Cherry Read online

  “Jeff, if you make up that people are sick in the hospital, God hears you, and he’ll think you’re praying and then strike that person with something awful so they wind up sicker even than you made up—”

  “She is at the hospital, I swear to God, Mary Karr! Stevie took her in Peggy’s car right after Queen for a Day,” he said.

  “God hates a liar, Jeffrey.” I hear his breath speed up and rasp out. “And unless you get your little sinning ass to confession and tell Father about this venal mortal sin, you’ll wind up in a big ditch in hell where liars get thrown all festering, and they itch like crazy and rake the skin on their arms and shins the way you’d scale a carp—”

  “She’s gone to work there, but she doesn’t like you anymore anyway.” And at that his wheezing starts full bore, and his daddy snatches the phone and asks who is it, and I hang up.

  Later that evening, I walk to Clarice’s house and peer in the side window for some sign of her. Which there just isn’t any.

  Maybe she went down to help her mother close up the doughnut shop. I slouch down in the ditch by the driveway to wait so my lurking won’t be over obvious to anybody driving by. During a storm, the water pours through this culvert like Niagara Falls, all the way to the big sewer ditch. I stick my head in the culvert pipe and see nothing in there but a one-legged baby doll. Then I just slump and wait. The sun’s slid down, so the sky’s gone all colors. You can see the red bleep of the radio tower a few blocks off.

  After a while, Mrs. Fontenot’s Buick comes surging up the drive, headlights swiping just above my head level in the ditch.

  But when Mrs. Fontenot gets out, the yellow dome light shows a wide prairie of blue plastic upholstery totally unoccupied by Clarice. This throws me a loop, for Clarice’s daddy wouldn’t let her roam around after dark by herself.

  Mrs. Fontenot walks in with the white pastry box she always brings home. It’s dark so she doesn’t see me at all crouched nearby. A handful of mosquitoes comes to hang suspended in front of my eyes. I swipe my hand and they go away, only to reappear a heartbeat later, as if they’ve been lowered there by puppet strings. Sometimes I feel like I’m dangling loose from such strings of sheer fishing line, my head like a block and my feet big wooden clod-hoppers. Lying in the spiky ditch grass, I try hard to figure where exactly Clarice could be this late.

  I run home for a stack of comic books and some kind of flashlight to read by while I wait. But the flashlight’s dead, so I unhook the hurricane lamp from the nail in the washhouse to read by. Usually, Daddy only lights it when a storm knocks the power out, or if you’re camping. It’s also a prop when I pretend I’m living back in the olden days with Abe Lincoln, scratching my sums on a shovel blade in the firelight and so forth.

  Back inside, Lecia’s hair’s all wet, and she’s toting the dresser drawer where she keeps all her curlers out in front of her like a cigarette tray from an old movie. I can smell the pink Dep hair gel she gunks up her damp hair with before she sets it. She’s wearing underpants and a T-shirt she made in art class with “Brain Child” written on it above a knobby-headed creature with a low-slung belly button. She takes one look at that hurricane lamp and says, “You running off to Africa again?”

  Before I can tell her to kiss my rosy red one, Mother wanders out with the New York Times Sunday crossword, her reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose.

  “An eight-letter word for potentate,” Mother says.

  “Monarch?” Lecia says. With her rat-tail brush, she sections off a parcel of hair on her crown and slaps some more Dep on it before wrapping the ends around a brush roller.

  “That’s seven letters, numb nuts,” I say.

  When I open the end table drawer for matches, the sight of all those match packs from a hundred different places sends the hurt I feel over missing Clarice through me like a spear. We used to play this game where we’d take turns closing our eyes to draw out a pack. Whatever was written there foretold some future with a little interpretive leeway, for most matches advertise jobs you can get making hundreds of dollars a month if only you’ll send one dollar to some training school for beauticians or drill-press operators.

  I could make bad news out of any such message tonight, and the pack I grab up only says Mobil, like the gas station. There’s that horse from my mythology book painted red and with wings on his hooves to fly him across the blank background. I worry a second it’s Mobile, Alabama, but then I decide the word augurs well. Mobile, I think to myself. I will be mobile. So be it.

  Mother uses her glasses to shove her hair back and peers at the lamp I’m holding. “That was my mother’s,” she says.

  Lecia says, “She’s an oddball, is little Mary Marlene.” I let that slide, but she’s on a roll. “I’ve tried,” she says, and her face goes all hangdog. “Lord knows, I’ve tried.” She stretches a hank of hair up in the air while she fumbles around for a brush roller big enough. I’ve been reading this long crazy poem all summer where in the best part a lady stretches out her hair in violin strings, and that’s what scoots through my head watching Lecia’s hair strung out.

  “Every day in every way, I’ve tried to guide her, to make her a better person. But no. She’s way too smart for old Lecia…”

  Mother turns back to the lantern hanging heavy by my side. “What do you want with that?”

  “To read outside.”

  “For what?”

  Then Lecia kicks in again. “Oh woman of mystery,” Lecia says, “searching Garfield Road for an honest man.”

  Mother tells me not to break her mother’s antique lamp then wanders out. I tell Lecia right before I leave that she might as well slap wallpaper paste on her head as that crap. The pink rat-tail brush she’s holding is so light that when she heaves it against the door I’m slamming behind me, it hardly makes a tick.

  At Clarice’s, I settle back down in the backyard to wait in her brother’s old pigeon cage. He built it from scrap lumber and number-two chicken wire, and after the birds all died or flew off, there it sits.

  I light the lantern’s wick and put the glass back on, the chimney blackening as the flame laps up. In my Wonder Woman comic book, the first great wonder is not how she flings that rope and shinnies up the side of a building and so on, but how she keeps her D-cup boobs from flopping out of the red strapless bra-top she’s got on.

  Headlights swing across the lawns. The chicken wire’s honeycomb lays across my face a second, then peels off. The beams plow into Mary Ferrell’s driveway. Mrs. Ferrell opens the car door and stands up wearing her registered nurse uniform. Next to her, the long-limbed Mary Ferrell, who’s been riding shotgun, unfolds herself out like a delicate crane. Then from the back, Clarice hops out. And she’s saying see you tomorrow and thanks for the ride.

  I wait till the Ferrells have gone in the house and Clarice’s shoes have hit her daddy’s oyster shell drive before I say hey.

  “Hey back,” she hollers out. She bends over and peers toward the lamplight while I edge out of the pigeon cage. “What’re you doing in there?” She crosses the wet lawn right off. “What’re you doing with that old-timey lamp?” she wants to know, and in the shadow of her face a smile gets cut like a slivered moon. And because her voice sounds the same as ever, I think I’ve been wrong all along about her not calling me back on purpose.

  “I’m detecting you,” I say. Then, “I like your hair.” It’s cropped short at the neck and jacked up and sprayed into a ball.

  “I have to wear a barrette to keep the bangs from falling in my eyes. But it’s what all the cheerleaders have.”

  “Mrs. Torvino do it?” I ask, for Torvino’s Castle of Beauty is the only place I know in the county to get a haircut not from a barber.

  “Mary Ferrell’s mother,” she says. I lift up my lamp and say again it looks nice even though I’m thinking to myself, Mary Ferrell’s mother’s ass. For to have Clarice sneak down to the Ferrells’ house and let scissors lop off the short flip we both wore all summer is a betrayal of
the worst sort.

  So I think what a best-friend hogging slut Mary Ferrell has turned into, and the lamp in my hand weighs heavier. But to set it down would somehow leave me feeling even more unarmed. Some fight between Clarice and me has been going on and I’ve been taking invisible hits. The lantern’s heft somehow anchors me to the instant.

  Under Clarice’s rain slicker she’s got a name tag pinned on. And under the name tag is a by-God candy striper’s uniform—the red-and-white getup worn by hospital volunteers. “Did you get drafted or something?” I say, for Clarice’s becoming a candy striper is a stunner I have no idea how to handle. The lostness of my not even knowing about it freezes me where I stand. The night’s cooling off. From the Gulf, I hear a far-off rumble of thunder—the devil’s bowling pins, some people say. Clarice and I stand in the smell of rain coming like a pair of gunfighters.

  Finally she pulls her raincoat across her front to cover her uniform and name tag all up. “I knew you’d be this way about it.”

  “Which way?”

  “The way you’re being!” She makes a little snort. “The way you just are. You’re that way about everything.”

  Right away I start scrambling around my skull to defend the way I’m being. Which I don’t even know how it is. I say, “Everybody is the way they are. About everything. That isn’t breaking any law.”

  “You act like you’re smarter than everybody. Like you’re so smart and everything anybody likes is stupid.”

  I can’t quite root out the truth in this, but I sense some ghost of it hovering. “Like what? Come up with one for instance,” I say.

  She shifts from foot to foot. “I gotta go,” she says.

  “C’mon,” I say, in what I hope sounds upbeat. “What way am I being?” I set down the hurricane lamp and rub at my fingers where the wire handle cut into it. “I really want to know. If you can’t tell me, who can?”

  “You make fun of everything,” she says.

  “Oh and you don’t,” I say. I sound sarcastic, but my throat’s actually tightening up. She looks back at her house like why doesn’t somebody come out and rescue her from this talk.

  “Not like you,” she says. She chews her lower lip a minute. “You make fun of church,” she finally says.

  “When did I make fun of church?”

  “You said the pope dresses like a girl. Plus you said kneeling in mass means that I worship dolls.”

  “I said Carol Sharp said her daddy said that. And it wasn’t dolls. It was graven idols.” I can feel my voice get loud. Still, my voice just foghorns out of me all loud, “Kneel. Don’t kneel. Hell it’s a free country. Suit your own damn self.” The silence I’d been yelling into seems made of tin. The air keeps ringing when I quit. “And the pope does dress like a girl,” I add.

  “And when I want to play secretary you say—” She shakes her hand in the air as if at some unseen creature she could gin up and wave away at once. It hits me that she’s been chewing on this cud a for some time. Worse, she’s even been something like scared to bring it up.

  “I played secretary the last time you came over chrissakes!”

  “Will you just shut up and listen.”

  “I liked playing secretary—!” Actually, I didn’t like it. But I memorized the typewriter keyboard because I figured it might help me if I couldn’t be a poet and had to be a newspaper woman. “—Didn’t I learn to write my name in shorthand?”

  “Shut up!” she hollers, then cranes around to look at the house, but they must have the air conditioners cranked on high. I pick up the lantern which sends up corkscrewing smoke.

  “Okay,” I say. The word tastes like something scorched in my mouth. “All right,” I say.

  She cocks her hip, then bends back her index finger in an arc to make a point. “You know I’m in the secretary program at school but you say, you say”—(she bends her index finger back); “‘I want to be a poet’”—(fuck-you finger back); “or ‘I want to run a newspaper.’” (ring finger back)—“or ‘Who wants to bow and scrape to some ignorant suit-wearing sonofabitch?’”—(pinkie finger so far it seems fixing to snap off).

  Suddenly I see her like she’s at the wrong end of a tunnel. She’s all small and worried, standing in her side yard between the abandoned pigeon cage and empty dog run. Her candy-striped uniform is secondhand from somebody who quit, and she probably spent thirty minutes starch-ironing it. Now all the times I’ve urged her to go to college or leave this one-horse town—advice that heretofore always seemed good—now such words have a new tilt, for someone’s urge to alter you will never feel kindly. There was never any care in my trying to steer her, just mockery of who she was, of what she’ll grow up into.

  I know for a stone truth that I’m the one who really needs overhauling. The stuff I think about is for dorks: parallel sentence structure or how to use a semicolon. Lord if anybody knew.

  Now Clarice is fixing to cry herself. Her round brown eyes in the lamplight seem to hold in their lower lids little low-slung half moons of mercury.

  Her voice when it next comes at me seems to fly unwatched from some wide, cold Arctic place inside her. “What’s so ding-dang wrong with getting your boss coffee?” she wants to know. “It’s nice. Or wanting to type fast? It’s that or being a nurse, which Moselle Ferrell says is hard on your feet, and we’ve got terrible feet, in my family.” I dimly recall a discussion with her grandfather about something called “hammer toes” and being terrified that after supper he’d take off his shoes to reveal a row of tiny hammers on the ends of his feet.

  From nowhere the tears that had been stacking up inside me spill out and run down both cheeks. And when I go to talk, there’s a choke in my voice I can’t hardly get by. “I was gonna join the junior secretary club next week,” I say. Which is a lie. Mother says I want to have a secretary, not be one.

  “Join whatever you want. You can’t be different than how you are, Mary.” Her tears seem to have sucked right back in her head soon as she spotted me crying. She reaches out for my arm, and I jerk it away. The lantern bangs my shin and I say shit, and she glances back at the house and shushes me. I dab under my eyelids with the heel of my hand, but my face is streaming like some spigot inside me has opened up full blast. “And you’d hate candy-striping. And I like it. Really. You get to tote flowers to people who’re glad to see you, and you can take pulses and temperatures.”

  “I’m just afraid you’ll—” I want to shore up my trying to get her to go to college instead of secretarial school. “I’m afraid you’ll grow up all, all—all limited.” I settle on this word as the most washed-out one I can find for what I mean, so as not to piss her off. Instead the word seems to fall on her like a high-fired arrow.

  “Limited! Limited! Jenny Raines is right. You really do think you’re smarter than everybody else.”

  That my being smarter than everybody would have fallen into dispute is a shock that shuts off my tears. I feel deep conviction that I am, in fact, smarter than everybody—an opinion both my parents have drummed into me my whole life.

  “My daddy’s calling me home,” she says and turns on her heel.

  I just stand there mute as a stump. I should say something. I’m sorry even flits through my head, though I’d never say it. Clarice hauls open the side door and disappears.

  I don’t feel like crying when I walk home. Somehow all the crying has been sucked out of me. The lamp at my side releases black soot from its round chimney as if from some hole in the earth. I think hell’s caverns must have that kerosene smell.

  Back home, there’s only the kitchen light on and the dull hum of TV in my parents’ room. I get into bed without brushing my teeth or washing the creosote off my feet. For a few minutes, I try crying, but nothing comes out.

  PART THREE Limbo

  When the mind swings by a grass-blade

  an ant’s forefoot shall save you.

  —Ezra Pound Canto LXXXIII

  Chapter Eight

  ONLY WHEN YOU READ A STOR
Y in your eighth-grade English book about a minister who insists on watching the world through a black veil do you realize that a vague exhaust has come to cast a pall over everything you see.

  Your limbs might be filled with sand or lead pellets. You are heavy, heavy, though you rarely eat. Lecia calls you the original buttless female. Mother says she wishes she could give you ten pounds. Daddy just stands each night holding out your steamy supper plate with its three neat compartments so the liquor from the greens doesn’t invade the black-eyed peas and soak into the cornbread, saying Chrissake eat.

  At night you lie on your stomach in bed copying poems in script so elaborate the words can actually vanish to let the shapes of letters take over. They become stick-figured birds perched on a blue wire, or a ballet troupe at the barre. Part of you longs for such orders. Another part feels your every move’s already been plotted out, and you’re only bumbling along like a chess piece.

  You’re not crazy exactly. No bugaboos or bogeymen appear unbidden. Nonetheless, your thinking is muddy. You feel some key moment went past that you’re now powerless to recover.

  Maybe it started when you saw John Cleary stepping down from the county fair carousel holding hands with a buxom black-haired girl. You thought, she’s probably got the face of an ape. But when he tucked her hair behind her ear, the gesture revealed the blue-eyed countenance of young Liz Taylor in National Velvet. Lord, she wins by a country mile, you thought.

  Not that you dwell on it. You’ve mostly blotted from thought the old dream of John Cleary and even Clarice’s absence. Your family’s remoteness likewise is pro forma, each of them a far-off blur.

  But the simplest letdown can leave your normally disaffected face scorched by tears. In eighth grade it’s a stupid athletic prize you met the criteria for but failed to receive in schoolwide assembly. Your striving for that—weeks of arduous wind sprints that left you limping—is your only real effort that year. The prize means nothing, really, but it’s not that easy to win, though Lecia took it in seventh grade easy—a fact she’ll remind you and anyone else of with no prompting.