The Best Night Ever

My mother told it at Thanksgiving the year my niece brought a boy to dinner.

She waits until the pie, when everyone has gone soft and slow, and then she says, “Do you know what your aunt did the night of her first kiss?” Kara groans the way sixteen-year-olds are required to. The boy goes pink to the ears. My mother sets down her fork like she’s about to hand out something precious.

“She came running into my bedroom,” she says. “Didn’t even knock. Jumped right onto the bed in her pretty little dress, and I was half asleep, and she said, Mama, he kissed me. Like it ought to be on the news.”

Everyone laughs. My sister glances at me and then at her plate.

“We stayed up till two,” my mother says. “I told her about my first kiss. Virgil Houton, behind the Esso station. We talked about everything.” She turns to me, and her face is open and fond. “Didn’t we?”

They’re all looking at me now.

Here is what I have.

The porch light was off. I remember that because I had to find the lock by feel. The dress was the blue one with the pleats that never stayed pressed, and I’d sat in Tony’s car for forty minutes at the dead end of Bradshaw Road with the radio low, and he kissed me once, carefully, like he was asking a question, and then once more. That’s all. I swear that’s all. I counted it later, lying in bed, so I would be sure.

The kitchen light came on before I had my shoes off.

She looked at me the way you look at a stain. She looked at the pleats, which had gone crooked from the car seat, and at the hem, and back up at my face. “Where have you been.”

I told her. A drive-in movie and then home. She said, “Don’t lie to me,” and I said I wasn’t, and then I said he only kissed me, as if that were a defense. As if offering up the smallest true thing would prove there was nothing larger underneath it.

I don’t remember her hand moving. I remember the sound, flat, like a book dropped on a table. I remember my cheek going hot slowly, afterward, the way a burn does. She said, “Look at yourself,” and I did, in the black window over the sink, and I couldn’t see whatever it was she saw.

I went to my room. I didn’t run. I sat on the bed in the blue dress until the window turned gray, and I didn’t take it off, because taking it off felt like agreeing with her.

There are things that don’t fit. I know that.

Her version has the blue dress in it too. Her version has my face in her hands. “I held your face,” she says sometimes, when she tells it. “You were so flushed.” And she’s right that my face was hot. She’s right about her hands. But there was nothing loving about those hands that night.

And I have a memory of being in her bedroom that night: the yellow lamp, the smell of her cold cream, the satin edge of the blanket under my fingers. I’ve never been able to place it. Maybe it was another night. Maybe I went in later, near morning. Maybe I went in to apologize for something I hadn’t done, because that’s what you did in our house, and maybe she was gentle about it, and maybe that’s the part she kept.

My sister was eleven and supposed to be asleep. I asked her once, years later, what she heard. She thought about it for a long time. “Voices,” she said. “Late. Laughing or crying, I couldn’t tell. I figured it was the TV.”

Tony I never asked. He moved to Oregon. I don’t think he’d remember anything but the car. His yellow Mustang. Was that boy ever proud of that car.

“Didn’t we?” my mother says again.

Kara is watching me. The boy is watching Kara. There’s a version of the next ten seconds where I say it all, right there over the pumpkin pie, and I can feel the words shaping in my mouth. Instead, I say…

“Something like that.”

It comes out harder than I meant it to. Or exactly as hard as I meant it to. It has an edge, the way the kitchen light had an edge, coming on in the dark.

My mother’s smile stays where it is a beat too long.

“Well,” she says. “It was late. You were so flushed.” She picks up her fork and puts it down again. “You came in my bedroom. You did come in.” It isn’t quite a question.

Nobody answers. My sister gets up to refill the water pitcher, though it’s still half full.

“I remember the lamp,” my mother says, quieter now, mostly to her plate. “And your dress was all...” Her hand makes a small creasing motion in the air and stops there. Something crosses her face. Not guilt, exactly. More like someone who has reached for a stair in the dark and found it isn’t where it’s always been.

“I remember I was really tired,” she says. “I was always so tired back then.”

Kara asks for the whipped cream, and the table closes over the moment like water.

After pie, my mother sends me upstairs to return an extra folding chair, and I end up in my old room instead, sitting on the floor of the closet with a shoebox I haven’t opened in thirty years.

The diary is on top. Red vinyl, a lock that never worked. I find the date without trying. I always knew the date.

The entry is four lines in purple ink, in handwriting rounder and more hopeful than mine has been since.

T. kissed me!!! Right on the mouth. Twice. Told Mama everything. She was so nice about it. Best night EVER.

There’s a heart drawn after it, colored in.

I read it three times. I know that girl. I know she sometimes wrote down the day she wished she’d had, the way you rehearse what you should have said. I know she was afraid of someone finding it. I know a lot of things about her.

But I also know I have told my version for so many years, to friends, to a therapist, to two husbands, that it’s worn smooth, like a stone kept in a pocket. I know I added the flat sound of the book on the table at some point, because it was true in a way the plain word wasn’t. I’m not sure anymore what else I added, or when.

I touch my cheek. It doesn’t tell me anything.

I put the diary back in the box and the box back in the closet and go downstairs.

Later, I’m drying while Momma washes, and she says, without turning around, “I wasn’t hard on you. Was I?”

I take the plate from her and dry it and set it on the stack.

She shuts off the tap. She reaches up and touches my cheek, the left one, lightly, with the backs of her wet fingers. And I don’t know, I have never known, whether to lean in or away.