The Kiss: A Memoir (15 page)

“How often? “

“Oh, you know, a couple times an hour anyway. ” The doctor winces, rubs his eyes.

When I tell him that my father and I have “this, uh, thing between us that is, uh, not platonic, ” he doesn’t betray disgust or even disapproval, only weariness. “Oh, ” he says, drawing a deep breath. “I see, ” he says, his sigh implying he’s seen it before. “It’s not terrible? ” I ask, after a silence.

“Aren’t you shocked? ” I say on another occasion. But he doesn’t answer.

He does not address moral questions, only those of feeling and function.

I’ve come to him because I’m afraid for my life. Because my father keeps a pistol in his house and he’s taught me how to shoot it. So far, all I’ve done is load it, I’ve dropped the bullets into the chambers and clicked the cylinder in place. I’ve felt its weight in my hand, but then, ultimately, I’ve put both gun and bullets away in their separate drawers. “Do you want to die? ” the doctor asks. I can’t imagine remaining alive. I can’t conceive of a life apart from my mother’s. I know my grandfather’s death will bring sorrow, but my mother’s is too great and too impossible to even begin to consider.

ayou did this to me! ” she wails once, her tongue loosened by morphine.

“You and your father are killing me! ” No! I think. Us! Us! KILLING us.

Not you. Never only you. Sometimes, when she’s afraid she’ll die that very night, I spend it in the hospital with her. I sit in the chair by her bed or I stand beside her as I keep watch over her and over the little jet that delivers oxygen to the green tube that snakes up her nose. Once, she takes my hand. Eyes closed, she gropes for it, she calls my name. “Are you there? ” she says. “Yes, ” I say. “You’re always there, aren’t you? ” Her voice is not even as loud as a whisper. Like a ghost’s, it’s made of air. ayes, ” I say. Even when I’m with him, I’m standing by your bed. Especially then. “Do you know, ” she says, “after I’m dead, you’re going to be very angry with me. ” And then she says nothing else. I squeeze her fingers, give them a little shake. I recognize the truth of her words without feeling them. Well, yes, I think, I guess you’re right. But it will be a long time yet before I feel it. She’ll have been dead for years before my anger cools enough to touch. The doctor prescribes an antidepressant that I am to take each night before bed. I’ve told him I’m frightened by my own capacity for recklessness, for selfdestruction. At my grandmother’s house, hidden in the desk I used when I was a schoolgirl, are twelve Seconal capsules.

They’re old, their red gelatin sides stuck to one another. I began collecting them when I was fourteen. I pilfered one or two a month from the medicine cabinet. A dozen Seconal won’t do much, though. I used to have forty, but I lost one, and once I tried it at midnight with twenty-seven and a tumbler full of scotch all that I managed to swallow before I began throwing up. I never even passed out. “You look a bit pale, ” my grandmother observed the next morning.

“I think I’m coming down with something, ” I said.

“What happened to your eye>”

“I don’t know. I must have slept on it funny. ” My right eye was red on the inside corner from having broken a blood vessel while retching.

Looking at her looking at me, I concluded that she had no idea of what had transpired in my bathroom only hours before. When the doctor asks me if I want to die, I tell him I’m worried about myself, but I don’t tell him about the sleeping pills because I’m too ashamed, a feeling I won’t understand until years later, when what will strike me as more damning than my self-destructiveness is my capacity for secrecy, my genius at revealing so little of my heart and thus the risk that I, too, could end up a woman as trapped within herself as my mother. I took the pills in the midst of an encompassing fog of despair, one I couldn’t see beyond, not at all. Although it was as much as a year after my mother and I went to the gynecologist’s office for a diaphragm, I connect the two events.

I think I took them so that my body would die along with what else was murdered that day, girlhood, hope, any notion of being safe anywhere, with anyone. The drug the doctor prescribes for me, Desyrel, paradoxically makes living both possible and, to the extent that I’m aware of it, unbearable. “My life, ” I tell my father, “sucks.

But I mean really, really sucks. “

“Look, ” my father says. We’re sitting at a picnic table at a roadside stop, the kind that truckers pull into for a few hours of sleep.

“If it’s the sex, we don’t have to do it. It’s just a means of expressing our commitment to each other. If it’s not good for you, we’ll find another way. ” But what could serve both our needs so well as this compulsive, joyless coupling, the use of our bodies to express our desires? In this way we are not different from other people. My flesh, starved and lifeless under his, how eloquently it says what I cannot, I’m hungry, and I’m dead. Dead in allegiance to my mother, and dead to him as well. Dead in response to his using his big body to separate me from the world. Trucks pass, one after another, and the wind they bring whips my long hair between our faces. I don’t want abstinence, I want release. “Please listen, I say.

“What if one day I want to have a husband, children, a family like other people have? To be loved like other people are. “

“What people? ” he says.

“Other people. People who aren’t like you or me. ” I look at him.

“Normal people, ” I say. “Who’s normal? Normal is a mathematical concept. It has no bearing on human personality or relationships. “

“You know what I mean! And you know I’ve tried. I’ve given you everything you’ve asked. I’m not saying that it’s what you intended, but I feel so alone in the world. You won’t let me have anyone, not anyone except you.

And you have other people. You have a family. “You can’t expect me to leave my children, ” my father says.

“No, of course I don’t. I don’t want that at all. But what about me? I’m your child, too. ” My father looks at me. “It’s too late for you, ” he says.

“What are you saying? “

“I’m saying you’ve made a mistake. ” He leans forward. “We’ve talked about this, you know. How all the mistakes we make are permanent.

How acts can’t be undone. “

“Yes, ” I say. “I know. “

“Well, ” he says, and he folds his arms. “You’ve done what you’ve done, and you’ve done it with me. And now you’ll never be able to have anyone else, because you won’t be able to keep our secret. You’ll tell whoever it is, and once he knows, he’ll leave you. ” I look at my father I hear his words and, to the extent that I believe them, I hate him. “This is irregular, ” the nurse says. “I know, ” I say. “We just don’t do it. “

She walks quickly, in shifting planes of white, white dress, white cardigan, white nylon tights, white shoes. awho do I have to see to get permission? ” Wait here, ” she says, and she leaves me outside a glass-paneled office. After making impassioned pleas to several hospital administrators and being passed from one cubicle to another, I finally secure admittance to the hospital morgue. The indulgence is granted because, as the paperwork attests, my grandfather’s body will be taken directly from the morgue to the crematory, there will be no other opportunity for me to see it. “But, ” as the man who signs me in insists, it’s irregular, highly irregular. My grandfather lies in his refrigerated drawer, his hands in fists under his chin, as if he found this position after he was brought to this cold room. His mouth is open, seemingly in protest against such chill. I expect to be frightened by this corpse I have fought to see, but how can I be? The face and hands above the sheet are so familiar that what I feel is a rush of affection.

The nurse leaves me with my grandfather, saying she’ll be back after her break, and then I kneel beside him. I lay my head on his chest as I used to when I was small. I touch his eyebrows and his cheek, the white stubble of his beard.

His eyes are open and show me the same mild blue as they did in life, the pupils are clouded as if the cataracts, removed years before, have returned. I look at his eyes for a long time. How they amaze me, and teach me why it is the undertaker closes them. Though I’ve courted and teased death, played irresponsibly with my life, I never believed in my own mortality until I sat beside my grandfather’s cold body, touched and smelled and embraced it. All along, it was my unbelief that made recklessness possible. The hour I spend with my grandfather, kneeling by the long drawer, changes my life. The kiss I place on his unyielding cheek begins to wake me, just as my father’s in the airport put me to sleep. I am transformed from a person who assumed she had time to squander to one who now knows that no matter how many years her fate holds, there will not be enough. “Are you all right? ” asks the nurse when she returns to the morgue and slides the drawer shut. My hands are shaking with my new knowledge. I stare at her.

“I said are you all right? ” she repeats. “Oh, ” I say. “Yes. ” At my grandfather’s memorial service, the rabbi calls upon each of his descendants by name, he has us stand as he exhorts us to live our lives honorably. The service takes place just after Hanukkah, and the rabbi reminds us of lighting candles. He asks that we cherish the memory of my grandfather, who died during the feast of lights, that for him we go forth as brightly as possible and make our lives those of illumination, not darkness. The words are sentimental, and they are spoken by a stranger, but they affect me. If the other mourners see how stricken I am as I contemplate the dishonor I bring to my grandfather’s funeral, if they see the hot tears that come at the recognition of how dark my life has grown well, undoubtedly they excuse those tears as proceeding from a grief more simple than mine can ever be. “What are you doing? ” my grandmother asks when she finds me a day later at the kitchen table, papers spread all over, searching through files I haven’t opened in years. “Applying to graduate schools, ” I say. She looks at me. “Really?

” she says. She sits down in the chair across from mine. where? ” she asks, after a moment. I name the cities where the schools are located, all far from my father’s home. She nods. ado you want tea? ” she asks.

She fills the kettle. Neither of us articulates what is happening. That I am beginning to pick up the parts of my life that I dropped years before. We cannot say what we don’t yet know, that what my grandfather’s death has begun my release–my mother’s death will complete. “Do you know, ” my father said in the car after we left the truck stop, “there’s only one person who could have given you the strength to leave me. ” And though we’d only driven a mile or so, he pulled over and stopped the car on the side of the road. He took offhis glasses and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. I looked at him. “You? ” I said, at last.

“Yes, ” he said.

When I was a small child, my mother would Sit at her vanity table and brush my hair The vanity table had opposing mirrors at its sides, and if I turned my head to the left or to the right I’d see the two of us multiplied endlessly, and I would read in that spatial infinity a message of temporal infinity as well, No matter which way I looked, back into the past or forward into the future, I would always see myself standing as obediently as possible under my mother’s hands as they worked, the two of us united in the bond that would always define us, our trying to make me into the child she can admire and love. Many of the nightmares I have about my mother concern hair. In the dreams, she cuts my hair off, she dyes it red or black, she locks me in a tower built of bathroom tile with walls too slick to scale. Like Rapunzel, my hair is so long that its length cannot be without meaning. I’ve always insisted on the excess of it to indicate the point at which I draw the line, to say that I would change only so much of myself to satisfy my mother. For years my hair has been a symbol of me, of how I differ from my mother, long versus short, blonde versus brunette. I’ve absorbed myself in its care, cutting split ends out one by one with manicure scissors. The longer it gets, the more brushing it demands, especially since I won’t braid or contain it with dips or elastics. “It’s too long, ” my mother complains, and then I always have to grow it longer, there can’t be enough of it to satis* me. My father is as dedicated to my hair as I am. For the past few years, he has been the one to trim it. Never trusting that anyone else would take the minimum amount, he has spent whole hours on his knees, using his scissors with absolute attention.

But during the last months of my mother’s life I devote myself to her desires before my father’s and before my own. She wants pink Kleenex, not white, I go out to get it. I bring food from distant restaurants, Vaseline in a tube, not a jar, French magazines, Swiss chocolate.

Whatever whim she expresses I satisfy. We invent time-consuming errands for me to perform so that we are spared each other’s company while I demonstrate my willingness to please her. The stylist at the salon gathers my hair into an elastic and cuts, as I’ve asked him to, just above it. In the hospital, I lay the severed ponytail, twenty-three inches long, on her bed. She touches the hair.

“Well, ” she says, “it’s about time. “

Having my hair CUT off and then giving it to my mother is a complex act, one with layers of meaning. There are things I need to tell my mother before she dies, before she leaves me, and I speak, as I always have, with the body she gave me, the one she carried inside her.

Within the haircut are, of course, love and anger, a hostile capitulation. I make my hair a sacrifice to my mother’s vision of the daughter she wanted, a relic of the girl who lived to please her mother, and who will live no more because without her mother that girl can have no life. If I don’t wait until my mother is dead to lay my hair in her casket, it’s because I can’t waste this last chance to secure her approval. To tell her how much I still want it enough to at last give her the one part of me I’ve always held out of her reach. “Turn around, ” she says to me as I stand at the foot of her bed and she pushes the little button that makes the head of the bed rise and lift her. “So, “

she says, when I’m facing her again. “There you are. All anyone’s seen for years was hair. ” She gestures toward the tail. “Are you going to keep it? ” she asks. “What for? ” I say, and she shrugs.