The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  “And those,” she said, pointing to my socks with toes like the fingers of mittens. The head began to redden and cough, showering her legs with saliva. When she pounded her chest, I could hardly stand it. “Oh dear me,” she said, “Oh dear me. I think I may be choking.” She spluttered on. “Would. You. Be. Kind. Enough. To. Get. Me …” While her torso shook, her head froze. Her eyes opened as wide as a mannequin, and her mouth twisted, as if someone playing a practical joke had put her lips on sideways.

  I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Moving made me realize that I had a rash like fine sandpaper on my butt from sitting in my wet underpants. I considered going into the bathroom to shed my damp clothes and apply talcum powder or a soothing cream, but I was afraid it would take too long. The bathroom was dizzying with all of its similarly shaped containers. I might accidentally slather toothpaste on my butt, in which case I’d have to scrub it off, thus aggravating the rash. Such mishaps had happened before. Once I had brushed my teeth with A+D ointment; another time, I had squirted nasal decongestant into my eyes. In another context, these mix-ups might have made amusing anecdotes, but in the context of my cancer, they weren’t—at least not to others. I might laugh to death about them privately, but that was no fun.

  I almost forgot about the woman, but then I saw the glass of water in my hand and returned to the living room.

  The woman brought it to her mouth, like a blind person using memory rather than sight. Cupping her head right beneath the chin, she tilted the glass, dribbling tiny sips into her open lips. I glanced away; it was as if I were watching something very private, like a mother nursing a baby or a bald woman being fitted with a wig.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t laughed that much in years. My lung capacity isn’t what it used to be.”

  I looked at her in disbelief. “Leave, you headless freak.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” She giggled.

  “You’re a fright,” I said. “There should be a law requiring you to wear a prosthetic device.”

  “And you’re a fright too,” she answered. “Sitting alone in your house day after day.”

  “I’m very sick,” I said, surprised by how offended I felt. “It’s difficult for me to leave.”

  “Why don’t people take you out?”

  “They do when they have time. But people are busy.”

  “Don’t you have friends?”

  I stopped to consider her question. It was true that I did have friends, but when I got sick and the tumors persisted against the doctors’ aggressive attacks upon them, the friendships became difficult. I suspected that many of my friends thought I was going to die, and pretending that I was not going to die was a burden too heavy for them to carry. Even my roommate, Sylvie, had left me. It was also true that for a long time, I thought I was going to live. So shoot me. I was alive, and I thought I’d keep living. Also, I stopped calling them; it was so tiring trying to comfort them.

  The phone rang.

  “Aren’t you going to get it?” the woman asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s probably one of your friends,” she said.

  The phone continued to ring. I had gotten rid of my machine because the little red eye, staring at me without blinking, reminded me that I was always home. I didn’t wish to abandon the idea that I might have been out doing fabulously fun things if only I had gotten the calls.

  “I can’t stand the ringing,” she said. “How can you bear it?”

  “Look,” I said, “when I finally came to terms with the fact that I was going to die, many of my friends, who thought I was going to die much earlier, stopped being my friends. It sounds cruel, and at first I thought it was, but they were living, moving on, and I interfered with this.”

  “What about your other friends?” the woman asked.

  “They’re still my friends because they’ve always believed that I’ll live,” I said. “And when I was still optimistic, this suited me, but now their hopefulness fits me like old clothes.”

  The woman stood up and was heading toward the phone when it stopped. She sat back down. “No wonder you’re by yourself.”

  “It was probably my father,” I answered.

  Her eyes lit up. For emphasis, she grabbed her head and moved it my direction, scrutinizing me. “Your father? Does he live in town?”

  “Indonesia. He has a coconut grove.” This was obviously a lie. My father had been dead for ten years. My mother lived across the country. After lengthy negotiations, she had agreed to allow me to live quietly in the house I inherited from my grandmother until I absolutely needed her. It was easier on both of us.

  “Right,” she said, clearly indicating that she didn’t believe me. “Does he use a long bamboo pole to knock coconuts from the trees?”

  She laughed. She was cradling her head in her hands again, rolling it back and forth like a basketball. Suddenly, I had a sick feeling that she was going to toss her head and expect me to catch it. Because my eye-hand coordination had been damaged with my third surgery, I knew I would miss it, and when I missed it, I didn’t know whether her head would bounce like a basketball, explode like a ripe tomato, dent like a cheap aluminum pot, or get scrambled like the brain of a carelessly shaken baby.

  And what would happen to her body if her head were lying on the floor? How would she find it?

  I started to sniffle.

  “Aha,” the woman said as though she had caught me doing something naughty. “Over the phone you said that you no longer cried. But I knew you were lying.”

  My own head began to hurt again. I could feel the pain pulsing like a sound wave from a small node buried in my front temporal lobe.

  “Did you know,” she said, “that crying is like urinating, shitting, or exhaling, that it cleanses the body of its waste and pain? Did you know that there is a difference in the chemical composition of tears that you shed when you’re peeling an onion and those that spill when you’re feeling sad, sorry for yourself, anxious? A study of ordinary men and women revealed that women weep five times as often as men, that the typical crying jag lasts six minutes, that people are most likely to cry in the evenings when they let down their guard, that there is no correlation between crying and age, except that babies younger than two months old do not shed tears, because their tears ducts are not fully formed. Were you aware of this? Were you aware of any of this?”

  She lifted her head from her lap, her thumbs pressed into her ears, and offered it to me like a gift. But then I realized the gesture was a rhetorical flourish, an exclamation point at the end of her speech.

  “Now,” she continued, “I want to show you something.”

  She carefully placed her head back into the valley of her legs and opened the cooler. I wondered whether she was going to feed me. Offering food—casseroles, cold cuts, homemade cookies—was one of the few ways that people were comfortable expressing their care. I hoped she would.

  She removed a small plastic container. Dip? I wondered. Perhaps she’d prepared crudités? I liked everything, except for celery, whose strings got tangled in my teeth.

  “This is onion dip,” she said.

  I eagerly peeled back the lid, but was surprised to find nothing but an inch of colorless liquid.

  “Onion tears,” she repeated, and then I realized I had misheard her. “Smell them, and tell me what they remind you of.”

  “Nothing,” I said, “except perhaps an old plastic margarine container.”

  She laughed. “And now smell this: brimming tears, most typical of the crying behavior of the human male.”

  I stuck my nose into the container. “These are familiar,” I said, thinking for a moment. “They remind me of something from my childhood, the mixture of hot water and salt that my mother made me soak in when I’d hurt myself.”

  “Epsom salts,” she said. “Exactly. And now this: cascading tears, a normal sign of women’s pain and suffering.”

  The scent of the liquid was clo
ying, like the breath of a woman who kept her lips pressed together and rarely spoke. My visitor handed me another container: sobbing tears that smelled like a pot boiling over and bursting into flames. It was difficult for me to believe that all the containers fit into the small cooler, and that they held so many different types of tears: of willful toddlers, of irritation caused by small bugs and grains of sand, of yawns and sneezes, of fear, of silent weeping, of rage and disappointment, of crocodiles and other forms of fakery. She handed me container after container, and each one smelled like something that came to me in words that I found in my head and brought to the tip of my tongue without a thought. It was the first time in months I hadn’t gotten terribly stuck in the middle of trying to remember something.

  “I’ve saved the best for last,” she said.

  “We’re at the end?” I asked, feeling a bit sad.

  Her head deflated slightly, like a balloon with a slow leak, or the way faces look early in the morning before they’ve regained their shape.

  “I’m afraid so,” she answered. “Lacrima mortis.”

  The container was the size of a baby food jar, and there was barely a teaspoon of liquid in the bottom.

  “This is rare, very difficult to collect.”

  I sniffed it gingerly. The liquid smelled of hospital, like brightly lit ammonia and anonymous starched sheets and uniforms, like the humiliation of the bedpan and the toilet bowl, like sapped blood, like an electric razor when it overheats, like bouquets with too much baby’s breath and the distance between the sky and the window when you’re not allowed outside, like greasy telephone receivers and plastic IV veins, like the staleness of the television playing for too long. The smell was so simple, so familiar, so disappointing. The pain got louder, and the container tipped, the drops of tears spilling across my lap as if I had wet myself again. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Someone was knocking somewhere, and I listened.

  Deirdre is not in denial about the mice. You can’t ignore what you don’t know about, and the mice took up residence in the cabin over the winter when storms pummeled the island, suddenly dimming the light of the afternoon, and no one was around except for the caretaker, who checked to see that the pipes hadn’t burst during January’s freeze. He wasn’t paying attention, and the mice were small and had enough good sense to make themselves scarce as he trudged from room to room.

  What Deirdre hasn’t been able to face, but must, is that she is pregnant. She must make a decision, or it will be made for her, and she hasn’t told her boyfriend, Dale, and he hasn’t noticed her condition, not because he is willfully obtuse, but rather because he is the sort of person who isn’t especially observant, who wouldn’t notice if she gained five pounds or developed a craving for mayonnaise or stopped having her period, who would never think of thumbing through her calendar or asking why she seems so distracted. She doesn’t know what she is going to do, which is why she’s spending ten days on a small, rocky island that can only be reached by prop plane or taxi boat, where there are no restaurants or stores—or people, for that matter, because it is early in the season.

  She pauses at the front door. The sameness, stretching back to when she was a child, is what she likes about the cabin. Broken clamshells have always littered the flower bed at the base of the stairs, and her family has always hidden the key in plain sight behind an ugly macramé of nylon rope and sea glass. The main room, which she can picture before she steps inside, is filled with her grandparents’ relics: a coffee table sliced from a massive ponderosa pine, shelves lined with A. A. Milne and cut jelly jars full of agates that her grandmother collected, lime green bar stools, lamps fashioned from driftwood. Even the water will smell and taste the same. This is why she has come.

  Inside, of course, something is different. Change is inevitable; people just usually don’t notice, though Deirdre does. First, it’s the smell—not the cabin’s usual scent of lemon furniture polish and burnt logs. It’s the odor of sex and too much living, like a dark room in a cheap roadside motel where you’re certain that people have hours earlier been doing dirty things, things you imagine but never do. The source remains a mystery until she sees a mouse dart from behind the couch, cross the wooden floor, and slip under the leather chair that was in her grandfather’s house until he died. A mouse? She doesn’t mind mice, but this is the first time in recent memory she has found them here. She shoves three T-bones into the turquoise refrigerator that matches the forty-year-old stove. While stowing crackers in the pantry, she discovers a yam haloed with mold and nearly throws up. Years ago, her father drafted a list of procedures for opening the cabin: turn on the water, flip the circuits, run the faucets, flush the toilets, build a fire. At the end of the typed list is an addition in her father’s neat, blocklike penmanship: “Pour a drink.” Deirdre skips to the fire, in hopes of restoring the cabin’s usual smell, and then proceeds to a celebratory finger of whiskey. In the drawer that holds the jiggers and the silver stirrers, she finds a cozy nest of shredded cocktail napkins. She takes a big sip, pushing the amber liquid through her teeth, feeling her tongue go pleasantly numb. Then she flushes with guilt and dumps out the glass.

  Evidence of the mouse invasion is everywhere: in every drawer she opens, every surface she touches, every dish she inspects. They have disemboweled one of her grandmother’s needlepoint pillows and snuck into the silverware drawer and wedged black pellets between the prongs of forks. She sweeps the nooks and crannies and washes everything she can. She flips on the radio, tunes in the Canadian station, her favorite because she imagines they match the music selection to the weather reports. It is late afternoon, that time of day when people can feel worn out and old, and they are doing a set of the Rolling Stones.

  Underneath the rotating water wand in the dishwasher is a shriveled mouse corpse. Deirdre can’t imagine why mice would be drawn to the dishwasher, but there is much she doesn’t understand about them. Dale is the one who, in recent years, has come to prefer animals to humans or at the very least sees little difference between the two. He is against using animals for research, having them as pets, putting them on display in zoos, and he has recently begun making outlandish statements, drawing comparisons between lactating women and cows, wondering in mixed company why there isn’t human cheese. When he launches into one of these harangues, Deirdre tries to move out of earshot. After the mouse carcass crumbles in her improvised paper towel mitt, she stabs at it with the wand of the Hoover, another item that has been at the cabin since before she was born and should be replaced since its suction is gone. Defeated, she unloads the dishwasher and runs it empty, hoping the hot water will dissolve the mouse crumbs, the droppings, everything.

  Kindness is a scarce resource. She appreciates this about Dale. But the human in her still sees mice as pests, little carriers of germs. She sets a trap, half hoping the mice will not recognize the feta as cheese, and places it underneath the sink. She eats dinner—salami, bread, two glasses of milk—standing at the counter. Then she goes into the children’s room. Two sets of bunk beds snake along the walls like railway cars. The dresser is filled with games from her childhood—Mastermind, Blockhead, Battleship. She pulls herself up onto the top bunk, remembering how tall and scary it seemed when she was young, but now it seems less risky than the bottom, where mice might attack her in the middle of the night. The master bedroom is out of the question. Without Dale, the king-size bed would be too vast.

  Almost no light comes through the heavy curtains. The clothes that Deirdre piled on the folding chair slump like a depressed man. “Dale?” she asks. She closes her eyes, hoping that when she opens them she’ll recognize where she is. Something rustles outside her door, and she quickly remembers the wooden trap, the morsel of feta. Emerging from the dark cave of the room, she goes into the kitchen, which is flooded with pale early-morning light, and very tentatively opens the kitchen cabinet. There is a mouse, still very much alive, scrambling back and forth, trying to free its tail from the triggered wire. Deirdre can ba
rely bring herself to look at the gray coat, the black beadlike eyes, the frantic movement of tiny legs and nose. She takes a step back, focusing instead on how the contents of the cabinet have been turned over and scattered in much the same way a tornado rearranges trees and cars, houses and bicycles. During the time she does nothing, the mouse sees an opportunity and makes a break for it, leaping out of the cabinet and racing across the floor, banging the trap behind it. Deirdre hesitates—she is not without fear of mice—before she grabs The Nation and attempts to herd the mouse into a paper grocery bag, but it outmaneuvers her, heading for the refrigerator, the trap scraping across the floor like sled runners over rocks. It suddenly stops, the wooden base of the trap wider than the space between the refrigerator and the wall. The mouse claws the floor furiously, though to Deirdre it sounds like nothing more than a handful of broom bristles, trying to find traction, trying to break free, and squeals.

  The mouse is trapped, and the trap is trapped, and all she needs to do is bend down and pull back the metal wire to free the creature. His high-pitched cry is painful, and his movements are panicked. At one point, the mouse contorts his body as though he is trying to back up or do a U-turn, and Deirdre may be fortuitously free of the responsibility of doing anything. There is a clatter, and the mouse is gone, but the trap remains, and pinned between the wire and the wood is the mouse’s tail, longer than her middle finger and healthy pink except for the bruised and bloodied stump where the mouse chewed it off. She flees the kitchen.

  On the deck, she sits bundled up in clothes that other people have left behind and tries to distract herself by reading about gastropods in Marine Life in the San Juan Islands, about how the keen intelligence of the octopus allowed it to evolve and shed its shell. What about mice? Does losing a tail disrupt their balance, make them vulnerable to sneak attacks from behind, cause them to misjudge distance and get stuck in awkward spaces? Without a tail, will a mouse survive?