The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison

restaurants to look at each other has become awkward, and quite literally so. We bump into one another, we step on each other’s feet, we knock over flowerpots. My father is an unsettling presence in my mother’s living room, where objects are carefully chosen and placed, surfaces immaculate, where the protocol is that emotions remain veiled, postures chaste. Even when he is silent, his features composed, my father’s heavy white flesh conveys a voluptuous sorrow in the gravity it demands. It’s as if his weight were more a psychic than a physical burden.
    His arms are fat like a boy’s, and his corpulence makes him not sexless but androgynous, adding female to the male. His limbs are large and strong but their muscles are cloaked with fat, their strength hidden by it. And while he isn’t grossly over weightin suits he appears big rather than obese beneath the thin fabric of his shirt a heavy man’s breasts are disconcertingly visible. His large hands are beautiful the way men’s rarely are, each finger straight, strong, manicured, and his fleshy feet are pampered as well, the gracefully formed toenails smoothly filed. We joke about how much prettier are his feet than mine or my mother’s.
    For women like my mother and myself, careful listeners to society’s normative messages of beauty and gender, a body such as my father’s and his utter lack of self-consciousness over it are as subversive and disquieting as is his readiness to weep. Everything about my father bespeaks appetites satisfied, hurts soothe. In contrast to my own flesh, always silenced, its hunger and pain ignored, his so white, so indolent both fascinates and repels me. I find my eyes return again and again to the dark points of his nipples. How different they are from the shriveled coins of college boys’, their hard chests, lean bellies. At meals, when my father bites into buttered bread or a banana or even something as yielding as yogurt, I can hear his teeth come together.
    They meet with a little snap, and I shudder at this noise that betrays the force of his hunger, and that reminds me of my own. Of a lifetime of hidden, thwarted desire. This time, when I return to my mother’s house after taking him to the airport no kiss, instead a feverish, disheveled embrace she is pacing around the white couch in her living room.
    “There’s something wrong with all of this, ” she says. “I feel it. ” I sit down on the couch, exhausted, tear-stained. “Wrong with what? ” I say, betraying my impatience, my unwillingness to be forced to defend myself, or him. “You know, ” she says, “he isn’t normal. Your father …
    . IS not a normal person. “He isn’t? ” I say. “What do you mean? ” I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to have conversations with anyone but my father, and my mother is angry, I can tell. She has that stiff prowl, all of her held in tight control except for her dark, darting eyes. “Anyway, ” I say, “who is normal? ” It’s a retort that, much later, my father will throw at me. “I don’t know. I’m just uneasy about this. You’re…
    you’re fixated on each other. I mean, I understand it in youyou’ve never had a father. Any one would expect you to be mesmerized. But him”
    My mother stops and turns. “You know, ” she says, pointing, “this isn’t about you. It’s about me. ” By “it”and I know this right away, there’s nothing more clear than this usually vague little word she means the love my father professes, the trembling hands and hot eyes. All of what she has noticed and is frightened by. So inappropriate, so immoderate.
    So abnormal to love me so completely, that’s what I hear her say.
    What I hear is that not only does my mother not love or admire me, but she will find a way to reinterpret my father’s love, to make it all her own. She folds her arms and looks at me. I look away. I won’t let her see with what deft strokes she can cut the very ground from