The Kiss: A Memoir (11 page)

The noise of the rails alternately lulls me to sleep and rattles me awake. I don’t use a youth hostel unless I have to. I exchange only as much money as I need to pay for a shower in the station’s public bathhouse, a meal in the station’s cafe. The economy of this makes me feel safe how little I need, really, to sustain me and it’s a relief to be excused from the routine scramble of arrival, queuing up in the tourist information office, finding lodging, getting to it under my heavy pack, trudging wearily off toward sights and galleries. On the trains, I never spend the surcharge for a berth. I just throw the pack on the shelf overhead and curl into the seat by the window. On hot days I lift the bottom pane and let the wind blow in, fierce and dry, it whips tears from my eyes. At night, if we go through cities, the lit rooms of unknown families flash by, squares of yellow light containing little people gathered around a table. Sometimes I miscalculate. I misread the fine print of my Thomas Cook timetable digest, itself often incorrect, and the train I thought would continue terminates in a small town, or I settle into the wrong coach, and while the front end of the train goes on to my planned destination, I discover too late that I’ve been left behind in a car that has stopped moving. A few times I arrive somewhere too late to get lodgings and have to sleep in the station waiting room. Once, when a station closes at 2:00 A. M., I have to spend the rest of the night outside. In a dusty, cool plaza I’m the object of interest to local tramps. If this is dangerous, I don’t know it, or I don’t care. I posit lives for myself, other lives than the one to which I will return. Lives that begin when I don’t return. There are always those stories of young women, they just never come home. I talk to my father a few times. I call him collect from the stations, less often than I said I would. Each time when he answers, he is excited, then angry, and at last fretful. “Call sooner next time, ” he says.

“Don’t make me ., , wait so long. “Okay, ” I say, “I won’t. ” But I break my word. “Don’t let me be alone, ” he says. “Don’t leave me all alone with my love. ” Do I notice that his words express the history of my life with my mother, Don’t leave me alone with my love. Whether or not I take pause, at last I know how it feels to be on the other side of that plea.

I return to school, as I promised my grandparents I would. My senior year, I live off campus in a house I share with four other girls.

The September to June rental agreement stipulates that no more than four tenants may occupy the dwelling, legally, one of the five of us does not exist. The names on the lease do not include my own, and the house, vulnerable to surprise visits from the real estate agent, has only four bedrooms and four beds, none of which is mine. I sleep either on the couch or on the floor, and on a few chilly weekend mornings I have to slip out the back door in my nightgown and wait in the shrubs while the suspicious agent either inspects the house or shows it to prospective buyers. It’s a surpassingly pleasant and leafy neighborhood in which we live, the house itself an emblem of middle-American comfort and normalcy, and this is undoubtedly why I can’t take my … place in it.

My father withdraws his outsized Mont Blanc fountain pen from the pocket inside his jacket. It’s among the phallic possessions that he most esteems. He pushes our untouched plates of food aside and places one of his business cards on the table. He hands me the pen, its barrel still warm from the heat of his flesh. “Draw two intersecting circles, ” he says. “One to represent you and the other to represent me. The area of intersection will show how closely you feel we should live our lives.

The place we connect. The extent to which commitment joins us. ” He folds his arms. I take the pen. My picture looks like one of the eights I made as a child, before I could do it without lifting the pencil from the paper, the two circles overlap, but not by much. He nods, takes the pen.

His picture looks like one circle drawn twice, the lines almost superimposed. I look at the pictures and my heart pounds with a sudden wild insistence. What I said is true, then. I thought I was being dramatic, but he does want it all, the whole of my life. He wants to leave only the little soap-bubble skin of the circle for me. The scruff of my neck, perhaps, the callus on my heel. I’m afraid you may be frightened by this admission, one letter’s postscript reads, but I have ruined an entire box of envelopes substituting your address for mine and mine for yours. I’m not as frightened as I should be. I don’t see that the destruction of his internal boundaries will of necessity erode my own. Nor do I shudder, as I will years later, when I read missives addressed to Beatrice my father’s pet name for me, whom he beseeches to guide him on the journey down through the dark circles of his soul, just as Dante’s beloved in the Divine Comedy revealed to the poet what for so long had been hidden. Inside my father, his letters confess, are emptiness wastelands, and black holes that only my love can fill. For nearly for tyyears, he writes, I ve worked to create the man I ve become.

What or who lies beneath the surface of all my accomplishments I do not know. You are my only hope of discovering myself My eyes move over such words without understanding them. I don’t allow myself to hear my father confess that he lacks identity. He calls as many as three times a day.

“How am I? ” he says when he calls, and he says he says this because how he is depends utterly on how much I love him. Without me, there is no meaning, purpose, or pleasure in his life. As a child, did I frighten my mother the way my father frightens me? When I stood by her bed waiting for her to waketo give me to myself she was the same age that I am now.

So even as I take my father from her, I learn what it was to be her, to be so young and vulnerable, to have to protect herself from a ravenous love that she was afraid would consume her, steal her from herself. In the car, my father pleads and threatens. I’ve admitted that I still correspond with my old boyfriend, now two thousand miles away. The angrier my father gets, the louder he yells, the further I retreat into silence. It’s not a strategy but a reflex, something left over from my mother’s anger, the French drills. I hear his strident tones, and I fall into what seems like a stupor. Inside, I feel as if I’ve shrunk, my essence distilled into a safe, impermeable core far within my body, far below its surface. I form answers to his accusations but cannot move my lips to speak them. Mile markers flash by, in the car I’m propelled along the weary trajectory of both his anger and the road, no end in sight. “Is it possible that you don’t realize my devotion? You say I’m disrupting your studies, but don’t you see that you’ve wreaked havoc in my heart! Only you matter to me! ” Again and again, we return to the “expression of love. ” He must possess me physically, for only that will reassure him of my commitment to him. Nothing else will suffice. Nothing less. Does he mean that without such reassurance, he’ll stop loving me?

I don’t ask. The whole visit, it seems, is awash with tears, his and mine.

The exhaustion of withstanding his desire is not supportable. When I give up, it’s almost a relief, the way it must be for someone who, holding tight to a ledge, at last lets go. After the agony of resistance, when for so long it’s been clear that a fall is imminent, plummeting is a kind of fulfillment. I plunge without knowing how fast I fall or how far, how hard the bottom will be when I hit. Five, ten, fifteen years later, the only thing I can remember is my father’s undressing and my shock at discovering that he’s uncircumcised. Raised in a Jewish household, I’ve never before seen such a thing, I can’t help but find it alien, unclean. The sight of him naked, at that point I fall completely asleep.

I arrive at the state promised by the narcotic kiss in the airport.

In years to come, I won’t be able to remember even one instance of our lying together. I’ll have a composite, generic memory. I’ll know that he was always on top and that I always lay still, as still as if I had, in truth, fallen from a great height. I’ll remember such details as the color of the carpet in a particular motel room, or the kind of tree outside the window. That he always wore his socks and that I wore whatever I could. I’ll remember every tiny thing about him. I will be able to close my eyes and see the pattern of hair that grew on the backs of his hands, the mole on his cheek, the lines, each one of them, at the corners of his eyes. But I won’t be able to remember what it felt like.

No matter how hard I try, pushing myself to inhabit my past, I’ll recoil from what will always seem impossible. Asleep. There’s the cottony somnolence of my days. There’s the little trick of selective self-anesthesia that leaves me awake to certain things and dead to others. There are drugs and alcohol, and there is food, too much or too little, with which to bludgeon the senses.

Over time I make use of each of these, and perhaps others of which I am still not aware. Sleep in response to unbearable desire, I have learned this from my mother. My psychic sleep is often not distinguishable from real sleep. My father calls me on the phone. I answer, and after the first few minutes of conversation, I drop off. I don’t mean to, but still, it makes him wild with anger. What evasion could be more absolute? When I wake, often as much as an hour after he has hung up in frustration, the phone, still off the hook, is bleating in my ear. No strategy works to control this. I tell myself I’ll stand throughout the conversation. At the first prickle of fatigue I bite my fingertips or the skin on the backs of my hands. Black coffee, No-Doz, amphetamines, nothing can prevent this sleep. As if under an enchantment, I sink inevitably to the floor. My housemates walk over or around my body, itself curled around the receiver. If they need to use the phone, they take it from my hand. I sleep not because of the shock of my father’s lust. at least not shock in the sense of something sudden and surprising. I have known what he wants from the start. And yet I am shocked, as I have been from my first sight of him, when he turned from the drinking fountain, his mouth wet, dripping. So yes, I sleep because I’m shocked, and because I’m frightened. I want to avoid contemplating the enormity of what we’re doing an act that defines me, that explains who I am, because in it is all the hurt and anger and hunger of my past, and in it, too, is the future. It’s anger that frightens me most. I sleep to escape my rage.

Not at him, but at my mother. To avoid owning a fury so destructive that I would take from her what brief love she has known, because she has been so unwilling for so long to love me just a little. The other object of my anger is myself. The good girl who failed, the thin girl, the achiever, the grade earner, the quiet girl, the unhungry girl, the girl who will shape-shift and perform any self-alchemy to win her mother’s love. She failed, and I must destroy her. Obliterate this good daughter with one so bad that what she does is unspeakable. At the same time, I can, of course, make myself the sacrifice my father’s love demands. One single act to destroy my old master and to serve my new one. But I don’t want to contemplate this.

I prefer to sleep.

As if afraid that she might poison me, I pick at the food she cooks.

Whatever I swallow, I throw up. We have never been closer than we are now, my mother and I. Guilt makes me draw near to her, and I go home to visit whenever I can, days that teach me there is an almost sickening intimacy between the betrayer and the person betrayed. Through my father I have begun at last to penetrate my mother, to tear away the masks that divide us. And now, even as I draw closer to her to judge the level of her suspicions, she comes closer to me to monitor what she fears. In her house, my heart pounds, my hands shake. The smell of her perfume, the glint of sun on her hair, the way that, in her small kitchen, our bodies sometimes inadvertently touch, separated by no more than the fabric of two thin nightgowns, any of these is enough to make me feel faint. My mother and I are gentle, polite, and careful with each other, as careful as only enemies need be. We don’t speak about him, we watch each other across from the dining table. On one of my visits home, I get what I’ve waited for, her accusation. She takes me to her psychiatrist’s office, the little brown room where she talks about her mother. Though she doesn’t tell me the agenda of the session”just to talk”I must suspect what will unfold, because I wear something so uncharacteristic that it still fills me with wonder.

It’s a dress I bought and then hid in a closet at my grandparents’

without taking it out of the bag. So short I can’t bend over without my underpants showing, it’s made out of a pale purple stretch velour that hugs my body tightly.

For our appointment, I wear it with high heels. When my mother picks me up at my grandparents’, she says nothing, but her eyes widen, her cheeks look pink, as if slapped. It’s the first time she’s seen me in something that isn’t long and black and baggy.

Just walking into her doctor’s office, sitting on the coffee-colored couch, I sense my mother’s doom there in the dead brown color of the walls, in the way her doctor’s hand perspires, even in his skinny, dotted Swiss necktie. She’ll never escape her mother, she’ll never stop hearing the screams from behind the bedroom door. My grandmother has her in a death grip. Is this because my mother is not as ruthless as I am?

She gets to the point without preamble. “I think they’re having sex, “

she says. The doctor turns to me, his eyebrows raised, and I lie as I have never lied before or since. I’m a bad liar, generally, but on this afternoon, wearing what I’m wearing, I am brilliant. “It just looks bad, ” I tell him. “I know why she’s worried.

But … it’s just that… ” I falter. “See, I never knew my father.

I’m going through a stage, like all little girls, just later than most.

” I pause at exactly the right moments. My performance is so good that I’m frightened. Is my personality so unformed that putting on a dress is enough to change it? Or is this shameless, sexual, purple-clad girl someone I can’t imagine as a friend a part of me? “She’s right, ” I say, nodding. “I am in love with him, but it… I’m not.

.. I’d never… I wouldn’t do that. ” The doctor looks at me sitting before him in my vulgar dress, and he believes me. I know it, and so does my mother. He’s mine, not hers, and so I have what I wanted what I thought I wanted. She is alone. I’ve taken her husband and now her only ally, the one person with whom she can share her troubles. And I, I begin to know the misery of wounding the person I love most. Seeing her face as she watches me speak, watching the death of any hope that was there, not just my heart but my whole body throbs in sympathy. When we get home, I throw the dress out. I run down the driveway at my grandparents’ house and throw it in the garbage. Later, I go outside with scissors. I stand in the dark and I cut the dress up. Head bent over the garbage can, I expect to weep, but don’t. Instead, I find myself moaning, making a noise that, if I didn’t know it came from me if I were inside and heard it rising out of the night I’d think it was an animal, something dying in the road. Student Health offers ten free hours of therapy, and the psychologist to whom I’m assigned is young and earnest. His hair is cut very short as if to display his balding head as honestly as possible. His eyes crinkle in lines as evocative of tears as of laughter. “Well, ” he says, sometime during my second visit. He puts a box of tissues in my lap. “I understand that something is wrong.