The Kissing List (10 page)

He still had all the Choose Your Own Adventure books that had once been mine and a beautiful hardback version of
Goodnight Moon
that he’d sold to Luke for five dollars just before both sets of parents put an end to their commercial activities because someone was always getting gypped.

“Do you remember when he got cut from the football team?” my mother said, holding up a dusty record album with a black cover. For some reason, Arnold had gotten a real stereo with a turntable and a tape player when he was a kid. If he weren’t dead, I probably would have started to joke-complain about the inequities of being the oldest.

“No,” I said.

“You don’t remember how he came home, and he locked himself in his room?”

“No,” I said.

“How can you not remember this?” she said.

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “You can’t suddenly expect me to remember everything.”

She didn’t look like a good liberal anymore, especially when she raised her hand as if she wanted to slap me. They had a flagpole in the front yard now, but they also drove a Prius. Grief had unpredictable results.

“What?” I said.

“What what?” she said.

If you think too hard about the grammar of talking, it can fill you with despair.

“What were you telling me?”

“He listened to this album …” It was Pink Floyd’s
The
Wall
. “He said it was so depressing it made him feel better about his own situation. It put everything in perspective.” She blew her nose into a Kleenex that she had been holding for three days straight. It looked like a clump of stringy bread dough. I offered her the tiny packet of tissue I’d stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans and thought of the following: the monkeys mopped up the banana slugs’ slime with their
pocket-size
tissue. Kids would get a kick out of a sentence like that, especially if one of the choices included pocket-size slime.

“That’s a nice story,” I said.

“It’s not a story,” she said, and before I could assure her that by story, I did not mean “made-up thing,” she added, “It’s the truth.”

T
he cat didn’t like Boise; there was so much grass she couldn’t decide which blades to eat. She stopped coughing up hairballs, grew sluggish, peckish. Nothing could rouse her, not even baby squirrels. That’s when I decided I should get married. We needed a to-do list that didn’t involve the Salvation Army and donations to scholarship funds and candlelight vigils and trying to track down girls from junior high dance pictures who probably have enough crap and heartache in their lives already without the news of Arnold. But, of course, before I marry, I need an Emil or a Neil, an Anil or a Niles—and it is not just a matter of switching letters and choosing the right form of the indefinite article. Everything would be more auspicious if no article were necessary, but I know better than most
that with hard work and discipline, you can do anything. At least, that’s what I tell kids in Ohio and West Virginia.

Everyone knows, though, that things happen, that the best-laid plans are sometimes ruined by surprises: the cat scrabbling around half the night with a mouse she’s brought in from the garden, milk mysteriously souring in the carton, skin too tender to be touched by anything, even clothing. When I am back at my desk after my trip to Boise, I see that the spider is still there. Moreover, she has laid another purse of eggs. Because of what happened the first time (a massive explosion of tiny spiders across the window, carnage), I use a tissue from the box on my desk, pluck the package of eggs from the web, and flush
the whole thing down the toilet. I avoid speculating about the spider’s feelings. Even though I caution students against talismans and charms
(You make your own luck! Hard work is what it takes!)
, I cross my fingers, hoping that Carlos is not in the garden, hidden behind the boisterous clumps of calla lilies that have just unfurled their smooth white trumpets, that he will not knock on my window and ask me why I am crying not just now, but in the morning when I am drinking my first cup of coffee and just after lunch when it is too soon to go back to work and I fill the minutes with little tasks like trimming my toenails and scanning old photos and sorting paper clips by size or color and also at other moments that I cannot predict and, even afterward, do not wholly understand.

I review process of elimination (POE) one more time because perhaps there’s still a slight chance that someone besides me will show up for my wedding.

Is it possible that I have eliminated the wrong choices, that my guesses have not increased my odds but done the opposite, taken them down to zero? There is the church, and there is the steeple. Open the doors, and there are the people: Arnold, my mother and father holding hands, my aunts and uncles and their children, my grandparents, all dead for many years, but surprisingly real-looking ghosts. There, at the front of the tiny chapel, is my neighbor Carlos, fussing with the flowers. As usual, he is greasy. In the third pew is my best friend, Vita, whom I have seen exactly once since Arnold’s death because I can manage multiple-choice questions, but not essays, and everything she asks requires an answer too long and complex for my state of mind. Grief has made me a misplaced modifier, a fragment, a _______ that is missing its subject …

But there is Emil! I always hoped he would turn out to be my betrothed, because of his wit, the shape of his green eyes, his strong hands and perfectly executed espresso.

An old organ starts to play the processional off-key in an
atmospheric way, and I glide down the aisle as though I have practiced walking in a long gown that I bought from Second Time Around to compensate for my natural clumsiness, until I remember that I am the one who writes the multiple-choice questions, and I know the right answers, and there is only one.

I wish I could admit to students that guessing still involves a risk, dumb luck, pretty good odds of being in the wrong place at the right time.

“Shit,” Arnold said the last time I talked to him on webcam. “I almost stepped on a camel spider last night. If I’d gone to the can just a few minutes earlier …”

He must have recognized the look on my face, the same one I wore the time we saw a rattlesnake in the foothills above Boise. Don’t believe a word of what you read about camel spiders, he told me. “First of all, they’re not technically spiders, they’re solpugids.”

I thought,
Maybe Arnold will go back to school and study entomology when he gets out of the Marines. Maybe he will be able to explain how slugs sneak into houses. Maybe he will show me a way to live with them peacefully
.

“And they don’t eat camels’ stomachs, and they can’t run thirty miles per hour. Yeah, they’re scary as hell, but they’re only six inches long. I don’t know how they doctor those photos so they wind up looking as big as a man’s thigh bone.”