbuttercup.
FiduciaryCheerwine.
AmortizationOreocookie. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
9
" Baby Harper and I were having dinner together, as we had done every Saturday night for close to a year by then. We went into Shelby and sat in our usual booth at Bridges Barbecue Lodge. We each ordered a pulled pork sandwich, a side of coleslaw, fries with an extra order of barbecue sauce for dipping, peach cobbler (only available on Saturdays), and a bottle of Cheerwine, a cherry-flavored cola, bottled in nearby Salisbury, which my great-uncle said brought out the "fruit" in Bridges's sauce. Bridges Barbecue Lodge had two things going for it, which was more than I could say for the other dining options in town, Pizza Inn, Waffle House, Arby's, Roy Rogers, and Hardee's. In the mid-eighties the greater Boiling Springs-Shelby area attracted only the B-list fast-food chains. Bridges was in a league of its own. The first thing that made Bridges special was that, even by the standards of North Carolina barbecue, Bridges's sauce was extraordinarily vinegary, which meant it was extraordinarily good. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
10
" When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this "instant" baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn't a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn't bring myself to call what he made for us "pancakes." There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
11
" Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was "as near to modern Gothic as we dared" according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word "dare" always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library's design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l'oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference.
Light and Truth, indeed. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
12
" We had been able to smell Bridges's vinegary sauce, its sharp notes tickling our noses, as we sat in the chapel. We knew what was awaiting us, and we knew that it would be good. The food that the caterer had prepared for the estimated thirty-five guests was served as the appetizers: dainty pimento-cheese sandwiches- made not with white sandwich bread but with a brioche loaf, which started a wave of "Oh, my!" and "Oh, dear!" among those of my great-uncle's generation who weren't quite sure that they approved of the substitution but eagerly ate the sandwiches anyway, bite-size buttermilk biscuits with thin slivers of baked ham, little tureens of summer squash casserole. I had ordered that dish for Kelly, the lone vegetarian in a sea of pork eaters. It was also a veiled reference to our childhood nemesis Sally Campbell, who, beautiful as she might have been and still may be, would always be to us a member of the humble squash family. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
13
" Kelly and I saw a future (otherwise known as the sixth grade) in which we would remain invisible and unchanged while around us other girls suddenly bloomed. In Kelly's version, the girls burst, blousy peonies after the first hot summer night. In mine, after seven days and seven nights of rain, these girls became dandelions while we remained green clumps of crabgrass. Kelly and I knew what we needed. Lips that looked pink, wet, and just licked. Sally Campbell's lips had started to look that way at the beginning of fifth grade. Sally was pretty, and pretty girls were always ahead of the rest of us. Sally's lips and also her mouth smelled of strawberry bubblegum. Kelly and I were jealous of both the shine and the scent. In order to make us feel better, I told Kelly that the word "Sally" tasted of pumpkins, without the brown sugar or the cinnamon. Just a squash.
Sally, nonetheless, set the example for us. Lips that could be seen from across the classroom we understood were desirable, and gloss for them has to be our first acquisition. Kelly begged her mother, Beth Anne, and then resorted to a promise of future weight loss for a shade of pink called Flamingo Paradise, which Beth Anne picked out for her. Beth Anne, at the time, didn't pay attention to Kelly. Beth Anne completely ignored the fact that her only daughter had asked her for lip gloss, strawberry-bubblegum-flavored. Flamingo Paradise was lipstick, the kind that my grandmother Iris wore. It went on creamy but soon became cracked and dry. The only flavor it gave to our lips was something that also belonged to Iris: talcum powder mixed with a crushed vanilla cream wafer. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
14
" Girls without their fathers were also at risk. I didn't learn this from the fairy tales of my youth, because in those stories the fathers were present in the castles and in the cottages. The fairy-tale fathers, however, were unforgivably weak and always thinking with their groins. These men would rather sacrifice their daughters than risk harm to themselves. Rapunzel's father loved her mother so much that he stole for the woman. When he was caught, he was a coward, and instead of paying with his own life he promised away their unborn child. Gretel was very much alive, as was her brother, Hansel, when their father tried to do away with them. Three times he tried. ("Abandonment in the forest" was a bloodless euphemism for attempted murder.) Of course, there was Beauty. Was she not the poster child for daughters of men who dodged their responsibilities and used their female offspring as human shields?
Fairy-tale fathers were also criminally negligent. Where was Cinderella's father when she was being verbally abused and physically demeaned by her stepmother and stepsisters? Perhaps he was so besotted, his wits so dulled by his nightly copulation with his new wife, that he failed to notice the degraded condition of his daughter. Snow White's father, a king no less, was equally negligent and plainly without any power within his own domestic realm. Under his very roof, his new wife plotted the murder of his child, coerced one of his own huntsmen to carry out the deed, then ate what she thought was the girl's heart. This king was no king. He was a fool who left his daughter woefully unprotected.
When I first heard these stories, I assigned to these men no blame because they worry the solemn and adored mantle of "father." I understood them to be, like my own father, men who went to work every day, who returned home exhausted and taciturn, and who fell asleep in their easy chairs while reading the newspaper. I assumed that they, like my father, would have protected their daughters if only they had known of the dangers their girls faced during those dark hours after school and before dinner. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
19
" Dill" tasted of fresh dill, a bright grassy entryway leading into a room where something faintly medicinal had recently been stored. This happy coincidence of meaning and flavor, however, didn't leave the word neutralized and without power. The word could still disrupt, dismay, or delight. In this instance, "Dill" was a promise ring. Inside its one syllable was a summer that would bring, along with the fireflies and the scuppernongs, a boy who would kiss me when my brother, Jem, wasn't looking. "
― Monique Truong , Bitter in the Mouth
