Kissing in America Read online

  He told me how over Christmas his dad sent him lots of gifts—a watch, a wallet, a tie he’d never wear, and a check for $600 to buy a new phone. His mother couldn’t watch him unwrap them without muttering “Jerkface” and “guilt money.”

  “What kind of phone did you get?”

  “I never got it. I gave the check to my mom.” He said his mom’s bakery was in trouble—they were losing money and she had to lay off most of the staff. He’d spent the whole break working there, in between meeting with the swim team to practice. “We’re behind on rent, and our landlord’s really nice, so we’ll see what happens.” His tone had a harsher, darker edge. “I’m actually glad school started.”

  “Me too.”

  He paused. “Christmas must be hard without your dad.”

  “We’re Jewish, so we never celebrated it, but—you know. It’s like the world is made for families with two parents and lots of kids. Not for measly families of two,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  I felt a surge of sympathy for him about his mother’s bakery, and his father who’d abandoned him for all those years, and his baby brother, and at the same time I reveled in these things, that we both had this in common—tragedies. Did he talk to Gia about his lost brother and his dad? Did he only talk to me about it? There was no way he could talk to Gia like this. What tragedies had she survived? A snag in a cashmere sweater. A slight redness after a mustache wax.

  “Holidays kind of suck,” he said.

  “I used to like them. I remember the winter before my dad died, we used to go to this coffee shop he liked in the West Village—it isn’t there anymore—where they had crepes and huge cups of hot chocolate. We’d sit there by their fireplace for hours and write in notebooks.”

  “You stopped writing because it was something you only did with him?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.” That wasn’t entirely true, since I used to write on my own also, at night before I went to sleep. Now, instead of writing before bed, I read romances. It was a painless way to escape.

  “So are you going to send a poem in to that contest?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.” My voice sounded more defensive than I meant it to. Why was he bugging me about this?

  “I just don’t think talent should go to waste,” he said. “Maybe you just need company. Sometime we can go find a café and write.”

  “We should.” Did he mean it? Would we do that?

  He peered over the windshield. “Sorry this is taking so long. Takes them forever to plow.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I felt so happy, inching toward the Triborough Bridge, happier than I’d felt in ages. The sun began to set, sitting on the horizon like a butterscotch candy. Orange light bounced off the windshield, and everything became quieter as the snow sugared the streets and parked cars. I loved the city in snow, the hush and slowness. And I liked looking at him as he peered over the steering wheel. I saw things I’d never noticed about him before: the tiny red birthmark on his neck, and the crumbs and little moth holes in his black coat. I listened to the van’s motor humming and the voices on the radio, which he kept turned down too low to really hear. The faint voices rose and fell in waves, and I wanted to freeze that time in the van with him, to keep it forever.

  The happiness stayed with me the whole drive, and when we finally reached my apartment building, he exhaled.

  “We made it,” he said.

  I asked if he wanted to get something to eat, but he said he should get back, it would be a long drive back to his apartment on 114th Street. I thanked him. I still couldn’t believe he’d driven so far out of his way. I started to take the scarf off.

  “Keep it,” he said. “Stay warm.”

  He drove off.

  As soon as the lobby door closed behind me, I called Annie.

  “He drove me home.” My voice dropped about ten octaves. I sounded like a dying werewolf. I had to repeat myself twice before she understood.

  “Wow. He’s a really nice guy,” she said.

  “He said he missed me over break. Does he like me? Do you think he likes me?”

  “Of course he likes you. You’re friends. He has a girlfriend in case you’ve forgotten.”

  I reminded her that Gia was in a European wilderness preserve and hopefully had been eaten by bears. “Why did he drive me home if he doesn’t like me?”

  “Because he wanted to show you his liquid velvet eyes and his manroot.”

  “Ha ha ha. Funny.”

  “Because he can’t stand the thought of you waiting, cold and alone, on a subway platform. He’s a genuinely good guy.”

  “But he said ‘I missed seeing you.’”

  “He could’ve meant it as a friend.” She paused. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

  “I’m not getting my hopes up.” Friends. Friends was good. Friends was great.

  Except we weren’t exactly friends, not like any friends I’d ever had. It didn’t feel like friends when he stared at me, or the way he said my name sometimes, Eva-a, a little too slowly, a little sarcastically. Or that electric feeling between us, like we were always balancing on a high wire.

  Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. Maybe it was just limbic resonance. During the school day he was with the swim team crowd and the seniors, a distance so far it could’ve been another country. Maybe we were a different type of friends: Friendish. Friendesque. Someone needed to invent a word for it.

  The next Friday morning I felt hyperawake, the afternoon lying ahead like an unopened present.

  Then came lunchtime.

  “What are you staring at?” Annie asked me, and followed my gaze. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Gia’s back.”

  I felt this crumpling inside. At tutoring, Will explained that Gia’s parents changed their minds. They didn’t want her missing so much school. (A rumor I’d heard that afternoon told a different story: she’d been fired from her modeling job for getting drunk. I didn’t ask him about that.) When she picked him up that afternoon, her legs seemed to have grown even longer, her hair thicker and shinier. Her eyebrows looked like skinny black licorice.

  I blinked back tears the whole subway ride home, wishing I was in the van with him. I felt this huge ball of shame in my stomach, too, at this crush that never seemed to go away. At all this doomed yearning and useless hope. What a waste. “Pour all that energy into school,” Annie said when I called her that night. “That will help you forget about him a little.”

  It didn’t help. I had a stomach bug day the next Friday, and the Friday after that. I knew I had to stuff the crush away again, to stop it from growing and flowering. I thought about quitting tutoring, but Annie said that was a mistake—I needed a good recommendation from Mrs. Peech for college. Anyway, quitting tutoring probably wouldn’t make a difference—whether I tutored him or not, the crush still simmered beneath everything, like a fluish misery.

  “Just wait till summer,” Annie said. She’d heard a rumor that Gia was going to Greenland over the summer. “It’ll be different then,” she said. Lulu agreed with the wait-till-summer plan. “See what happens,” she said. “Let the feelings be there, without judging them. Everything is always changing. This will change, too.”

  Will started his final term paper, and the warm weather arrived early—the school yard sprang alive with Frisbees and thumping basketballs and backpacks on the ground like colorful sleeping cats. One afternoon, he came to the north tower holding a letter. He’d gotten accepted to UC–Santa Cruz, his first choice, with a scholarship.

  Will took off his cowboy hat. As the moon rose into a perfect crescent in the indigo sky, he told her, “I know everybody supposes I’ll head off to Santa Cruz, but I ain’t goin’. I’m stayin’ here with you, Miss Eva. Now get over here and lie down with me by the creek on this bed of moss.”

  Our friendish friendship continued but the crush never disappeared. It just lay buried, like an un
derground spring.

  Little things he said in passing encouraged it.

  We should hang out at the Strand over the summer.

  I’m supposed to write an essay for college freshman English in August. You’ll have to help me. No one else will tell me the truth about how much I suck.

  We exchanged phone numbers, though he never used mine. (I’d texted him once when he missed tutoring:

  Hope you’re ok—are you coming today?

  but he never wrote back.) He didn’t find small things important: returning texts, charging his phone, being on time, punctuation.

  I brought him a brochure of summer classes that the Poetry Society was offering for free to high school students—I planned to take a three-week one starting in late June. He signed up also.

  The end of school wasn’t the end but the beginning. Gia would be gone and things would start over. Start new. Annie still said that after Gia left for the summer, I should tell him the truth about how I felt about him, but I knew I could never go through with it. Loving someone seemed like offering your soul on a plate—Here you go! You can have me!—and they could so easily say, No, none for me. No thanks. If my dad hadn’t died, if my insides weren’t filled with quivering Jell-O, maybe I could handle the rejection. But his death had scrubbed off a layer of my skin. It made me feel scared that at any moment the world might throw something else at me that I couldn’t take.

  I loved romances because when you opened the first page, you knew the story would end well. Your heart wouldn’t be broken. I loved that security, that guaranteed love. Sure, a minor, usually unlikable character might drop dead from typhus or consumption or starve to death in the brig, but bad things were only temporary in those books. By the end, the hero and heroine would be ecstatically in love, enormously happy.

  In real life, you never knew the ending. I hated that.

  I knew if I told Will how I felt about him and he said no thanks I’d have a stomach bug day that I’d never get out of. It would become a whole stomach bug life.

  I measure every grief

  I’d taken Will’s advice: I wrote a poem, the first poem I’d written since my dad died, and submitted it to the contest.

  (It wasn’t exactly “writing”—I’d scrawled it really fast on the back of a Fresh Direct receipt while I stood at the kitchen counter at midnight. It was the night after Will asked, “Are you afraid?” I’m not afraid, I told myself. Then I ate an entire package of Chips Ahoy.) I hadn’t written anything else since.

  It didn’t win the contest, but in June I found out that it received an honorable mention.

  “They’re printing it in a book and giving me a certificate,” I told my mom. “At this festival held at our school. It’s called Urbanwords. It’s next Friday.”

  We were sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, eating breakfast. We lived in an old brick building with peeling green paint and cracked mirrors in the lobby, and hallways that smelled like overcooked cabbage and Mr. Clean. Out the kitchen window, the pink neon sign of Mega Donuts blinked on and off, though the “n” was broken. Mega Douts. Mega doubts, I always thought.

  I had Cowboys on Fire (book 8: Cousin Bryce) propped in front of my fried eggs and potatoes. The New York Times lay in front of my mom’s spinach omelet.

  My dad used to be the cook in our family—pastas, roast chicken, and eggs were his specialties, and I was his assistant. Now I was the cook. My mom had never asked me to (for a long time, we’d order takeout when she came home from work, and scarfed down cold cereal for breakfast every morning), but I liked cooking. I liked going to the store and stuffing the fridge and cupboards full of fresh bread and cheese, eggs, ripe peaches, berries, cantaloupe, and other delicious things to eat, and standing over the stove with the recipes my dad had torn out of magazines. I even liked placing the Fresh Direct order, ordering bagels and whitefish salad.

  “The ceremony starts at five o’clock,” I said.

  She looked up from her newspaper and pressed her lips together. “I have a conference at Brooklyn College that day. I’m giving a keynote at five and I have events till late at night.”

  I shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.” But I felt this emptiness just the same.

  She seemed angry—not at me—but she stared out the window at some uncertain point in the distance and seemed almost teary for a second. “Sometimes I get so frustrated that I can’t be in two places at once,” she said. “Can you bring back extra copies of the book for me?”

  “I’ll get extra copies if you promise to read it.”

  “Of course I’ll read it.”

  I didn’t believe her. She’d glance at the poem, her face as blank as when she read her students’ papers.

  She put her hand over mine. “I’m sorry I can’t be there.” She paused. “I hope the ceremony won’t go too late. I don’t want you taking the subway from the Bronx after eight.”

  “I’ll be fine. It won’t go late.”

  Ever since my dad died, my mom had been worried that something bad would happen to me. A year ago she signed me up for a Self-Defense for Women class where each week I repeated the phrase “I want I need I deserve” and practiced sticking my fingers into a dummy’s jugular notch. She worried about muggings, crazy people on the street, kidnappers, and every crime that she read about in the paper.

  Even now, the thought of me riding the subway at night set something off in her, and she passed her newspaper to me. “Read this.” She pointed to an article about pedestrian deaths. Kids who had been killed while crossing Manhattan streets.

  “These people crossed with the light but the drivers turning didn’t see them. When you cross, you have to make eye contact with the drivers. Make sure they see you,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m always careful.” I stood up and put my dishes in the sink. I glanced at the clock. “I’m meeting Annie to go study. I promise I’ll make eye contact with drivers when I cross the street.”

  “I’m not joking,” my mom said.

  “You be careful too, then,” I said. “You’re spacier than me.” My mom was always doing her work on the subway and missing her stop.

  “I will,” she said.

  As I walked to Athens Diner to meet Annie, I thought about how my dad used to say that when he looked at me, he felt like he’d re-created himself in girl form. “You’re both gooey lovecrumbs,” my mom had agreed. Now I wished she was a little bit of a gooey lovecrumb. A smidge of a lovecrumb. She used to be, before he died. When I was younger, we’d go to the park, and from the swings I’d watch my parents kiss. On weekend mornings, I climbed into bed between them, and the three of us read books together. We stopped doing that after he died.

  It was like my dad was the glue between my mom and me, and the glue had been washed off.

  Annie waited in a booth. We ordered hot chocolates with extra marshmallows and I told her about the poem.

  She squealed and hugged me. “Did you tell Will?”

  “Not yet. He hasn’t been in school the last couple of days, and there’s no point in texting him—his phone doesn’t work half the time.” I’d never even told Annie or Will that I’d written it and submitted it—I wanted to spare myself the humiliation if it didn’t get picked.

  She propped her head on her chin. “I heard a rumor this morning about why he was absent. Jill in my lab group is in AP English with him, and she told me he was out because his dog died. The Undead was not sympathetic.”

  “Silas?” I pictured the three-legged, sixteen-year-old dog that he’d had since he was two. I couldn’t believe Silas was dead. I thought of everything he’d told me—how Silas slept at the foot of his bed every night, and how even when Silas lost his leg—he was hit by a car—he just went on so happily as if nothing was ever wrong. He was able to walk and run again, though a little strangely, and he slept with his head in Will’s lap while Will studied. Will had told me that without Silas maybe he’d never have gotten over his dad’s leaving them, his brother�
��s death, everything.

  I stared into my mug. “I should go see him. Today. I should stop by the bakery. He told me he works there on Saturdays.”

  “Really? To say you’re sorry about his dog?”

  I nodded. “It’s what you’re supposed to do. Like a shiva call.” We’d never sat shiva for my dad—we’d barely survived the funeral, and my mom decided sitting shiva would be too much. We never even went to synagogue anymore. My mom didn’t want to see our rabbi and be reminded of my dad’s death and funeral every time we went.

  “People sit shiva for dogs?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. They should. If it had been my dog, I’d want him to come.”

  She looked skeptical. “Are you sure it’s a good idea? What about Gia?”

  “She leaves in three weeks. She’ll be doing her photo shoot in Greenland.” In my mind, I watched Gia drift away on an ice floe with a crowd of hungry walruses. “Anyway, I’m not going to do anything with him. I just want to tell him I’m sorry.”

  We studied a little while more, but all I could think about was going to the bakery. I’d visited the bakery’s website dozens of times but never had the guts to go in person before. Finally, I gave up studying and told Annie I was going to head over there.

  “Maybe he’ll give you some free cupcakes. You can pretend you like them,” she said.

  I’d never liked frosting—I loved cookies and chocolate, but cake and cupcakes with their thick layers of too-sweet buttery goo weren’t my thing. Still. “I know I’ll like his cupcakes,” I said.

  “And his man frosting,” she said.

  I hesitated. “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well. I’ll tell him that you asked about his man frosting.”

  “He’ll love that. Thank god you have me here to give you romantic advice,” she said.

  I packed up my backpack and stopped at home—my mom was grading papers, and barely noticed I was there—and grabbed a copy of an Edward Gorey book called Amphigorey that had once belonged to my dad. Not cartoons exactly, but dark and funny and perfect. I said good-bye to my mom and told her Annie and I were headed to the library—but she just nodded and went back to work.