Kissing in America (10 page)

A
nnie's mom picked us up in her laundry van to drive us to Port Authority; Annie talked so fast I could barely keep up. “I had the hardest time choosing which books to bring—I couldn't decide what my weakest subjects were, so I packed
Silver's Scientific Miscellany
,
The Eberson Review of American History
,
Complete Mathematical Theorems
, and . . .” She named ten other books. She loved her rare, beloved books from the Strand better than anything you could download or read online. “My mom wants to kill me. We couldn't lift my duffel bag, so we had to ask our neighbor Mr. Rigamonti to help, and he got it in the van but he threw out his back. My mom had to offer him free wash-and-fold for a month. Did you bring the lit books?”

I nodded. “
Reader's Encyclopedia
,
A Complete History of English Literature
, and a lot of poetry.” My dad's books. I'd fit all my stuff into my backpack and a rolling suitcase I'd borrowed from Larry.

My mother and Larry sat in the row behind us; my mom gazed out the window as the city blurred by. She sighed, one
of the long, heavy sighs she'd been making the entire ride.

“This is good for both of us,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself this was true. “It's good you're going to see the country a little. Really good.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were trembling.

“They'll be okay,” Larry said, and patted her on the back. “They're staying with friends and family every night. They have pepper spray, an iPhone, and the best pocketknife.”

“And a whistle.” I held up the orange monstrosity.

“And I have a can of Mace. My sister Jenny got it for me,” Annie said brightly.

“Some people would think it's odd that New Yorkers are this worried about
leaving
the city,” Larry pointed out. “Most people are afraid when they
come
to New York City.”

We all turned and stared at him.

He shrugged. “It's true.”

Larry was the only one among us who'd spent most of his life outside of New York. His mother had been married four times, and he'd lived in New Mexico, Kentucky, and Texas—places that seemed as exotic as Fiji to us. Places that we were now going to see.

“When you say you're from New York, people think you live your life dodging muggers and bullets and thugs every day,” he said. “You'll see. They'll be shocked that you think you need Mace and pepper spray to survive your journey through the cornfields. The Midwesterners, Southerners,
and Texans will probably be afraid of
you
.”

Annie and I exchanged looks.

“I'm serious,” he said.

At Port Authority, we waited outside the turquoise-and-silver Go Blue bus. My mother glared at everyone on line as if they were all ax murderers. She clutched her elbows; she looked like she wanted to grab me and yank me back inside the station.

“You sure you want to go?” she asked me as the driver took Annie's ticket. Her voice wavered. “Because you could change your mind right now. It would be completely fine.” She looked like she might cry.

“It's only two weeks. I'll be back really soon. Please don't worry.” I was so embarrassed. Was she upset because she'd miss me, or because she didn't want me to have any freedom?

Larry put his arm around her.

We gave our bags to the luggage worker. Larry gave me a quick, awkward hug. “Godspeed,” he said. “And good luck.”

“Good luck!” Annie's mom echoed. She waved at us, looking thoroughly unworried about the impending trip—she looked excited, in fact. “Bye-bye!” she said. “Come back with the two hundred thousand dollars!” She grinned.

Annie sighed. “I'll try.”

We boarded the bus. I watched my mother's gaze scan the windows, though they were tinted so darkly there was no chance she could see me anymore.

W
hat no one ever tells you is that riding a bus can make you feel rich. The key is the front seat, the view out the wide grand window, perched high above the traffic. As we emerged from the dark station and into the city, I thought that I'd never seen Manhattan like this before. You were always stuck in subways and on crowded sidewalks, in the backseats of smelly taxis or standing inside packed city buses. It never looked like this, so bright and open, the road and the river flowing out the window.

Annie cracked open
People
,
EW
, and
In Touch
. She speed-read them before she took out a textbook and a folder. “We only have six days till the show, so I made a schedule,” she said, unveiling an elaborate spreadsheet. Today said
Math
in her column; in my column she'd typed: “Prep Annie for lit q's!!!!”

Aside from being her Official Literary Consultant, I was also our Travel Coordinator. I'd checked out guidebooks from the library and read tons of travel sites, and decided what we couldn't miss: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grand Ole
Opry, the Fort Wells rodeo, Sabino Canyon, Universal Studios, Venice Beach, and the Santa Monica pier, which wasn't too far from where Will's father lived (I'd Google mapped it).

The bus driver caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Big trip?” he asked.

I nodded. “We get off in Ohio today. Cleveland.” Almost nine hours from now. I couldn't believe I was finally traveling for the first time in my life.

“Ohio is the best. You gotta eat at City Chili,” he said. “Chili on top of spaghetti. The chain started in Cincy. They got them in Cleveland too now. First time I ate there, I come home and I says to my wife, I says, ‘Let's put the chili on top of spaghetti for a change.' She says, ‘No way. Chili? Spaghetti? No can do.'”

I elbowed Annie. Why was he telling us this?

“Most people you know, they want to stay in their little house and not change nothing. But when you hit the road—and do I hit the road, I been to every state in this country, and you know what? Everything you ever thought about the world is wrong. That's why you gotta travel. I'm telling youse two this cause you're young. You got time. You gonna eat chili on spaghetti, right? You gonna see the world, right?”

The world
seemed a bit overzealous, considering we hadn't even gotten to New Jersey yet, but I said “Right” anyway.

We sped toward the George Washington Bridge. I half expected a taxi to follow us, my mom's voice on a bullhorn:
I changed my mind!
She'd send out giant mechanical pincers to pluck me up and hoist me away.

I stuffed my whistle into my backpack. Sunlight bounced off the cars below us, their paint shimmering. My stomach quivered. I took out
American Poetry
and opened the cover. I'd stashed Will's letters inside it. I'd gotten seven of them in the six weeks since he'd left.

I loved seeing where he'd written
Eva
at the top of the page, or sometimes just
E—
, and once:
To the Poetess
. I loved the feel of the paper and the envelopes, reading my address in his handwriting, the postmark dates. I touched where he'd written
Miss you
. And once, instead of his name, he signed it
Griefy in LA.

Eight days until I'd see him. We'd be traveling for over two weeks—one week to get there, three days in LA, and then five days to return home.

Annie glanced at the letters in my lap. “Don't you wish sometimes that you could just text him? With no waiting?”

“Lord Ellis, Sir Richard, Destry, and Gurlag didn't text,” I said.

“Gurlag wouldn't know how to text. He couldn't read,” she said.

“Only because he was raised by wolves and without a formal education. When Penelope started teaching him in book three, he picked it up really fast.”

Even though I said this, I still kept checking Will's photo
stream every day, though he hadn't posted anything in six months. I Googled him daily, too, though nothing new ever appeared, and I'd practically memorized the small amount of info about him already online—three photos on school web pages from swim meets, a picture of him from last November that Gia had posted (ugh), the website of his mom's bakery (still up, though the bakery had closed now), and his dad's website. That was all. Still, I clicked on this stuff all the time, with the magical hope that something new might appear.

Letters were better, though. You could hold letters in your hand. Yesterday, I'd received a small package from him with a mix CD. Songs for our road trip. He'd burned it on his dad's computer, and used a CD that looked like an old vinyl record. He'd typed up the song list on his typewriter. I felt a thrill every time I looked at the CD, with its antique-looking surface.

        
1. The Littlest Birds - The Be Good Tanyas

        
2. Chicago - Sufjan Stevens

        
3. Petoskey Stone - Dana Falconberry

        
4. The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon & Garfunkel

        
5. I Don't Know - Beastie Boys

        
6. On the Road to Find Out - Cat Stevens

        
7. Everyday - Vetiver

        
8. Drowning in the Days - Old 97's

        
9. A-Punk - Vampire Weekend

        
10. Swim Good - Frank Ocean

        
11. I'm on a Roll - Over the Rhine

        
12. What I Got - Sublime

        
13. The Way I Am - Martin Sexton

        
14. Star Witness - Neko Case

        
15. Tape Loop - Morcheeba

        
16. Walking on the Moon - The Police

        
17. America - Simon & Garfunkel

        
18. California - Joni Mitchell

I'd loaded it onto my new phone and listened to it over and over. I'd played it so many times that I kept hearing the songs even when my phone was off.

The CD also held a snippet of a poem, typed on a white label and stuck on the case:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing
--e. e. cummings

Every time I read it, I felt like I'd inhaled too much air. Floating, inflating, my face felt hot and my stomach felt full. I was back in the roof garden again.

In two of his letters, Will only sent poems—just the poem and nothing else. Not even romantic poems—he'd sent one
by Langston Hughes and another by Philip Larkin. As I read them, I kept thinking of what my father once said:
Every poem is a love poem
.

Sometimes I sat by the window waiting for the mailman to reach our building—I'd race for the elevator, run down the hall, turn the mailbox key, and see the long skinny envelope, the familiar handwriting. In my last letter to him, I'd included the dates of our trip and the addresses of where we'd be staying on the way, hoping I'd keep hearing from him, keep receiving the letters and poems. I never wanted it to stop. I'd told him about each person we were staying with—Aunt Janet in Cleveland, Annie's cousin Grace in Tennessee, Larry's mom in Texas, and Lulu in Tucson. I wanted him to be a part of the trip, to share it with me.

Last night, while his mix played, I'd sat on my bed and arranged his seven letters on the quilt in front of me, organized by postmark date. Somehow it made it all seem more real that way. Holding them in my hands, they were undeniable. The letters, poems, and eighteen songs were proof.

Proof of us. Proof of love.

A
s our bus approached Cleveland, something rose inside of me. I liked the way the city looked—the small cluster of buildings, the river, the sky. There was so much sky. In New York you had to brace yourself before you went outside, muster the courage to face the crowds and subways and noise. Here, we'd passed farmland less than an hour ago. The sun shimmered on baseball diamonds, emerald lawns, and pretty, quaint houses.

We'd arrived, our trip was real, there was no turning back now.

Outside the window, Aunt Janet stood in the parking lot. She wore green pants that sat high on her skinny waist, and a green blouse buttoned to the neck. Her hair frizzed out sideways. She looked like a stalk of broccoli. Broccoli with glasses. She was eight years older than my mom; she'd always been part older sister, part second mother to my mom.

We gathered our bags, and the bus coughed us out onto the street.

“You made it.” Janet hugged me and Annie tightly. As we
waited for our luggage, Janet squinted at the phone in my hand. “May I see that, please?”

I handed it to her. She cradled it like it was a hand grenade. “Your mother's put parental protections on it, right?”

“Um . . . I don't think . . .”

“Do you know what this is?” She held it up.

I hesitated. “A phone?”

“It's the most convenient, direct conduit between pedophiles and sexual predators and
you
. This is the best thing to ever happen to those people.”

“But I don't talk to pedophiles or sexual predators.”

She slipped the phone into her pocket. “I'm going to put controls on it, some safety measures.”

I glanced at Annie. I'd warned her about Janet—I'd told her that Janet had moved to Cleveland from Syracuse five years ago for a guidance counselor job at a private Jewish school, which she eventually quit to start her own business. Her company, Safety Solutions, instructed parents about infant CPR, babyproofing, and children's and teens' health issues, and in recent months she'd begun leaving creepy messages on our home voice mail. “Gonorrhea,” she'd said. “I'm very worried about gonorrhea and teenagers. Please sit down with Eva and discuss the risk of gonorrhea with her.” When she visited us for Passover in the spring, she left pamphlets about herpes and gonorrhea on top of my desk. I called her Aunt Gonorrhea for a long time, until my mom made me stop.

The three of us dragged Annie's duffel bag through the parking lot, a slow and excruciating process. Eventually, we got all our luggage into the back of Janet's gargantuan white Honda Odyssey.

Janet pumped Purell into our palms. She'd gotten her germ phobia from her mother, Bubbe 409, who used to stay up all night long scrubbing the kitchen floors, behind the refrigerator, and under the stove. Bubbe 409 had been my age when she survived the war. To my mom and Janet, just the mention of
the war
explained everything about Bubbe 409. Whenever I asked my mom about her, my mom would clam up. She'd say, “Your grandmother lived in very dirty conditions during the war”—and that was all.

Janet glanced at my legs as I climbed into my seat. “Have you gained weight?” she asked me.

“No.” I looked down at my body. I didn't think I had, but just hearing her question made my thighs look soft and fleshy.

“Where's your whistle? Your mom told me to check you're wearing it.”

“Oh. That.” I took it out of my backpack and put it back on, feeling about five years old.

The minivan was spotless. A giant stack of placards took up the back, which Janet said were for her Lifestyle Choices presentation, a new part of her business.

“We read a lot about Cleveland—we'd love to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” I said, and showed her the
travel page I'd printed out, with its picture of a giant guitar.

She frowned and glanced at her watch. “We don't have a lot of time.”

“Or the International Women's Air & Space Museum.” I showed her the picture.

The frown deepened.

“The Metroparks Zoo? A baby Allen's swamp monkey was just born there.” Annie told Janet about her sophomore-year research on swamp monkeys—their webbed fingers and toes, their
frugivorous
and
diurnal
tendencies.

“Actually, I have somewhere I want to take you,” Janet said. “A surprise.” Her elbows relaxed on the steering wheel. “I'm just so happy you're here. For years your mom told me you were going to come visit, but you never did. Two Hanukkahs ago she promised. Then she canceled. I like visiting you in New York, but it's not the same as having you in my home.” She paused. “It means a lot to me.”

“My mom works really hard” was all I could think to say, but I felt guilty that we'd never visited Janet before. Since my mom hated traveling, I didn't think visiting Cleveland had ever really been a possibility.

“I keep telling her you two need to move here. You could afford a big house. We've got great schools. It's safer. You'd be so happy.”

My mom once told me she'd rather stab herself in the eye than live in Cleveland. I didn't tell Janet that.

“Of course, there's the problem of Larry,” Janet said. Janet and I'd never talked about Larry, though she'd met him when she stayed with us for Passover. He'd left a bottle cap on the floor that had pierced Janet's foot. She'd made a big fuss about how it ruined her expensive sock, and that thankfully she was up-to-date on her tetanus shot.

Janet glanced at me. “She's not going to marry him.”

“How do you know?”

“Your mom and your dad were a couple for
ten years
before they got married. Your mom doesn't make big decisions easily. She'll put Larry off for a good decade or so, too.”

“She's different now,” I said.

Janet raised her eyebrows. “She's the same. Drowning herself in work—when she feels down, that's what your mom does. When she was a teenager, after our father died, she studied nonstop. She didn't work as hard when you were a baby, and when your dad was alive—she was too happy, I guess.” She paused. “She and Larry haven't set a date yet. Larry will get tired of waiting and he'll be gone.”

I hoped she was right. I looked out the window and felt glad to be away from my mom and Larry. Even a little distance made me feel like I could be myself more, like I could breathe, as I left my mom on one coast and moved toward Will on the other.