The Kiss: A Memoir (6 page)

he says. Humiliated on behalf of my mother, and shocked that he would betray her this way, I look not at him but at my plate. When it’s time to take my father to the airport, again my mother says she cannot go.

She has a headache. She is flattened by discouragement. This visit, like all his others, has convinced her that she’s wasted years on the wrong men, the wrong life. “You drive him, ” she says. “He seems more interested in your company … . than m mine, anyway. As during our previous conversation about getting to the airport on time, I’m sitting in the rocking chair in her bedroom and she is on her bed, her face in her hands. Looking at her, I can’t think of any words that might reach across the divide between us. “All right, ” I say at last, and I kiss her cheek under her closed eyes. “I’ll go. You stay. ” When I tell my father she’s not coming, he smiles. “Oh good, “

he says. “I’m glad to have you to myself for a little while. ” He picks up his bags. “Maybe you should go up and say good-bye, ” I say, surprised by his callousness, the way he doesn’t seem to consider her feelings when she is slain by as little as a glance from him. In the terminal, he puts down the camera case to embrace me with both arms. “I love you, ” he says. “God, I love you. I lost you, but now I have you back, and I’ll never let you go again. ” He says the words and he holds me tightly, so tightly. How solid he is, how real. Father. My father.

The word made flesh. “You don’t know how I suffered when they sent me away, ” he says.

“You can’t imagine the pain of losing you. ” He takes my face in his hands and kisses my forehead, my eyes.

“How can a daughter of mine be this beautiful? ” he murmurs. “When I look at you, I wonder if I, too, must not be handsome. ” My father knows he is a good-looking man. He’s overweight, and I have to stretch to get my arms around him, but his features a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and long no seare good enough to excuse the excess. I smile, but I don’t return to him the compliment I suspect he’s trying to prompt. We look at each other. We search each other’s faces. “What happens now? ” I say, and we make promises that we’ll be together again soon. “In the summer, maybe, ” I say.

“No, ” he says. “Sooner. Sooner. “

With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen. I’ve seen it before, fathers kissing their daughters on the mouth. A friend of mine’s father has kissed her this way for years, and I’ve watched them, unable to look away, disquieted by what I see. In my family, lip-to-lip kisses between parent and child are considered as vulgar as spitting in public or not washing your hands after using the toilet, all of which failures my grandmother would judge as evidence of poor upbringing. She might excuse such kisses from a person raised in an exotic, backward culture, but never from a decent American. A voice over the public-address system announces the final boarding call for my father’s flight. As I pull away, feeling the resistance of his hand behind my head, how tightly he holds me to him, the kiss changes. It is no longer a chaste, closed-lipped kiss. My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth, wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane. How long do I stand there, my hand to my mouth, people washing around me? The plane has taxied away from the gate before I move. Through the terminal’s thick wall of glass, I watch it take off, the thrust that lifts its heavy, shining belly into the clouds. I am frightened by the kiss. I know it is wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret. In years to come, I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion, a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It’s the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed. The route I take from my mother’s home back to school is devoid of visual distractions, a straight path cut through flat, dry country. The highway is so old that the asphalt has faded to a pale gray, its cracks painted over with black lines of tar. It’s a road that lacks a vanishing point even when it isn’t hot, a mirage of water glimmers at its end.

the Rolling Stones album still plays in the tape deck, over and over and just as loudly as during the previous drive. But everything is different now, and the difference is the kiss. My thoughts return to it obsessively but never there. One kiss. An instant, seemingly discrete and isolated in time, yet paradoxically so, for the kiss has grown. It is like a vast, glittering wall between me and everything else, a surface offering no purchase, nor any sign by which to understand it. I can see past and through it to the life I used to have, but, mysteriously, the kiss separates me from that life. I can’t dismiss the vision of the cockroach I trapped under the water glass, how it circled slowly at first and then faster, faster. Back at school, there is a specific hour during which I and students whose last names begin with the same letter as mine are supposed to register for classes, and I miss it. There is a makeup registration and then a late registration that carries a penalty fee, and I miss both of those as well. The three young women with whom I live rush in and out and around me, signing up for classes, buying books, reuniting with friends, retrieving the previous quarter’s grades, blue books, term papers. I sit in a green vinyl-upholstered chair in our communal living area, and do none of what I, as a student, am supposed to do. “What’s with you? ” my roommates say. “Is anything wrong? ” I may have acted in peculiar ways before I’m sure I have but I’ve never just sat. My screwups, historically, have been of an energetic variety. “I’m fine, ” I assure them. “Everything’s okay. “

Eventually they stop asking questions, and the green chair with its back to the wall is where I spend the better part of two weeks, days and nights as well, sleeping upright, my arms encircling my knees. During the day, I keep a novel open in my lap, and if someone passes through the living room they tend not to settle there now that I’ve claimed it for my unnamed, inert vigilI pretend, sometimes, to be reading. Once late registration is a week behind me, I receive a letter from the office of academic probation. It asks that I make an appointment to discuss my status. “What’s going on? ” my boyfriend asks repeatedly, more vocal than my roommates in his concern. “What happened during the break? ” I recount the surface of the visit. I reconstruct it up until the kiss. I say how bereft I feel at having lost what cannot be recovered, twenty years with a father whom I now find I love and who seems to return that love. My boyfriend’s own lost father makes him a sympathetic listener, he seems not just to understand but to share my anguish, and this encourages me to tell him what I haven’t told anyone else. “Something weird happened at the airport, ” I say. We’re in his car, parked in the driveway of the little house he rents off campus. “At least I think it was weird. Maybe it wasn’t, ” I finish hopefully.

“What? ” he asks.

“Well, my father was saying good-bye. We were saying good-bye in the airport. And he… Well, when he kissed me he sort of put his tongue in my mouth. Do you think that’s weird? “

“Are you fucking kidding! ” my boyfriend yells at me. “I can’t believe that! Yes, it’s weird! Of course it’s weird! It’s wrong! Did you tell your mother? ” I shake my head no.

I cover my face with my hands.

My voyeriend’s outrage forces me farther into secrecy. I realize that what I felt in the car while driving back to school, that the kiss has separated me from everything else, is true. It’s not a conceit or an overly dramatic interpretation. As for my mother, she is the last person I would tell about the kiss, she’s the one most likely to respond hysterically, even violently. She would prevent me from ever seeing my father again. And I can’t not see him again. From the time he left me, my first thought, the one that pushes aside my fears about the kiss, has been When. When will I see him again? When will we be together? He calls each day the phone’s ring summoni probation. It asks that I make an appointment to discuss my status. “What’s going on? ” my boyfriend asks repeatedly, more vocal than my roommates in his concern. “What happened during the break? ” I recount the surface of the visit. I reconstruct it up until the kiss. I say how bereft I feel at having lost what cannot be recovered, twenty years with a father whom I now find I love and who seems to return that love. My boyfriend’s own lost father makes him a sympathetic listener, he seems not just to understand but to share my anguish, and this encourages me to tell him what I haven’t told anyone else. “Something weird happened at the airport, ” I say. We’re in his car, parked in the driveway of the little house he rents off campus. “At least I think it was weird. Maybe it wasn’t, ” I finish hopefully.

“What? ” he asks.

“Well, my father was saying good-bye. We were saying good-bye in the airport. And he… Well, when he kissed me he sort of put his tongue in my mouth. Do you think that’s weird? “

“Are you fucking kidding! ” my boyfriend yells at me. “I can’t believe that! Yes, it’s weird! Of course it’s weird! It’s wrong! Did you tell your mother? ” I shake my head no.

I cover my face with my hands.

My boyeriend’s outrage forces me farther into secrecy. I realize that what I felt in the car while driving back to school, that the kiss has separated me from everything else, is true. It’s not a conceit or an overly dramatic interpretation. As for my mother, she is the last person I would tell about the kiss, she’s the one most likely to respond hysterically, even violently. She would prevent me from ever seeing my father again. And I can’t not see him again. From the time he left me, my first thought, the one that pushes aside my fears about the kiss, has been When. When will I see him again? When will we be together? He calls each daythe phone’s ring summoning me from the green chair even if registration and classes and friends cannot and we ask each other the same question over and over, When? I take my hands from my face. “I made a mistake, ” I tell my boyfriend. “I exaggerated. I-described it wrong.

It wasn’t exactly like that. He may have done it by accident. “

Bit by bit, layer by temporizing layer, I work to obliterate the truth.

My boyeriend, threatened himself by what I revealed, colludes with me in this process. Together we forget what I’ve said, even as privately I forget what my father did. It is as simple as only denial can be.

Don’t think about it) I tell myself, and I don’t, but it seems to require an enormous effort of will. Everything takes more energy than I have. I realize I’m in a kind of shock, a cold, sinking torpor gives it awaya sensation I recognize from a few years before, when I was hit by a car while riding my bike.

The position of my body in the green chair, knees drawn protectively up to my chest, the way I can only answer people’s questions internally, my voice won’t speak the words I hear in my head, these symptoms are the same as when I was lying in the street, unable to talk to the paramedic.

But now I retreat from the cause of my shock, I ascribe it to the discovery of my father and its implicit loss, to the grief over all the years we missed, to the unbearable injustice of getting him back when it’s too late, I’m all grown-up. I don’t let myself wonder if any of what I feel is in response to his kiss. Curled in the green vinyl chair for those two weeks, hugging an old blue afghan, I become one of the people to whom I wouldn’t mention such a thing as my father sticking his tongue in my mouth. There is an option offered by the university to students who suddenly find they can’t be students. It’s called “stopping out, ” to distinguish it from “dropping out. ” As long as I register again for classes before a full academic year has passed, I can rematriculate without having to reapply to the university. “Why do you want to do this? ” the counselor in the office of academic probation asks. The last time we talked was when my grades were lost through a computer error at the end of the first quarter of my freshman year. As an incoming student, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t received a pink grade slip in the mail I never missed what I didn’t know I was supposed to get and I was shocked when my case was described as one of a particular concern” since I hadn’t failed just one or two courses but rather had earned no units whatsoever during my first quarter. High school valedictorian, child who routinely threw up from nerves before Latin exams, ambitious student who within a week of arriving at college had petitioned the dean to allow me to take an unusually high course load, I spent an hour sobbing in this same counselor’s office before the computer glitch was caught and my professors contacted for my grades.

“I’m just having some family problems, ” I say to him now. “I need a little time to think. ” My tears, reminding him perhaps of those that proved so hard to stanch before, stop the interview. “Yes, yes. Of course, ” he says briskly. “I’ll just get the forms. ” The university returns my tuition fees and those for room and board, minus a prorated amount representing the two weeks I’ve wasted. No longer enrolled, I cannot remain in student housing, and so, despite my near paralysis, I have to move out. I use the refunded money to rent an apartment, a basement room with squat windows forced up to the low ceiling and plumbing tangled like entrails overhead. The pipes sweat and seep, filling the dark space with a uterine warmth. The basement, a labyrinth of dank, linoleum-floored units, is part of an old estate now engulfed by the campus. It borders the student commons, where the bookstore and bank and post office are located, and outside my windows busy feet walk or run by. The sky is invisible from my room. I can’t see past the trees in the rear courtyard. This is the spring that bagworms infest the oaks on campus, and the moths’ eggs fill silvery webbed pouches that hang from the branches outside my windows. Stray strands of silk twist in the breeze. I watch them, sitting on the end of my bed. My father continues to telephone me every day. He calls from his office, waiting until the rest of the church’s staff has gone home. We talk for hours every night, a courtship encouraged by the paradoxical intimacy of long-distance calls, the telephone’s invitation to say anything, to be more forthcoming, passionate, reckless in ways we might not be if we were meeting face-to-face. Our words about love are, like most people’s, unoriginal, unmemorable, but my father and I have a subject more consuming than love, Her. Love’s object. My mother.