over and just as loudly as during the previous drive. But everything is different now, and the difference is the kiss. My thoughts return to it obsessively but never there. One kiss. An instant, seemingly discrete and isolated in time, yet paradoxically so, for the kiss has grown. It is like a vast, glittering wall between me and everything else, a surface offering no purchase, nor any sign by which to understand it. I can see past and through it to the life I used to have, but, mysteriously, the kiss separates me from that life. I can’t dismiss the vision of the cockroach I trapped under the water glass, how it circled slowly at first and then faster, faster. Back at school, there is a specific hour during which I and students whose last names begin with the same letter as mine are supposed to register for classes, and I miss it. There is a makeup registration and then a late registration that carries a penalty fee, and I miss both of those as well. The three young women with whom I live rush in and out and around me, signing up for classes, buying books, reuniting with friends, retrieving the previous quarter’s grades, blue books, term papers. I sit in a green vinyl-upholstered chair in our communal living area, and do none of what I, as a student, am supposed to do. “What’s with you? ” my roommates say. “Is anything wrong? ” I may have acted in peculiar ways before I’m sure I have but I’ve never just sat. My screwups, historically, have been of an energetic variety. “I’m fine, ” I assure them. “Everything’s okay. “
Eventually they stop asking questions, and the green chair with its back to the wall is where I spend the better part of two weeks, days and nights as well, sleeping upright, my arms encircling my knees. During the day, I keep a novel open in my lap, and if someone passes through the living room they tend not to settle there now that I’ve claimed it for my unnamed, inert vigilI pretend, sometimes, to be reading. Once late registration is a week behind me, I receive a letter from the office of academic probation. It asks that I make an appointment to discuss my status. “What’s going on? ” my boyfriend asks repeatedly, more vocal than my roommates in his concern. “What happened during the break? ” I recount the surface of the visit. I reconstruct it up until the kiss. I say how bereft I feel at having lost what cannot be recovered, twenty years with a father whom I now find I love and who seems to return that love. My boyfriend’s own lost father makes him a sympathetic listener, he seems not just to understand but to share my anguish, and this encourages me to tell him what I haven’t told anyone else. “Something weird happened at the airport, ” I say. We’re in his car, parked in the driveway of the little house he rents off campus. “At least I think it was weird. Maybe it wasn’t, ” I finish hopefully.
“What? ” he asks.
“Well, my father was saying good-bye. We were saying good-bye in the airport. And he… Well, when he kissed me he sort of put his tongue in my mouth. Do you think that’s weird? “
“Are you fucking kidding! ” my boyfriend yells at me. “I can’t believe that! Yes, it’s weird! Of course it’s weird! It’s wrong! Did you tell your mother? ” I shake my head no.
I cover my face with my hands.
My voyeriend’s outrage forces me farther into secrecy. I realize that what I felt in the car while driving back to school, that the kiss has separated me from everything else, is true. It’s not a conceit or an overly dramatic interpretation. As for my mother, she is the last person I would tell about the kiss, she’s the one most likely to respond hysterically, even violently. She would prevent me from ever seeing my father again. And I can’t not see him again. From the time he left me, my first thought, the one that pushes aside my fears about the kiss, has been When. When will I see him again? When will we be together? He
Eventually they stop asking questions, and the green chair with its back to the wall is where I spend the better part of two weeks, days and nights as well, sleeping upright, my arms encircling my knees. During the day, I keep a novel open in my lap, and if someone passes through the living room they tend not to settle there now that I’ve claimed it for my unnamed, inert vigilI pretend, sometimes, to be reading. Once late registration is a week behind me, I receive a letter from the office of academic probation. It asks that I make an appointment to discuss my status. “What’s going on? ” my boyfriend asks repeatedly, more vocal than my roommates in his concern. “What happened during the break? ” I recount the surface of the visit. I reconstruct it up until the kiss. I say how bereft I feel at having lost what cannot be recovered, twenty years with a father whom I now find I love and who seems to return that love. My boyfriend’s own lost father makes him a sympathetic listener, he seems not just to understand but to share my anguish, and this encourages me to tell him what I haven’t told anyone else. “Something weird happened at the airport, ” I say. We’re in his car, parked in the driveway of the little house he rents off campus. “At least I think it was weird. Maybe it wasn’t, ” I finish hopefully.
“What? ” he asks.
“Well, my father was saying good-bye. We were saying good-bye in the airport. And he… Well, when he kissed me he sort of put his tongue in my mouth. Do you think that’s weird? “
“Are you fucking kidding! ” my boyfriend yells at me. “I can’t believe that! Yes, it’s weird! Of course it’s weird! It’s wrong! Did you tell your mother? ” I shake my head no.
I cover my face with my hands.
My voyeriend’s outrage forces me farther into secrecy. I realize that what I felt in the car while driving back to school, that the kiss has separated me from everything else, is true. It’s not a conceit or an overly dramatic interpretation. As for my mother, she is the last person I would tell about the kiss, she’s the one most likely to respond hysterically, even violently. She would prevent me from ever seeing my father again. And I can’t not see him again. From the time he left me, my first thought, the one that pushes aside my fears about the kiss, has been When. When will I see him again? When will we be together? He
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