Kissing in America Read online

  The world seemed a bit overzealous, considering we hadn’t even gotten to New Jersey yet, but I said “Right” anyway.

  We sped toward the George Washington Bridge. I half expected a taxi to follow us, my mom’s voice on a bullhorn: I changed my mind! She’d send out giant mechanical pincers to pluck me up and hoist me away.

  I stuffed my whistle into my backpack. Sunlight bounced off the cars below us, their paint shimmering. My stomach quivered. I took out American Poetry and opened the cover. I’d stashed Will’s letters inside it. I’d gotten seven of them in the six weeks since he’d left.

  I loved seeing where he’d written Eva at the top of the page, or sometimes just E—, and once: To the Poetess. I loved the feel of the paper and the envelopes, reading my address in his handwriting, the postmark dates. I touched where he’d written Miss you. And once, instead of his name, he signed it Griefy in LA.

  Eight days until I’d see him. We’d be traveling for over two weeks—one week to get there, three days in LA, and then five days to return home.

  Annie glanced at the letters in my lap. “Don’t you wish sometimes that you could just text him? With no waiting?”

  “Lord Ellis, Sir Richard, Destry, and Gurlag didn’t text,” I said.

  “Gurlag wouldn’t know how to text. He couldn’t read,” she said.

  “Only because he was raised by wolves and without a formal education. When Penelope started teaching him in book three, he picked it up really fast.”

  Even though I said this, I still kept checking Will’s photo stream every day, though he hadn’t posted anything in six months. I Googled him daily, too, though nothing new ever appeared, and I’d practically memorized the small amount of info about him already online—three photos on school web pages from swim meets, a picture of him from last November that Gia had posted (ugh), the website of his mom’s bakery (still up, though the bakery had closed now), and his dad’s website. That was all. Still, I clicked on this stuff all the time, with the magical hope that something new might appear.

  Letters were better, though. You could hold letters in your hand. Yesterday, I’d received a small package from him with a mix CD. Songs for our road trip. He’d burned it on his dad’s computer, and used a CD that looked like an old vinyl record. He’d typed up the song list on his typewriter. I felt a thrill every time I looked at the CD, with its antique-looking surface.

  1. The Littlest Birds - The Be Good Tanyas

  2. Chicago - Sufjan Stevens

  3. Petoskey Stone - Dana Falconberry

  4. The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon & Garfunkel

  5. I Don’t Know - Beastie Boys

  6. On the Road to Find Out - Cat Stevens

  7. Everyday - Vetiver

  8. Drowning in the Days - Old 97’s

  9. A-Punk - Vampire Weekend

  10. Swim Good - Frank Ocean

  11. I’m on a Roll - Over the Rhine

  12. What I Got - Sublime

  13. The Way I Am - Martin Sexton

  14. Star Witness - Neko Case

  15. Tape Loop - Morcheeba

  16. Walking on the Moon - The Police

  17. America - Simon & Garfunkel

  18. California - Joni Mitchell

  I’d loaded it onto my new phone and listened to it over and over. I’d played it so many times that I kept hearing the songs even when my phone was off.

  The CD also held a snippet of a poem, typed on a white label and stuck on the case:

  i like my body when it is with your

  body. It is so quite new a thing

  --e. e. cummings

  Every time I read it, I felt like I’d inhaled too much air. Floating, inflating, my face felt hot and my stomach felt full. I was back in the roof garden again.

  In two of his letters, Will only sent poems—just the poem and nothing else. Not even romantic poems—he’d sent one by Langston Hughes and another by Philip Larkin. As I read them, I kept thinking of what my father once said: Every poem is a love poem.

  Sometimes I sat by the window waiting for the mailman to reach our building—I’d race for the elevator, run down the hall, turn the mailbox key, and see the long skinny envelope, the familiar handwriting. In my last letter to him, I’d included the dates of our trip and the addresses of where we’d be staying on the way, hoping I’d keep hearing from him, keep receiving the letters and poems. I never wanted it to stop. I’d told him about each person we were staying with—Aunt Janet in Cleveland, Annie’s cousin Grace in Tennessee, Larry’s mom in Texas, and Lulu in Tucson. I wanted him to be a part of the trip, to share it with me.

  Last night, while his mix played, I’d sat on my bed and arranged his seven letters on the quilt in front of me, organized by postmark date. Somehow it made it all seem more real that way. Holding them in my hands, they were undeniable. The letters, poems, and eighteen songs were proof.

  Proof of us. Proof of love.

  We flee to the Cleve

  As our bus approached Cleveland, something rose inside of me. I liked the way the city looked—the small cluster of buildings, the river, the sky. There was so much sky. In New York you had to brace yourself before you went outside, muster the courage to face the crowds and subways and noise. Here, we’d passed farmland less than an hour ago. The sun shimmered on baseball diamonds, emerald lawns, and pretty, quaint houses.

  We’d arrived, our trip was real, there was no turning back now.

  Outside the window, Aunt Janet stood in the parking lot. She wore green pants that sat high on her skinny waist, and a green blouse buttoned to the neck. Her hair frizzed out sideways. She looked like a stalk of broccoli. Broccoli with glasses. She was eight years older than my mom; she’d always been part older sister, part second mother to my mom.

  We gathered our bags, and the bus coughed us out onto the street.

  “You made it.” Janet hugged me and Annie tightly. As we waited for our luggage, Janet squinted at the phone in my hand. “May I see that, please?”

  I handed it to her. She cradled it like it was a hand grenade. “Your mother’s put parental protections on it, right?”

  “Um . . . I don’t think . . .”

  “Do you know what this is?” She held it up.

  I hesitated. “A phone?”

  “It’s the most convenient, direct conduit between pedophiles and sexual predators and you. This is the best thing to ever happen to those people.”

  “But I don’t talk to pedophiles or sexual predators.”

  She slipped the phone into her pocket. “I’m going to put controls on it, some safety measures.”

  I glanced at Annie. I’d warned her about Janet—I’d told her that Janet had moved to Cleveland from Syracuse five years ago for a guidance counselor job at a private Jewish school, which she eventually quit to start her own business. Her company, Safety Solutions, instructed parents about infant CPR, babyproofing, and children’s and teens’ health issues, and in recent months she’d begun leaving creepy messages on our home voice mail. “Gonorrhea,” she’d said. “I’m very worried about gonorrhea and teenagers. Please sit down with Eva and discuss the risk of gonorrhea with her.” When she visited us for Passover in the spring, she left pamphlets about herpes and gonorrhea on top of my desk. I called her Aunt Gonorrhea for a long time, until my mom made me stop.

  The three of us dragged Annie’s duffel bag through the parking lot, a slow and excruciating process. Eventually, we got all our luggage into the back of Janet’s gargantuan white Honda Odyssey.

  Janet pumped Purell into our palms. She’d gotten her germ phobia from her mother, Bubbe 409, who used to stay up all night long scrubbing the kitchen floors, behind the refrigerator, and under the stove. Bubbe 409 had been my age when she survived the war. To my mom and Janet, just the mention of the war explained everything about Bubbe 409. Whenever I asked my mom about her, my mom would clam up. She’d say, “Your grandmother lived in very dirty conditions during the war”—and that was all.

 
Janet glanced at my legs as I climbed into my seat. “Have you gained weight?” she asked me.

  “No.” I looked down at my body. I didn’t think I had, but just hearing her question made my thighs look soft and fleshy.

  “Where’s your whistle? Your mom told me to check you’re wearing it.”

  “Oh. That.” I took it out of my backpack and put it back on, feeling about five years old.

  The minivan was spotless. A giant stack of placards took up the back, which Janet said were for her Lifestyle Choices presentation, a new part of her business.

  “We read a lot about Cleveland—we’d love to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” I said, and showed her the travel page I’d printed out, with its picture of a giant guitar.

  She frowned and glanced at her watch. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Or the International Women’s Air & Space Museum.” I showed her the picture.

  The frown deepened.

  “The Metroparks Zoo? A baby Allen’s swamp monkey was just born there.” Annie told Janet about her sophomore-year research on swamp monkeys—their webbed fingers and toes, their frugivorous and diurnal tendencies.

  “Actually, I have somewhere I want to take you,” Janet said. “A surprise.” Her elbows relaxed on the steering wheel. “I’m just so happy you’re here. For years your mom told me you were going to come visit, but you never did. Two Hanukkahs ago she promised. Then she canceled. I like visiting you in New York, but it’s not the same as having you in my home.” She paused. “It means a lot to me.”

  “My mom works really hard” was all I could think to say, but I felt guilty that we’d never visited Janet before. Since my mom hated traveling, I didn’t think visiting Cleveland had ever really been a possibility.

  “I keep telling her you two need to move here. You could afford a big house. We’ve got great schools. It’s safer. You’d be so happy.”

  My mom once told me she’d rather stab herself in the eye than live in Cleveland. I didn’t tell Janet that.

  “Of course, there’s the problem of Larry,” Janet said. Janet and I’d never talked about Larry, though she’d met him when she stayed with us for Passover. He’d left a bottle cap on the floor that had pierced Janet’s foot. She’d made a big fuss about how it ruined her expensive sock, and that thankfully she was up-to-date on her tetanus shot.

  Janet glanced at me. “She’s not going to marry him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your mom and your dad were a couple for ten years before they got married. Your mom doesn’t make big decisions easily. She’ll put Larry off for a good decade or so, too.”

  “She’s different now,” I said.

  Janet raised her eyebrows. “She’s the same. Drowning herself in work—when she feels down, that’s what your mom does. When she was a teenager, after our father died, she studied nonstop. She didn’t work as hard when you were a baby, and when your dad was alive—she was too happy, I guess.” She paused. “She and Larry haven’t set a date yet. Larry will get tired of waiting and he’ll be gone.”

  I hoped she was right. I looked out the window and felt glad to be away from my mom and Larry. Even a little distance made me feel like I could be myself more, like I could breathe, as I left my mom on one coast and moved toward Will on the other.

  Those who are dead are never gone

  A cemetery.

  Janet’s surprise was a cemetery.

  Janet drove down the road slowly, along the graves. I fingered the hem of my shirt. “Why are we—?”

  She craned her neck. “Just wait.”

  I hadn’t been to a cemetery since my dad’s funeral—I pushed away the memory of that gray, rainy day, our black umbrellas, my mom and me yelling at each other—that day I never wanted to think about. My mom hadn’t let me bring Annie to the funeral—she’d wanted to keep it private.

  A year ago, on the one-year anniversary of the crash, I told my mom I wanted us to visit my dad’s grave. I thought that maybe if we could visit it again, on a sunny, summery day, it could become a nice place to go to, instead of a terrible memory. But my mom froze. We’re not doing that again. We need to move forward. Not back. End of subject. I thought about going by myself, but the cemetery was two hours away, far from any train, and my mom would probably kill me if I told her I planned to wander around Westchester alone.

  All I remembered about my dad’s cemetery was the dank smell of the rain, the mud washing onto the paths, and the gravestones turning dark gray under the downpour. This cemetery seemed completely different. Here, everything glowed in the sunshine—blossoming trees and hydrangeas, a sparkling stream beneath a wooden bridge, grass waving in the wind.

  Janet stopped the car, and we walked down a wide path to a headstone beneath the willow trees.

  BRONSTEIN.

  FREDA BRONSTEIN, ABRAHAM BRONSTEIN.

  Freda was Bubbe 409.

  “My grandparents—? I thought they were cremated?”

  “I’d been carrying those ashes around from Queens to Syracuse to Cleveland and I was sick of it,” Janet said, as if she were talking about a load of laundry. “Cremation is actually against Jewish law, you know, but my mother was pretty much done with religion by the time my father died. She didn’t want us to pay for a burial. And the upkeep. It didn’t matter to her. But you know what? After all these years I decided it matters to me. I wanted somewhere to go to.”

  Janet brushed off the headstone and plucked a few tiny weeds that had grown among the flowers.

  I smiled at Annie awkwardly. The first stop on our cross-country road trip and we were standing in a cemetery. She didn’t complain, though. She looked around approvingly. “Jewish cemeteries totally have it over Christian ones,” she said. “It’s so simple and understated without those phallic statues and giant tombs all over the place.”

  Janet picked a dead petal off a flower. “I toured a bunch before I chose this one. I like that it has a good amount of space between the plots.”

  I’d never imagined I’d be standing in Cleveland in front of my grandparents’ buried ashes, talking about the width between plots.

  I felt my chest tightening, a small seed of panic beginning—the image of my dad’s grave hovering at the edge of my mind—but I willed it away. My grandparents’ names were carved into the stone in both English and Hebrew, and I ran my finger across the deep grooves, their jagged edges.

  “Some people—like your mom—think it’s odd I did this.” Janet shrugged. “But I figure, my parents were never really happy when they were alive. At least they can have some peace when they’re dead.”

  I told Annie how my grandfather had died before I was born, and that my memories of my grandmother revolved mainly around cleaning products.

  Janet sighed. “She was pretty screwed up.”

  Annie gazed at the headstone, at the dates of birth and death. “I can’t imagine what your grandmother must’ve gone through during the war.”

  “My mom never talks about it. She’s never told me anything,” I said.

  “You know your mom. She doesn’t like talking about the past,” Janet said.

  “How did Freda even survive the war?” I asked.

  Janet looked for a rock and placed it on the headstone. “She was around your age then. They’d started liquidating ghettos in Poland, rounding people up for the camps. Freda’s father wrote to a distant relative in London and asked for help. He couldn’t get the whole family out of the country, but he got Freda a place on a children’s train to England with dozens of other kids.”

  “One of the Kindertransports? We studied those in school,” Annie said.

  Janet nodded. She told us how Freda’s parents had taken her to the station and said good-bye. As the train moved, her parents raced alongside it, their faces crumpling. Freda waved at them until her mother and father blended into a blur of gray and brown, then disappeared in the distance.

  Freda and her parents wrote letters through the Red Cross for
months. Freda never told her parents the truth, that in London she lived in a boardinghouse with other girls, refugees. Mice ran across the girls’ beds at night, little pricking thumps on their stomachs. She had lice on her scalp and in her eyebrows. The air raids began, and the girls slept in the basement, where the ground was covered with rat droppings. During the day, she worked in a hat factory. Her fingers bled, and two fingernails broke off. The girls were only allowed to take baths once every couple of weeks, and each girl had to use the same bathwater. There was hardly any laundry soap, and her clothes became spotted with stains. Every night, Freda fell asleep with a photo of her parents beside her pillow, but one morning she woke up and the photo was gone. Another girl had stolen it and thrown it in the fireplace. Sometimes, girls stole things for no reason at all. Just to steal and destroy. Freda had no photos of her parents after that.

  “Did she ever see her parents again?” I asked. Around us in the cemetery, everything was quiet, except for the wind whistling through the trees.

  “The letters from Freda’s parents stopped coming. But she was sure she’d see them when the war was over. She was sure they’d come for her.”

  “What happened then?” Annie asked.

  “When the war finally ended, she still hadn’t heard anything from them. She decided to go back to their village in Poland, thinking that if her parents survived, they’d return also.

  “The outside of the house looked exactly the same, but another family was living inside it. They came to the door. They denied it had ever been Freda’s family’s home and wouldn’t let her in. No one in the town would speak to her. An old neighbor told her to leave—some Jews who returned were being killed in the open, even though the war was over.

  “She never saw or heard from her parents again, and found no records of their deaths. She found records of their deportation—her mother to Treblinka, her father to Sobibor. That was all. Nothing more.”

  “I can’t believe my mom never told me this,” I said.