The first kiss at the fence

The first kiss at the fence is the hinge on which the narrator's entire story turns: the moment she stops merely imagining another life and actually reaches for it. It is the point of no return in her marriage, the instant the affair with the radiologist becomes real, and the event that retroactively explains the violence, the cuts, and the institutionalization that follow. Everything before it is buildup; everything after it is consequence.

The Setting and the Approach

The kiss happens at the fence that surrounds the narrator's house, in the bucolic surroundings she has come to despise — the little gate leading to the pond, the fruit fallen from trees, the swamp. She hears him and leaves the house barefoot, moving "like an animal" to the gate, and she does not go back. His presence is described as "my mouth's desire made flesh," a longing for lightning answered by the sky, a wish for a horse that walks slowly by and brushes against her with its back. The insipid things of her rural life suddenly become arousing; the ordinary landscape is transformed by his arrival. She stands in front of the fence, looking at him while he looks at her, and she knows that afterwards she will go out into the woods and vomit everywhere, that she will have a beak, feathers, talons.

The Kiss Itself

At first, as often happens at first, she does not know whether to kick him out or stick a rake into his chest. But then, "as if firing silver sparks into the black air," they kiss. The kiss is framed by the domestic chaos it interrupts: her husband is sleeping and the baby is falling out of bed, a pebble slipping off a cliff. The image of the falling child, unattended while his mother kisses another man at the fence, is the novel's starkest emblem of maternal neglect — the baby literally tumbling toward harm while she is elsewhere, consumed by desire.

The Context of the Marriage

The kiss does not happen in a vacuum. The narrator's marriage has been hollow for months. Her husband, an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, tries to share the stars with her, setting up his telescope at the bottom of the garden where it slopes down into the woods, asking her whether she sees the String of Pearls or the Great Bear and the Little Bear. She is not interested in stars, not interested in what is in the sky, and her eyes linger instead in the starless space, in the absence of light. They have not hugged in months, do not hold hands because they are always pushing the buggy or carrying the baby. She has already imagined the knife in her hand, lying in the grass among fallen trees, the sun on her palm feeling like a knife she could use to bleed herself dry with one swift cut to the jugular. She has already dropped the knife and gone to hang out the washing like nothing had happened. The kiss is the first time she acts on what she has only imagined.

The Aftermath and the Affair

The kiss is the beginning of the affair that runs through the rest of the novel. It is the event that the husband will later rage against with jealous fury, the act that makes her, in her own telling, someone who has "been dead" since forever and even before being born. The affair leads to the condoms found in the car, the fight over them, the narrator's repeated insistence that she did not touch the radiologist's head, not a hair on it. It leads to the cuts that cover her body — on her shoulder blades, her chest, her belly, her neck — small cuts that nurses stare at for thirty seconds when they come in, from which tiny shards, bits of blades, splinters, pieces of crystal, tiny mirrors, petals and slivers of glass are removed. She is brought to the hospital straight from the field, unconscious, the first time she has fainted and been lost to the world. The kiss at the fence is the origin point of all of this: the affair, the violence, the breakdown, the institutionalization.

The Significance of the Fence

The fence itself is a charged symbol. It is the boundary between her domestic life and the outside world, the barrier she must cross to reach the radiologist. She stands on her side, he on his, and the kiss happens across the divide — a crossing that is also a transgression. The fence is the threshold she has been circling for the entire novel, the line between the woman who dreams of a knife and the woman who acts. Once she kisses him, she has crossed it, and there is no going back. The bucolic setting, the little gate, the fallen fruit, the swamp — all of it becomes erotic precisely because it is the landscape of her imprisonment, and the kiss is her escape from it, however temporary, however destructive.