by Mary Karr
Still, it seems to you that no girl in drill team ever goes to the beach alone, the way a boy would just to surf. Nor do most “make the drag” alone (drive up and down Gulfway in a Sisyphean oval while watching other teens drive up and down, etc.) without appearing either to be chasing some lost boyfriend or trolling for a new one. But a girl can stop by Dairy Queen solo as long as she quickly buys her dip cone then leaves. This mobility Phil lends you feels like a great triumph over everything stifling and dull.
He also defies the school’s dominant rule, opposing in word, thought, and deed the cruel social pyramid you’ve mostly failed to scale. By mocking most conventions, he becomes your longed-for defender, some knight busily slaying the old monsters of orthodoxy, while praising in you what others have heretofore damned. When some Holy Roller relative of his questioned your pagan status and morals, he said, She’s a better woman than you. And he got smacked with the flat blade of a butcher knife for his trouble.
In public, he tends to draw sharp glances (if not vague slurs) from burly rednecks. It’s his weirdo clothes, his hair curling over his collar.
Quite simply, Phil is cool, a state to which you aspire. (If only you’d had the edict a punk pal would give you in 1976: Anybody who spends more than half an hour per day being cool isn’t.) You hope to mirror his pose of cynical defiance. Your very survival seems to depend on it.
Most of all, though, you need his attention—to be gazed at, admired, to have your face tenderly held.
Time will never again stretch to the silky lengths it reaches that spring when you and Phil first sit entangled in his car, the odor of narcissus and jasmine and crab-apple blossoms blowing through the open windows on black wind. Nor will kisses ever again evolve into such baroque forms, delicate as origami in their folds and bendings. Because the nights don’t have sex as an end (for you anyway, though doubtless your eighteen-year-old partner trembles in hope), the kisses are themselves an end. And in that, they become endless. (There’s a line in Hopkins you copy: “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall…”) You float in some watery demimonde where normal laws of physical gravity and identity boundaries vanish. You find yourself looking at your own hand, thinking, Well there’s my hand. Or touching the hard shell of his kneecap through blue jeans with awe, unable to name it.
You often go meandering inside his breath until you feel yourself vanish into the plush warmth of his tongue, each movement of which is a word or piece of punctuation in a conversation so intricate, all your diligence is required to keep up. He runs his tongue along your lower lip like a question, and you return the inquiry. Then in unison your tongues meet all soft on that same territory and glide together the small distance. Touch and withdraw, taste and test. All the light of your being seems to pour into him at such moments, and his into you. His tongue barely spirits along a closed eyelid leaving a light stripe of cool damp. For the whirled cartilage of your ear, it’s cyclonic. Or he can hypnotize you by lightly tracing a finger along your jawline as if he were drawing you into being. (Maybe as you subconsciously recalled your mother once doing.)
And you have the same power to fascinate him, something a girl’s not supposed to acknowledge, for this particular expression of power makes her, in popular parlance, a prick tease (the moral equivalent of, say, scab labor). But being able to capture his focus so completely works on you like a drug, and you’re blighted by the power of it. You can hold his entire being rapt for as long as you care to. You can feel his eyes on you, almost feeding off your form and movements. Even stepping from his car for a movie, you catch him staring at the curve of your calf. Or in the deep cauldron of the theater, he pinches your small wrist as if measuring it, turning it in his hands in a kind of wonder till you feel airy-boned as a bird.
Shooting pool with him once, you bend the length of the table to sink a far ball, your brown legs in shorts in the wide-straddled stance you’d learned as a kid would lend a long shot stability. After the shot, you turn and catch on his face a longing akin to thirst, fierce enough to be contagious, heat rising in you like mercury in one of those cartoon thermometers. It’s a va-va-voom moment, and you’re drunk on being both source and recipient of that desire. After the vast years of solitude, his aqua eyes somehow carve you into the air. Incarnate you. Your fleshly image of yourself is deriving from what he sees. (You’re also giving up very cheaply the freedom to be unself-conscious about how you move, for never again can you lean over a pool table without being at least cryptically conscious of how it appears to any man standing behind you.)
What power each gives to the other, with just a look, just a kiss, for you can’t recall him so much as cupping a breast. (Though time doubtless erodes certain facts like acid till only the so-called mythical truths remain.)
It’s either spectacularly sad or spectacularly innocent that while your solar plexus churns and all your body rushes with desire, you don’t long to unzip Phil’s pants or otherwise dismantle his clothing, nor do you even get so far in fantasy to actually envision sex, the brute carnality and mechanics of which would ruin all the verdant, soft-focus power of his kisses. It would slip you both from eternal time into the time of furrow and field, entering and leaving, start and (no please God) finish.
It’s also, in retrospect, tragic that however bound you are to Phil in this passion, his dream of sexual paradiso seems to differ quite strongly at eighteen from yours at fifteen. He is, in effect, hardwired to procreate, to get the deed done, so the kisses you find so luscious in their endlessness must translate into painful yearning in him. He tells you this, as politely as one can say such a thing. But you also sense it—this enormous biological pressure bearing down on you, even when he is (from love or terror or the new wisdom of a young seducer) doing everything in his power to court you by reining it in. You get the feeling that, unleashed, this tender boy would throw you to the earth and boff you into guacamole. (In the words of a latter day friend, the guy has a boner he can breathe through.)
Still, this schism ultimately rings the romance’s death knell. When you won’t “go further,” he takes back his ring, escorting a more popular senior girl to some dance. He doesn’t put it this way, exactly, just talks about your ages. He’s going on nineteen, en route to college, has a car (and needs to get laid). You’re fifteen; shipwrecked in this suckhole; and, for reasons neither moral nor religious, you’re a putative virgin—though your ancient worries on that count have been tidily banished from conscious thought.
After a single day of your misery, Lecia appears in your doorway like a teased and lacquered rescuing angel. She’s holding a damp washcloth, saying, “Get your skinny ass up and double-dog fuck him. Who’ll he find smarter than you?” And it’s true that one coy rival for his affections—a senior beauty queen who once intimidated you—proves her limited intellect in the talent portion of a town pageant, the story of which you never tire of retelling. First, she listed sewing and poetry for her talent entries. Then onstage, she slipped behind a folding screen to change into various outfits she’d sewed at home, and all the while she was reciting verses to the audience:
Tonight at eight
I have a date
With that very special guy.
My evening skirt and bolero
Will surely catch his eye.
Hearing these lines over lunch trays for the first time, Meredith reminds you of your brief exchange with Julia Osborne in the lunch line at the start of the year.
Tell me again, I don’t remember, you say. Your knife-taps on the burrito are audible.
Meredith says, I think they’re cardboard.
Get on with it, you say. I have a spiritual need to hear what an idiot she is. Then you fall to sawing at the burrito with yeoman-like vigor.
Don’t you remember? Old Julia was saying Colleen Stanley is so dumb, and you said, Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. And this made Julia have to think for a minute.
I remember that, her thinking. You could smell the wood burn.
And she finally says—with the meanest face I’ve ever seen on a twirler—That’s right!
Meredith has floated back into your life while remaining detached from the whole drama of Phil, as if it’s some dalliance you’ll any day now snap out of. You eat lunch together every day, but afterward, when you go outside to socialize, she always seems to ease away from whatever circle of boys Lecia is steering you into. (Or do you ease away from her? Maybe you’ve forgotten—in the self-absorption of the age—some spring project of hers or series of labs she went off to.)
Lecia has undertaken a campaign to rally whole swarms of boys to your side whether you like them or not, if only to piss Phil off for breaking up with you, which somehow served as a personal affront she’s intent on correcting.
Not that Lecia approves much of the new bell-bottomed you. She seems evolved from a 1950s ethos and has a friend who actually asks you why hippies don’t take baths. But Lecia also tries to endure your eccentricities while coaching you on how to handle the boys who see her approach and automatically start digging in their pockets for money to buy her a Coke, for you still seem to require much adjustment and correction. Your natural enthusiasm often outstrips social propriety.
One day, you start off to tease this guy with the child’s prank of pointing to a shirt button till he looks down, then raising your finger up to hit his nose as a joke. But you manage to hit him with such force that blood gushes, and while you grab napkins, Lecia quietly points out that busting his face in public before the first date might sour him on the deal. You feel safe moving in her shadow and with her instruction, mimicking her flip carriage, as if you’d shed not one tear over your ex-sweetheart.
But despite her efforts to shore you up, Phil still exerts enormous pull on your heart. When you try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they’re absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind. You’re sitting on one side of a tire-size pizza, staring out the window because some car the same shade as Phil’s has blurred past, and when you look back, you actually jump—the person across the table is that great a shock. You announce to these guys when they pick you up that you don’t kiss on the mouth, which strangely enough seems both to arouse them and to fence them off.
(You eventually ask one persistent guy why he keeps buying meals and movie tickets without a single kiss to egg him on, and he says he figured you must be really good at it. Plus he thought eventually he’d wear you down.)
At the oddest moments, missing Phil flares up and threatens to leave your whole charade of indifference in ashes. The odor of camphor from his mothbally old grandpa jackets as he whisks by you in the hall trailing a brief hello prompts stinging regret. He knew all the words to Dylan. He found your swearing cute. He used to buy you cigars to smoke out by the seawall while he and Hal blew pot (that they were filthy drugstore stogies pungent as buffalo dung was slid over in these moments of reverie). Lecia says, for God’s sake, zip it. She eventually bans radio play in the car because all the stupid pop tunes (stuff by the Archies for God’s sake) start your grousing.
So you ride home most days in the silence of one who’s lost an irreplaceable soul mate. You fail to account for the fact that your body’s glands have (coincidentally) begun to dose your brain’s pleasure centers with a substance more powerful than opium. Phil’s face and smell alone stimulate this fierce response, so the deliriously pleasure-soaked brain attributes all this body-juicing desire solely to him. (Again, you’ve forgotten that the pussy goes with you.)
Only pissing off school authorities seems to distract from your heartbreak. The habit comes almost inadvertently since your public alliance with Phil branded you subversive and landed your name on whatever list they keep in the main office. You actually cherish this identity and seek to cultivate an aura of careless desperado.
Lecia’s reputation also helps. She’s been skipping school at will for years, using excuses penned in her own hand so often that Mother’s real writing prompts both scrutiny and a phone call from the long-suffering attendance clerk. Mother will swear to be the author of virtually any note, no matter how outrageous. Hence:
Lecia Karr’s leprosy kicked in, and I had
to wrap her limbs in balm and hyssop.
Please excuse her.
As ever, Charlie Marie Karr
Or:
Lecia Karr’s malaria caused her fever to spike to 105˚
last week, and while her delirium had abated this
morning, her blurry vision made driving, in my view,
a danger. Please excuse her.
Your pal, Charlie Karr
The only time the assistant principal and neo-fascist truancy cop you and Meredith dub Godney LeBump dares to call your mother in for a midday consult about Lecia’s absences, it backfires. Your mother explains to LeBump that the less time her children spend in his tutelage, the smarter she figures they will be. The episode ends with her shouting in the attendance office—loudly enough to carry down the echoing hallway where the cheerleaders are hanging posters and thus can memorize and repeat her words the next day—Go ahead and hit me, you pious sonofabitch. Nothing would make me happier than to get your ass canned!
For the last month or so of school, Lecia barely shows up unless there’s a test; otherwise, she’s out in the woods on endless squirrel- or dove-hunting expeditions with her ex-marine boyfriend, whom you’ve dubbed Grizzly Adams. Or she vanishes into his aunt’s house, where she’s mastering a gumbo roux few can equal in its blackness without burning the flour and leaving a bitter mud no decent soup will grow from. But your tenth-grade attendance record gets good—partly because you want to catch every glimpse of Phil you can; partly because you relish being the administration’s poster child for dress-code infractions, the girl of whom an example will be made.
Little does LeBump know that a summons to his office not only holds no sting, you actually glory in it, for it permits you the fine-tuning of your wiseass persona. The conversations go something like this: Miss Karr (pregnant pause), I’m sure you realized when you got dressed this morning that your skirt is way shorter than three inches above your knee.
I’m a growing girl, sir, you say, smiling the false smile you copped from Meredith and favoring the southern drawl of Ellie Mae Clampitt on The Beverly Hillbillies. My mama and daddy can’t hardly keep me in clothes. LeBump scribbles in your folder, and it’s hard for you to ignore how thick said folder’s become by just sophomore year. (How, a tiny part of you wonders, will you ever get into college from this place? The distance from here to there seems oceanic.)
The third or fourth time you get suspended, the school year’s almost out, and the heat in the boxed-up classroom you’re slouched in would peel house paint. It’s Algebra II, and the single floor fan is whirring on the far side of the room when an office helper appears at the glass side of the door waving a slip. But before your teacher—one stern but fair Miss Gacy—even reads the slip or beckons you, you’ve grabbed your notebook and begun to disengage yourself from the cagelike desk of curved metal and plastic laminate.
Miss Gacy follows you through the doorway, saying, Just a minute. She pulls the door shut after, so the two of you stand alone in the shadowed cool of the glazed hallway. You arrange your face into the snide untouchable expression of one about to receive another in a long series of metaphorical ass-whippings.
She says, I just want you to know, they’re doing this on purpose, with a goal in mind, and I think it’s unfair.
The obliquity of her wording doesn’t escape you. She’s saying that Mr. LeBump has fixed you in his sights and will pull the trigger anytime he gets a clear shot. They want you out, not suspended but expelled, and for good.
The enormity of Miss Gacy’s generosity in letting you in on this, however indirectly, is hard to convey. The action has the political resonance of a narcotics cop taking a drug dealer aside mid-bust to say her civil rights are being violated.
And Miss Gacy is your least expected champion
, being about a million years old, cursed with a thin comb-over hairdo and the bad breath that seems to plague any teacher who winds up bending over close to help. You suck at math and suspect they only keep you in the advanced class so it won’t be all boys and Ruth Gallagher. You should be grateful for Miss Gacy’s shocking confidence. Instead, it upends the entire cosmos and the frailty of your constructed self which relies wholly on stereotypes, black-and-white judgments.
You tell Miss Gacy it’s okay. Then you give her the ancient lie of adolescents everywhere (which she can’t possibly, after her years of teaching, still swallow): That you don’t care.
But you should care, she says. And as you stare flatly at her, she lays a palsied hand on your forearm. The humanity of this touch shoots along your arm like thin lightning. She says, You’re not a bad girl.
This gentleness shapes a compact knot in your throat, and your eyes start to well the hallway blurry, for nothing is more shocking in that environment than unbidden care.
You turn your back to her and head toward the office in what you hope appears a casual amble. Soon as you round the corner from her sight, you duck into the smoky girls’ room, lock yourself in the first stall and bend over, fighting sobs, and what is wrong with you, snap out of it, for God’s sake.
Later at the sink, washing your face in cool water, you glance up at the shrunken image staring quizzically back from the industrial mirror. How little you’ve actually changed since junior high.
