The Textual Confessional
39
also felt repelled at the notion of her father betraying his wife and her mother
betraying her boyfriend. When her father realizes Harrison is upset, he tells her
that he had sex with her mother as an act of “charitable reassurance.” He adds,
“1 didn’t do it because 1 wanted to,” but because “she asked me” (63-65).
The next day, Harrison takes her father to the airport for his departure
when her mother pretends to have a headache. Before boarding the plane, he
takes his daughter’s chin with his hand and kisses her on the mouth—a kiss that
transforms itself from a chaste, close-lipped exchange to a deeper, overtly sexual
one:
My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet,
insistent, exploring, then withdrawn. He picks up his camera
case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of
passengers disappearing into the airplane. How long do 1 stand
there, my hand to my mouth, people washing around me? The
plane has taxied away from the gate before 1 move . . . I am
frightened by the kiss. 1 know it is wrong, and its wrongness is
what lets me know, too, that it is a secret (68-69).
This kiss, she says, is like a drug that is leading her to surrender to her father’s
advances. In fact, she’s so distraught and absorbed with thinking about her
father’s kiss that she drops out of college for a year when her grades plummet.
She and her father carry on a “long-distance courtship” over the phone, talking
for hours about the meaning of love and even more importantly, their common
consuming subject: her mother, his former wife. Harrison writes:
“With words, my father and I lay open the organs of love. We
see from where our blood flows, how fast and how thick, how
red. It fascinated us, our capacity for pain. For we are in love
with that too: our suffering, the anguish of the unrequited. Or
if we don’t love suffering, we don’t know who or what we are
apart from it. For half of his life and all of mine, we have
defined ourselves as those who love her, the one who won’t
love us back” (70-77).
In these conversations, her father vilifies her mother, and although she defends
her, it proves to be a relief to hear someone call her mother “selfish and cruel as
only the weak can be—because cruelty is all she has to keep herself safe” (79).
When her father returns for a second visit, he takes hundreds of
photographs of her, continues to stare at her, and takes her hand in his. Upon his
departure at the airport, there’s no kiss this time, just a feverish embrace. Her
mother confronts Harrison when she returns from the airport, saying it’s not
natural how fixated she and her father are with each other. “You know,” her
(85-89, 97-99).
mother says, enraged, “this isn’t about you. It’s about
Harrison doesn’t answer, and it isn’t until years after her mother’s death that she
realized she was right.