The Kiss: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

gynecologist prescribes hormones, the acupuncturist screws needles into my thighs.
    Before I go away to college, we return together to the gynecologist’s office. She wants me to get a diaphragm, that notoriously unreliable form of birth control. But I can’t be fitted for one. “Not without breaking her hymen, ” the doctor says after he examines me. “You don’t want to do that, do you? ” My mother, standing near the window, hesitates. I sit up on my elbows. “Yes, ” she says. He uses a series of graduated green plastic penises. When he withdraws the set of them from under the lid of a stainless steel surgical tray, I can’t believe what I see in his hands. Their green is a green that exists nowhere in nature but that colors surgeons’ scrubs and emesis basins and other dire instruments I associate with illness and death. One after another he inserts them, starting with the smallest no bigger than his little finger until the second to last one comes out smeared with blood. This doctor deflowers me in front of my mother. Is it because he was her obstetrician, the man who delivered me, that he imagines this is somehow all right? I lie on the table, a paper sheet over my knees, my hands over my eyes. Highway repairs and a detour make the drive home from college even longer than usual, and I arrive at my mother’s barely in time to sit down for dinner, something French and ambitious to which she must have devoted an afternoon of labor. Even so, we leave the television on during the meal, and taste rather than eat what she prepared. “You get it, ” my mother says whenever the phone rings. I find this odd she’s usually so secretive about her social life but when it rings at nine-thirty, I understand. It’s him, my father, calling to give us his flight number. His voice, which I have not heard for ten years, surprises me with its high pitch. I’ll learn, in time, that it doesn’t always sound this way, but rises and falls in concert with his emotions.
    On this night, however, we speak only as long as it takes to confirm the necessary details. “I’ll be wearing a brown suit, ” he says.
    “Okay, ” I say.
    “See you soon, ” he says, ordinary words made extraordinary by the fact that I have never heard them from him, a man I would have seen under other circumstances every day for all the years of my life. “Okay, ” I say. “Yes. ” He’s due to arrive at two the next afternoon. Everything is disrupted for this visit. My mother’s companion of many years is banished, I’m not sure where he goes. Perhaps to stay with his estranged wife, the one he can’t bring himself to divorce. My grandparents, disapproving, will share one dinner with us at my mother’s, one tea at their house. The rest of the week’s plans do not include them. I am not sure whether to regard this as a slight, a mercy, or merely a pragmatic consideration of what we all think we might be able to handle together.
    My mother and I go to our beds, where we spend our separate, sleepless nights. As only a narrow hallway divides our rooms, we can hear each other sigh and shift beneath the blankets. At one point she gets up. I hear her open and close a drawer in her bathroom. My bedroom at my mother’s is the first she’s ever had for me. She furnished it the summer after I graduated from high school, when, as I was moving from my grandparents’ house to college, I would no longer need it. It’s a modern room, with a futon whose brightly colored bedding strikes a garish note among the other rooms’ understated fugues of beige. The comforter bears a floral pattern of restless, itchy pinks that are echoed in the window blinds. Through them the morning sun streaks in and falls in warm patches on the cream carpet, the pink and cream blending together into a color I associate with inflamed eyelids, On the wall is a print, a watercolor by Jean-Michel Folon, a painting of a single chair that stands on a hill amidst a grove of leafless