Cherry

by Mary Karr

  Basically, you say.

  In truth, your asking advice from your mother has become so rare she doubtless wants to savor it, so she takes a minute before answering. She thumbs the butt of her cigarette out the side window so sparks whoosh behind her profile. She says, Well, baby, you either got it or you don’t.

  After a while, you say, Well we know Lecia’s got it.

  Seems like, Mother says. Definitely.

  What about me? Do I ‘got it’?

  Absolutely. No question about it. By the boatload. By the time you’re thirty—

  Thirty! Christ why don’t you just say by the time I’m dead?

  No, I just mean. Well, you were a later bloomer—

  You hold up your hand like a traffic cop, saying, Say no more—

  She says, You’re gonna be one of those women who’s always real little. You’ll stay skinny like your daddy—and you won’t get any wrinkles. You’ll just get skinnier and better looking without sprawling out all over your ass. Getting pones on your legs, and so forth.

  When I’m thirty? You say. When I’m thirty? Fabulous. That gives me thirteen years of celibacy before I start getting any johnson. (In truth, it’s not johnson you want, but you have no other vocabulary for wanting.)

  Anybody else’s mother would have slapped your face for talking that way, but your mother’s dearth of maternal impulse permits her an ironic distance. Like you’re not really her daughter, just some interesting kid she hooked up with. Oh she worries, of course, but there’s no spine in it—and no threat of intervention, nor even firm opinion.

  Finally, she says, Aw hell, Mary, you’ll be beating them back with a stick way before then.

  This will turn out not to be true. But the alacrity with which she says it feels like a longed-for pat on your greasy head.

  So you ride home strangely placated. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. If you’d glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  MEREDITH BRIGHT IS THE PERFECT FRIEND—budding genius and playwright. She doesn’t complain when you keep her John Lennon record for nearly two months. Plus you can usually muscle her into skipping school even days when she has a chem test. Top student. But such perfection is costly for its bearer. Even as you celebrate her departure for a top college, you can sense some payment is coming due. Will be expected from her. Extracted.

  Who saw it coming?

  You two cackle overmaniacally at her house that night. Her mother is off wherever her mother went, and you two are about to consume scads of worry-obliterating dope.

  Now Janis Joplin’s gritty voice from Pearl (“Freedom’s just another word for/Nothing left to lose…”) blares grittier still from the record player’s tinny single speaker. And that beep of the horn in the driveway is your daddy dropping off tacos for you both. When Meredith opens the door, he says, Don’t you look like a little angel standing there.

  She takes the bag and edges out on the porch a little to stand as a receptive audience for Daddy’s counsel, for he cannot come within spitting distance of you without launching into nagging advice of the most nerve-wracking kind. On his way to his truck, he’s saying: Put on some house shoes. You’ll take sick running barefoot on that cold floor. And eat those while they warm. Chop you up a raw onion.…

  You hide behind the door, whispering to Meredith, Come on in. You’re just egging him on.

  But when you tug her elbow, she shakes loose, repeating what he just said as if it’s a pearl of great price while resolutely holding the bag, which darkens with creeping grease.

  He climbs into his green truck saying, You girls lock those doors when y’all get ready to lay down. The truck backs out about one tire’s rotation before it stops, and he leans out yelling, You look like a little girl out there in your pajamas, Miss Meredith. About ten years old.

  In the tremulous neon green light of Meredith’s bathroom, you watch her untwist the razor’s stem at the bottom so the safety hinges on top open.

  Like a magic doorway, Meredith says.

  More like a crocodile mouth, you say. Isn’t it the crocodile that both jaws open up on? With the gator only having flip-top action?

  Meredith says, I think so. But her voice arrives as if spoken in a trance. She pinches the safe ends of the metal and draws it out, holding it up so light shines through the oddly shaped die cut in the center. (Is it really Gillette Super Blue, or is that just the brand you most used back then?) Meredith’s mother leaves her alone so much because she exudes some Anglo-Saxon competence. She’s never actually been expelled like you.

  She’s also inordinately well read for her economic station and geographical placement. Maybe your combined respect for her intellect and physical powers persuades you that she knows what she’s doing, even if you don’t. Also, suicide has become integral to the jargon that you and Stacy and Meredith deal in. You all three joke about swinging off beams, or laying down on train tracks. Buying the farm.

  In the bathroom’s neon, she talks sagely about how serious suicide would call for wrists sliced the long way, rather than sawing lightly side to side, which she plans now to undertake. Unstitchable, the long way. This exercise is not that dark endeavor. No, this is cutting, and she claims to have perfected it. Mr. Provost in physiology always raved about her dissections. Delicate as a surgeon, he said. Your efforts to embroider blue jeans always leave a bramble of thread on both surfaces, with snags and puckers every which way.

  You don’t actually wonder why she invited you into this. Again, notions of suicide threaded many of your conversations. People also tend to invite you into the clandestine event, rituals that would fill most people with sweaty trepidation. You do feel a little breathless looking at her plump wrist, for the prospect of it razored and bleeding seems like butchery. But the whole scene also holds you in morbid wonder. (Maybe your mother’s flirtation with suicide is evoked, and you witness this scene played out with some semblance of control, as if this time you’re mastering it. You’ll see it without blinking, stand resolute before it without stifling a scream. As a kid outside a locked bathroom, you lacked such self-possession.)

  You say, Just promise me you won’t cut the long way. Or deep. You said not deep. Then you try not to stare at the criss-cross scabs on the other wrist, which seem inflamed at the edges though Meredith swears devotion to two antiseptics. You noticed the band-aids under her cuff today. That’s when she’d told you about the cutting.

  On the other wrist, veins the color of bright sky are embedded. She lowers the razor’s edge to that milky spot. Even this makes you wince, and she hesitates as if in deference to that. How you suck air between your teeth. It’s a breach you might step into, an interval for a protest.

  Finally she says, I haven’t even done it yet.

  You ask for the umpteenth time doesn’t it hurt.

  She says no, but in that offhanded way of one reading from a sheet. Then, You wanna try it? You’ll see it’s no big deal.

  Oh hell no. I’m not doing it. It hurts me to see you do it.

  (Why were you there? You’ll justify it later by saying she insisted you come as witness, but you’ve no specific memory of that.)

  Some nasty taste is globbing up your mouth—viscous and bitter. You don’t move as she swipes one light stroke at her wrist, not too deep, the thin line oozing crimson in the skin. Then she criss-crosses a few times, beads of blood gathering along each slice.

  That’s enough, you say. It’s freaking me out.

  But Meredith doesn’t seem to be listening. Her head has fallen forward as if she’s praying.

  Afterward, the wounds will foam under the sheer splash of peroxide. Then she’ll dip a small glass wand in some orange medicine to swipe on. You’ll help her stick the oversize band-aids to her wrists.

  A decade hence, when you ask her what purpose this cutting served, she’ll claim there seemed no other way to get rele
ase. By then, you’ll know she suffered from what Churchill called the black dog. You all did. You’ll be conversant with symptoms like blunt affect; the virtues of exercise-induced endorphins; understand how exogenous depression (caused by outward losses) opposes the endogenous (the brain you were born with).

  What you won’t know—ever—is who you were at sixteen that you failed to stop your best friend from mutilating herself. Couldn’t you have told someone? Or just left the room? Surely witness is tacit approval. What was that elegant, self-condemning sentence Michael Herr wrote in Dispatches about being a journalist in the carnage of Vietnam? I was there to watch.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  IN FALL, REMOTE COLLEGES ONCE AGAIN let swing their low-swooping scythes over Leechfield proper, harvesting the few remaining pals left in your area code. The year before, all the boys left; this fall every dear girl clears out. Those who were once leaving in a few months or weeks or days seem to vanish in an eyeblink.

  Only Doonie remains. And by now, he’s so swarmed on by sloe-eyed blonds and so-called business associates (read: gangsters) that you mostly see him in motion—either entwined serpentlike with some teen beauty queen in the backseat of your mother’s car heading home from the concert you drove to stoned, or he’s flying past in the shotgun seat of some jacked-up hot rod so fast his profile trails vapor.

  Thus you’re left with various snapshots of departure that you mentally fondle in the scooped out days to follow the way a film aficionado replays scenes for detail.

  Like this: Stacy climbs the bus steps in the blurry stop-action that prompts you to address her first letter to “Dude Ascending the Staircase”—a joke on Marcel Duchamp so ubiquitous that someone eventually makes a postcard of it. Through smoked glass, her solid shape moves behind the heads of strangers while your throat tightens. Dan drives Meredith away from her house in afternoon scorch, while she leans her head back into the open window so her waves of copper hair trail flapping behind her like some shredded flag.

  Even Clarice goes away, albeit metaphorically. When at the church altar during her wedding (you were maid of honor), she turns to hand you her waterfall bouquet of white roses and baby’s breath, you’d just finished whispering how it wasn’t too late to bolt, your car being just outside. But she instead turns away, promising to love, honor, and obey a young soldier who often looks at you slantwise as if he might eventually spy the horns he suspects under your hair or the scaly tip of your long prehensile tail withdrawing under your floor-length gown. (This is pure projection—he never says boo to you.)

  This loneliness sets you loose on a spiritual path, for after so many goodbyes and so many hungover mornings, you long for some steady state. Please let the boat stop rocking, you write in your journal. That’s how you wind up swearing off drugs—not as part of a conscious reform program (for you never link drug use either to your mind state or to any harrowing experience). You just sign up for transcendental meditation class (aka TM) at a local technical college. A letter you get from Raphael claims you’re just looking for some self-induced buzz the pigs won’t toss you in the tank for. Absolutely.

  The head TM honcho asks initiates to stay dope-free for some weeks prior to the ritual induction when mantras are doled out. Dope- free, you think. No big effort.

  Not smoking pot turns out to be easy if you don’t leave the house. This isolated spate of clean living also prompts a Get Me into College Please God program that involves rereading Russian novels between slaving over letters to your girlfriends, who, from their respective colleges, actually write immediately and keep the mailbox stuffed.

  But you dodge and wheedle and hand-wring to avoid the one college entry task you absolutely must undertake: the college essay, a document so dreaded that you repeatedly lose application forms from every school—some more than twice. Each time you send off for a new form, you picture some malevolent clerk who actually keeps track of your requests, citing each incident in your file with the note—Poor organizer!

  Finally you tire of the effort toward virtue, and thus you wake one Saturday to your rat’s nest of hair in the smudgy bathroom mirror—in response to which you think, Fuck it, I’m going to the beach. Next thing you know, you’re standing in wet sand under nail-headed stars having smoked some head-fogging hash. (In the absence of a hash pipe, somebody heated wide knife blades in the fire, pressing them together over little thumbnail nuggets of hash so smoke rises from the crossed blades in a hissing fury that you all lean over and snuff down like wolves.)

  You feel vaguely guilty the day you set off for the TM initiation Lecia calls Nirvana-rama. But that hash was Your Absolute Last Time with Unprescribed Chemicals. It’s fall of senior year, the last year of your long sentence in this spirit-frying inferno. The day is blue-skyed and sparkling, since in the night a freak cold snap brought an ice storm that sheathed backyard foliage with hard rime.

  You’d imagined that some reverence would infuse the ritual, but the doe-eyed college boy who inducts you has set an unlikely stage with the altar he’s created—a batik bedspread draped over what looks like a TV tray. It’s there you lay your mother’s check along with a snap-frozen azalea withering to black and a handful of Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice—both of which seem inordinately paltry and last-minute as holy offerings go. But when the instructor starts chanting mumbo jumbo with his eyes rolled up in his head, you gaze around the room half embarrassed for him. (As an adult, it will stun you that most bizarre encounters with virtual strangers from this period could have ended by your simply leaving, walking away—an option you exercised by running off from various relationships but that never occurred to you in real time.) You don’t feel like a bodhisattva. You feel like a chump.

  Still, you give meditation a go for nearly a week, morning and night for ten or so minutes (you were supposed to do fifteen or twenty). But enlightenment is coming at such a snail’s pace, and your senior year is stretching out so long before you that soon you’re gobbling down a black molly pre–SAT testing because you need a little boost. Then you’re blowing a little boo to take the edge off, and etcetera.

  By now, the streets of Leechfield are closely patrolled for unwary teens holding dope. So every time you drive under an overpass and see (surprise!) some cop car like a low-lying cobra waiting to strike at your tripping or otherwise medicated self, your own brief jail stint flashes bright inside to kickstart cardiac overdrive. You wind up eating perfectly good joints while uttering prayers that you’re certain no Great Spirit of the Cosmos would venerate with attention. (Later you’ll decide that desperate, self-serving prayers must surely predominate, and that foxhole spirituality is perhaps the only kind anyone gets.)

  Though your romantic travails are scant, a few stray heads steer you to concerts or through dope parties.

  Then Doonie introduces you to a catlike guitarist everybody calls Little Hendrix for the laid-back, willowy moves he carves out with his body onstage and for the Fender Stratocaster he can play (already, at eighteen) with his teeth. He inserts your name in enough rock songs at the strip mall’s Battle of the Bands (which he of course wins) that you find yourself standing backstage any time he warms up for or jams with some headliner like Johnny or Edgar Winter. You master the disaffected, I’m-with-the-band pose that makes it extremely easy to picture yourself—resplendent in Edwardian hippie regalia—on the cover of Rolling Stone.

  About that romance little will survive, for you both stayed fairly bleary from the abundant drugs his hangers-on doled out. You will remember he bathed in some herbal stuff that sparked fantasies of Eden and resulted in a game for making love in the shower that you would ever after call Tropical Rain Forest. When he swayed above you in bed, that same fragrance made a small curtained room that held your two faces.

  You even transfer illegally to his school—the crosstown rival high where Doonie also goes. You just lie to the registrar that your family has moved, and so your checkered records are mailed from Leechfield. Within a month of carpooling with Doonie and
Little Hendrix every day, blowing joints with his entourage in the parking lot at seven A.M., he goes back to his college girlfriend. She looks like Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet, drives a white Mercury Cougar, and has her own apartment in Austin. Bummer.

  Little Hendrix’s baby sister, who worshiped the ex-girlfriend, even dropped a dime on you at the registrar’s, ratting you out about your parents’ true address, so you were ignominiously sent packing. Back to your old high school. Your old self. Double-dog Bummer.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  YOUR CRUSH ON LITTLE HENDRIX fades out in a whiff of smoke and sulfur, but he blesses you with a lingering thirst for good blues.

  That’s how one legendary night you travel to Effie’s Go-Go, a black juke joint in the bowels of Beaumont behind the shipyards where no underage girl of any color should be granted admission. You drive there flaming so luminously on orange sunshine that dark trees on the roadside seem to rear back to let you pass, and your bare arms and hands glow in the car’s hull like fine marble.

  You go with the new kid in town—a boy maybe higher than you—and with his putative girlfriend, Ann. Let’s call him Augustus Maurice Schuck—a curlicued moniker no less astonishing than his real name or the self behind it. Augustus is a tall and chubby-cheeked, flamboyantly gay creature (albeit not yet officially uncloseted) with brown corkscrew ringlets that are a white man’s answer to a Jheri-Kurl.

  Augustus strode into drama class the first day of senior year wearing hot pants held up by flag-print suspenders. The clogs on his feet clopping like horse’s hooves caused every head to crane toward him. He’d just moved there from Houston and shared an apartment with his mother and drag-queen brother, who carried his makeup in a metal box designed for fishing tackle, and who was more adroit than Lecia at gluing on the Bambi-esque false eyelashes popular in discos back then.