The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

fell asleep. Our companionship gave both of us great pleasure”Oh, you keep him young! You keep him young! “
    his wrinkled friends said, tweaking my ear or cheek but everything changed abruptly when I went through puberty. “You’re too big for that now, ” my grandfather would say, and he’d push me out of his lap. When he hugged me, he didn’t let our bodies touch, he made sure that my breasts and hips didn’t press against him. I suppose the same thing must have happened to my mother when she turned twelve or thirteen, her flesh announcing to him that she had become sexual and therefore untouchable, and that his rejection as she slipped from childhood into womanhood must have wounded her as it did me. Born in 1890, my mother’s father is a true Victorian. He was raised in houses in which even a table’s curved leg was draped, and he has remained squeamish about what he would call our animal nature. My grandmother can be derisive about his prudishness, Victorian mores being to her like a language she can speak but mostly chooses not to. She alludes disparagingly to my grandfather’s willful innocence, and when he turns the television off because an ad for a feminine-hygiene product has interrupted the news broadcast, she throws her magazine down in disgust. “Good God! ” she cries. “Are you going to leave the world still thinking the stork brought you into it! ” Whatever it is about my father that so draws me to him must have to do in part with the very different ways he and my grandfather respond to my femaleness. As a child of five or of ten, happiest at my grandfather’s elbow while he grafted a branch onto a fruit tree or nailed perches to a bird feeder, I couldn’t keep my father’s attention. During his two brief visits, his eyes passed quickly over me on their way to my mother. But now that I am grown up, my fingernails no longer rough and black with earth from the garden, my once-bobbed hair long, and my flat chest filled out, my father’s eyes are fixed on me, he tears his gaze away with reluctance. This kind of besotted focus is intoxicating, especially for a girl schooled in selfeffacement and taught that virtue believes more in its ugliness than in its beauty. One afternoon, when we’ve returned from a gallery, I fall asleep sitting next to my father on the couch. When I wake up, whole hours later, my head is in the crook of his elbow, like a baby’s. I startle, arms jerking in alarm. “I’m sorry! ” I say. “I was so tired. “
    “Oh, no! ” my father says. “Please don’t apologize! I’m not sorry at all. ” He looks at me with his hungry eyes.
    “My arm went to sleep, ” he says. “I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t dare move. If it was up to me, I would have sat holding you forever, I would never have woken you. “They didn’t let me hold you,” he says. “Not at all. I don’t remember that they ever let me. They had you on a schedule. It was sacrosanct, it was absolute. They tolerated no exceptions. They fed you, they changed you, they put you down. If you cried, no one was allowed to pick you up. ” By they he means the baby nurse, my mother and grandmother.
    “They didn’t even let me say good-bye, ” he says. He puts his hand under my chin and turns my face toward his. My mother is watching him. At one point she opens her mouth as if to say something, but then closes it. As my father talks, tears seep into the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. They don’t fall so much as spread into a glittering web over his face, following the fine lines made by the sun, by laughter, by sorrow.
    I’ve never seen a man cry before. My father’s eyes, what is it about them? Their color is utterly familiar the same as mine, the same as my mothers but they burn like no other eyes I’ve ever seen before or since.
    Burn like a prophet’s, a madman’s, a lover’s. Always shining, always bloodshot, always turned on me with absolute attention. Intelligent