Kissing in America (26 page)

             
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

             
the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.

             
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

             
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those

             
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

             
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush. This is it.

             
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.

             
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

             
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

             
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

             
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

             
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

             
I am living. I remember you.

—Marie Howe

H
ow did you get here?” I asked her. She looked so out of her element in the peachy-white hotel restaurant, with its pastel napkins, absurdly huge baskets of peonies, and pink tablecloths. She wore a short-sleeved black dress and black sandals. All around us were bouncy blond waitresses in white pants and floral shirts.

“I flew.”

My mom had flown to see me. I couldn't absorb it.

She looked around. “It's nice here.” She smiled at me. I looked away from her face. I couldn't meet her gaze.

Lulu and Annie excused themselves and said they'd meet us later. I wished I could go with them.

“I'm so happy to see you. I missed you.” My mom's voice sounded both nervous and relieved. “You look good. I'm so glad—” She paused. “Please sit down.”

I sat across from her and didn't say anything. I kept my backpack on my lap like a barrier between us, an extra person.

Saying good-bye to her in Port Authority seemed like months ago. I thought of how my mom looked in the photo
of us in Central Park, young and happy, a different person. I thought of my mom as a teenager, studying nonstop after her father died. My mom watching Freda scrub and scrub. And I thought of my dad under the sea, looking at us in the restaurant right now, using his own telescope.

“Lulu and Janet told me about your trip. Sounds like an adventure.” She smiled again, a sad smile. She rearranged the sugar packets, making sure all were right side up, the same way Janet had in Cleveland. “I wish I could've come along.” Her voice was gentle.

I shook my head. “You wouldn't have liked it.”

She let go of the sugar packets. Her hand lay on the table, grasping and releasing something invisible. She had a callus on the same finger that I did, from writing her lectures by hand.

I stared out the window at the beach and the ocean. California seemed as if it was on the edge of the world, a different country from the east coast and every state in between. The waitress grinned as she placed menus and water glasses in front of us. We didn't touch them.

“Come home with me tomorrow,” she said. “We'll take the train back together.”

I shook my head.

“You want to go back with Annie. I understand.”

I fingered my bag. It was softer after having been lugged across the country, with tiny grease stains from our rest stop
meals, and dirt from the middle of Texas, and a million other splotches and microscopic souvenirs from our trip.

I let go of the bag and smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth. My mom reached her hands across the table and tried to touch mine, but I moved them to my lap.

“I shouldn't have made the decision about the search without you. I kept thinking if we had to have another funeral—” She spoke slowly, then paused. “I wanted it to be easier for you this time.”

I looked down. “We never talk about him,” I said.

“Who?”

“Daddy.”

My hands started to shake as I said his name. All the anger I'd buried for so long simmered to the top. I opened my bag and took out the pillowcase.

The silk tie, T-shirt, postcards, Toffee Crisp wrappers—I dumped everything out.

The edges of her face quivered. She stared at it all, disbelieving, as if I'd just taken my father out of my bag and placed him on the table.

Her lips thinned into a frown. She picked up the tie first, her mouth working, twisting at one corner. She touched the fabric like a scientist, distantly, unsure. Then she picked up the paperweight, the postcards.

“Where have you been keeping it?” She made a little movement with her shoulders, as if she wanted to get away from all
this stuff, get rid of it as soon as possible.

I shook my head. “You would've thrown it out.” The backs of my eyes stung, and I could feel the tears threatening.

The waitress walked by and glanced at our faces and all the stuff on our table. She hurried off.

My mom's mouth kept working. Then she took the T-shirt and held it, pressed it to her face. She breathed it in. She picked up the Toffee Crisp wrappers, touched the yellow lettering, the white insides. “Do you know why he couldn't stop buying these?”

I shook my head.

Her face changed; her mouth relaxed. Her skin looked soft and pale. “I never got to meet Daddy's father, but from the stories Daddy told me, I think he was a lot like my mother. Except instead of her crazy cleaning, he used to hoard food. Candy. Chocolate. When Daddy's father was a kid in England, food was rationed during the war. He hoarded sweets for the rest of his life. Whenever he traveled, he brought back tons of Toffee Crisps for Daddy. Daddy was only twelve when his father died of a heart attack.”

I pictured my dad as a boy, missing his own father, losing him when he was younger than me. Here all this time I'd been remembering the carefree and happy side of my dad, but he had his own grief and worries, too. Maybe he'd felt his own father's buried fears and heartache, just as my mom felt Freda's. As I felt hers.

My mom kept holding the wrappers. “They're releasing the preliminary report next week. About the data and voice recorders.” She spoke quickly. “It isn't a surprise or anything. It was a combination of things, of errors and mistakes. Computer malfunctions. Pilot errors—a string of pilot errors. Bad weather, bad luck.”

I touched the tablecloth. Maybe he had been thinking of us in those last minutes. Or maybe what he felt then would always be a mystery. An unanswerable question.

“I wanted to be strong for you,” she murmured. “I thought if we could forget the past and move forward—both of us—we'd be okay.” She glanced down. “Maybe it wasn't the best way. But it was all I could manage to do.”

Her face looked bare, unsure. We were quiet for a long time.

It's not enough, I wanted to say. Maybe the two of us, left alone, isn't enough. Maybe too much had been broken between us, more than could be fixed.

My mom lowered her voice. “Your romances are right, you know. About great love.”

I looked up at the ceiling. “Please don't make fun of me right now.”

She shook her head. “I'm not making fun. I'm telling the truth.” She opened her handbag and took out a big cloth pouch. Silk floral fabric with a silver zipper.

She opened it and gingerly removed a baby's pink and blue
knit cap, a tiny hospital bracelet, a necklace I'd made for her in first grade out of puffy beads, a small album of elementary school art, the Urbanwords book of poems.

“I usually keep it in my top drawer, but I wanted it with me on the plane.”

I looked at the stuff. I didn't understand it.

“The minute you were born, the nurse put you in my arms, and I felt like all my life I'd been waiting for you. I couldn't stop kissing your velvet skin and spun-sugar hair and tiny seashell fingernails. At night you'd fall asleep on my chest and I couldn't bear to wake you. I'd sit in the rocking chair, holding you, letting the love wash over me in waves. The fairy tales were right—there were stars and moons, my dream come true.” She stared at me. “That feeling never changed. It will never change.”

She'd never told me this before. Not in words.

But she had told me—she'd told me in the phone calls and texts, so many of them; in that hand on my forehead, knowing it wasn't a stomach bug at all; in wanting to keep me nearby for college; in trying to protect me from the grief and pain. I'd always seen it as overbearing, or as something I didn't understand, and maybe it didn't always take the right form, but it had been there, all around me, though I'd never before let myself see it for what it was.

My eyes hurt. Under the table, her fingers closed over mine.

No one wrote romances about mothers and daughters. There were no epic cowboy and jungle tales about mother and daughter love. Our table held a paperweight and a striped silk tie, a baby's cap and a book of poems, and our hands lay beneath it, hidden like the stitches of a quilt.

her wounds     came     from the same source as her power

                        —Adrienne Rich

A
s the sun sank toward the horizon and the city grew even more alive, we walked along the beach near the Santa Monica pier. Annie, Lulu, Janet, my mom, and me. The air was warm as bathwater; we carried our shoes and felt the sand squish between our toes. (Except for Janet, who didn't take her sneakers off.) We walked past little kids building sand castles, and people playing volleyball in bathing suits, and we watched a man with a white beard comb the sand with a metal detector.

My mom and Lulu talked and laughed and caught up on their lives. As we stood at the edge of the ocean, my mom told us that she and Larry had decided to postpone the wedding. They'd been rushing things. They weren't quite ready, not yet.

“While Eva was away, we had a lot of time alone together. I don't know if he's right for me, or if it's still too soon. And I forgot how much laundry men make. Even when they have their own apartment, all their laundry ends up at your place.” My mom rolled her eyes. “I'm not ready to have a man in my
life that much of the time just yet. Maybe having one
sometimes
is just fine for now.”

“Sometimes is definitely good,” Lulu agreed.

“Sometimes
is
good,” Janet said in an entirely different tone.

We started walking again. Maybe there were people in our lives who left us—like Will—but they served another kind of purpose. They made you do things you'd never have done otherwise. If I hadn't met Will, I wouldn't be here right now. None of this would've happened.

Janet watched the waves lap at our feet. “Watch out for jellyfish. Even when they look dead, their sting is a pain in the
tuchas
like you never felt in your life.”

We walked for over an hour. When it was time to leave and return to the hotel, I paused at the shore. Annie and Janet stopped with me.

I opened my bag.

I thought about how honoring the dead means making a hundred little choices. What to keep, how to remember. The people who are left behind have to curate the memories. That's the job we have to do.

I'd keep the paperweight, the postcards, the real things. The things that he would want me to keep. I took out the Toffee Crisp wrappers and the receipt.

“What are you doing?” Janet asked. “There's a $100 fine,” she said as I flung the wrappers and paper into the ocean.

“Oh, too late.” Janet shook her head. “
Yitgadal v'yitgadash
. There go some Toffee Crisps that meant a lot to Frederick Roth, and now they're being returned to—”

The wind had picked up, and instead of carrying them to the ocean, they flew up and over us, back to shore.

“—to the beach,” Janet said.

“Hey!” the white-bearded old man called, waving his metal detector. “Whatcha doing? Ya littering! Ya littering!” He ran across the beach, chasing the wrappers as they flapped in the breeze.

We started laughing. My dad would love it. It was better than any funeral he could wish for—the old man in his chase like a modern dance, the flying Toffee Crisp wrappers, the warm sand, the wind and the sea.

I
t almost seemed like a bus station. An incredibly clean, expensive bus station.

Women in giant sunglasses and heels tottered across the floor, little girls dragged their tiny pink suitcases, and mothers juggled babies. All these people going about their lives fearlessly. Or so it seemed.

We'd gotten there two hours early. To get used to it. To prepare. My mom was determined not to take a pill this time, as she had on the flight out. (She'd taken two.) “It's just a flying subway, really,” my mom said. “A subway with wings.”

I felt a familiar whirring in my stomach, my skin growing colder. We stuffed my mom's tote bag with magazines, sandwiches, juices, Skittles, Snickers, Tic Tacs, and granola bars, as if we were traveling for a week. She picked out a new bottle of perfume, though she already had two others in her checked baggage, including the bluebonnet one I'd given her. We picked out a gift, a lavender-scented household cleanser set, for Janet, who'd given us her frequent flyer miles for the tickets.

We sat and read in a coffee shop—almost like any other coffee shop—except there were planes out the window. We ordered two giant pieces of chocolate cake.

My mom closed her magazine. “I'm so freaking scared,” she said.

“Me too.” I laughed at her honesty; she giggled too. To everyone around us, we probably looked deranged: mother and daughter devouring cake like it was their last meal.

We walked toward the gate.

I thought of Elizabeth Bishop, traveling the world. Or Edna St. Vincent Millay, touring the country, reading to packed theaters. Or Adrienne Rich or Nikki Giovanni or Marie Howe, or all those women at once. Those women took risks, they loved and lost, they wrote about it. They took their disasters and turned them into something beautiful. That's what I wanted to do with my life.

I thought of Annie and Janet, who were on a train right now barreling toward Texas. I thought of Lulu, who was driving back to Tucson. And I thought of my mom.

She stood beside me as we faced the gate. All this time I'd been searching for true love when I already had it.
Every poem is a love poem
, my dad had said. I'd always thought he meant romantic love—but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother's-best-friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who
you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for the things you yearn to do, for putting words on a page. Love for traveling, for meeting new people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world, for it being a hard pain in your ass. Love for the questions, for the ever more complicated questions.

I watched the display of destinations.

AMSTERDAM

BANGKOK

DUBLIN

EDINBURGH

FLORENCE

LONDON

MADRID

MELBOURNE

NAIROBI

PARIS

ROME

SINGAPORE

TAIPEI

TEL AVIV

TOKYO

Places that someday I would see.

The sun filtered through the giant windows, dappling the floors and seats and walls with diamonds of light.

I took that leap, and I was flying.