Kissing

She was old teen age, I was young teen age, when we discussed kissing. We both came of very English families who believed in orgies of kissing preceding and following every family event. 

“I have heard it stated,” said Elsie, “that it is a very unhealthy, unwholesome habit this kissing.”

“It must be,” I said with a little girl’s admiration of a big girl’s superior knowledge. “Especially where there are beards,” I added. “And I must say, when there is a beard it is ticklish and horrid, especially on foggy evenings, no mater how you love. What about giving it up, all except tremendous occasions? Fathers, mothers and maybe the whole family on Christmas or birthdays might be excepted? Otherwise, no kissing.” 

My friend was fifteen and had a lot to learn yet. I was eleven and had a great deal more to learn than my friend. 

“Of course I’d have to kiss Papa,” Elsie said doubtfully, “even if he has got a beard, because he is a clergyman and expects it.”

“We except him,” I allowed graciously, “but mind you, Elsie, aunts, cousins, friends we don’t know much, have got to leave our cheeks alone. Because they are round and pink they think they have a right to kiss them. What right do strangers to dart at little girls, yum, yum, as if they were preachers? I wish I’d have been a boy. Well, good-bye,” I jumped the ditch and waved my hand. “Remember Elsie, when we meet, if I just bow and say ‘Hello’, I’m not mad at you.”

New Year’s Day was the first real test. I don’t know how Elsie managed, but I know that I did not have half a chance to be firm. In those days all the gentlemen friends of the family called to wish Mother and her family the “compliments of the season.” of course none of them ever kissed Mother, but they took it out on Mother’s children. The older the men were, the more they kissed, and the old ones all had beards. It was no good to try to back, they followed you until you were up against the walk. Then it was a hard kiss with no spring, only a hard wall-bump so firmly planted that the kiss was almost cruel. 

Elsie kept her pact with time, but a few years later she married. I never saw her do it, but she was a very fond sweetheart and I am absolutely certain she broke the pact many months before she married. I expect she was glad I was in San Francisco or somewhere when they were engaged and married, so that I did not have to see her kiss him at the alter. 

Kissing dogs, cats, bird was a different matter; the creature were never embarrassed  nor made you embarrassed. Apart from the genuine love you have for them, it was a convenient let-off to loving and you just had to love. 

My third sister was ultra-kissy. When, after my pact with Elsie, she saw me squirming to get out of being kissed, she said, “You are unloving and wicked. Bye and bye you will kill peoples’ love for you.”

That made me stop and think for a moment! I did not want to kill love. But she made a duty of kissing. If you were going away, or it was bedtime, she’d kiss you If there were strangers there to see, she’d kiss you extra hard, because she wanted everyone to know what a devoted family were were. It was correct in old-fashioned English families to be devoted, to exhibit profuse kissing. 

I was really fond of that excessively kissy sister. There was so much in her to admire. But, as I told her once, I loved her much the best if there was an ocean or a continent between us. Or perhaps I should have said, out of kissing reach. If she’d been honest, she’d have said the same. There was so much in me of which she disapproved, it falsed out our kisses. 

Middle, the sister next to me, was not the same. She was undemonstrative and indifferent. We were always pals and shared things. I never dodged her kisses. They were lukewarm, business affairs. We shared a room. It was always our custom on going to bed to blow out the candle, sit up in the dark, each push a hand under the pillow and pull out a fine rosy apple put there in the morning when we made our beds. Munch, munch, in the sharp cold dark. My sister put her apple core into the candlestick-tray. I flung mine under the bed and had seven scoldings every Saturday morning when the room was cleaned. We kissed and lay down after the apple-eating. Middle was very aware of my shortcomings, but she thought they were my own business. Bigger shouldered the wickedness of the entire world and thought a kiss fixed everything. 

So, in young girlhood I kissed my Mother for the joy and comfort f it, the next three sisters I kissed for duty, Middle I kissed because it was natural to do so and I loved her very deeply, and my brother I kissed on Sunday nights. This habit came about because my brother and I went to stay every summer with some friends at the seashore. The mother, very English, tried to insist on family goodnight kissing, every day but the boys refused to kiss more than once a week. Dick and I thought the plan rational, so on returning home followed suit an kept it up 

Elise raised a large family, and of course when she became a wife and mother her habits changed, so in a general way the pact was off. We have been dear friends all our life, but to this day when we meet we do not kiss, we clasp each other’s hands, smile and remember. 

After our family was reduced to two and that two was Middle and me, everything was so sad and lonesome that automatically we began to kiss again. But soon it dawned on me that MIddle did not care much about much about kissing, either. She stuck out her jaw bon and I picked. If she kissed anything it was the air. 

“Let’s quit this jawbone kissing, it doesn’t mean anything,” I said. 

“All right,” she answered, so promptly I think she was glad. By and by one of us nearly died and Middle of her own free will began to kiss me again. Well, so much for family and promiscuous kissing. I often wonder, do angels kiss? 

There are other kissed than do count, count tremendously, and they are not necessarily given and taken by blood relatives. Your heart does it and the lips don’t count and you cannot lay any laws down about it because it would not obey. It has no excuse, no shame, and there it is something beautiful about kissing, and it no good trying to dodge. But these are adult kissed, a man’s to a woman and a woman’s to a man. They are different. They are from the heat. Elise and I did not discuss this kind, at that immature age we could not.