Molly Prentiss: Tuesday Nights in 1980

“Well congratulations to you two,” Winona said. “You’re very lucky, and your child will be, too! From what I can tell — and I am the littlest bit clairvoyant, you know — you’re going to make wonderful parents. And do we think we’ll get an artist?”

“I won’t wish it on him,” Marge said with a laugh. “Well, him or her.”

Winona laughed falsely and touched Marge’s shoulder. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I almost forgot. The tradition is that I tell you the scoop on whatever artwork you’re standing in front of, and then that’s your painting for the year. Well not your painting — I’m not going to give it to you! — but sort of like your spirit painting, do you know what I mean? You hold it with you through the year. You darlings have the Frank Stella. And you see, Stella did everything backward. He started abstract when no one was being abstract! And then once everyone started going abstract, he got lush and moody and majestic. So there’s your token of Winona wisdom for 1980: Be backward! Go against the tide! Do things the wrong way!” She laughed like a pretty horse.

“Won’t be hard for me,” James said with an awkward chuckle. He thought of how he had gotten here or anywhere: he had only ever done anything wrong, and it was only by chance that it turned into anything right.

“Oh, you shut your mouth now!” Winona practically screamed. “Your name is on the very edge of everyone’s lips! Your articles are on the very first page of the arts section! Your brain is, well, I don’t know what the hell your brain is, but it sure is something. And your collection! Lord knows I’ve wanted to get my paws on that since I was covered in placenta! You’re on fire, James. And you know it.”

James and Marge laughed for Winona until she got pulled away by a woman in a very puffy white dress. “It’s almost time for the countdown!” the woman squealed. Winona looked back toward James and Marge and said over her shoulder: “Get ready for the first Tuesday of the year!” And then to her puffy friend: “I’ve always found Tuesdays so charming, haven’t you? I do everything on Tuesdays”—her voice trailing away—“I take my shower on Tuesdays; I have my shows on Tuesdays… how fortuitous that the first day of the decade will fall…” Her monologue was out of range now, and she ducked back under the surface of the party as if it were a lake. In the relative quiet of her wake, James found a little bracket of time to delve into his Running List of Worries.

On James’s Running List of Worries: baby food, and would it smell bad?; the Claes Oldenburg in Winona’s fireplace (Was it being given enough space to breathe? Because it was making his throat close up a little bit); the wrinkle, shaped like a witch’s nose, on the cuff of his pant leg, despite Marge’s diligent ironing; his suit itself (Was white out ?); would his child, if she were a girl, shove a man against the library stacks and kiss him like Marge had done to him, and at such a young age?; would his child, if he were a boy, have a small penis?; did he have a small penis?; and what had Winona just said a moment ago? You’re on fire, James. But what would happen if his fire burned out?

It was true, he knew, that his brain — a brain in which a word was transformed into a color, where an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation, where applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue — was the reason he was on any front page of anything, on anyone’s lips, at any party like this one. His synesthesia, as they had finally diagnosed it when he was sixteen — too old for it to have not fucked up his childhood — had unlocked a key to a world of art he would never have been invited into otherwise. But the way Winona had said it gave him pause, and through his happy mood he felt the Running List of Worries gather enough speed to hop the fence onto the Existential Track, where the profoundest worries — worries that came all the way from the past — ran a relay of sorts, passing the baton through the race of James’s life, landing him, of all places, here.

SEVEN STEPS TO SYNESTHESIA

ONE: MOTHER/ORANGE

James was born different . Or at least that’s what they called it, the doctors and the nurses, when he came out floppy and smaller than average, on November 17, 1946, in a low-ceilinged hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a morning marked only by an ambivalent drizzle. A certain anxiety had been bred into him — he screamed more than any other baby in the maternity ward, as if he already had something to say. His parents, a shifty banker (James Senior, who slept with his eyes open) and a lazy housewife (Sandy Bennett, formerly Sandy Woods, who hailed from the South, loved piña coladas, and specialized in making her son feel as different as they said he was, and not in a good way), misunderstood him from the start. His early childhood characteristics — seriousness, tenacity, anxiety surrounding food, a squeaky yet sincere laugh — made it so everyone else did, too. He didn’t talk until age four, and when he did, it was in full, existential sentences.

“How old are we when we die?” was the first question he asked his mother, who swatted at him with a peach-colored flyswatter, looked at him incredulously, and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No,” James said, already computing his next question in his mind, which was, “Why was I born?”

James was shorter than average, large-eared, eager to be at the center of a play group, quick to ditch the play group to study something more interesting than other humans: a caterpillar, a melting ice cube, a book. When he was eight years old he discovered his secret powers; he caught his finger in a screen door and yelled the word Mother , and he distinctly smelled oranges. His mother was busy painting her toenails the same pink as her pillbox, and so he sat on the front steps of his house all afternoon, saying Mother, Mother, Mother and breathing in deeply through his nose in between, awaiting the flash aroma of citrus.

TWO: BEIGE/DOOM

Soon after came the realization that his secret powers — the smells he smelled, the colors he saw — were not “normal.” This realization came to him not as a sudden surprise but rather as a slow, steady amassing of minor incidents that made him feel crazy: Georgie called him a dumb-ass when he answered a math equation with the word beige ; Miss Moose, his overly optimistic third-grade teacher, made notes on the margins of his homework that said things like Inventive! But still incorrect! ; his mother began forcing him to drink a chalky powder that she mixed into glasses of water, which the pediatrician had told her would keep her son regular . At the young age of ten, James sensed that he was not regular even a little bit, not even at all.

Parents and teachers saw James’s condition as an oddity or a lie; he was pegged with having a “vivid imagination” or a “tendency toward exaggeration,” and was twice made to see school psychologists because of something he wrote in a paper or said in class.

“Your boy says he is seeing colors,” he overheard a teacher tell his parents when they picked him up one day. “And… today he said he felt fireworks behind his eyes.”

Was it a problem with his vision? Was he seeking attention? Whatever it was, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were not pleased about it.

“No more of this crap,” his father had said on the car ride home. James just looked out the window, away from the angry gray of his father’s words. He would get a spanking tonight, he knew, a series of very hard spankings, probably, but he couldn’t help what he had felt that day in class. The numbers had made him feel sick — the way Miss Ryder had colored them had been all wrong. Nines were blue! Tens were dark blue! And she had assigned them pinks and reds. Miss Ryder, his father, all the booger-nosed kids in his classes — everyone, including him, knew that he was doomed.