Kissing in America Page 2

  Our wait-till-college plan was easy since no boys were interested in us anyway. At our nerd-heavy school, the boys rarely had the guts to speak to us, except when asking to borrow math notes or to pass a beaker in lab. The only guy who’d ever asked me out was David Dweener, who had oily hair and liked to a wear a T-shirt from the musical Cats. Will belonged to the good-looking elite, a small, ultracool crowd. I never thought in a million years that he’d ever speak to me.

  Annie and I walked toward the subway. “Maybe next week you’ll get lucky and he’ll ask to touch your bunion,” she said.

  “That would be wonderful. Except I don’t have a bunion.”

  “Sadly, it was a short-lived romance, since Lady Eva’s dead skin was not yet thick nor copious enough to satisfy Sir Will,” Annie said.

  Laughing about it made me feel a little less nervous when I thought about him, but the next Friday, my heart banged away when he walked through the door of the tutoring center.

  He had a completely new essay:

  The last time I saw my brother he looked perfect. They made his skin pink. His lips were bright red. He wore a fuzzy blue sleeper that had been given to him as a gift, but he’d never worn it while he was alive. My mom wanted each of us to give him something to be buried with, to take wherever he was going. My dad gave him a tiny telescope so that he could always see us on Earth. I gave him one of my stuffed animals, an orange monkey. My mom gave him a gold necklace that said “Mother” on it, which she’d been wearing the day he was born.

  I was seven.

  When people ask my mom how many children she has, she says two. For a while, if someone asked me how many siblings I had, I said none. She got mad when I said that. She likes talking about him. It gives her comfort. I had another son, a baby who died in his crib. They don’t know what caused it. I put him to bed on his back. I didn’t have a blanket in the crib. I didn’t do anything wrong but it happened and you have to learn to live with it. It never gets easier.

  It doesn’t bother her that people cringe and look away when she talks about him. They don’t want to hear about it. She talks about him anyway. She takes out the album and looks at his photos, and she remembers his birthday every year and thinks of how old he would’ve been. Eleven now. He’d be eleven. My mother tells me He will always be your brother. He was born, he lived, he died. Don’t erase his life from yours.

  My mom says that if my brother hadn’t died, she never would’ve known who my father really was, that he was the type of man who would leave when things got hard. After my brother died, my dad started drinking, staying out all night, stopped coming home. Then one day he left for good. I didn’t see him again for ten years.

  So I guess this essay is supposed to be about what’s influenced me the most, but I think sometimes the biggest influence isn’t what’s present in your life, but what’s absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

  I was quiet for a long time. “It’s good,” I said. “Really good.” My voice was soft. “I’m sorry about your brother and your dad.”

  I couldn’t stand how lame sorry sounded. “I hate sorry—I mean—my dad’s dead—he died almost two years ago. I’ve never figured out what the right thing to say is. Or to hear.”

  I knew what the next question would be before he even said it.

  “How did he die?” he asked.

  Truth

  When people ask how my dad died, I lie. I say he died of a heart attack, in his sleep.

  When I used to say the truth, when I used to say plane crash, there was always this look. This flash as their mouths opened, this unbearable hungry eager excitement. They’d want to know what kind of plane, how big it was, where it was going, what went wrong. They wanted more of this freakish thing that didn’t happen to real people, not in real life, not to anyone they’d ever met, it didn’t.

  I understand the curiosity. I mean, I do it too—who doesn’t click on links to accidents and scary things, kids falling down wells, burn victims, serial killers? People always ask bits and facts about the plane, but what they really want to know is how it would be to die like that, to fall from the sky, how it would feel.

  The heart attack happened in his sleep so he never felt a thing, I tell them. Peacefully. Rest in peace. I can never stop thinking about those words rest in peace.

  The airline officials asked my mom for items so he could be identified. Hairs from a comb. Toothbrush. She gathered these specks of my father, specks because there might be nothing of him left from the impact, nothing but other matching specks.

  “You’ll feel relief when they identify the remains,” said the grief counselor lady assigned to us. Her chest was the size of a jumbo loaf of Wonder bread. I called her Wonderboob. Wonderboob liked to tell my mom and me things like “You need to make the time to do your grief work,” as if it was something I could add to my homework list after algebra and English. She led group sessions for the families; she belonged to a team of therapists who’d donated their services. During these weekly sessions she’d yawn and periodically check her texts. She recommended vanilla scented candles and Be Relaxed herbal tea. The plane had crashed deep into the ocean, and only a small amount of remains and wreckage had been recovered from the surface. As the search and DNA analysis continued, Wonderboob ended all our sessions by saying, in a businesslike tone, “I’ll keep you updated on the status of the remains.”

  Remains. She really liked the word remains. You’d think that adults—social workers, grief counselors, people whose job it is to make you feel better—you’d think they’d come up with a better word than remains.

  My mother attended all the sessions with me, but she never said a word during them and never seemed to hear anything anybody else said, either. She’d gaze into the distance, emotionless.

  I never said a word during the sessions either, but I listened to everything. Back then, during those first six weeks after the crash, I was certain my dad was still alive, that he’d never gotten on that plane. I saw him everywhere around the city. I followed a man in a suit into a subway car, thinking it was him. I saw him in a taxi whizzing over the 59th Street Bridge. In a booth at McDonald’s. It was never him.

  I tried not to think about it. I didn’t think about it, I’d be okay not thinking about it, and then I’d see a girl my age with her father and it was like someone was pulling my intestines out with their teeth.

  There’s a KFC on my walk home from the 52nd Street subway station, and sometimes I glance in the window and see them. Girls and their dads doing the tiniest most boring thing like sharing chicken wings (and I don’t even like chicken wings), and I watch them through the window, wanting to soak up all this fatherness, this luxurious fatherness they don’t even appreciate. Usually they’re not even talking to their dads, they’re texting or playing a video game in their laps. Don’t they know? I want to shake them. Don’t they know how lucky they are to sit in the KFC with their fathers?

  Six weeks after the crash, they confirmed my dad’s remains. They’d found a small part of his body.

  Three months after that, my mom got rid of his stuff. His clothes, his shoes, his papers all went in the trash or in a Queens Thrifty-Thrift truck. The only things that she approved of me keeping were our photo albums, his books, and presents he’d given me—a horseshoe necklace for Hanukkah, a silver bracelet for my birthday, three turquoise rings, pens, and notebooks.

  I snuck some other things away before she could throw them out, though. I hid them in a large purple shoe box in my closet.

  Things I kept:

  spare glasses with brown plastic frames and scratched lenses

  Brooklyn Bridge paperweight

  eight postcards he sent from business trips

  soft white Hanes T-shirt

  collar he bought for our cat, Lucky

  two blue handkerchiefs

  striped silk tie

  a receipt from Popeyes for 5 TENDER, 1 BISCUIT, SM PEPSI with
his signature

  six Toffee Crisp wrappers I found in the pockets of his coats

  I take these things out sometimes; I touch the paperweight and T-shirt and candy wrappers and I lie on my bed, holding them.

  A year after he died, my mom said our apartment was too big and expensive, so we moved to a smaller place nine blocks away. That’s when I began saying heart attack to our new neighbors and the owner of the corner grocery store and any stranger who asked.

  A heart attack. In his sleep. At the hospital. He went into the hospital with chest pains and had the heart attack there, in a comfortable hospital room with yellow walls and a striped curtain separating the beds. (I’ve only been to a hospital once, when my aunt Janet had fibroids removed, and that’s what I pictured.) It was a quiet room with a flower painting and a window with an East River view. The caring nurses comforted my mom and me, and we held his hand and said good-bye and I kissed his forehead. I knew the whole scenario. I almost believed it myself. I called it his passing. I heard someone say this one time, his passing, about their father who had a heart attack in his sleep, and I envied it. I was actually jealous of how someone else’s father died. The passing, the peaceful transition between life and death. Rest in peace. That’s how I wanted it to be.

  Funny grief

  The heart attack was so sudden that he never felt a thing. People say it’s lucky to die that way,” I told Will. Around us, in the tutoring center, people talked in quiet voices; someone clapped a book shut.

  He nodded with a sad and intense look.

  I paused. “I always wish they had cartoons—sympathy cards with cartoons, you know? That would capture all the crazy messed-up feelings.” After my dad died, we’d received a mountain of cards featuring footsteps on beaches, silhouettes staring out rainy windows, and bare-branched trees. Annie and I decided that someday we’d come out with our own line of funny sympathy cards. I drew one with a cartoon on the back of my English notebook: The Stages of Grief: (1) Cookies. (2) Candy bars. (3) Bed. (4) More cookies.

  “I’m sorry about your dad. I’m sorry for saying sorry. I wish I had some cartoons.” His voice was gentle and quiet, patient and kind.

  I’d never had a conversation like this with anyone, not even Annie. Her parents were together. No one close to her had died.

  There was something in the room, something new between us this Friday. An understanding. He knew what it was like to lose someone, to be in that dark and awful space, to have your family changed forever.

  “My mom never talks about my dad,” I told him. “She’s the opposite of your mom. She kind of pretends he never existed.”

  “Even around you?”

  “Especially around me.” A year after he died, my mom said she was done grieving, that was all, it was over, like a roast cooking, a timer went off, Aha! All better now! She gave me a book called The Stages of Mourning, which was much worse than Girls Be Strong. The majority of mourning will take place in the first year, it said. After that, it will be easier. I kept thinking, When? When does it get easier? I felt like I was two different people: happy at school, laughing with friends, smiling on the subway reading Torrid Tomorrow; then I’d go into Sunshine Market and see the Toffee Crisp bars, his favorite chocolate bars, next to the gum and Tic Tacs, and I’d stare at their orange-and-yellow wrappers as my eyes began to sting. This other half of me would take over, my stomach would fill with wet rags, and I’d think how hardly anyone even knew this about me, this piece of my dad buried in me.

  One day, I bought a Toffee Crisp and left it on the kitchen counter, and when my mom thought I wasn’t looking, she stuffed it in the garbage. She did the same thing with the newspaper whenever any subject remotely related to his death appeared there.

  Lulu, my mom’s best friend, had explained my mom’s attitude to me once: She’s coping differently than you are. This is her way of grieving. She said my mom’s practical, thick-skinned, stuff-the-feelings-away-and-get-it-done approach came from her parents, especially her mom, who’d been born in Germany and survived the war. “People do what they have to do to get through,” Lulu said. “She’s doing a good job as a single mother. You two are different, but she really, really loves you.”

  My mom said “I love you” every night—“Good night, brush your teeth, I love you”—like an item on a to-do list. My dad used to say it with a soft voice and a kiss to the head, and I told my mom that once: “Daddy said I love you differently.” She looked stricken. She told me she had a headache and she went to bed.

  Now, most of the time, she looked like I was giving her a headache.

  I turned to Will. “When I talk to my mom these days, she pretty much always looks like this.” I imitated her, scrunching up my face and clutching my forehead with one hand.

  “This is what my mom looks like when talking to me.” He made the exact same pained expression.

  I laughed.

  “They’re singing in their chains like the sea,” he said.

  I paused. My ears felt hot. “You liked it. The poem.”

  “He breaks the rules. Made-up words. If I turned something like that in to the Undead, she’d faint. I mean, if she was capable of human reactions.” The Undead was what everyone called his AP English teacher, Mrs. Saddler. She was a stickler for rules and looked approximately 150 years old.

  He liked the poem. His quoting from it had the same effect on me that Sir Richard telling Lilith I will give you all the world’s riches had on her. Of course he liked poetry—he already seemed like a poet. A loner. A bit odd was how Annie described him once. Occasionally at lunchtime he’d go off by himself and wander to god knows where. (I’d suggested to Annie one day that we should follow him. That would be stalking, she’d said.) He told me he rarely checked his email, and he was barely online at all. He only posted photos a few times a year—artsy pictures of subway tracks and his three-legged dog—and he had an ancient flip phone that belonged in a museum (it made my Crapphone, an old, basic smartphone, look almost fancy).

  I loved his oddness. Poetry was sort of odd, which was why I thought—I hoped—he’d like it.

  “My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color,” I said.

  “Your dad was a writer?”

  “No, not really. His day job was in corporate communications, but he had a PhD in English—his thesis was on Dylan Thomas. He scrawled stuff in notebooks, but he always threw out everything he wrote.”

  “But you write,” he said.

  I paused. I hadn’t written anything since my dad died.

  “I used to write poems and stuff.” I shrugged. “I don’t really anymore.” When I tried to write after my dad died, nothing came out. I’d open a notebook and stare at the blank page, but it hurt too much to put anything on it. It felt like staring at a giant slab of pain. Go away, I’d tell the feelings. Go away. I don’t want to talk about you. I want you gone. I’d stick the notebook back in my closet.

  The bell rang. He stood up and stared at the doorway. A new bikini girl waited for him this time: Gia Lopez, who had giant boobs and looked about twenty-five years old. She was the most beautiful girl in our school. I saw her on the subway sometimes and men always gawked at her. Rich-looking guys in suits handed her their business cards.

  He said good-bye, then picked up Gia’s backpack and slung it over his shoulder. I watched them leave. His sure-footed, confident stride, a cowboy-like walk.

  Annie came over to me. “You have this really weird expression on your face,” she said.

  I buried my head in my arms. “I love him,” I muttered to the table.

  She sat down. “I think what you’re feeling is limbic resonance.”

  I looked up. “My limbs are vibrating? You know, they kind of are a little, every time I see him.”

  “No. Limbic resonance is the ability to feel someone else’s feelings. Girls and women are really good at it. It’s part of evolution, so we can sense wh
at babies feel even though they can’t speak. When you see him, you’re feeling that resonance.” Annie’s favorite beach read was Behavioral Endocrinology; by sophomore year she’d already taken two AP science classes and gotten the highest grade in each.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I actually love him.”

  She shrugged. “If you’re sure, then you should tell him.”

  I zipped my backpack closed. “What planet do you live on?”

  Annie rooted around in her bag, which contained, in addition to her textbooks: a TI-89 calculator; Sephora Magnetism lipstick; Quarky, her stuffed subatomic particle (her good-luck charm, a birthday gift from me); three issues of Us Weekly (she liked to read about “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” and molecular biology simultaneously); and chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts, which she preferred to eat cold.

  “In the animal kingdom, they don’t fake it or hide their feelings,” she said. “Baboons’ backsides turn bright red and swell when they see a male they’re interested in.”

  “Thank you. That information is hugely helpful. I’ll be sure to drop my pants and shake my red ass at him in the middle of lunch tomorrow.”

  I didn’t drop my pants. I’d think of Will during English and Spanish and chemistry, picturing us floating from medieval Europe to Antarctica to the Tahitian islands in our romance. Friday couldn’t come fast enough. I sent out pleas to the universe, hoping he’d come back to tutoring again, and all week I imagined things to say to him. Funny things. Smart things. Things that would make him dump Gia Lopez and travel across South America with me, by vine.

  Then, the next Thursday, I saw Will and Gia kissing in the hallway outside the cafeteria, all lips and hands and shiny hair. They could’ve been a couple from a perfume ad, glossy and passionate and perfect. They could’ve been the cover of a romance novel.