“So I gather.”
“So if I tell you that Susie was in the room ten minutes ago, what would you say?”
“I’d say you were insane and you were probably right.”
My father reached up and traced the line of my mother’s nose and brought his finger over her two lips. As he did, the lips parted ever so slightly.
“You have to lean down,” he said, “I’m still a sick man.”
And I watched as my parents kissed. They kept their eyes open as they did, and my mother was the one to cry first, the tears dropping down onto my father’s cheeks until he wept too.
After I left my parents in the hospital, I went to watch Ray Singh. We had been fourteen together, he and I. Now I saw his head on his pillow, dark hair on yellow sheets, dark skin on yellow sheets. I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might-have-been, and I did not want to leave him any more than I did my family.
On the listing scaffold behind the stage, with Ruth below us, Ray Singh had gotten close enough to me so that his breath was near mine. I could smell the mixture of cloves and cinnamon that I imagined he topped his cereal with each morning, and a dark smell too, the human smell of the body coming at me where deep inside there were organs suspended by a chemistry separate from mine.
From the time I knew it would happen until the time it did, I had made sure not to be alone with Ray Singh inside or outside school. I was afraid of what I wanted most – his kiss. That it would not be good enough to match the stories everyone told or those I read in Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. I feared that I would not be good enough – that my first kiss would equal rejection, not love. Still, I collected kiss stories.
“Your first kiss is destiny knocking,” Grandma Lynn said over the phone one day. I was holding the phone while my father went to get my mother. I heard him in the kitchen say “three sheets to the wind.”
“If I had it to do over again I would have worn something stupendous – like Fire and Ice, but Revlon didn’t make that lipstick back then. I would have left my mark on the man.”
“Mother?” my mother said into the bedroom extension.
“We’re talking kiss business, Abigail.”
“How much have you had?”
“See, Susie,” Grandma Lynn said, “if you kiss like a lemon, you make lemonade.”
“What was it like?”
“Ah, the kiss question,” my mother said. “I’ll leave you to it.” I had been making my father and her tell it over and over again to hear their different takes. What I came away with was an image of my parents behind a cloud of cigarette smoke – the lips only vaguely touching inside the cloud.
A moment later Grandma Lynn whispered, “Susie, are you still there?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
She was quiet for a while longer. “I was your age, and my first kiss came from a grown man. A father of a friend.”
“Grandma!” I said, honestly shocked.
“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”
“No.”
“It was wonderful,” Grandma Lynn said. “He knew how to kiss. The boys who kissed me I couldn’t even tolerate. I’d put my hand flat against their chests and push them away. Mr. McGahern knew how to use his lips.”
“So what happened?”
“Bliss,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but it was wonderful – at least for me. I never asked him how he felt about it, but then I never saw him alone after that.”
“But did you want to do it again?”
“Yes, I was always searching for that first kiss.”
“How about Grandaddy?”
“Not much of a kisser,” she said. I could hear the clink of ice cubes on the other end of the phone. “I’ve never forgotten Mr. McGahern, even though it was just for a moment. Is there a boy who wants to kiss you?”
Neither of my parents had asked me this. I now know that they knew this already, could tell, smiled at each other when they compared notes.
I swallowed hard on my end. “Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Ray Singh.”
“Do you like him?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the holdup?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.”
“Susie?”
“Yes?”
“Just have fun, kid.”
But when I stood by my locker that afternoon and I heard Ray’s voice say my name – this time behind me and not above me – it felt like anything but fun. It didn’t feel not fun either. The easy states of black and white that I had known before did not apply. I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.
