The Kiss: A Memoir (9 page)

Once they had, I was tranquilized before I was stitched and then finally taken home asleep. Later that afternoon, I woke up screaming in a panic that had been interrupted, not assuaged, by the drug. My mother, soon exhausted by my relentless crying and clinging to her neck, her legs, her fingers to whatever she would let me me to a practitioner whose name she picked at random from the listings in the back of The Christian Science Journal. The practitioner was a woman with gray hair and a woolly, nubby sweater that I touched as she prayed over me, my head in her lap and one of her hands on my forehead, the other over my heart.

Under those hands, which I remember as cool and calm, even sparing in their movements, I felt my fear drain away. Then the top of my skull seemed to be opened by a sudden, revelatory blow, and a searing light filled me. Mysteriously, unexpectedly, this stranger ushered me into an experience of something I cannot help but call rapture. I felt myself separated from my flesh, and from all earthly things. I felt myself no more corporeal than the tremble in the air over a fire. I had no words for what happened I never will have and in astonishment I stopped crying. My mother sighed in relief, and I learned, at six, a truth dangerous to someone so young and so lovelorn. I saw that transcendence was possible, that spirit could conquer matter, and that therefore I could overcome whatever obstacles prevented my mother’s loving me. I could overcome myself. Every day the sun rises and sinks over the Grand Canyon, each time filling it with shadows the color of blood. On the road we are free, and yet it is a freedom too exhausting to sustain.

There’s no place to light or to rest, and though for now it goes unrecognized, denied, there will always be the knowledge that what we felt during our first stricken week together is the truth, We lost each other. We lost my childhood and his fatherhood and twenty years of love, and these losses are not recoverable. We are fleeing from this truth, but we can’t flee indefinitely. After months of letters and calls, as many as three of each in a day, all promising devotion, all asking for mine, my father has prepared me for what he requests. “I’m not sure I want to, ” I say. “I don’t think I can. ” My teeth chatter in the warm car. It’s dusk when he finally says it. The canyon is dark. The canyon is a river of blood, because when my father says the words I’ve dreaded”make love” is the expression he uses—God’s heart bursts, it breaks. For me it does. “I love you, ” my father says. “I need you. “

“I need you, too, ” I whisper. Please don’t make this the price, I beg silently. “What are you afraid of? ” he asks.

I’m afraid that whatever he wants, I will give him. It’s only a matter of time. “Going to hell, ” I say, not really joking. He laughs to tell me I’m being childish, naive. In his laugh are all his years of studying theology held up against my ignorance of whatever God and His anger might be like. “There are rules that apply to most people, ” says my father, “and there are people who are outside of those rules. People who are”

“How can you know that you that weare exceptions? “

“I just do, ” he says. “You’ll have to trust me. “

My father and I argue about the nature of love and its expression.

These conversations begin like academic papers with suffocating theories, Latin and Greek words from divinity school, agape, caritas.

Not eros.

But then abruptly they devolve into the personal. How can he help the way he feels for me? It’s the way God made him. “God gave you to me, “

he says. When the preacher in my father speaks, I lose what’s left of my power to defend myself. The words that might send most people running are the very words to trap me. God gave you to me. Does my father believe this? He convinces me that he does, that I am his by ordained right, his to do with what he wants. It doesn’t occur to me that his invocation of divine will is the tidiest and most unassailable means of exonerating us both. I ! never question his sanity, although I will come to the point where it is less painful to regard my father as crazy than to conclude that he has been so canny in his judgment of my character and its frailties that he knows exactly what language to use, what noose of words to cast around my neck. In the years following the car accident, and with increased fervor after the debacle of the French test, I became determined to return to wherever it was I had visited in the practitioner’s lap, and I thought this place might be discovered in Sunday school. Around the wood-laminate table I was the only child who had done the previous week’s assignment, who had marked my white vinyl-covered Bible with the special blue chalk and read the corresponding snippet from Mary Baker Eddy’s Key to the Scriptures. The other children lolled and dozed in clip-on neckties and pastel-sashed dresses while I sat up straight.

The teacher had barely finished asking a question before my hand, in its white cotton glove buttoned tight at the wrist, shot up. Sometimes I saw the teacher looking at me with what seemed even then like consternation.

The lassitude of the other children, their carelessly incorrect answers that proceeded from lips still bearing traces of hastily consumed cold cereal were clearly what she expected. What was disconcerting was my fierce recital of verses, my vigilant posture on the edge of the red plastic kindergarten chair. The arena of faith was the only one in which I had a chance of securing my mother’s attention. Since she was not around during the week to answer to more grubby requirements, and because she was always one who preferred the choice morsel, it was to my mother rather than to my grandparents that the guidance of my soul was entrusted. On Sundays, after church, we went to a nearby patio restaurant, where we sat in curlicued wrtion his sanity, although I will come to the point where it is less painful to regard my father as crazy than to conclude that he has been so canny in his judgment of my character and its frailties that he knows exactly what language to use, what noose of words to cast around my neck. In the years following the car accident, and with increased fervor after the debacle of the French test, I became determined to return to wherever it was I had visited in the practitioner’s lap, and I thought this place might be discovered in Sunday school. Around the wood-laminate table I was the only child who had done the previous week’s assignment, who had marked my white vinyl-covered Bible with the special blue chalk and read the corresponding snippet from Mary Baker Eddy’s Key to the Scriptures. The other children lolled and dozed in clip-on neckties and pastel-sashed dresses while I sat up straight.

The teacher had barely finished asking a question before my hand, in its white cotton glove buttoned tight at the wrist, shot up. Sometimes I saw the teacher looking at me with what seemed even then like consternation.

The lassitude of the other children, their carelessly incorrect answers that proceeded from lips still bearing traces of hastily consumed cold cereal were clearly what she expected. What was disconcerting was my fierce recital of verses, my vigilant posture on the edge of the red plastic kindergarten chair. The arena of faith was the only one in which I had a chance of securing my mother’s attention. Since she was not around during the week to answer to more grubby requirements, and because she was always one who preferred the choice morsel, it was to my mother rather than to my grandparents that the guidance of my soul was entrusted. On Sundays, after church, we went to a nearby patio restaurant, where we sat in curlicued wrought-iron chairs and reviewed my Sunday school lesson while eating dub sandwiches held together with toothpicks. The waiters flirted with my mother, and men at neighboring tables smiled in her direction. They looked at her left hand, which had no ring. They seemed to share my longing for my mother who already embodied for me the beauty of youth, who had the shiny-haired, smooth-cheeked vitality my grandparents did not have, who could do backbends and cartwheels and who owned high heeled shoes in fifteen colors who became ever more precious for her elusiveness. I grew impatient with Key to the Scriptures’ and in order to reexperience the ecstatic rise that had for an instant made me an attractive child and that came through the experience of pain, I began secretly to practice the mortification of my flesh. At my grandfather’s workbench, I turned his vise on my finger joints. When my grandmother brought home ice cream from Baskin-Robbins and discarded the dry ice with which it was packed, I used the salad tongs to retrieve the small smoking slab from the trash can. In the privacy of the upstairs bathroom, I touched my tongue to the dry ice’s surface and left a little of its skin there. I looked in the mirror at the blood coming out of my mouth, at the same magic flow that had once summoned my mother from the impossibly wide world of grown-ups and traffic and delivered her to my side. Through those transformations made possible by faith, I would become worthy of her loving me. Either that, or faith would make me feel no more pain from my mother’s abandonment than I did from my jaw while lying in the practitioner’s lap. So I looked in the mirror at my tongue, I tasted my blood, and I practiced not hurting. My mother converted to Catholicism when I was ten, and I followed in her wake, seeking her even as she sought whatever it was she didn’t find in Christian Science. In preparation for my first communion, I was catechized by a priest named Father Dove. Despite this felicitous name, Father Dove was not the Holy Spirit incarnate, he chain-smoked, and the face over his white collar had a worldly, sanguinary hue. In a repetition of failures not unlike those of my humiliating French career, I frustrated the priest and angered my mother by consistently answering one question incorrectly. “What is it that becomes the body and blood of Christ? ” Father Dove wanted to know.

“Bread and water, ” I said every time, substituting prisoner’s fare for the holy meal of the Eucharist. In the end, since it was the only question among the fifty that I couldn’t get right, he passed me.

Nevertheless, “A distressing mistake, ” he said, looking at me and my mother through the veil of cigarette smoke. “I trust it doesn’t mean anything. ” For Christmas I received a boxed set of Lives of the Saints.

There were two volumes of male saints, which I read once and then left in a drawer, and two of female saints, which I studied and slept with.

The books included color plates, illustrations adapted from works of the masters. Blinded Lucy. Maimed Agatha, her breasts on a platter. Beheaded Agnes. Margaret pressed to death under a door piled high with stones.

Perpetua and Felicity mauled by wild beasts. And Dymphna, patroness of those suffering mental illness.

Dymphna was the daughter of a widowed Irish king who wanted to marry her. She fled, but he pursued her. She refused him, and he cut off her head. My father is a brilliantly clear theologian, as only arrogance could make him. His faith is comprised of answers, no uncertainties.

Meeting me is what he characterizes as the first crisis of that faith, in me he found a creature more worthy of worship than the Creator. He was frightened when he felt he loved me more than God, but the heresy was resolved when God announced to my father that He was revealing Himself to my father through me. “God did? ” I say. “How do you know? “

I cover my face as I talk, I cannot look at him. His words about God make me dizzy, almost sick. They frighten me more than anything he could say about sex.

How can he claim such an ally? How can I defend myself if he does?

The god he has must be different and stronger than mine, who died in the canyon. This time, when we return to our separate homes, I am relieved.

The constant calls and tapes and letters assure me that my father is as much mine long distance as he is in person, and without the complications of staving off his physical advances, and denying my own response to them. Alone in my apartment, I receive no guests, I rarely go out.

Having stopped out of school, I’ve lost contact with my friends, I’ve withdrawn from them, and they from me. Though my relationship with my father has not been consummated, it is unnatural, and observably so. How pale we are when we’re together, and then, in the next instant, how flushed, how our hands shake, how we weep without provocation. Consumed by my father, I hide myself in my underground room. On the few occasions that I see someone approach through my squat windows or hear footfalls in the long corridor outside my door, I don’t answer the bell. Instead, I crouch on the floor between my bed and the wall until whoever it is leaves. Sometimes I fall asleep there, my arms around my knees, my body curled tight. For as long as I know my father, no matter where I live, I will always be in a room like this one cramped, uncomfortable. No matter what floor it is on, it will be bathe in this dim, drowned light.

My attempts to escape the basement are few and unsuccessful. I spend a token night or two with my boyfriend and return to find my phone already ringing. “Where were you! ” my father demands, nearly hysterical, spluttering in anger. “I was out, ” I say.

“With him? “

“Yes. Him. “

Our quarrels about the boyfriend are not honest in that what we talk about is whether he is worthy of me, not whether my father is jealous of him. And though I don’t reassure my father I won’t give him the satisfaction, nor will I relinquish the facade of independence my relationship with my boyfriend has not survived my father’s sudden entry into my life. In a few months, my boyfriend will move away. We won’t break up, exactly. Instead, we’ll allow his being hired for a job in a far-off city to redefine us as a long distance couple, this geographic estrangement a useful way to excuse the alienation we continue to suffer in the long wake of the kiss. Apart from my boyfriend, my closest female friend is the only person I see, and we don’t talk about my father. The changes wrought in me over the past months have been so profound and, perhaps on a level neither of us can acknowledge, so worrisome that we always find some subject other than what is happening to me. I am beginning to learn what it means, unspeakable. And yet, for as long as we live, we express ourselves. With or without words, we speak. There are stories of mad people, of people possessed, on their bodies writing appears to tell of the anguish they hold inside. In an earlier century, a case of shingles might have been cause for exorcism. The skin on my neck breaks out in blisters, each the size of a match head and clustered in patches of twenty or more that open to form raw sores. Before a week passes, the “lesions, ” as the doctor calls them, have spread onto my shoulder, my back, my chest, and down my right arm all the way to the tip of my thumb. The infection follows nerve paths that originate from my seventh cervical vertebra, where herpes zoster, the chicken-pox virus, has lain dormant since I contracted it, at age five. What a memory the body has, events recorded in our bones, our blood, our nerves. It was the summer of my father’s first visit, just after he left, that I came down with chicken pox. “But why would it become active now? ” I ask the doctor on my second visit. “Why now, after fifteen years? “