Cherry

by Mary Karr

  I’m not pregnant, sir, you say.

  Are you positive?

  Not unless it’s the immaculate conception, sir. (Lord but the lies come easy).

  He pulls off the glasses he’s been peering down through. He reaches behind himself on the desk and grabs your folder to consult for some pertinent detail, then stares back at you with dark eyes. It does give you a twinge of fear to be flat-faced stared at with such fury. You automatically look down, then hate yourself for giving him that triumphant point.

  Finally, he says, Were you aware I’m a practicing Catholic?

  No, sir.

  Don’t get a smart mouth on me, he said.

  No, sir, you say.

  Because I won’t tolerate it. Not for a Yankee minute.

  No, sir.

  He glances down at the folder through his specs, then looks back up at you with a glare that must have been searing when it came framed within his football helmet’s grate. He says, It might surprise you that I have taken personal interest in locker number 481.

  Why, sir?

  Let’s just leave it at that.

  The prospect of a locker search actually fills you with juvenile glee, for number 481 swung open would reveal an ancient, unlaundered gym shirt the color of cat piss; a graveyard of old papers; some novels by Salinger and Bellow and Hemingway; and a sack holding an orange so lustrous with green and white mould and caved in on one side that you might well pawn it off as a bio experiment.

  We’ve also made some changes in your schedule, Miss Karr.

  This is a slyly palmed trump card he’s playing. You’ve heard rumors about a few criminal-type detentions they set up for incorrigible guys who’d punched a teacher or blown something up. The offending party would get isolated from general population, left to sit all year in a steamy, padlocked storage room behind the field house—the only contact being some tobacco-spitting coach who came in periodically to collect homework, or the lines the boy had to write repeatedly, stuff like “I will not sass.” It was said that one guy had been forgotten entirely over some summer, was found in fall either swollen and crawling with maggots or else shriveled like a mummy, his Venus pencil clutched in his finger bones.

  Like what changes? you say.

  Sir, he says. What changes, sir. He must see the fear spark in you, for he seems invigorated—a predator who’s caught the whiff of a wound. You don’t say anything, just slouch a notch lower in the hard chair.

  We’ve taken you from Miss Park’s English class and Mrs. Theriot’s history, and put you in Mrs. Wylie’s English and Coach Kryshak’s history that same period.

  Don’t they do, like, remedial classes, or something? (Long pause) Sir.

  It’s true that we’ve taken you out of AP English and history.

  For what reason, sir? I’ve stayed on the honor roll. I believe I have A’s in both subjects.

  There are issues of maturity and citizenship—

  What!

  —that we feel could affect the learning environment.

  He hands you a pink hall pass. End of interview.

  You plod from the office trying for the first time in a while not to cry, for you’ve been cast into the academic equivalent of a dungeon. It’s only a few weeks before the kind-eyed Mrs. Wylie insists to the head office that you move up from both classes into AP—a feat that must’ve cost her considerable ill will from LeBump.

  Meanwhile you spend two weeks in Kryshak’s class, where it turns out he passes whole class periods reading aloud from the textbook, often until he himself corks off, dozing in the valley of the pages while hell breaks loose in the room. On Moratorium Day, when Meredith stitches black armbands for you both to wear in protest of Vietnam—her one act of civil disobedience—he catches her alone and shoves her against a locker, saying, Take it off or I’ll take it off for you. Her hands tremble all the way home.

  Before Thanksgiving, you travel to Phil’s college for a plotted weekend escape of illicit sex and drugs. You find yourself stepping down from the metal Greyhound steps like a bride with the Samsonite suitcase that you borrowed from Clarice despite its hideous salmon color. As soon as you see Phil leaning in jeans against the wall in a pose worthy of the young James Dean, he somehow seems unbelievably goofy-looking and beside the point.

  How did this happen? For weeks, you’ve carried a snapshot of him in a pair of overalls the way Catholic girls carry mass cards of their name saints. Nights, you’d stood at various 7-Eleven pay phones, risking arrest and jail to use a fake credit-card number, just to hear for three minutes (before they could trace the card and discover it was fake and call the cops) his voice—the low pitch of which could mesmerize you with desire.

  But in the steamy, diesel-soaked air of the bus terminal, he looks all wrong. He’s bought a wide-brimmed felt hat of the kind Western farmers wore in cowboy movies. (His American Gothic hat, you call it, after that Grant Wood painting.) On the way, the two-tone Ford he drives—the same one you’d kissed in all the previous summer—chugs like an Okie tar-kill. His fingers entwined with yours are damp with sweat.

  Once you get to his dorm room, you find the odor of old pizza unfathomably discouraging. The same holds for his agenda of things he wants to show you. The worst of these is a record of two guys having a fart contest, which ends when one actually batches his pants.

  (Twenty years later, this notion and its attendant memory will strike you as wicked funny. Also you could then recall the boy’s tender, odd ministrations with the fondness they warranted.)

  Phil seems to know you and yet does not in any way know you. After some awkward introduction and small talk, his nerd-ball roommate is conveniently dispatched with sleeping bag to some other where. At that instant, Phil adopts the sheepish sidewise look of the amorous cartoon skunk called Pepe LePew, whose cookie-cutter heart beat through his furry chest whenever he saw his sweetheart.

  Suddenly you feel too much like a child in Phil’s hands. When he pulls your T-shirt over your head, it tangles in your hair for a blind minute and you feel choked and push him off.

  He says, Hey slow down—we’ve got all night. But in saying this his face warps, his teeth suddenly looking bucked as any mule’s (which they weren’t). In that hallucinatory instant, Phil somehow embodies everything in your life you want to get loose from. In this way, your soul mate on the slopes of Parnassus (translate: college dorm room) thus becomes a kind of Gomer fawning over you in a cold cinder-block purgatory.

  He’s all kinds of sweet. He holds you a long time, touching your rib cage with shy fingers. His neck smells of patchouli oil and his mouth of cumin from the Mexican food you had earlier. You want to take a shower and brush your teeth, but being concerned with hygiene at such an instant would sound so uncool. Also, you aren’t sure that cleaning up would help. It’s the whole blunt corporeal exchange that’s eating away at you.

  Soon after you make love, you curl in the fetal posture in the narrow bed and fake sleep for hours, staring at the luminous dial of the roommate’s clock face. Once you think Phil’s breathing deep and slow enough, you slink into the bathroom downstairs—on the girls’ floor—with your ragged copy of Anna Karenina. You sit on the cold tiles in your sweatshirt and shorts and have just begun to ponder the lunkheadedness of the cuckolded husband when Phil appears in the doorway. He looks tousled and fond. He wants to make love again, and you swear to yourself that on future nights you’ll lie still till dawn rather than risk these additional ministrations.

  Once you’re home, Phil sends flowers—a box of peach-colored gladioli. The florist’s card with its calligraphy birthday wish contains a vow from him to love you forever. Your mother grinds up aspirin with a spoon back to mix in the water, to keep the blooms fresh. But the phone rings, so she forgets, and you just wipe the powder off the countertop with a sour sponge.

  Chapter Seventeen

  DOONIE FIRST CRAWLS INTO YOUR LIFE on his hands and knees like a reptile. You’re spending the night with his sister Elizabeth (aka Elizabeth L
ouise Deets), who lies in her own twin bed in a somnolent heap with her dark hair arrayed across the pale covers, just across the leaf-shadowed room from the identical bed in which you lie staring ceilingward, your insomniac skull crawling with words like a veritable anthill.

  For hours each night, you lie awake this way composing letters to woo the far-flung, cherished college boys (the Adorees, as Lecia calls them) from the tidal wave of pot-sodden pussy that—if their letters are true—seems to be crashing down on them inside their various zip codes. These correspondences are your chief modes of expression and human contact. Without them, you barely exist, and never again will you bring such lapidary fervor to the manufacture of a single paragraph, nor will language ever hold more totemic power. The wooden English essay that won some prize this week took less time to conceive of than a single supposedly clever postcard. At school you’re laying low, angling for “good kid” status, part of a ploy to weasel your way sans high school diploma into some hippie college far from here. With the new dress code, thay can’t even kick you out much this year.

  Lying awake in Elizabeth’s white bedroom that night, you’re wholly absorbed in the skullwork of polishing some transition or other when the knob on the door starts to twist. First left, then right. Then the door cracks open to let an inch of hall light pour in, a knife blade’s width, then more than a yard of yellow hallway light spills in. You stare transfixed at the place a face should appear—expecting some quizzical parent come to loom a few seconds en route to the can. But there’s nothing. Unpunctured quiet.

  Till the squeak of hands and knees on the linoleum announces someone crawling low around the end of the bed. You sit upright to watch Doonie in his pajama bottoms using his elbows to drag his skinny body forward to the side of your bed.

  Then his giant sunburst of frazzled black hair pops up. He says in a whisper almost wholly starved of air, Wanna see something?

  Like what? You say curious.

  At which point, Elizabeth bolts up like some marionette jerked from full slumber into straight-backboned fury. (She studies ballet and has admirable posture.) She says, Get out of here, you little pervert.

  Doonie says, Nobody’s talking to you.

  You say, It’s okay. Really.

  And it is okay. Though Doonie’s just a piddling-ass sophomore to your exalted junior status, you’re actually the same age. (You skipped a grade.) Plus his nervy entrance has piqued your interest, set you fumbling around for a sweatshirt to pull on. Whatever is he hoarding that would warrant such stealth?

  Elizabeth says, He wants to show you his dick.

  At which prospect you bust out laughing, and Doonie, outraged, says, That isn’t it. Get your mind outa the gutter.

  I swear to God, Elizabeth says. Somebody told him he had a big dick—

  I never showed anybody my dick! Doonie says.

  —and he tries to show it to everybody.

  ’Cept people who asked. He says under his breath if you ask nice, he’ll show it to you.

  I promise you, I don’t wanna look at your dick, you say. And you can see in the moonlit room Doonie’s eyes glint with the faith that someday whole herds of females will clamor to see his dick, so he can good-naturedly forgo showing it tonight because he can see that happy day approach. Besides that’s the kind of pedal-to-the-metal individual he is. (This facial expression of his is so inspirational, so able to infuse hope in its absence, that it will carry you and many others through acid trips and drug deals, across various state lines, through sagas that invariably end with the sentence, And the miracle is, the cops just let us go.)

  It isn’t my dick I’m gonna show you, he says. I swear.

  Elizabeth says, Get outa here before I call Daddy.

  By then, you’re really wondering what exactly Doonie might have to unveil other than his johnson that would prompt him to steal in here like a jungle operative and risk Elizabeth’s hopping up and down in his ass. So you say to her, That’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

  You get up while Elizabeth topples back down, saying, Just yell if he whips it out. Doonie, I’ll call Daddy if you whip it out. I swear to God. Don’t test me.

  You’d barely noticed Doonie the summer before when you’d first met. It was one of those flattened-out Sundays when you’d been blowing joints with Elizabeth and the college-bound boys in a car, all of you winding up gathered per usual in the Deets’s yard in the aimless loitering of the stoned and willfully unemployed. The older boys were already shining like bronze icons you’d already cast them to be in memory—Phil and Raphael, Hobbit and the blond-haired Raj. (Hal was already in Mexico.) Each exuded a sly radiance that blinded you to anyone else in the vicinity in that early dusk amid the whisk-whisk of sprinklers. Distant refinery flames flapped against the fluorescent orange sky.

  Those boys had the allure of transience. They’d already mentally checked out, like explorers before the anchor is hoisted, or astronauts during the countdown. They were setting off on quests and would come back (question mark) to regale you with slain dragons. This charisma of departure so beguiled you that sentences were already assembling for the letters you’d write to each. So Doonie had been background noise: a scarecrow boy on a bike popping wheelies with his pal Hogan.

  His greeting to you spoken while circling the whole crowd on the bike was, You gotta cute butt.

  You were way too cool to respond to this acknowledgment of your ass before the Adorees. Still, you had to stifle a grin when he whizzed by on his bike close enough for Elizabeth to swat at him. Then he affected a quick stop that left a skid mark, a kind of exclamation point to the whole exchange.

  Months later, you find yourself in Doonie’s room, a veritable graveyard for wadded up jeans and T-shirts and one Cheerio-encrusted bowl. Surf magazines scatter glossy blue oceans across every extant surface. He opens his closet door and hauls out a garbage bag that’s heavy enough to need dragging. He undoes the yellow twistie-tie with great drama, saying, You not gonna believe this. The bag yawns open, and it holds neither the Holy Grail nor pirate treasure nor bearer bonds you can cash in. No, it holds pills and capsules and powders and elixirs in every shape and size. Quite simply, it’s the largest stash of pharmaceuticals you’ll ever see excepting TV footage of government sting operations.

  Where’d you get all this? you ask.

  To which Doonie answers, with the grin of a kid who’s hit a home run, Hogan hit a drug store.

  At the entrance to King’s Pharmacy there’d once been—for decorative purposes—this apothecary jar big around as a truck tire and aswill with pill samples. Hogan had stolen handfuls from there before, but this time he slithered down through an air vent with a garbage bag for the whole stash. Soon as his feet hit the floorboards, though, an alarm sounded, and shortly after that cops started in the back door. Since the front door was dead-bolted, Hogan had to toss a vacuum cleaner through the plate glass and dive out behind it while pedestrians gaped and screamed.

  According to Hogan, he jumped and looked one way like a cartoon burglar, then jumped and looked the other before he took off, tennis shoes flapping.

  He left the whole stash with Doonie for safekeeping, because Hogan knew the cops were after him. In Doonie’s psychedelic hyperbole, the arrest involved SWAT teams and a hovering helicopter. Hogan walked out with hands in the air and feeling the whisper-light touch of two dozen pairs of crossed hairs fixed on his big knobby head.

  So he’s in jail? Your friend I met?

  Aw he’s all right. It’s just Gatesville. He’s just sixteen. Be out before he’d have to hit the big time. Want me to get him to make you a belt from in there? They nice, those prison belts. I got one. Big old buckle’ll pick up your basic Cuban TV station. Get your name tooled on back.

  You laugh more in Doonie’s company than in anybody’s since Clarice. He claims he does crappy in school (in contrast to his brilliant sisters) and wants you to tutor him in geometry. But his mind dodges around like a pinball bouncing, lighting up in places so od
d you know it’s driven by the torque of great smarts.

  For one thing, he’s isolated the tastier drugs into labeled sandwich bags. There’s valium by the packet and even birth control pills in round spaceship-like compacts, which you take in hopes of saving your Catholic pals from the early pregnancies they’re heading toward (two are knocked up within the year). Plus there are colored pills for any mood—methamphetamine (black mollies and white crosses), opiate derivatives like codeine, phenobarb in every dose level, nembutal (yellow jackets), seconal (red birds).

  How’d you figure all this stuff out? you ask, scooping up a handful.

  That’s the beauty of it, Doonie says. I made Hogan go back before his trial and steal this book. Told him, hell, you going to the joint anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  From under his bed, Doonie hefts a giant crimson volume, just smaller than the library dictionary and with gold-embossed lettering like some alchemist’s tome. It’s the first Physicians’ Desk Reference you’ve ever seen. He’s marked it with flat toothpicks at dozens of places.

  Don’t they keep that thing chained to the counter? you ask.

  Not like fence chain or anything. Just needed lightweight wire cutters like Mama totes in her glove box. Walked out the door with it tucked under his arm like that professor dog. What’s his name? Mr. Peabody.

  Doonie sits in the room’s center cross-legged in pajama bottoms, the book open on his lap, holding up various baggies and describing their contents. It’s his hobby, pharmaceuticals. The way other kids glue model airplanes together, Doonie pores over the PDR, thus undertaking the study of chemicals with a vigor he’ll never bring to the geometry you wind up tutoring him in.

  He says, Now here’s something meant to be what they call soporific. You gotta love the lingo, man. Soporific. Rhymes with so terrific. Don’t you write poetry or something? There’s a poem for you. (He grins up at the ceiling.) My soporific/ Is so terrific. You like that?

  Not a whole lot, you say, and it’s dawning on you that you’re not gonna be able to tell when Doonie’s actually kidding. So when he says—Wanna eat some soporifics and get nekked?—you don’t want to insult him by laughing outright at his audacity. You just say no thanks.