It happened on a rainy day, a Tuesday in October. I was eight years old—eight, my unluckiest number, two zeroes, one stacked on top of the other. I was wearing my pink Mary Janes with pink polka dotted socks and lacey underpants. Three days before I’d gotten a pixie haircut at Watson’s Beauty Salon on Jefferson Park Avenue. My mother, who suffered from hospital phobia, kept licking her finger, tamping the cowlicks down on my forehead while she spoke with the receptionist about my procedure. Then, suddenly, she was running away, her red raincoat swinging open like a cape. Your daughter will be fine! the receptionist called after her. A nurse helped me undress and handed me a sleeping pill and a crinkly paper cup. I was so hungry and thirsty, my mouth tasted like a dirty cottonball. I sat on the edge of the hospital bed, swinging my legs. Honey, you aren’t supposed to be awake, the nurse said before rolling me into the operating theater and placing a mask over my nose and mouth. Count backwards from ten to one. An acrid sweetness dripped in the back of my throat. I felt my body turn stiff and cold. Something’s wrong, I thought. I need a blanket. I tried to wave my arms and call for help, but I was a pinned butterfly beneath the fluorescent lights. She’s out, the doctor announced, lifting one eyelid and clamping it open as my mind slid away like a slipcover from a couch.

No one can say how it began, least of all the girl in the photo on my desk, dressed in the white frothy wedding dress, who has been performing all her life: for teachers, lovers, friends, parents, spouses. Her mother was always arranging her like a bouquet, each morning pinning her hair back in pink Goody barrettes, then dabbing her face, first with a wet cloth, then with rouge and lipstick and eye shadow. Her mother always said a girl can be someone special or no one at all.  The choice is hers. I will be no one, the girl knew, as certain as her name was Annie Louise, as the gap between her front teeth, as the long wait between dinner and four o’clock in the afternoon with the cat and a Nancy Drew mystery on her lap, a macaroon melting on her tongue. She ate slowly as she read, so slowly that even now, years later, the late afternoon hours taste like coconut and sugar, so sweet, her heart aches.  Sometimes, when she put the book down and gazed into the distance, she thought she heard the still quiet voice of God. What does it sound like? her mother asked. She didn’t say—like the pause between the bathroom faucet’s slow drip-drips. Each drop clinging to the spout, a tiny universe waiting to fall.

One day when the girl was home alone, the phone rang repeatedly, no messages left. She thought she heard footsteps, first outside and then upstairs. Did someone lean a ladder against the house and then climb in an open window? Isn’t that what happened to the Lindbergh baby? Her mother had told her the story about the Lindbergh baby over and over again, as if it happened yesterday, or the day before. The girl grew still as a statue, afraid to move or breathe. Certain she heard someone coming down the steps, she hid beneath the couch.What if I sneeze? she worried. What if he can hear me breathing. Or thinking? She noticed that the thought, don’t sneeze, tickled her nose. The thought, I’m scared, made her teeth chatter. I must not think, she reasoned. When a thought arose, she pictured it as words on a blackboard and erased them letter by letter. Scared became cared became ared became red . . . until there was nothing but blackness where words once stood. After a while the blackness began to hum. It grew louder and louder until it throbbed inside her head like a summer night full of insect wings.

As a student I took a job posing nude for art classes at a university and became obsessed with a man who painted my body again and again. Tall and lanky with silver hair, he was unlike the other artists who stared at me as if I were not all there.  Instead, he smiled, asked my name, and nodded from time to time. As he painted and talked, his arms waving wildly, I felt the darkness I carried inside me glide away like a shadow.  

One day, without bothering to dress, I waited for him to pack his things after class. He sighed and lowered his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I am a Christian, newly saved, which is why I miss so many classes. My pastor says I should not be seeing a woman who poses nude before an audience. He left without another word, the swinging door whooshing behind him. The next day, when I arrived for a sitting, I found a stack of paintings on my chair, rolled up neatly and tied with red ribbons. At first, I thought they were paintings of me, but when I opened them, I saw they were of mermaids, or rather, of women dressed in form-fitting white gowns that bound their thighs together and flared out at their feet like a tail. Will you marry me? was written in red on each painting.

we moved to your hometown of Scranton, PA. I knew no one there, but everyone knew me as the wife, a title I wore like a mask.  We bought an old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road where the postman was my only guest. After a few months, I began to talk to stray dogs, cats, and the wind and the clouds.  Alone, I saw ghosts in the window, a stranger in the mirror.  You were gone all day, working from dawn till night, while I was supposed to wash the dishes, clean the house, weed the garden where only the turnips thrived. And to make our dinner, of course, usually burgers or tuna with Hamburger Helper, or hotdogs with Uncle Ben’s Minute Rice. Some days I never left the couch. When I complained I was depressed, you said I was just a little stressed. Such things happen with new brides, you’d read in the advice column of Christian Life. We needed to save money, but on special occasions you bought me gifts: white roses (the color of purity and faithfulness, according to the florist) or “proper clothes” from Sears Roebuck & Company (you never liked my taste). On Sundays, you dressed me in voluminous gowns. Wide at the hips, I looked like a three-tiered cake—the kind placed in the display case to be seen, not sliced or served with a warm cup of tea on a wintry night.

You didn’t want anyone to know I left you. You treated it as a terrible secret.  Why? you asked. And, how could you? You told no one the truth: we never kissed. Not in all our years together. The kisses, like schools of fish, swam upstream without us.  

I pity me. And us. I, who dreamt of kisses all my life, who was told as a girl that a single kiss can save lives, change the tides, the weather, the time of day, the future. Even the afterlife. My Uncle Louie said this years ago, bless his soul. He said that’s why he married Aunt Maude. One kiss, and he asked her to be his wife.

I read articles in Seventeen and Vogue on how to kiss a man. Some said to practice on your hand. Keep the lips soft, the tongue still. Don’t bite or nibble or lick. Not right away. Of course, there were other articles, more poetic, in The Knot and Christian Bride, that compared a kiss to a rose, a kiss to a kite, a kiss to a boat.  (No mention of what might happen next.) Another said a kiss is like a Laundromat for the mind. It cleanses the thoughts, undresses the soul.

Then why were we denied? Of course, I know. You said you couldn’t put your mouth on mine. It reminded you of death, of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Of germs. Contamination. And what if you had bad breath? (Your father had terrible halitosis. You can still smell his ghost when he stops by for a break from the great beyond.)

You kissed my cheeks of course, and my neck and breasts. But somehow, those kisses left me cold. Maybe that’s why I began to dream of other men and women with beautiful mouths. Like Angelina Jolie, for example. In one dream, she was holding my hand, but when I looked at her face, she had no eyes or nose, only fat wet lips. In another, she sucked mollusks from the sand.

At night, I began to fantasize. Could I buy a ticket to a kiss?  Lasso a kiss like a calf at a rodeo?  Train you to kiss me like a circus master trains a tiger to jump through flaming hoops? That’s the question I asked myself as I crossed my arms over my chest and drifted off to sleep.  And I am asking it again as I walk off alone, leaving our home one last time. 

‍Why did you betray me? you asked again and again. I didn’t confess that I just wanted a kiss before I grow old and leathery and numb. I didn’t want to talk about what I missed. You looked so sad—so hollowed out, like a husk of man, not at all yourself. I couldn’t admit that sadness follows me as well. That it’s everywhere I go as memories blink on and off in my mind like fireflies in the summer dusk.

I heard on the radio this morning that someone commits suicide in the US every eleven minutes. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen are particularly vulnerable. Also at risk, children who experience medical trauma or repeated surgeries. 

I underwent six eye surgeries between the ages of one and twelve. Once, during an eye operation, I became a ghost and looked down at my body as the surgeon sliced open the conjunctiva of my left eye.  When I told this to the doctor, he suggested I see a psychologist. 

Back then, I thought I was the only girl with a death wish. What saved me: animals. A farm child, I loved cows, horses, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, birds, mice. I rescued baby starlings that fell from nests in the eaves of our house and raised them on Alpo. Birds, I thought, were small angels. 

My parents didn’t believe in therapy, said it was unscientific—a modern-day religion.  My father, a philosophy student, loved to quote Nietzsche and announce to his Christian friends, God is dead.  Once, when one of my baby starlings woke my father at dawn with its raucous cries, he flushed it down the toilet. 

Both Nietzsche and my father suffered from depression, mood swings, chronic pain, and visions of grandeur. They believed they were supermen, or rather Übermenschen, who could rise from the ashes of despair.
When Nietzsche was forty-four, he watched a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and was so overwhelmed with grief, he never spoke again. 

My father debated whether animals suffer. The question originated with Rene Descartes, who claimed that animals lack souls and consciousness and therefore can feel no pain. Descartes practiced vivisection and insisted that animal howls and moans are uncorrelated with physical discomfort.

On our farm, horses that became fractious, whinnying day and night, kicking their stalls and riders and  rearing when approached, were first whipped, then treated with Acepromazine, an antipsychotic and mood stabilizer.  

I have often wished for a mood stabilizer.  

The effectiveness of antidepressants is unpredictable. For some, a placebo works as well as drugs. For others a drug can be a miracle—a savior in pill-form. Once, when I was treated with Prozac, I saw death as a doorway with light leaking around the edges. The light was singing my name.

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