Kissing in America (21 page)

T
wo years ago, six weeks after my dad died, we'd received a call. A man on the phone who said,
We've recovered Mr. Roth's remains.

Remains? You have a body?

We've identified a hand and forearm that match the DNA of Mr. Roth.

A hand.

My father's hand.

That was the part of him they'd identified. The
remains
.

We'd had to decide if we wanted it sent to a funeral home and cemetery of our choosing, to be buried.

Our rabbi said that was what we should do. That according to Jewish law, or at least his interpretation of it, we should bury it in a grave.

I asked to wait. To see if they'd find the rest of him, the body with the missing hand. The weeks passed and nothing more was found, so we went ahead with the burial.

My mom didn't invite anyone else and we almost didn't go ourselves—she wanted to back out—but I made her promise to take me.

At the cemetery, a tent was set up beside my father's grave. It was raining. We carried black umbrellas. We walked toward the tent, stared into the hole and at the coffin waiting to be lowered inside it.

“Hello, hand!” I said brightly.

“It's not funny,” my mom said. “Why do you have to make this into something funny?”

“
He'd
think it's funny. He'd laugh. He'd think it was hysterical that we're having a ceremony for his hand.”

And forearm, I wanted to add, but didn't.

It was absurd. It was absolutely and completely absurd and no one ever warned me how this would feel.

Now
hand and forearm
was etched in my brain forever. I couldn't stop thinking of what it must look like inside the full-size coffin (they don't make a hand-size one; it would be inappropriate, according to my mother), and I pictured it like the Halloween pranks boys in my third grade class used to do: sticking their finger in a box, making it look disembodied, with ketchup spots.

Or like a horror movie, its bloody edge with gristle and veins, a violence. I couldn't stop my mind from thinking of what had happened to the rest of his body, to the body I loved, the chest I'd crawl up on to nap and how happy I felt there, and how that could be destroyed, how I wanted to think of him in one piece but never could.

One day in school, I was trying to write the words
one piece
and instead I wrote
one peace
.

A person should die in one peace.

A good death.

People shouldn't die with their bodies destroyed.
How you die
was never a phrase that had entered my head before.

At the cemetery, my mom wore sunglasses. She'd taken a pill that morning, something her doctor had prescribed. She asked the rabbi to keep it short.

“No,” I said. “Let him do the whole thing.” I sort of liked the rabbi, with his long face and maplike certainty about how we should proceed, his self-assurance. I'd already gone along with my mom and agreed not to have a real funeral in a funeral parlor, but just a graveside service, just a burial. Just.

My mom couldn't even watch the service. She kept looking off to the side. Fidgeting. Buttoning and unbuttoning her coat. The rain stopped. Sweat beaded at her forehead. She kept glancing at the taxi, which waited nearby. They'd given us an hourly rate and it was going to be an expensive fare. There'd been traffic.

“Can you pay attention?” I asked her.

The rabbi paused, embarrassed.

My mom smiled awkwardly; she looked like she wanted to run away or throw up. She didn't even recite the Kaddish, the mourner's prayer; she kept the card in her hand without reading the words.

“You're not doing this right,” I said.

“Don't tell me how to do it right.”

“You don't even miss him.”

“Stop it.”

“You don't! You didn't want to give him a funeral! Why are we the only ones here? Where are his friends? My friends? Why couldn't they come too?”

She took off her sunglasses. “Don't do this to me.”

The rabbi paused the ceremony. He took us aside separately. He talked to my mom for a while, hovering by the gravestones along the trees. Then he spoke to me. “Your mother is having a difficult time. Understandably,” he told me.

“Not understandably,” I said.

He was patient. Maybe he'd learned how to handle mother-and-daughter funeral squabbles in rabbi school. Maybe they had a whole class called
Crazy Grievers: What to Do When Mom and Kid Fight over Burial of Severed Hand. And Forearm.

“She feels ill. It may be the medication her doctor prescribed. She needs to go home,” he said. He told me that she was going to leave in the taxi, and he'd finish the service with me and drive me back to Queens.

My mom tried to hug me, but I stiffened like I did when I was four and she tried to get me into a snowsuit. She let go and climbed into the cab. She took off.

I was alone at my dad's funeral. My shoulders curled with ten different kinds of shame, and things were never the same with my mom and me again.

We started unraveling, then. We'd been unraveling ever since.

The rabbi and I finished the ceremony, and he let me shovel dirt onto the coffin after it was lowered into the ground, but without my mom there that didn't feel right, either.

When it was over, I sat by the grave. The rabbi stood off to the side, leaving me and the hand alone. I prayed for the first time in my life. I'd never asked anything of God before—in synagogue my thoughts were usually limited to
What will I eat when this is over?
—but now I had a real prayer. Maybe because I thought He might actually be listening, that there might be some kind of direct line when you're sitting in a graveyard. I prayed:
Please bring the rest of his body back
. The words kept echoing in my mind. Other words echoed too, not so much a prayer as a one-line poem:
If he's shattered, I'm not whole
.

I didn't stay at the cemetery much longer. Maybe an hour. On the way home I sat beside the rabbi, picking at the leather seat, watching the suburbs turn back into the city and wishing I could be somebody else, giving anything in the world to be somebody else.

When I got back to our apartment my mom was asleep, and when she awoke we pretended that nothing had happened. We were still pretending.

I'd never even told Annie or Lulu about that day—I'd only told them it was awful and I wanted to forget it.

Now that memory of the funeral crushed me fully, and those little bits of thumb-squashing on top of it, push after push that built up over time until I felt like I'd been knocked
to the floor. I thought of how much happier I'd felt this week, being away from my mom—how I felt like myself. I wanted to keep being free from her. I didn't want to pretend anymore.

I picked up my phone. I had four missed calls and a voice mail from my mom that I didn't listen to.

I called her back. My hand wobbled as I dialed the number.

She picked up right away. I took a deep breath and tried to level my voice. “I have to tell you something. I'm not staying at Janet's condo in LA,” I said. “The show is giving us a hotel room and we're going to use it.” She tried to interrupt me, but I didn't let her. “And you know what? I'm done pretending with you. I'm done being your daughter.”

The words came out on their own. Just two days before, at the perfume stall at the rodeo, I'd missed her—but those feelings had been trampled away now. I wiped my face on my arm. More words came, like a boulder rolling. “I'm throwing your whistle in the garbage. I'm not answering your texts anymore. Maybe I'll stay in LA after the show. Maybe I won't come home.”

I hung up the phone.

She called me back. I didn't pick up. The ringer was silent, and I watched the calls pile up, Claire Roth, Claire Roth, Claire Roth, until I turned the power off. I was done with her. We were going to LA and I was done with my mother.

A
t the bus station the next day, Lulu waited on line beside us, clutching her elbows and shifting from foot to foot. We hugged her good-bye. Her belly felt hard beneath her soft dress.

She was jittery. “Please answer your mom's messages, just for today. She's so worried. . . .”

“I can't.” When we woke up that morning, Lulu already knew about the fight—my mom had emailed her. Lulu thought I should call her, but I couldn't. Lulu asked if I wanted to talk about it with her, but for the first time, I didn't want to. The feelings and anger felt so raw and confusing, and all I wanted to think about was getting to California, seeing Will, and winning the show. That was all that mattered.

She took off her sunglasses. “You'll meet Janet at the other end, right?”

I shrugged. I hadn't figured out how I'd handle Janet yet. All I knew was we'd traveled this far; we could handle LA on our own, without a chaperone.

She bit her lip. “I wish I could go with you. I don't like
seeing you take off with everything with your mom like this. Please call me from the road, okay? And call as soon as you get there. I want to know you're okay. And please try to get some sleep.” She touched my arm gently.

“I will,” I said.

She hugged me and Annie. “Take good care of each other,” she said to both of us.

We nodded and boarded the bus; the front seats were already taken. My mind buzzed from coffee and lack of sleep. I'd stayed awake the whole night, thinking of my father's body in a freezer container like that person had described, abandoned, no one telling us, no one telling me.

Annie squeezed my hand. When she'd woken up that morning and I'd told her what had happened, she'd looked at me with an expression that I've never seen in any other friend—her eyes absorbing all my feelings like a sponge, as if it were happening to her too.

W
e found seats in the third row; Annie took the spot by the window. An old woman sat across the aisle from me, knitting a scarf. Her tangerine hair floated above her scalp like a cloud; she clutched a tote bag embroidered with jumping kittens. She'd tied various trinkets onto the scarf's fringe—plastic rings, tiny children's toys, a miniature koala. She said, “Don't forget the battery acid!” and “Who took my foot grease?”

I elbowed Annie. Seven days into our trip and we'd met our first crazy bus person.

I reached into my backpack, opened my pillowcase, and checked everything was still inside. My fingers touched the glasses and tie and T-shirt. My eyes were completely dry. I was all cried out. I'd cried the tears behind the tears. My whole face felt numb.

I'd see Will tomorrow night. No one could stop us. The words rolled around in my head like marbles, like prayer beads: tomorrow night tomorrow night tomorrownight.

As we drove through Arizona, I sensed the crazy lady's
eyes on me. “I like your pillowcase. Nice pillowcase. Nice pillowcase,” she said.

Great. Anger fizzed inside me, a slow burning feeling, but instead of saying something, I stuck to the Normal New York City Response to Wackos Rule: Pretend They Don't Exist.

That was easier to do on a subway, where you could get up and change your seat. We were stuck in place, and the woman was only inches away across the aisle. The driver saw her staring at me in the rearview mirror. He called back to me, “Don't mind old Trinkets. She's harmless.”

Harmless. Except she smelled like foot grease.

I put on my earphones and listened to Will's mix again. At lunchtime, the driver pulled into a rest stop somewhere in the middle of western Arizona with a convenience store called Havalind's. A quirky-looking place with a slate roof and shingled siding. I hoped the crazy woman would get off, but no luck.

I left the bus to get something to eat while Annie watched our stuff. We'd been on the bus for almost three hours, but my legs were already feeling cramped and achy. Thank god this was our last bus day. We still had over six hours to go before we reached LA.

Havalind's didn't sell live crickets or elk jerky, but it had shelves and shelves of candy. Old-time candy like Pixy Stix and Candy Buttons, and ones I'd never heard of before: Valo­milks, Twin Bings, Nut Goodies, Idaho Spuds. They had
British candy bars, too: Crunchies, Starbars, Twirls, Aeros, and Flakes.

On the bottom shelf in the far right corner was a box of Toffee Crisps.

I picked up two, then four, then all they had. Seven total. Back on the bus, I stuck the brown bag of candy inside my pillowcase, and Annie took her turn to get food.

The bus was nearly empty; almost everyone had left on the break. People stood outside, smoking and talking on their phones.

I reached inside my backpack and took out three bars. I walked up to the front and opened the first one. The chocolate melted on my tongue. I tasted the soft gooey toffee and airy crunchy rice as I looked out the wide window, down the highway toward California. I ate the other two. I was so tired that I felt heavy all over, as if my body were filling with wet sand.

I heard something—a rustling noise—and turned around.

Orange hair bobbed between the rows. I went back to my seat. My backpack was unzipped. I reached inside and checked that my wallet was there—it was. The pillowcase was missing.

I wheeled around. “Where is it?”

The crazy woman looked away. She shook her head.

“Give it back.”

She gripped the handles of her kitten bag. Of course she
had it. She'd seen me take it out a moment ago.

“Give it to me.” My voice was sharp, sharper than it had ever been.

Her eyes looked blue and watery, bloodshot. She pressed the bag more tightly to her chest.

A force outside of myself seemed to act. It happened in half a second: grabbing Larry's Swiss Army knife out of my backpack, opening the blade, my feet firmly planted, the same stance I'd had when I'd shot the gun in Texas.

“Give me my goddamn stuff.”

She handed the pillowcase back to me and screamed.