The Kissing Diary
Authors: Judith Caseley
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Contents
1. The Diary Rosie Never Wanted
2. Rosie Goldglitt, Bitter about Her Name
3. Rosie Goldglitt Is So Mad She'd Like to Goldspit
5. It's All Greek to Rosie, Including Boys
7. Rosie Goldglitt's Grandpa Joe
8. Rosie's Mind over What-Mary-Says-Doesn't-Matter
11. Rosie Goldglitt in the Pits
12. The Goldglitts at the Gynecologist
13. Rosie's Intentions Did Not Include Detention
14. Rosie's Intention Is to Never Again Get Detention
15. Rosie Goldglitt's Dance of Doom
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To Jenna, my shining star
Rosie Goldglitt sat in the corner of the dining room, doing the unmentionable. She was peering through a crack in the door to the living room, watching her mother kiss a strange man on the couch. She wasn't kissing the couch, of course. She was kissing his mouth. He wasn't really a stranger either. His name was Sam, and he was her mother's new boyfriend, if you could call an old man of forty or fifty a boy. Mary Katz, Rosie's worst enemy in the world, wouldn't be caught dead watching her mother kiss a man on the couch. For one thing, her parents weren't divorced. They drove matching Mercedeses and smiled a lot. For another, Mary knew all about kissing, and didn't need to do scientific research on other people. And Mary's couch would be a butter-soft leather sofa that stretched from one end of their mansion to the other.
In the name of science, Rosie squinted and crinkled up her nose as she examined her mother's closed eyes. Did people always shut their eyes to kiss, she wondered. Sam's eyes were closed, too, and one of his hands was moving like a sluggish rodent up and down her mother's back.
Rosie had been thinking a lot about kissing. She even looked up the word in the dictionary.
A touch or caress with the lips as a sign of love, affection, or greeting.
What would it be like to kiss her big crush, Robbie Romano? Could she do it? Would she like it? What if she kissed him and opened her eyes, and he was looking back at her? She shuddered at the thought.
Rosie pressed herself back against the wall. Maybe watching her mother was a bad idea. It made her feel kind of sick. She thought to herself that a new word should be invented that combined being mesmerized and disgusted at the same time. A word that meant “fascinated” as well as “repulsed.”
Mesmergusted,
that was it. Or
fascinpulsed.
Whatever you called it, Rosie was stuck in the dining room and couldn't escape upstairs without giving herself away.
It was her mother and father's fault, of course. When they were married, she couldn't remember the last time she had seen them kiss. Kissing had to do with liking a person, didn't it? Maybe that's why she never saw them do it. Her mother obviously liked Sam a lot. Her eyes did this little dance when she talked about him. Rosie obviously liked Robbie if she wanted to plant her lips on his wide mouth, which sometimes had a tiny blemish below. If Rosie were researching the signs of divorce, the absence of kissing would be at the top of the list.
She wanted to run upstairs to record her findings in her diary, the same diary she had chucked in the garbage can when her father had given it to her almost a year ago.
It was a fateful moment. She remembered being on the phone with her best friend, Lauren Jamison, when her father had marched into the living room and said, “Please hang up. I have to talk to you.”
“In a minute, Dad,” Rosie told him, irritated by the interruption.
“Now,” he said, looking so somber that she was afraid he was going to tell her that someone had died.
In the few moments it took to say goodbye to Lauren, Rosie wondered what she'd done wrong. Had she mouthed off disrespectfully to her mother? Not lately. Did she stay too long in the shower that morning, when her father needed the bathroom? Not serious enough. Had a teacher discovered that she'd cheated on a test? Not likely, as Rosie had vowed she'd never do it again when she'd copied Keith's paper in sixth-grade science and her original answer had been right.
Rosie sat opposite her father in the bright yellow kitchen, under the indecipherable clock that had vegetables for numbers. Her brother, Jimmy, would ask her, “Is it eight o'clock yet?” and Rosie would tell him, “It's a quarter past broccoli.” The two of them would shriek with laughter while she ran over to the oven clock to read the digital numbers. Her mother would go crazy and say, “What kind of world do we live in where children can't tell time?”
Her father didn't look as though he was going to discuss the problem arising from digital clocks. Rosie couldn't help noticing a package wrapped in brown paper sitting on the table next to the salt shaker in the shape of a plump old lady. “What's that?” she asked.
“Never mind,” he said. “We need to talk. Do you remember last year, when you said to me, âDo you and Mom ever have fun anymore?'”
Rosie shifted in her chair and felt her stomach dip as if she were on a roller coaster, except she wasn't hurtling down a track at fifty miles an hour. She was sitting in a kitchen chair that her mother had painted with fruit across the back. She remembered, of course. Rosie said to her father, “No, I forget.”
Mr. Goldglitt cleared his throat and said, “Well, your question gave me a lot to think about, Rosie. Did your mom and I ever have any fun together?”
She remembered that her father hadn't answered yes. He hadn't answered her at all.
“I realized that the answer was no,” he said. “That I could not remember an instant of fun with her in a very long time.”
“Oh,” Rosie replied. Her skin felt clammy and her face got hot, and she felt as though she'd run around the track a hundred times.
“Your mother and I have talked about it, and we've decided to get a divorce. It has nothing to do with you or your brother. I mean, you and Jimmy didn't cause this to happen. We⦔ Mr. Goldglitt cleared his throat. “We fell out of love,” he said. And then he added, “We can't seem to get it back.”
“Try,”
Rosie said loudly.
“Try,”
she repeated before letting loose with a torrent of tears that she wanted to collect in a cup and throw in her father's face.
“We've tried, honey,” he said softly. “For years.”
“NO YOU HAVEN'T!” she screamed in a voice that was so disrespectful that if her dad didn't think he deserved to be yelled at, he would have reprimanded her.
“I know you're upset.” He held out his hand and, with trembling fingers, pushed the package toward her. “I bought this for you.”
Rosie picked it up and ripped off the paper. It was a book with the word
DIARY
written across it in pink script. “What's this for?” she asked, in the contemptuous tone that her mother detested even more than her father.
“I thought it might help, writing your thoughts in a journal. I know you're upset, but it's for the best, honey. In the long run, it will be better for all of us.” He waited for an answer.
Rosie made him wait a long time. At last, she asked him, “What do you do for a living, Dad?”
“You know what I do,” he said cautiously. “I'm a psychologist.”
“And what does a psychologist do, Dad? You help people with their problems, don't you?” Rosie pressed on ruthlessly.
Her father's “yes” was so low she could barely hear it.
“So how come you can't help yourself? How come you can't fix your own marriage, Dad? I don't understand.”
Tears filled her father's eyes as he spoke. “Rosie, if I had been my own patient, I would have tried to make myself see that my marriage had ended years ago. That fixing it was hopeless.”
Rosie was speechless. Finally, she said, “So this is my big present? A divorce diary?”
“If you want to call it that.”
“I should write down all my emotions and feelings in this little book, right?”
“I guess that's the idea.”
Rosie pushed the chair that her mother had painted away from the table and picked up the diary. Her father had a glimmer of hope in his eyes. Then she walked across the room and dropped the book into the garbage can.
That night, her mother fished it out, cleaned it off, and left it on the shelf next to Rosie's bed. Rosie was quite tempted to throw it out the window. But there was something about the clean white unfilled pages. They beckoned her, and she didn't have the heart.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Rosie's leg had gone numb from sitting on the floor spying on her mother, when her brother, Jimmy, burst through the front door. The adults jumped up from the couch as if they were kids caught smoking cigarettes, which gave Rosie the chance to escape upstairs.
In the privacy of her bedroom, she picked up the diary. With a permanent marker, she wrote the word
KISSING
in big bold letters above the word
DIARY.
Then Rosie wrote:
Saturday night
Today, I watched my mother kiss. I must admit, it skeeved me out. My mother seemed to like it, which must mean she likes Sam, who is not too good-looking and has less hair than my father does. It doesn't seem to matter, though.
I hope if I ever get to kiss Robbie Romano, I won't think of Mom and Sam. That would make me want to hurl.
I am yours sincerely,
Rosie Goldglitt
also known as Rosie Gold-gag-me
P.S. I have decided that brushing your teeth is a must before mouth-to-mouth communication.
Rosie Goldglitt, Bitter about Her Name
Rosie draped a piece of string across the top of her diary so that she would know if anyone tampered with it. What if her mother discovered that her only daughter had spied on her love life with her balding boyfriend? She would go ballistic. There were certain grownup speeches that were repeated over and over, as if a replay button had been pressed. “Mothers have rights as human beings” was one of Mrs. Goldglitt's favorites, and Rosie had no wish to hear it. The comment about Sam wouldn't please her mother either. Just a few days before, she had said to her daughter, “Isn't he handsome?” Rosie rolled her eyes, which was
not
a smart move, as her mother had heard on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
that it was a sign of contempt.
Rosie's brother, Jimmy, was another matter. She suspected that, at fifteen, he already had experience in the realm of kissing. If Jimmy read the diary, one thing was certain. He would make Rosie's life a misery. But her brother didn't have a history of snooping. Her mother did. Rosie twisted a rubber band around the diary, tucked the string underneath, and buried it deep in her pajama drawer.
At breakfast the next day, Rosie munched on cereal while her mother made coffee and toasted Jimmy a bagel. She mumbled out loud that she needed to vacuum. Rosie doubted she would, and wondered if she would be hearing her mother's housework speechâ“Cleaning is useless, because the dirt comes back.” It was fine by Rosie if she didn't have to spend Sunday morning scrubbing out the bathroom. Sarah Singer's mother was a fanatic neat freak, which meant that her friend had had to miss several trips to the mall for weekend chores.
