Cherry Read online

  Then it’s later that same summer. No long episodes from that dull time exist. There are no lost plots, or tangled dramas. There are only brief snippets of memory, outtakes, captured instants where your sagging performance becomes plain. You remember the last report card you got saying you’d missed forty-seven days of school. Another where you got a D in art. You remember lying stretched out in a green canvas hammock, rocking yourself with a broom handle on a blistering day with the distant noise of kids splashing at the town pool and a ragged paperback of Great Expectations open to the same page all afternoon. You have no attention for novels or even stories anymore, just poems.

  Oh you are manufacturing an arena of darkness in your sullen self. Poems that romance suicide are accruing in your head like so much trial evidence. Maybe it was the Keats—“Darkling, I listen, for a long while/ I have been half in love with easeful death…”—that got you first. You memorize it, along with Hamlet’s hand-wringing suicide speech and more than a few nasty bits by Sylvia Plath. You read Camus’s play Caligula where the mad emperor so torments his senators that they wind up stabbing him in the face while he screams, “I’m still alive.” On the unused black upright, you teach yourself to read music—one note at a time—solely in order to play the same morbid Chopin prelude over and over till everyone in the house threatens to move out unless you stop.

  You are waving hope off like a stinging wasp.

  You sit on your bedroom floor and unshelf another well-thumbed novel. A brilliant girl your age in a mental institution invents a magical world of gods and monsters. Then she keeps opening her veins the long way. You know you could never cut yourself. You can’t even stick your finger with a pin, much less take up a razor. Still there’s some seduction to the idea, a silky feel that it draws over you.

  You spend a whole night writing an elaborate suicide note, in which you list every minor gripe and oversight. Lecia, you shouldn’t have hit me over that chicken pot pie. Clarice, I was a good pal to you, and you were a turd. John Cleary, no grinning and large-breasted pom-pom shaker could reveal the high-minded wisdoms I truck in. And the givers of athletic prizes. And the designers of children’s shoes. Before long, you’ve worked up to your parents, who are blind to the spit you feel yourself to be writhing on. Just thinking how bad they’ll feel reading this note makes you cry, but you keep writing, letting big tears splash the page so they’ll know how bad you felt.

  Anacin from a brand new bottle get counted out till you reach one hundred—“one hundred bitter wishes,” the British poet Craig Raine will write someday of another girl.

  Thus readied, you step into this puddle of dress—the closet’s only black one—and pull it over your legs and up waist high. It’s satin-back crepe and slides over your skin like water, but too small so you have to struggle to get the zipper up. It’s short enough to pass for a shirt, and your hands hang down too long from the sleeves like a chimp’s.

  You wash the pills down three and four at a time, but only get as far as ten or twelve before the melted pill taste is too bitter to stand. So you mash some with the spoon back, mix the powder in orange juice, hold your nose. Still the bitterness starts a gag. And since discomfort is not now (nor ever will be) your long suit (and since it’s less death than family attention you crave), you decide you’ve swallowed enough, skinny as you are.

  Having cried yourself quiet, you now lie down in the bed and cross hands over your chest and arrange the skirt so your underpants aren’t gaping out at everybody. In this pose, you wait to die.

  Then comes the first sliver of fear, a sharp and shining itch of it from the prospect of snuffing out. If you don’t exist, who will impart your tremendous insights, write the great poems you design in your head that never see paper? You lie there and listen to the neighbor dog yip-yipping, cars idling by.

  Mr. Lawrence is digging in the side yard. He shouts to his wife, This deep enough? And she says deeper, it’s rose bushes. The blade crunches through the wet ground, and the spadeful of dirt and rocks hits the wheelbarrow. You want to fling open your window and shout, Show some respect! I’m killing myself here. But they keep remarking on color and fullness of bloom.

  Socrates never had this kind of insignificant crap to listen to after he took the hemlock. Somehow when he described the cold inching up his shins, it was sadder. But then Socrates had Crito leaning over him weeping, saying, Don’t you have something more to tell us? Good old Crito. Where is he when you need him? You have only the disinterested gaze of that cross-eyed Siamese and the nerve-wracking chatter of morons. You’re nowhere near dead—just wicked queasy, like that time deep sea fishing—when the sprinkler gets turned on so fake rain slaps your window at stunned intervals.

  You pad through the house looking for an audience. Then it’s through blazing heat to the studio where—peering in the window—you see that Mother’s constructed a huge giraffe of papier-mâché for some play at her school. How can that garish yellow contraption find a home in this pit when you can’t? It’s an indignity even to look at.

  By the time your mother walks in less than an hour later, you’re kneeling on the cold floor tiles emptying the emptiness from your stomach into the small white emptiness of the wastebasket in your room. She helps you to the bathroom, dampens a washcloth to drape around your neck. You poor little duck she says, rubbing your back. You must have eaten something bad, she says. I’m throwing that old potato salad out, she says, and those shrimp your daddy brought home.

  Bent over, sick and ashamed, you feel like the worst sort of fool.

  When the heaves pass, Mother takes your angular self onto her lap in the ebony rocker. Your feet hang over the arms on one side. Poor poor you, she says. Your head lolls over her shoulder, your nose near the source of the Shalimar cloud that drifts around her—a smell of rose attar in oil. She says, You’re never too big to rock, but you’ll appreciate it, I know, if I leave off singing to you. Once when you wake up she asks what are you doing in that old dress, and you say seeing if it fits. And she says, That would be a negatory.

  Still later, she strips you out of it and jams your arms in a cotton nightgown you wriggle on. Thus sheathed you lie on the couch, your head pillowed nearby while she combs your hair with her fingers.

  When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?

  All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and Mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.

  The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.

  Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.

  Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.

  Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.

  Through the window you see the Lawrences’ new rosebush, its base of burlap sticking out of the fresh red dirt. Its white buds are tightclenched knots. But it’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.

  And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody—anybody—who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens
or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.

  PART FOUR High

  “Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?” Abel answered. “I don’t remember anymore; here we are, together, like before.”

  “Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,” Cain said, “because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”

  —Jorge Luis Borges Legend

  Translated by Andrew Hurley

  Those who live here are chained; those who leave must return.

  —Curse of the Karankawa chief on the Gulf Coast region before Jean Lafitte’s invading pirates chopped off his head and flung it into the waves

  Chapter Nine

  IF THERE WAS ANY PLACE WORTHY of escape in the seventies, it was Leechfield with its mind-crushing atmosphere of sameness. Sitting in your room, you often felt the town spread out around you as inescapable as the stench it gave off. Sometimes you even fancied you could hear the traffic light over deserted Main Street blink. Time lagged mule-like in muddy traces. You had to beat it and cajole it before it plodded forward even a few steps and the earth swung you back to another tarnished sunrise.

  With drugs you could endure it. Question mark. Maybe. Better living through chemistry was one pervasive (if unintentionally ironic) company slogan. That first year of high school would be your last as a pharmaceutical virgin.

  Sure you were told that drugs cut a coiled and downward swerving path to degradation if not death. That was part of their allure. In the fifties, teenagers had fought the boredom of this place with games of chicken in souped-up cars. Your sister’s first steady had been an older hood with a sinister slouch who liked to face off against other drivers Saturday nights, revving up and peeling out toward a head-on crash till the other driver (he always claimed it was the other guy) lost nerve and swerved. The daredevilry of your generation’s chemical adventures differed from this not one whit. The only trick was to cut your wheel at the right instant. To ride as far out as you could before being forced out of the game. Sure one alternative was your skull flying through a windshield like a battering ram. That was part of the thrill.

  So for your first week of high school, a drug film is scheduled, and you file down the auditorium slope with this new herd hoping solely to blend in. And you do, sort of. The white daisies on your dress are not incongruous with the sea of floral patterns bobbing around you, though your frock’s black background makes it darker than the sizzling oranges and Day-Glo pinks you’re in the midst of. While you’ve hemmed this dress exactly three inches above your knobby knee—dress-code perfect—the white threads of that quick basting will draw comment all day from home-economics masters (whom you secretly call the home-ickies).

  The drug film seems pointless in a school so stalled in the 1950s. You don’t even know anybody who smokes pot, doubt it even exists in this county. The film says marijuana resembles dried oregano and smells like burning garbage, though you’re fairly sure the garbage part was just made up to shoo kids off it. School films are always doing that, saying beer tasted like cow urine, or boys you sleep with won’t call again. (In fact, the opposite proves true: the girls who put out—scags and skanks in local parlance—are swarmed on.)

  The girl in green paisley next to you is—with regard to pot—a tight-lipped Baptist-type. She announces with loud authority that everybody’s brother in Vietnam smokes marijuana. She heard it from Walter Cronkite.

  Some cowgirl behind her says, Bullshit, my brother didn’t.

  This cowgirl is one of those low to the ground, hillbilly-looking girls who never says much, but who manages to convey the physical seriousness of people who do field work and therefore aren’t worth messing with.

  Green Paisley says, There was a TV news thing last Sunday that said—

  Hillbilly says, TV’s big hairy ass. My brother died a Christian, you sack of steaming horseshit.

  You list forward and away from the squabble. Part of you wants to scream at both girls it’s not heroin, for chrissake, my own mother smoked it in a big-deal jazz club in New York and didn’t wind up robbing liquor stores at gunpoint for it. The rest of you wonders who else’s mother in this auditorium would brag about getting high in such a kittenish tone. Or ask if you knew where she might get any. Maybe Jane Maculroy’s mother. But she also screws a red lightbulb out front of their trailer on Saturday night and is said to have accepted from one trucker for her favors a pallet of canned hams.

  The film ends by telling you about LSD and the schizophrenia it induces. On the screen, a cartoon beatnik is balanced on the ledge of a high-rise for a suicide dive. This makes you think, hell we don’t even have a building tall enough to jump off—somebody’s ranch house or carport wouldn’t sprain an ankle, much less kill you. Maybe a little brother’s tree fort would work. The beatnik is holding his face in a scream while the zipping cars below him mutate into scorpions and spiders and all variety of insect. They don’t show the splat at the bottom, of course. Which is typical. Only the cartoon smoke of sudden falling suggests he’d been there at all.

  That was one message—Drugs will kill you. On the other hand, lots of parents stayed medicated out of their gourds on perfectly legal substances. Maybe the county’s few martini mixers and country-club pill heads could blame stock prices or work stress. But such luxurious complaints were denied the average refinery worker, who also couldn’t let slip the soul-nagging brutalities he brought back from World War II or Korea. Nor did these guys often bitch about the innate hideousness of their jobs—waiting at the massive gate in a long line of more or less identically chugging trucks to reach the time clock’s vacant face—punch in, punch out. It was a life of meat sandwiches, and the shift whistle screamed to end it.

  The long repetitive hours were punctuated by panicked frenzies of back-wrenching labor that could turn lethal. There was a famous anecdote about a pit of waste chemicals somebody forgot to fence off and into which a new guy fell, only to be fished out a skeleton. Maybe true, maybe not. Still, somebody’s dad or uncle or cousin was always falling off a tower or getting scalded by pressurized steam. Most people had a grisly story about visiting a neighbor or relative in Galveston’s famous burn unit. Or every few years, some guy would wrench open the wrong valve and blammo. Vapor. Him and everybody in the vicinity. The paper once ran a photo of a metal ladder that had been welded to a tank that blew. On rungs going down, at exact intervals, four pairs of steel-toed work shoes were melted in place. These facts told a man exactly what his life was worth.

  Such earnings were sufficiently high to make a man of your dad’s generation and social stripe talk big in a bar. His father had been a logger who trucked very little in hard currency, with earnings that mostly vanished into script at the company store. Other locals were born to hardscrabble sharecroppers or shrimpers or seamen. A union salary paid a mortgage and doctored the kids and kept two cars mostly running. If you chipped in with buddies, you could buy a place down on Village Creek, or a fishing trailer, or a bass boat with an Evinrude motor. For your dad’s generation, these undreamed of luxuries doomed them to don hard hats. Day in, day out, as your daddy used to say. No time off for good behavior. (His gold retirement pin would document forty-two years’ service: four diamond chips and two ruby—none bigger than a roach’s eye.)

  Result? Step into the VFW at eight in the morning, and there on the red diner stools were dads stopping off after graveyard to throw back a quick bourbon. Or two or four. (Not all of them, of course. It was a dry county, and there were loads of teetotalers.) Drinking a few bumps could ease a fellow to sleep even with the goddamn ingrate kids slamming doors and blaring the TV to bust your ears.

  Plus the average home medicine cabinet held a virtual army of pills, a wanna-be drug addict’s cornucopia. Valium was common, at least one type of sleeping pill. (Your mother had two or three varieties and in variable strengths.) Diet pills could perk up the basic
hungover or low-level-miserable housewife, then power her through the daylight jitters till she could mix a blender drink at five. Speed didn’t hurt a guy pulling a double shift either. The milder doses of Ritalin snitched from various hyperactive little brothers were the first tablets you saw crushed up with a hammer and snorted.

  If your dad had a bad back or your brother played football, faux opiates could be pilfered—the fat white pills with numbers carved in the chalky surface—one through four. Refills aplenty.

  Small irony that many of your friends’ names would someday be carved in almost the same blocky typeface on a whole scattered flock of tombstones in Greenlawn Cemetery. But all that came later.

  That fall, you enter the glossy halls of high school unsullied by any chemical other than the fluoride everybody guzzled with the drinking water. You’re not yet looking to drugs for rescue. You’re still expecting to transform magically into one of those chipper, well dressed girls whose name-box on student ballots is automatically checked, to open the yearbook and find your tiara-wearing self in full-page color next to John Cleary. But the instructions for such exalted status are vague and seem only to drift to you in negative form—things NOT to do. Some linger in fragments for years. DON’T:

  Wise off bad enough to get sent to the principal or swear in public (girls only).

  Give any evidence of knowledge concerning bodily functions or fluids (includes everything from the obvious ejaculate down to nose-blowing during a head cold).

  Collapse in tears in a public place even if your dog’s been run over, or you got your period on the back of your dress and everybody says well gee, who wouldn’t cry, it’s okay, let it out.

  Hit anybody unless you can fake it’s accidental (i.e. kidney-kicking somebody in a pushball pileup).