Read The Kiss: A Memoir for Free Online

trees. The chair is as large as the trees and is in metamorphosis, branches and twigs project from its wooden back. Either it is becoming fully a chair, or it is reverting back to tree. I chose this print with my mother, undoubtedly because it expresses my sense of always striving to become what I am not and because the longing I find expressed in the chairmute, paralyzedis also so familiar. Still, despite its beauty, I don’t enjoy looking at it. The pink glow coming from behind the hill is too faint to suggest hope, there’s no way to know if it’s sunrise, sunset, or the light of an approaching fire. The print is reflected twice, in full-length mirrors on closet doors, and the whole room shines with an optimism neither of us has ever felt about the other. Because most of my school holidays are spent with my grandparents, it’s a place of brief visits. We agree that we have to leave for the airport by one o’clock, but I’m dressed to go long before noon. It’s not unusual for me to be ready this early. I’m always too early. I arrive at restaurants whole hours before dinner dates and have to walk around neighboring blocks or wait in nearby stores until I’m merely painfully punctual. I’m helpless against it, this response to my mother’s chronic lateness, to having always been the last child to be picked up from school, camp, church, birthday parties, dental appointments, dance lessons. Always in tears, always sure that this time she wouldn’t come at all but would leave me forever with the dentist or the Russian ballet mistress who slapped the backs of my knees with her yardstick. Even after my mother moved out, the arrangement between her and my grandmother was that she would provide at least half of whatever transportation I required, and so in hallways and foyers, on dank stone benches or the vinyl-upholstered couches of waiting rooms, I silently rehearsed my grandparents’ phone number and their address, to which the police should return me. My mother’s lateness is so extreme it transcends hostile insult.
    The reason for lost jobs and lost loves, for useless sessions of behavior therapy, it implies she exists in another temporal frame. In being late, if in little else, my mother is so predictable that my grandmother routinely gives her the wrong time for family gatherings, adjusting it as much as two whole hours forward, and still my mother nearly misses them. But I am not as pragmatic as my grandmother, and I never get used to it. At 12, 45 I knock on the bedroom door. She’s out of the bath, she’s set her hair, but she has not put on her makeup.
    She’s not wearing anything but a bra and a slip. Discarded blouses and skirts and trousers cover every surface of her usually immaculate bedroom. Shoes tumble from the closet as if arrested in the attempt to escape. I sit in the rocker and watch her. “That looks nice, ” I encourage with each change of clothes, but she looks in the mirror and tears whatever it is off. “Please, ” I say. “It’s one. ” And then, after a few more outfits, “It’s one-fifteen. “
    “You go, ” she says. “I can’t.
    I’m not ready. ” She sits on the bed, still undressed. She puts her face in her hands. “Alone? ” I say. “I can’t. “
    “You’ll have to. Or you’ll be late. “
    “Just put something on, ” I beg. “Please. I’ll drive, and you can do your makeup in the car. “
    “No. You go. “
    At one-thirty I leave, transfixed with dread, whether of the solitary meeting or of being late, I can’t say. I speed on the highway, flooded with adrenaline, nervous enough that my back aches, a cold clench. I park the car and run all the way from the lot and through the terminal to the gate. I arrive breathing hard. A man wearing a tan suit, not a brown one, straightens slowly from the drinking fountain, and turns to look at me. We recognize one another immediately. We’ve exchanged recent photographs, but it’s more than that, we look like