calls each day the phone’s ring summoni 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 boyeriend’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 calls each daythe phone’s ring summoning me from the green chair even if registration and classes and friends cannot and we ask each other the same question over and over, When? I take my hands from my face. “I made a mistake, ” I tell my boyfriend. “I exaggerated. I-described it wrong.
It wasn’t exactly like that. He may have done it by accident. “
Bit by bit, layer by temporizing layer, I work to obliterate the truth.
My boyeriend, threatened himself by what I revealed, colludes with me in this process. Together we forget what I’ve said, even as privately I forget what my father did. It is as simple as only denial can be.
Don’t think about it) I tell myself, and I don’t, but it seems to require an enormous effort of will. Everything takes more energy than I have. I realize I’m in a kind of shock, a cold, sinking torpor gives it awaya sensation I recognize from a few years before, when I was hit by a car while riding my bike.
The position of my body in the green chair, knees drawn protectively up to my chest, the way I can only answer people’s questions internally, my voice won’t speak the words I hear in my head, these symptoms are the same as when I was lying in the street, unable to talk to the paramedic.
But now I retreat from the cause of my shock, I ascribe it to the discovery of my father and its implicit loss, to the grief over all the years we missed, to the unbearable injustice of getting him back when it’s too late, I’m all grown-up. I don’t let myself wonder if any of what I feel is in response to his kiss. Curled in the green vinyl chair for those two weeks, hugging an old blue afghan, I become one of the people to whom I wouldn’t mention such a thing as my father sticking his tongue in my mouth. There is an option offered by the university to students who suddenly find they can’t be students. It’s called “stopping out, ” to distinguish it from “dropping out. ” As long as I register again for classes before a full academic year has passed, I can
“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 boyeriend’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 calls each daythe phone’s ring summoning me from the green chair even if registration and classes and friends cannot and we ask each other the same question over and over, When? I take my hands from my face. “I made a mistake, ” I tell my boyfriend. “I exaggerated. I-described it wrong.
It wasn’t exactly like that. He may have done it by accident. “
Bit by bit, layer by temporizing layer, I work to obliterate the truth.
My boyeriend, threatened himself by what I revealed, colludes with me in this process. Together we forget what I’ve said, even as privately I forget what my father did. It is as simple as only denial can be.
Don’t think about it) I tell myself, and I don’t, but it seems to require an enormous effort of will. Everything takes more energy than I have. I realize I’m in a kind of shock, a cold, sinking torpor gives it awaya sensation I recognize from a few years before, when I was hit by a car while riding my bike.
The position of my body in the green chair, knees drawn protectively up to my chest, the way I can only answer people’s questions internally, my voice won’t speak the words I hear in my head, these symptoms are the same as when I was lying in the street, unable to talk to the paramedic.
But now I retreat from the cause of my shock, I ascribe it to the discovery of my father and its implicit loss, to the grief over all the years we missed, to the unbearable injustice of getting him back when it’s too late, I’m all grown-up. I don’t let myself wonder if any of what I feel is in response to his kiss. Curled in the green vinyl chair for those two weeks, hugging an old blue afghan, I become one of the people to whom I wouldn’t mention such a thing as my father sticking his tongue in my mouth. There is an option offered by the university to students who suddenly find they can’t be students. It’s called “stopping out, ” to distinguish it from “dropping out. ” As long as I register again for classes before a full academic year has passed, I can
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