The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  “I don’t know,” she says, even though she does. Her conversion, mundane and not singular, is close at hand, and she wants to savor her last few days of freedom—if such a thing exists. Her individuality is just a fiction. Who said that? All her big ideas are already slipping away. A temp is just a worker with commitment issues. She holds her breath longer than usual.

  “Ted?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you wanna go out for martinis?” She almost says Bombay martinis, but she’s pretty sure that’s not the proper terminology.

  “To celebrate?” Ted says. “You bet.”

  On the street, everyone is going somewhere, even if they don’t quite know where. That’s both the promise and the lie of the world. It would be easier if Vita didn’t understand this.

  “To celebrate,” she says. “To celebrate.”

  Who will come to my wedding?

  A. My parents

  B. My brother

  C. My betrothed

  D. None of the above

  There is a spider who lives in a high corner of the big bay windows that look out on the garden. The garden is more like a nursery because all the plants are in pots, just in case Carlos, the man who lovingly tends the garden, ever decides to move. He has lived in the apartment building for more than twenty years and looks like he would ride a motorcycle, except that his teeth hang by slender roots from his gums. I leave the spider and her web unmolested because of the fat black flies who whoosh through the bedroom window, the one I leave open for the cat, who is fond of jumping out, eating potted plants in the garden, leaping back inside, and regurgitating tangles of bright green grass on the wooden floor. When the flies get caught in the web, the spider is at the ready, climbing her jungle gym of delicate thread more expertly than the children at the elementary school beyond the garden on the other side of the high cyclone fence. The flies sound like faraway race cars, gunning their engines to hurl themselves down a straightaway or around a bend when they find themselves glued to the web with the spider poised to kill them.

  My desk is pushed against the window where the spider lives. This is where I sit when I write multiple-choice questions for schoolchildren—not the schoolchildren across the garden, who, in fits of occasional anger or exuberance, throw one another’s winter jackets over the high fence, but schoolchildren who live in Ohio and West Virginia and whom I will never meet:

  Read the sentence. If you find a mistake, choose the answer that is the best way to write the underlined section of the sentence. If there is no mistake, choose Correct as is.

  Arnold built a ship out of toothpicks

  that were three stories tall.

  A. Arnold built a ship out of, that were three stories tall, toothpicks.

  B. Arnold, who was three stories tall, built a ship out of toothpicks.

  C. Arnold built a ship that was three stories tall out of toothpicks.

  D. Correct as is.

  I feel sorry for the children who have to answer these questions. I am told that if they do not apply themselves to the study guides I write, they will fail important tests and get held back. Imagine flunking fifth grade because you can imagine a three-story-tall Arnold, a towering boy with delicate fingers whose hobbies include shipbuilding and farming worms. I picture him in the backyard—not the garden, but the backyard of my childhood—a half acre of land with a dead catalpa in the middle where we swung from an old tire until the day the branch came down with a crash. I see the building-tall boy stabbing electric stakes into the sod, making the ground extracharged so that the worms rise and thrust out their naked heads. I see Arnold studying the lawn through his superspy binoculars from a great height before carefully lowering himself and tweezering free the worms like the finest loose threads.

  My brother, whose name also happens to be Arnold, was involved in worm cultivation, along with his best friend, Luke. Bitten by the capitalist bug one summer, they harvested dozens and dozens of worms, storing them in an old wooden barrel in our garage. They had planned to sell them to the convenience store a half mile from our house, but the manager didn’t want them, and they quickly moved on to another moneymaking scheme and forgot all about the worms. August heat sucked the moisture from the dirt, and the worms hardened into squiggles as crunchy as chow mein noodles. Now Luke is a recovering drug addict, and Arnold is dead, a casualty of the war in Iraq. So eliminate “B.” Arnold will not come to my wedding, and I will not go to his. The best I can manage is test questions, the occasional imaginary Arnold doing something extraordinary. I know if Arnold took this test, he would pass with flying colors. Even though grammar was never his specialty, he would offer a quick solution to the chimpanzees slowly chattering for their bananas, not that chimpanzees are the real problem. Banana slugs are.

  The chimpanzees chattered slowly as they watched the banana slugs creep toward the cat food.

  A. The chimpanzees chattered as they watched the banana slugs creep toward the slowly cat food.

  B. The chimpanzees chattered as they slowly watched the banana slugs creep toward the cat food.

  C. The chimpanzees chattered as they watched the banana slugs slowly creep toward the cat food.

  D. Correct as is.

  In addition to the spider, the cat, and the flies, there is a slug—not my boyfriend, the one I intend to marry despite what I imagine would be my parents’ threats to stand when the minister asks, “Is there anyone who opposes this marriage?” and speak their minds. (Using process of elimination [POE], you would be making a fairly educated guess if you struck my parents from the list of people who are likely to attend my wedding as well.) A slug/the slug/the slugs emerge from the crack beneath the backdoor. (It’s important to note that you can use the definite article with both the singular and plural forms of the noun; the indefinite article is a different story.) This experience has taught me that slugs like to eat cat food, but cats don’t like to eat slugs. When there is a slug spooned over the cat food like marshmallow fluff, my cat does nothing. She likes flies fine, but not slugs because, I suppose, there is no challenge in catching and eating them. Then the challenge is mine—to carry the dish of cat food to the garbage without tipping the slug onto my foot. The back stairs are narrow and rickety, and the thought of upsetting the slug food onto the ground and luring more slugs from the dusty corners of the basement is enough to upset me, though I do not generally upset easily. For instance, I would walk a mile sucking a lime if I could tempt Emil to marry me, but neither e-mail nor anagrams nor homophones seem to entice my betrothed-to-be to appear with a jar of daffodils, to build me a three-story picket fence. I have chosen just the spot—on the desk next to my brother’s picture—to display the daffodils. I will assure Carlos that I did not steal them from his garden, though I cannot vouch for Emil, because I barely even know him. This is why my parents would oppose the marriage, and who can blame them? They are upset about Arnold, and my plans to plan a wedding before I have even secured a husband would salt their wounds. They are old-fashioned. They do not believe in green card marriages, open marriages, courthouse marriages, starter marriages, secret marriages, or marriages of convenience for insurance purposes. They do support gay marriage as long as the loving couple intend to adopt or buy sperm and a baster and get down to business.

  I made that last part up. My parents, good liberals, support gay marriages with or without children. When my brother, Arnold, announced his intention to join the Marines, just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday and a year before we declared war on Iraq, they begged him to reconsider, and then when they saw how determined he was, they begged him to go back to school and earn the last three credits he needed to graduate so he would have the option of enrolling in officers’ school instead of going straight into the infantry. That’s not a sentence a student in Ohio or West Virginia should read, not because I’m ashamed of what my parents wanted for Arnold or what Arnold said he believed in, but because it’s a run-on.

  The only grammar the cat knows is the sound of
a key in the front lock, the caw of the backyard blue jay, the mechanical pop of a fresh can of Fancy Feast being opened. The blue jay sometimes alights on Carlos’s shoulder while he waters or weeds the garden, its animal intuition keen to the fact that Carlos is a kind man with no interest in raiding its nest. The same can’t be said for the cat, who would present herself with a hero’s medal for massacring a baby bird. Arnold knew his nouns and verbs, his adjectives and adverbs. He knew, for instance, that cats do not purr brave, but that brave cats purr. He knew he could run faster and do more pull-ups and sit-ups than most twenty-one-year-olds. He knew the difference between comparatives and superlatives, knew that being better than most was nearly as good as being the best. I’m not sure whether he had considered the grammar of movement to contact or maneuver under fire. He maneuvered under fire better than 95 percent of the other Marines. But what about that other 5 percent? And the peculiar nature of the word forever?

  Don’t assume there is always a correct answer. If none of the answers is correct, choose None of the above.

  The spider lived forever, but died once.

  A. The spider lived once, but died forever.

  B. The spider lived forever, but died.

  C. The spider lived, but died once.

  D. None of the above.

  If I were a student, I would lose my faith in formal education when I got to that one, and if I were brave or rebellious or overbursting with life, I would just forget about the test and make an interesting pattern with the rest of the answer bubbles. Art is as good an answer as any. As for the spider, her life span is probably shorter than a human’s, but I can’t be sure. Cats may linger until their early twenties, and if you’re lucky enough to own a parrot, you’ll have a lifelong companion. For a period of time, the spider in my window and my brother were both alive. Then I went to Boise. My parents and I had to go through Arnold’s things, his LEGOs and Star Wars figures, his mechanical bank that sorted coins by weight and from which I stole quarters whenever I was short on money, his track ribbons and high school dance pictures—there he is wearing enormous glasses, there he is with a powder blue boutonniere, his arms wrapped around a girl wearing equally huge eyeglasses and a carnation pink corsage that matches her dress …

  The name of Arnold’s high school girlfriend was—

  A. Liz Roberts.

  B. Liza Robertson.

  C. Elizabeth Robison.

  D. I’m not sure.

  E. I can’t remember.

  F. I wish I could remember.

  G. I have decided that it’s Lisbeth Rodgers.

  He still had all the Choose Your Own Adventure books that had once been mine and a beautiful hardback version of Goodnight Moon that he’d sold to Luke for five dollars just before both sets of parents put an end to their commercial activities because someone was always getting gypped.

  “Do you remember when he got cut from the football team?” my mother said, holding up a dusty record album with a black cover. For some reason, Arnold had gotten a real stereo with a turntable and a tape player when he was a kid. If he weren’t dead, I probably would have started to joke-complain about the inequities of being the oldest.

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t remember how he came home, and he locked himself in his room?”

  “No,” I said.

  “How can you not remember this?” she said.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “You can’t suddenly expect me to remember everything.”

  She didn’t look like a good liberal anymore, especially when she raised her hand as if she wanted to slap me. They had a flagpole in the front yard now, but they also drove a Prius. Grief had unpredictable results.

  “What?” I said.

  “What what?” she said.

  If you think too hard about the grammar of talking, it can fill you with despair.

  “What were you telling me?”

  “He listened to this album …” It was Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “He said it was so depressing it made him feel better about his own situation. It put everything in perspective.” She blew her nose into a Kleenex that she had been holding for three days straight. It looked like a clump of stringy bread dough. I offered her the tiny packet of tissue I’d stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans and thought of the following: the monkeys mopped up the banana slugs’ slime with their pocket-size tissue. Kids would get a kick out of a sentence like that, especially if one of the choices included pocket-size slime.

  “That’s a nice story,” I said.

  “It’s not a story,” she said, and before I could assure her that by story, I did not mean “made-up thing,” she added, “It’s the truth.”

  The cat didn’t like Boise; there was so much grass she couldn’t decide which blades to eat. She stopped coughing up hairballs, grew sluggish, peckish. Nothing could rouse her, not even baby squirrels. That’s when I decided I should get married. We needed a to-do list that didn’t involve the Salvation Army and donations to scholarship funds and candlelight vigils and trying to track down girls from junior high dance pictures who probably have enough crap and heartache in their lives already without the news of Arnold. But, of course, before I marry, I need an Emil or a Neil, an Anil or a Niles—and it is not just a matter of switching letters and choosing the right form of the indefinite article. Everything would be more auspicious if no article were necessary, but I know better than most that with hard work and discipline, you can do anything. At least, that’s what I tell kids in Ohio and West Virginia.

  Congratulations! You’ve completed the practice book for the Ohio State Reading Comprehension Test, and now you’re ready to race to success on the exam. To make sure your car is in tip-top shape:

  get a full night’s sleep;

  eat a good breakfast;

  dress in comfortable clothing;

  bring three sharpened No. 2 pencils with good erasers; and

  review process of elimination (POE) the night before.

  Everyone knows, though, that things happen, that the best-laid plans are sometimes ruined by surprises: the cat scrabbling around half the night with a mouse she’s brought in from the garden, milk mysteriously souring in the carton, skin too tender to be touched by anything, even clothing. When I am back at my desk after my trip to Boise, I see that the spider is still there. Moreover, she has laid another purse of eggs. Because of what happened the first time (a massive explosion of tiny spiders across the window, carnage), I use a tissue from the box on my desk, pluck the package of eggs from the web, and flush the whole thing down the toilet. I avoid speculating about the spider’s feelings. Even though I caution students against talismans and charms (You make your own luck! Hard work is what it takes!), I cross my fingers, hoping that Carlos is not in the garden, hidden behind the boisterous clumps of calla lilies that have just unfurled their smooth white trumpets, that he will not knock on my window and ask me why I am crying not just now, but in the morning when I am drinking my first cup of coffee and just after lunch when it is too soon to go back to work and I fill the minutes with little tasks like trimming my toenails and scanning old photos and sorting paper clips by size or color and also at other moments that I cannot predict and, even afterward, do not wholly understand.

  I review process of elimination (POE) one more time because perhaps there’s still a slight chance that someone besides me will show up for my wedding.

  POE? It’s a snap!

  1. Read the question.

  2. Read each answer carefully.

  3. Eliminate each answer that you are confident is wrong.

  4. Choose the best answer from the choices that are left.

  Even if you aren’t 100 percent sure you know the right answer, POE can help you makean informed guess. If you guess without eliminating any incorrect answers, you have only a 25 percent chance (1 out of 4) of guessing correctly. If you get rid of one wrong answer, then you have a 33 percent chance (1 out of 3) of choosing the correct answer. If you do away w
ith two wrong answers, then you have a 50 percent chance (1 out of 2) of being right. POE increases your odds of getting the question right!

  Is it possible that I have eliminated the wrong choices, that my guesses have not increased my odds but done the opposite, taken them down to zero? There is the church, and there is the steeple. Open the doors, and there are the people: Arnold, my mother and father holding hands, my aunts and uncles and their children, my grandparents, all dead for many years, but surprisingly real-looking ghosts. There, at the front of the tiny chapel, is my neighbor Carlos, fussing with the flowers. As usual, he is greasy. In the third pew is my best friend, Vita, whom I have seen exactly once since Arnold’s death because I can manage multiple-choice questions, but not essays, and everything she asks requires an answer too long and complex for my state of mind. Grief has made me a misplaced modifier, a fragment, a _______ that is missing its subject …

  But there is Emil! I always hoped he would turn out to be my betrothed, because of his wit, the shape of his green eyes, his strong hands and perfectly executed espresso.