The Kiss

Short story “The Kiss” by Nynke Salverda Passi originally published in: Gulf Coast, Vol. VII, number 2, Summer/Fall 1995, nominated for Pushcart Prize 1996, Gulf Coast Past Issues.

Orange light falls through the stained glass window up near the ceiling; the hallway and my coat are orange, the wet umbrella leaning against the door, the floor, the wallpaper with lilies and roses—everything orange. I am wet. I just walked in the door. I took off my green rubber boots and put them on the shelf beneath my father’s winter coat; now my feet trail the waxed hardwood floor carefully on orange socks. The world is suspended, completely still, except for the dripping of water. Left-over rain leaks purple from the boots on the shelf, from the umbrella and my braids, from the hem of my coat which swishes against my bare knees. A concert: drip, drip, drip. Reminds of the sound of clocks ticking time away, but this is a different time. An orange time. I am the only one who lives it.

In the corner stands a statue of a woman, bow and arrow strapped across her shoulder. The strap cuts between her breasts, which are clothed in bronze but so thinly they seem naked. She is Artemis, my father says, the goddess of the hunt. A deer grazes by her feet unafraid. I talk with the statue when I am here by myself. I talk with her now. She alone is with me in this orange time.

‘Artemis,’ I say, ‘where is my mother?’

‘My Lady,’ she says, ‘she has taken your baby brother and gone grocery shopping. After that she will visit a friend as she does every day.’ Artemis pauses, looks me over. ‘But why are you here?’ she says. ‘You went off to school just an hour ago with your Mickey Mouse lunch box. You came home early yesterday too, and the day before. Three days home early. What happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I won’t tell you,’ I say. ‘I feel sick I suppose. I have a stomach ache.’

‘Take off your coat, My Lady, and dry your hair or you will catch a cold.’

‘Artemis, where is my father?’

‘He must be at the office.’

‘But what if he’s home? I came to see him. I want him to be home.’

‘What we want is what is, My Lady. He must be home.’

‘But I don’t hear the tapping of his typewriter keys upstairs!’

‘So he sleeps, he sleeps behind his typewriter. He is tired.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I say, ‘that must be it. He is tired and he is home. I won’t wake him up.’

I take off my coat. I hang it on the same peg as my father’s. I am free. I have to be more silent than the drops of rain that fall from the boots and my coat hem and my braids but I can leap and dance in this orange world because it is only mine.

My mother says she hid her head in my father’s coat to not have to hear him chant my name right after I was born. Cora, Cora. He sang it all day. She bought herself earplugs, which poked yellow and rubbery from her ears; but she still could hear his voice. She hid in the kitchen where my father never came but then she began to bake casseroles and stir soups so she wouldn’t be bored; she became fat and old. I was twelve quite soon, thirteen, and my body was that of a woman, only I did not know this. My mother informed me of it one day before I went to bed. I stood naked in my room and she came in without knocking. She held an oblong mirror she had unscrewed from her own wall up to my face.

‘Stop dancing, stop swinging your hips,’ she said. ‘How can you be so thoughtless. This is what he perceives you to be, because you stole my looks: he thinks you are me, his wife. I lost myself when you came out of my womb and you found me and picked me up; you put on my face. You stole from me. Now you owe me. You have to do as I say. I want you to wear pigtails and knee-high socks, penny loafers without a penny. I want you to stop bouncing. Be sedate, read books, wear a pair of glasses. If you don’t, I’ll kiss your face. My kiss will leave a black mark on your cheek in the shape of a heart; it will never wash off. No lover can stroke it away. No man will want to look at you if I choose to kiss you like that.’

I watched my own face in her mirror. I had never seen myself as I did now. I had long, wavy hair and parted lips and my eyes seemed private and soft like flannel folded. Instantly, I understood why she was afraid; I understood both what power I had in our house and how dangerous it would be to use it. I was afraid of her. Her lips cut her white face like knives.

‘I will do as you say Mother,’ I replied.

She threw me my bed sheet to hide myself in. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Let me see you first. It makes me remember myself.’

I stood motionless in the room because she asked.

‘I used to be like that,’ she said. ‘I used to be young and go to parties. I wore white fingerless gloves my grandmother had crocheted, I wouldn’t dare touch anything for fear of making them dirty. I was asked to go sledding one winter by a boy with yellow hair named William Dingle. He picked me up and on his toboggan we skidded down the steepest hill in the park. We landed in a snow pile on purpose. That’s when I received my first kiss. His breath smelled after onions. His lips were stiff like two twigs but otherwise it made me happy. Then came your father. He took me dancing every night and sneaked into my room afterward by climbing up a tree. I knew nothing, so that was that. You won’t understand what I am saying and I am glad. What I am saying is: I’ve given up enough for you. I expect you to listen carefully: men don’t have restraint. William Dingle didn’t in spite of his twig-like lips and your father certainly didn’t. He still doesn’t, that’s why I lug around another baby. You better do as I say, young lady. I am watching you, I can hear the conversations you have with yourself at the dinner table inside your own head; you are up to no good. I am your mother. I must protect you.’

I covered myself in the sheet and my mother left. I sat stunned on the bed, shaking.

Since, I do what she says. The only times I dance and leap are when I’m alone in the orange house. I cannot speak about it. I untie my braids and take off layers of clothes. I strain to see my reflection in the copper umbrella holder, the shiny glass that frames a picture of the sea, and my mother’s high-heeled, polished shoes. My reflection looks uncertain like a water polyp. I always hope my father will be home, that he will come down the stairs and see me as I saw myself in the oblong mirror, as my mother sees me. But he never is, he never does. Wishes aren’t the truth. Perhaps it is better they aren’t for I might not know what I wish for.

I don’t know my father. I dream of him under my cool sheet at night, and I see him at breakfast and dinner when he asks me questions about school politely, slicing his food with knife and fork into small square bites. He hardly looks at my face; he passes me in the hall and brushes his hand through my hair as if he collects a sheet of paper that he lost and that isn’t important—only to be organized, to fulfill an obligation. My mother locks my room at night. The father I know in my head and speak about with Artemis waits for a chance to see me when she’s left the house. The other father, the one with the black leather attaché case and gold-buckled belt, has forgotten my name.

I think I am a princess. I am not what I seem. I wander through the downstairs of the house in my school skirt and blue ribbed sweater, on knee-high socks, but I have taken off my glasses, I have undone my braids. I find one of my mother’s voile nightgowns in her sewing basket and I put it on over my clothes. I close my eyes. I lie on the couch and touch myself where it is forbidden. I begin to remember things.

In school three days ago Patrick Himsel asked me to touch tongues. This is a gross habit among boys and girls at my school. You stick out your tongue and let it be grazed by somebody else’s, which tastes thick and sweet and hot on yours and if you are dared you are not allowed to say no according to a unanimous but unspoken rule. I was playing hopscotch with Pauline Kaars when he asked. I said yes. I stuck out my tongue. Patrick Himsel stuck out his and touched mine and it was thick and sweet and hot but all of a sudden, unexpectedly, I didn’t hate it, I liked it. I closed my eyes. Patrick Himsel said we could go into the bushes and I trembled because I remembered my mother saying men don’t have restraint. Still, I laced my arm through the arm of Patrick Himsel, avoided Pauline’s eyes, and let myself be guided into the hydrangeas and rhododendrons where we had to watch out for the small black elongated bugs with pincers—earwigs—that pinch if you, even unintentionally, interfere with the path they naturally take in and out of flowers. Here Patrick Himsel pulled me close and stuffed his whole hot sweet tongue into my mouth so I couldn’t breathe or say no and I let him, mostly to see what it would be like. I had never done this before. I had played doctor in my closet with Elina Bausk, who had a pretty lilt in her voice when she said ‘breathe deeply’ and held the plastic stethoscope to my chest. Now I was entered, not approached but entered, and it loosened a dark spool of thread in my brain because I couldn’t say I liked it or disliked it, I couldn’t say I was there to feel it at all. I saw a black earwig in the middle of a cluster of hydrangea blossoms from the corner of my eye. I brought my hand within its grasp and it pinched me. This reassured me that I was real.

I lie on the couch and touch myself where it is forbidden. My hand folds across my chest like a paraplegic’s and I am embarrassed, I have to sit up, I have to think good thoughts—I spent all my money on a wicker duck for my grandmother’s birthday, I spent all my money on a wicker duck for my grandmother’s birthday. That thought soothes me. I must be a good person. Then I pleasantly forget I have a body. I float around between the walls again like an orange mist and this way I am happy. I don’t know how time spends itself, not even that it does.

I hear footsteps above my head. Thirsty, I have just gone into the kitchen, poured some faucet water into a porcelain cup, lowered my lips to drink. I jolt. Now I must turn into the Cora I become when someone else is near. He is here, he really is home, I think; I didn’t make it up. This is the first, the only time this happened. I want to take off my mother’s nightgown but I can’t, I am frozen. I stand still and register for the first time that the drip, drip, dripping has stopped in the hall. Time dried up. How late it must be!

I walk into the orange hall and my father walks down the stairs. Our footsteps have one rhythm but his is light, mine heavy with fear. I see my mother’s face big as a moon in the chandelier and I want to run and cry, only I cannot. Some things are destined to happen and we cannot change them. Sometimes there is nothing to decide; the feet just walk obediently to their destination and we follow as the children of Hamelin followed the flute of the Pied Piper.

‘Here he is. Here you are,’ Artemis says. ‘As you wished.’

My father wears his suit but no tie and slippers. His hair is ruffled as if he slept on it. ‘Cora,’ he says. He smiles. He doesn’t think, Why isn’t she in school? as a mother would. Fathers don’t think these things.

‘Why are you home?’ I question him instead.

He looks guilty. He smooths his hair with his hand. ‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he says. ‘I didn’t feel like being at the office.’

‘I am,’ I say. ‘I was sick. A stomach ache, but I feel better now.’

His eyes glance over my mother’s nightgown as I speak but he does not ask me why I wear it. He only asks questions that are sure to have answers. ‘When will your mother be back?’ he asks.

I shrug.

He goes into the kitchen to make some coffee but won’t let me out of his sight. ‘Cora, Cora,’ he says.

We are alone together. I follow slowly; I don’t dance but my heart leaps and I don’t know what to say. ‘I love you daddy.’

‘I love you, Cora. Love you, Sweet.’

I am not surprised. He holds my hand while he pours the coffee.

There is a stirring overhead. We both look up, I wide-eyed, my father nervous—even, for a moment, afraid.

‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Probably the cat. I’ll go see.’

I say, ‘No, stay with me. I never get to be with you alone.’

‘All right,’ he says, one eye on the ceiling.

He sits next to me on the couch, his coffee mug in one hand while with the other he catches the hem of the voile robe which, because I wear it, is not as much my mother’s as mine. I know what I can do in this moment. I hadn’t known before, but my mother showed me when she held her oblong mirror up to my face.

‘You are pretty with your hair down,’ my father says and strokes the brown velvet waves that fall down past my shoulders. ‘You are pretty without your glasses. You are beginning to grow. See? You have breasts and hips and you don’t look at all twelve, or thirteen, whatever age you are. You remind me of your mother. Your mother looked like that on our wedding day. Don’t stare at me Cora, your eyes say they want things a father shouldn’t give.’

I sit down on my father’s lap and stroke his cheek with mine. I see tears welling in his eyes.

‘I shouldn’t have, I never should have,’ he says. ‘Life is too complicated. It seemed right, but I know it wasn’t. I came into your room at night when you were a child and kissed you all over your face. You were asleep. Your mother came in. She didn’t understand, she screamed. Then you woke up, you screamed. I only wanted you to know what it’s like to be loved tenderly. But you are a child. I can be correct if I don’t see you, if I close my eyes when you are near. What confuses me is, it can’t be wrong. You so much are my wife. Her hair, her shape, her nostrils, see, the way they flare as I speak! Time is turned back. I don’t know whether I am young or old when I see you. When we are alone it is particularly terrible; I forget that the other one, the other wife exists. I forget that I have gray hair and arthritic wrists and I want to do what I always did when you came this close to who I am.’

‘It is OK, daddy,’ I say. ‘I’ll cup your heart in my hands, so it cannot spill sadness. It was meant to be that we are together, I am her now, I feel guilty but I can’t help it. She says I stole her face but I only woke up one morning wearing it. I think she put it on me herself. I don’t know why, but she must have and it is glued so tight I can wear glasses and braids but that face still won’t come off. I will hold you now. I have waited for you. I’m not a child. I am not afraid.’

‘You should be,’ he says.

We put our arms around each other and cling to each other and all of a sudden I realize we are afraid; we both are. I don’t know what of. I want to be bitten by another earwig to remind myself with pain of something that is too easy to forget.

What happens next is so startling I can hardly believe it. I think the cat comes down the stairs, pit pat, pit pat. When the cat is about to enter the living room where my father and I hold each other on the couch, it turns into a woman who looks like a cat with ruffled orange hair and sleepy eyes, dressed in my father’s blue bathrobe. I have never seen her before and I wonder whether I imagine her.

My father jumps. He lets me tumble out of his arms; I fall to the floor like a feather, distinctly sensing that for him I no longer have weight.

‘Bertha,’ he says.

Bertha. She is real. She is not the cat. Artemis looks at her disapprovingly from behind.

‘You will not tell your mother, will you?’ my father says to me. ‘You will be silent?’

I nod. A pebble settles in my throat so I can’t speak.

‘I’ll go,’ says Bertha. She squints her eyes. ‘I enjoyed meeting you, but I don’t want to hurt anyone. I am not that kind of person. I don’t want people to know what I did.’

My father goes out into the hall and whispers with Bertha who disappears hurriedly back up the stairs.

‘I am sorry,’ my father says out loud—to me, to the walls with lilies and roses that hold memories of him and my mother.

He says, ‘This happens in a lot of homes. I know what you think, but it is not just my fault. Your mother doesn’t take care of herself; she looks like she’s sixty and she reminds me of my own mother. I don’t want her to touch me. Life is more complicated than you think. You may be sure you will never do things that everyone knows are disgusting, but you’ll find yourself doing them, not knowing why. It happens. You’ll see.’

I murmur I understand. I still lean against the couch, sit slouched on the white wool carpet. I realize I landed on my glasses, which I don’t need except to prove my innocence to my mother. They cracked. A small shard of glass cut my thigh and I cannot roll up my skirt now to check whether I bleed. I must do that later, when I’m alone.

Bertha comes back down in a red and black velvet suit. Her hair is up; she looks ready for work. ‘I’ll see you Bernard,’ she says to my father and kisses his cheek lightly, leaving the red mark of her lips. She avoids looking at me. She slips out the door on her cat feet and the door closes behind her like a mouth.

‘Get up, go do something,’ my father says. ‘When you sit there like that, stunned, crazy, it seems something is wrong. Your mother will be home soon. You’ll scare her. You scare me.’

My father tugs at my shoulders and I get up, obediently. I do what he says. He grabs hold of me briefly, absentmindedly, as if I were a sheet of paper he would like to dispose of if only he could. When he lets me go, I fall back down against the couch.

My father puts his shoes on, tucks his shirt into his pants.

‘I have to go to work,’ he says. ‘I won’t tell your mother you were here. It will be our secret.’

The house turns purple with dusk. My mother comes home. She carries my whining baby brother on one arm, a paper grocery bag in the other; her hair is up in pink foam curlers and covered by a pale nylon net. She finds me in the living room, wearing her see-through nightgown over my school clothes, the scent of my father’s cologne hidden in the curls of my hair, and my glasses cracked, a red blood stain in back of the nightgown, about where my knees are. Her eyes freeze; she puts down her burden.

‘I see,’ she says. ‘I see.’ That is all she says.

I lie in bed. It is completely dark. I am wearing a thin nightgown which has slipped up around my thighs; the sheet brushes coolly against my skin. I don’t remember dinner, I don’t remember looking at my father or my father looking at me, though we sat across from each other at the table. I spilled milk on my sleeve. My mother heaped extra potatoes on my plate and her lower lip, colorless, protruded like a shard of broken glass. My baby brother cried in his crib for two hours and would not drink when my mother offered him her breast.

I think of what Patrick Himsel did after stuffing his tongue down my throat. He tried to grab another part of me, I am not sure which because I didn’t feel a difference between them. I did something I don’t understand. Patrick Himsel didn’t understand it. I blindly kicked my own shins with my penny loafers without a penny, kicked and kicked, but didn’t feel anything. I kicked the air perhaps, or the hydrangea bush—for a pink snow drifted down onto both of our heads while we stood there waiting for my foot to stop. I heard the bell ring for class but I did not go back into the school. I cut classes since. I went back to the orange stained glass light of our house without my mother there, and with only, except today, the thought of my father.

I was happy alone. I leaped, danced. When I took off my stockings I noticed with slight curiosity that my left leg was bruised at the shin; because the bruise didn’t hurt, I didn’t give it much thought. When I got tired, I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. Then everything turned black: resting, my mind became a black spool of thread. I see the spool now, while I’m almost asleep in this bed. It unwinds, unwinds. The black thread leads me to things I cannot know, less vocal than secrets.

When I’m asleep, I dream I feel a soft thing brushing by my cheek—soft, soft but cold, like a wind. I try but I can’t open my eyes, I am too tired. A kind voice says, ‘Sleep, sleep my child,’ but it isn’t Artemis who speaks and then my heart freezes.

I can’t feel it. Everything seems as before. But I know I received my mother’s kiss.