The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison Page A

beneath my feet. By claiming all of my father’s devotion, she pushes me toward him.
    Because, if she won’t love me, then the only way not to fall into the abyss of the unloved is by clinging to him. “Don’t you see? ” she insists. “Can’t you see that I’m right?
    ” I don’t answer. No, I don’t see. I won’t.
    Years after my mother’s death, I’ll know that she was right. I’ll read letters my father sent to her when she was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, seventy-six of them stored in a Charles Jourdan shoe box, the last of which is dated October 22, 1970, and invokes the word love in all but one sentence. I’ll read the letters through and then read them again.
    Like all children, I’ll be compelled forever by my parents’ courtship.
    But what will fascinate me about the letters my father sent my mother will not be any quaint “otherness, ” not their belonging to a time different from my own, but their absolute familiarity. I’ll have read letters just like them, letters addressed to me. The ones written to me are written in the same language, the language of desire, of possession.
    The ones to me include identical lines from poems and songs. I’ll weep reading the letters my father sent my mother, for all that is in them, all that I so wanted to believe was mine and only mine was, as she said, hers. In my basement apartment, my life is one of idle enervation. The research projects I owe to my grandparents, the reason for remaining on campus and spending their money on rent, are a sham. My time, empty of activity, is filled by my father. I think of no one else, of nothing else. It is April. It is May. Days pass unmarked, except in relation to how long it is since last we were together and how long it will be before we’re together again. Neither of us is satisfied with anything less than the total possession of the other. My father doesn’t care if he has interrupted my education or cut me off from my friends, he delights in any evidence of my enslavement to him. And I never consider his work or his family, the money spent on phone bills and airfares instead of on his children’s clothing. I have embarked on a peculiar passage in my life a time out of real time, one which will not fit either into the life I lived as a child or the one I create as a woman, but which will carry me, like a road, from one to the other. “You were named for saints and queens, ” my mother told me when I was young enough that a halo and a crown seemed interchangeable. We weren’t Catholics yet. We were members of the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Above my bed was a plaque bearing these words from its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, “Father mother Good, lovingly the I seek. In the way thou hast, be it slow or fast, up to the. ” The little prayer, which I was taught to recite as I fell asleep, scared me. I didn’t want to die fast. As every asthma attack I had seemed capable of killing me, when I wasn’t thinking of my mother I thought of death and of God. They made my first trinity, Mother, Death, God. By the time I was born, all that survived of my grandparents’
    Jewishness was that our household was pervaded by a sense of clean and unclean, chosen and unchosen. My mother never went to temple, and I think the faith of her forebears must have struck her as dowdy and workaday, lacking the overt glamour of crucifixion. The blood of Judaism was as old and dull as a scab, whereas Christ’s flowed brightly each Sunday. I might have remained immune to the mind-over matter doctrines of Mrs. Eddy if I had not, when I was six, suffered an accident that occasioned a visit to a Christian Science practitioner, or healer. Since my mother had moved out, my grandfather drove me to school in the morning, a ride that was interrupted dramatically the day the old Lincoln’s brakes failed. Pumping the useless pedal, my grandfather turned off the road to avoid rear-ending the car ahead of us. We went down a short embankment,