The Kiss: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

hitting whatever she can reach my back, my legs,” she says.
    “You don’t. ” I am silent, chastened by her refusal of what I’ve given her.
    “You love your mother best. That’s the way it is for every child, and that’s the way it is for you. too. It’s a scrupulous rather than truthful statement from my grandmother She fully intends that I should love her best she wants to be everyone’s first love but at the time, many of her arguments with my mother have to do with whether one or the other of them is plotting to alienate my affections. As my mother has recently moved out, perhaps inspiring this pragmatic shift of adoration, my grandmother is careful not to say anything seditious that I might repeat. I watch as she pulls up her other stocking and fastens it. That afternoon, I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself, a lesson reinforced often during a childhood of female warfare and tricky, shifting alliances, so often that my genius for evasion at last approaches that of my mother. She may sleep with a mask, but by the time I am a teenager I have made one within myself, I have hidden my heart.
    Rebuked by my grandmother, sitting in silence beside her, I begin to teach myself to define what I really feel toward my mothera desperate, fearful anger over her having abandoned me, an anger that has left me stricken with asthma and rashesas love. And what about my mother, so ready to use the word, to write me a note comprised of nothing but kiss’s and the hollowness of her hugs? Her anger with me is wild and uncontrolled, a force that seems to take her by surprise as much as it does me. Once, just before she moves out, I get underfoot while she is dressing for a date. She is late, and I am irksome.
    Standing with her before her mirror, I reach under her arm for one of her lipsticks, and she turns on me with her hairbrush. Her blows fall all over me. She chases me down the staircase, hitting whatever she can reach my back, my legs, the top of my head. At the bottom of the stairs, I collapse in tears, at first in shock and fear, but afterward, when my grandmother and grandfather have come running to the sound of my sobs, I cry with the intention of getting my mother in trouble, cry harder and longer, learning the power of vengeance. Necklaces. Rings Clothes.
    Books. A portable stereo and lenses for my camera. The fountain pen he used in college. His grandfather’s razor and strop in its original pewter case etched with curlicues. A diamond stud that belonged to someone I can’t remember who. Some of his gifts I’ll give away, and others I’ll sell to a pawnbroker, tearing up the claim check as soon as I’m outside the shop’s door.
    The heirlooms I’ll return, packed carefully into a box, insured at the post office and mailed without a letter to his address. They belong to his children. Not me, but the children he raised, the daughters who will still be his when we no longer speak. Christmas presents. Birthday presents. Presents for Easter, for Valentine’s Day, for Halloween. All re wrapped in the pretty paper I am careful not to tear, ribbons I untie but do not cut. I retrieve the bright papers and bows from trash cans after the celebrants of whatever occasion it is have gone to bed.
    Smooth them, replace them around the boxes. I have to preserve them just so, this evidence of my mother’s love, or what passes for it> what she calls love. Her gifts are valuable in that they always provide clues as to how I might ingratiate myself. If she gives me a dress in a size six, then I know to alter my size ten self to fit it. I can make myself the creature she imagines she might love, at least while standing in the store where she buys the dress. It will be years before I can acknowledge that in preserving such evidence I document another, different emotional transaction, not one of love but of rage, my rage over always receiving directives disguised as gifts and my refusal, ultimately, to accept