The Two Words That Come to Mind are "Gulp" and "Vomit."

Last night the worst thing happened. It was bound to happen, I guess, so I shouldn't be so horrified, so surprised, so nauseous. But I am. Oh, am I ever.

Last night my father walked in on me as I was kissing a boy. I've never seen my father move so fast, especially at 3:30 AM, a time when sane 54 year-olds should be in bed, sleeping and dreaming dreams where their daughters are young and not yet kissing boys, or dreams where their daughters are living far away in other states, where the kissing and whatnot goes on in houses other than their own.

The fact that my father walked in on and then ran away from me kissing a boy makes me want to cut out my tongue and scoop out my eyes. I am mortified. If this were a perfect world, he and I would both stay out of each other's way for several days, weeks, months until I felt okay to face him again. But no. Tomorrow I have to attend a graduation party with him.

The boy I was kissing last night was a Boy From Work, and the kissing was just that: plain kissing, straight up kissing, kissing without other things going on. We were, however, under a blanket, which I am certain made the situation look a lot more scandalous than it actually was. All clothes were on and accounted for, except for my sweatshirt, which was pooled at the foot of the couch. I had another shirt on underneath, but I'm sure my father's worked what he saw over and over in his head until he's imagined something very R-rated.

My father isn't one who handles things like this very well. I am, after all, his little girl, and his little girl would never do such a thing with a boy. As he sees it, his little girl bakes cookies and teaches English and likes cats and is a virgin. And because he doesn't handle things like this very well, my father and I have had had our share of uncomfortable incidents. Once, my senior year of high school, after he found out that I'd been sneaking around with a boy he didn't very much care for, a boy I was definitely wasn't supposed to be sneaking around with, my father drove home from work early and sat at the kitchen table until I got home from school. When I walked in the door, my stomach almost fell out of my body. The look he was giving me was pure disaster. He made me sit down with him, made my brother leave the room, then made me answer a string of awful questions.

He said, Did you let this boy touch you, Jessica? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his hands? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his mouth? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. I wanted to disintegrate, to spontaneously combust, to melt like the witch in The Wizard of Oz so I would no longer have to be sitting there answering those horrible questions.

I was barely seventeen years old, and what I'd let the boy do with his hands and mouth (no big deal, really--nothing scandalous, nothing advanced) were things that most girls in my grade had been letting boys do since they'd started high school. I was getting a late start, but at that moment, when I had to confess things that were really none of my father's business, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be so scarred by my father's interrogation that I would never let a boy touch me anywhere ever again.

Well, I was scarred by that day, but not scarred enough to stay away from boys forever. A few months later I had met and somehow charmed Keith into liking me. A few months into our relationship, Keith and I were sitting in my bedroom, on my bed, watching TV. My door was half-open, because I knew if I tried to close my door my father would have a royal conniption.

Whatever we were watching went to commercial, so I leaned over to lightly kiss my boyfriend. It wasn't a kiss that involved even the slightest bit of tongue--there were parents around, after all--but I was unlucky in that my father happened to be coming down the hall and--in fine Dad-Fashion--my father overreacted. He told me to meet him in the kitchen right now. He said he had to talk to me about something very important.

When I got out there, my father told me that there was no way his daughter was going to be lazing around on a bed and tongue-ing her boyfriend under his roof. I tried to tell my father that there certainly wasn't any tongue-ing going on, but this only made him angrier. He went on to say that there would be no more half-shut, three quarter-shut, or any kind of shut doors in his house while Keith was there. In fact, there wasn't really a reason for Keith to be in my bedroom anyway, so we might as well go watch TV in the living room, where there were no beds, only couches that were in plain view. My father, who was worked into a real frenzy now, went on to say that he also wasn't a fan of the fact that Keith had come over a few minutes prior to my parents' arrival home that night. He said there was a new rule, and that rule was that Keith could never ever ever ever be in the house if there wasn't at least one parent present. If Keith came over and my parents were running late after work, we had to stay out in the driveway and wait until they got home. He thought all these rules would somehow keep us from being consumed in a fiery swarm of sin.

Of course, my father's discomfort with my relationships with boyfriends didn't completely erase after I grew up, moved out, went to college and grad school. In fact, after my thesis reading last May, the Wily Republican and I were in a corner of the bar, half-hugging and half-dancing, when my father came over and put his hands on my shoulders and took me away from the WR for no good reason. I didn't think anything of it at the time, until I got back over to the table where my friends were gathered for the celebration, and one of them said, What was that all about? And I thought to myself, Yeah. Wait a minute. What WAS that all about?

This winter, when Josh came home from Quebec, he and I went out to our former place of employment on a Saturday night, when it was teeming with the trashiest of the local trash and the skeeviest of the local skeeve, and Josh had an awful lot to drink. There was no way he was driving home, so I drove him back to my house and put him up on my couch with a glass of water and a couple Tylenols. I put on some late night TV and we watched it for a bit before falling asleep. The next morning I woke up at 7:30 AM, and there was my father standing in the archway to the living room, surveying the damage. I was on one couch and Josh was on a separate couch on the opposite side of the room. We couldn't touch each other if we wanted to. But a few days later, while lunching with my cousin, she told me that her mother had come home from a family function and told her that my father had been talking about the horrors of waking up one morning and having a boy in his living room, a boy who had spent the night right there, right next to his daughter, mere feet--oh, those dangerously few feet!--away from her. I was twenty-five years old and on a separate couch from a boy, and yet this was quite the event for my father.

So I think it's easy to understand why this last incident is one that has my skin crawling, that has me wanting to bury my head in the sand, that has me wanting to spend several nights far away from here. There's just something about fathers and daughters--especially this daughter and her father--that takes embarrassment to another level. And if it weren't for this weekend's graduation party, you can bet I'd be long gone, that I'd be somewhere else, some other place that would keep me from running into my father and pretending nothing ever happened, pretending that he didn't demonstrate impressive agility and speed as he ran away from the living room and back to his bedroom, where he probably lay awake for long, long minutes, thinking he liked it so much better when I played in the sandbox and wore pink corduroy pants and called him Daddy.

The Hookup

This is what my mother says to me this afternoon: "Don't you want to meet our friends' attractive son? We could go out to a fish fry tomorrow night. Or maybe I could slip him your e-mail address the next time I see him. Or maybe we should print off a picture of you. Yes, maybe that's what we should do. You decide on a picture, print it out, write your name and e-mail and phone number on the back, and I'll bring it to him. That's a good idea."

I ask her if I should write my height and weight, my likes and dislikes on the back, too. "You know," I say. "Long walks on the beach, sponge candy..."

"Listen," she interrupts, "I'm just worried he's going to meet some other girl before he meets you. He's such a nice boy, Jess."

My mother sounds so sincere and a little heartbroken--as if she's imagining the friends' attractive son meeting some girl, falling for her, bringing her to the next bowling party--and that's why I say okay, okay, I'll do it. I'll find a picture. I'll write my name and e-mail and phone number on the back. I'll sit around try not to think how sort of lame that makes me seem, how desperate. My mother, after all, thinks it is a good idea. My mother also thinks that her boyfriend's gay black belt son is not gay, so her judgment can sometimes get iffy, but I want to make my mother happy. She's mostly stopped giving me the normal pep-talk, the one that involves her saying things like you're actually lucky you're single and everything will work out in its own time. Now sometimes when she looks at me I think it looks like my mother is wondering if she gave that pep-talk a little too fervently, if she's worried I'm actually starting to believe I'm lucky and that things will come my way if I just wait around all patient-like.

This attempted hookup smacks of disaster. Any attempted hookup that involves me smacks of disaster.

Katy once tried to get me interested in one of her husband's friends. He worked in some sort of meat-packing plant. He had a child. He drove a purple Grand-Am, which--if I remember correctly--had pink flames on its side. He had nine and a half fingers--a result of a tragic accident at the meat-packing plant.

Katy also tried to get me interested in another of her husband's friends. This one lived in a trailer, didn't own silverware, didn't do dishes except for once a month (if you were lucky), slept with every dirty girl and stripper in town, and got fired from a job--even the Happy Chef--every few months.

My uncle has tried. My mother has tried. My cousins have tried. My friends have tried. It has only worked once. Once.

That once was Ex-Keith. He'd seen me once at a party thrown by mutual friends. He liked what he saw, and he asked his best friend about me. His best friend asked his girlfriend, who was my best friend's sister. Then, at a baby shower thrown for my best friend's other sister--who had, consequently, been knocked up by a man who moved away with his gay lover several months later--my best friend's non-pregnant sister, the one who was dating Keith's best friend, grabbed me by the arm and towed me into their parents' bedroom. The bedroom was small and cramped. I felt a little nervous. The sister was looking at me with big eyes, telling me she had something to tell me, to ask me.

"What?" I asked. "Just what?"

Then she told me about Keith, how he thought I was cute, how he wanted to take me out. "I know it's all very overwhelming," she said, "so I thought maybe we'd all go on a date together. A double date. Very low pressure."

A week later I was sitting across from Keith at an Olive Garden in his hometown. I was eating chicken parmesan and praying I didn't get a little crazy with the knife, send a hunk of the chicken catapulting into my lap. Later that night Keith and I stood awkwardly at the foot of the sister's car while she and her boyfriend said goodbye with loud, loud kisses. I told Keith I had fun. I was shivering. I was thinking low pressure my ass. That's when Keith put his arm around me, tipped my chin up for a kiss. And that's when I realized it was all worth it, that things were going to be okay.

So maybe someone will have that kind of success with me again. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will give me his coat because it's just so cold out, it's starting to snow, and the sister and her boyfriend won't stop making out. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will take me to the bottom of a ski hill at the end of the night--just when everyone is doing their last runs before slipping out of their skis, just when everyone is doing their fanciest, most elaborate, best moves of the night. And maybe this boy will sit there with me and tell me all his best stories until it's late, until they're shutting the lights off and the whole world goes dark right there in front of us. Maybe I can have that sort of luck again. Maybe it can start this way. Maybe it can start with a picture and my name and e-mail and phone number on the back.

Maybe.

The Worst/The Best

I haven't had much luck with Valentine's Day. I've had a few alright ones--decent, fine, not anything to write home about--and I've had a few Valentine's Days where I've wanted to throw things, yell, and punch people.

Ex-Keith is responsible for my worst-ever Valentine's Day. This was my junior year at Fredonia. He and I were back together, but tentatively. He was giving me the run-around, telling me he didn't want anything to do with a "relationship." The last girl had driven him crazy and soured him on commitment. He wanted things loose. He didn't want to be with anyone else, but he didn't want to feel obligated to take me out, show me a good time, make dates, or anything like that. I told Ex-Keith he was a moron.

On Valentine's Day he called to tell me he was going to be late. "Just a few hours," he said. "Well, actually, I don't know how late I'm going to be. I'll be there when I'm there."

We'd had plans for weeks. He was coming down to spend the night in Fredonia. There was going to be dinner and romance--as much romance as you could milk from a boy who insisted he was wary of long-term love. When he told me he wasn't sure if he was going to be able to make it until much later because he'd found some work he wanted to get done I just about lost it. I told him it was unfair that he was treating me the way he was--after all, it wasn't my fault he'd cheated on me and gone on to date a girl who bordered on clinically insane, a girl who turned him against love and commitment. While he'd been off doing that, I'd been sitting around and crying and being good and praying he'd come back to me. I was sick of him not making plans, of breaking plans, of treating me like I was some toy he could pick up or toss away whenever he felt like it.

We fought over the phone for an hour. He told me I'd blown it, that I'd ruined everything, that he wasn't going to come down anymore. Fine, I said. Fine, fine, fine. And then I got under my covers and cried myself into a big snotty mess.

He came down, though. He stood outside my door and said he was sorry. He admitted to being a jerk, an asshole, a cruel, cruel boy. He filled my apartment with flowers. He made awkward jokes. He bought me a chocolate cake. And even though I came out of my room and stood in front of him with my mascara-streaked eyes so I could tell him I forgave him and that he should never do anything like that again, I knew there was something ugly brewing on the horizon. We couldn't go on like this forever. If he was soured on love and commitment, I was now soured on Valentine's Day. I was dreading what was going to happen next.

Still, Ex-Keith is also responsible for the best Valentine's Day ever. It was our first year together. I was seventeen years old. His mother had gone away for the night, so I lied and told my parents we were going on a double date with his best friend and his girlfriend. There would be dinner and coffee afterward. In reality, Keith and I were going back to his place after our dinner. I had to lie because my father was still very nervous about me being in such close proximity to a boy. He wanted us to remain in public at all times. He somehow thought that would keep us from spontaneously combusting into a lusty pink tumble of limbs.

Nothing that would have distressed my father happened on our first Valentine's Day, though. Keith brought me back to his house, where there were roses arranged in the living room for me. He lit a fire. He lit candles. We stretched out on the couch and listened to the wind outside. He told me he'd never liked a girl the way he liked me--in fact, he'd never met a girl like me. He said for a long time he didn't believe that girls like me even existed. He told me he wanted to go on like this forever. And then we were quiet for a long time. The snow whipped against the window but inside everything was just the way it needed to be: warm and dark and nice. The night was quiet and relaxed. It was just what I'd wanted and all that I've wanted since. It hasn't been like that in the last eight years, though. I don't know if that's because it was the first time and nothing ever feels like the first time, or if it's something more than that. Maybe I haven't had that kind of quiet connection to someone since then. Maybe I'm waiting for something to feel that easy again. Because even though I loved good men after Keith, none of those relationships have been easy. Not even close.

So I'm still waiting. And in the meantime at least I have the Pink Torpedoes, who came over and drank a lot of champagne and ate a lot of chocolate tarts on Monday night. And at least I have this man, who, really, is probably the love of my life: