power plants

“Nezzie, what’s it like to kiss someone? Will you kiss Bopper for me?”

She looked at me, and her gaze lingered for a moment too long; I thought she may cry. I thought it might have been my hands at first, since they were now stained with Crayola markers. There I was, this awkward and polka-dotted ten year-old, sprawled on the ground and surrounded by my drawings of large and largely Anglo families. I was working on the Hutchinson family (they were to live next to the Robinsons in their gated community in Connecticut), and I needed some kind of reference as to what a kiss between two loving and white spouses looked like.

(However, I knew at the time that Nezzie and Bopper, my grandparents, weren’t necessarily the archetypal upper-echelon husband and wife. You know, the kind who share the last name of what their ancestors did upon their arrival on the Mayflower, and actually know that there isn’t a Martha that lives at Martha’s Vineyard. But regardless, I needed to see the two of them kiss for Christopher and Elizabeth (Dr. and Mrs. Hutchinson, respectively) to work. After all, my grandparents had been high school sweethearts from a small town in West Virginia: a town where at night, horny teenagers liked to drive to the park and look at the power plant glowing from across the river, and make out and do other things that their gangling bodies shouldn’t. Nezzie told me later on that everyone thought it was about the prettiest and most romantic thing they’d ever seen. It reminded them of some kind of sparkling castle*. It was there that Bopper asked her to go steady. And two wars, four moves, and five children later, the only things that grew between them over the years were waistlines, white hairs, and love.)


*it’s important to note that years later, when they took me to bear witness to this steel castle of love, it was completely decrepit. It was dingy and surrounded by a thin film of filth, and sectioned off by a sooty river filled with miner’s sweat and coal. But Nezzie and Bopper got out of the car, holding hands, closing their eyes, and soaking in the scene, as if this abandoned power plant was the most beautiful thing since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The smell reminded me of rusty cans, and I asked if we could go get lunch now. We went to Denny’s, and while Bopper was eating his Grand Slam, he told stories of how Nezzie liked to play hard to get, and then Nezzie would disagree, saying that Harry was just an immature jock who didn’t like to pay for his dates at the drive-in. And then they laughed while Nezzie checked his blood sugar and gave him some rainbow pills from her pillbox.


Nezzie didn’t move. Bopper, who was resting his gin and tonic on his now ample belly (it reminded me of the top of a white mushroom) and reading the newspaper, put both of them down on the floor and looked at Nezzie. “Well you heard her, Inez,” he laughed. “Come on over here and give me a kiss! We’ll show Savannah what a kiss looks like.”

And they did. Nezzie smiled and leaned into Bopper, both of their wrinkles creeping up the sides of her face like some kind of intricate embroidery on cloth, and gave each other a tender peck (as they later called it) on the lips. The sound reminded me of suction cups. Bopper grabbed my arm with his hand. “Come here, brat! Don’t think you’re getting out of this either. I’m not that bad of a kisser, I promise. Ain’t I a good kisser, Inez?” He made an ugly-on-purpose face.

She swatted his belly and drew me closer to them, plopping me on her lap. And the three of us sat cramped together on Bopper’s recliner for what felt like hours, watching Tom Brokaw talk about things and numbers I didn’t understand, until Nezzie said that she needed to get back to cooking her potato pancakes.

I jumped off Bopper’s chair, and then went back to my drawings of perfect families. In the background, I could hear the ice swirling around in Bopper’s glass to the slow rises and falls of his stomach, and the sound of Nezzie humming gently in the kitchen while the potato cakes made that warm, cracking POP! in the oil. I looked to Christopher and Elizabeth Hutchinson, staring blankly at me with their three children and their Victorian home with wraparound porch and cocker spaniel, and I put down my marker. I threw that piece of paper away, and started drawing power plants.