First Kiss
Jacqueline Vogtman
It’s dusk when we pass through the trailer park and drive over the footprints of children who have played in the dusty road. Clothes are drying on lines in the shape of the strangers who wore them, and I imagine these strangers in their homes—all pink flesh and vulnerable nakedness. Hanging on the lines are worn brassieres, torn underwear, graying slips. It feels wrong to be able to see all this on display, to know these strangers so intimately. I turn away, look at my father, who’s been driving all day to see his dying sister, my aunt Johanna, in Tennessee. I’m looking at his profile, yet all I can think of is his underwear that I see sometimes in the wash, the waistband torn, the cotton stretched, stained. They could just as well be his clothes hanging on the line, his footprints we drive over.
We find Johanna’s home on the other side of the trailer park separated by a stream that glows supernaturally blue as the dusk deepens. She’s been sent back from the hospital to die in the home she shares with her boyfriend and daughter. I follow my father to the porch, where Johanna’s boyfriend smokes a cigarette in his wheelchair, the stubs of his legs puckered above the knees, like lips perpetually kissing the air.
My father asks how his sister is. There’s a moment as Johanna’s boyfriend takes a drag on his cigarette—a moment when we don’t know what will come out of his mouth with the sigh of smoke, a declaration of death or life—but then he exhales, says she’s holding on, and there’s a nurse inside making her comfortable. We could go in, but Johanna’s out of it.
We don’t go in. I don’t know why, but my father wants to wait. We sit out on the porch, and my father has a cigarette with Johanna’s boyfriend, who introduces himself to me as Hal. We hear the whirr of fans, machines keeping Johanna alive—for us? Out here, the crickets begin to sing, and without either of us asking him, Hal tells my father and me about how he lost his legs.
It happened years ago, right before he met Johanna. He had been drinking pretty hard at the time, working here and there. One night, it was maybe Christmas Eve or some other time near Christmas, he was walking home from the bar and saw some pretty statues lit up on someone’s lawn, a manger scene. He stopped in front of it, transfixed, the glowing Mary, the glowing Christ. It reminded him of going to church when he was a kid. He sat for a long time, doing something like praying, he said, but then the owner of the house, a big man, came out with a shotgun and told him to get the hell off his lawn. They began fighting, but when the first shot rang out, Hal ran, ran down to the train tracks, the only place he could think of to hide. So he lay down beside the tracks, scared the man with the gun was following him and, because he was scared, he took out his flask and drank some more. Then he fell asleep, legs stretched out over the tracks. When he woke, he was in the hospital and his legs were gone.
I wonder how many times Hal has told this story. He tells it like it happened to someone else, laughing at a part that might seem funny, silent at the end, until my father slaps him on the back and says, That’s tough. And then Hal looks up directly into the porch light, says, Well, that’s just life. He’s silent for a moment. Then I met Johanna, he says, looks back at my father and me. I try to imagine Hal and Johanna’s first kiss, their younger, but still broken, bodies knowing each other for the first time, maybe making some sort of whole.
But he doesn’t tell us that story. We’re silent again, the three of us enveloped in the porch light’s orange glow like a bubble, like the old orange Volkswagen Bug in which my first boyfriend and I found each other’s bodies years ago. I remember we’d park in my old elementary school’s lot, listen to Bob Dylan on the car’s tape player, and how the orange streetlight would make our skin and hair look like it was lit from within, flaming. Anytime I heard “Visions of Johanna” after those nights, I thought of him, that orange light; now, I think of her—will she die while we are sitting out on this porch?—and this night, this light.
Right before I met him, my first boyfriend had tried to kill himself with pills and had burned his forearm by holding it above a candle. Some of those nights, while sitting with him in his car, I took his forearm and held it in my lap, running my finger over it. So white, so soft, so young. And that burn, like a swollen mouth wanting to kiss me.
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Jacqueline Vogtman, originally from New Jersey, currently resides in Ohio, where she is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. She serves as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review and teaches.