The Kissing List (9 page)

“I know,” Vita says halfheartedly. Afterward she dresses like her normal self (in jeans and a zippered black hoodie), practices typing pages from Cotton Mather sermons, reads her novel, still sheathed in
Built to Last
, and naps.

That evening, it begins to rain. The street turns a darker shade of gray, and the sidewalks are umbrellaed over. It is five o’clock, that hour when people finish one thing and start another, not quite metamorphosing. More like changing outfits. Six o’clock will release another wave. Seven, yet another. And so on and so on throughout the night. Leo calls and offers her a job covering the secondary loan market. Ted calls and doesn’t quite ask her out.

“I got a job offer at Corporate Investor Publications.”

“No way!” Ted booms. “That’s great. Did you take it?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” he presses.

What will she do? If nothing changes, on Monday and Tuesday she’ll temp at Condé Nast, where everyone is scary thin, interesting looking though not terribly attractive, and they
want coffee all the time. At some companies, they have desks that are plainly meant for temps—they’re like Super 8 motels: just necessities and no indulgences—but at Condé Nast, hers will clearly belong to someone else. She’ll study a picture of two men, wondering which one of them works there. Hard to tell. They’re both young and impossibly hip, the way gay guys are. Their smiles are practiced, a little impish. This is something she needs to work on. In every picture, she looks a little different. On Wednesday, she’ll file. On Thursday and Friday, on the switchboard at Ralph Lauren’s corporate headquarters, she’ll find herself adopting the faux British accent that the other temps use: “Ralph Lauren, may I help you?”

“I don’t know,” she says, even though she does. Her conversion, mundane and not singular, is close at hand, and she wants to savor her last few days of freedom—if such a thing exists. Her individuality is just a fiction. Who said that? All her big ideas are already slipping away. A temp is just a worker with commitment issues. She holds her breath longer than usual.

“Ted?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you wanna go out for martinis?” She almost says Bombay martinis, but she’s pretty sure that’s not the proper terminology.

“To celebrate?” Ted says. “You bet.”

On the street, everyone is going somewhere, even if they don’t quite know where. That’s both the promise and the lie of the world. It would be easier if Vita didn’t understand this.

“To celebrate,” she says. “To celebrate.”

T
here is a spider who lives in a high corner of the big bay windows that look out on the garden. The garden is more like a nursery because all the plants are in pots, just in case
Carlos, the man who lovingly tends the garden, ever decides to move. He has lived in the apartment building for more than twenty years and looks like he would ride a motorcycle, except that his teeth hang by slender roots from his gums. I leave the spider and her web unmolested because of the fat black flies who whoosh through the bedroom window, the one I leave open for the cat, who is fond of jumping out, eating potted plants in the garden, leaping back inside, and regurgitating tangles of bright green grass on the wooden floor. When the flies get caught in the web, the spider is at the ready, climbing her jungle gym of delicate thread more expertly than the children at the elementary school beyond the garden on the other side of the high cyclone fence. The flies sound like faraway race cars, gunning their engines to hurl themselves down a straightaway or around a bend when they find themselves glued to the web with the spider poised to kill them.

My desk is pushed against the window where the spider lives. This is where I sit when I write multiple-choice questions for schoolchildren—not the schoolchildren across the garden, who, in fits of occasional anger or exuberance, throw one another’s winter jackets over the high fence, but schoolchildren who live in Ohio and West Virginia and whom I will never meet:

I feel sorry for the children who have to answer these questions. I am told that if they do not apply themselves to the study guides I write, they will fail important tests and get held back. Imagine flunking fifth grade because you can imagine a three-story-tall Arnold, a towering boy with delicate fingers whose hobbies include shipbuilding and farming worms. I picture him in the backyard—not the garden, but the backyard of my childhood—a half acre of land with a dead catalpa in the middle where we swung from an old tire until the day the branch came down with a crash. I see the building-tall boy stabbing electric stakes into the sod, making the ground extracharged so that the worms rise and thrust out their naked heads. I see Arnold studying the lawn through his superspy binoculars from a great height before carefully lowering himself and tweezering free the worms like the finest loose threads.

My brother, whose name also happens to be Arnold, was involved in worm cultivation, along with his best friend, Luke.
Bitten by the capitalist bug one summer, they harvested dozens and dozens of worms, storing them in an old wooden barrel in our garage. They had planned to sell them to the convenience store a half mile from our house, but the manager didn’t want them, and they quickly moved on to another moneymaking scheme and forgot all about the worms. August heat sucked the moisture from the dirt, and the worms hardened into squiggles as crunchy as chow mein noodles. Now Luke is a recovering drug addict, and Arnold is dead, a casualty of the war in Iraq. So eliminate “B.” Arnold will not come to my wedding, and I will not go to his. The best I can manage is test questions, the occasional imaginary Arnold doing something extraordinary. I know if Arnold took this test, he would pass with flying colors. Even though grammar was never his specialty, he would offer a quick solution to the chimpanzees slowly chattering for their bananas, not that chimpanzees are the real problem. Banana slugs are.

I
n addition to the spider, the cat, and the flies, there is a slug—not my boyfriend, the one I intend to marry despite what I imagine would be my parents’ threats to stand when the minister asks, “Is there anyone who opposes this marriage?” and speak their minds. (Using process of elimination [POE], you would be making a fairly educated guess if you struck my parents from the list of people who are likely to attend my wedding as well.) A slug/the slug/the slugs emerge from the crack beneath the backdoor. (It’s important to note that you can use the definite article with both the singular and plural forms of the noun; the indefinite article is a different story.) This experience has taught me that slugs like to eat cat food, but cats don’t like to eat slugs. When there is a slug spooned over the cat food like marshmallow fluff, my cat does nothing. She likes flies fine, but not slugs because, I suppose, there is no challenge in catching and eating them. Then the challenge is mine—to carry the dish of cat food to the garbage without tipping the slug onto my foot. The back stairs are narrow and rickety, and the thought of upsetting the slug food onto the ground and luring more slugs from the dusty corners of the basement is enough to upset me, though I do not generally upset easily. For instance, I would walk a mile sucking a lime if I could tempt Emil to marry me, but neither e-mail nor anagrams nor homophones seem to entice
my betrothed-to-be to appear with a jar of daffodils, to build me a three-story picket fence. I have chosen just the spot—on the desk next to my brother’s picture—to display the daffodils. I will assure Carlos that I did not steal them from his garden, though I cannot vouch for Emil, because I barely even know him. This is why my parents would oppose the marriage, and who can blame them? They are upset about Arnold, and my plans to plan a wedding before I have even secured a husband would salt their wounds. They are old-fashioned. They do not believe in green card marriages, open marriages, courthouse marriages, starter marriages, secret marriages, or marriages of convenience for insurance purposes. They do support gay marriage as long as the loving couple intend to adopt or buy sperm and a baster and get down to business.

I made that last part up. My parents, good liberals, support gay marriages with or without children. When my brother, Arnold, announced his intention to join the Marines, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday and a year before we declared war on Iraq, they begged him to reconsider, and then when they saw how determined he was, they begged him to go back to school and earn the last three credits he needed to graduate so he would have the option of enrolling in officers’ school instead of going straight into the infantry. That’s not a sentence a student in Ohio or West Virginia should read, not because I’m ashamed of what my parents wanted for Arnold or what Arnold said he believed in, but because it’s a run-on.

The only grammar the cat knows is the sound of a key in
the front lock, the caw of the backyard blue jay, the mechanical pop of a fresh can of Fancy Feast being opened. The blue jay sometimes alights on Carlos’s shoulder while he waters or weeds the garden, its animal intuition keen to the fact that Carlos is a kind man with no interest in raiding its nest. The same can’t be said for the cat, who would present herself with a hero’s medal for massacring a baby bird. Arnold knew his nouns and verbs, his adjectives and adverbs. He knew, for instance, that cats do not purr brave, but that brave cats purr. He knew he could run faster and do more pull-ups and sit-ups than most twenty-one-year-olds. He knew the difference between comparatives and superlatives, knew that being
better than most
was nearly as good as being
the best
. I’m not sure whether he had considered the grammar of movement to contact or maneuver under fire.
He maneuvered under fire better than 95 percent of the other Marines
. But what about that other 5 percent? And the peculiar nature of the word
forever
?

If I were a student, I would lose my faith in formal education when I got to that one, and if I were brave or rebellious or overbursting with life, I would just forget about the test and make an interesting pattern with the rest of the answer bubbles. Art is as good an answer as any. As for the spider, her life span is probably shorter than a human’s, but I can’t be sure. Cats may linger until their early twenties, and if you’re lucky enough to own a parrot, you’ll have a lifelong companion. For a period of time, the spider in my window and my brother were both alive. Then I went to Boise. My parents and I had to go through Arnold’s things, his LEGOs and Star Wars figures, his mechanical bank that sorted coins by weight and from which I stole quarters whenever I was short on money, his track ribbons and high school dance pictures—there he is wearing enormous glasses, there he is with a powder blue boutonniere, his arms wrapped around a girl wearing equally huge eyeglasses and a carnation pink corsage that matches her dress …