Pickled Tongues
by Rachel Sussman
We were eleven the year the boy with the good hair drew my name in the holiday gift exchange. He grinned from ear-to-ear. He knew just the thing, he said.
This boy's name was monosyllabic and made of hard sounds. His hair was always cut just so and perfectly gelled into place. His clothes were pressed and preppy and he excelled at athletics. And because this boy had such good hair and because he was so good at sports and maybe because he used cruelty and charm with equal precision, he was very popular. When kids were around, he liked to tell the other boys that I was too ugly or too fat or too skinny or too slutty or too prudish. When no one was around he liked to tell me worse. When teachers were around, he liked to smile as if we were friends. As for me? I mostly held my tongue.
When he gave me his perfect gift, the boy with good hair and I were standing in his father's classroom, where the boy always stood slightly straighter, his chin a little higher. In his hands was a paper bag and on his face was a look of rapt anticipation. The bag felt heavy and solid in my hands. I slid out a simple glass jar, cool to the touch. As I looked, my brain was slow to register its contents—brackish liquid sloshing, taste buds pressed against convex curves—an entire jar crammed and jammed full of cows’ tongues, a jagged cut where each had been severed from a mouth. My jaw clenched. My mouth went dry. I looked at the boy with good hair, whose father, with similar hair and a similar face and a similar jocular-and-almost-but-not-quite-mean way of talking, now stood behind him—in on the joke.
Growing up as a kid who didn’t eat meat in a small town in the woods, adults and other kids alike often sought to shock me, or perhaps to tantalize me, with edible dead things—slices of bologna, ham sandwiches, Slim Jims, raw meat—dangled in front of my face. In my steely preteen wisdom, I thought I had become inured to it all. But those tongues. They were his whispered insults—slut, ugly, weird, worthless—packed into a jar. Those tongues. They were subjugation brined with malice and glee. Those tongues were grotesquery wrapped up and given my name.
I thought, then, of the cows I used to visit at the dairy farm down the road from my house. Of walking through the barns that smelled of manure and milk and warm, matronly bodies. Of stroking their soft, substantial sides and running my hands over the contours of their jutting bones. Of feeling the warm fullness of their udders under my palm. Of peering into the huge pasteurizing vat where their milk whirled in a swirl of white-topped foam. Of their fleshy, strong cow tongues eagerly licking my face until I squealed with a mixture of delight and disgust—they were so much spongier and so much smoother, their spit much more viscous and slimier than those of our horse or goats at home. I thought of the wanton violence unleashed by the boy with good hair against my stalwart, steady cows. Acts of enormous cruelty carried out on his behalf just to prove a point to me.
As the boy with the good hair and his father watched me, waiting to see my reaction, I caught an already familiar glint in their eyes. You have to be able to take a joke, said the glint. You're the problem, said the glint. Don’t be difficult, said the glint. My tongue lay thick and heavy in my mouth. Not my own. "It's so funny," I lied to appease the glint. "It's just a joke," I lied to quell my insides.
I planned to get rid of the jar of pickled cows’ tongues, but it was so full, so heavy, so dense that I didn’t know how to throw it away. Instead, I put it on a shelf in my bedroom and let it sit alongside the things I treasured most. I hoped that by staring it down each day I would be less vulnerable to its vitriol. For years, I looked at it and let it collect dust, and tried to believe I drew power from facing it. Eventually though, I found my own tongue and learned to wield it—tart and pickled and so much stronger than I expected, and I finally threw the jar, the tongues, the boy, and his threats away.
Rachel Sussman is a writer living with her family and two devoted nurse cats in centrally isolated Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Months to Years, The Good Life Review, and The Pinch. You can find her movie and television reviews on chronicallystreaming.com.