It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [86]
Then, in 2003, when my soon-to-be-brother-in-law, Greg, started hanging around, my father introduced The Double, which took the foundation of the kiss and the Psych Hug and added another kiss—that’s right, twins—to the mix. For a short time, he only gave Greg The Double. Being new, Greg had no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary in this culture, thinking we just hadn’t assimilated completely yet, since it was clear that his kind wasn’t allowed to park in the garage. Sensing no opposition, my dad then started working it in among the rest of us without a briefing or warning, and on one occasion my husband thought he had fulfilled his departing requirement with the single kiss, only to be caught off guard when my dad went in for The Double and kissed my husband square on the lips.
Everyone saw it; everyone looked away.
The silence in the car on the way home was disturbing.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said weakly. “I thought I told you he had revised the kiss and was now making double contact. I thought you knew. He’s been doing it to Greg for a while.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” my husband answered staunchly. “I have never kissed your dad on the lips.”
And no one has talked of it since.
After the Five-Mississippi Hug, I stopped. But, you know, I’m a little glad that hugging didn’t really work out for me. As a family of non-lickers, we are decidedly fine the way we are. We are very happy. So what if we can’t get a massage without feeling dirty and shameful? I never had one before the anxious-hand incident, and it turns out I’m not missing out on anything I can’t live without. I know Brandie is clean, but my sister didn’t know where those Yugoslavian hands had been. Who knew what unclean body she was rubbing lotion on just an hour before?
And so what if I was the offspring of a non-licking mother? With one lick, who knew where I would have ended up? I might have been the one coming at someone’s thigh with two hands full of lotion.
Seeing Nova actually reinforced what I had suspected: I’d have a boring, nicely balanced life and have a boring, nicely balanced job, and I wouldn’t see any of the things I see on a daily basis that licked people can’t see. The licking mothers, I think, were boring mothers who never wanted to shave their grandsons’ armpits when they hit puberty or emailed their daughters warnings that wearing ponytails was basically putting a handle on your head and nearly guaranteeing an abduction. Their boring offspring would never get banned from the post office because she got snotty about stamps, or banned from a party because she mouthed the words to a song, or became trapped in a shirt in a fancy store because the jelly beans made her arms enormous (not because she’s strong).
I’ll bet we laugh harder at family gatherings, once we determine who the scapegoat is going to be. We have a lot more stuff to talk about than how calm we were that day and how it didn’t even annoy us when the lady in front of us in line at FedEx/Kinko’s picked up her copies and then asked the clerk if they knew someplace close by where she could ship them. I am delighted that no one has ever opened a family dinner at my mother’s house with the phrase “I solved the most fantastic maze today!” Not to mention that I like getting checks and impersonal gift cards for birthdays and Christmas, not subscriptions to the Fig of the Month Club or a book of Sudoku