Cherry Page 6

  Since John was a boy, the world permitted him such lapses into callowness, but mostly he was sweet. If I flew into Carol Sharp for crowding me under the basketball hoop, it was John who pulled us apart. She didn’t mean anything, he’d say to her while from behind me he hooked my arms. The straight shot of the ball from John’s chest level to my stinging hands was the arrival of certitude. It said something like I did belong, and everybody was really okay if you thought about it first thing in the morning before it got too hot.

  The rest of us in the neighborhood were still unformed, our characters fluid. Our alliances followed tidal shifts we could neither predict nor chart after the fact. We swore to God to keep secrets we later blurted out. We pledged fealty to sleepover companions who later served as targets for our bulging water balloons. John was more substantial. When in the football huddle he was drawing a play in his palm, I jostled to stand near him. So did everybody.

  He was also wicked cute. There was this adorable gap between his front teeth you could fix the pointy end of a pencil in. Plus in a town where phone book listings tended to Mexican or Cajun names, John’s hair bleached near-white every summer, and his blue eyes stood out amid the mostly black-eyed populace. He was fair enough to freckle and Catholic enough to blush through those freckles if one of the girls who circled him like buzzards at the rink rolled over to ask him to couple skate.

  Besides being commonly adored, he’d that summer been kind to me in ways I chose to interpret as chivalrous. In a savage game we played called Hide-the-Bat, he’d actually left base to lure the predatory “it” (the guy swinging a ball bat) away from me so I could dash untouched to safety. Just before he’d done this, our eyes had met. He was beaming an unspoken Get ready to me. But I felt that gaze differently. That was the instant a tensile line stretched between us. Some silk actually seemed to spin invisibly in the summer air from him to me. I pictured at its end this silver hook flying—unseen by others—into my chest to lodge in the meat of my heart and forever tether me to him. From then on, in fantasies I derived from all the King Arthur stories I was soaking up, John Cleary became the pious but ardent Sir Lancelot defending my honor before barbarians. In his presence, words like destiny and evermore flickered through my head. I inked his name on every random slip of paper—or even on palms or foot soles—in elaborately curlicued script.

  First loves take us like that. But because they rarely have any consequence (few marry the sixth-grade sweetheart), people slight them. They exist in the thin cliché of bad country tunes, thus becoming generic, sandblasted of peculiarities. Our own features in youth have not yet been sharply carved. So in some way, we don’t exist yet. Thus we mock ourselves for loving so easily and in the process choke the breath from our first darlings.

  Which denies their truth, I think, for my inner life took full shape around such a love. I learned to imagine around his face. Before such enchantment takes us, there are only the faces of parents, other kin. Those are doled out to us; they are us in some portion. These first beloveds are other. And we invent ourselves by choosing them.

  The pimple episode catapulted me into a painful new vigilance toward myself, for I knew I needed to ready myself for John Cleary now, to change into one of those junior high girls who could make him go quiet as Lecia could do.

  One thing I definitely needed was a bra, the wearing of which might urge my chest to grow some titties. In Sigona’s dry goods store, there was a terraced altar of Playtex bras I’d been sneaking looks at. But I had to ask Daddy for the money. And he, of course, had to say what for. When I told him, his face broke in a grin. “Baby,” I remember him saying one night, “you want a bra, hell I’ll buy you a little bra.” We were shelling pecans at the time, and I had to use both hands to squeeze the cracker, which only smushed the nut in two, and sent shards flying sideways in the rug.

  “I don’t just want a bra, goddamn it, Daddy.”

  “Lemme do it, Pokey,” he said. After a quick crunch with the nutcracker, the husk fell into the bowl in large, neat pieces.

  My head was down. I was using my fingernail to grout out the bitter part in the nut’s tight furrows. What did I want, he asked, if not a bra.

  What I wanted formed in my head for a good instant before I said it: “I want titties, goddamn it, Daddy. Not some bra.”

  His eyes widened slow at what I’d dared to say. “You want titties?” He threw back his head and hooted with laughter, howling up at the dusty light fixture.

  I hurled a handful of pecan husks into the bowl and stood up. Mother came in wearing a nightgown and rubbing lotion into her hands. “What is it?” she said. Her head was wrapped in a towel like a swami.

  I tore into my room and power-slammed the door into its molding. The window glass shivered. I hurled myself down on the lavender-flowered spread. Part of me knew I’d crossed the border into some country where he didn’t—or wouldn’t—tread.

  I instinctively knew the rules laid down for girls’ comportment, but I wasn’t yet resigned to them, for to place my head into that yoke was to part with too much freedom. One day I sat on my porch sucking the long ears of my Bugs Bunny popsicle into a syrupless white dunce cap when a herd of boys my age on bikes pedaled into view. They were shirtless, sailing down the street in careless whooshing speed.

  One blond boy named Corey was somebody’s cousin down from Houston for the summer. He was slim and brown and expressionless in a way that let me manufacture complex thoughts for him. (Was it Chekhov or Tolstoy who complained about what deep personalities we can manufacture behind “some little scrap of face”?) His surfer cut hung in a bright wing across his forehead. He stood stock still in his pedals for the entire strip of road past my house like the figurehead on a ship’s prow, and his thoughtless beauty dragged from me the faint tug of something like desire. His body was thin-muscled as a greyhound’s. Maybe his hurtling motion made enough wind to cool him off, but he didn’t look to suffer from the heat I felt so squandered in.

  This wasn’t desire as it would become. Not yet. The cool fire circled more in my abdomen than between my legs, and it was vague and smoke gray. I pictured no boy yet—not even John Cleary—gathering me into his arms. Despite what Nabokov’s Humbert wanted to think, I’ve never met a girl as young as I was then who craved a bona fide boning. But glowing nonspecifically from my solar plexus was this forceful light. I wanted John Cleary or Corey or some other boy to see that light, to admire it, not to feed off it for his own hungers. When I closed my eyes at night, I did not manufacture naked bodies entwined. Mostly I didn’t even venture into kissing. Rather my fantasies at that time were all in the courtly mode. I pictured John Cleary/Corey taking my hand for the couples’ skate at the rink, how we’d cut a slow circle together in a spotlight, with his gaze inventing me in the stares of those we passed.

  But the boys’ bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn’t yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose for it. To that I’d say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.) Boys did not have to sit like miserable statues alone on their front porches. They could be swooped up and carried by the force of their compadres before idleness had sucked all momentum from the day.

  This lodged a bad idea in my head, unignorable as any pebble. I went into the air-conditioned kitchen to confer with Mother. She was pouring cornbread batter from a crockery bowl into a cast iron skillet. The cold compound hit the bacon fat greased pan with a hiss. A pot of volcanic-looking chili must have been burbling on the stove, for in memory all the scents of seared meat with four kinds of pepper and cumin made glands in my throat go tight.

  Did Mother think I was too old to go outside without a shirt? She didn’t.

  The bowl returned to the counter, and I swiped a bit of the gritty batter onto my
index finger (not sweet like Yankee cornbread, but serious with salt and lard). Asking Mother was a formality, for she seldom saw much reason not to do anything you thought up.

  That’s how right before sixth grade I came to peel off my T-shirt, mount my pink-striped Schwinn, and set off down the oyster shell of Taylor Avenue wearing only red shorts.

  By the time I reached the first porch where a line of ladies in their rockers were sipping iced tea, it was clear I’d made a terrible mistake. Their eyes widened, and their heads turned rigidly to one another and back at me as if on poles. After I rounded the corner, I felt their stares slide off my back. A different kid would have gone hauling butt back to her garage. She would have stayed inside till some car wreck or church supper had drawn the local talk from her escapade. But I was not bred to reversals. I only had to make it one loop around the block to finish.

  On the second block, Mr. Hebert was elbow deep in his truck engine, his son Gerald Lee holding the caged mechanic’s light. The heavy man’s body unbent quick from the truck’s bowels. He shouted toward the house. A screen door popped open, and there was Mrs. Hebert, a startled jack-in-the-box-type figure in sponge curlers, her mouth a tight o. Gerald laid down the light he’d been holding and ran the same direction I was pedaling to alert other kids, slanting off across the Ferrells’ backyard to try to head me off. He vaulted over the far fence, dodging their chained-up mutt before he vanished from view.

  The Clearys’ house stood as the final gauntlet. It was also the vortex from which the most intense judgment could emanate. Sure enough, under the pin oak, all the neighbor women sat in low-slung green folding chairs doing some kind of lap work that involved huge silver pots. It was only a short streak past them to my yard.

  I felt the shining whiteness of my chest, wholly untouched by sun since I was three or four—so different from the sleek, tanned chests of the boys. It blared out my mistake in pale flesh.

  Mrs. Sharp reached a thin arm out to touch Mrs. Cleary’s elbow. Mrs. Cleary’s hand flew to her mouth just as I sailed past. Behind the hurricane fence, Gerald Lee’s witnesses were galloping, sharp-faced boys who had no fear of pointing and hollering at my near naked self. I surged into my yard. Somebody called my name. The bike dropped in the grass and took something of me with it as I hurdled the five porch steps in just two leaps.

  Chapter Three

  MOTHER WAS MISSING, AND I STARED out the back screen after her absence. Vapor ghosted up the patio bricks and made skeletons of the rusted furniture we never sat out on. Her figure-drawing class at the local college had let out hours ago. Now I tried to divine her presence on those roads that webbed out from our crackerbox house.

  Maybe her disappearing had to do with the fight my parents woke me up having last weekend. They hadn’t gone at it full bore like that in so long, I almost didn’t believe the voices were theirs. I eased out of bed all smoky-headed and tiptoed into the dining room, clinging to the shadow of the bookcase.

  Mother had said, “It doesn’t have to be like grandpa did it for it to be worth investigating. Now the I Ching—” She cut off her sentence as if she’d thought better of it. “Fuck you,” she finally said. For extra measure, she shot Daddy the finger with both hands from down low, about hip level.

  Daddy leveled his stare at her. “You know in the state of Texas, ‘fuck you’ is interchangeable with ‘Please hit me.’”

  She jutted her jaw out. “Go ahead! Go ahead and hit me, you ignorant sonofabitch.” But Daddy was picking up his truck keys, saying she wasn’t worth it.

  When I slid under the covers next to my sister, you could hear his truck tires roll out on gravel. “You awake this whole time?” I asked her.

  “Who could sleep. Jesus. World War Three,” she said. Mother slammed the bedroom door. The air conditioner’s compressor kicked on, so the porch light surged like a beacon signaling some far off ship.

  “You ever worry Mother’s gonna start drinking again?” I finally said.

  “She doesn’t have to drink, she’s so loaded up on pills.” And it was true that her bedside table was a forest of prescription bottles, some with dates going back to Kennedy. In the distance, Daddy’s truck engine wound down to nothing, but I still clung to the silence for the noise. The air conditioner chugged like bad diesel. In the back bedroom, Mother put on Mozart’s Requiem. “Great,” Lecia said. “Dead man music. Lullaby and good-goddamn night.”

  We lay listening to the weaving angelic chorus till it gave way to this deep-throated war march sound—the hounds of hell rising up from some hole in the earth to chase Mr. Mozart’s ass to the grave.

  “Where does Daddy go all the time?” I asked after a while. “I mean, there’s nowhere to go this late. The package store’s closed. The Legion’s closed. You can’t even get a tank of gas.”

  “Who knows?” Lecia said, and I said Mother must. “Mother doesn’t know shit,” Lecia said with certainty. Till right that instant, I’d clung to the notion that Mother somehow colluded with Daddy in not explaining his whereabouts.

  “You ever ask her?” I said, for there was a thread of hope that Lecia had only presumed Mother’s ignorance on this.

  “Hell yeah. She says if he wanted her to know, he’d tell us, and if he didn’t, he’d just lie.” By the time the luminous dials on the clock read midnight, Lecia was breathing deep.

  Daddy was so far off in those days, even when he was there, he was gone. In every room I occupied, he was just passing through. One night that summer, I’d decided to wait up for him. When it got late, I’d fetched a quilt to wrap around me and a pillow. No sooner did my cheek settle into that softness than sleep had come. In the next instant, I’d felt Daddy scooping me up from my seat into his arms.

  “You smell like Tennessee whiskey,” I said. “Where you been?” He said just making rounds. Cradled against his chest, I felt the cold of his shirt snaps on my cheek. The whole house was dark. Our reflections moved across glistening windowpanes. I asked what time it was, and he said time for my narrow ass to get on to bed. “They’s school tomorrow.” I rolled out of his arms onto the covers with a plop like a meal sack. “You getting long, Pokey,” he said. And when I asked him when I’d get too old for him to carry, he said not long as he could walk.

  Only a week had passed since then, and I was at the same back door, staring out into the same dark after Mother. Hell is repetition, somebody once said, and this backyard never altered. Its orders were dull. Nothing would move but the occasional cockroach unless wind hit the foliage.

  The Siamese shoved her chin against my ankle. I banged the aluminum screen open so she could snake out. The noise must’ve jolted Daddy up, for down the narrow hall where he’d been asleep the bed creaked. “That you, Joe?” he said, by which he meant Mother. There was a wire of joy in his voice that nobody but Mother could get from him. After I said it was just me, he stayed quiet. I stood in the doorway a minute before asking was he awake enough to play some rummy. His silhouette just lay back down. “Get on back to bed, Pokey,” he said. “She’ll roll in directly.”

  On the white pillow, his black hair was a crow’s wing. A pair of headlights swam slow past the windows. I made out his beaked profile, like the calm, farsighted Indian on old nickels. (His mother was from some tribe we never figured out.) There was no crisis so dire that Daddy couldn’t sleep through, particularly if he’d pulled two nights of double overtime at the refinery, as he just had. I came to stand by Mother’s side of the bed. Still he didn’t open his eyes.

  “What if she’s dead?” I said.

  “She’ll stay dead,” he said. “She’ll still be dead come morning.” Strangely enough, this was an old conversation in my family. He folded his hands on his chest like a corpse himself. (I’d later picture him again in this posture when I read a poem by Bill Knott: “They will place my hands like this./ It will look as though I’m flying into myself.”)

  “She’s all right,” Daddy finally said. I wasn’t so sure. Her bedside table was still scarred wi
th leftover circles from a series of vodka-full tumblers. On the lacquer surface, moons in various stages of eclipse overlapped. From inside one of those moons came a glint, a dime I figured to pick up.

  But what I felt between thumb and forefinger was a ring, the platinum star sapphire Daddy had presented to Mother in a velvet box at Christmas. For months after she first came home from that other short marriage to our stepfather, she’d steer Lecia and me past the jeweler’s at the tail end of any errand to ogle that ring. Daddy paid a month’s salary for the mossy black stone with a six-pointed star that seemed to emerge on the oval surface as if through seawater from uncharted fathoms. Come Christmas morning, Mother clicked open the box and sighed like a burden had been wrested from her. It did not augur well that Mother would slip off that ring, which she’d sworn never to remove, till death do us part and all that.

  I didn’t want Daddy to know she’d taken it off and so hid it under a pack of cigarettes in the standing ashtray, a bronze Viking ship poised to sail off the earth’s edge.

  When Mother had first come back to Daddy and us, she’d contracted to do mechanical drawings of appliances for repair guides, exploding dishwashers and outboard motors and Waring blenders so every unscrewed washer floated distinct in a lavender cloud. Somehow in moments of fear, I felt myself to be mechanically bolted together like that. The more real the threat of her absence became, the more I felt all the bolts and lug nuts of who I was loosen.

  “I’ll stop by the bookstore at the college,” she’d said that afternoon, keys in hand. “Y’all need anything?” Lecia wanted a True Detective magazine. Even at that age, she had the authority required to ask for such a thing.