The Kiss: A Memoir (14 page)

This seemingly anachronistic element of my program of recovery, its evocation of a tubercular, Dickensian slum, strikes me as appropriately punitive, especially at the hands of my father’s wife. Like a small child, my fantasies during the procedure are those of my own funeral, at which my mother and my father weep inconsolably. My mother has fallen ill, as well. But her treatments are state-of-the-art, so modern they seem futuristic. One day, while reading the newspaper, her fingers splayed thoughtlessly on her chest as she leans over the arts page spread on the breakfast table, my mother discovers a lump in her left breast, a little one, quite palpable and hard. It’s excised and found to be malignant, and a margin of tissue surrounding it is taken as well, all in all, about an egg-sized subtraction. She doesn’t tell me until it’s done, and by the time I fly from my father’s to see her, she’s back in the hospital undergoing postoperative therapy. She opens her gown to show me her breast, and the position of her hands around the sutured rent in her flesh reminds me of the familiar image of Christ displaying His bleeding heart. The freshly livid scar is made incidental by the radium implants that are supposed to wipe out stray cancer cells.

“Sputniks” are what we call the implants, because they look like space probes. Two long stainless-steel skewers disappear into the white skin around her nipple, their ends bearing tiny, complex apparatuses.

Every one is afraid to touch the sputniks, not just my mother and I, but also the hospital personnel. A securely lidded can outside her room’s private bathroom is marked HAZARDOUS WASTE. DEPARTMENT OF NUCLEAR

MEDICINE, and the younger nurses won t come in because they’re afraid that radioactive contaminants will leak out of my mother and cost them their fertility. They make a wide swath around the door to her room.

“Does it hurt? ” I ask.

“Not really, ” she says, her head cocked quizzically on one side, her eyes on mine as if to ask how much her pain might concern me. I cannot account for the days, nor the weeks, nor the months. They are all the same and all of them lost. Not forgotten, because they were never lived.

I read many books, walk many blocks, write a few stories, and then rewrite them. Every day is a drowning. Except for brief spasms of weeping that leave my face as wet as if I actually have, for a moment, broken the surface of some frigid dark lake, I feel nothing. My self-anesthesia may be involuntary, but it is not easy or idle. For the first time in my life I slide into serious bulimia, the business of consuming and rejecting food useful for the hours it wastes.

I never understand it for what it is, a painful parody of hunger and the satisfaction of hunger with something that demands my being sick, a secret ritual of appetite and addiction. I never taste what I eat.

Sometimes I don’t even know what it is until I’ve thrown it up. I consider going to the bishop, but I’m afraid of losing my father his job. Haven’t I wronged his family enough? It’s not his wife that I worry about. After all, she knows that it happens, she lets him do it.

All she asks, my father tells me, is that he be considerate enough to spare her any evidence of his affair with his daughter. She and I deserve each other, both of us too weak to deny my father his impossible demands. But what of their children? Their eldest daughter is a girl I’ve come to love, and who seems genuinely to love me, even though my arrival has cost her so much. Deposed as oldest child and favorite daughter, she starts spending more and more time at her school’s gymnasium. She outweighs me and she has big muscles. “I could beat you up, ” she says, flexing her biceps under my nose so that I can admire them. “I could really clean your clock. “

“Definitely, ” I agree. I wish she would black my eyes and bloody my nose, but what I get instead is a sweet peal of laughter, bravado, the inevitable kiss. Does she know why it is that I cry when she embraces me? How I wish that I were her, sinned against, not sinning? Both jealous and appalled, she does not name but recognizes my plight.

Years younger than I, she holds me in her arms. Perhaps she thinks I’ve saved her from my fate. When my half sister and I meet again, it’s in another city, miles away, years later. She sends letter after letter to my publisher until at last I reply. There is a debt I owe her, one I can’t repay, but I know it would be unkind and cowardly to refuse to see her. According to plans made awkwardly over the phone, we meet in the train station of a city between our homes and go from there to a restaurant in a nearby mall. We have barely two hours to catch up on a decade. “I’m sorry, ” I say. It’s something I’ve never said in person.

“It’s okay, ” she says. “Me too. “

She’s pregnant by her second husband, and I bring her a bag of maternity clothes I no longer need. She tells me that she fled her parents’ home at eighteen, the age at which she always promised that she’d go. Her first husband was a soldier trained in hand-to hand combat, who used his special skills on her. To escape him, she returned briefly to our father’s house with her cat, the pet with which she slept when she managed to lock her husband out of the bedroom. By this time my father had left the church, he occupied part of his time with the breeding of attack dogs. The dogs killed his daughter’s cat. “The poor little thing went over the fence into their pen and they just ripped her up, ” my half sister says, dry-eyed, smiling her wry smile. “Oh God, ” I say. But I don’t say more. The irony is not acknowledged, if irony is what it is.

The restaurant is a franchise that exists in every mall, in every city.

Its windows look out onto the inside, a tiled floor, a planter and a fountain surrounded by benches on which people loll under skylights.

Across the way is a Sunglass Hut, a Foot Locker, a Hallmark card shopplaces so generic that they deny any notion of specific place and time. Looking at them, it’s as if all the intervening life suddenly evaporates, I feel I could be anywhere at any time in the last twenty years, that I could be in the place I escaped. The sweat of fear gathers under my shirt and at the roots of my hair. “We have to go, ” I say, standing suddenly, grabbing my satchel. “We’ll miss our trains. ” My half sister stands. “Okay, ” she says, and I see that she thinks the abrupt departure is odd but excuses it as proceeding from what she’s always regarded as my high-strung nature. On the train on the way home I become convinced that the invitation to meet her, the impassioned requests, are part of a plot. That she’s been so nice and so forgiving because she’s conspired with our father, and while I was eating the turkey sandwich that I throw up in the lavatory on the train, he has been murdering my husband and stealing my children. What else might satisfy him but to destroy the life I’ve built despite him, to plunder another generation? What has he ever wanted but everything? From the train’s mobile phone I call and call my own number. No one answers, and I begin to sob, curled over on the seat before the telephone, my face in my lap. “What’s the matter? ” a woman says. “Can I help >,, you.

shake my head. I can’t look up at her. Is there a way to tell a stranger that once upon a time I fell from grace, I was lost so deeply in a dark wood that I’m afraid I’ll never be safe again? When I get home, my family is fine. Husband, children. I weep. I have to touch them all, I can’t stop. Though they have never seen their grandfather nor he them, my children pay, too, by having a father who carries this darkness inside her Even from afar, my father exacts a cost. “What is it? ” my husband says. “What happened? “

“Nothing, ” I say. “I tried to call. No one answered. “

“Oh, ” he says. “I guess we were taking a walk. “

We look at each other, my husband and I, a meaningful look, but we don’t talk about my crying. In our marriage we’ve made a place for my father and what happened between me and him. It’s a locked place, the psychic equivalent of a high cupboard, nearly out of reach. My children touch my face, my hair. They kiss me. To them I am perfect and beautiful. We’re taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It’s they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are. As if my father’s house were some kind of punitive school which, in a way, it is, I’ll remember my time with him as filled with painful lessons I spend holidays with my mother and her parents, all of whom are strangely kind to me, unprecedentedly gentle.

As if by agreement, we never mention my father, we pretend that he doesn’t exist. But we mourn for me, the lost child, the child snatched away by the lost father. We weep extravagantly at any opportunity, over fictive deaths on television, distant accidents in the newspaper. We cry over the tiny losses of flat tires, broken radios, spilled milk. After Christmas, my mother and I shop together listlessly. We’re going to the same party on New Year’s Eve, one hosted by a friend of hers. She’s buying me a dress to wear to that party, I’m to choose it with her from the overpriced Laura Ashley boutique. In the store, standing under her critical gaze, I am as I was as a child, I command my body to endure the process with as much dignity as possible, while I remain underground, contracted to an unassailable morsel deep within myself, too deep to exhume. It’s not unlike the way I tolerate my father. This flesh, I tell myself, means nothing. You are not a body, but a heart, a mind, a soul.

These are yours and no one can take them from you. The dress costs a great deal and is something I will never wear again. It’s made from beautiful fabric, a subtly luminous blue plaid, but I dislike its high neck and tight bodice, the long sleeves, wide sash, and white cotton petticoats meant to be worn so that they show several inches below the hem. With black patent-leather shoes and white lace tights, my blond hair falling whole feet past the bow in the back, I look like what my mother must wish I were, a chaste, pretty doll incapable of the sins I conceal. After she buys my dress, she finds a low-cut one of black velvet for herself, and then we take the Galleria escalators back down to the garage. “Here, let me carry your bags too, ” I say, holding out my free arm. One tread below me, the wan winter sun falling onto her white face, my mother looks strangely frail. “Are you okay? ” I ask.

“Tired, ” she says. “Just tired. ” But there’s something in the droop of her shoulders, the way she lets her head fall forward, that frightens me. I don’t think of the lump, cut out a year before. I don’t think cancer, but I feel a visceral squirm of fear, my heart pounds erratically. In the future, when I remember my mother, I’ll recognize that instant on the moving stairs as the point at which I begin to understand that I will lose her. The pallor of her face, its ghostly translucence, predicts that what I’ve always feared will come to pass, it whispers that the woman I have pursued for all my life will vanish.

When we dress for the party, my mother tells me what makeup to wear, and I obey. “Put on some rouge, ” she says. “Promise me, if you don’t have a tan, you’ll always wear rouge. “All right, ” I say. The party is comprised of people I have never met, all of us gathered in a beautiful glass house on a hill overlooking the city. My mother’s companion is with us. He drinks too much and we don’t drink at all, as is usual when the three of us are together. We sit before a strange late meal of potatoes and bratwurst and various pates, slices of rare meat bleeding on the white china. Our Austrian hostess calls us to attention by striking a spoon against her champagne glass. She announces that in the town where she was born it’s considered inauspicious to eat anything with fins or with wings on New Year’s Eve, lest in the coming year your luck might swim or fly away. My mother spears a coin of sausage from her plate. She holds it up on her fork as if in a toast. “So, ” she says, I guess we are there. The clock strikes midnight, and my mother and I exchange a solemn kiss. The next time I see my mother she’s in the hospital, she and my grandfather both. “What happened? ” I say over tea at my grandparents’

breakfast table. “Oh, ” my grandmother says, “your mother’s having tests and your grandfather’s broken his leg, falling over the damn hose. ” She points through the kitchen window toward the pool, and when I go outside, I see by the coiled hose a yellow stain on the deck where he vomited from the shock of the break. I stare at the mark for a minute, perhaps longer, and then I go to get a scrub brush to remove what the paramedic’s cursory rinsing did not. My grandfather survives the surgery to repair his femur, his ninety-three-year-old bone pinned together with four long stainless-steel nails, but then he gets gangrene from a bedsore on his heel, and the painstakingly reassembled limb is amputated. He survives that surgery as well, a strong heart cursing him to a few more months in hospitals and nursing homes, where first the lining of his stomach and then his gall bladder and then everything else gives out. CAT scans reveal that my mother’s back is hurting her because it’s broken. Her vertebrae are beginning to crumble because of metastatic breast disease. X rays show that her cough won’t go away because her lungs are riddled with cancer, as is her liver. The blood-gas profile says she’s tired all the time because she’s not getting enough oxygen. They both die slowly, and as they do I return to them, and to my grandmother. I fall into a pattern of spending two weeks at my father’s house and then two weeks at my grandparents’ that amount of time representing the limit of my ability to bear either place and its pain. At my grandparents’ house, my grandmother and I sleep in the same room, I in my grandfather’s twin bed pushed up next to hers. We keep the telephone between our two pillows in case one of the hospitals calls during the night, and I realize, lying awake beside her in the dark, that this is the closest I’ve felt to anyone in years. Each day at teatime we visit my grandfather. We bring him his tea in a thermos, along with two cookies in a Baggie. My grandmother has had tea with my grandfather every day for more than forty years, and she will do so until the last day of his life. We see my mother after dinner, and in her room we watch television on the set bolted to the wall over our heads. We watch nighttime soaps like Dallas or Dynasty shows in which people often scream or sob, and my mother and I cry with them. My grandmother doesn’t cry while she’s awake, but one night I listen as she cries in her sleep. It’s an odd noise, a little uh-uh uh, like the sound puppies or babies make while nuzzling at their mothers for a nipple. But it’s definitely crying. Her face is wet, tears leak from under her closed eyelids, and sometimes she interrupts herself to speak. “Oh, no, no, no, ” she says, still asleep, words I interpret as a prayer, so facause it’s broken. Her vertebrae are beginning to crumble because of metastatic breast disease. X rays show that her cough won’t go away because her lungs are riddled with cancer, as is her liver. The blood-gas profile says she’s tired all the time because she’s not getting enough oxygen. They both die slowly, and as they do I return to them, and to my grandmother. I fall into a pattern of spending two weeks at my father’s house and then two weeks at my grandparents’ that amount of time representing the limit of my ability to bear either place and its pain. At my grandparents’ house, my grandmother and I sleep in the same room, I in my grandfather’s twin bed pushed up next to hers. We keep the telephone between our two pillows in case one of the hospitals calls during the night, and I realize, lying awake beside her in the dark, that this is the closest I’ve felt to anyone in years. Each day at teatime we visit my grandfather. We bring him his tea in a thermos, along with two cookies in a Baggie. My grandmother has had tea with my grandfather every day for more than forty years, and she will do so until the last day of his life. We see my mother after dinner, and in her room we watch television on the set bolted to the wall over our heads. We watch nighttime soaps like Dallas or Dynasty shows in which people often scream or sob, and my mother and I cry with them. My grandmother doesn’t cry while she’s awake, but one night I listen as she cries in her sleep. It’s an odd noise, a little uh-uh uh, like the sound puppies or babies make while nuzzling at their mothers for a nipple. But it’s definitely crying. Her face is wet, tears leak from under her closed eyelids, and sometimes she interrupts herself to speak. “Oh, no, no, no, ” she says, still asleep, words I interpret as a prayer, so familiar an internal refrain are they. “Does it mean I’m suicidal if I fantasize about my death, if I picture it? “