More Than a Kiss

Claire’s Story

Long before she dove headfirst into dumpsters, Amy’s mother, Claire, was a sorority girl dating a frat boy at an Ivy League college. They fell in love, graduated and married. Everyone thought them the perfect couple until Amy’s father, Brent, discovered the two true loves of his life: Golf and Philandering. Amy often wondered if her father had always been a philanderer. Did he also cheat on her mother when they were in college? She liked to think that he’d been madly in love with her mother once and cared for her deeply before he turned into the Brent-the Fuck-o-rama Man.

The part that Amy despised the most was how her mother didn’t do anything about it. Claire had to have known she was being cheated on. If Amy had figured it out, then surely Claire had. But instead of leaving him, Claire enabled him. She made excuses for him not showing up at Amy’s seventh birthday party. She laughed over the telephone with other women and told jokes about being a golf widow. Amy swore that she would never be like her mother.

Then the unthinkable happened. Brent didn’t come home one day. A week went by and Claire received divorce papers. Amy was helpless to do anything but watch her mother go off the deep end. Claire became a hippie artist who dumpster-dived to gather her art materials. She filled their house to overflowing with smelly objects rescued from dumpsters. Amy was embarrassed to bring friends home. Then the backyard filled up with junk that was welded together to form totem poles. And wind chimes. And windmills. And anything else imaginable.

Amy graduated high school and left home. She went to med school on her father’s dime and didn’t feel guilty about it.

She visited her mother occasionally. Two or three times a year they would get together at a local restaurant. (Amy never went to the junk house.) Claire called Amy occasionally and they would chat about Claire’s art. Claire had become a locally famous avant-garde bohemian type artist whose art shows embodied buzzwords like “upcycle,” “recycle,” and “unicycle.”

So when Amy saw her mother’s trademark turquoise boots sticking out of the dumpster, she thought it was fate interceding. Now was the time to tell her mother she was in love with a woman. If she couldn’t deal with it, that was her fault.