The Kiss: A Memoir (8 page)

Its head moved in the same blind bobbing circles as before. Having failed once, I didn’t spare the remaining four kittens, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing. I finished the job weeping, and the fur around all of the kittens’ eyes was wet as well. They looked as exhausted and grief-stricken as I felt, and they curled into their mother’s warm belly and went to sleep. Within a day their eyes were swollen shut, tightly resealed under lids that showed red beneath the fine white fur. I picked one up and tried to brush away the yellow crust that had formed in the corner of one of its eyes. A worm of pus shot out, and, shocked, I dropped the kitten. I knew this was the worst thing I had ever done, too awful to confess, and when I told my grandmother that I thought something was wrong with the kittens’ eyes, I didn’t tell her what, only that they looked funny to me. My voice shook as I talked to her. “What’s wrong with you? ” she said.

“Nothing, ” I said. “My throat is sore, ” I lied.

The veterinarian kept the cat and the kittens for a week. When they returned, their eyes were open and clean, a pale icy blue, disdainful, disinterested. I pulled a string on the floor and they followed it. “But I thought you wanted one, ” my grandmother said when they were older, when she was selling them. “I don’t, ” I told her.

“Why not? “

“I just don’t, that’s all. I changed my mind. “

On our way to my mother’s, the backseat of the car filled with camera equipment, my father and I have our first fight, one that begins, like most lover’s quarrels, with a misunderstanding as absurd as it is revealing. On a street corner outside a little bistro where we ate dinner, we argue about the price of shampoo. He insists that at some point during his previous visit, I spent thirty dollars on a bottle of shampoo. “I never! ” I say. “Are you kidding! Thirty dollars? “

“I watched you. “

“It must have been three dollars. When was it? Where? “

“I saw you hand the cashier the money. “

“Look, ” I say, feeling the shift in the conversation, it’s gone from trivial to deadly serious. “In my entire life I have never spent more than four dollars on shampoo, and that was a very big bottle. “

“But you did, ” he says, his face red. “I saw you. “

“Come on. Not even my mother would spend that much on shampoo.

I don’t even think it’s possible. ” We pursue the topic, ridiculous, essential, until we are too exhausted to continue. Nothing I say will convince him of the truth. But, at twenty, I am still in the throes of rebelling against my mother’s extravagance. I wear thrift-store sweaters, army surplus trousers, and when I buy shampoo, I ostentatiously spend a dollar fifty-nine on a tube of Prell in response to my mother’s ten-dollar vials of Klorane, her five-dollar, half-ounce applications of rare, cuticle-smoothing emollients. Twenty years past his humiliation by my family, years spent in feverish accomplishment two master’s degrees and one doctorate from top universities, followed by a notably quick ascension through the ranks of his church my father is still stinging. To me he ascribes my mother’s waste of money, and for it he punishes me. And when I at last give in, it isn’t only because our argument is pointless and unresolvable. “Okay, ” I say. “Okay, you’re right, ” deciding that in this small way I can atone for his being shamed by the people who raised me. After all, I know how foolish, how frail and mistaken my mother and grandmother can make a person feel. My father tells me that his ordination was postponed by mandatory psychoanalysis, and I am not as interested in this confession as I should be. I want my father to be perfect. The details he offers are scant. In one of the small towns where he served as a traveling pastor in the days he described to me when I was ten and chose a barn to paint for him he put his fist through a church wall. Damned by his gifts as much as by his misfortunes, my father’s intelligence is itself an enemy.

The mind that fascinates me with its nimbleness, its elastic capacity, could outwit most psychiatrists. It cant have taken him long to perceive which behaviors and opinions were appropriate to a minister and which ones he had better keep to himself. If therapy was useful to him, it was that in its context he learned how to create a desirable profile for a pastor, even if, as he says to me, he has “unresolved problems with the church. ” In spite of those conflicts, my father needed badly enough to succeed on the world’s terms to prove my grandparents wrong in their harsh dismissal of him that by force of will he accomplished all he did with his rage intact, his hurt as sharp as mine, and directed against the same person as mine. The greatest blindness we share, my father and I, is that neither of us knows how angry we are. It’s perhaps because I cannot admit my fury that I don’t see what he hides from himself. And he, long practiced in self-deception, doesn’t see my anger either.

Whatever passions we feel, we call love. We’re late arriving at my mother’s, where we discover that the hard-won, precarious balance of our threesome, our “little family, “

has been undone. My father no longer makes the gesture of taking one photograph of my mother for every one of me, and not only his camera has shifted its focus. In my mother’s home, both of us her guests, my father and I forsake her, our former object of devotion, for each other. All that the three of us did together in relative comfort on the previous visit trips to galleries to look at art, trips to gardens to look at plants, to restaurants to look at each other has become awkward, and quite literally so. We bump into one another, we step on each other’s feet, we knock over flowerpots. My father is an unsettling presence in my mother’s living room, where objects are carefully chosen and placed, surfaces immaculate, where the protocol is that emotions remain veiled, postures chaste. Even when he is silent, his features composed, my father’s heavy white flesh conveys a voluptuous sorrow in the gravity it demands. It’s as if his weight were more a psychic than a physical burden.

His arms are fat like a boy’s, and his corpulence makes him not sexless but androgynous, adding female to the male. His limbs are large and strong but their muscles are cloaked with fat, their strength hidden by it. And while he isn’t grossly over weightin suits he appears big rather than obese beneath the thin fabric of his shirt a heavy man’s breasts are disconcertingly visible. His large hands are beautiful the way men’s rarely are, each finger straight, strong, manicured, and his fleshy feet are pampered as well, the gracefully formed toenails smoothly filed. We joke about how much prettier are his feet than mine or my mother’s.

For women like my mother and myself, careful listeners to society’s normative messages of beauty and gender, a body such as my father’s and his utter lack of self-consciousness over it are as subversive and disquieting as is his readiness to weep. Everything about my father bespeaks appetites satisfied, hurts soothe. In contrast to my own flesh, always silenced, its hunger and pain ignored, his so white, so indolent both fascinates and repels me. I find my eyes return again and again to the dark points of his nipples. How different they are from the shriveled coins of college boys’, their hard chests, lean bellies. At meals, when my father bites into buttered bread or a banana or even something as yielding as yogurt, I can hear his teeth come together.

They meet with a little snap, and I shudder at this noise that betrays the force of his hunger, and that reminds me of my own. Of a lifetime of hidden, thwarted desire. This time, when I return to my mother’s house after taking him to the airport no kiss, instead a feverish, disheveled embrace she is pacing around the white couch in her living room.

“There’s something wrong with all of this, ” she says. “I feel it. ” I sit down on the couch, exhausted, tear-stained. “Wrong with what? ” I say, betraying my impatience, my unwillingness to be forced to defend myself, or him. “You know, ” she says, “he isn’t normal. Your father …

. IS not a normal person. “He isn’t? ” I say. “What do you mean? ” I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to have conversations with anyone but my father, and my mother is angry, I can tell. She has that stiff prowl, all of her held in tight control except for her dark, darting eyes. “Anyway, ” I say, “who is normal? ” It’s a retort that, much later, my father will throw at me. “I don’t know. I’m just uneasy about this. You’re…

you’re fixated on each other. I mean, I understand it in youyou’ve never had a father. Any one would expect you to be mesmerized. But him”

My mother stops and turns. “You know, ” she says, pointing, “this isn’t about you. It’s about me. ” By “it”and I know this right away, there’s nothing more clear than this usually vague little word she means the love my father professes, the trembling hands and hot eyes. All of what she has noticed and is frightened by. So inappropriate, so immoderate.

So abnormal to love me so completely, that’s what I hear her say.

What I hear is that not only does my mother not love or admire me, but she will find a way to reinterpret my father’s love, to make it all her own. She folds her arms and looks at me. I look away. I won’t let her see with what deft strokes she can cut the very ground from beneath my feet. By claiming all of my father’s devotion, she pushes me toward him.

Because, if she won’t love me, then the only way not to fall into the abyss of the unloved is by clinging to him. “Don’t you see? ” she insists. “Can’t you see that I’m right?

” I don’t answer. No, I don’t see. I won’t.

Years after my mother’s death, I’ll know that she was right. I’ll read letters my father sent to her when she was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, seventy-six of them stored in a Charles Jourdan shoe box, the last of which is dated October 22, 1970, and invokes the word love in all but one sentence. I’ll read the letters through and then read them again.

Like all children, I’ll be compelled forever by my parents’ courtship.

But what will fascinate me about the letters my father sent my mother will not be any quaint “otherness, ” not their belonging to a time different from my own, but their absolute familiarity. I’ll have read letters just like them, letters addressed to me. The ones written to me are written in the same language, the language of desire, of possession.

The ones to me include identical lines from poems and songs. I’ll weep reading the letters my father sent my mother, for all that is in them, all that I so wanted to believe was mine and only mine was, as she said, hers. In my basement apartment, my life is one of idle enervation. The research projects I owe to my grandparents, the reason for remaining on campus and spending their money on rent, are a sham. My time, empty of activity, is filled by my father. I think of no one else, of nothing else. It is April. It is May. Days pass unmarked, except in relation to how long it is since last we were together and how long it will be before we’re together again. Neither of us is satisfied with anything less than the total possession of the other. My father doesn’t care if he has interrupted my education or cut me off from my friends, he delights in any evidence of my enslavement to him. And I never consider his work or his family, the money spent on phone bills and airfares instead of on his children’s clothing. I have embarked on a peculiar passage in my life a time out of real time, one which will not fit either into the life I lived as a child or the one I create as a woman, but which will carry me, like a road, from one to the other. “You were named for saints and queens, ” my mother told me when I was young enough that a halo and a crown seemed interchangeable. We weren’t Catholics yet. We were members of the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Above my bed was a plaque bearing these words from its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, “Father mother Good, lovingly the I seek. In the way thou hast, be it slow or fast, up to the. ” The little prayer, which I was taught to recite as I fell asleep, scared me. I didn’t want to die fast. As every asthma attack I had seemed capable of killing me, when I wasn’t thinking of my mother I thought of death and of God. They made my first trinity, Mother, Death, God. By the time I was born, all that survived of my grandparents’

Jewishness was that our household was pervaded by a sense of clean and unclean, chosen and unchosen. My mother never went to temple, and I think the faith of her forebears must have struck her as dowdy and workaday, lacking the overt glamour of crucifixion. The blood of Judaism was as old and dull as a scab, whereas Christ’s flowed brightly each Sunday. I might have remained immune to the mind-over matter doctrines of Mrs. Eddy if I had not, when I was six, suffered an accident that occasioned a visit to a Christian Science practitioner, or healer. Since my mother had moved out, my grandfather drove me to school in the morning, a ride that was interrupted dramatically the day the old Lincoln’s brakes failed. Pumping the useless pedal, my grandfather turned off the road to avoid rear-ending the car ahead of us. We went down a short embankment, picked up speed, crossed a ditch, and hit a tree. On impact, the door to the glove compartment popped open, and, not wearing a seat belt, I sailed forward and split my chin on its lock mechanism, cracking my jawbone. My grandfather was not hurt. He got me out of the wrecked, smoking car and pressed a folded handkerchief to my face. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and chin, and I started to cry, from fear more than pain. I was struggling against this makeshift compress when, by a strange coincidence, my mother, enroute to the law office where she worked as a secretary, saw us from the street and pulled over. Her sudden mate rialization, the way she sprang nimbly out of her blue car, seemed to me angelic, magical, an impression enhanced by the dress she was wearing that morning, one with a tight bodice and a full crimson skirt embroidered all over with music notes. Whenever she wore this dress I was unable to resist touching the fabric of the skirt.

I found the notes evocative, mysterious, and if she let me, I traced my finger over the stitched dots as if they represented a different code than that of music’s, like Braille or Morse, a message that I might in time decipher. My mother was unusually patient and gentle as she helped me into her car. We left my grandfather waiting for a tow truck and drove to a nearby medical center, where I was x-rayed and prepared for suturing. I lay under a light so bright it almost forced me to close my eyes, while a blue disposable cloth with a hole cut out for my chin descended over my face like a shroud, blocking my view of my mother. I held her hand tightly, too tightly, perhaps, because after a moment she pried my fingers off and laid my hand on the side of the gurney. She had to make a phone call, she said, she had to explain why she hadn’t shown up at work. I tried to be brave, but when I heard my mother’s heels click away I succumbed to animal terror and tried to kick and naw my way after her. All I understood was that she was leaving me again this time with strangers and it took both the doctor and his nurse to restrain me.