Kissing in America (2 page)

Will it come like a change in the weather?

Will its greeting be courteous or rough?

Will it alter my life altogether?

O tell me the truth about love.

—W. H. Auden

A
ccording to my mother, my first kiss happened on a Saturday in July. The weather: steamy, blacktop-melting, jungle-gym-scorching New York City sunshine. The setting: the 49th Street playground in Queens, good on the sand quotient, low on the rats. The kisser: Hector Driggs, cute but a little bit smelly, like wet blankets and aged cheese. The event: one sopping, clammy-lipped, deranged, lunging kiss, directly on my lips.

I bit him.

I was three.

A mark bloomed on his arm like two tiny purple smiles and he cried for half an hour, but my mother felt no pity for him. In fact, she swelled with pride. “Even at that young age I knew you understood the need for girls and women to fight for our freedom, equality, and personal space,” she said when she retold the story. “Plus, he smelled weird. I would've bit him too.”

My mom is a professor of women's studies at Queens College. While other newborns were happily drifting to sleep to
Goodnight Moon
, my mom read to me in my crib from Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Audre Lorde. In our living room there's a picture of me in my stroller at a women's rights march in Washington, clutching a sign with my tiny green mittens:
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History!

And so, two years ago, when I was fourteen and began what my mom termed “your ultimate rebellion,” she said I chose the worst thing possible. She would've preferred odd piercings, full-body tattoos, or even shoplifting to what I did.

I fell in love with romance novels.

It wasn't even just regular book-love. I was crazy for them, head-over-heels, obsessed. I read them in grocery aisles, on subways, buses, between classes, and most often, curled up in bed. Over the next two years I read one hundred and eighteen of them. (Not counting those I read twice.)

I'd discovered my first romance novel on the shelves of my best friend Annie Kim's apartment—she has two older sisters. Jenny, her middle sister, saw me gazing at the array of colorful spines and handed me
Cowboys on Fire
(book 1), with bare-chested cowboy Destry and gold-belt-buckled cowboy Ewing on the cover. (I'd get to know Destry and Ewing with a passion that bordered on the scientific.) “Here,” Jenny said. “You have to read this.”

Slowly, my room became plastered with posters of Destry and Ewing on horseback, riding bulls one-handed, and roping calves; of Sir Richard from
Torrid Tomorrow
, who led a
double life as the pirate Diablo; and Gurlag, who was raised by wolves and known as
The Wilderness Rogue
.

My mom would come into my room and gaze at the books on my night table, at Ewing on his bronco or Gurlag swinging from a tree, and she'd sigh. “I didn't raise you to worship imbecilic apes.”

Other times she'd grow more serious, looking at my books. “I've failed you as a mother, as a woman, and as a citizen of this world,” she'd say.

It wasn't true. I called myself a feminist (to her at least—to my friends it would be like calling myself a maiden or some other dusty crusty ancient word). At school I was quick to point out whenever boys dominated class discussions, or girls were excluded from handball games. When a flasher was spotted in our schoolyard three times in one month, I organized a Take Back the Yard march, with forty-five eighth graders parading around the Intermediate School 125 grounds chanting, “Girls on guard! Take back the yard! And dude, put some clothes on!” The flasher was undeterred, but eventually caught and prosecuted.

Still, my books kept bothering my mother. “That happiness only comes from romantic love is the biggest myth of our society,” she told me once. “They're selling you a fantasy version of love. It's dishonest. Misleading. And untrue. Real love is a mess. Complicated. Not like
this
.” She picked up
Torrid Tomorrow
.

“But you haven't even read it.”

As if possessed by a magic maternal sixth sense, she turned to the worst sentences in the whole book.

Sir Richard's chest sparkled with man-dew as he whispered, “Lilith, it may hurt you when I burst thy womanhood.”

“Hurt me,” Lilith breathed. Her rosy domes undulated like the sea as he joined her in a love that vanquished every sorrow known on Earth.

“The rest of the book is filled with a historical portrait of late-nineteenth-century American society, and Lilith is treated as an equal in the relationship—she's at the forefront of the suffrage movement,” I pointed out, but my mom ignored my explanations and tried to get me to read
Girls Be Strong: A Guide for Growing Up Powerful
instead.

Girls Be Strong
wasn't a bad book. It had some semi-interesting advice about how a boy stealing your scarf may mean that he likes you, but you're still entitled to tell him to get the hell out of your way. And it included a funny piece by Gloria Steinem called “If Men Could Menstruate,” which said: “Guys would brag (‘I'm a three-pad man') or answer praise from a buddy (‘Man, you lookin' good!') by giving fives and saying, ‘Yeah man, I'm on the rag!'”

But it wasn't exactly a romantic book, either.

To my mother, my real problem was that I believed in love, in great love. I had this trickle of hope, always, that the future would be filled with romance. I didn't expect to meet a Sir Richard or a Destry exactly, but it didn't seem entirely impossible.

My mom says that the events of last summer all started because of those one hundred and eighteen romance novels percolating in my brain. I don't think so, though. I think everything started when I met Will and told him about my father.

T
he first thing Will ever said to me was: “Tell me the truth.” Then he plunked several pieces of crumpled notebook paper on my desk.

It was last September, in the tutoring center in our school's crumbling north tower. Our high school was a charter school in a city-owned former mansion in the Bronx; it featured a faded fresco in the auditorium, gilt moldings on the first floor, and entire wings of the building that were never renovated or used. The north tower overlooked Van Cortlandt Park. Iron bars covered the windows, as if someone was afraid we'd be tempted to hurl ourselves out.

When Will appeared at the door, Mrs. Peech, our faculty adviser, read his form and announced, “William Freeman,” as if everyone didn't know who he was already—he was like a part of the school you learned your first week, along with your map and schedule. “You're with Eva.”

Seventeen faces watched him sit down. He barely fit in the small chair.

I felt like I'd stepped onto a shaky subway train. I'd had a
crush on him for over a year, since I saw him my first day of high school. Now I tried not to stare at him. He had dark, wavy, unkempt hair like Gurlag, Destry, and all the windblown men on my romance novel covers, but he was different. He always carried books around—James Baldwin, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut—and while his friends were laughing and talking on the 1 train home, sometimes he'd just read. He managed to be weird and popular at the same time. The trophy case on our school's second floor displayed a shelf of his swim team awards (he was the captain), and his photo. I glanced at it every time I walked by: his brown eyes and his smile that always seemed partly sad and partly amused, as if he was thinking of some dark, mysterious joke.

I picked up his pages and the words swam before me. I glanced across the room at Annie; we both tutored at the drop-in center every Friday afternoon. She raised her eyebrows.

Focus.
Focus
. Do
not
think of man-dew.

I smoothed his rumpled pages and read. It was a college application essay about a swim meet, with descriptions of butterfly strokes and buzzers ringing, and it was achingly boring.

“This sucks,” I said.

“Don't hold back now.”

“You said to tell the truth.”

“Because I thought you'd say it was
good
.”

“There's no punctuation.”

He pointed to a period.

“A period is the wallflower of punctuation. And you only have three.”

“Three good ones,” he said. He gazed right at me, practically through me.

Rosamunde Saunders, author of
Torrid Tomorrow
, would describe him as having
cheekbones as big as apricots
and
café mocha skin
. I glanced at the pale scar on his chin, like a tiny river. He sat so close to me that I could smell soap and something else—was I imagining it?—like sugar. His leg, in his dark jeans, brushed mine.

He picked up Dylan Thomas's
Selected Poems
from my desk. I'd been reading it before he got there; he'd arrived forty-five minutes after tutoring hour had started. “He looks startled,” he said, staring at Dylan Thomas's face.

“It's startling to be reinventing the English language,” I said. “I mean—dingle starry!” I blurted, quoting from the book.
The night above the dingle starry . . .
I took a breath and tried again. “I mean, in the book, um . . .” Why was I babbling? What was wrong with me? It was like an evil spirit had overtaken my body. I couldn't believe I was talking to Will and we were talking about Dylan Thomas, and the sheer magnitude of it all turned my brain to goo. All that was left was Rosamunde Saunders's voice.
He's looking at you with liquid velvet eyes. Eyes that know how to love a woman and—

The bell rang. Someone called his name. A girl who stood
in the doorway, a swim team girl. Vanessa Valari. She and her friends bought entire pages in the yearbook to fill with photos of themselves in their bikinis on Rockaway Beach, their hands on their hips, laughing at the camera.

Will stood up, still holding the book. “Can I borrow this? I'll bring it back next Friday.”

I nodded and watched him leave with the bikini girl.

The door closed behind them. “What's a dingle starry?” Annie asked me.

I took her phone—it was faster than my own Crapphone—and Googled Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill,” and showed it to her. “Fern Hill” was my father's favorite poem. He'd bought the book of
Selected Poems
for me one summer day after he phoned in sick to work (playing hooky, he called it), and we took the train to the Strand and picked out a whole pile of books, then went uptown and bought so much food at Columbus Comfort Kitchen that we could barely carry it all—fried chicken and fluffy biscuits and fried apple pies, still warm in tinfoil, and chocolate malt shakes smothered in whipped cream. We walked through Central Park and sat by Turtle Pond, and all afternoon we ate and wrote and read. I'd never heard the words
dingle starry
before, but I could see the stars dingling and sparkling, the sun dappling hidden lakes and magical trees, everything feeling easy and light, and though I wouldn't be able to say exactly what it meant to
sing in my chains like the sea
, I knew that I'd felt it, that I hadn't known
that feeling existed until I saw the words on the page. After we read the poems, we wrote in notebooks—small spiral-bound college-ruled ones from the drugstore—he never saved his, but mine were stashed in the back of my closet. I hadn't looked at them since he died.

“You let Will take your dad's copy of the book?” Annie asked me, in shock.

My insides dropped—why had I done that? What if he spilled something on it or lost it? All week I watched him in the cafeteria and schoolyard, but I never had the guts to say,
Hey, by the way, please be careful with my book!

On Friday at tutoring, he brought the book back to me, in perfect shape.

“Good book,” he said.

I'd hoped we'd have time to talk, but he was late again, and we had only fifteen minutes. Mrs. Peech kept glancing at us; we got right to his essay. He'd rewritten it. I read it quickly. “The punctuation is great now, but I think the swim team topic has got to go,” I told him.

“Why? That's what I
do
.”

“Everyone does a sport. Maybe if your sport was, I don't know—calf roping—that might be interesting, but they're going to get a million essays about swim meets.”

“I've got nothing else to write about.”

“I don't believe you. Dig deep,” I said.

“How do I know you're giving me good advice?”

“My mom has been coaching me on my college application since I was a fetus. Plus Mrs. Peech makes all the tutors read a book about college essays.”

The bell rang. The bikini girl waited in the doorway again. “See you next Friday,” he said.

The week crept by. Annie and I studied—sometimes I felt like all we did was study: we studied on the 7 and the 1 trains (the 1, when it reached the Bronx, was quieter), at the Woodside Library, the Sunnyside Library, the 42nd Street New York Public Library, and at Athens Diner, which was halfway between our apartments, and where they let you sit with a hot chocolate for three hours and never kicked you out. At night, before we fell asleep, she texted me updates about
Dancing with the Stars
and all her favorite reality shows, and I texted her quotes about Gurlag's manroot.

I couldn't wait to see Will again. When the day arrived I kept watching the door, expecting him to appear, which he did, only ten minutes late this time.

His new essay was about his dog, Silas.

“The college essay guide said no dogs,” I said.

“What's wrong with dogs?”

“They get so many pet essays, they usually toss them right out. Instant reject.”

“My dog isn't a normal dog. He has three legs.”

“I know. Silas sounds like a great dog. Still. Four-legged dogs, three-legged dogs—the book said they get tired of
reading about dogs.” I tapped his essay. “Also, the voice here doesn't sound like you. I mean, it could've been written by anybody. You want something that could only have been written by you.”

I scribbled in the margin of his essay: “More you.” He took the pen from me and put it down, and then touched my finger.

“You have a callus from writing so much,” he said.

No one in my books ever pointed out a callus.
“I love your callus,” Sir Richard said. “What a beautiful callus.”

He ran his finger up and down mine. My face warmed; a flicker traveled under my skin. He let go as the bell rang. The door opened and there stood the bikini girl, as always.

He left without a word. I stared after him. I told Annie what happened as we packed up our things and walked down the hall.

“He touched my finger. He told me—he actually told me,
‘You have a callus from writing so much.'
” I said it in a husky tone.

Annie squinted. “What's wrong with your voice? You sound like you have a throat disease.”

Annie was a romantic only up to a point. She liked watching
Anne of Green Gables
,
Pride and Prejudice
, and even the occasional Lifetime Original Movie with me, and she loved her reality shows, but she drew the line at reading romance novels, or having a real-life romance right now. “We've got plenty of time for all that crap in college,” she'd say.

In college. That was Annie's mantra. She always knew
she'd wait till college to fall in love. Her sisters, Jenny, who was a junior, and Lala, who was a senior, got straight Cs and wasted all their time thinking about who they hoped to hook up with, or regretted hooking up with. Annie said they were on a fast track to folding sweaters at American Eagle for the rest of their lives.

Our wait-till-college plan was easy since no boys were interested in us anyway. At our nerd-heavy school, the boys rarely had the guts to speak to us, except when asking to borrow math notes or to pass a beaker in lab. The only guy who'd ever asked me out was David Dweener, who had oily hair and liked to a wear a T-shirt from the musical
Cats
. Will belonged to the good-looking elite, a small, ultracool crowd. I never thought in a million years that he'd ever speak to me.

Annie and I walked toward the subway. “Maybe next week you'll get lucky and he'll ask to touch your bunion,” she said.

“That would be wonderful. Except I don't have a bunion.”

“
Sadly, it was a short-lived romance, since Lady Eva's dead skin was not yet thick nor copious enough to satisfy Sir Will
,” Annie said.

Laughing about it made me feel a little less nervous when I thought about him, but the next Friday, my heart banged away when he walked through the door of the tutoring center.

He had a completely new essay:

The last time I saw my brother he looked perfect. They made his skin pink. His lips were bright red.
He wore a fuzzy blue sleeper that had been given to him as a gift, but he'd never worn it while he was alive. My mom wanted each of us to give him something to be buried with, to take wherever he was going. My dad gave him a tiny telescope so that he could always see us on Earth. I gave him one of my stuffed animals, an orange monkey. My mom gave him a gold necklace that said “Mother” on it, which she'd been wearing the day he was born.

I was seven.

When people ask my mom how many children she has, she says two. For a while, if someone asked me how many siblings I had, I said none. She got mad when I said that. She likes talking about him. It gives her comfort.
I had another son, a baby who died in his crib. They don't know what caused it. I put him to bed on his back. I didn't have a blanket in the crib. I didn't do anything wrong but it happened and you have to learn to live with it. It never gets easier.

It doesn't bother her that people cringe and look away when she talks about him. They don't want to hear about it. She talks about him anyway. She takes out the album and looks at his photos, and she remembers his birthday every year and thinks of how old he would've been. Eleven now. He'd be eleven. My mother tells me
He will always be your
brother. He was born, he lived, he died. Don't erase his life from yours.

My mom says that if my brother hadn't died, she never would've known who my father really was, that he was the type of man who would leave when things got hard. After my brother died, my dad started drinking, staying out all night, stopped coming home. Then one day he left for good. I didn't see him again for ten years.

So I guess this essay is supposed to be about what's influenced me the most, but I think sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

I was quiet for a long time. “It's good,” I said. “Really good.” My voice was soft. “I'm sorry about your brother and your dad.”

I couldn't stand how lame
sorry
sounded. “I hate
sorry
—I mean—my dad's dead—he died almost two years ago. I've never figured out what the right thing to say is. Or to hear.”

I knew what the next question would be before he even said it.

“How did he die?” he asked.