The Kiss: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

them. Under the Christmas tree I make the appropriate noises of delight, but then later, alone, after the house is dark, I reverse my response, I reject the gifts by wrapping them back up as if I’ve never opened them. It’s possible to apply this bifurcated vision to other areas of my life. An uneasy relationship with food is the standard example in cases such as my mother’s and mine. At fifteen, when I stop eating, is it because I want to secure her grudging admiration? Do I want to make myself smaller and smaller until I disappear, truly becoming my mother’s daughter, the one she doesn’t see?
    Or am I so angry at her endless nagging me about my weight that I decide I’ll never again give her the opportunity to say a word to me about my size. You want thin? I remember thinking, I’ll give you thin. I’ll definitely be thin, not you. Not the suggested one hundred and twenty pounds, but ninety-five. And not … . Size SIX, but size two. If only I understood the triumph of refusing to eat, if only I could recognize my excitement as that of vengeance, of contriving to shut my mother out, the way that she denied me as I stood for hours by the bed where she lay, her eyes closed and hidden under her mask. Anorexia may begin as an attempt to make myself fit my mother’s ideal and then to erase myself, but its deeper, more insidious and lasting seduction is that of exiling her Anorexia can be satisfied, my mother cannot, so I replace her with this disease, with a system of penances and renunciation that offers its own reward. That makes mothers obsolete. A pool party at the big house with the courtyard and the red tile roof, the one owned by the architect she’s been dating. It’s a house with seven bedrooms, six of them unoccupied. We change in the one he calls “the blue room, ” an icy pale, female space with a vast canopied bed.
    Like boxers, my mother and I back into opposing corners of the bedroom.
    She’s always hated to be seen naked. If she can, she changes in the dark. I watch as she pulls her bathing suit up under her dress, wanting her to look at me, my body. I like nothing so much as taking my clothes off, I do now that I’m so thin. Each day, I undress countless times and stand on the scale. In public restrooms, I wait until I am alone so that I can lift my shirt and admire my ribs in the mirror. Seeing myself is enough to make me gasp with pleasure, to make my hands shake with excitement. I am amazed by this body I’ve made. I don’t interpret it as a criticism that no one else admires it, only as evidence that my standards are too rarefied for ordinary human beings to appreciate.
    Since I have no boyfriend, there’s no one to complain that I’ve left nothing soft for his hands or his eyes to enjoy. I am my own lover. At night I go to bed naked, and in the dark I touch my body until I know by heart the map of my hunger. The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity. It isn’t just appetite for food that I deny, it’s all appetite, all desire. It’s sex. I starve myself to recapture my sexuality from my mother not just by making my breasts and hips disappear, but by drying up the blood. The one thing she can’t **skip**stand about my being so thin is that I don’t menstruate, I lose my capacity to get pregnant, to be in a danger of the kind that precipitated the abrupt fall from grace she endured. Because she’s angry, too. She can’t have missed hearing the message of my childhood and adolescence, as delivered to me by my grandmother, Don’t make the mistakes your mother made. How she must hate me, with my good grades and smug avoidance of boys. She has to insist that my transgressing and getting caught is at least possible, and when she discovers that I’ve lost my period she takes me to doctor after doctor, accompanying me into the consulting room and even the examining room. The