Unkiss Me (5 page)

“Bachelor number two?”

“Um….I’d buy you a mink coat.”

“Number three?”

“We’d go to the church and get married, so we could go on the Newlywed Game!”

And that’s exactly where this game would lead, to another question and answer session, where we’d take turns exposing our paper husbands as buffoons
or as perfect in every way, as on the real Newlywed Game. There didn’t seem to be an in-between. Spouses were either cherished objects or deserved to be torn in half.

Meanwhile, on All My Children, we witnessed the infamous Erica, Phillip, Jeff and Tara storyline.
Toni and I sat transfixed, stuffed animals under our stretchy summer shirts (for our paper husbands had managed to impregnate us), watching that vixen Erica plot against Tara, to get Phil. Our own husbands were named English. Both of them. We called them the Englishes, and referred to them casually in our banter, patting our stuffed animal tummies until one afternoon Grandmother burst into the TV room to announce the boiling of the frankfurters, and caught us in our faux maternity. “This is not a game,” she huffed. “Having a child is a blessed event. You must never make fun.”

It hadn’t occurred to us that we were acting out a parody of childbearing.
One couldn’t play house properly without a baby, and one couldn’t have a baby without first being pregnant. It was cause and effect, just as one couldn’t appear on the Newlywed Game without first capturing a spouse from the Dating Game.

It was clear that we needed to work on the stealth of our escapades.
Our stern but well-meaning Grandmother looked sad as she watched us act out pregnancy. As if in doing so, we were circumventing innocence. Disrespecting the state of maternity. I felt sorry for Grandmother, who sometimes stood for half an hour in front of a childhood picture of my father. I wondered if she knew. Or what she knew, of her son’s married life.

~

Back home, before this latest summer, my parents’ casual affairs had become less subtle.
There was the one morning I chanced to discover a blue van parked in front of our house. A vehicle belonging to my mother’s friend, Jack. My father had been out of town. That afternoon, my mother took me aside. “He’s just a friend, Jackie,” she said. “Even though he spent the night, nothing happened.”

Jack.
I thought of unappealing things that rhymed with Jack, as in: there once was a dickhead named Jack… sack, shack, slack, smack. Why did his name have to sound so much like my name?

My mother asked me to explain this friendship to my little sister.
“She’s so sensitive about these things,” my mother said. I doubt my little sister even noticed, nor would she have a frame of reference for nothing happened. As much as I wanted the conversation with my mother to end, I had to ask. “So, are you guys getting a divorce?”

“Darling,” my mother said, trying to pry my eyes up into hers by twisting weirdly in her seat and inserting her face near my collarbone, “I can’t answer that right now.”

Our father, who was south of the border for an undisclosed reason, returned the following weekend. His first day back he spent with our mother, locked in their bedroom. Soft, warm murmurs came from behind their door, like apologies after a fight. Toni and I had been promised a trip to the zoo, but as the day wore on it became clear: there would be no outing. We decided to make a mess in the kitchen. We had a jar of this new product, Marshmallow Fluff, and a TV commercial showed kids making something called Fluffernutter sandwiches. Toni was spreading Skippy on the Wonder bread we had also convinced our mother to buy, and I had a tablespoon heaped with a mound of marshmallow innards when our father stumbled into the kitchen in his underwear.

He took a long, appraising look at me, my father did.
The same way he’d passed his eyes over his Corvette once, after he’d watched a car parked next to it graze its hard, red finish. His eyes stopped at the glopping mound of white in a spoon held near my mouth. He shifted his glance to my belly, which had, over the last year, pooched out in a roll over my waistband.

“Jackie,” he said, “you’re turning into a fat slob.”

He filled a glass with ice cubes and orange juice, then returned to our mother, in the bedroom. I stuck the entire tablespoon of Marshmallow Fluff into my mouth and kept it there until I knew I wasn’t going to cry.

~

We developed a new version of Stanleys and Joes called: This is How it Happened. In this is How it Happened, we’d draw an unfortunate child on the newsprint—again, using our own outlines. Usually, the child would be dismembered or mutilated in some fashion. Perhaps the child would be missing an arm, or some vital organ. The drawing details were best left to my sister, who now, even according to Grandmother, was showing artistic talent. That left me with the happy chore of narrative. For example:

This is James, and he used to be a happy boy, but one day he decided not to come home for supper.
Instead, he stole his little brother’s bike. As punishment, he was hit by a car, and now he’s a retard.

Toni hated when I invented an affliction that was difficult to draw, such as retardation, and she would edit my narrative, inviting a dented skull at least, or hair that grew out in patches.
Occasionally, I had to pull rank and grab her pen to introduce a Frankenstein scar or a tilted, elongated mouth: “It’s pretty obvious that he’s not normal anymore.”

The “anymore” was the crux of our game.
All our freaks had been born normal. The interesting part was developing a story about each child, finding a heinous accident or misdeed that would result in spectacular malformation. Toni and I were God. We were fate. We had ultimate power.

In August, Tara got Phillip, and Erica set her sights on Tara’s brother, Jeff (the doctor).
Erica’s evil behavior kept me both riveted and disgusted. I imagined inflicting a this is How it Happened narrative on Erica—inordinate weight gain, facial burns. Toni, however, hated Erica so much she stopped watching TV for a while. Instead, she began organizing our toys upstairs in the attic. I’d return to the attic after lunch to find stuffed animals lined up according to height, and paper dolls in various categories, stacked one atop the other with last year’s Stanleys and Joes peeking out of an old crayon box to weight down the pile.

Toni had taken to dusting off Grandfather’s dollhouse, and, I suspected, playing with it.
When I returned to the attic, there she would be, cuddled up in a chair with the toy maid and the baby, murmuring some sort of nurturing dialogue. The sweetness of it made me sad, somehow. I retreated to the north dormer, pried open the lid of the toy box coffin, and thrust my hands inside. The rough, unyielding fur of the dog on wheels prickled my hands. The metal puzzles were cold to the touch. The Snow White lay under the pile of dwarfs, seemingly unkissed by the prince, who’d disappeared altogether. I kept moving my hands around in the toy box, as I imagined a blinded pirate might look for treasure. And, soon, I was rewarded. My hands discovered a small book.

The cover of the book—a boy holding a pencil between his hand and cheek while resting his elbow on a desk—jolted me with recognition.
Where before I’d felt depressed and lethargic, I now experienced a burst of energy. The boy on the cover had a daydreamy look on his face, staring out into space. In his expression, I saw myself. Clearly, this boy was enchanted by something inside his head. I wondered, suddenly, if this had been a favorite book of my father’s. If he also aligned with the boy on the cover. The Good, Bad Boy, this book was titled.

I sat next to Toni, and began to read the story of this good, bad boy.
His classroom was a lot like one I’d attended, back when I went to Sacred Heart—the year I developed a twitch in my right eye. Confined to a Catholic School of strict nuns and spirit-numbing punishment, the good, bad boy longed for release of some type. The book was composed of his eighth grade diary entries. It was the first book I’d encountered told through the voice of an actual boy, and because of that, my mind kept wandering to my father. The thought of my father as a boy in that attic, the thought of him as Grandmother’s little boy, before he became a husband. A father.

Toni had fallen asleep.
She was so beautiful, my sister, with the maid and baby still curled in her fist, her cheek laying against the polished wood arm of the chair. I hated and loved my sister’s beauty. A paradox, like the good, bad boy. Like Erica. Like everything.

At the end of the summer, our mother came to fetch us.
She looked rested and happy. No circles under her eyes. More smiles than usual. On our last day in Grandmother’s attic, our mother floated as she packed our suitcases, commenting on our imaginations when she came across the discarded paper dolls, which were piled up in the toy box— relegated to a common coffin.

“I’m glad you made use of the newsprint,” she said.
“My little James Thurbers.”

James?

We stared at our mother. Wondered at her psychic abilities. She was humming, as though the name she’d uttered was a compliment.

The next day, we left the summer’s creations in their crude coffin, and, wearing matching gingham sundresses, Toni and I boarded the plane with our mother for the long flight back to San Diego.
When we arrived, there stood our father, his round, whiskery face greeting us. And this is how it would remain until the divorce was final, ten years later: Toni and I, our enigmatic parents, together, apart, together, just like tape and scissors and a family of paper dolls.

He thought sometimes of breaking up with her. The act would be easy, reckless and undoable, like swerving into a tree with a car, another unexplainable flirtation of his. When she grazed his mouth with her breast, when he sucked the color from her nipple, when they slammed her air mattress against the concrete walls of her condo, and when she laughed and sat up straight, their wet, sticky selves still connected, and she tied up her hair with the band she kept on her wrist like a bracelet while rubbing herself back and forth on him, he thought, I should just get it over with.

His mother always said he had a penchant for self-destruction. Actually, it was his ex-wife who had said that. His mother wouldn’t have used the word “penchant.” What his mother likely said was, “Ralphy, one of these days you’ll get your heart broke in half and you won’t even know why.” She was a reverse Hallmark card, his mother. She had been a careful, deliberate speaker whose mind and body were unraveling in a leapfrog pattern.

One day a few weeks earlier when he’d ushered his mother through the Walgreens—cat food, Tums, knee-highs—she turned to him and said, “I need some of those things.”

“What things, Mom?” he’d said, rubbing a thumb on his forehead as though there were some sort of umbilical wavelength between them that would, genie-like, produce the missing objects.

“You know!” she screeched.

More and more she screeched instead of spoke.

He shrugged his shoulders and placed a hand under her elbow to steady her, since she refused, out of vanity he thought, to bring the walker. She shook his hand away and gave him a helpless look with those watery eyes of hers. “These things!” she screeched, almost happily, and then she fluttered up the hem of her tartan plaid skirt to reveal a network of blue and pale, and, to his disgust, a diaper.

It was hard not to think about his mother’s decline, even while fucking his girlfriend. Pleasure, sensation, doom. In that order, and repeatedly. Negative thoughts like, I wonder how and when I’ll break up with this woman, insinuated themselves constantly. Ralph found that his mind liked to toss around the details of her inevitable cheating: where, with whom, when. At the brink of orgasm occasionally he’d envision himself morphed into the fierce Latino stud he was sure she had stashed somewhere. It was all such a soup. Guilt, desire, pleasure, remorse.

But at work, when his cell phone pulsed with her picture and the downloaded ringtone, Feels like the first time, joy and dread often collided, the sweet and sour of them, a revelry of lust and shame. More often, of course, his cell phone would buzz and skitter in the vibration mode; should the Foreigner fuck music of his young adulthood blare his happy truth, well, who knew where it would all go. The sort of respect he garnered was carefully crafted—he was steady, deliberate. With her as his girlfriend this reputation as a dependable wonk was now in jeopardy. He’d gotten the cautiously envious nods from his male colleagues. The slightly off-color sexual gestures typically reserved for the newly separated physicians who trolled the Health Sciences buildings for girl—certainly not the sort of wink-wink that he, the Senior Financial Analyst, was used to.

They’d first met at the noon hour on the Sam Jackson, jogging the stress from their respective mornings. It was spring, and he’d been aware of a high-spirited young woman in Lycra sharing the route with him and about a dozen other regulars. Typically, she’d be heading downhill while he chugged up. They began to nod at one another. Then, smile and nod. He thought about winking, actually, but decided against it. And one day, they had a conversation. Here’s where their memory of the day cleaved. She reported that he’d stopped, stooped over, and hyperventilated, and that she had passed him by, then worried that he (who was, after all, in the right demographic) might be having an infarct. She recalled offering a slug of her bottled water, and that he’d looked startled, as though she’d just pissed on his leg like a retriever.