Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

dead, ominously, like teachers, or like the couples one sometimes saw on the tough streets around grade schools, squaring off like cats and dogs before a fight, the women arching their backs, the men splatting their feet.
    Not Katie. When she came to a stop she seemed merely to grow more like herself, on what you might call an “on hold” basis, those eyes dilating at me the way a movie brings you a close-up.
    “Whah—yew,” she said, in that chiding, half-amused drawl Southern mothers use to remonstrate with a child. “Whah yew, ” Then her face came back to still. I could see what a student nurse might suddenly find there if a procedure went wrong. My easy father, who hated scolding anybody, would take to quoting Robbie Burns: “Something gone agley, darlin’?”—leaving you uncertain of anything except his love. But Katie meant business.
    “Now you hearken, my little cousin,” she said. “I trained up here with my black sisters. Nights on double duty I slept in the same bey-ud. My schoolmate Marnine Tooker writes me from Atlanta every year. My head caw-diac nurse right now, I would trust her with my life. And she me.”
    I did hearken. I heard the “my.”
    She cupped my face in her hands. Just so she had done when we and my mother had had to leave Atlantic City sooner than planned. Your mother has to go inside for a while again, dawlin. And your daddy still has to be away awhile, on business. You’re coming down to us, at Port. Now she chuckled, not releasing me. “Why you dirty li’l ole No’therner. At Shirley—what the dickens were you thinking I went out to shoot?”

B UT KATIE AND I never did visit Arnella’s, though we had had the invitation, a large greeting card with red, blue, and gold flowerets, in the middle of which a good round hand, surely her mothers, had inscribed the date and the hour, Six O’clock Supper, and both our names. Four days before, I got a note through Student Mail to meet Arnella at Friedgen’s, the Teacher’s College haunt. Over their famous brownies she said, “Have to take back that invite. I’m sorry. My parents had a big fight over it. Shall I level with you why?”
    What a girl Arnella was, a leveler shooting straight for the whites of one’s eyes. And if I may say with the immodest pride we take in our youth once we are mortally separate from it, what a girl was I, humbly brooding on what I was with all the arrogance of the beginner who believes in change.
    Sometimes I think of memory as a Sistine Chapel. Down there on the sunny floor are all the early figures of life’s morning, still as busy as ever they were at that time; up here on the ceiling are the swollen, over-muscled shapes we have become; ceiling and floor are powerless to meet. Which is the ultimate viewer? Which the most alive?
    Anyway, good prospects as we two were—for what? The worlds grace?—we muffed it.
    “You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s because I’m Jewish. Your mother had second thoughts. It doesn’t matter.”
    I was too cool about that, I’ve thought since. Maybe I should have made like it did matter. The worst of race relations is for either side to be impervious.
    “No, it was my father,” Arnella said. I would have said her voice was too high-tone, if I hadn’t known from home how hysteria closets itself in the too polite. “My father married down, or thought he did. My mother, as you saw, is not educated. But she’s light. He’s dark. And what it comes to is—” She made a face. “Neither’n can get the best of t’other. So—he hates Shirley. It’s what made her light-skinned. So he’s laid down the law to her. In our house, which is his house, she can’t have anybody white.”
    The brownies were double chocolate, the darkest ever. I chewed down the rest of mine. My European mother laughed at such sweets—gingerbread, angel food cake, any of that American stuff—the way she did at men drinking malteds, as Columbia College students were doing at