The Kiss: A Memoir (16 page)

I end up throwing it out, letting it fall in a shining mass into one of the hospital garbage cans. Long hair is an obvious symbol of sexuality, and for me it was the safeguard of my femaleness when I’d given up my breasts and my period. By cutting my hair off, I tell my mother that my sexual life is severed as well. Discarding it, I promise her that she can die knowing the affair between her husband and her daughter is finished. How surprised I am, years later, when I see the altarpiece of the Church of Saint Dymphna in Gheel, Belgium. Sculpted by Jan van Wavre in the early sixteenth century, Dymphna’s father cuts off her hair, a long blond tail of it, as much like my own as a statue’s could be.

Except that I don’t let my father have that hair, or my life. “Oh! ” my father says when he sees me after the haircut. “My God, ” he says. “Dear God. ” He grieves over the hair as he does not over my telling him I’ve been accepted in graduate school, that I’ll be moving away in the next few months. “How could you take it from me! ” he cries. Malignancies in the bone are among the most painful of cancers, but they offer a solace that no other can. During the final weeks of my mother’s life her bones deteriorate at such a rate that in places they almost dissolve, and as they do they release calcium into her bloodstream enough calcium that the sedative property of the mineral is intensified to the point that she needs no morphine. The chemistry of her own death frees my mother from pain and anxiety, and each day she sleeps longer and more deeply, until at last she falls into a coma. Eyes closed, she no longer responds to the voices around her. As I look at her, I remember that once, when I was five, I lifted her mask as she slept. Gently, without waking her, I pushed it up onto her forehead, and then, since I couldn’t bear to look at her closed eyes to have her eyes perpetually closed to me I tried to do the same with her eyelids. I pushed one up, very gently. She woke in an instant, angry. “I… ” I whispered, stepping back. ai just wanted you. “Don’t ever do that! ” she said. “Don’t touch me! ” After that, she locked her door when she went to bed. For months she remembered to do it each night. But then one day she forgot. One morning when I tried the knob the door opened. And I returned to my place beside her, standing silently, not touching, just waiting. Waiting. “Wait here, ” the undertaker says. “She’ll be out in a *” minute.. When he returns, he’s put his suit jacket on, as if the meeting between me and my mother’s corpse requires a certain decorum. I follow him into the viewing room, decorated to look like a library with a wingbacked chair and bookshelves bearing, incredibly, a set of Encyclopedia Britannica bound in the same red leatherette as those my father sold my grandparents. Screwed into the fixture over the casket are pink The light light bulbs, like those my mother always used because she thought they made her look prettier. I wait by the door until the undertaker leaves. I wait until I’m alone to go to her. She’s small in the casket I chose. She lies so deep within it that I have to reach in to stroke her hair, rough and suddenly gray. Her cheeks are cool, dry, rouged. Her eyes are closed, and her lips as well.

When I bend over her, I smell embalming fluid. I touch her chest, her arms, her neck, I kiss her forehead and her fingertips, I lay my warm cheek against her cold one, and, as I do, something drops away from me, that slick, invisible, impenetrable wall. Whatever it was that separated me from my life, from the life I had before I met my father the remains of what was built in an instant by his long-ago kiss comes suddenly down. And as it does I gasp, I squeeze my mother’s fingers. Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I say. My God, oh God, it’s over. I reach under the bottom half of the lid for the catch to unlock it but find none. I slip my hand down as far as I can, past her knees, past the hem of her white dress. I want to touch and know all of her, want her feet in my palms.

Impossible to get my arms around her, she’s too heavy to lift, her dress too slippery to allow me any purchase. I cry and my tears fall in her hair and on her face. Her hands come undone from the crucifix they held and fall to her sides. I stay with my mother’s body for an hour, longer.

I stand by her casket until I grow tired, and then I pull up a chair so I can sit beside it. When I leave, I drive to my grandmother’s home only to get back into the car and return to the mortuary. I ask the undertaker if he would please have my mother brought back to the ..

room. “Again? ” he says, sounding annoyed. I nod.

“Please, ” I say. Just once more I have to return to her side, touch her hair, her cheek. Just once more I have to make sure that it’s…. The undertaker leaves. I wait until I’m alone to go to her. She’s small in the casket I chose. She lies so deep within it that I have to reach in to stroke her hair, rough and suddenly gray. Her cheeks are cool, dry, rouged. Her eyes are closed, and her lips as well.

When I bend over her, I smell embalming fluid. I touch her chest, her arms, her neck, I kiss her forehead and her fingertips, I lay my warm cheek against her cold one, and, as I do, something drops away from me, that slick, invisible, impenetrable wall. Whatever it was that separated me from my life, from the life I had before I met my fatherthe remains of what was built in an instant by his long-ago kisscomes suddenly down.

And as it does I gasp, I squeeze my mother’s fingers. Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I say. My God, oh God, it’s over. I reach under the bottom half of the lid for the catch to unlock it but find none. I slip my hand down as far as I can, past her knees, past the hem of her white dress. I want to touch and know all of her, want her feet in my palms.

Impossible to get my arms around her, she’s too heavy to lift, her dress too slippery to allow me any purchase. I cry and my tears fall in her hair and on her face. Her hands come undone from the crucifix they held and fall to her sides. I stay with my mother’s body for an hour, longer.

I stand by her casket until I grow tired, and then I pull up a chair so I can sit beside it. When I leave, I drive to my grandmother’s home only to get back into the car and return to the mortuary. I ask the undertaker if he would please have my mother brought back to the ..

vlewmg room. “Again? ” he says, sounding annoyed. I nod.

“Please, ” I say. Just once more I have to return to her side, touch her hair, her cheek. Just once more I have to make sure that it’s true, the spell is broken, her death has released me. At the funeral, serving as one of her pall bearers, my father knows, too, that it’s over. He looks at me and sees that I am no longer his. He reads it in my eyes that return his gaze levelly, that suddenly don’t find his eyes passionate or even mysterious, only bloodshot, weary. They narrow as he looks at me looking at him, and I see that he knows. The realization, surprisingly, does not provoke tears, his or mine. Without my mother as witness, do I no longer bewitch him? It is one of the many questions I never ask my father, one that occurs to me only after our break from each other, abrupt and final, one phone call during which neither of us cries or begs or says the word love. “It’s all or nothing? ” I ask. I don’t want to be the one to say what I know is true, we can’t start over, we have to say good-bye. Clumsily, I try to diffuse our agony with sarcasm.

“You’re not willing for the sake of novelty to try to be a little conventional? You know, the occasional phone call, birthday card? “

“Don’t you know me yet? ” my father says, his voice as low and as cold as I’ve ever heard it. “Don’t you know my answer? “

“Yes, ” I say. “I know. “

What else have the last years taught me if not that my father will take nothing less than all of me? “Which do you choose? ” he says after a long silence. nothing, ” I say. “You know that I have to choose nothing.

“

His wife packs the things I left in his house, and my grandmother pays to have them shipped back to me. thank God, ” she says when I ask her for the money. She gives voice to the words still ringing in my head, athank heavens, it’s over at last. ” Having so long prayed for release having begged fate for a deliverance I couldn’t yet effect on my own I don’t expect our parting to be painful. But the loss of my father will grieve me, it Will hurt and never cease hurting. I won’t escape it any more than I escape my love for my mother or my remorse over how gravely I wronged her. The loss of my father will haunt me as it did in the days long past, when I saw a man with no face walk the halls in our house.

Somewhere in the world is a father I can’t know. Once he was unknown in his absence, and now that I have known him, and he me, the rest of my life depends on our exile from each other. After the graveside service, my father and I stand silently by my mother’s casket, which is suspended over the dark, empty hole, awaiting descent. The plot my grandmother bought is a double-decker one, deep enough to leave room for her own remains to rest one day on top of my mother’s. But years later, when my grandmother dies, I disregard her wish to be buried in that grave. I have my grandmother’s body cremated and I scatter the ashes myself I won’t leave her resting for eternity on top of my mother, won’t leave my mother eternally under that weight.

When my mother’s headstone comes, it bears only her name and the dates of her birth and death. As soon as I see it, I’m sorry that I didn’t include the word Beloved. On the day I ordered it, the day after she died, I sat beside my grandmother in the cemetery’s business office and paged through the heavy book that illustrated the various styles of grave markers. I chose granite over bronze and I carefully picked among the types of lettering. But I left the space below the dates empty, because on that afternoon the only word that I could imagine carved in that blank struck me as one I didn’t deserve to use, rather than the truth that it was. Is. Beloved.

I don’t keep a journal of my dreams, but on February 7, 1995, I have one so unusual that I mark the date on my calendar, writing the word Mother.

For myself there’s no need to record what happens in the dream. I know that I will always remember everything about it. My mother finds me in my kitchen. It’s early one winter morning, and I’m preparing breakfast for my family, still asleep upstairs. I’m startled when I look up from the cutting board and see her, and I’m frightened. The only dreams I ever have of my mother are nightmares. But she seems friendly, almost eager. The light that comes through the glass door and falls on her is absolutely clear and white, sun reflected by snow. She wears a tailored navy blue suit, cut with care from fabric so lovely and lustrous that it shines. I am surprised that she has come to me years after her death, and I am fascinated by every detail of her presence. Her lapels, even how perfect they are! I want to touch them, her, but I am afraid of dispelling this ghost. I want to show her my children, but I can’t risk leaving the kitchen to rouse them or scaring her away by calling out.

Yet she doesn’t disappear, she is luminously real. With the split consciousness that sometimes characterizes a dream, I remark to my sleeping self that perhaps my mother’s spirit is really with me, that I can’t have fabricated a presence so convincing simply by virtue of longing. “Oh Mother, ” I say at last, not daring to touch her, “you are so very beautiful, and you are wearing the most exquisite suit.

” She shrugs offthe compliment as if she doesn’t care how she looks, as if she is no longer concerned with such things, and I know that we are both thinking of how it was at the end, how cancer stole her youth and beauty, how it mocked vanity. Nothing happens then, and yet everything transpires. My mother and I look closely at each other. We look into each other’s eyes more deeply than we ever did in life, and for much longer. Our eyes don’t move or blink, they are no more than a few inches apart. As we look, all that we have ever felt but have never said is manifest. Her youth and selfishness and misery, my youth and selfishness and misery. Our loneliness. The ways we betrayed each other. In this dream, I feel that at last she knows me, and I her. I feel us stop hoping for a different daughter and a different mother.

the end.