Does My First Kiss Count if She Never Opened Her Mouth?

Romantic Regrets and Sweet Desserts

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Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. (John McPhee)

When I was fifteen, the girl I was enamored of got into an argument with her boyfriend—my pal, Dave—and said, “Fine, I’ll go out with Don, then.” That’s how Molly Parker, this beautiful and self-assured girl I’d considered way out of my league, came to be my girlfriend. (My friendship with Dave floundered, but we eventually worked things out.)

The problem was, I had only kissed one girl before, and I knew for sure we’d been doing it wrong. Her name was Abeer. We used to make out on the recliner in the living room of her parent’s raised-ranch while afternoon reruns of Gilligan’s Island played on the fuzzy TV console. I say “make out” but she never opened her mouth, so we were basically just pushing our lips together and moving them around. I still remember how numb and tingly my lips would feel afterward. I was too shy and self-conscious to ask her to try parting her lips a little.

I don’t remember how all that ended. We were probably both embarrassed later by the memory. We continued to ride the same bus to school, but didn’t sit together.

When I started going out with Molly; or I should say, when she declared we were a couple, I was afraid she would realize her mistake as soon as we kissed. I had seen her making out with Dave at the playground where we hung out over the summer. They were practically in each other’s mouths. To say that I was intimidated by her experience would be an understatement. I may have understood you were supposed to open your mouth while kissing, but I was certain there was more to it than that; surely there was a host of techniques of which I was ignorant. Fear of the unknown and fear of exposure paralyzed me.

So, you could say that Molly and I were friends who held hands.

Molly was that blond-haired, caramel-skinned beauty who was also tough and could do anything the boys could do. Bicycle motocross was all the rage in the late 1970s, and she and I both joined our local BMX team. I believe she was the only girl on the team. As you could guess, I was in heaven. I had the girl of my dreams by my side as we rode bikes around town, went out for burgers and ice cream with an evolving collection of friends, competed at the BMX track on the weekends, and made a nuisance of ourselves in our respective parents’ kitchens. For that brief period, we were inseparable.

To this day I remember our time together with a small swell of pride, but also with just a little bit of remorse, because I’ll always wonder what it would have felt like to kiss her.

Molly Parker. Such a lovely name. It really flows off the tongue, doesn’t it? I remember how her blonde hair fell over her perfect shoulders and down the back of her Team Schwinn tee-shirt as I pedaled behind her through the wooded trails behind my house.

After some months, the news came that her dad, who worked for the Raytheon Company, would be transferred to Iran. He would take his family with him. On our last day together, I walked her home. She insisted I accompany her only halfway, and since we always took the shortcut though the pine grove, that meant stopping along a quiet shady path, just before it opened onto a broad cornfield (it only occurred to me later that she may have anticipated this privacy). We stood facing each other; it was time to say goodbye.

I hesitated.

She waited.

I knew what I wanted—very badly—but I was so afraid to leave her with the memory of my clumsy, incompetent kiss.

“I love you,” I said after a moment. Why was it easier to say that than to reach out for her?

She mumbled, “Me, too.” She obviously hadn’t expected that.

We continued to look at each other. And the kiss that should have been... was not. She wouldn’t wait any longer. She said goodbye, then turned and crossed the corn field.

I never saw her again.

Jennifer riding her motorcycle on the beach in Brazil, 1987

We all have our regrets, and that’s to be expected, as long as they don’t impede on our ability to live a good life. My wife, Jennifer, for instance, regrets that she wasn’t allowed to walk the graduation stage at her boarding school and collect the art prize she’d won; her punishment for breaking curfew the previous weekend (a punishment that far outweighs the crime, in her opinion, and mine). Jennifer is now a working artist who teaches at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and a handful of other community arts centers, so obviously the loss of the art prize didn’t ruin her life.

And I went on to kiss plenty of girls, so no great loss resulted from my missed chance, either.

I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life, but one very good thing that happened was meeting Jennifer. She, like Molly, is a long-haired, beautiful, and self-assured woman, and guess what? She is also comfortable on two wheels, and holds the motorcycle endorsement on her driver’s license. Before we met in our forties, Jennifer had traveled all over the world. She worked on an organic farm in Israel, assisted a surgeon in Papua New Guinea (where she first learned to operate a motorcycle), fought for Native American rights in South Dakota, and interned at Arcosanti, an experimental sustainable village in the American Southwest, among other work and travel adventures.

And now she is on Cape Cod with me.

I have no idea where Molly Parker is today, but you could say that I got my Molly, by golly, and her name is Jennifer.

Jennifer and Don, just after we met in 2006, Bourne, Massachusetts

*Quote is from John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. Purchase a copy here and help support this newsletter. Thanks!

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