Kissing in America Page 9

  “Does this mean . . . I get to go?”

  She sighed. “I know I’m overprotective. I just . . . I worry about you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “Nothing bad’s going to happen to me.”

  She put her hand on my arm, and I resisted the urge to pull away. She always wanted to be close to me at the exact moments when I didn’t want to be touched. I most needed to talk to her on the nights she worked late or sat huddled at the kitchen table, hidden behind a fortress of her students’ papers. During the moments when we got along well, like when we watched a TV movie together last Saturday night on the couch, a wall still stood between us. During a funeral scene at the end of the movie, I couldn’t escape the rushing memory of my dad’s funeral. I felt a surge of anger remembering that day, the worst day, the day that we never spoke about. I stopped watching and went to bed.

  I knew I was harsh on her sometimes because she was here, and my dad wasn’t. But we couldn’t go back to the way things were before he died.

  Now she moved her hand away. “It’s not that I don’t trust you . . . it’s all the crazy people out there who I don’t trust. The world isn’t what you think it is.”

  I wanted to tell her that I knew this—that I understood, just as she did, that the world was the kind of place where your father could leave on a business trip and never come back. But we never said these kinds of things to each other.

  “It’s a long time for you to be away,” she said.

  “It’d be two weeks. You wouldn’t even notice I was gone.”

  She sighed. “Larry and Lulu think it’s a good idea. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Lulu said. And Janet really wants to see you. She told me you’d be even safer with her than with me.”

  “Definitely true, knowing Janet.” Janet was so neurotic that she made my mom look almost mellow. “It’s not such a big deal,” I said. “We’ll be back before you know it. Safe and sound.”

  “You’ll promise to be careful?”

  “Of course. I’m always careful. And I’ll be with Annie. The most responsible person on the planet.”

  She walked over to my bookshelves and straightened Margaret Thatchbear’s hat. Below the bears, I’d stacked Women and Economics and Girls Be Strong beside my romances. A pile of the Urbanwords books lay on the shelf underneath. I’d never given a copy to her, and she’d never asked.

  She sat on my bed again and brushed my hair away from my forehead. She had absolutely no idea who I was.

  Lately I had this feeling, sitting in our apartment in the melting summer, of wanting to shed it. To shed our apartment building with its two hundred residents piled on top of each other like rats; to shed riding the 7 train every day with its smells of garbage and BO and strangers smushed together like cattle; to shed Larry with his broken glasses and bird-poop-attracting bald head; to shed my mother and her worries and expectations and refusal to talk about my dad. Sometimes I wanted to shed my whole life.

  I had this constant sense of yearning, and I wasn’t even sure what I was yearning for.

  It was for Will—but for more, too. Maybe it was yearning for another life—for that dream life, that sublimely happy existence it seemed a few people had, that I wanted.

  On the subway every morning I watched the crowds of strangers in their suits and dresses, jeans and sweatpants, and I’d wonder sometimes if I’d become one of them. When I grew up, would I stay in Queens? Who would I be? Where would I be?

  “So . . . can I go?” I asked her.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “Yes,” she said finally, reluctantly. “You can go.”

  PART THREE

  IT FEELS SO OLD A PAIN

  I measure every grief I meet

  With analytic eyes;

  I wonder if it weighs like mine,

  Or has an easier size.

  I wonder if they bore it long,

  Or did it just begin?

  I could not tell the date of mine,

  It feels so old a pain.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love

  The morning we had to leave, I scurried around our apartment making sure I had everything: my favorite jeans, my red sneakers, my soft blue pajamas, my dress and shoes for the show, and my books. It was so early, it was still dark outside; my mom and Larry sipped giant cups of coffee at the kitchen table. They showed me the heavy artillery they were sending me away with: an iPhone (a discounted floor model, courtesy of Larry’s cousin who worked at AT&T) to replace my Crapphone, pepper spray, and a Swiss Army knife. And they handed me a map of the country marked up with our route, and a red dot to show every person’s house where we’d be staying—Aunt Janet’s in Cleveland, Annie’s cousin Grace’s in Tennessee, Larry’s mother’s in Texas, and Lulu’s in Tucson.

  “You have the dress and heels carefully packed, too?” My mom had let me borrow one of her vintage dresses—black with white piping—and a pair of red patent heels (they fit perfectly after I stuck two gel liners inside them) to wear on the show. “Please be careful with them,” she said. “Please don’t get them stained.”

  She’d never recovered from the time I was twelve and borrowed a blouse of hers for a school dance without asking. It had gotten splattered with fruit punch and she’d nearly killed me. I’d asked my dad why she was so angry, and he said, “Your mom didn’t have a lot of nice things as a child. They had no money. These things are important to her now.” I thought of my mom’s mother, Bubbe 409, who worked at the Swingline stapler factory in Queens. Lately, my mom seemed to hoard her nice things more than she actually wore them. She liked to keep her dresses in perfect condition in her closet, like it was a museum.

  “I won’t stain the dress. I promise,” I said.

  Larry seemed most excited about the pocketknife, which he’d owned since he was ten. He showed me each of the twenty-one attachments.

  “Now look at this doohickey over here.” He maneuvered a gray piece of plastic. “A tiny magnifying glass. You could start a fire with that if you needed to.”

  “Why would I need to start a fire?”

  “You never know,” he said. “It’s all about being prepared.”

  “That’s why I’m glad I had you take that Self-Defense for Women class,” my mom said.

  “I want I need I deserve,” I said.

  “Don’t be sarcastic. Now come here. I got you this.” She reached into her bag and handed me an orange whistle on a matching string. “Please put it on and don’t take it off.”

  “You’re kidding.” It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was like wearing a tiny traffic cone around my neck.

  “It’s not a fashion accessory. It’s for your safety.”

  I put it on. There was no way I was wearing this thing in public.

  Larry hunched over the iPhone and beckoned me closer. “I wish I understood half the things this gizmo does. Let’s see.” He squinted. “Your mom added a Locate My Kids app so we always know where you are, but I haven’t figured out how to—uh-oh. What did I press?”

  The screen turned black.

  “Here—let me help,” I said. He didn’t want to fork it over, but eventually relented. I turned it back on.

  “Don’t forget the gifts,” my mom said, and brought out a bag of things we’d picked out for everyone: Murray’s bagels for Aunt Janet (her favorite, from Manhattan); lipstick for Grace from a boutique in the West Village and a New York City cookbook for her parents; chocolates for Irma; and a letterpress print of an Elizabeth Bishop poem for Lulu, made by one of my mom’s colleagues. My mom had rolled it up carefully into a cardboard tube.

  I checked the time on the phone. “We’re running late—there are still a few other things I need to pack, okay?”

  My mom stared at the whistle swinging against my stomach. “Hurry back though, so I can show you how the pepper spray works.”
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  I went into my room and shut the door.

  I pulled the purple shoe box out of the back of my closet.

  I opened it. I emptied it onto my bed.

  I held the gold horseshoe necklace my father had given me. The chain was so delicate, the horseshoe tiny, the size of my fingertip. It had a pink stone in the center. I’d always been afraid to wear it because I might lose it, so I kept it in the shoe box. Now I didn’t want to leave it here.

  I fastened it around my neck, under my shirt so my mom wouldn’t see it and give me her Let go of him look.

  I picked up one of the postcards, from a business trip he took to Chicago four years ago. A picture of the Tribune Tower, with rocks from the Parthenon and Edinburgh Castle and the Taj Mahal embedded in its side, brought back by journalists from their travels.

  I stared at the signature:

  Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, Daddy

  That was how he signed all his postcards, so many loves that they curled up the edge toward the address and around the stamp—there was never enough room.

  I kept staring at it. This happy string, this happy endless string of loves.

  I picked up the Toffee Crisp wrappers. When we’d cleaned out his office, we’d discovered a Toffee Crisp treasure trove: he’d hoarded them in his desk, filing cabinets, and even inside an old flower vase.

  I snapped the cat collar closed. He’d taken me to Petco to pick it out for Lucky. He helped me choose the purple collar, and Fancy Feast Wild Salmon Florentine and Marinated Morsels Beef Feast. (“Lucky eats better than we do,” he’d said.) We both felt sad seeing all the cats in cages at the store, waiting to be adopted, especially the ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old ones who looked forgotten and forlorn. “Someday we’ll come back and adopt all the old fogies,” my dad had said. “We’ll turn our apartment into a nursing home for old cats.”

  Try not to be so thin-skinned, my mom had said after Lucky died. But she’d never said that when I cried about my dad. For three months after the crash, I spent every night in her bed. I’d wake at four in the morning and not know why I was in her room. Then I’d remember. The tears would roll out like water as I watched the green numbers on her clock. She’d press me to her stomach, which was warm and soft, holding me like she did when I was six years old. I’d think of how I used to climb into their bed on weekend mornings, to cuddle and read, and how different this was—not snuggling at all—it was more like she was trying to save me from drowning.

  We never talked about it in the morning. We pretended everything was fine.

  She never really wept in front of me; she only did it in the bathroom, running the water so she’d think I couldn’t hear. When she came out, I always wanted to ask if she was okay or wanted to talk, but she’d give me this withering look that said, Don’t ask. I don’t want to talk about it. I’d look away and pretend I couldn’t tell she’d been crying.

  Sometimes she had fits of anger, too. One day soon after they confirmed my dad had died, I stood outside our apartment door, about to put my key in the lock, when I heard her scream my father’s name. Then she smashed a ceramic pitcher. It had been my grandmother’s pitcher, Bubbe 409’s. I’d hovered outside the door for a long time, and when I finally came inside, she was sweeping up the shards. She said it had slipped from her hands. An accident.

  Now I picked up the pillow from my bed, took off the pink pillowcase, and put the postcards inside. Then I folded the tie, handkerchiefs, and white T-shirt and put them in also. I stuffed in the paperweight in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge, his glasses, the cat collar, Popeyes receipt, Toffee Crisp wrappers, and the bracelet and rings he’d given me, and tucked it all inside my backpack.

  After all this time, even to take them out of the box hollowed out my stomach. He was in these things. They were him. They were a part of me, as much myself as my arms and legs and eyes and blood.

  You can’t keep weaving all day and undoing it all through the night

  Annie’s mom picked us up in her laundry van to drive us to Port Authority; Annie talked so fast I could barely keep up. “I had the hardest time choosing which books to bring—I couldn’t decide what my weakest subjects were, so I packed Silver’s Scientific Miscellany, The Eberson Review of American History, Complete Mathematical Theorems, and . . .” She named ten other books. She loved her rare, beloved books from the Strand better than anything you could download or read online. “My mom wants to kill me. We couldn’t lift my duffel bag, so we had to ask our neighbor Mr. Rigamonti to help, and he got it in the van but he threw out his back. My mom had to offer him free wash-and-fold for a month. Did you bring the lit books?”

  I nodded. “Reader’s Encyclopedia, A Complete History of English Literature, and a lot of poetry.” My dad’s books. I’d fit all my stuff into my backpack and a rolling suitcase I’d borrowed from Larry.

  My mother and Larry sat in the row behind us; my mom gazed out the window as the city blurred by. She sighed, one of the long, heavy sighs she’d been making the entire ride.

  “This is good for both of us,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself this was true. “It’s good you’re going to see the country a little. Really good.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were trembling.

  “They’ll be okay,” Larry said, and patted her on the back. “They’re staying with friends and family every night. They have pepper spray, an iPhone, and the best pocketknife.”

  “And a whistle.” I held up the orange monstrosity.

  “And I have a can of Mace. My sister Jenny got it for me,” Annie said brightly.

  “Some people would think it’s odd that New Yorkers are this worried about leaving the city,” Larry pointed out. “Most people are afraid when they come to New York City.”

  We all turned and stared at him.

  He shrugged. “It’s true.”

  Larry was the only one among us who’d spent most of his life outside of New York. His mother had been married four times, and he’d lived in New Mexico, Kentucky, and Texas—places that seemed as exotic as Fiji to us. Places that we were now going to see.

  “When you say you’re from New York, people think you live your life dodging muggers and bullets and thugs every day,” he said. “You’ll see. They’ll be shocked that you think you need Mace and pepper spray to survive your journey through the cornfields. The Midwesterners, Southerners, and Texans will probably be afraid of you.”

  Annie and I exchanged looks.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  At Port Authority, we waited outside the turquoise-and-silver Go Blue bus. My mother glared at everyone on line as if they were all ax murderers. She clutched her elbows; she looked like she wanted to grab me and yank me back inside the station.

  “You sure you want to go?” she asked me as the driver took Annie’s ticket. Her voice wavered. “Because you could change your mind right now. It would be completely fine.” She looked like she might cry.

  “It’s only two weeks. I’ll be back really soon. Please don’t worry.” I was so embarrassed. Was she upset because she’d miss me, or because she didn’t want me to have any freedom?

  Larry put his arm around her.

  We gave our bags to the luggage worker. Larry gave me a quick, awkward hug. “Godspeed,” he said. “And good luck.”

  “Good luck!” Annie’s mom echoed. She waved at us, looking thoroughly unworried about the impending trip—she looked excited, in fact. “Bye-bye!” she said. “Come back with the two hundred thousand dollars!” She grinned.

  Annie sighed. “I’ll try.”

  We boarded the bus. I watched my mother’s gaze scan the windows, though they were tinted so darkly there was no chance she could see me anymore.

  There is no music like this without real grief

  What no one ever tells you is that riding a bus can make you feel rich. The key is the front seat
, the view out the wide grand window, perched high above the traffic. As we emerged from the dark station and into the city, I thought that I’d never seen Manhattan like this before. You were always stuck in subways and on crowded sidewalks, in the backseats of smelly taxis or standing inside packed city buses. It never looked like this, so bright and open, the road and the river flowing out the window.

  Annie cracked open People, EW, and In Touch. She speed-read them before she took out a textbook and a folder. “We only have six days till the show, so I made a schedule,” she said, unveiling an elaborate spreadsheet. Today said Math in her column; in my column she’d typed: “Prep Annie for lit q’s!!!!”

  Aside from being her Official Literary Consultant, I was also our Travel Coordinator. I’d checked out guidebooks from the library and read tons of travel sites, and decided what we couldn’t miss: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grand Ole Opry, the Fort Wells rodeo, Sabino Canyon, Universal Studios, Venice Beach, and the Santa Monica pier, which wasn’t too far from where Will’s father lived (I’d Google mapped it).

  The bus driver caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Big trip?” he asked.

  I nodded. “We get off in Ohio today. Cleveland.” Almost nine hours from now. I couldn’t believe I was finally traveling for the first time in my life.

  “Ohio is the best. You gotta eat at City Chili,” he said. “Chili on top of spaghetti. The chain started in Cincy. They got them in Cleveland too now. First time I ate there, I come home and I says to my wife, I says, ‘Let’s put the chili on top of spaghetti for a change.’ She says, ‘No way. Chili? Spaghetti? No can do.’”

  I elbowed Annie. Why was he telling us this?

  “Most people you know, they want to stay in their little house and not change nothing. But when you hit the road—and do I hit the road, I been to every state in this country, and you know what? Everything you ever thought about the world is wrong. That’s why you gotta travel. I’m telling youse two this cause you’re young. You got time. You gonna eat chili on spaghetti, right? You gonna see the world, right?”