Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong Page A

and especially in law school, I realized that the people around me were smart like a whip. Scarring, thought-clearing, exhilarating, and best to be avoided. Leo was a whip. He was hyperarticulate. His mouth was never quite able to keep pace with his brain. His gray cells pushed out his words, configured into perfectly constructed sentences, paragraphs, and pages. In this way, he was a variant on the singing-talker, a cappella. And like my great-uncle Harper, Leo chose me.
    It was possible that I fell in love with Leo the moment he told me his first name, which tasted of parsnips, a peculiar vegetable, or rather a distinctive one:
    A celery and a potato meet and have a love child. The celery departs soon thereafter, and the potato thinks of their fleeting time together with fondness and longing. Skating around the edges of their unlikely love affair is a McIntosh apple, contributing to the tableau all of its faint spiciness but none of its obvious sweet or sour.
    Yes, it was very possible that I fell in love with his name first.
    “Leo parsnip,” I remembered saying back to him and smiling.
    The Amtrak train was pulling out of Penn Station. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the train from New York to Boston was packed. He was walking slowly through the crowded car trying to find an available seat. Before sitting down next to me, he said, “Hi greenLifesavers , my name grapes is Leo parsnip . Is this seat rawcarrots taken?” Unremarkable, except for the unnecessary volunteering of a first name. Quotidian. Banal. Except to me. My smile must have encouraged him to continue the conversation despite the headphones that I had over my ears. He mouthed, “What are you listening to?”
    “Dolly Parton Sweet’nLow,” I replied.
    He laughed.
    I should have lied. I should have answered Bach or U2. I never told the truth about DP. Never. So, why had I without hesitation offered up the Madonna of my childhood to this stranger on a train? Thanksgiving, perhaps. Baby Harper was far away, and my body was moving even farther north. The slight rubbing of a stranger’s coat sleeve against mine. The taste of his name in my mouth. All these things were also possible answers.
    I turned off my Walkman, took off my headphones, and Virginia Dared myself to ask him, “What’s grahamcracker so funny cucumber , Leo parsnip?”

W ILBUR W RIGHT WOULD REMEMBER THE SOUND OF THE WIND rushing into him at thirty-one miles per hour as a song written only for him. Even as he was experiencing the sensation of speed—the coldest day in December he could ever imagine, his internal organs lurching forward telling him to go faster, faster —he knew the song would soon end. The question was how.
    Wilbur, as his younger brother Orville had done just minutes before, was lying flat on his stomach, and above and below him were two flat fabric “wings” stretched tight over a delicate framework of wood. To those in the village of Kitty Hawk who had seen it but didn’t understand it, Wilbur was strapped inside of a giant box kite, a toy that these two well-mannered, well-dressed brothers had come to play with on the shores of the Atlantic, among the sand dunes and the wind gusts of the Outer Banks of the Old North State. This was the fourth time that the Wright brothers had come to Kitty Hawk, and each time they had kept to themselves except for the occasional trips into the village to buy food and supplies. The ladies of Kitty Hawk and their daughters had observed that neither Wilbur, the elder, with the balding, egg-shaped head, nor Orville, the younger, with the dashing mustache, wore a wedding band. The brothers were both a bit slight of build for some tastes, but all of Kitty Hawk were in agreement that these two men must be of independent means to have the time and the money to amuse themselves as they did. The daughters of Kitty Hawk understood, though, that these men had eyes only for the heavens above them. Wilbur, especially, was always