The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  She continued: “I think it was strange because he was performing for me. That doesn’t happen often. Mostly, it’s the other way around—the woman performing for the man.”

  When she looked up, she saw that Jed was masturbating again. His hand moved deliberately up and down his penis. This was Friday afternoon. This was early summer in Maureen’s backyard, and she was trying to have a conversation with him.

  “That was a sexy story,” the Porn Star said, smiling. “It got me turned on.”

  She picked up the plate and dropped it on the rock path from the house to the garage. “It was my story,” she said. “We can be friends, but I’m not interested in continuing to have this weird sexual relationship with you.”

  “Weird sexual relationship?” He sounded surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll have to meditate on that.”

  “Meditate, huh?”

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Several weeks passed before Maureen saw him again. She was working on the quilt square, trying to think of something clever to commemorate Lila’s engagement to Edu. For some reason, the only thing that came to mind was a silly nursery rhyme that she had known in elementary school:

  Two little lovers sitting in a tree

  K-I-S-S-I-N-G

  First came love,

  then came marriage,

  Then came baby in a baby carriage!

  Now, of course, that wasn’t the order at all. After kissing and before love came sex. And after sex with no love came a liberation (or deadening?) of the emotions, a severing of sex from love, which Maureen had once declared a good thing, standing by this belief for many years. Sex was just an act. And after love, marriage didn’t necessarily follow, though it could. Or marriage might precede love. Or it might exist independent of love. The two little lovers might climb down from their perch in the tree and find the baby already waiting in the carriage.

  Maureen heard him knock, but by the time she got there, he had moved to the center of the front lawn. Through the half moon–shaped windows at the top of the door, she could see that he was facing her house. His sweats were pushed down and scrunched around his ankles; his white T-shirt fell to the top of his hips. His hand was on his penis. Maureen thought about going into the living room, opening the curtains, and sitting down on the couch to watch the whole show. She imagined the picture that would form in her mind—all the details that she’d missed before by being too connected, too close: the way he moved his hand and how he held his body, his hair, his expression, the color of his skin. She would simply focus on the image: the man on the lawn outside the window masturbating.

  Maureen stood, thinking about whether she could do all of this, but she felt scared. She felt scared and sad, and finally disappointed that she couldn’t will herself to walk into the living room with a funny rhyme already forming in her mind. In the kitchen, she called the police.

  You know you have reached a certain age when you learn that your BFF (in today’s vernacular) is writing a memoir. “It’s nice to be writing on an advance,” she notes. Of course you’re happy for her, the girl who taught you how to shave your legs and introduced you to eyeliner, Emily Dickinson, and Ivy League colleges, your locker partner and confidante from seventh grade onward. You have long admired her intelligence, her beautiful sentences, the way she could hunker down in the hallway right before class and scribble out a perfect compare/contrast essay on Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the only two things you remember studying in AP English. You think about those lazy late afternoons on your sleeping porch with the smell of the flowering crab apple riding little eddies of air through the open windows and rainbows darting like schools of tropical fish across the walls as your crystal prisms twirled in the light. Dreamy! Your BFF propped herself up against your pillows underneath the glow-in-the-dark stars you’d arranged into several constellations when you were eight and obsessed with astronomy and the fuzzy pink bat you’d hung more recently, opened the leather-bound diary that you envied, and read her newest poems while you hmm-hmm-hmm-ed in a way you hoped conveyed profound admiration for her verse. “That’s soo amazing,” you said afterward, praying she wouldn’t press you for specific reasons why. When she did, you searched for the right words to obfuscate (SAT prep) the truth: that you didn’t understand them well enough to say anything meaningful.

  You were never a poet. One of your poems, whose title was something like “Is This One Man’s Fate?” was about a moth repeatedly drawn to a lightbulb until it singed to death. At a statewide creative writing camp for kids like you and your BFF, kids who mooned over words and socialized in study groups, the local bearded bard told you to stop trying so hard. You were showing him the masterpiece you’d suffered over for days about chained dogs and spiritually dead lawns and proud flags wilting like lettuce, a poem you’d written after wandering through bad neighborhoods for inspiration.

  “This, for instance, is a very good poem,” the bard said, pointing to a little ditty on a neighboring page:

  I like coffee

  I like eggs

  I like soccer players’ legs

  You went red with shame, embarrassed by the idea of an adult being privy to feelings you weren’t sure you had. You can’t even remember if you had a crush on a particular soccer player, or if you’d just written the poem because you liked the sound of it. You do remember that your BFF made out with a super-gorgeous fullback from a rival high school. She was interested in boys long before you were, or maybe it was that boys were interested in her. The poet also touched upon one of your sensitive spots: trying hard. This was what you specialized in. You weren’t a natural genius like your BFF or Roderick Netermyers, who in a single day whipped off a semester-long biology project on the effects of caffeine on athletic performance. (Never mind that he had to fake all his data.) At that time, you thought of yourself as just a hard worker, a plodder who only made good marks through sheer discipline. For your AP Bio project, for example, you cloned a carrot. This involved driving to the local university several times a week, where you wrestled your hands into plastic gloves and checked on the progress of your experiment under a sterilized hood. Mostly you had to monitor whether there were sufficient nutrients in your petri dish to feed your little orange nub. The nutrients? You can’t for the life of you remember what the sticky gel consisted of—come to think of it, you’re not sure why this experiment of yours was considered cloning and not just gardening.

  For her experiment, your BFF did something far more exotic on pheromones. She was testing the theory that attraction is mostly chemical and not a conscious choice, not a careful tabulation of how cute so-and-so looks in his wire-rimmed specs and brown slouchy corduroys, how much you admire the way he dances to the Talking Heads, making subtle movements of his upper body while his feet remain firmly planted, how you melt at his old-fashioned greetings versus your misgivings about how frequently he wants to discuss The Naked Ape, specifically how often the typical male thinks about sex in an hour. Yuck, your seventeen-year-old self thought but never said aloud.

  If you were going to write your own memoir, you would definitely include your BFF’s experiment. She recruited couples and pairs of best friends as test subjects, and they agreed to wear cotton balls taped in their armpits for a whole day and forgo all the products they usually wore to mask their natural smell: Dial, Chanel, and ChapStick; Noxzema and their mom’s Night of Olay. At the end of the day, everyone gathered to see whether they could correctly identify their partners. You can’t recall whether couples fared better than friends, though you do seem to remember that your BFF failed to choose the damp, shriveled cotton ball saturated with your essence. Or perhaps you were the one who plucked up a cotton ball smelling of ambition and hunger and teacups of melancholy and immediately thrust it back to its designated spot, the bagel you ate for lunch rising dangerously fast. Your BFF was always on a diet and often moody. Were the two connected? You’re not sure. Her moods scared you. You often
felt responsible, or rather you thought if you did everything perfectly—if you were the nicest, most conscientious best friend ever—you might cheer her up. You tried to be punctual, say the right thing, agree or disagree gently. Ah, adolescent narcissism! Face it, though: you’re still susceptible to this kind of magical thinking. Which is why you and your BFF don’t spend much time together anymore. Which is why you haven’t seen or talked to her in three years. Which is why it’s probably better, or at least more honest, to call her your BFFY (Best Friend from Youth).

  You’re happy for her. Maybe you’re a little jealous, but jealousy is natural. You have watched from afar as she fought her way to the top of her Ivy League class, aced the LSATs, edited the law school journal, was courted by a white-shoe firm with a reputation of making pulp of women. You knew she would do well because she is so brilliant and well connected and very good at making strategic decisions and willing to do whatever success requires. After she tells you about her memoir, you e-mail back:

  Dear Rhadika,

  Wow! I’m surprised. This is such a switch from the law, but you’re such a talented writer. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. What’s it about?

  Love,

  Tabitha

  A day or two passes before her name appears in your Inbox. Her memoir, she writes, is about quitting the firm for a year (you had no idea she did!), surfing from California to South America, meeting the man who is now her husband (did they have a wedding?! Were you really not invited?!). It started as an essay about radical rebirth (it is hard to imagine your old friend hanging five or ten), but the poetry of bombs and barrels, the beauty of lining up beyond where the waves were breaking and looking out into the vast and always changing sea … “well, it was like nothing I’d ever done before, and I ended up writing a hundred pages of this thing in a fevered dream … Then I got an agent, and she shopped it around …”

  You are genuinely happy for Rhadika. You are! You also recall your AP English teacher, the extraordinary Mrs. Pearlman, who wore high heels, showing you that poem by William Carlos Williams:

  This is just to say

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving for breakfast.

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  But never mind. Rhadika continues:

  Sometimes in the middle of a long stretch of writing when I’m trying to explain something that happened in junior high, like why Christine Thompkins and I were mortal enemies, I’ll stop and wonder: Is anyone going to care about this?

  Junior high? How is junior high relevant to the year that Rhadika told her boss hasta luego and bought a longboard? What do thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, those years that everyone tries to forget or at least excise from family albums, have to do with trading blue suits for board shorts?

  Yikes! (You have not divested yourself of all your teenage speak.) She is writing about your shared past, and already—based upon the little information you’ve gleaned from her e-mail—you’re convinced she’s going to get it wrong. Take Christine Thompkins. She wasn’t Rhadika’s enemy, as far as you can remember. Indeed, if she was anyone’s enemy, she was yours, not that you thought of her as such at the time, but she did beat you soundly in the race for seventh-grade president. God, what were you thinking when you took on Christine? You’d gone to the tiny feeder elementary instead of the big one in the foothills where the kids were already drinking and making out in sixth grade. You didn’t have a pair of Levi’s or an alligator shirt; you didn’t have a boyfriend (Christine was already dating the most popular boy, who happened to be running for seventh-grade vice president); you didn’t have straight hair or a membership at the country club; and most important, you weren’t a cheerleader (Christine was). This, in fact, was the first of many poignant, misguided decisions you made: going out for seventh-grade cheerleader. At the tryouts, all the girls wore white shirts tucked into blue shorts (to match the school’s colors), whereas you wore your favorite pink culottes and a polka-dot T-shirt and performed a cheer your aunt had done a million years ago as a teenager:

  Go back / Go back into the woods

  Because you haven’t / ’cause you haven’t got the goods

  You ain’t got the rhythm and you ain’t got the jazz

  And you ain’t got the spirit that East Side has

  It’s not that you still wish your foray into cheerleading had a Pretty in Pink ending, though at the time, Molly Ringwald was your favorite actress, and the highest compliment someone could pay was to note the resemblance. You didn’t quite play the part of the nerd in junior high and high school, though you definitely disappeared in the crowd scenes. Would the attention of a popular boy have changed this? Teenage self-perception is more ironclad than a battleship. You doubt a missile attack could have penetrated your insecurities. Besides which, actual attention from a real boy made you cringe. Take your secret admirer—the boy wonder who sleuthed out your locker combination (how he accomplished this still puzzles you) and began leaving little anonymous notes and drawings taped to the inside of your locker door:

  I like to think of you

  on days that begin

  with mornings

  His other missives? They’ve vanished from your memory, except for one that had something to do with wanting to be the pillow under your head. (Now, unfortunately, this reminds you of what Prince Charles said to Camilla about wanting to become a certain form of feminine hygiene.) Eventually your secret admirer called, announcing in a disguised voice (disguised how? You have no idea.) that he would unmask himself at the Christmas dance.

  Junior high dances! Remember how you and your girlfriends circled up and danced with each other, pretending to have a riotous time while periodically stealing glances to see whether any guys were approaching. Remember how you towered over all the boys and slouched to make yourself shorter the handful of times you were asked to slow dance. Remember the first time a boy put his hands on your butt in ninth grade, and your body felt like a container you were spilling from. Afterward, you migrated in herds to the Copper Creek, where you and your friends, who never had enough money for pizza, ordered Cokes and 7UPs with extra ice and tried to spot your crushes but never ever talked to them.

  For the big seventh-grade Christmas dance, your mom bought you a mushroom-shaped dress made from pastel pink parachute material from Jay Jacobs. It stands out in your memory because it was one of the few times your mom brought you a whole outfit, and you loved it. Your hair was cut in the asymmetrical style that was popular in the eighties (buzzed above one ear, big and poufy above the other), and Mom gave you the green light on baby blue eye shadow, pink lip gloss, and the small, dangly sombrero-hat earrings that your grandparents brought back from Mexico. (Anything besides studs required special permission.)

  After spending most of the dance furtively checking out the popular guys with dark hair, intense eyes, and actual pectoral muscles (not that you noticed such things at the time, but these characteristics probably contributed to their popularity), growing jittery the few times their heads turned in your direction, your secret admirer appeared before one of the last slow dances, one of those aching power ballads. You immediately recognized him from the windowless basement art room, where you and your friends ate lunch to avoid the indecipherable hierarchy of the cafeteria. He had black hair, big glasses with brown frames. He wasn’t a mystery. He was just like you.

  “I’m your secret admirer, Calvin Hill,” he said, his voice breaking. “May I have this dance?” He smiled and shoved his hands into his jeans before he seemed to realize that dancing would involve his hands and pulled them out again.

  “Sure,” you said. His tie was patterned with red and green Santa Clauses, and he smelled of shoe polish and peppermint. This was the first time you realized how much skill was involved in slow da
ncing—maintaining a safe distance from his torso while simultaneously keeping your hands hovering on the outer surface of his white button-down. Twice you stepped on his left foot. Once your knees buckled, and you nearly toppled over.

  Afterward, did you hug or just shake hands? You try to call the moment to mind but fail. You hope you had the good manners to say thank you and good-bye, but you can’t be sure. When your parents picked you up, the small of your back still felt damp from where he held you. What ever happened to Calvin Hill? After that night you have no more memory of him. Did his family move away? Did he start avoiding you?

  Recently, though, you have been startled by the numerous blank spaces in your recollection of the past, you who once prided yourself on being able to rattle off every single thing you received for Christmas (even stocking stuffers like Hello Kitty erasers, plaid socks, and Jockey for girls) between the ages of eight and twelve. Case in point: that guy on Obama’s White House staff who graduated the same year you did and even allegedly played for the boys’ basketball team. You study his portrait in the New York Times Magazine, but you still draw a blank, can’t visualize him in the pack of tall guys with big hands whom you adored. You fret: What else has gotten untethered from its moorings? How many memories of people and experiences, emotions and events drift like lost ships on the high seas because their lines have grown too old and frayed to hold on to?

  Does Rhadika remember the guy whom no one remembers—an informal poll of your friends turns up nothing—the guy who has entered an orbit never even imagined by the popular kids—the football players, the cheerleaders, the soccer player who got into Stanford and then bragged that he’d probably have invitations from all the Ivies because he was that good with a ball, and subsequently got NEGed everywhere (remember how frighteningly thin those rejection letters were)? Probably the guy who is now Obama’s right-hand man, and whose name you still can’t bring to mind without Google, is not thinking, “Nah nah nah nah nah.”