Kissing in America (15 page)

I
excused myself to the bathroom. It was the only place I could think of to be alone.

I sat on the edge of the tub with the envelope in my hands. Just holding it made me feel better. This was what I needed, a letter from Will.

I leaned against a fluffy green towel and tore it open.

Eva—

I just got off work. I've been helping set up my dad's new show at LACMA along with his four assistants. Moving things and answering phones and stuffing envelopes addressed to Herman Therbinder IV and Bunny Burmeister-Boddington (no joke) and other rich people, inviting them to the opening reception and to donate more gobs of cash.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in West Hollywood right now. The guy making the coffee keeps blathering about his screenplay.

I wish I had something better to say but this
summer isn't going so great. All my dad and I do is fight. When we actually speak about something besides his show, he criticizes my mom. Last night we got in a huge fight about how he thinks my mom squandered the money he sent, how she made mistakes with her business, and all the things she did wrong while raising me. I can't even sleep in the same house as the man. Last night I slept outside in a tent. I thought when I came out here it would be different. We could start over. What a stupid dream.

My friend Jon in Seattle has a job for me up there. It's building houses. I think I'm going to take it. I don't know if I can stand another day of my dad's bullshit. Jon told me to just leave tonight. I might do it.

Will

This could not be happening.

I'd get to California in five days and he wouldn't be there.

The heat, which had seemed like a warm blanket in the morning, now felt like it would choke me. Why hadn't this letter said what I thought it would? I thought he'd say
: I can't believe you're coming out here. I can't wait to see you. My dad and I are having a hard time but I'll stick it out till you get here. Seeing you will help.

My T-shirt grew damp with sweat. The letter was
postmarked from four days ago. Just a few days after the letter he'd sent to Cleveland.

For the first time, his mysterious side—disappearing at lunch, not caring if his phone was working, saying he didn't want people
to find me
—pissed me off. All I wanted in the world was to see him again. Why did that have to be so difficult?

Someone knocked on the door. Annie. I showed her the letter.

She read it and then handed it back to me. “Just call him. He might not have meant what he wrote. Or he could've changed his mind after he sent it.”

My mouth felt dry as I dialed Will's cell phone—dead, of course. It went straight to his voice mail. I tried his father's house. Nobody picked up. I left a message.
This is Eva Roth. Please tell Will to call me.

“What if he doesn't get the message?” I asked.

Annie thought for a minute. “Come with me,” she said. We left the bathroom and quietly went up the back stairs to Grace's brother's room. Annie searched the desk until she found a spiral notebook. She tore out a blank page. “Write to him, then. We'll mail it as soon as we can. FedEx it overnight or two-day or as fast as they can get it there.”

I paused. “What do I say?”

“Anything. Just tell him how you feel.”

I picked up the paper and took out my pen. I scribbled his
name at the top. I started to write without thinking, and the words came out on their own.

Will,

I'd give anything to have one more day with my dad. One hour. Everything sucks sometimes, but you have to stick it out and give it a chance. Talk to him about it. Tell him how he's making you feel. Tell him you need to spend some time alone together. When his show is over, you guys can take your own trip together, have time to connect.

Stick it out and things will get better. I promise.

We'll be in LA in five days.
I'll see you then.

Maybe you can call my cell phone? I'd love to talk. Please call when you can, or text or email me.

As soon as the words were on the page, I felt a little better. I wanted to say more, but I wasn't sure what. Writing the letter and knowing he'd hold this piece of paper in his hands felt like it would solve things, though. He wasn't really thinking
of leaving before I got there. It was his misery from his dad talking. He didn't mean it.

Seattle wasn't too far. Even if he did go, he could come back to LA to see me.

He'd get my letter and it would change his mind.

Hope. There it was again in me, trilling out.

And Rosamunde Saunders's voice was back too:
Girl, send this damn letter and go get your man.

I didn't want to hold anything back. I didn't want to pretend. I wanted him to read this letter and know how I felt. To put a seal on things, a certainty.

The truth.

I scribbled at the bottom:

I love you—

Eva

The words looked stark against the page. I'd never said those words to a boy. I'd never
felt
them about a boy. I folded it up and put it in the envelope before I could change my mind, and Annie took it downstairs and asked Mr. Young to mail it overnight.

the more I live the more I think

two people together is a miracle.

—Adrienne Rich

W
e left Tennessee in darkness, at five o'clock in the morning, for our fifteen-hour bus ride. We'd said good-bye to Grace and her parents as they stood at their front door, bleary-eyed, and then went back to bed.

Annie and I claimed our first-choice front row; Janet sat across from us, behind the driver.

“Next stop, Texas,” Janet said. “I've always wanted to visit Texas. You wouldn't believe how interested they are in my programs. At my meetings yesterday I was given three more contacts to see in Dallas. I'm assuming rates of STD—”

“It's too early to talk disease,” I told Janet. “No gonorrhea till after ten a.m., ok?”

She made a quiet huffing noise and went through her settling-in routine: spraying the armrests and upholstery, laying a large cloth napkin on the top of the seat back (to avoid catching lice), and then stretching all her muscles as well as she could in the small row.

Annie flipped on the light above. She began to read a book she'd borrowed from Grace about American first ladies.
“Grace has read every biography of every first lady ever published.” She sighed. “I'm so behind.”

“I heard Grace practicing questions with her father last night. They're extremely well-prepared,” Janet said.

Annie wrote a note on an index card. “Do you think we'll be ready?” she asked Janet, and showed her our study spreadsheet, with its check marks for every topic we'd covered so far. Janet put on her glasses and surveyed it all thoroughly.

“I'm not sure. I'm happy to help you, though. I was a history major in college. Summa cum laude,” Janet said.

Annie looked up. “I could use help with history.”

“I was also captain of the debate team. We used a buzzer in my day, and if I do say so myself, I was pretty good at it.”

Annie put down her pen. “So what are your tips?”

Janet shook her arms, loosening her muscles. “It's all in the wrist flick.” She slapped an invisible mosquito on her lap. “See?”

We practiced, looking like crazed women enthusiastically hitting ourselves.

The bus hummed as the sun rose; the road ribboned ahead. Annie and Janet kept slapping imaginary insects while I compiled facts about nineteenth-century novelists. For breakfast, we ate the corn muffins that Mrs. Young had packed for us.

All morning I checked for a voice mail, text, or email from Will—no word—and the message board. No news. Nothing new in the papers either. Trees and farms whirred by out
the windows, and I decided I'd try to not think about it too much until I saw him. I knew that when he got my letter, he wouldn't go to Seattle. And if he was here right now, I knew what he'd say:
They'll find your dad and he'll be peaceful. He's resting in peace. Annie's right. It will be okay.
He'd understand. I'd be able to tell him things, the deepest things, just as I did in the roof garden.

But there was also this tiny voice in the back of my mind, this dark place that kept telling me: Everything, in fact, will
not
be okay. The very worst thing you imagine, your biggest fear,
does
happen, it happens to people every day. Parents die, children die, babies die, animals die, love is lost in a thousand ways every second. No one is ever safe.

What are the odds?
our neighbor Mrs. Neegall had said, a hand over her mouth, when she found out how my dad died.
Well, don't worry
, she said.
Lightning never strikes twice
. But she was wrong. Lightning could strike twice, three times, or ten. When you're on the wrong side of the odds, the odds are meaningless. They don't protect you or give you comfort. The mask's been pulled off your eyes. You're never immune to disaster.

My phone came to life. My mom was awake on the east coast. She texted me:

Please keep your phone on! If you turn it off, the Locate My Kids app doesn't work & I can't see where you are.

I didn't turn it off.

You had it turned off just now.

We're just driving thru places w/no service. You know where I am. On the way from TN to TX w/Janet & Annie.

It makes me feel better to see you on the GPS. THX FOR KEEPING IT ON!

She also kept inventing excuses to check in. An hour later, she wrote:

Looks like the weather's really hot there!

It's summer. Hot. The 2 kinda go together.

Drink lots of water! You don't want to get heatstroke. Janet told me you're wearing your whistle! Thx!

I was tempted to blow the whistle right now, which I wore tucked under my shirt when Janet wasn't looking.
Emergency! I'm trapped on a bus and my crazy mom won't stop texting me!

Then she wrote:

I'm sorry I sound worried & keep asking you to check in. I'm just not used to being away from you. I really, really miss you.

I knew I was supposed to say
I miss you too
, but something kept me from saying it. I could feel her strings wrapping around me, wanting me to come back, to tie me down and have me live in our Queens apartment forever.

We stopped at a Minit Mart, and Annie and I bought chips to go with the peanut butter and apple sandwiches that Mrs. Young had made. The Minit Mart had a sign that said “Get Your Ammo Here.”

Janet brought out bags of freeze-dried blueberries, and we sat at a picnic table (Janet wiped it down with a sanitizing cloth) at the edge of the parking lot.

“I'm glad I'm here with you girls,” she said. “This bus line is not as bad as others I've ridden. I'm actually getting quite a lot of work done on my new presentation. Though all this sitting is wreaking havoc on my sciatica.” She placed her foot on the picnic table bench and did several stretches. She wore light brown today, and looked like a potato doing yoga. A group of truckers walked by and stared at us. When she finished her exercises, she told us she had appointments to confirm in Texas, so she walked up the hill behind the parking lot to try
to find better cell phone service. We watched her raise her phone in the air.

I took out my book. I only had a few pages left of
American Amour
. I finished it before Janet rejoined us for lunch—Dorothea and John Paul got married on horseback—and I put it away in my backpack so I wouldn't have to hear Janet call it a ridiculous fantasy, or whatever she might say.

The story was a fantasy, but the feelings were real, I thought as we got back on the bus. That yearning, the sparks, the enormity of love—I felt those exact things with Will. The thrill of what it felt like to be in his arms, to have him look at me as if I were the only person who existed in the world. Those feelings felt as real and true as any other feelings I'd ever felt. As real and true as grief.

As we drove on, we all lost cell phone service. On my phone a bold
E
appeared in the corner where the bars would usually be; then that disappeared too.
Searching . . .
it said, and it kept searching for over an hour. Finally, I turned it off.

Annie looked at her watch. “Grace is probably already packing for LA.”

“Fab for her,” I said. “I still can't believe she auditioned.”

She shook her head. “She's not going to win. She's weak on art and literature—and she doesn't have the secret weapon.”

“What secret weapon?”

“You.”

“No one's ever called me a weapon before,” I said. “I kind
of like it. Like a secret literary superpower.”

She shut her book. She paused. “I'm sorry Grace was such a jerk. I should've . . . I wish I'd stopped her more. It's just she's my only family member I have anything in common with. At all. And I think she was acting so weird because she's so unhappy.”

I grunted.

“She hates Shawnee. She doesn't have any friends there, not really. They're one of the only Asian families in town. She told me that on Nick's birthday, his baseball teammates gave him chopsticks and a Chinese takeout menu as a joke. They think Chinese and Korean are the same thing. People always ask her what her immigration status is. If she's legal. She misses New York.”

In our neighborhood in Queens, almost everybody's family was from another country—our local library had books in Korean, Spanish, Romanian, Chinese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Turkish. Even the Jews were from Israel or Yemen or Ethiopia, or their grandparents, like mine, were born in Europe. My dad had come here from England when he was seven, and he said kids made fun of his accent so much that he'd watch
The Brady Bunch
and practice talking like an American, flattening his vowels, though British terms still slipped out when he was tired or angry.
Stuff the bloody broken dishwasher
. Will's grandparents were born in Saint Lucia. He'd told me that when he visited as a kid, all he saw was a
paradise—the sugar-white beach and the jewel-blue ocean—and it wasn't till years later that he realized what poverty his family lived in there. His cousins' house barely had a roof.

Annie had come to America when she was five—her father came first and sent a postcard of the White House to Annie and her sisters back in Seoul. She thought when they came here they were going to live in the White House. She also thought her hair would turn blond as soon as she stepped onto American soil.

Janet was listening to our conversation as she looked through one of Annie's history textbooks. “Immigrants have never had it easy,” she said. “Including your grandparents.” She glanced at me. “People didn't even use the word
immigrants
back then. They were foreigners. Refugees. Everyone looked down on refugees. They thought they didn't deserve to be here. Ahhh. Look at this.”

In the V-J Day chapter, she'd come upon a photo of a couple kissing—a GI and a nurse.

She showed it to me. “Do you remember this? It was one of my mother's favorite photos. She tore it out of a magazine and kept it taped to the wall above the kitchen sink for years.”

I remembered Freda's plastic-covered couches and chipped brown plates, and eating buttered noodles at her kitchen table, its peeling white laminate with steel edges, cracks running across its surface like tiny black rivers. She called noodles
noonies
, and while I ate them she'd pour a teacup of coffee for
me (actually milk with a drop of coffee in it). I felt so grown-up when I drank it. And I remembered looking at the photo of the kiss above the sink, its fading gray picture and crumbling yellow edges.

“She said it reminded her of her first kiss with Abraham in New York,” Janet said. “On the street. He took her in his arms, and she leaned back, and he kissed her till she thought she'd faint.”

I couldn't believe Janet had just happily said the words
kissed her till she thought she'd faint
.

“Of course in reality, after that, this country was never all that nice to them,” Janet said. “Freda called America
a hard pain in my ass
or sometimes
a pain in my hard ass
—her English was never great.” She paused. “They had crap jobs and no money. But she kept that photo pinned above the sink till the day she died. She loved believing in that kiss just the same.”