Kissing in America

by Margo Rabb

  I’d thought the blank page was a giant slab of raw pain, but once I was inside it, it was like looking off to the side during a horror movie, realizing that all that fear isn’t necessary or real.

  That’s what writing did, what I’d forgotten: how it unraveled the tangled feelings and wove them into something new.

  Caesura

  I lay in bed for a long time, holding the journal, staring at what I’d written. The stomach bug was mostly gone and there was a sense of quiet. And with it came an idea.

  I wrote down notes, and then I called Trent in Texas. We talked about my idea to build a website, to start a campaign to raise donations for Annie’s scholarship fund. He said he could design a rough beta version, working from his trailer in Texas. At first I wanted to get something posted online as fast as possible, but he said that the better we made it, the bigger chance it would have of paying off. I wrote a draft of the content, explaining what happened with the show, Annie, and Will (changing his name), and explaining how it had been my fault we lost. I told the whole story of what led to me being shut out of the studio that day. We planned to set up a PayPal account for the donations to the fund, and to create links to all of Annie’s academic prizes. I hoped that if we worked hard at this, I could make back some—or even all—of the money I’d lost for her.

  “It’ll take me a week to get the site live,” Trent said. “I’ll work as fast as I can.”

  The thought of posting the whole story online felt a little bit like dancing naked on a stage, humiliating and crazy at the same time—but the idea of splaying your insides out for the entire world to see is easier when you’re not actually on a stage, but hiding in a hotel room under a blanket.

  I sent Annie a link to the first page Trent designed for the beta site. I didn’t hear back. The next morning, while Lulu was out getting breakfast, there was a knock on my door. I opened it.

  Annie looked both the same and different—she wore jeans and a black T-shirt she’d worn during our trip—but she stood stiffly, her elbows sticking out at odd angles.

  “Janet dropped me off,” she said. “She’s on her way to discuss syphilis with members of the LA school board.”

  She leaned against the doorframe, her arms folded. Would she forgive me? Or murder me?

  I held the door open. “Come in! Do you want coffee? The coffee pods they have here are really cool.” I hated how self-conscious I sounded, like I was either an extremely bad waitress or we were on some weird sort of friend date.

  She shook her head.

  “How’s the condo?” I asked.

  “It’s nice. Janet’s actually been really great.” She shrugged.

  Everything seemed strange between us now. The world had turned upside down. She and Janet had probably been painting each other’s toenails while watching Lifetime movies and stabbing a voodoo doll of me.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and twisted her hands in her lap. It felt a little like it had when I’d seen Will. She was going to say it was over with us. Our friendship was done. She’d bolt like he did. Something sharp lodged itself in my throat.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I screwed up.” I leaned against the dresser and squeezed it so tightly my knuckles turned white. “I keep thinking how I can make it up to you—”

  “Was this whole trip just about a guy for you?”

  “No—”

  “Were you lying that you cared about the scholarship? Did you just use me because you wanted to take this trip?”

  “No.”

  “We would’ve won.”

  “I know.” I hated that this had happened. How could I fix it? “I have a check for you. I can pay you back for the trip now. I borrowed the money from Lulu.” I walked over to the desk to get it. I thought it might make things easier if I paid Lulu back instead of Annie.

  “You don’t need to do that. I know you’ll pay me back.” She returned the check to me.

  “I’ll give you all my checks from the laundromat. Everything I earn from now on. I promise. I got so carried away. I had to see him. I couldn’t not see him. I never thought they wouldn’t let me back in. Not in a million years.”

  “I know you didn’t do it on purpose. I just—” She sighed. “I thought you’d be there for me, you know?”

  “I know.” I squeezed the corner of the dresser again, so hard this time that my fingernail broke. “I’m going to do everything I can to get you another scholarship. I’ll go on Promzillas if I have to.”

  “You’re not going on Promzillas.”

  “Then Girls with Lots of Cats, Who Need Boyfriends.”

  “You don’t have cats.”

  “I’ll get some.”

  I shook my head. “I’m so sorry. About everything. Losing the money. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.” I couldn’t stop thinking about the money. It had been so much that I couldn’t even picture it, two hundred thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars, ha ha ha, it had even seemed like a joke sometimes, but now that it was lost, I felt ashamed to have joked about it at all, because it wasn’t a funny thing—it was our futures and our freedom.

  “Wait till the website’s up—it’ll get the word out. Maybe there are scholarships out there that we don’t even know about,” I said.

  “I got a couple emails this morning. One from this woman who works at Girls Strive, one of the organizations that sponsored the show. She wants me to apply for some other scholarships. And I got a message from some guy who saw the show and found me online. He knows about this internal-nomination-only scholarship. I mean, I Googled him and it says he works for some education foundation, so I think he’s for real. Of course, maybe it’s fake and he’s really some convict writing from prison.”

  “Possibly,” I said. “See? So many opportunities. Even prisoners want to help you.”

  She smiled for the first time, and then hesitated and lowered her voice. “I’m really sorry about Dickhead. I mean Will.”

  I moved to the bed and sat down across from her, on the blanket. “Thanks. He isn’t totally a dickhead, though. Maybe just five percent dickhead. Two percent.” The dickhead part of him was because his kisses, whether he’d wanted them to or not, had felt like a promise to me. A broken one, though I saw now that all along he’d never intended to promise anything.

  “There should be a government board that labels guys like meats, listing the degree of potential dickheadness. The chance they’ll break your heart. Prime Grade A Dickhead. Mild Grade C Dickhead,” she said.

  “I don’t regret the night with him on the roof, though. The friendship.” Maybe that’s what “The Floating Poem” meant. What had happened with him would always exist, apart from time. Not everything has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Will would always be the first boy I loved. Whatever happens, this is. We still were, the way Will’s brother was always his brother. My father was always my father.

  I thought of how I’d always admired Will’s strength, how confident and sure of himself he seemed, how even in the beginning when I hardly knew him, he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth about his brother. Maybe the real strength was in facing things, putting your heart out there, leaping, as Lulu said, taking chances, feeling pain, loving again and again. Maybe there were as many different types of strength as there were different types of love.

  “I regret seeing him in the parking lot and losing the show—that I’d take back in a second,” I said.

  I got up and walked over to my bag. “I need to give this back to you.” I took out Quarky and handed him to her. She held him in her arms.

  I lay next to her on the bed. We were quiet for a long time as we stared at the ceiling, just as we had all over the country.

  There’s a thing in poetry called the caesura—a pause between words, a silence. I thought: That’s what real friendship is, too. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone who understands your mistakes and forgives you.

  She finger
ed the blanket. “Grace was so embarrassed about her panic attack, she hasn’t even talked to me since. She and her dad took a flight after the show—they didn’t want to stick around. I think she just cracked under the pressure.” She turned to me. “She didn’t mean to have you locked out. She told me how guilty she felt about Tennessee. How she treated you there.”

  I nodded. I didn’t think it had been Grace’s fault, either.

  “I decided for the trip back I’m going to get off in Calypso and spend a week there with Chance. Is that nuts?”

  “It’s not nuts. I think he’d be labeled only .5 percent dickhead. Or maybe zero.”

  She smiled. “Want to stay there with me? And Janet? Janet’s going back to Texas too.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently she’s coming around to the idea of love. Herpes aside. She’s planning to ‘meet with more clients’ there—but I think she’s really just planning to see Farley again.”

  “Wow. Janet in love. You guys really need to read Cowboys on Fire, you know.”

  “We can write a new book. Cowboys on Fire with Gonorrhea.” She leaned on her elbow. “I did win something from the show after all. They had a consolation prize from one of their sponsors. Guess who the sponsor was? GE. You could pick a plasma TV or anything. I told my mom she could choose what she wanted.”

  “What did she get?”

  “Three new washers and dryers. She’s thrilled. She can’t wait to replace some of the old clunkers.”

  “Oh god. Life is so mean,” I said.

  “Could be worse,” she said with a small smile. She reached out and picked a piece of lint off my shirt. There was still a gulf between us—but it was closing.

  A little while later, Lulu returned. We’d planned to have lunch in the Mirabelle restaurant and then go for a walk. We rode the elevator down together.

  “I have a table reserved,” Lulu said. The other hotel guests clopped past us in flip-flops and towels, coming in from the beach.

  We entered the restaurant. There was someone at our table already. My mother.

  PART EIGHT

  I REMEMBER YOU

  It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

  the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and I can’t turn it off.

  For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

  I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those

  wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

  I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush. This is it.

  Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

  What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

  whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

  say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

  for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:

  I am living. I remember you.

  —Marie Howe

  From the same source

  How did you get here?” I asked her. She looked so out of her element in the peachy-white hotel restaurant, with its pastel napkins, absurdly huge baskets of peonies, and pink tablecloths. She wore a short-sleeved black dress and black sandals. All around us were bouncy blond waitresses in white pants and floral shirts.

  “I flew.”

  My mom had flown to see me. I couldn’t absorb it.

  She looked around. “It’s nice here.” She smiled at me. I looked away from her face. I couldn’t meet her gaze.

  Lulu and Annie excused themselves and said they’d meet us later. I wished I could go with them.

  “I’m so happy to see you. I missed you.” My mom’s voice sounded both nervous and relieved. “You look good. I’m so glad—” She paused. “Please sit down.”

  I sat across from her and didn’t say anything. I kept my backpack on my lap like a barrier between us, an extra person.

  Saying good-bye to her in Port Authority seemed like months ago. I thought of how my mom looked in the photo of us in Central Park, young and happy, a different person. I thought of my mom as a teenager, studying nonstop after her father died. My mom watching Freda scrub and scrub. And I thought of my dad under the sea, looking at us in the restaurant right now, using his own telescope.

  “Lulu and Janet told me about your trip. Sounds like an adventure.” She smiled again, a sad smile. She rearranged the sugar packets, making sure all were right side up, the same way Janet had in Cleveland. “I wish I could’ve come along.” Her voice was gentle.

  I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have liked it.”

  She let go of the sugar packets. Her hand lay on the table, grasping and releasing something invisible. She had a callus on the same finger that I did, from writing her lectures by hand.

  I stared out the window at the beach and the ocean. California seemed as if it was on the edge of the world, a different country from the east coast and every state in between. The waitress grinned as she placed menus and water glasses in front of us. We didn’t touch them.

  “Come home with me tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll take the train back together.”

  I shook my head.

  “You want to go back with Annie. I understand.”

  I fingered my bag. It was softer after having been lugged across the country, with tiny grease stains from our rest stop meals, and dirt from the middle of Texas, and a million other splotches and microscopic souvenirs from our trip.

  I let go of the bag and smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth. My mom reached her hands across the table and tried to touch mine, but I moved them to my lap.

  “I shouldn’t have made the decision about the search without you. I kept thinking if we had to have another funeral—” She spoke slowly, then paused. “I wanted it to be easier for you this time.”

  I looked down. “We never talk about him,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Daddy.”

  My hands started to shake as I said his name. All the anger I’d buried for so long simmered to the top. I opened my bag and took out the pillowcase.

  The silk tie, T-shirt, postcards, Toffee Crisp wrappers—I dumped everything out.

  The edges of her face quivered. She stared at it all, disbelieving, as if I’d just taken my father out of my bag and placed him on the table.

  Her lips thinned into a frown. She picked up the tie first, her mouth working, twisting at one corner. She touched the fabric like a scientist, distantly, unsure. Then she picked up the paperweight, the postcards.

  “Where have you been keeping it?” She made a little movement with her shoulders, as if she wanted to get away from all this stuff, get rid of it as soon as possible.

  I shook my head. “You would’ve thrown it out.” The backs of my eyes stung, and I could feel the tears threatening.

  The waitress walked by and glanced at our faces and all the stuff on our table. She hurried off.

  My mom’s mouth kept working. Then she took the T-shirt and held it, pressed it to her face. She breathed it in. She picked up the Toffee Crisp wrappers, touched the yellow lettering, the white insides. “Do you know why he couldn’t stop buying these?”

  I shook my head.

  Her face changed; her mouth relaxed. Her skin looked soft and pale. “I never got to meet Daddy’s father, but from the stories Daddy told me, I think he was a lot like my mother. Except instead of her crazy cleaning, he used to hoard food. Candy. Chocolate. When Daddy’s father was a kid in England, food was rationed during the war. He hoarded sweets for the rest of his life. Whenever he traveled, he brought back tons of Toffee Crisps for Daddy. Daddy was only twelve
when his father died of a heart attack.”

  I pictured my dad as a boy, missing his own father, losing him when he was younger than me. Here all this time I’d been remembering the carefree and happy side of my dad, but he had his own grief and worries, too. Maybe he’d felt his own father’s buried fears and heartache, just as my mom felt Freda’s. As I felt hers.

  My mom kept holding the wrappers. “They’re releasing the preliminary report next week. About the data and voice recorders.” She spoke quickly. “It isn’t a surprise or anything. It was a combination of things, of errors and mistakes. Computer malfunctions. Pilot errors—a string of pilot errors. Bad weather, bad luck.”

  I touched the tablecloth. Maybe he had been thinking of us in those last minutes. Or maybe what he felt then would always be a mystery. An unanswerable question.

  “I wanted to be strong for you,” she murmured. “I thought if we could forget the past and move forward—both of us—we’d be okay.” She glanced down. “Maybe it wasn’t the best way. But it was all I could manage to do.”

  Her face looked bare, unsure. We were quiet for a long time.

  It’s not enough, I wanted to say. Maybe the two of us, left alone, isn’t enough. Maybe too much had been broken between us, more than could be fixed.

  My mom lowered her voice. “Your romances are right, you know. About great love.”

  I looked up at the ceiling. “Please don’t make fun of me right now.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not making fun. I’m telling the truth.” She opened her handbag and took out a big cloth pouch. Silk floral fabric with a silver zipper.

  She opened it and gingerly removed a baby’s pink and blue knit cap, a tiny hospital bracelet, a necklace I’d made for her in first grade out of puffy beads, a small album of elementary school art, the Urbanwords book of poems.

  “I usually keep it in my top drawer, but I wanted it with me on the plane.”