The Kissing List (12 page)

It’s silent—just for a split second—but this cook is very kissable. If I asked something like that, they’d have me immediately trussed and ready to hold over the hot flames of their sarcasm.

“It’s just a dictionary,” I tell Hayley, surprising myself and probably Peter. “
OED—Oxford English Dictionary
. It’s like a history of language.”

“Sylvia went to Oxford,” Alex says.

“Sylvie’s very smart,” Peter adds.

“Fuck off,” I tell them.

“Oh,” Hayley says. She’s quiet for a moment.

“Where’s the wand?” I say. “You’ve got to find out how Alex woke.”

“Here.” She taps him on one shoulder, twice on the head, then on the other shoulder.

“Astonished,” Alex says.

Hayley narrows her martini olive–colored eyes. “You woke surprised?”

“I dreamt my arm was amputated,” Alex explains.

“How?” Peter asks.

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you get it stuck in a thresher?” I say.

“There’s our farm girl.” Peter smiles at me.

“You grew up on a farm?” Hayley asks.

“Sort of,” I answer, “an orchard near a small town called La Grande, Oregon.”

“Cool,” Hayley says.

“The dream wasn’t about me losing the arm,” Alex says. “In the dream, I’d already lost it, but I thought it was there.”

“Of course, because it was.” Peter hates talking about dreams. He thinks two people have been together too long when they start being fascinated by each other’s dreams.

Alex leans back and tilts his chair onto two legs, and Hayley stands behind and kneads his shoulders.

“You had a phantom limb,” I say.

“You’re tense,” Hayley observes.

“I was at a party on someone’s terrace,” Alex continues.

“Like your parents’?” Peter asks.

“Maybe. I remember looking down on the park and thinking how wild it was, how with the trees hiding everything you can imagine being alone.”

“Your parents have a terrace that overlooks the park?” Hayley asks.

“My parents …,” Alex starts.

“His parents …,” Peter says.

“Eat high on the food chain,” Alex finishes and laughs.

On the table are salt and pepper shakers that look like small dachshunds. The one time I met Alex’s mother, she talked to her dogs more than she talked to me.

“Geoff’s parents are super rich, too,” Hayley says, peering into the refrigerator. “His sister’s spending three hundred dollars a plate for her wedding. The only place they registered was Tiffany’s.”

Outside it’s sunny, but an irregularly shaped shadow is
drifting across the back lawn. Peter’s face looks like someone has pulled a tinted transparency over it, like a shade dimming a window.

“Geoff’s parents have money?” Alex asks.

Knowing Peter and Alex, they are probably thinking that Alex’s odds with Hayley aren’t looking so good anymore, even though he’s a social worker, which gives him the do-gooder-with-money angle. But in men’s fantasies of women’s romantic interests, the artist with coin is practically at the top of the pyramid, alongside the rich-as-shit cowboy. What they don’t know is cowboys don’t exist, not in the way that easterners imagine western men. La Grande was filled with guys who worked as hired hands on big ranches, and they all wore baseball caps and tried to put away enough money so that they could move into town and start taking classes at Eastern Oregon State College. And the ranch owners, the ones with the real money, were more businessmen and politicians than anything else.

“They’re loaded,” Hayley says. “But Geoff just wants to be an artist. Having money’s such a burden. I’m glad my family’s normal. I won’t have to worry about some big wedding.”

Alex looks stricken. “Are you planning on getting married soon?”

Hayley blushes. “No, I mean, whenever. Marriage is totally old-fashioned.”

“I’ll second that,” I say.

“I’m starved,” Peter says, standing up.

The topic of marriage makes all of us nervous. This summer, Peter, Alex, and I are going to five weddings of friends
from college. To say you don’t want to get married makes you wonder what you’re doing sleeping in the same person’s bed several times a week, but to say you do brings waves of despair.

Hayley moves to the stove. “I’m not exactly sure how I’m supposed to make a pancake look confounded,” she says, scooping blueberries out of a bowl and dropping them into the sizzling skillet of pancake batter. “Or bewildered, for that matter.”

“You’re doing great,” Alex says, standing next to her.

When Hayley hands me my plate, a smiling pancake stares up at me. “This isn’t resolute,” I complain, which is how I woke.

“You’re always smiling,” Hayley answers. “So even if you are feeling resolute, or whatever, you still look happy to me.”

T
he tennis court is hot. Hayley doesn’t wear her tennis dress. Instead she has on a faded pair of surfing shorts, a turquoise blue tank top, and Converse low-tops, probably with black soles. As usual, Peter and Alex are dressed in cutoffs and bleach-stained T-shirts with stupid jokes. We’ve donned the baseball hats with mosquito netting—this time to keep blackflies and horseflies from landing on our faces.

Alex, Peter, and I didn’t actually know one another until our final year of college: Peter started a year ahead of us, but took time out to hike the Appalachian Trail and “get straight with God,” even though he didn’t believe in God then, and still doesn’t. Alex hung out with the crowd of people who had gone to high schools whose formal names started with definite pronouns, instead of no pronouns at all. They read primary sources in their high school history classes, and this made them
intellectuals from the get-go. The rest of us, like me, had our epiphanic moments the first time we spoke the word
epiphany
in class instead of church.

“Should we play, or just play around?” Alex asks.

“Remember, I’ve only played three times,” Hayley chimes in.

“Hit,” Peter answers.

Peter and I pair up, hitting nice, even strokes to Hayley and Alex. The court is turf, not clay, so the ball moves slowly. This gives me enough time to remember to roll to the balls of my feet and crank back my racket.

“Nice,” Peter says to me.

I’m no tennis player—just high school PE and games with friends. The first time Peter and I played tennis, he hit the ball to me with such perfection that I was able to return it hard and straight. Each time my racket kissed the ball, it made a satisfying sound, like a bottle of champagne being uncorked. Peter confessed he wanted me afterward, right there on the public tennis court underneath the Williamsburg Bridge.

The order switches. Peter hits to Hayley. “Watch the backspin,” he says, even before his ball lands. “Move up.”

Hayley swings but misses it completely, which I’ve done numerous times before. She doesn’t say a word.

“Nice try,” Alex says.

“Those are tricky,” Peter says.

When Hayley tries to restart the rallying, she drops the ball, swings, and misses completely.

“Fuck,” she says, throwing her racket on the ground and shuffling toward the gate.

“Don’t worry,” Alex calls. “It’s a damn frustrating game.”

“And it’s hot,” Peter says. “I’m on my edge.”

They both head toward her. I spin my racket in my hand, twisting it, letting it go, then catching it by the grip. It’s the sort of obsessive thing I did a lot when I was a kid. Like making self-improvement lists or trying to jump rope for an hour straight or memorizing poems. I throw the racket into the air, like a baton, and it twists several times. I miss, and it hits the turf with a thud, like the sound of a small animal meeting the tires of a car. Neither Peter nor Alex looks back at me.

H
ayley vetoes croquet. In a rare show of controlling his competitive urges, Peter says he doesn’t want to play cards—“not on a day as beautiful as this one.” Because of the mosquitoes, spending the day in a hammock with a book is out of the question. Finally we agree on a swim in a small lake on the mainland. The road is narrow and twisty, like a ball of unraveled yarn. Alex takes the turns fast. Out the window, I see the place that Alex pointed out the last time we were here where a freak tornado touched down years ago and cleared a square mile of timber in less than thirty seconds.

“How fast can this do a hundred?” Hayley asks suddenly, leaning forward in the gap between the front seats, one elbow on Peter’s headrest, the other on Alex’s, her chin on her forearms.

“The Wagoneer?” Alex says. “No inkling.”

“Could it even do a hundred?” Peter says.

“Oh, sure, it would do a hundred,” Hayley says. “People race cars like this out at the track where Geoff drives, and they do a hundred, easy, without souped-up motors. I bet this could do it in ten seconds or so.”

“Starting from a standstill,” Alex asks. “Is that what you mean?”

“How fast it can accelerate?” Peter echoes.

“Yep,” Hayley answers. “From zero to a hundred.”

“Should we try it here?” Alex asks. “See how fast we can make this bad boy go? There’s a straight stretch in a couple of miles.”

Peter laughs. “This bad beast.”

I try to catch Peter’s eye in the rearview mirror, but Hayley’s head is in the way. “Sounds stupid and dangerous.”

“Geoff and I do it all the time,” Hayley answers. “If we come on another car, we’ll just slow down and try again.”

With this, she’s thrown down the gauntlet. There’s no way Alex and Peter will miss the chance to prove they’re just as cool as Geoff.

“I’m getting out,” I announce. “Less weight,” I add, an afterthought. I’m hoping Peter will offer to wait with me.
I’ll keep Sylvie company. I’ll let you two hotshots eat up the road
. But he doesn’t, of course.

“Are you sure?” Peter asks, before they let me off on a gravel shoulder.

“Oh sure, I’m sure. Have a great time.”

Peter certainly hears the fake cheerfulness in my voice, so
forced I almost choke on it. After the three of them peel out, I stand there, the tanginess of the evergreen trees that line the road mixing with the dullness of the dirt that I’m mindlessly kicking up with my toe. I’m mad at myself for not playing, even though it’s a stupid game, stupid like so many games that people play.

I went to college with two body-size duffel bags and my bicycle taken apart and packed in a box. At the airport, ninety minutes away, I’d had to reassemble my bike curbside and ride Peter Pan for the last leg of the journey. The small New England town that was to be my home welcomed me with a downpour. I locked my bags to a signpost and took off on my bike, trying to figure out where I was supposed to go. All my neatly folded clothes, clothes my mother doubted would be in fashion “back East,” were wet by the time I returned to ferry them to my new dorm room. At first, everyone thought my boots and Lees were quaint. “You grew up on an orchard?” boys would ask at parties, eyeing my leather belt. “Yep,” I’d chirp and then launch into an explanation until it dawned on me that they weren’t really interested in growing fruit trees. I saved the money I earned from working in the cafeteria and bought a pullover fleece and Doc Martens. I earned an A in my first lit course and spent my free time in my professors’ office hours so that by the time I graduated, no one could see how ill at ease I sometimes felt. I could handle a hard frost that hits before the peach trees have shed their blossoms, but the rules that everyone else seemed to have effortlessly mastered—eating rice with chopsticks, or networking, or lining up the perfect internship—still seemed
cryptic. Through sheer effort, I tried to hide my sense of being two moves behind. Even now, even after succeeding by the most conventional measures, this feeling lingers.

I hear the sound of the car before I see the Wagoneer. Hayley’s at the wheel with Alex next to her. Peter’s in the backseat. They’re sitting up very straight and looking ahead. It’s impossible to judge how fast they’re going. As they come closer, they seem to go faster until they flash by—a streak of forest green. Then, as my perspective changes, the car seems to slow down. I hope Hayley’s wrong about a hundred without a souped-up motor.

Before I know it, they’re back, the car spraying gravel on the shoulder.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

Hayley leans across the seat. Her chest is touching Alex’s shoulder, and she’s grinning. The dimple in her left cheek is as round and perfect as a small pie cherry. “Twelve-point-three seconds,” she answers. “A little slow, but not too bad. This thing probably just needs a tune-up and a couple quarts of high-performance oil.”

“It was great,” Alex says, grinning. “I think I’ve gone a hundred before, but never like that.” He gives Hayley a playful punch on the shoulder. “You’ve whetted my appetite for speed.”

“Fantastic,” Hayley says to him. “You’ll see. Going really fast gives you such a rush, about ten times more intense than this.”

Peter rolls down his window: “The rush I had was already pretty intense.”

“Are we going to the lake now?” I ask.

“Not yet,” Hayley says. “There’s another thing we want to do. It’s really cool. It’s kind of like a game of trust. Two people sit in the driver’s seat—one person between the other person’s legs. One person drives while the other directs.”

“I don’t get it,” I say.

“The person who’s driving can’t see,” Hayley explains. “Either the driver is blindfolded, or the other person covers the driver’s eyes.”

“What?” I ask.

“The other person, the person sitting behind the driver—Geoff and I call him the director—gives the blind driver directions,” Hayley explains. “You know, like a little to the left, sharp turn to the right, slower, faster.”

“That’s crazy,” I say.

“It sounds great,” Alex says.

“I bet Sylvie doesn’t want to do it,” Peter says. “It’s not her thing.”

I glare at him: “You’re right.”

“Luckily that doesn’t mean it’s not my thing,” Peter says. “Should we play rock, scissors, paper to see who goes first?”

“It’s my idea,” Hayley says, “so I get to drive. It’s what gives me the biggest rush.”

Alex groans when his scissors are crushed by Peter’s rock. Peter’s lame for letting his competitiveness get the best of him, for not giving Alex first dibs.