The Kiss: A Memoir (2 page)

It’s the first of my mother’s attempts since the divorce to make an independent life for herself, a life that does not seem possible to her unless motherhood is left behind. My father and I don’t exchange letters again until I’m a freshman in college and have, for the first time in my life, an address separate from that of the rest of my family. At school, there’s no one other than the post master to witness who might send me mail, or how often. The letters my father writes me are stiff, formal, unimaginative. They betray little of the man himself, but propound tedious theories of education and aesthetics. As with the letters he sent when I was small, their purpose is to instruct. When I read them, standing in the drafty corridor outside my post-office box, I am consumed by frustration.

Can anyone really talk and think this way? Is he erudite, or is he what my grandmother would call a “crashing bore”? Following my father’s example, I write careful, pinched responses that require drafts and redrafts, the final copies folded carefully in thirds and sealed in spotless white envelopes. My mother and father met in the lobby of a theater, where they were introduced to each other by a mutual friend.

They were seventeen, and both virgins. Knowing this about my parents is powerful enough to make seventeen the age at which I, too, lose my virginity. I cast it off as if that birthday ordains my doing so, and my partner is also a boy whose inexperience equals mine. What followed the night of the play, the night my parents met, was not unusual, infatuation, feverish meetings, pregnancy, a hasty marriage, the birth of a child, and then divorce all of which was played out in my mother’s parents’ home, as my father’s family lived far away from the boarding school he attended. My parents became parents while still children, without money, with no more than high school educations.

“She enjoys reading and attending concerts, and hopes someday to become a dramatic actress, ” reads the legend below my mother’s yearbook picture. Years after her death, I cut her page from the book’s binding.

I keep it framed in my study, and sometimes I take it and hold it in my hands. I look carefully at the photograph and at the words I know by heart. How solemn she is, how unnervingly still for a girl of eighteen, and how much care she has taken with her clothes and her hair, the perfectly plucked brows over her wide hazel eyes. They are dangerous, those eyes in the picture, unplumbed pools of sorrow into which I can tumble and drown. My mother’s expression is one that betrays the kind of fear and vulnerability I associate with orphans or refugees, people who have lost everything. Her mouth is small, precise, virginal, her lips closed against appetite. The Cupid’s bow of her upper lip is drawn with an exactitude that makes my own look comparatively blurred, unfocused.

Do I know my mother any better than the long-ago classmate, “J. M., “

who foretold her future? “She will study literature, French and drama, “

J. M. wrote. This all comes true, incidentally, although my mother pursues these interests on her own, she doesn’t ever go to college. As for my father, suddenly faced with unimaginable responsibilities”How will you support them! ” I’m told my grandfather cried. “How can you possibly! ” he takes a job as an encyclopedia salesman. My grandparents’

library includes a set of darkred Britannicas.

They’re on the highest shelf, so I have to stand on a chair to reach them, their tops furred with dust. The binding of the first of the supplementary yearbooks is stamped 1962, the year after that of my birth. How many times during my childhood do I take down one of those heavy volumes, use it for a school project or just to satisfy my own curiosity? How many times do I hold one of those books in my arms not knowing who sold them to my grandparents? Cotton gin. Gregor Mendel. The major exports of China. The pollen dance of bees. My mother and my grandmother speak French fluently, my mother with an accent so flawless that even Parisians comment upon it. “Not possible, ” they say. “You must have lived in France as a child. ” As for me, despite lessons begun at age two, for years I make no progress beyond the table, le crayon, words that are the same as those in English.

Intelligence tests confirm my mother’s suspicion that my failure is due to stubbornness rather than lack of aptitude, and she sets OUT to break me. Willing or not, I am to be ushered intdrown. My mother’s expression is one that betrays the kind of fear and vulnerability I associate with orphans or refugees, people who have lost everything. Her mouth is small, precise, virginal, her lips closed against appetite. The Cupid’s bow of her upper lip is drawn with an exactitude that makes myown lookcomparativelyblurred, unfocused.

Do I know my mother any better than the long-ago classmate, “J. M., “

who foretold her future? “She will study literature, French and drama, “

J. M. wrote. This all comes true, incidentally, although my mother pursues these interests on her own, she doesn’t ever go to college. As for my father, suddenly faced with unimaginable responsibilities”How will you support them! ” I’m told my grandfather cried. “How can you possibly! ” he takes a job as an encyclopedia salesman. My grandparents’

library includes a set of darkred Britannicas.

They’re on the highest shelf, so I have to stand on a chair to reach them, their tops furred with dust. The binding of the first of the supplementary yearbooks is stamped 1962, the year after that of my birth. How many times during my childhood do I take down one of those heavy volumes, use it for a school project or just to satisfy my own curiosity? How many times do I hold one of those books in my arms not knowing who sold them to my grandparents? Cotton gin. Gregor Mendel. The major exports of China. The pollen dance of bees. My mother and my grandmother speak French fluently, my mother with an accent so flawless that even Parisians comment upon it. “Not possible, ” they say. “You must have lived in France as a child. ” As for me, despite lessons begun at age two, for years I make no progress beyond b table, le crayon, words that are the same as those in English.

Intelligence tests confirm my mother’s suspicion that my failure is due to stubbornness rather than lack of aptitude, and she sets OUT to break me. Willing or not, I am to be ushered into this language of conflict, the one in which my mother and grandmother fight, and which when allied they use to secretly eviscerate their foes. Each weekend, my mother drills me with flash cards. She bribes, threatens, cajoles. Nothing works. At the shortest syllable I retreat, not purposefully but helplessly, into a place deep within myself one from which I can hear her only distantly, as if she is calling down into a well, but cannot respond. Anger, my mother’s in particular, renders me almost mute from the time I am small, and my silence always tends to enrage her. Once, she throws the flash cards down and slaps my face. In the second grade, after five years of failure, I prepare for a French test in a way I have never done before.

We have been told to memorize the colors. Red = Rouge. Yellow = Jaune.

Green = Vert.

I write all the equivalents on a slip of paper and hide it in my sleeve.

The test is a mimeographed picture of a clown holding a bunch of balloons, and on each balloon is the French word for one of the colors.

WITH our crayons we are to color them in appropriately. My mother’s excitement over my perfect score is devastating. She hugs me, she kisses me, she buys me gifts, and even at the age of seven I understand how damning is my success that my mother’s love for me (like her mother’s for her) depends on my capitulation. She will accept, acknowledge, see me only in as much as I will make myself the child who pleases her. i knew you could! I knew you could, if only you tried! “

she says. I pull out of her arms, sobbing. I can’t! ” I cry. I did it with this! ” I shove the grubby crib note at her. My mother splutters, so livid that she can’t speak in any language. The next day she takes me to the teacher, and with her hand tight around the back of my neck I confess. Then she drives me home to my grandparents’. In the driveway, she reaches across my chest to open the passenger door. “Get out, ” she says. I do, and she leaves. That night, I come down with an illness no one can define or cure. It begins like the stomach flu but doesn’t stop.

It goes on for weeks, until the day I overhear the pediatrician tell my grandmother that I’m so dehydrated I’ll have to be hospitalized, and then it does stop, as suddenly as it began. I return to school not just thinner but seemingly smaller than I was before I left, pale, and with my hair cut very short to keep it clean while I was sick. “Why, this isn’t the same child! ” the teacher exclaims, as does the principal and everyone who sees me. “She’s a different child! Who is this child! ” I hear it ten or more times. And I am different. I learn French, never with the ease of other subjects and never with pleasure, but I learn it well enough so that I can still read a French novel. Very occasionally, I dream in French, and on those mornings I wake up ill, I vomit. Do my father’s accomplishments cost him as dearly as mine do me?

He is one of those men who rises far enough from his roots that among old acquaintances he is held exemplary, and probably in turn despised.

How many of his old friends and family the community from whom success makes him an exilesee what I will discover, that rage has been what motivated him? It was in the garden, between the rose bed and the fruit trees, that my grandfather told my father that it was over between him and my mother my father could forget about calling her his wife. The bargain was simple. If my father would leave without causing the family further trouble, then he could consider himself free, the divorce settlement would require nothing of him. My grandfather made it clear that there was nothing anyone wanted from him. Not child support, not anything. My grandparents thought they could end it, erase my mother’s unfortunate mistake. There was the baby, of course, the life that sprang from my mother’s rebellion, her attempt to thwart her parents and especially her mother’s desire to control her there was me to consider, but I was a cost they’d accept. He, however, had to go. Worn down by her mother’s campaign to oust her husband, one which, cannily, focused on the very extravagance my mother’s upbringing encouraged, my mother succumbed to the fear that with my father she would always be poor. Poor is something that my grandmother, herself raised by a father with a fortune, can make seem very desperate, even fatal. A preachers wife! I can hear the disdain with which my grandmother uttered the words. The earliest directive either I or my mother received from her Jewish parents was to form ourselves in opposition to the children around us.

Born in London, my grandmother and grandfather have lived all over the world. They’ve always considered America a land of convenience, hygiene, and safety, and one in which children are “dragged, ” as opposed to “brought, ” up. What an inspired flight of defiance was my mother’s choice of my father, his German immigrant ancestors, the miscegenation of his Native American grandmother, not one but two missionary grandfathers, his own parents’ broken marriage, not to mention their relatively modest circumstances. How irresistible he must have been to my mother, and how appalling to her parents. My father, with his tenuous origins, found my grandparents awesome in their entitled European condescension, their wealth and property and the solid history implied by antiques that were passed down, not acquired. If my grandparents still frighten me, raised as I was to assume their mantle of entitlement, how much more they must have frightened my father at nineteen, far from home, the money for his senior year at a fancy prep school scratched together as a kind of apology from his father My father’s father was a philanderer. As my father tells me years later, he often left his wife and children to pursue other women.

The finishing touch to my father’s high school career a diploma from a name-brand prep school and thus a chance at a better college was intended as a kind of compensation for earlier neglect. In that it gave my father the opportunity to meet my mother, it did change his life. But not in the ways his father must have hoped. Twenty years old. My life is that of a fugitive. I’m always in an airline terminal, trudging after him over expanses of stained carpet and dull linoleum. The walls around us warn of illegal transport. Arrows point to baggage claims and taxi stands. Everywhere there are small blue signs bearing international symbols for food, first aid, toilets.

Our protracted good-byes are consumed with magazines and junk food by the weary, bored travelers who surround us, slumped in molded plastic chairs. Do we resemble each other enough that people suspect we’re father and daughter? Do we sit too close to one another? Does his hand on my arm betray his intent? And why do we cling so, as if our parting will be as final as death? People fix their eyes on us without embarrassment, as unabashed in their staring as if our movements and speech issue from one of the coin-op televisions in the waiting area.

Sometimes, in the airport stores, my father buys greeting cards, big ones with roses and lace and matching pink envelopes. I watch as he writes in them, stamps and mails them, too, so that our visit will not interrupt their relentless flow to my address. As I grow up, I know little of my father’s life, He has a new wife and another daughter. It snows where he lives. He has hay fever and a large dog called a malamute that once ate a cat. He’s a doctor, but not the medical kindhe has something called a Phd. My source of such details is my mother, because the infrequent letters stop, and there are only two visits during which I can observe him myself. He arrives the summer I am five, and my mother, my father, and I go to the beach together. My father wears a long-sleeved shirt and canvas shoes into the surf. He walks out until a wave breaks over his shoulders, and then he turns back. I watch him make his way up the sand to our umbrella. The shoes squelch and the shirt’s tails and cuffs drip.

He sits in one of our folding chairs, and water streams in rivulets down its aluminum legs. He spreads a towel over his white knees. What frightens me most about him is the way he fascinates my mother. I am sure, watching as they pack up the beach equipment and walk toward the car, that if I didn’t follow, they wouldn’t notice I was missing. He brings a large camera with him, and one afternoon he poses me before it.