Kissing in America (7 page)

        
and cheap wine and shared familial genocide.

        
No one actually discussed the shared familial genocide.

        
It was just there, I guess, like the wine

        
and the desperation. My mother never talks about her family's

        
history. Her mother escaped Poland during the Holocaust.

        
But she never spoke of it either.

        
Not once. I called my grandmother

        
Bubbe 409 because she had a bottle of Formula 409

        
permanently attached to her hand.

        
She died when I was eight.

        
My mom's dad died when she was a teenager.

        
Larry's father survived Dachau.

        
My dad's parents survived
the war in London. They died before I was born.

        
My father's grave is in Westchester but we never go see him there.

A bad poem. It wasn't even a poem really, just a bunch of sad and depressing lines chopped up into verses. I wondered why I'd even wanted my mom to come today. She'd probably keel over when she read it. I'd published private details about my dad and generations of our family. She'd murder me. What had I been thinking? Well, I knew what I'd been thinking: if she read the poem, maybe she'd be forced to talk about him again.

“I know it sucks,” I said. “I wrote it on the back of a Fresh Direct receipt.”

“It sucks beautifully,” he said.

The air felt chilly now. He took a fleece pullover out of his backpack and offered it to me. I pulled the soft navy sleeves over my arms.

We were quiet. I kept thinking: as long as I'm with him, everything will be okay. I remembered catching my parents kissing on the bench in the park, how happy they were back then, a happiness I'd always wanted and that I finally felt now, for the first time.

The trees swayed. There was a gentle sound, a bird, maybe an owl. We were in an owl-filled castle, a mansion that had been used for waltzes and parties a hundred years ago. Up there on that roof, it suddenly seemed that anything was possible. The world was literally at our feet. The sky turned the strange orangey-gray color it often was on city nights. I used to hate that color and wish for a deep velvet or indigo sky, a romance-novel sky. Now I loved this sky.

He sat on top of the stone table and looked toward the park. He knit his hands together in a way I'd never seen him do before—his fingers touching each other, then moving apart.

“What is it?” I asked.

“We didn't find a new apartment,” he said.

“Oh no. How long will you keep looking?”

He shook his head. “We're not looking anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

He gazed at me again, that intense stare. “We're getting evicted from our old one. I didn't think our landlord would actually go through with it, but he is. We've looked for a new place nonstop, but there's nothing we can afford. My mom
finally decided to move in with her best friend, into her one-bedroom apartment. She doesn't have another choice. She wants me to move in with them too. I can't. It's crazy. That's why I was out of school this week. We're trying to figure all this out.”

He rubbed his forehead. “My mom's declared bankruptcy on the bakery. We're getting evicted from there, too. I'm not moving into her friend's place.” He shook his head.

“Then where will you go?”

“Only place I can go. My dad's.”

I froze. “What?”

“I'm moving in with him,” he said quietly.

“I thought he lives in California?”

He nodded and stared out toward the park. “I'm taking a red-eye tomorrow night. I'm sorry. I didn't know how to tell you.” His voice was soft.

He told me his father's wedding was this Sunday—the wedding I'd seen the invitation for, but I hadn't looked at the date. Mrs. Jerkface. He was supposed to go for two nights and come right back, but now he was going to stay and live with his dad until his freshman year started.

I couldn't look at his face. Everything I'd imagined us doing this summer—taking the poetry class, going to the Strand, reading books in cafés, writing—evaporated.

“It's not such a big deal. I'll be back soon to see my mom,” he said.

“Really?”

“Of course.”

My eyes focused on a light blinking in the park. I thought of cholera and typhus and tornadoes.
It's not such a big deal.
It could be worse. Annie and I always said
Could be worse
whenever we didn't do as well on a test or a paper as we'd hoped, or didn't win an award we thought we might get—it was a joke between us, but there was something real to it, too. Whenever I said
could be worse
, I thought of my dad. It had been worse. The worst had happened. Nothing else could be that bad again.

Will wasn't dead. He was just going to California. It would be okay. He'd be back soon.

He touched my wrist. Slowly, his fingers stroked my arm, my elbow, my collarbone, my neck. My skin felt like it could slip off my body.

He kissed me. His hand crept up my back, his fingers wound through my hair, my mind danced and catapulted and shouted HE'S KISSING ME and MORE. My brain no longer felt connected to the rest of me. I looked at him but felt almost afraid to look at him—his hair, so thick and dark as chocolate, the pale scar on his chin. I was scared to look in his eyes, that he might see what I was feeling. That he might see the love that had been there all along, waiting so many months for this.

Every bad feeling I'd ever had, the stomach bugs, the
griefy grief, disappeared. Each kiss removed the bad things from the past—erased them, brushed them away.

We spent the night in the roof garden. Later, when Annie asked me, I said nothing happened. I meant no clothes had come off. But everything had happened. Everything had changed.

A
fter the sun came up, he drove me home. He parked two blocks away from my building; I didn't want to take any chance that my mom might see us. I'd texted her last night before my ten-o'clock curfew and told her I was spending the night at Annie's.

“When will you be back?” I tried to sound normal, my voice even, casual.

He smiled. “Soon.” He said it factually, without a doubt.

Soon
.

“When?”

“I'll be back in New York in December.”

December wasn't soon. It seemed five thousand years away. There was no way I could wait till December.

He saw the look on my face and said, “Come see me in California.” He said it so matter-of-factly, as if I could pop out there in a second, any time I wanted.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

At that moment, even though we only had a few more minutes together, his leaving didn't seem real. Our night together,
our kiss on 96th Street, our whole friendship, had lasted a million years. Of course we'd see each other in California. Soon. We had to. Because this was so rare and strange and happy, there was no way it could end when we said good-bye.

We kissed again and my mind blurred, and I thought how until now I'd never known what it was like to be kissed. Spell-casting kisses, kisses that take off layers of your soul, that split you open.

There's no way you can be kissed like that and not have it change you.

It was like his kiss took a part of me into him, and I had to go find him to get that part back.

Or to let him keep it, and to give him more.

I wished that grief group had been led by Rosamunde Saunders. She would've told the truth. She would've told me:
What you need to do, Eva, is find someone to love you. Not a parent—that's not replaceable. We know that. Nothing you can do about that. What you need is one goddamn romantic dude who will love you like you've never been loved before. When you've found that person, someone who understands your secrets and sadness, don't let him slip away.

Go get him.

if i were a poet

i'd kidnap you

—nikki giovanni

W
ill sent letters. Real letters, just like Sir Richard, Lord Ellis, and Gurlag did (though Gurlag's were written on birch bark in ink brewed from blackberries).

We'd only spoken once since he left two and a half weeks ago—he'd called on his ancient phone and we got cut off when his minutes ran out, and he hadn't called again since. He'd given me the number to his father's landline, but I'd called it once and a woman said, “Jim Freeman's line, how may I help you?” and I'd been so nervous, I hung up.

I remembered how he'd told me that Gia complained about his phone not being charged or prepaid. “I hate being interrupted. I don't always want people to find me.” He'd said the words
find me
as if they were a punishment.

“If I didn't have a cell phone, my mom would probably implant one in my head,” I'd told him.

In some ways, letters were even better, though. I sent him the reading list for the Poetry Society class we'd planned to take together, and he'd look up the writers' work online and
copy out a poem he liked, sometimes by hand and sometimes on his typewriter. So far he'd sent three letters with poems: Yehuda Amichai's “A Letter,” Nikki Giovanni's “Kidnap Poem,” and Marie Howe's “What the Living Do.” Today I'd received this:

Hi from the land of sunshine and plastic surgery. The wedding gifts for my dad and his wife (I can't say stepmother—it sounds like she'd be ordering me to sweep the floor) keep coming. You wouldn't believe what rich people buy. Someone sent a “gardening kit”—three bags of soil, compost, and fertilizer. No joke. They sent fertilizer. I couldn't have come up with a better gift myself.

I miss New York. Miss you.

I felt the paper, soft as cloth, and could almost smell soap and sugar. The thought of him hovered behind everything now, like a shadow.

I hadn't had a stomach bug day since our night on the roof. I wrote back to him:

I'm coming to see you. I'm not sure when I'll get there yet—still working out the plan—but hopefully it'll be really soon.

I clipped out the latest newspaper article about the wreckage. There was little progress. We'd been waiting for the specialized recovery boats to reach the site, and they'd finally arrived, but the robotic submarine they used to travel to the wreckage took twelve to sixteen hours from the surface, and they'd been delayed by bad weather and storms. More waiting. I wrote:

You were right—you never stop missing them.

I always debated every word, writing and rewriting it.

“You should send some of your own poems back to him,” Annie suggested.

“I haven't been writing any poems,” I said. I hadn't had the urge to stand at the kitchen counter and scrawl on another Fresh Direct receipt. It was easier to pack those feelings away and read romances instead. After that night with Will, when I showed Annie the article about the plane crash being found, she'd said exactly what I wanted to hear. “‘A happy discovery,'” she quoted when she finished reading the newspaper report. “
Happy
. It's nice how people always know the right thing to say.”

I'd laughed.

“The NTSB should send you a giant balloon that says
Happy Discovery!
”

One of the reasons Annie is my best friend is because she understands how funny and absurd all this is. My mom of course didn't find the whole thing funny at all. When I got home from seeing Will, I'd asked her if she'd seen the news. Her lips were thin and tight. “Yes,” she said in the high-pitched voice she used when she wanted to pretend something wasn't happening, and then changed the subject. Afterward, she went to her office. On a Saturday.

Now, after we finished our summer classes in the morning, Annie and I worked at her parents' laundromat all afternoon; her mom paid us to do the wash-and-fold for the drop-off service. Outside, a heat wave had struck the city, and even the blacktop seemed to melt. Inside the laundromat, the gas dryers made it even hotter.

I glanced at the row of framed academic prize certificates Annie's mom displayed behind the cash register—Annie's sisters, Jenny and Lala, called it the Annie Shrine, with a roll of their eyes. Jenny and Lala were always calling Annie “14C.” (14C was the apartment where their neighbor, a retired, never-married scientist, lived alone with her six cats. She rarely appeared except to welcome delivery boys carrying groceries and kitty litter. Nobody knew she'd died until the hallway began to smell and Animal Control came and took away the cats.)

Jenny and Lala worked weekend shifts at the laundromat, which they hated, and weekday shifts at American Eagle in
Queens Center mall, which they loved. They were happy to let Annie shoulder all their parents' hopes.

Annie never complained about the pressure from her parents, mostly because academics came naturally to her, and she was the most ambitious person I knew. She wanted to do big things. It rubbed off on me—I wanted big things, too. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life exactly, but I definitely didn't want to stay in Queens forever, watching the Empire State Building looming over 43rd Avenue in the distance, as if it were taunting us.

Annie tossed a bag of men's clothes into a washing machine and tugged at her latex gloves. That day, a woman in her seventies had dropped off a giant bag of G-strings; a tall guy handed over a sack of lace lingerie, size 44W, and he had no wife or girlfriend that we ever saw; and when a woman with a baby came through the door, we wanted to hide. I had no idea what a little baby could do to clothing. It was terrifying.

If I did write Will a poem, it would sound like this:

        
Seeing you is the only thing

        
keeping me going while washing and folding

        
old G-strings

        
man undies

        
and stinky onesies

        
with rubber gloves on

        
and if it wasn't for you

        
I'd read the newspaper articles

        
about my dad

        
over and over and over

        
feeling worse

        
and worse

        
but I don't

        
because I think of you.

I couldn't send that. It was bad, it was too much, and I wasn't that brave or that crazy.

We finished the folding while the dryers thumped and the washers whirred, and then we took a break. Annie studied, poring over her
Animal Behavior: Mechanisms, Ecology, Evolution
textbook, and I did homework and Googled. Every day since Will left I searched:

            
free bus New York to California

            
free train cross-country

            
must get to LA broke

I had no idea how I was going to get to California. I couldn't fly—just the thought of getting on a plane almost gave me another panic attack. My mom had been afraid of flying even before my dad died, and she hated to leave New York. When he was alive, we never even visited our cousins in London because she couldn't stand the idea of getting on
a plane; my dad visited them alone on business trips. “New York has everything,” my mom always said. “Why would you need to leave?” I'd only left New York the handful of times my parents took me along to visit their friends in New Jersey and Connecticut. I didn't think it even counted as travel if you'd never left the tristate area.

I kept Googling, and I fantasized about finding a bag of money on the street. I saved all the money I made, but it would still take me the entire summer to save enough for the bus fare—it was cheaper than the train—and food along the way. By then it would be time to go back to school.

I couldn't ask my mom for the money. Her elbows tensed whenever a bill arrived, and she often said how much she hoped that I could go to the Honors College at Queens College, where she taught, for free. Though even if we did have the money, she'd never let me go see Will. How could I even ask her?
Oh, by the way, I fell in love with this guy, so I'm going to travel to LA by myself, don't you love that idea ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha?

I had to find a way to get there. I kept thinking that if I could find a last-minute internship out there, or some reason that my mom would approve of, then I wouldn't even have to mention Will to her.

There had to be a way. Buried in the internet, there had to be something.

I kept Googling.

            
need job internship student free travel LA no flying desperate now PLEASE

There were contests sponsored by travel agencies (but you had to be eighteen to enter), sketchy-sounding real estate brokers, and some particularly skeezy-looking sites that sounded like they were abducting girls into slavery.

My legs stuck to my plastic chair as I waded through www.be-a-courier.com, www.freestudenttravel.com, and sites casting for reality TV.

            
Are YOU a Female Athlete Who Has Overcome a Devastating Illness?

            
Are YOU a Promzilla?

            
Do YOU Own Lots of Cats and Need a Boyfriend?

And then I read this:

            
Are YOU the Smartest Girl in America?

            
Are you taking college-level courses as a high school sophomore? Do you read math books for fun? Do you feel like your academic achievements are worlds ahead? How would you like to earn a full college scholarship worth $200,000? Reel Life, Real Teenz Productions is looking for the smartest teens across the country for a new game show that will crown the Smartest Girl in America this summer.

I clicked links; it sounded like an ordinary quiz show taped in Burbank, except it featured teen girls vying for scholarships. The show would be broadcast on a new cable network; the scholarships were funded by various corporations and a nonprofit called Girls Strive (their mission statement: “Fostering Female Academic Achievement.”) Casting calls were taking place right now in cities all over the country, including New York.

I answered the Sample Test Questions. “What are the names of the Brontë sisters?” Easy: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (I read
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
in English class, and they were basically romances). But “What scientist and peace activist discovered the concepts of orbital hybridization and electronegativity?” “Which Nobel prize winner is also the mother of another Nobel prize winner?” and “One hundred people are in a room. How many handshakes can take place between any two people?” I had no idea.

I touched Annie's elbow and asked her the handshake question.

She thought for five seconds. “Four thousand nine hundred and fifty,” she said.

“What scientist and peace activist discovered the concepts of orbital hybridization and electronegativity?”

“Linus Pauling.” She answered instantly, with a yawn.

“Which Nobel prize winner is also the mother of another Nobel prize winner?”

She glanced at me as if I was a bit dim. “Marie Curie and
her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie. Marie Curie is the only woman to have won the Nobel twice, and the first person to win in two different fields. Her daughter won for chemistry in 1935 for discovering artificial radioactivity.”

I wasn't the smartest girl in America. But Annie was.