Kissing in America (19 page)

I
put the diary back into my pillowcase. Annie and I napped and talked, and I made more flash cards for her—we were actually ahead on our study schedule, according to her spreadsheet—and when we finally had cell phone service, I checked the message board. Nothing new.

I tried calling Will. I dialed the number to his dad's house and left another message.
We're on our way to Tucson and I've got cell service again. Please tell Will to give me a call.

I hung up. I felt good. I was glad I did it. It was the right thing to do.

This feeling lasted for only five seconds.

The bus plowed on, and I entered the Fifth Dimension of Female Existence: the Realm of the Waiting.

Lulu was the one who'd called it that. Years ago, before she'd met her husband Michael, she'd stayed with us while she went to a conference in Manhattan. There, she'd met a guy who asked for her number, and then she waited for him to call. All morning and afternoon she waited. She sat at our tiny kitchen table and pretended to drink coffee and read
the newspaper. The coffee cooled; she continually read page three.

Finally, she decided something was wrong with her cell phone and called the phone company. “It's working just fine,” the customer service lady told her. “You got any idea how many girls call up every day and ask me that? Every hour, every day, girls suffering all the same. I'm gonna tell you something, honey: he ain't calling.”

Lulu got over him, but my mom made a lesson of it. “Right now there are women everywhere, around the world, staring at their phones, waiting and waiting. You can become one of them, wasting your time, or you can be too busy achieving world peace and solving the universe's problems to even notice whether a guy has called you back. You decide.”

It had sounded like an easy choice at the time.

Now, on the bus, my phone became a live object, a hand grenade. Over the next two hours I checked my messages every minute, but there was nothing. Not even from my mom. I'd texted her and asked why she hadn't told me that Larry and Irma had set a date for the wedding, but she hadn't texted or called me back.

Annie's forehead wrinkled. “You need to put that phone away.”

“Maybe Janet did something to it back in Cleveland so I can't receive calls or messages from Will. Or maybe she broke it.” I held it up to the light and tapped it encouragingly.

“It's working fine. Just put the phone in your backpack and don't think about it,” she suggested. “Put it away for half an hour.”

“Okay. No problem.” Half an hour. I could do that.

Of course I could.

Fifteen minutes would be a lot more reasonable, though.

The bus thrummed. Every fifteen minutes I checked it. I kept checking it while we rode past Las Cruces and Deming and Lordsburg, and as we worked our way through
Essential Mathematical Trivia
and
An Almanac of World History
, until I thought about taking the phone to an AT&T store to get it fixed.

I turned it off.

For a few minutes.

Meanwhile, Annie received eight texts and two emails from Chance. She only checked her phone once an hour. She scribbled notes on index cards, then shook her head. “I should turn mine off, too. I can't get him out of my head. Is this normal?”

“Yup,” I said.

I kept checking it throughout the twelve-hour ride to Tucson. My mom hadn't written to me in two days—her last email had been sent the night we'd arrived in Texas. She'd written:
Just to let you know, I may be a little hard to reach for a day or two—I have a lot of work. Larry says that his mom's place is pretty far off the grid, but hopefully you, Janet, or Irma can
leave me a message and let me know you're okay. Please call me when you get to Arizona!
I tried her cell phone, but there was no answer, so I called our home number.

An unfamiliar, scratchy voice picked up. “Hello?”

“Who's this?” I asked.

“Who are
you
?” the voice snapped. I said my name.

“Oh, Eva. This is Mrs. Neegall. Your mom asked me to take in your mail while she's out of town.”

“Where is she? She didn't tell me she was going somewhere.”

“She and Larry took a couple of nights away in the country. Upstate. A little romantic time alone. They get back tomorrow.”

My mom, who hated to travel, to even leave the city, had gone to the country? Why didn't she tell me?

Two thoughts suddenly anchored themselves in my mind:
Maybe she does love Larry after all. Maybe she's happier without me.

“She told me she had a lot of work to do,” I said. “Not that she was going away.”

“Well, those lovebirds are hopefully not doing too much work,” Mrs. Neegall said.

I reached my hands inside my backpack and touched the pillowcase. The bus picked up speed as we headed toward Arizona, the landscape blurring until I couldn't distinguish anything anymore.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (
Write
it!) like disaster.

—Elizabeth Bishop

L
ulu lived in a yellow cottage with giant white flowers blooming around the porch. A stone path lit by tiny white lights led to the front door; the air was hot and honey-thick. It looked like a fairy-tale house, small and welcoming. “Beats Queens,” Lulu said, and it did.

She looked the same as always—dark curls spilling over her pale bare shoulders, red lipstick—except for one difference: her stomach, which was now shaped like a small round balloon.

When she'd picked us up at the station, we'd tried not to stare at it, but we couldn't help ourselves. After we'd hugged and whooped and hugged again, she'd patted her middle. “Too many doughnuts.” She smiled. “I'm kidding. I'm pregnant.”

“Why didn't you tell us?” I asked her.

“We've been waiting for the amnio results. We didn't tell anyone,” she said. They'd gotten them yesterday: the baby was a healthy boy. “I wanted to tell you in person,” she said as Annie and I dragged our luggage inside. “I know it's kind of a freak show. I'm forty-six, and they call it a ‘geriatric
pregnancy' when you're over thirty-five. Really makes you feel good about yourself.”

She seemed happier than I'd ever seen her. She'd always wanted to be a mother, and though I never said this out loud, I always thought she seemed more maternal than my mom.

“I never thought it would happen for me,” she said, “after David.” David was her ex-husband; they'd gotten divorced fifteen years ago. He was a yoga instructor who, as my mom put it, started giving overly personal instruction to his female students.

She met her second husband, Michael, here in Tucson—he was a professor at the university, too. They'd tried fertility treatments for the past five years, she said, and finally, it had worked.

Now we sat on the fuzzy white rug in her living room. Michael came home from the grocery store with two pints of ice cream, fudge topping, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate chip cookies, blueberries, and iced tea. I'd only met him once, when he and Lulu came to New York after they'd eloped five years ago. He had floppy blond hair and wore black-rimmed glasses, and he had a rumbling, gentle laugh. He gave us big hugs and poured us glasses of iced tea.

“Thank you,” Lulu told him. “You didn't need to do all that.”

“Of course I do. Now I'm off to go pack,” he told us. “Save me some cookies for the road.” He was leaving early tomorrow
to take a group of students on a week-long archaeological field trip. He kissed Lulu and rubbed her shoulders.

Annie and I showered and put on pajamas, and then the three of us ate New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream out of yellow teacups as we sat on the rug. Lulu placed a bowl of the blueberries on the coffee table.

Lulu had changed into pajama pants and a maternity T-shirt that said, “Give Me Chocolate.” She wore blue slippers and had tied her brown curls into a ponytail. She fiddled with the ring on her left hand—her wedding ring—which was antique silver with a giant pale purple stone. In the kitchen, the washing machine whirred with our clothes from the trip.

“So tell me about the boys,” Lulu said, glancing from Annie to me. “Look at you both. You look lovesick. Starry-eyed, exhausted. Dreamy. Anxious.”

“It's really that obvious?” Annie asked.

She nodded. “I've been there myself.”

“I thought I was hiding it.” Annie hugged her knees to her chest. “I hate this feeling. It's like a disease, pining for someone. I can't stop thinking of him.” She shuddered, as if trying to shake it off. “I'm worse than an elephant.”

“Please don't start talking about elephant sex again,” I said.

“This is different—I never told you about this state they have called
musth
—it's kind of an elephant lovesickness—they ooze this thick liquid from between their eyes and ears, and they pee constantly. Females love it.”

I gaped at her. “Thank you for that image.”

She rested her head on the arm of the sofa. “I'm so tired. I can't even function.”

I touched her arm. “It's not that bad,” I said reassuringly, though I wasn't doing much better. No letters had arrived at Lulu's house, and I couldn't stop checking my phone. Still nothing. They watched me. After I'd sent the letter from Tennessee, I'd convinced myself he wouldn't go to Seattle. He wouldn't go through with it. But maybe he had gone after all. I picked a blueberry out of the bowl, but it tasted sour. He'd sent me letters in Cleveland and Tennessee, but why not Texas or here?

On the bus I'd come up with a reasonable explanation: He'd sent letters here, but they'd been delayed in the mail. It had sounded plausible after staring out the window at the desert for hundreds of miles. Now I wasn't so sure anymore. I wished I hadn't said
I love you
. It had seemed right at the time—fearless and honest—but now I wanted to take it back.

Dear Will, When I said “I love you” I was COMPLETELY KIDDING. I meant: I like you. That's it. See you soon.

If only I could send that.

I showed Lulu all the poems and letters from him, the whole stack, and his mix CD, and told her everything I'd written to him.

I searched her face for a reaction, some Yoda-like words of wisdom, some prediction of the future. “Do you think it's the
real thing?” I asked. Grace's words were lodged in my mind like the lyrics of an awful song. “Look at this e. e. cummings poem he sent. You wouldn't send that if it wasn't real, right? If you didn't plan on seeing that person again? Will I see him again?” We were so close to California now. Two days away.

She didn't answer. She didn't say,
Yes, it's real, and this is what you must do, young Jedi
, as I hoped she would. She stood up, went to her shelves, and handed me a stack of books instead.

T
hey were all shapes and sizes: a cream-colored
The Dream of a Common Language
, by Adrienne Rich; Mary Oliver's bluish-gray
New and Selected Poems
; and a tiny thin purple one called
Letters to a Young Poet
, by Rainer Maria Rilke.

I remembered the letterpress print my mom had ordered for Lulu, and I gave it to her: it was a copy of Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art.” Lulu's favorite poem. She'd written her PhD thesis on Elizabeth Bishop. She unrolled it and touched the grooves of the letters and the paper, which was soft as cotton.

“Thank you,” she said.

The art of losing isn't hard to master
. She beamed as she read it. “I love this. I'm going to frame it and hang it right there.” She pointed to a wall behind us.

I touched the books in my lap. They looked like they'd been read a hundred times, with frayed covers and the page corners folded down. Lulu pointed to the little purple book, to page thirty-four. “Start there,” she said.

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your
heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Don't search for the answers
. I felt like I was always searching. Literally—when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time—and feel worse.

Lulu added more books to my pile.

“I know what you really want to do is to send him a video of yourself strumming a guitar and singing,
You've got grief, I've got grief, obviously we're soulmates
,” she said.

“I kind of do,” I said.

“That's what we're here for,” she said. “To stop you from doing that.”

She spooned more ice cream into our bowls and pointed to the letterpress print. “You know, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that poem when she was lovesick. She'd broken up with her lover, a woman named Alice. Alice was engaged to a man at the time. After Elizabeth wrote that poem, Alice broke it off
with the guy and she and Elizabeth got back together. They remained together till Elizabeth died.”

I couldn't believe a poem could do that, could have that kind of power.

Lulu looked at me. “What about your poems? Have you started writing again?”

“No. I've only written one in the last two years and it's bad.” I was going to explain it:
I've been busy
, I could tell her, or some other lame excuse. I thought of showing her the journal Janet had given me, but I felt embarrassed about the Dear Daddy, the stuff I'd written about pretending, and the naked need of it all. And I didn't want to tell her the truth, how despite that one page I'd filled with that letter to him, it still felt too painful to try to write more than that, and how I was afraid if I really opened the floodgates, it would all rush out like Pandora's box, ugly and embarrassing things that I didn't want to write about.

I picked up
The Dream of a Common Language
. I opened it to a section called “Twenty-One Love Poems.”

“Ah,” Lulu said. “Another favorite.” She pointed to a poem in the middle, the only poem in the sequence without a number. It was called “The Floating Poem.”

Whatever happens with us, your body

will haunt mine—

. . . whatever happens, this is.

Maybe, no matter what, everything that happened with Will and me would never end—it would be out there, floating, forever.
Whatever happens, this is.
I wanted to send this poem to Will. Or I could give it to him when I saw him.

I'd forgotten how much I loved to talk to Lulu about poetry. We never talked about it on the phone—when I called her it was always about some problem I had that I couldn't share with my mom. I decided to call her more often, just to talk.

Annie cradled the stack of poetry books in her lap. “Is there any problem that can't be solved with a book?”

“Nope,” Lulu said, and smiled.

Lulu was a lot like my dad in ways, treating life like a big celebration, like the world was an enormous apple they wanted to bite. Annie and Will were like that, too.

I stared at “The Floating Poem,” tracing the last line with my finger.