The Kiss: A Memoir (4 page)

Or am I so angry at her endless nagging me about my weight that I decide I’ll never again give her the opportunity to say a word to me about my size. You want thin? I remember thinking, I’ll give you thin. I’ll definitely be thin, not you. Not the suggested one hundred and twenty pounds, but ninety-five. And not … . Size SIX, but size two. If only I understood the triumph of refusing to eat, if only I could recognize my excitement as that of vengeance, of contriving to shut my mother out, the way that she denied me as I stood for hours by the bed where she lay, her eyes closed and hidden under her mask. Anorexia may begin as an attempt to make myself fit my mother’s ideal and then to erase myself, but its deeper, more insidious and lasting seduction is that of exiling her Anorexia can be satisfied, my mother cannot, so I replace her with this disease, with a system of penances and renunciation that offers its own reward. That makes mothers obsolete. A pool party at the big house with the courtyard and the red tile roof, the one owned by the architect she’s been dating. It’s a house with seven bedrooms, six of them unoccupied. We change in the one he calls “the blue room, ” an icy pale, female space with a vast canopied bed.

Like boxers, my mother and I back into opposing corners of the bedroom.

She’s always hated to be seen naked. If she can, she changes in the dark. I watch as she pulls her bathing suit up under her dress, wanting her to look at me, my body. I like nothing so much as taking my clothes off, I do now that I’m so thin. Each day, I undress countless times and stand on the scale. In public restrooms, I wait until I am alone so that I can lift my shirt and admire my ribs in the mirror. Seeing myself is enough to make me gasp with pleasure, to make my hands shake with excitement. I am amazed by this body I’ve made. I don’t interpret it as a criticism that no one else admires it, only as evidence that my standards are too rarefied for ordinary human beings to appreciate.

Since I have no boyfriend, there’s no one to complain that I’ve left nothing soft for his hands or his eyes to enjoy. I am my own lover. At night I go to bed naked, and in the dark I touch my body until I know by heart the map of my hunger. The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity. It isn’t just appetite for food that I deny, it’s all appetite, all desire. It’s sex. I starve myself to recapture my sexuality from my mother not just by making my breasts and hips disappear, but by drying up the blood. The one thing she can’t **skip**stand about my being so thin is that I don’t menstruate, I lose my capacity to get pregnant, to be in a danger of the kind that precipitated the abrupt fall from grace she endured. Because she’s angry, too. She can’t have missed hearing the message of my childhood and adolescence, as delivered to me by my grandmother, Don’t make the mistakes your mother made. How she must hate me, with my good grades and smug avoidance of boys. She has to insist that my transgressing and getting caught is at least possible, and when she discovers that I’ve lost my period she takes me to doctor after doctor, accompanying me into the consulting room and even the examining room. The gynecologist prescribes hormones, the acupuncturist screws needles into my thighs.

Before I go away to college, we return together to the gynecologist’s office. She wants me to get a diaphragm, that notoriously unreliable form of birth control. But I can’t be fitted for one. “Not without breaking her hymen, ” the doctor says after he examines me. “You don’t want to do that, do you? ” My mother, standing near the window, hesitates. I sit up on my elbows. “Yes, ” she says. He uses a series of graduated green plastic penises. When he withdraws the set of them from under the lid of a stainless steel surgical tray, I can’t believe what I see in his hands. Their green is a green that exists nowhere in nature but that colors surgeons’ scrubs and emesis basins and other dire instruments I associate with illness and death. One after another he inserts them, starting with the smallest no bigger than his little finger until the second to last one comes out smeared with blood. This doctor deflowers me in front of my mother. Is it because he was her obstetrician, the man who delivered me, that he imagines this is somehow all right? I lie on the table, a paper sheet over my knees, my hands over my eyes. Highway repairs and a detour make the drive home from college even longer than usual, and I arrive at my mother’s barely in time to sit down for dinner, something French and ambitious to which she must have devoted an afternoon of labor. Even so, we leave the television on during the meal, and taste rather than eat what she prepared. “You get it, ” my mother says whenever the phone rings. I find this odd she’s usually so secretive about her social life but when it rings at nine-thirty, I understand. It’s him, my father, calling to give us his flight number. His voice, which I have not heard for ten years, surprises me with its high pitch. I’ll learn, in time, that it doesn’t always sound this way, but rises and falls in concert with his emotions.

On this night, however, we speak only as long as it takes to confirm the necessary details. “I’ll be wearing a brown suit, ” he says.

“Okay, ” I say.

“See you soon, ” he says, ordinary words made extraordinary by the fact that I have never heard them from him, a man I would have seen under other circumstances every day for all the years of my life. “Okay, ” I say. “Yes. ” He’s due to arrive at two the next afternoon. Everything is disrupted for this visit. My mother’s companion of many years is banished, I’m not sure where he goes. Perhaps to stay with his estranged wife, the one he can’t bring himself to divorce. My grandparents, disapproving, will share one dinner with us at my mother’s, one tea at their house. The rest of the week’s plans do not include them. I am not sure whether to regard this as a slight, a mercy, or merely a pragmatic consideration of what we all think we might be able to handle together.

My mother and I go to our beds, where we spend our separate, sleepless nights. As only a narrow hallway divides our rooms, we can hear each other sigh and shift beneath the blankets. At one point she gets up. I hear her open and close a drawer in her bathroom. My bedroom at my mother’s is the first she’s ever had for me. She furnished it the summer after I graduated from high school, when, as I was moving from my grandparents’ house to college, I would no longer need it. It’s a modern room, with a futon whose brightly colored bedding strikes a garish note among the other rooms’ understated fugues of beige. The comforter bears a floral pattern of restless, itchy pinks that are echoed in the window blinds. Through them the morning sun streaks in and falls in warm patches on the cream carpet, the pink and cream blending together into a color I associate with inflamed eyelids, On the wall is a print, a watercolor by Jean-Michel Folon, a painting of a single chair that stands on a hill amidst a grove of leafless trees. The chair is as large as the trees and is in metamorphosis, branches and twigs project from its wooden back. Either it is becoming fully a chair, or it is reverting back to tree. I chose this print with my mother, undoubtedly because it expresses my sense of always striving to become what I am not and because the longing I find expressed in the chairmute, paralyzedis also so familiar. Still, despite its beauty, I don’t enjoy looking at it. The pink glow coming from behind the hill is too faint to suggest hope, there’s no way to know if it’s sunrise, sunset, or the light of an approaching fire. The print is reflected twice, in full-length mirrors on closet doors, and the whole room shines with an optimism neither of us has ever felt about the other. Because most of my school holidays are spent with my grandparents, it’s a place of brief visits. We agree that we have to leave for the airport by one o’clock, but I’m dressed to go long before noon. It’s not unusual for me to be ready this early. I’m always too early. I arrive at restaurants whole hours before dinner dates and have to walk around neighboring blocks or wait in nearby stores until I’m merely painfully punctual. I’m helpless against it, this response to my mother’s chronic lateness, to having always been the last child to be picked up from school, camp, church, birthday parties, dental appointments, dance lessons. Always in tears, always sure that this time she wouldn’t come at all but would leave me forever with the dentist or the Russian ballet mistress who slapped the backs of my knees with her yardstick. Even after my mother moved out, the arrangement between her and my grandmother was that she would provide at least half of whatever transportation I required, and so in hallways and foyers, on dank stone benches or the vinyl-upholstered couches of waiting rooms, I silently rehearsed my grandparents’ phone number and their address, to which the police should return me. My mother’s lateness is so extreme it transcends hostile insult.

The reason for lost jobs and lost loves, for useless sessions of behavior therapy, it implies she exists in another temporal frame. In being late, if in little else, my mother is so predictable that my grandmother routinely gives her the wrong time for family gatherings, adjusting it as much as two whole hours forward, and still my mother nearly misses them. But I am not as pragmatic as my grandmother, and I never get used to it. At 12, 45 I knock on the bedroom door. She’s out of the bath, she’s set her hair, but she has not put on her makeup.

She’s not wearing anything but a bra and a slip. Discarded blouses and skirts and trousers cover every surface of her usually immaculate bedroom. Shoes tumble from the closet as if arrested in the attempt to escape. I sit in the rocker and watch her. “That looks nice, ” I encourage with each change of clothes, but she looks in the mirror and tears whatever it is off. “Please, ” I say. “It’s one. ” And then, after a few more outfits, “It’s one-fifteen. “

“You go, ” she says. “I can’t.

I’m not ready. ” She sits on the bed, still undressed. She puts her face in her hands. “Alone? ” I say. “I can’t. “

“You’ll have to. Or you’ll be late. “

“Just put something on, ” I beg. “Please. I’ll drive, and you can do your makeup in the car. “

“No. You go. “

At one-thirty I leave, transfixed with dread, whether of the solitary meeting or of being late, I can’t say. I speed on the highway, flooded with adrenaline, nervous enough that my back aches, a cold clench. I park the car and run all the way from the lot and through the terminal to the gate. I arrive breathing hard. A man wearing a tan suit, not a brown one, straightens slowly from the drinking fountain, and turns to look at me. We recognize one another immediately. We’ve exchanged recent photographs, but it’s more than that, we look like each other. As my father walks toward me, he wipes his wet mouth with the back of his free hand. The other carries a heavy-looking black case his camera, he explains. “You’re late, ” he says. Even though the plane was delayed, it has been on the ground for some minutes. “I know, ” I say. “I’m sorry.

The traffic… “

I lie to protect my mother, so naked in her bra and curlers. I could give her away, let him know how much this visit means to her, enough to warrant a frenzied morning before the mirror, but I don’t. I protect her, as I’ve learned to do from her own example, from the mask, the secret phone number. I cannot remember a time that I was not aware of my mother’s fragility. It’s part of what has convinced me of her surpassing worth, the way only the best teacups break easily. In the terminal, my father leads me out of the flow of passengers and the friends and family who have come to meet them. He finds an empty spot by one of the big plate-glass windows that look out onto the airfields. “Don’t move, ” he says. “Just let me look at ,, you. My father looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before. His hot eyes consume me eyes that I will discover are always just this bloodshot. I almost feel their touch.

He takes my hands, one in each of his, and turns them over, stares at my palms. He does not actually kiss them, but his look is one that ravishes. “Oh! ” he says. aturn around! ” I fed his gaze as it moves over my neck, my back, and down to my feet. god, ” he says when I face him again. oh God. ” His eyes, now fixed on mine, are bright with tears.

There there, ” he says. “It’s.

.

. it’s longer than I imagined. Than I could have. It was behind your shoulders in the picture you sent. ” I nod. I don’t speak. His eyes rob me of words, they seem to draw the air from my mouth so that I can barely breathe. The girl my father sees has blond hair that falls past her waist, past her hips, it falls to the point at which her fingertips would brush her thighs if her arms were not crossed before her chest.

I’m no longer very thin away at school I’ve learned to eat but, as if embarrassed to be caught with a body, I hide whatever I can of it. We walk to the baggage claim in silence and wait where the metal plates of the luggage conveyor slide one under the other as the stream of suitcases turns the corner. My father picks up his bag and we walk, still without talking, out of the terminal. Once outside, he takes one of my hands in his. I feel his fingers tremble. “Do you mind? ” he says.

“Could I? ” I don’t take my hand away. “It isn’t brown, ” I say of his suit as we get in the car.

“Yes it is, ” he says.

“Isn’t it more of a tan or a khaki? “

“It’s brown. “

The trip home from the airport is mostly silent. I can’t think of anything to say, and I don’t dare do what I want, escape into music on the stereo. Turned sideways in his seat, my father watches me, and his look doesn’t allow my hand to reach for the knob. As I drive I make mistakes I rarely make. My hands, wet from nerves, slip on the steering wheel. As we cross an intersection, my foot loses the clutch and I stall the car in traffic. At home, my mother is wearing the clothes she set out the previous night, black trousers and a cream colored cashmere sweater that sets off her dark shining hair. She’s in high spirits, a is a small gold miraculous medal, rays of light bursting from the Virgin’s open palms. My parents embrace quickly, almost shyly. They kiss each other’s closed mouths with their lips thrust forward in prissy, monkey-like puckers. We try hard to make it work, the three of us together. We sit in the living room and drink iced tea. “At last, ” one of us says, “a family. ” Calling ourselves this, saying the words Who says them? My mother? My father? Do I? it’s meant ironically, but the pain the words bring, the admission of failure, is so intense that afterward no one speaks.