Kissing in America (11 page)

A
cemetery.

Janet's surprise was a cemetery.

Janet drove down the road slowly, along the graves. I fingered the hem of my shirt. “Why are we—?”

She craned her neck. “Just wait.”

I hadn't been to a cemetery since my dad's funeral—I pushed away the memory of that gray, rainy day, our black umbrellas, my mom and me yelling at each other—that day I never wanted to think about. My mom hadn't let me bring Annie to the funeral—she'd wanted to keep it
private
.

A year ago, on the one-year anniversary of the crash, I told my mom I wanted us to visit my dad's grave. I thought that maybe if we could visit it again, on a sunny, summery day, it could become a nice place to go to, instead of a terrible memory. But my mom froze.
We're not doing that again. We need to move forward. Not back.
End of subject. I thought about going by myself, but the cemetery was two hours away, far from any train, and my mom would probably kill me if I told her I planned to wander around Westchester alone.

All I remembered about my dad's cemetery was the dank smell of the rain, the mud washing onto the paths, and the gravestones turning dark gray under the downpour. This cemetery seemed completely different. Here, everything glowed in the sunshine—blossoming trees and hydrangeas, a sparkling stream beneath a wooden bridge, grass waving in the wind.

Janet stopped the car, and we walked down a wide path to a headstone beneath the willow trees.

BRONSTEIN.

FREDA BRONSTEIN, ABRAHAM BRONSTEIN.

Freda was Bubbe 409.

“My grandparents—? I thought they were cremated?”

“I'd been carrying those ashes around from Queens to Syracuse to Cleveland and I was sick of it,” Janet said, as if she were talking about a load of laundry. “Cremation is actually against Jewish law, you know, but my mother was pretty much done with religion by the time my father died. She didn't want us to pay for a burial. And the upkeep. It didn't matter to her. But you know what? After all these years I decided it matters to me. I wanted somewhere to go to.”

Janet brushed off the headstone and plucked a few tiny weeds that had grown among the flowers.

I smiled at Annie awkwardly. The first stop on our cross-country road trip and we were standing in a cemetery. She
didn't complain, though. She looked around approvingly. “Jewish cemeteries totally have it over Christian ones,” she said. “It's so simple and understated without those phallic statues and giant tombs all over the place.”

Janet picked a dead petal off a flower. “I toured a bunch before I chose this one. I like that it has a good amount of space between the plots.”

I'd never imagined I'd be standing in Cleveland in front of my grandparents' buried ashes, talking about the width between plots.

I felt my chest tightening, a small seed of panic beginning—the image of my dad's grave hovering at the edge of my mind—but I willed it away. My grandparents' names were carved into the stone in both English and Hebrew, and I ran my finger across the deep grooves, their jagged edges.

“Some people—like your mom—think it's odd I did this.” Janet shrugged. “But I figure, my parents were never really happy when they were alive. At least they can have some peace when they're dead.”

I told Annie how my grandfather had died before I was born, and that my memories of my grandmother revolved mainly around cleaning products.

Janet sighed. “She was pretty screwed up.”

Annie gazed at the headstone, at the dates of birth and death. “I can't imagine what your grandmother must've gone through during the war.”

“My mom never talks about it. She's never told me anything,” I said.

“You know your mom. She doesn't like talking about the past,” Janet said.

“How did Freda even survive the war?” I asked.

Janet looked for a rock and placed it on the headstone. “She was around your age then. They'd started liquidating ghettos in Poland, rounding people up for the camps. Freda's father wrote to a distant relative in London and asked for help. He couldn't get the whole family out of the country, but he got Freda a place on a children's train to England with dozens of other kids.”

“One of the Kindertransports? We studied those in school,” Annie said.

Janet nodded. She told us how Freda's parents had taken her to the station and said good-bye. As the train moved, her parents raced alongside it, their faces crumpling. Freda waved at them until her mother and father blended into a blur of gray and brown, then disappeared in the distance.

Freda and her parents wrote letters through the Red Cross for months. Freda never told her parents the truth, that in London she lived in a boardinghouse with other girls, refugees. Mice ran across the girls' beds at night, little pricking thumps on their stomachs. She had lice on her scalp and in her eyebrows. The air raids began, and the girls slept in the basement, where the ground was covered with rat droppings.
During the day, she worked in a hat factory. Her fingers bled, and two fingernails broke off. The girls were only allowed to take baths once every couple of weeks, and each girl had to use the same bathwater. There was hardly any laundry soap, and her clothes became spotted with stains. Every night, Freda fell asleep with a photo of her parents beside her pillow, but one morning she woke up and the photo was gone. Another girl had stolen it and thrown it in the fireplace. Sometimes, girls stole things for no reason at all. Just to steal and destroy. Freda had no photos of her parents after that.

“Did she ever see her parents again?” I asked. Around us in the cemetery, everything was quiet, except for the wind whistling through the trees.

“The letters from Freda's parents stopped coming. But she was sure she'd see them when the war was over. She was sure they'd come for her.”

“What happened then?” Annie asked.

“When the war finally ended, she still hadn't heard anything from them. She decided to go back to their village in Poland, thinking that if her parents survived, they'd return also.

“The outside of the house looked exactly the same, but another family was living inside it. They came to the door. They denied it had ever been Freda's family's home and wouldn't let her in. No one in the town would speak to her. An old neighbor told her to leave—some Jews who returned
were being killed in the open, even though the war was over.

“She never saw or heard from her parents again, and found no records of their deaths. She found records of their deportation—her mother to Treblinka, her father to Sobibor. That was all. Nothing more.”

“I can't believe my mom never told me this,” I said.

Janet shrugged. “Your mom took it hard when our dad died, and then our mom. She didn't know how to cope.”

She still doesn't know how to cope, I thought.

We put more stones on top of their graves. I put stones on other people's graves, too. It didn't seem right that no one had visited them. I thought of my father's grave back east, neglected, no stones having been placed on it for almost two years, no one to plant flowers or pluck the weeds.

I understood why Janet wanted the graves, wanted a place to visit. I wished that I had a place to go to, somewhere to remember my dad instead of just a pillowcase in my backpack, and a faraway cemetery that held bad memories. On the message boards, people had talked about plans for a memorial somewhere in New York, but that seemed years away from ever happening.

I felt a warmth toward Janet that I'd never felt before—maybe she wasn't all prickly comments and awkward phone messages. Maybe we weren't so different after all. We both shared that yearning to be with the dead again.

A
fter the cemetery, our trip took a cheerier turn—Janet agreed to a quick stop to see the swamp monkeys at the zoo before it closed, and even let us go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a half hour. Annie and I locked arms as we stopped for dinner at Gittel's, Janet's favorite restaurant. It was a deli just like the ones in New York, except it was a lot cleaner. Annie ordered a pastrami sandwich. I got an egg cream, which they called a chocolate phosphate, and blueberry blintzes and matzo ball soup—and while we ate, I kept staring at the orange booth across from us.

A blond girl and a boy in a baseball cap sat there, nestled together. They shared a milkshake, and the boy kept feeding the girl French fries. Her knee bobbed up and down, and the boy put his hand there, steadying it.

The boy grasped the girl's fingers and held them tightly. He kissed them. Then he kissed her on the mouth. Hungrily.
With an ardent throbbing need
, you could say.

His hand went up her shirt. Janet glared at them. All the openness she'd shown as we'd stood in the cemetery and
toured the city drained away. A switch turned on, and she was Aunt Gonorrhea again.

Janet's eyes drilled into the couple. “Disgusting,” she said too loudly. “
Boys
.”

I clutched my napkin. Whenever the subject of boys came up, Janet usually said the same thing, how she thought all my mother's feminist theories could be summed up in three words:
Men are beasts
.

According to my mom, when Janet was twenty-eight, her fiancé, Sam Katz, dumped her the night before their wedding. Sam had gotten his dental hygienist, Binnie Burkowitz, pregnant. Janet got a partial refund on the reception hall and the caterer, and she returned the gifts. The dress was not returnable. It had been shredded and sent to Sam in a cardboard box.

Now Janet skewered a pickled red pepper. “They only want one thing. Girls can't get it through their heads that boys have one mission: to fornicate and impregnate.”

I turned around. I hoped that the sweet-looking white-haired lady at the next table hadn't heard us. Annie was suddenly absorbed in her sandwich.

Janet picked up her fork and knife and dispatched her meat loaf. “Men—and boys—are animals.”

Annie wiped her lips with her napkin. “Well, I agree we're driven by biology. Humans are mammals. And only three percent of mammals are monogamous. Males have evolved to spread their genetic material around as far and wide as
possible. Even animals who mate for life, like gibbons, swans, and foxes, still have outside couplings.”

“Exactly. Beasts,” Janet said. “I hear all the time about what teens your age are reading on the internet, and how you're ‘sexting' and sharing pornographic photos.” She touched the sugar packets. “You girls are too young to realize that boys will tell you anything to take advantage of you.”

I tried to think of a new subject—how to distract her? Could we talk about nice pretty cemeteries instead?

She gazed at me with her most intense glasses-on-a-stalk-of-broccoli stare, then took a deep breath. “There's something we need to discuss.”

She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a letter. She put her glasses back on and adjusted them on her nose. “This arrived at my house this morning.”

Long white envelope, neat black script. Will.

A letter from Will with the top ripped open. My stomach fell.

She handed it to me. I looked inside and pulled out the poem—a short one, half a page.

E—I thought you'd love this.

It was by Emily Dickinson.

I measure every grief I meet
.

“Who's this from?” Janet asked me.

“Why did you open my mail?” I gaped at her.

“Why did he send you that? I found it very cryptic.”

“It's a poem. Just a poem.” I couldn't believe she'd opened it. Even my mom respected federal privacy laws and never opened anything addressed to me.

Janet's eyes narrowed. “Who's Will Freeman?”

I thought fast. “We edit our high school literary journal together. That's all. He's sending poems that we're going to include in the next issue. Every issue highlights famous poems.”

“Why did he need to send it here?”

“Because Mrs. Peech, our faculty adviser, asked us to work on it over the summer. If you don't believe me, you can ask Mrs. Peech. She won't believe that you
opened it
.”

I hoped she wouldn't try to contact Mrs. Peech.

“The postmark is from Los Angeles. Are you going to see this person while you're there?”

“No,” I said. “Why would I?”

Her eyes looked huge behind her glasses. “It's not that I'm against young people exploring a dating type of relationship. It's that I believe they should be well educated about the dangers of these situations, and of course be supervised. And I don't believe that privacy should exist among young people anymore. Not in this day and age. Not with the internet.”

“Some people my age barely even use the internet,” I said.
Well, one person. One person in the world. And I had to fall in love with him.

She fingered a button on her green shirt. “You know, I get paid to discuss these issues with teens. It's part of my job. I expanded my business last year to include workshops with private schools. I teach about safer driving, and my Lifestyle Choices presentation was recently featured in
Cleveland Parent
magazine.”

“I'm sure it's a great presentation,” Annie said politely. She probably thought that would pacify Janet and make the normal side of her return. Little did she know.

Out came the iPad from Janet's bag. She placed it on the table between us and opened up PowerPoint. “I'll just show you the beginning,” she said. “Though it's much more effective on a large screen.”

“LIFESTYLE CHOICES” flashed in red block letters on the tablet. Janet swiped through the pictures—a stock photo of two teenagers holding hands while strolling down a sidewalk, then one of a girl, alone, silhouetted in darkness.

“Unfortunately, teenagers often make decisions without thinking of the consequences,” Janet told us. The screen read: “ONE IN FOUR TEENS IS DIAGNOSED WITH AN STD EACH YEAR.”

The next photo: Lesions. Crusting sores and yellowy blisters around a girl's lips.

I put down my fork.

Annie's mouth dropped open.

“Herpes on the face,” Janet said. “Most teenagers believe oral activity is completely safe. They're mistaken.”

The oozing blisters trailed across the poor girl's cheeks, toward her nose.

Next: A crusty rash engulfed a man's cheeks like barnacles roosting on the skin.

“Syphilis on the face,” she said.

Then another girl, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, one eye red as blood.

“Gonorrhea on the eyeball.”

I shook my head. I knew we'd be hearing about gonorrhea.

On Janet went, photo after photo, sore after sore, some on hairy areas that I hoped I'd never be asked to identify.

She gleefully shut the iPad off. “That's just a sample. Hopefully on our next visit I can show you the whole thing.”

There was more?

“I want to protect you,” Janet said. “I feel it's my responsibility as an adult to help you avoid making big mistakes. I want you to be safe.” She separated the sugar and artificial sweetener packets, making sure all were right side up.

Annie and I were speechless.

The waitress stopped by our table. “Would you like dessert?”

We said, “No thank you.”

“I have pie in the freezer at home,” Janet said brightly.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered to Annie as we walked to the car. “I didn't know she'd gone this wacko.”

Annie's mouth was still half open. “I'm staying a virgin until I die. Did you see that
eyeball
?”

We drove to Janet's house. She lived in a gated development called Castle Ridge. The entire house, inside and out, looked like it had been dipped in Clorox: white stucco, white carpet, white walls, white tables and sofa and chairs. I gave Janet the bag of bagels we'd brought for her.

“Murray's!” She touched the bag tenderly. “I'm going to freeze them,” she said, as if that was the highest compliment she could give to a bagel. She opened the freezer door.

It was the biggest freezer I'd ever seen in my life. It looked as if it had eaten three other freezers. It overflowed with frozen kosher dinners and foods of every kind.

“When you live alone, you have to freeze everything,” she explained. Her hands swam through the boxes of vegetables. She was concerned that Annie and I hadn't eaten enough vegetables that day, so she microwaved a package of mixed corn, carrots, and peas for us. Annie and I set the white plates and napkins on the table.

While the microwave whirred, I lingered for a long time in Janet's living room, staring at the photos on the wall. She'd hung up a dozen framed photos of our family, pictures that I'd never seen—ones of my mom and Janet as kids, photos of Freda and Abraham, and pictures of my mom, my dad, and me.

“I love your Snoopy dress,” Annie said as she looked at a photo of me. It had been taken when I was five years old.

“Pretty fancy. My mom got it at a thrift shop.”

I felt a pang of longing as I stared at a picture of my parents and me hugging, sitting on a rock in Central Park. I must've been only two or three in the picture. The sun shone on us, bright on our beaming faces.

“Your mom and dad were so happy in those years,” Janet said. “You were a happy baby.”

My mom never threw away any photo albums after my dad died—she stored them in the back of her closet—but I never asked to look at them. Now I knew why: because it hurt too much. Our family sitting in Central Park, hugging. I couldn't believe the smiling, carefree kid in the photo was me. We had no idea what would happen to us.

We sat down to eat.

I stuck my fork in a rumpled pea. The food was thoroughly cooked, but everything had a slightly puckered, waterlogged feel, as if even the carrots were tired from their epic climate-shifting journey to our plate.

I thought about Will. Seeing him would sweep away all the bad feelings. When he kissed me on the street and on the roof, his kisses removed the world for a little while. His love, and loving him, seemed like an antidote to grief.

When I'd read about Lilith and Sage being swept away and swept off (there was always a lot of sweeping in romances), I'd
always wondered what it would feel like in real life. I had no idea that the books never captured it entirely—that it felt so much better, more intense, that I felt it with my whole body—since the night with him, I didn't crave cookies or online message boards or books in the same way I used to. I didn't need any of the things I used to use for comfort. The thought of him had become the comfort.

I even felt less anxious when I thought about the recovery of the wreckage. The news articles had stopped for a while—we were still awaiting analysis of what the recorders said, and whether they'd retrieve the rest of the wreckage from the ocean floor. I thought again of what Will had told me:
The recorders will confirm what you already know: he wasn't scared
. Ever since he'd said that, I felt less frightened, too.

I watched Janet inspect her fork and her plate for cleanliness and signs of contamination, and it occurred to me that Janet was afraid. She was afraid of germs and diseases and sex and heartbreak, of her broken engagement, her old messy love.

It doesn't have to be a mess, I wanted to say.

It could be like me and Will.

Easy. Because that's how it had felt—easy to fall for him, easy to let the world fall away, to escape into dreams of him in the same way I escaped into books.

Loving him was easy. The hard part was how to keep it that way.