Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free Page A

false membrane in the throat,” I told my friends table, who were all listening now, even the boys. “You have to suck it out, mouth to mouth. You have to take it in your own throat. And that’s what she did.”
    When I myself put it to her, the first time I heard it, she’d said, “Oh, hush, child. I never catch a thing.”
    “Sure like to swap talk with that lady from Shirley,” my friend’s mother said when I was saying good-bye. Their hallway had a comfy, musty smell like ours used to, maybe from the same kind of leather davenport—another word and object I had now left behind me, when after my grandmother’s death we had moved to the smaller apartment where my mother was at last free of the clan dinners, and maybe missed the regularity, the grandeur.
    “Oh, Mother, her cousin is not from Shirley,” my friend said. I could have made that correction myself, but knew better. Although I’d never been South I knew that region’s grandiosity, white or black, in which in one evening’s hearsay a grandfather might slip from being a “boy” somewhere on the “ess-state” to being a butler in the mansion house.
    “She’s a superintendent of nurses now,” I said proudly. “But I bet she’d come. She’d be interested to. And I do thank you for that lovely meal. It was like home.” Or like home when we went to Flora’s, where my father took his hankering for okra, creamed corn off the cob, and oyster dishes Germans had never heard of. I looked around for the father and the boys, but they were gone. “Thank you kindly,” I said. It twanged in my ear like a requiem.
    “I wanted Arnella to train for a nurse,” her mother said. “It stays with you. But col-lege—” She said it with that delicate double “1.” Shaking her head at Arnella and me—at what going there had made of us. “Well, come again,” she said. “You talk more Southern than my own chile.”
    Outside on East 110th Street I figured out that Arnella lived at about the same distance from Columbia as I did on Riverside Drive.
    “I’ll walk you,” she said. “Gotta late class.”
    As we parted on Broadway she said nervously: “Hope you don’t mind what she said about Jews. She had a hard time.”
    I said I didn’t—and I didn’t.
    “I sometimes feel worse about being a Northerner. Or even a Southerner. But in the Jew department? Nothing can touch me there.”
    Next time Katie dropped in at home I did ask her if she would go. She was regarding our new living room absently. The apartment was decent enough, but there was no grandmother wing, and in the family there had been other decimations. At four o’clock, the former coffee hour, light from the river fell askance on two barrel-shaped chairs that curved forward, empty-armed. The furniture came at us to be noticed now; it had always been subsidiary.
    “Good grief, y’all are in reduced circumstances as regards relations, aren’t you?” she said. “But the view is nice. Sure, hon’—where did you say?”
    When she understood clearly she gave me a long look. Her eyes were still big enough in her face to be called “teacup eyes,” as I had once said of them when small, the aunts shrilling behind me, “Saucer eyes, the child means. You mean saucer!” I arguing—“No! Teacup!”—and they teasing on until I cried, and Katie, squeezing her eyes shut to settle the matter, had taken me on her lap to be consoled.
    “Hon’, you sure do get into things,” she said now. Then she chuckled. “Sure I’ll go. Sure.” Then we hugged.
    “Whoosh, I’m tired,” she said then. Her face had always been wan, with an even delicacy that as she aged I came to know as the ultimate health, but by now her mouth drooped some at the sides. “Been doing some night duty in the mental ward.”
    She had never wholly given up nursing, and this was her specialty, her interest dating, she had not long before told me, from the time my own mother, released from a sanatorium after a breakdown