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  For a few minutes, Bobbie Stuart tries to weasel up the other pole, but he’s too stiff. His legs jackknife out from under him, and his arms can’t hold his long thin body.

  Then Clarice does something wholly unexpected for which she will be forever marked.

  She sticks her thumbs in the gathered waistband of her corduroy pants with the cowgirl lassos stitched around the pockets. With those thumbs, she yanks both her pants and her undersancies down around her bare feet. She then bends over and waggles her butt at us as I later learned strippers sometimes do. Screams of laughter from us. John falls over and rolls on the ground like a dog, pointing up and laughing at her bare white ass, which still holds a faint tan line from summer.

  We’ve just about got used to the idea of her butt when she executes another move. She wheels around to face us and show us her yin-yang, a dark notch in her hairless pudendum. Her belly is round as a puppy’s jutted forward. Then our howls truly take on hyena-like timbre. And there across the ditch, which marks the realm of adult civilization, appears the fast moving figure of Mrs. Carter through leaf smoke of a ditch fire. She’s holding the spatula in her hand with which she intends to blister our asses, Clarice’s most specifically.

  But she’s a grown-up, Mrs. Carter. Her steps on the muddy slope are tentative. Not wanting to funk up her shoes with mud, she hesitates before she leaps across. And in that interval, Clarice slithers down the yellow pole and tears off in a streak. And the rest of us flee like wild dogs.

  Decades later, I asked Clarice point blank why she did it. We were in our forties then, living two thousand miles apart, and talking—oddly enough—on our car phones. Her voice was sandpaper rough with a cold, but it still carried the shimmer of unbidden amusement. I’d only seen her every two or three years—the occasional holiday, at my daddy’s funeral, and after Mother’s bypass surgery when she kept vigil with me. Still, there’s no one who’d be less likely to tell me a flat-footed lie. Across the hissing static, I asked why she took her pants down that day, whether somebody had dared her to and I just didn’t remember.

  The answer that she gave remains the truest to who she was and who I then so much needed her to be: “Because I could, I guess,” she said. “Wasn’t anybody around to stop me.”

  Chapter Two

  MOTHER’S OLD POWERS CAME BURBLING up in her again that interminable summer, for the first time in years. She tore around so fired up about her schoolwork she left an almost visible trail of energy. She pored over books the way a thirsty person sucks down water. Even poking at a pot of mustard greens, she’d have some paperback on the Russian Revolution getting damp on the counter beside her. When I staggered out from sleep before dawn, I often found her studying calculus at the kitchen table, held in a cloud of Kool smoke like some radiant, unlikely Buddha.

  “It’s a language,” she said of the math one morning, tapping her legal pad with the tip of the mechanical pencil. “I’ve never understood that. It’s a language that describes certain stuff really precisely.” Before I’d even rubbed the crust from my eye corners, she was prattling on about some old Greek named Zeno who fired an arrow at a target. Trouble was, he was trying to measure how it traveled in this really stilted way. So he cut up the line between the bow and the target—first into feet, then into inches, then half inches, then quarter inches, and so on till the whole infinitesimal universe unfolded in that strip of air, multiplied. This didn’t seem like a language anybody would bother to talk. You want the butter passed, you don’t talk about arrows shooting. I said something to that effect.

  But Mother was incandescent with the idea. Her green eyes shone. She ran her hand through her thick hair and left brief rows in the new white streaks. “You do if you’re trying to measure this line.”

  “Why not just say it’s a line, thus and such long?”

  “Because that doesn’t describe the whole thing. The rate of change. It’s a language for motion, speed. Like in those Pollock paintings. Movement.” Her hand cut arcs in the air. The number of pieces Zeno cut the line into approached infinity. The size of the pieces approached zero. Didn’t I see the beauty of that? I didn’t. I only wondered if the waffle iron was scrubbed out from the day before, and what manner of interest I’d have to feign in this before she’d whip up some batter.

  “It’s called taking the limit. As x goes to zero and n to infinity. Get it? One’s going one way big forever, and the other’s going one way little forever?” I still didn’t. Her words washed over me as the words of every math teacher I’d ever had, like the blat of a flat-noted trombone. (Years later, a college math tutor would pick up this dropped thread, and I would let out a delayed belly laugh of understanding at the punchline of some ten-year-delayed joke.)

  Some time after her calculus final, she bought roller skates like mine, the metal kind that clamped around your shoes, and went skating with me. She wobbled to a stand holding my arm. When she hung the key threaded on a brown shoestring around my neck, I briefly felt something like pride.

  While Mother and I tested our balance on the front walk, Lecia hovered inside the door screen, threatening to hide in the bathroom so nobody would associate her with an activity so dopey as this. “You’re not my sister,” she said, her shapely form withdrawing a foot deeper into the murk of the house. “I mean it. No take-backs. Stick a needle.” She crossed her heart with one square finger. “You set off down that road, I’m an only child. I swear.”

  Lecia’s just thirteen and heading into eighth grade, but already she can hardly stand to live here, for we are liable to say or do any damn thing that strikes us. Daddy once asked a square-shouldered date of hers, “Did you poot, young fellow?” His name was Gaylord or Ray or Daryl, and when the content of Daddy’s question finally dawned on him, his mouth slung open.

  “Why no, sir!” Gaylord/Ray/Daryl blurted out.

  “Well somebody cut one,” Daddy said. He narrowed his eyes. “It was a silent one, but deadly. And it wasn’t me.” He turned my way, “Was it you, Pokey?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well keep that butt closed for business,” he said to the boy with a tight nod. And I held my face still as a plaster mask.

  That’s why Lecia sailed around all the time on some imaginary parade float, and why that day before Mother and I went skating, she was firing invisible daggers at me. She felt stranded in our household as in a bad Okie movie, orphaned from her real kin amid us feral types.

  “You ready?” Mother said. I was. Though I was too old to need help, she grasped my hand, and her touch injected a kind of warm, familiar syrup along my arm. Linked that way, we went rolling down the bumpy sidewalk toward the road. My feet shivered clear up to my knee bones. If I put my teeth together loose, they chattered like those joke teeth you sent away for from the backs of comic books. Once we hit newly tarred asphalt, we got flying. My hair blew back from my head like wings. Kids lined the ditches, for a mother skating was a noteworthy event. She kept her arms wide like a ballerina’s. It was dusk. The refinery gases pumped into the atmosphere left us manufactured psychedelic sunsets: the sun was a Day-Glo ball in the poisoned sky.

  That night when it came time to go to sleep, I padded out of my room to ask Lecia was she coming to bed. She sulked on the tweed couch reading. The lavender bedroom she slept in was officially mine. Still, no matter how epic in scale our fights of the day had been, she usually corked off in there, both of us rolled into the same saggy puddle of mattress.

  Lecia just lay there silent, the Siamese cat, Sally, stretched out along her sternum, ink-dipped paws between those mountainous boobs. This seemed a particular betrayal, for I thought of Sally as mine. (A lie under which many cat owners labor.) The times I jammed that cat into lace pinafore, she’d never once bit or scratched me. Oh she’d struggle. I could feel her sinews tighten in my hand. Only once did she lose her temper though. When I’d tied her into my baby carriage with an elaborate web of Christmas ribbon, she managed to gnaw through her restraints and wound up under an a
zalea bush hissing in her white bonnet.

  Lecia didn’t even look up from her detective magazine when she told me that nobody’s mother skated.

  “Oh come on. Who cares what nobody does?” Truly when it came to convention, I had a lot of double-dog fuck-you in me by then.

  “You’ll care when you hit junior high and you’re the new Becky Smedley.” This prompted a thin layer of concern, for the comparison had been made before. One of those chip-toothed boys with ringworm scabs on his arms had likened me to Becky after I wouldn’t let him copy my math one morning. She was certainly no skinnier than I was, and I’d watched her in the cafeteria suffer the scapegoat’s fate of sitting alone among cubed carrots and peas shot from various straws.

  What she’d done to warrant this was a mystery. She was gawky, sure. Plus she was a good head taller than most of the boys but for a few who’d been held back a lot.

  What she did to encourage it, though, was plain: she took it—every flipped paper clip, every sign pasted to her back, every foot slipped out sideways into the aisle so she’d trip and her avocado-green tray would sail from her hands. Thus the cube steak and sliced peaches would become airborne with the milk carton whose red-and-white presidential faces we failed year after year to memorize. Into this slop and other slops like it Becky went sprawling. And she did not rise up. Her passivity in the face of such acts became a magnet for them. Even second- and third-graders would trail behind her like bad goats bahhing. Over the years her sticklike form curved in on itself—head bent down another millimeter each day, shoulders pinched forward—till her whole body became a sort of living question mark, the punctuation with which she responded to every mean sentence we could construct.

  “Becky Smedley is too big a spaz to go skating,” I said. The cat sighed, her eyes at half-mast. From Mother and Daddy’s room, the TV chittered.

  “No but if she did go, she’d take her mother. And they’d hold hands.” I looked down at Lecia. Surely her hair hadn’t been in curlers all day, but that’s how I recall it—in giant wire rollers under a lacy net. She kept her hair set that way for so long that the pink spikes fixing the curlers in place worked permanent dents into her head.

  “What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “If you don’t know, there’s no help for you,” Lecia said. Her voice was flat. The cat pushed her nose against Lecia’s chin, then tipped her triangular head to rub her face there.

  “You don’t know everything,” I said. Actually I doubted the veracity of this.

  “No but I know that. Goddamn sure do.” Not once since I’d stood there had our eyes met.

  “So you coming to bed?” I finally asked. My invitation was close as I could get to an apology.

  “I’m sleeping out here,” she said.

  It was my wrongness she meant to convey, and ultimately to correct—to save me from my own self, to protect me from the fate of Becky Smedley and her ilk. But the condemnation of her sleeping on the sofa felt like more than I deserved.

  Not everybody branded by difference suffered Becky’s fate. The town tolerated affliction with more grace than most places I’ve lived. They had to, for we were, as populations go, teeming with chemical and genetic mutation. Toxic air, I suppose, cooked up part of the human stew. Plus there was inbreeding galore. People disapproved of marriage between first cousins, but it happened, and at least one boy I knew was rumored to have knocked up his sister. Three kids in my grade school contracted and later died from leukemia and bone cancer. (What are the odds of that?) Before we lined up at the elementary school for sugar cubes in paper cups, the polio bug ran through us, for there were stagnant ponds a plenty, and we worried little about wading in ditches to catch crawfish after a heavy rain, even times you could see the encephalitic mosquito eggs afloat on the surface.

  Lecia’s best friend, Caroline Forman, had actually logged time in one of those notorious iron lungs we saw pictures of in Life magazine. Her thin legs inside braces bent in too much to bear her weight. She used steel crutches with double arm cuffs. When she slept over, I swung on them from room to room.

  Add to polio victims the hunting accidents—one boy lost his leg below the knee—the falls from high places, cuts never stitched, concussions never X-rayed for, the minimal dental care and complete absence of orthodonture, and you had a population so maimed and mutilated, bucktoothed and listing, that we had to dole out insults and blows to each other, for it was the closest contact many got.

  Far more deadly than overt physical handicap was social wrongness of some sort. Its markers were way more subtle. Knowledge of it came slower. For me, it started with a slow-wincing awareness of my bodily flaws.

  Mostly I didn’t feel that way, of course. Mostly I was a child, infused with the mindless joy that a girl who’s been taught to swing a bat and catch pop flies is blessed with. The fact that my father doled out these lessons was a win. Most girls never saw their dads, and mine doted on me in a way neighbors found peculiar but which I relished.

  Plus odd as Mother was, she was beautiful, which had seemed an upside deal till my own form went starkly angular and my skin started blotching up. Then her beauty became a sideways indictment of sorts. She tried to buoy me up by telling me how adorable I was all the time, but her certainty about this in the face of contrary evidence sometimes made me doubt she saw me at all.

  I remember running to her vanity table with my first pimple. Surely I’d had a few before. But this one was smack in the center of my forehead. Mr. O’Malley, the swimming pool manager who’d one day have the impossible job of teaching me algebra, had pointed this one out. Loudly. “That where the Indian shot you?” he’d said, smirking down with the sunburned face of the ex-jock he was, someone who’d grown used to pom-poms being shaken at his every victory. Every kid lined up for the high board had doubtless heard him. My hand moved between my eyes and touched the sore spot I hadn’t noticed before.

  Mother was creaming makeup from her face when I showed up with it. Regarding O’Malley’s comment, she said, “He’s an asshole. You can’t even see it with your bangs.” The silvery cream being patted along her jawline was glossy as meringue.

  But my wet bangs had been pushed back at the pool, for Clarice and I had been playing a kind of water ballet where you hiked your butt up and dove far enough down for your ears to throb inward. Then you shot back up to the surface head first, hair slicked back like an otter’s pelt.

  “Lemme see it,” she said. Her thumb pressed the edge of the sore place with fingers smelling of eucalyptus. She said the sun probably helped it, and the chlorine. “It looks better than yesterday,” she said.

  “This was here yesterday?” I said. My jaw unhinged. I felt the black world outside our windows whirl as I tried to gauge the implications. And why hadn’t Mother told me? If she was heading out to college classes with the back of her skirt tucked into her girdle, I’d by God let her know. That’s what family was for, to help cut back the extent of your unabashed fooldom so it didn’t spill out all down the streets and avenues and leave you shoved and spat at like poor Becky Smedley.

  While Mother tissued off her Noxzema, I tried to reconjure yesterday. Had I played Otter? No. Clarice was the only girl I did that with, and her grandma had come to visit from Louisiana, so Clarice spent yesterday splitting field peas and peeling new potatoes for supper.

  This mental skitter for mastery of my public self rose up from nowhere as I scrambled to reimagine yesterday. Then incidents started to unpack from a simple image as days are wont to do if you ponder them with sufficient anxiety. I’d had a horse-fight against none other than John Cleary. From my post on Carol Sharp’s back, while her water-shriveled hands held my knees, my skinny arms had locked the whole length of John Cleary’s muscly brown ones. At one point toward the end of the match, John had actually reached around to grab my hair from behind. I’d hit the surface laughing, nasal passages stung with sucked-in chlorine. Visualizing that very instant, I felt another tra
pdoor in my quivery sense of self fling open. My bangs had fallen aside then, so this massive boil in the center of my forehead had been right in John Cleary’s face. He probably saw my pulse in it.

  Such rushes of physical shame came more often that summer before sixth grade, for my once idle crush on John had been intensifying. My collection of related memorabilia—scant a year ago—now filled my jewelry box’s every compartment and forced the lacquered lid with the cherry tree to gap.

  Open that lid. A slender ballerina with a pink crinoline tutu spins before a rectangular mirror no bigger than a gum packet. There’s John Cleary’s school picture about twice as big as a postage stamp. His thick blond hair is slicked over to one side in an odd triangular thatch that looks ready to sprong up at any minute. On the back, he’s unceremoniously written “John Keith Cleary,” in a slanting script I could probably still copy today. That everybody in Miss Boudreux’s class got the same picture didn’t lessen its value for me. In the ring nook are inch-long slips of oxford cloth torn off the back of John’s dress shirts—fruit loops, we called them. Finally there’s the green army soldier who lies horizontal, rifle shouldered as if over sandbags, ever awaiting the invasion of unseen attackers into the jewelry box. I pocketed it from the eight-jillion such soldiers John fixed in battle configurations in his room. Most treasured of all, though, are the few straws from various drugstore malteds, candy-stripe papers I could put my mouth on to deliver to John discreet, unfelt kisses.

  I had first declared my love for John at six with little subtlety: I walked the road before his house with I LOVE JOHN CLEARY in black magic marker on the back of my T-shirt.

  It was the same year that John handed me my first ever mash note, which, once the fat-lined page was unfolded, read like this: If you play nasty with me, I’ll like you for one year. This was such an obvious ruse as to be insulting. Worse than that, the note was dog-eared. Other hands had unfolded it before it reached me. With the cold fury born of scorn, I sneaked the note back in John’s Superman lunchbox, where that afternoon his mother drew it out from amid wax-paper leavings and the gnawed-out apple core. As a result John was introduced that evening to the flat side of his daddy’s cowhide belt.