The Kiss: A Memoir (3 page)

In the photographs he takes I’m wearing a yellow dress with tight elastic at the waist and sleeves, and I remember that dress, how uncomfortably it gripped the top of my arms. In memory its hold is not distinguishable from that of his large-fingered hand as he guides me into the positions he wants. When he returns, I’m ten, and the three of us go to the art museum and to the farmers’ market. At the museum, my mother and father hold hands and I trail several yards behind, all of us perspiring and moving with dull languor through the airless galleries.

At one point, I put my hot hands on the cool foot of a huge marble statue of Venus, and my father wheels around and reprimands me. “Hasn’t anyone taught you not to touch things in a museum! ” he says, and he looks disapprovingly at both my mother and me. At lunch in the farmers’

market my chair is pushed uncomfortably close to the table’s edge, so close that I feel I can’t breathe, and I am on the floor a good deal of the time, retrieving silverware I’ve nervously dropped. I sense that my father regards me with some curiosity his child, after all and little pleasure. I am, as I have been from my birth, the inevitable compromise of my parents’ privacy. Ten years later ten years after the day I look at his black shoes from my vantage under the table everything has changed. My father mails me cassette tapes he’s made, and I play them on my car’s tape deck.

I drive to a shopping center a few miles from the university’s post office, and with the car doors locked, I use my thumbnail to slit the tape sealing the small white box. His voice fills the car. It rises, falls, begs, breaks. Girl, he calls me. Oh, girl. My girl. Alone in my car, I put my hands over my face as I listen. I am no less enslaved to him than I have been to my mother. I play the tape over and over, pushing the rewind button so that I can hear as often as I like the sound of my father telling me he wants me. His recorded voice is something I will keep forever, and something that, when it’s over, I won’t allow myself to hear. Like his letters and photographs, the cassettes will be locked in a trunk, returning him all evidence of the man to his original relationship to me, the lost father.

I tell my mother that I want to send my father a gift, something I make myself. It must be that I hope to erase or at least mitigate the poor impression I’m afraid I made on him during the last visit, when he scolded me in the sculpture gallery. “What about one of your paintings?

” she suggests.

I’m enrolled in an art class that meets on Wednesdays after school.

“All right, ” I agree. In the class, I’m learning to paint in oils the traditional way, by copying existing works, often reproductions featured on calendars or torn from old greeting cards. The one I use as a model for my father’s painting is of a red barn surrounded by yellow fields and haystacks. I choose it because, sitting across the table in the farmers’ market, my father told me that he drives past farms while traveling between the two small churches he serves. The barn’s door is open and no interior shows, only a black shadow. I sketch the picture’s outlines onto my canvas with a pencil, and over the next weeks I paint the yellow hay and the barn’s red roof and sides. The trotting-horse weather vane, which I expect to be so difficult, turns out nicely, and it’s the seemingly simple part that goes awry. I can’t paint the black rectangle of shadow formed by the open barn door so that it looks even, it’s -wobbly on both sides. I set out to make the shadow right. I work on the doorway for months, trying to get it perfect. At one point, the teacher tries to take the canvas away, but I won’t let her, and week by week the shadow grows bigger and bigger, its outlines no less uneven.

Masking tape and a straight edge don’t help. When I at last give up, I see that in the effort to perfect the shadow, I’ve made it so big that the doorway almost fills the outlines of the barn itself. As I sat before my easel, I fell headlong into a dark square of uncertainty, whose limits I tried over and over to define, never getting them right.

“Well, you can’t send him that! ” my mother says when she sees it. “What on earth happened to it? “

“I don’t know, ” I say. “I don’t know. “

It looks so funny that she cannot help from laughing, nor I from crying.

She brings a tape recorder from her apartment and sets it up on my bed.

I’m old enough to write letters, as old as twelve perhaps, but I’m supposed to use tapes in lieu of pencil and paper to send messages to my father. She promised him I would. I can push the square red button when I’m ready, she says. When she grows bored with my unreadiness, she leaves the room.

I follow her. I don’t want to be left alone with the heavy black box studded with silver knobs. Looking at it, I see a black casket with shiny steel hardware, the kind into which a magician locks a girl before he saws her in half. I cling to my mother’s sleeve, making her angry. We try over and over to induce me to say something into the microphone on the end of the black wire. Nothing works. Not threats, not promises. My mouth, so uncooperative. At swimming school it opens under the surface of the pool and water rushes in, choking me. In front of the tape recorder, it closes on my tongue, refuses to surrender even one word.

Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that will undo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until that sentence comes, I say nothing. It begins when I’m twenty. It begins with a visit, and afterward my mother and I disagree over whose idea it was to invite him.

My mother says that it was mine. I think it was hers. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen him, and if my mother is right if inviting my father to come see us was my idea it must be that my curiosity over the hidden parent, the other half of me, is great enough to overcome the discouragement of the letters. Perhaps I suspect or hope that passion lies behind such a bluster of ideology. That something must require such a screen, some interesting beast must be contained by this cage within cage of words. My parents have shared their secret meetings over the years. In distant cities, and despite another wife and other children, they’ve said they would run away, remarry, try it again, but their plans always fall through. My mother and father were together for no more than two years, married for less than one, divorced before my first birthday.

If I suspect that the coming visit is my mother’s idea, it’s because I don’t remember suggesting it myself, and it has been too long since she’s seen him too long since she’s taken any solitary, mysterious vacations. Perhaps what I later conclude is true, she uses his curiosity about me, and mine about him, as the excuse to plan a reunion that will include her. If this is the case, how bitterly she will come to regret the ruse. The visit is scheduled for spring break of my junior year in college, exactly a week after my twentieth birthday, which falls, as usual, in the middle of exams. “So, ” says my boyfriend, bidding me good-bye in the parking lot outside my dorm. “Pretty heavy. “

“Do you think? ” I ask. I’ve carefully not considered the prospect of seeing my father for the first time in ten years, for only the third time in my life. As always, my course load was heavy, and the last weeks were lost to late hours in the library. “Are you kidding? ” he says, and I shrug and look ,. away, a gesture, one among my many, or evasive. This boyfriend is older than I, a graduate student. He’s a gentle person, and the quality affords him a unique position in my brief history of boyfriends. His own father died when he was an infant, he has no stepfather. Having missed his lost father for all of his life, he knows what I cannot admit, that some of the longing in my life must be focused on that hole in the family portraits. It cannot all be consecrated to my mother. The drive home takes seven hours, hours during which I play the same Rolling Stones album over and over, letting the tape deck’s auto-reverse mechanism make a continuous loop of sound. The insistent rhythms consume the miles of gray highway and make deep consideration impossible.

My thoughts skip and skid and skitter like the discarded cups and candy wrappers on the windy embankments. My grandmother’s bedroom, the two of us sitting together at the foot of my grandparents’ big bed. I’m six, maybe seven. She’s just taken a bath. She’s wearing a slip and is drawing one of her old-fashioned stockings up over her knee and fastening it to her garter. In her sixties, she still has nice legs. Her skin is a warm olive, smooth and lustrous, her kneecaps, as small and inviting as walnuts, make me want to touch them. As she does every day, she is wearing Chanel No. 5 and the string of pearls her father gave her when she was seventeen. around my neck, ” she says, and I run my fingers lightly over the place where her blacked hair is shorn just at the nape.

do you know, ” I say, “I love you more than anyone else in the world. I love you more than Mommy. ” My grandmother takes my hand from her neck.

“No,” she says.

“You don’t. ” I am silent, chastened by her refusal of what I’ve given her.

“You love your mother best. That’s the way it is for every child, and that’s the way it is for you. too. It’s a scrupulous rather than truthful statement from my grandmother She fully intends that I should love her best she wants to be everyone’s first love but at the time, many of her arguments with my mother have to do with whether one or the other of them is plotting to alienate my affections. As my mother has recently moved out, perhaps inspiring this pragmatic shift of adoration, my grandmother is careful not to say anything seditious that I might repeat. I watch as she pulls up her other stocking and fastens it. That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for evasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.

Rebuked by my grandmother, sitting in silence beside her, I begin to teach myself to define what I really feel toward my mother a desperate, fearful anger over her having abandoned me, an anger that has left me stricken with asthma and rashesas love. And what about my mother, so ready to use the word, to write me a note comprised of nothing but kiss’s and the hollowness of her hugs? Her anger with me is wild and uncontrolled, a force that seems to take her by surprise as much as it does me. Once, just before she moves out, I get underfoot while she is dressing for a date. She is late, and I am irksome.

Standing with her before her mirror, I reach under her arm for one of her lipsticks, and she turns on me with her hairbrush. Her blows fall all over me. She chases me down the staircase, hitting whatever she can reach my back, my legs,” she says.

“You don’t. ” I am silent, chastened by her refusal of what I’ve given her.

“You love your mother best. That’s the way it is for every child, and that’s the way it is for you. too. It’s a scrupulous rather than truthful statement from my grandmother She fully intends that I should love her best she wants to be everyone’s first love but at the time, many of her arguments with my mother have to do with whether one or the other of them is plotting to alienate my affections. As my mother has recently moved out, perhaps inspiring this pragmatic shift of adoration, my grandmother is careful not to say anything seditious that I might repeat. I watch as she pulls up her other stocking and fastens it. That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for evasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.

Rebuked by my grandmother, sitting in silence beside her, I begin to teach myself to define what I really feel toward my mothera desperate, fearful anger over her having abandoned me, an anger that has left me stricken with asthma and rashesas love. And what about my mother, so ready to use the word, to write me a note comprised of nothing but kiss’s and the hollowness of her hugs? Her anger with me is wild and uncontrolled, a force that seems to take her by surprise as much as it does me. Once, just before she moves out, I get underfoot while she is dressing for a date. She is late, and I am irksome.

Standing with her before her mirror, I reach under her arm for one of her lipsticks, and she turns on me with her hairbrush. Her blows fall all over me. She chases me down the staircase, hitting whatever she can reach my back, my legs, the top of my head. At the bottom of the stairs, I collapse in tears, at first in shock and fear, but afterward, when my grandmother and grandfather have come running to the sound of my sobs, I cry with the intention of getting my mother in trouble, cry harder and longer, learning the power of vengeance. Necklaces. Rings Clothes.

Books. A portable stereo and lenses for my camera. The fountain pen he used in college. His grandfather’s razor and strop in its original pewter case etched with curlicues. A diamond stud that belonged to someone I can’t remember who. Some of his gifts I’ll give away, and others I’ll sell to a pawnbroker, tearing up the claim check as soon as I’m outside the shop’s door.

The heirlooms I’ll return, packed carefully into a box, insured at the post office and mailed without a letter to his address. They belong to his children. Not me, but the children he raised, the daughters who will still be his when we no longer speak. Christmas presents. Birthday presents. Presents for Easter, for Valentine’s Day, for Halloween. All re wrapped in the pretty paper I am careful not to tear, ribbons I untie but do not cut. I retrieve the bright papers and bows from trash cans after the celebrants of whatever occasion it is have gone to bed.

Smooth them, replace them around the boxes. I have to preserve them just so, this evidence of my mother’s love, or what passes for it> what she calls love. Her gifts are valuable in that they always provide clues as to how I might ingratiate myself. If she gives me a dress in a size six, then I know to alter my size ten self to fit it. I can make myself the creature she imagines she might love, at least while standing in the store where she buys the dress. It will be years before I can acknowledge that in preserving such evidence I document another, different emotional transaction, not one of love but of rage, my rage over always receiving directives disguised as gifts and my refusal, ultimately, to accept them. Under the Christmas tree I make the appropriate noises of delight, but then later, alone, after the house is dark, I reverse my response, I reject the gifts by wrapping them back up as if I’ve never opened them. It’s possible to apply this bifurcated vision to other areas of my life. An uneasy relationship with food is the standard example in cases such as my mother’s and mine. At fifteen, when I stop eating, is it because I want to secure her grudging admiration? Do I want to make myself smaller and smaller until I disappear, truly becoming my mother’s daughter, the one she doesn’t see?