Cherry (14 page)

When the game’s over, John leaps up and runs to his room to get ready for bed, and I am down the steps and out into the dark before I know it. Mr. Cleary follows me out. He lights a smoke and stands on the sidewalk, watching me run home, waiting till I wave on the porch to go back in.

That night may be the first time I’m grateful Lecia’s gone. I reach for the damp between my legs and find my panties soaked through. There are so many gross jokes you hear about stuff coming out of you down there. (“After a date, throw your panties against the wall, and if they stick, you had a good time,” Darlene Smith once said.) I push these out of my head and close my eyes, for under my hand there’s a fire burning cool as menthol. For some reason, I don’t conjure John’s body stretched over mine, or under it, or even the long muscles of his thighs hard under my hands. The fact of that body is too carnal for this sharp luminosity in me. Instead I picture John leading me under the spangled light of this mirrored ball for a slow dance. How he wheels me past those too stunned by our beauty to dance themselves. And suddenly John is there, holding me lightly in his arms and breathing his Juicy Fruit breath into my mouth. Then the horse leaps between my legs, and that soaring fall enters me, and everything dissolves.

I remember the next morning, or think I do, lolling in bed like my own bride. Maybe it was some other morning, but I remember it
nonetheless. Some dense little sun glowed in my solar plexus. I’d wallowed my whole sleep away in it.

Only when I came across the baggie in my pocket did my face heat up. Touching myself didn’t seem so bad. Mother said everybody did that, even people who swore to God and stick-a-needle that they didn’t. What shamed me was the plastic bag, that an ardor so pure as mine for John Cleary could involve such deceit. I took the baggie outside in heavy rain and shook the squiggles of hair out into a sewer ditch of rushing rainwater, tossing the empty plastic after it.

S
OMETIME DURING EIGHTH GRADE
, Clarice decides I’m not her best friend anymore. If she’d said this outright, I would have nattered and mullygrubbed at her. Instead, she just stops coming over. No fight, no nothing. One Sunday evening after we’d been playing dominoes all afternoon, she just strolls down to her house and doesn’t come back. Not that I didn’t ask her to.

I did ask, and ask, and ask again nice. The more I ask, the more broke-dick her excuses get. She’ll say she has to help her mother at the doughnut shop one day. The next it’s yardwork, or cleaning the house. Or her cousins are spending the night, and she has to shampoo and set the little girls’ hair for mass the next day. My offers to pitch in and help just make her squirm and tack some bull dookey onto her story. Like she’ll say it turns out her grandma is maybe coming from Louisiana, and her mother wants just family. Or she’s being punished for not doing the yardwork and can’t have company.

Lecia tells me when I complain about it to take the hint. But Lecia
seldom spends a whole Saturday by herself reading two books in a row. Mother’s always off at the library, and Daddy’s wherever he goes. It’s just me thumbing encyclopedias with Sally the Siamese or the sleek black tomcat Roy laying around till Lecia’s date brings her home.

That’s why I won’t just blindly take Clarice’s dropping out of my traffic patterns without an explanation. Also I pretty much can’t stand anybody my own age and it’s mostly mutual. I call Clarice every Saturday till one morning her little brother Jeff picks up the phone.

“She ain’t here,” he mumbles.

“Jeffrey?” There’s a little pause. I can hear the Road Runner on TV go
beep-beep,
then make a dashing-off whiz sound. Clearly Jeff’s attention has gone back to old Wile E. Coyote, who winds up—gauging from the explosion I hear—biting down on a dynamite sandwich and lying in the desert with a crown of orbiting stars and his eyes all bugged out. “Jeff, listen up!” I finally say.

“What!”

“Are you telling the truth?” I said. “About your sister?”

“She ain’t here. I swear. She ain’t nowheres around,” he says. I hear what must be an anvil from the Acme Anvil Factory crate fall whistling from the cliff edge.

“Jeff, why do I get the sense that you’re lying to me?”

“I’m not. Cross my heart!” Now the vaudeville closing music plays on their TV, and I decide that I can now weasel something out of Jeffrey.

“Have you made first communion yet?” I ask him, which is a curveball question.

“I just took it Easter!” he says. Clarice and I had grilled him on the catechism questions that still spooled through my head some nights: “Who made the world?” “God made the world.”

“Now Jeff, you know, and I know, and God almighty sure as hell knows that you’re lying like a rug right now. They wouldn’t leave you stranded there by yourself at barely first communion age, and I just saw your momma glazing a tray of crullers down at the doughnut shop.” This last part’s a lie, but how would he know.

His hand smothers the receiver while he mumbles something to someone who barks something back. I can picture his little hand—the nails with half moons of black dirt, knuckles scabby.

When he comes back on, you can hear the ad for the Easy-Bake oven in the background. Jeff says, “Clarice’s gone to the hospital.” His voice has the hard newsbreaking timbre of a revival tent preacher.

“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.