Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (34 page)

Anthony Farrington

 

ANTHONY FARRINGTON
teaches creative writing at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His most recent work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices, and appears or is forthcoming in
Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories From the Left Hand of God, Georgia Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Salt Hill
, and others. He was the Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf in 2006, and he received a 2007 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

 

 

So, go, breake off this last lamenting kisse

— John Donne,
The Expiration
(from the 1669 edition of
Poems
)

 

This is a story about the mouth and the tongue, about conversations of one kind and another. This is a story about the first girl who ever kissed me. Her name was Lulu, and we were in the second grade. She was — exotically — a twin, and she had long red hair and bell-bottom pants. I still have two pictures of her. One from the first grade and one from the second. In one, I forget which, she is leaning up against me; she is smiling. Even then, especially then, I was terrified of her. Her electric body. Her hair and her fingers and her slender legs everywhere. She was the first.

 

The secret of good kissing is a relaxed mouth. Never, never pucker your lips, or kiss with the lips and teeth sealed firmly shut…. Let your lips go almost limp. Ease the tension from your chin. Automatically your teeth will part slightly and you will be able to slip that teasing tongue of yours into his mouth as the pressure of the kiss (and your passion) mounts.

Naturally…the trick is to slip in an embellishment here and there.
¹

 

Jenny — who eventually married me — said that when she was younger she used to practice by kissing the mirror; she practiced by kissing the bedroom walls. She put on lipstick and kissed the entire room. When we dated, years later, the lipstick was still there — light purple stains, pink; perfect kisses, half kisses, kisses of surprise. There were kisses over her bed and along every wall. Embarrassed, Jenny scrubbed with toothbrushes and hand brushes but could never remove the stains of kisses. Some things stick, no matter what.

Jenny — who eventually divorced me — now lives with another man somewhere in the middle of Arkansas. I raise our children alone. I hear she wears lipstick that doesn’t smudge or smear. She told this to our children. She seldom talks to
me
anymore. They call this lipstick
kissproof
.

 

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score;

Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:

A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,

To make that thousand up a million.

Treble that million, and when that is done.

Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
²

 

Invented Advise Column:

Question:
Help! I’m a virgin. I’ve never even been kissed! I panic at the thought of touching or being touched. I’m desperate! Any advice?

Answer:
Stick to butterfly kisses and Eskimo kisses; avoid the mouth. The first is for foreplay, the second is for post-play. The third — the mouth, my dear — is for yourself and for yourself only.

Question:
My partner won’t kiss me. All he wants is sex. It’s the same routine.

Answer:
Only kiss the irresistible. Small children, for example, or aging grandmothers. Or men who love you.

Question:
Is it wrong to kiss a boy on the first date?

Answer:
Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.
³

 

’ Scuse me while I kiss the sky…

 

Sometimes, all that’s left of love is tied up in song. With Deanne, who kissed me second, it was bubble gum pop and Air Supply — “lost in love” and “every woman in the world” — the music filling the small space of my car while we drove in the early evenings — her body against mine — fifteen years old (me seventeen) and lovely — her head on my shoulder and the windows open, the wind and her long yellow hair blowing up and against my face. She was the second.

 

Now is your chance! The moment you feel the tip of your nose touch her scalp, purse your lips and kiss her, the while you inhale a deep breath of air that is redolent with the exquisite odor of her hair. It is then but a few inches to her ear. Touch the rim of her ear with your lips in a sort of brushing motion. Breathe gently into the delicate shell…From the ear to her neck is but another few inches. Let your lips traverse this distance quickly and then dart into the nape of the neck and, with your lips well pursed, nip the skin there, using the same gentleness as would a cat lifting her precious kittens.

Then, with a series of little nips, bring your lips around from the nape of her neck to the curving swerve of her jaw, close to the ear. Gently kiss the lobe of her ear. But be sure to return to the tender softness of her jaw. From then on, the way should be clear to you….

All right. You have subtly kissed the corner of her mouth. Don’t hesitate. Push on further to more pleasurable spots. Ahead of you lies that which had been promised in your dreams, the tender, luscious lips of the girl you love. But don’t sit idly by and watch them quivering.

Act!

Lift your lips away slightly, center them so that when you make contact there will be a perfect union. Notice, only momentarily, the picture of her teeth in her lips, and, then, like a seagull swooping gracefully down through the air, bring your lips down firmly onto the lips of the girl who is quivering in your arms.

Kiss her!

Kiss her as though, at that moment, nothing else exists in the world. Kiss her as though your entire life is wrapped up into the period of the kiss. Kiss her.
⁴

 

In the car, Deanne sang but she didn’t want me to hear. So sometimes she sat facing her own window — the music taking her places — singing just loud enough that I could tell she was singing but just soft enough I couldn’t distinguish her voice from the song.

With Jenny, it was Foreigner coming from a tinny cassette player — the ceiling and the walls closing in on us, her bed smelling of skin. Jenny was the third. And I eventually married her. Twelve years later, she kissed me goodbye and left me with two children. She says I must never use the word “abandon.”

With April, it was Guns N’ Roses. But let’s not go there.

Kissing involves more than the mouth. It involves ancient nights, the deep smells of summer turning fall, cars cruising the four lanes on Saturday evenings, and music vibrating the air. In a gas station parking lot with neon lights shimmering on newly washed cars, my older brother tried to act casual. His arm was around his girlfriend, and he flicked the ashes of his cigarette dramatically. By looking at him, you would think he was perpetually bored. Or maybe very thoughtful. He was seldom either. Bones, his best friend, was there too, with Teresa — always Teresa. Bones and my brother sneaked me into the drive-in theater once, in the trunk of a purple LeMans. I don’t remember a single kiss in the whole movie; but I remember sitting on the hood of the car and gaping at fifty-foot women and yards and yards of skin. When the movie was nearly over, my brother’s girlfriend came back from the concession stand with a bag of popcorn to share with me. In the glow of the drive-in lights, her lips were berry; and as she came toward the car, she was pulling her fingers through her hair and walking so the whole wide world took a deep breath. I don’t even remember her name.

Sometimes, the longing for those nights is tangible, so intimate, so lonely, that merely the thought of kissing breaks my heart with hope. Back then, let’s be honest, my best friends and I rarely told each other about who we were kissing. There was something sacred there, or maybe we sensed our own vulnerabilities. Like most boys, we thought we knew what impressed girls: our cars (jacked-up and unbelievably fast), the nights of stealing beer, our car wrecks, stays at the police station. The smell of peppermint to this day makes me think of Danny Joe and Martha; one night — at Danny Joe’s party — they were both drunk off their asses with homemade peppermint schnapps — kissing on the couch, crawling inside each other. What they had looked good, what they had seemed good. I literally stared until I collapsed with laughter; but even then they didn’t stop.

Years later — I don’t know how many anymore — Danny Joe danced with another woman; I think he kissed her too. And maybe there was more to it. Martha nearly left him for that. And the thought of Martha leaving him fills me with an overwhelming emptiness — a sudden retrospective disappearance of their present two-story house in west Wayland, Iowa, the dematerializing of their two strawberry-blonde girls playing on the swing-set Danny Joe made for them. The sudden loss of Danny Joe and Martha — together, at once — saying (to me) they’re so sorry my wife left. They didn’t think that could ever happen. Not to us.

 

Favorite definition:
The dictionary says that a kiss is a “salute made by touching with the lips pressed closely together and suddenly parting them.” From this it is quite obvious that, although a dictionary may know something about words, it knows nothing about kissing.
⁵

 

Lulu’s kiss was electric and quick. Just at the corner of my mouth. She was the first.

Deanne was second. With her whole body shivering from the cold, she kissed me by the John Deere tractor in the machine shed at her father’s farm.

Jenny wanted to kiss me so bad, she had me backed up against a green refrigerator; her boyfriend was in the next room. I told her to never do that again, and she went home crying. Well, you can imagine, I married her. Jenny was the third girl I kissed.

Robin was number four; she always gave me a friendly peck. She loved the Beatles like I did. Once, while reading the lyrics to “A Day in the Life,” she cried at my mother’s kitchen table. I was hers for the taking, but we never moved beyond the goodnight kiss. Years later, we got drunk together because we were still great friends. And I wanted to kiss her so badly. But I kept drinking instead and dreamed that many sad years later — maybe fifteen — she would tell me that she had wanted to kiss me too. And sometimes I still think about that.

 

From the personals:

Single divorced female seeks honest man and soft kisses.

SWM seeks big-breasted blonde. Looks not important.

SM seeks. Call 367-1078.

 

April kissed me and I kissed her. In that order. And I nearly broke down. Wondering where my wife was.

Carolyn was number six. She was so beautiful with the softest lips — like petals. I regret kissing her. She left me for her ex-husband. Kissing, like most everything, gets progressively more complicated. She was so beautiful.

Sometimes, the princess kisses the frog. Other times, the frog-prince kisses the sleeping princess. But let’s face it, transformative kisses aren’t practical. I went out with the prom queen once. But I didn’t kiss her. We each loved someone else.

 

“And from this slumber you shall wake,” said a fairy to Sleeping Beauty, “when true love’s kiss the spell shall break.”
⁶