Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 43

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to a deeper, overtly sexual one: My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn.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.