Free The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison Page B

about the price of shampoo. He insists that at some point during his previous visit, I spent thirty dollars on a bottle of shampoo. “I never! ” I say. “Are you kidding! Thirty dollars? “
    “I watched you. “
    “It must have been three dollars. When was it? Where? “
    “I saw you hand the cashier the money. “
    “Look, ” I say, feeling the shift in the conversation, it’s gone from trivial to deadly serious. “In my entire life I have never spent more than four dollars on shampoo, and that was a very big bottle. “
    “But you did, ” he says, his face red. “I saw you. “
    “Come on. Not even my mother would spend that much on shampoo.
    I don’t even think it’s possible. ” We pursue the topic, ridiculous, essential, until we are too exhausted to continue. Nothing I say will convince him of the truth. But, at twenty, I am still in the throes of rebelling against my mother’s extravagance. I wear thrift-store sweaters, army surplus trousers, and when I buy shampoo, I ostentatiously spend a dollar fifty-nine on a tube of Prell in response to my mother’s ten-dollar vials of Klorane, her five-dollar, half-ounce applications of rare, cuticle-smoothing emollients. Twenty years past his humiliation by my family, years spent in feverish accomplishment two master’s degrees and one doctorate from top universities, followed by a notably quick ascension through the ranks of his church my father is still stinging. To me he ascribes my mother’s waste of money, and for it he punishes me. And when I at last give in, it isn’t only because our argument is pointless and unresolvable. “Okay, ” I say. “Okay, you’re right, ” deciding that in this small way I can atone for his being shamed by the people who raised me. After all, I know how foolish, how frail and mistaken my mother and grandmother can make a person feel. My father tells me that his ordination was postponed by mandatory psychoanalysis, and I am not as interested in this confession as I should be. I want my father to be perfect. The details he offers are scant. In one of the small towns where he served as a traveling pastor in the days he described to me when I was ten and chose a barn to paint for him he put his fist through a church wall. Damned by his gifts as much as by his misfortunes, my father’s intelligence is itself an enemy.
    The mind that fascinates me with its nimbleness, its elastic capacity, could outwit most psychiatrists. It cant have taken him long to perceive which behaviors and opinions were appropriate to a minister and which ones he had better keep to himself. If therapy was useful to him, it was that in its context he learned how to create a desirable profile for a pastor, even if, as he says to me, he has “unresolved problems with the church. ” In spite of those conflicts, my father needed badly enough to succeed on the world’s terms to prove my grandparents wrong in their harsh dismissal of him that by force of will he accomplished all he did with his rage intact, his hurt as sharp as mine, and directed against the same person as mine. The greatest blindness we share, my father and I, is that neither of us knows how angry we are. It’s perhaps because I cannot admit my fury that I don’t see what he hides from himself. And he, long practiced in self-deception, doesn’t see my anger either.
    Whatever passions we feel, we call love. We’re late arriving at my mother’s, where we discover that the hard-won, precarious balance of our threesome, our “little family, “
    has been undone. My father no longer makes the gesture of taking one photograph of my mother for every one of me, and not only his camera has shifted its focus. In my mother’s home, both of us her guests, my father and I forsake her, our former object of devotion, for each other. All that the three of us did together in relative comfort on the previous visit trips to galleries to look at art, trips to gardens to look at plants, to