Cherry (15 page)

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

—Ezra Pound
Canto LXXXIII

O
NLY WHEN YOU READ A STORY
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.

Thus junior high seems a series of mishaps that vault you involuntarily from one mudhole to another—each time landing deeper, more remote.

Suddenly it’s ninth grade. You’re standing before Lead Head Briggs inside the closed door of his office, remembering you’d learned to spell the word principal from a book that said, The principal is your
pal.
Briggs has gone through the formality of opening his mail while you wait. He performs this same drill for anyone sent to his office more than once—slitting the sides of envelopes with a silver letter opener, blowing inside to make it easy to draw out the pages. He hopes the interval will unnerve you, as if he could punk you any worse. You’re standing there waiting to be expelled for questioning the validity of studying algebra one more year.

Now he’s taking his Ben Franklin glasses from the edge of his nose. Under his gray crew cut above one ear, you can see the old scar where
they put the plate in his head. He’s telling you that you’ll need math more than you know.

Actually, you say, I intend to be a poet, sir.

A what? he says.

A poet, you say. Down the hall, an electric typewriter start its machine gun then halts. He seems to wait till the carriage zings its return and the hammering starts up again.

Then he says, How’s that exactly?

Somebody who writes poems.

Well I know that, but how do you plan to get folks to pay you for it?

This stumps you a minute. Finally, you say, I’ll sell my books. Before him on the wide desk there’s a gold football mounted, gold pens at a slant in a granite holder. Behind his bristly head are the framed pictures of football teams past.

How much you think that’ll make you? he says.

Come again, sir?

Let me put it to you another way, he finally says. How many books of poetry do you think the average American buys?

You see where he’s going, and you jack up the number you give him. In my house? Maybe thirty or forty, you say.

And your house is usual, he says.

There’s the low simmer of worry now, for no one would call your house usual. When you eke out your
yes,
your throat tightens on the word.

I don’t think your house is usual, Miss Karr. (He hisses the Miss.) Maybe there’s one book of poems inside every two houses, he says. Or to be generous, let’s go on and say a book of poems in every house.

You’re speechless a second. You want to say he’s being unfair. But you can’t quite locate the unfairness of it. He knows you can’t outright say that people in Leechfield are boneheads and don’t really constitute your audience (something that you’ll grow up to believe untrue). That would implicate him and constitute insult. You peel the bottom of one sweaty thigh up from where its stuck to the chair naugahyde and tug down your skirt.

He says, So, that’ll be your book, then. That single book, the one every family buys. That’ll be your book instead of—oh let’s say, Mr. Longfellow. The sudden reference sends the opening lines of “Hiawatha” jogging through your head on its dogged, pentameter-paced horse. He’s not the first person to suggest that poets don’t earn much, but your parents never give that concern the slightest credence. “Shit, you can do whatever you feel like, Pokey,” Daddy would say (an endorsement vague enough to have begun fading in power), while your mother would claim those idiots wouldn’t know poetry from piss ants.

Briggs waves his hand saying, Let’s drop the poet thing. Get back to everything that’s right with math. It’s true you don’t need math to write poetry. But any other task you undertake will require a thorough grounding in mathematics. Especially in the space age.

This stupefies you. You aren’t even being a smartass when you say, Like what?

This is the very cue he’s been waiting for. He says, You’ll need math to measure out your recipes. Say your husband needs you to have a dinner party. You’re gonna have to double or triple what it says in your cookbook. You’ll have to multiply all those parts, not just three eggs or four cups, either. Lots of halves and thirds. There’s your math! (He points his index finger down at his calendar and stabs it so hard you peer over to see if there was some bug he’s smashing. There isn’t.)