The Kiss: A Memoir (5 page)

My mother breaks away and goes into the kitchen. She returns with a platter of cheeses and vegetables and little sandwiches, her comments arranged with as much care as the food. We all stare at one another, fascinated, years of observation collapsed into minutes. We catalog similarities, differences. Whose am I?

From the neck down I’m a replica of my mother, but my head resembles his. The line of his jaw is echoed in mine, as are his cheekbones, his ears, his brow. And how mysterious it is that my father and I do the same things with our hands as we talk. I’ve never had the chance to see his gestures and learn to mimic them. I watch and listen as my parents begin to argue. They can’t reconstruct a year, a season, or even a week from the past without disagreeing. Whatever they talk about their wedding day, my birth it’s as if my mother and father experienced two separate, unconnected realities, a disjuncture that allows no compromise, no middle ground. The picture that I form of their courtship is one that I have to piece together, no matter how hard I try to make things fit, it will always have the look of an incomplete collage some details too large, others too small, many missing. My father takes pictures of my mother and me. An accomplished amateur photographer, he owns a number of large-format cameras and develops his work himself in a darkroom he’s set up in his parsonage. I watch as he poses and records images of her, and she watches as he poses me.

Though no one counts aloud, I sense that he is careful to make an equal number of exposures of both of us, and that we all keep track of this quantifiable measure of his attention. Then, “How about the two of you together? ” he asks, and my mother and I sit next to each other on the hearth. These pictures of my mother and me are the last I have of us together. As it turns out, they are overexposed, my father never makes so I have only the proof sheet away and goes into the kitchen. She returns with a platter of cheeses and vegetables and little sandwiches, her comments arranged with as much care as the food. We all stare at one another, fascinated, years of observation collapsed into minutes. We catalog similarities, differences. Whose am I?

From the neck down I’m a replica of my mother, but my head resembles his. The line of his jaw is echoed in mine, as are his cheekbones, his ears, his brow. And how mysterious it is that my father and I do the same things with our hands as we talk. I’ve never had the chance to see his gestures and learn to mimic them. I watch and listen as my parents begin to argue. They can’t reconstruct a year, a season, or even a week from the past without disagreeing. Whatever they talk abouttheir wedding day, my birthit’s as if my mother and father experienced two separate, unconnected realities, a disjuncture that allows no compromise, no middle ground. The picture that I form of their courtship is one that I have to piece together, no matter how hard I try to make things fit, it will always have the look of an incomplete collagesome details too large, others too small, many missing. My father takes pictures of my mother and me. An accomplished amateur photographer, he owns a number of large-format cameras and develops his work himself in a darkroom he’s set up in his parsonage. I watch as he poses and records images of her, and she watches as he poses me.

Though no one counts aloud, I sense that he is careful to make an equal number of exposures of both of us, and that we all keep track of this quantifiable measure of his attention. Then, “How about the two of you together? ” he asks, and my mother and I sit next to each other on the hearth. These pictures of my mother and me are the last I have of us together. As it turns out, they are overexposed, my father never makes so I have only the proof sheets showing the two of us, our heads inclined, our bodies not touching. Behind my mother and me, visible between our shoulders, are tongues of flame from the gas log. In certain of the poses the fire looks as if it comes from our clothes themselves, as if the anguished expression we each wear is not the smile we intended but the first rictus of pain. As if what my father caught with his camera was the moment when suddenly we knew we’d begun to burn. from the tube. His scrutiny both excites and exhausts me. How can it be that anyone finds me so interesting? The three of us spend much of our week together at art museums and botanic gardens and other tourist attractions. We are drawn to these places of silent staring and confused, enervated wandering because they make us seem and feel less like freaks as we stare in speechless shock at one another. Rather than increasing the strain, the time we spend with my grandparents is a relief in that it diffuses and refracts our attention, filling a few hours with polite, careful conversation about politics and gardening and books we’ve all read. Each night at my mother’s house we stay up as late as we can, trying to drain sensation from every minute. Whatever I do peel an orange, tie my shoe, pour water from a pitcher into the dry soil of a house plant enthralls my father. I get up to brush my teeth, and he follows me into the bathroom. He leans against the doorjamb to watch as I squeeze the paste “Is that the brand you always use? ” he says.

“Crest? ” I nod. My teeth, as we’ve observed aloud, match his shape and color. “Did you ever wear braces? ” he asks. “No, ” I say. He nods. I’m as captivated by him. I’ve never really known who my father was, and revelation is inherently seductive. There is, too, the fascination of our likeness, that we resemble each other in ways that transcend … ..

physical slmllarlues. “You walk like your father, ” my mother used to say to me when I was younger. “As soon as you stood up and put one foot in front of the other, I could see it. “

“What do you mean? ” I’d say. “How? “

“I can’t explain it, ” she’d say. And she wouldn’t try. What she said was spoken wistfully sometimes, but mostly it wasn’t a compliment.

So much of what my mother and her mother seem to regard in me as alien my bookishness, for example, or my killjoy disinterest in fashion and in what they consider the fun of manicures and facials and going out for high tea in a tea shop has always been blamed on the other, rogue half of my genes. What a surprise to find that this judgment, which previously struck me as facile, turns out to be correct. In my father I meet someone not only familial but familiar, like myself. Now, my stubborn streak, my willful, marching walk, and the way I frown when I’m thinking all such traits are not evidence of my separateness but of my belonging. “Pretty is as pretty does. ” My grandfather has said these words to me all my life, and since I’m always doing something wrong I know just how ugly I must be. My grandfather was seventy-one when I was born, and he often took care of me when I was a small child. A tall, remarkably vigorous man, he gardened, he swam, he drove me to school and helped me with my homework. It was my grandfather who taught me how to ride a bicycle, and in his shirt pocket he kept a small pad of paper on which he wrote pretend traffic tickets when I went too fast on the long driveway or ran into one of his flower beds. The penalties he doled out were usually tasks that I had to perform in order to insinuate myself back into his good graces. This game of make-believe crimes and punishments was one of which I never tired. I was a tomboy, I tagged after my grandfather, underfoot so often that my first nickname was Shadow, as in “Me and My. ” He whistled the old music hall tune whenever he heard me coming. Because his patience was greater than theirs, my mother and grandmother turned me over to him at bedtime, and sometimes he had to sing for hours until I fell asleep. Our companionship gave both of us great pleasure”Oh, you keep him young! You keep him young! “

his wrinkled friends said, tweaking my ear or cheek but everything changed abruptly when I went through puberty. “You’re too big for that now, ” my grandfather would say, and he’d push me out of his lap. When he hugged me, he didn’t let our bodies touch, he made sure that my breasts and hips didn’t press against him. I suppose the same thing must have happened to my mother when she turned twelve or thirteen, her flesh announcing to him that she had become sexual and therefore untouchable, and that his rejection as she slipped from childhood into womanhood must have wounded her as it did me. Born in 1890, my mother’s father is a true Victorian. He was raised in houses in which even a table’s curved leg was draped, and he has remained squeamish about what he would call our animal nature. My grandmother can be derisive about his prudishness, Victorian mores being to her like a language she can speak but mostly chooses not to. She alludes disparagingly to my grandfather’s willful innocence, and when he turns the television off because an ad for a feminine-hygiene product has interrupted the news broadcast, she throws her magazine down in disgust. “Good God! ” she cries. “Are you going to leave the world still thinking the stork brought you into it! ” Whatever it is about my father that so draws me to him must have to do in part with the very different ways he and my grandfather respond to my femaleness. As a child of five or of ten, happiest at my grandfather’s elbow while he grafted a branch onto a fruit tree or nailed perches to a bird feeder, I couldn’t keep my father’s attention. During his two brief visits, his eyes passed quickly over me on their way to my mother. But now that I am grown up, my fingernails no longer rough and black with earth from the garden, my once-bobbed hair long, and my flat chest filled out, my father’s eyes are fixed on me, he tears his gaze away with reluctance. This kind of besotted focus is intoxicating, especially for a girl schooled in selfeffacement and taught that virtue believes more in its ugliness than in its beauty. One afternoon, when we’ve returned from a gallery, I fall asleep sitting next to my father on the couch. When I wake up, whole hours later, my head is in the crook of his elbow, like a baby’s. I startle, arms jerking in alarm. “I’m sorry! ” I say. “I was so tired. “

“Oh, no! ” my father says. “Please don’t apologize! I’m not sorry at all. ” He looks at me with his hungry eyes.

“My arm went to sleep, ” he says. “I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t dare move. If it was up to me, I would have sat holding you forever, I would never have woken you. “They didn’t let me hold you,” he says. “Not at all. I don’t remember that they ever let me. They had you on a schedule. It was sacrosanct, it was absolute. They tolerated no exceptions. They fed you, they changed you, they put you down. If you cried, no one was allowed to pick you up. ” By they he means the baby nurse, my mother and grandmother.

“They didn’t even let me say good-bye, ” he says. He puts his hand under my chin and turns my face toward his. My mother is watching him. At one point she opens her mouth as if to say something, but then closes it. As my father talks, tears seep into the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. They don’t fall so much as spread into a glittering web over his face, following the fine lines made by the sun, by laughter, by sorrow.

I’ve never seen a man cry before. My father’s eyes, what is it about them? Their color is utterly familiar the same as mine, the same as my mothers but they burn like no other eyes I’ve ever seen before or since.

Burn like a prophet’s, a madman’s, a lover’s. Always shining, always bloodshot, always turned on me with absolute attention. Intelligent eyes, enraptured eyes, luminous, stricken brilliant, spellbound, spellbinding eyes. I don’t know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it, my father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being. His look gives me to myself, his gaze reflects the life my mother’s willfully shut eyes denied. Looking at him looking at me, I cannot help but fall painfully, precipitously in love. And my loving him is inseparable from a piercing sense of loss. Whenever I am alone in my bedroom, the bathroom I find myself crying, sometimes even sinking to my knees. How am I to endure this new despair? How can it be that I am twenty years old, that I’ve had to grow up without a father, only to meet him now when it’s too late, when childhood is over, lost?

On the last night my father spends with us, I wake after only two hours of sleep. I sit up in bed and find my wristwatch on the nightstand. It’s ten minutes before three. My throat is sore as if I’m catching a cold, and I go downstairs for a glass of orange juice. I move quietly so as not to disturb my father sleeping in the den. The thick carpet on the stair treads absorbs my footfalls. As I pass the den’s open door, I see that the convertible sofa is empty, my father is not on it. I turn on the lights in the living room just to make sure he’s not sleeping on that couch, but already I know where he is, in my mother’s bed. I sit on the carpeted stairs to consider this, their cheating on his current wife and my mother’s banished, trusting partner. Do my parents perhaps consider their bond so primary that it is absolute, ungovernable by the dictates that guide more pedestrian relationships? Maybe they believe that they are being faithful only when they’re sleeping together, and that other loves are the betrayal. Alone, outside my mother’s closed bedroom door, I feel jealous. And, like all children, I discover that I’m squeamish at the thought of my mother and father having intercourse.

I’m both fascinated and repelled. When I turn on the light in the kitchen, I find a cockroach on the counter, rather than kill it, I gingerly and at arm’s length place a water glass upside down over the insect leaving the problem for my mother to resolve in the morning. I dislike insects, and cockroaches in particular have always frightened me. As I drink the juice, I see the roach circle inside the glass, rising occasionally on its hind legs to touch the clear, smooth, obstructing surface with its forefeet and sensitive antennae. I watch how it must relentlessly search for the seam, the tiny ridge or rill in the glass that might offer some hope of climbing, penetrating, escaping.

But there is nothing about the glass that it understands. The next day, while my mother is taking a shower, my father talks about what happened the previous night. “I heard you, ” he says. “I heard you go downstairs.

” He leans forward over the breakfast table. “I did it because I had to, ” he says. “She asked me. ” I say nothing, but we both know that I know what he’s talking about. He describes their making love not as sacred, the way I’ve imagined it, but as an act of charitable reassurance. He answers a question I never voice. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to, “