Cherry (10 page)

But in reality, Lecia was steering us to the highway that led to Mother’s art class. The streetlights chopped up the night in a regular staccato, with her face flickering through the bright patches. Her forehead was tight, and there was a hard set to her jaw.

“You think Adam Phaelen’s cute?” I finally said.

“Like you read about,” she said with just half her attention. “Cute isn’t the word.”

I kept thinking about his full mouth. At night in bed, I practiced kissing the fleshy part of my hand at the base of my thumb. That’s how I trained for the real kiss Adam Phaelen would doubtless plant on me, once he snapped out of his cologne-soaked fog and twigged to the Inner Beauty that Mother swore shone out of my liquid brown eyes.

A red traffic light above an intersection bobbed in the wind. Lecia eased to a stop without a hitch and downshifted to first gear. “Why in hell”—she said—“would they string up this many traffic lights in a town when there’re no cars?”

“There are cars here,” I said, “just not after it gets dark.” I was working my way up to what I thought of as The Big Question. The light slipped to green, and Lecia eased into the intersection. She was getting slick at it.

Finally, I said, “Would you give it up for Adam Phaelen?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Give it up. For Adam Phaelen,” I said.

“Don’t be ignorant,” she said. I looked at her soft profile in the dashboard light, the big bubble of black hair net above her face inflating her head size overmuch.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a don’t be ignorant. Jesus. Adam Phaelen’s twenty-one years old.”

Actually he was twenty-two. On his birthday, I’d caught sight of him at a high school football game when I’d gone to pee. He was staggering around under the bleachers wearing a black gabardine suit with his tie all unhitched and a crimson red brocade vest, from which he’d untucked a half-pint of cherry brandy. You could make out on his neck above his shirt collar a love bite the size of a half dollar. He’d called me
little sister
in a rusty voice that made the stars lurch.

“You want a guy with experience,” I finally said. “Otherwise, they hurt you.”

“They hurt you anyways,” Lecia said, “the first time anyway. Experience or no.”

Many nights, I’d listened through the heating vents to Lecia and Nickie Babin discussing the mysteries of being deflowered. That’s how they talked about it. Something you owned was stolen, something of worth ruined. You never could get it back. And your whole market value as a female unit took a subsequent plummet. (Such talk conjured a prickly burr in my own gauzy sexual wonderings, for a long ago evening had left me fearing for the state of my own cherry.) Through the truck window that night, I watched a phone line laze in a low-sloping arc between poles.

“I got news for you,” Lecia finally said. “Adam Phaelen wouldn’t fuck you with somebody else’s dick.” Then she asked, “What are you talking like this for?”

“Just wondering,” I said. We heaved to a stop by the fried chicken stand, where a pullet hen in a crouched running posture circled all night. Now why didn’t somebody flip the switch to turn that thing off when they flipped the closed sign at the glass door?

“Well quit it,” Lecia said. “That’s all we need. You giving it up.”

“I was actually wondering about
you
giving it up,” I said.

“Well I’m not giving it up. Not to Adam Phaelen or anybody, anyhow. Jesus. Where do you get this shit?”

“It’s natural to wonder, Mother says it’s how we’re made,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” she said. After a long silence she added, “And get unmade that way. You’ll be in junior high soon for chrissakes.”

We must have driven in silence mostly after that. The gray road came at us in segments through the fog we drove into and out of. Many veils lowered across our windshield were torn away. At no time along the roadside did Mother’s yellow station wagon appear. When we reached the college parking lot, it was bereft of cars.

But somehow in the process of driving, the early rushes of terror about Mother had dulled down. Maybe it was the moist air, or that glimpse of Adam Phaelen. But the minute the truck wheels rolled silently back into the dark garage (Lecia had killed both engine and headlights to sneak back), the fear came back again even sharper inside me. (“Like stabbing a stab wound,” the poet Thomas Lux once wrote.)

Lecia seemed less worried than disgusted with the whole endeavor. Her hands made a strong stirrup to heave me back up to our window slot, after which she bench-pressed the pillowcase full of books we’d used. I hadn’t noticed how fragrant the night was till I slid back in air-conditioned dark, away from honeysuckle and wisteria and cape jasmine. The house smelled of mildew and my sister’s sweat. She fell asleep right off. I sat up with Daddy’s flashlight thumbing the old Shakespeare for sonnets to learn.

We’d used the volume as a booster seat so I could reach the plywood table as a toddler. Its cover was a weathered navy cloth with a massive water stain on the front. Cardboard showed through the corners. But any speech I learned from there could charm Mother into still attention—a rare state for her. With a sheet draped over one shoulder and a laurel wreath of twisted florist wire, I made an ignoble Mark Antony.

I balanced the book on my pubic bone and pinched the flashlight under my neck. At first I couldn’t actually read without Mother’s absence rushing back to distract me. Still the book’s weight alone anchored me with a strange comfort. I kept thumbing the onionskin pages for the pictures alone. There was a triad of Weird Sisters over a kettle.
There was a dwarf with the face of a frog. The footnotes—absorbed in a glance—began to sink in first.

These realms were rife with monsters, but there was odd solace in them. The woods and castles and battlefields seemed to carry definite rules of comport, orders everyone adhered to. But for kings and queens and nobility, everyone seemed to stay put where you’d left them.

Before I even knew it, I was slowing down, starting a kind of blind search, skimming first one passage then another with the urgent attention of a wizard over a book of spells. I wanted some entrance to those dominions, some language to say what I was mute to.

I don’t know whether it was that night or some other I found the soliloquy from
Richard the Second.
I only know that finding it let me sail off some blind cliff face into full-blown flight:

Sure the passage was dark. But in my somewhat magical system of thought, pessimism served as a hedge against disaster. Think the worst, and you stave it off.

I read and reread the passage, covering verses with my palm then checking a line at a time what I could remember. Next to me, my sister was sawing metaphorical toothpicks. In the far room my cowboy daddy was equally clean of thought. I was the only one awake, for I was growing into a worrier, a world-class insomniac, what one friend would later call a grief-seeking missile.

I
WANDERED FROM BED ALL
sleep sodden and crusty eyed to find Mother sitting placidly at the plywood table over a sketch pad, the charcoal stick in her hand aslant over the paper’s rough field. She held out her arms to fold me into a warmth that stilled the body-thrumming worry I’d woken up with.

Daddy shuffled around the kitchen fixing his mess kit and thermos for work while Mother told Lecia and me the truncated version of the night before—how a man on a thruway turnaround had attacked and abducted her in the car. I never understood quite why Daddy only heard certain stories in abridged form, but could predict the expanded version coming by the silence we sat in till he hugged us all and picked up his truck keys. Soon as the engine revved up, Mother reached for her smokes, and it all poured out.

“He just popped up out of the ditch,” she said. She’d been idling on the turnaround while headlights passed when the car door yanked open, and he shoved her down. He put his fat knee in her middle, then socked her hard enough to leave a bruise the size of a serving spoon on her left
cheekbone. Above it was a small moon-shaped cut that Mother claimed matched the horseshoe ring he wore. (Daddy would say a fella wearing a ring like that was all hat and no cattle.) Then the guy tore open her flower-print blouse before backhanding her again for good measure.

All this was near impossible to picture, and Mother’s cool, indifferent tone didn’t add to the reality of it. She was flat-eyed as a reptile, as if some screen were lowered behind her irises. The whole deal came out with no more feeling than the average book report.

I pulled my knees up inside my string T-shirt, and the stretched-out neckhole of that shirt showed my own titless chest. The untrammeled view went clear past where boobs should have been to the elastic top of my panties. I quick put my bare feet down on the cool linoleum.

“He choked around my neck,” Mother said. Her square fingers went to her throat. Its necklace of red marks looked more like hickies than fingerprints.

“That would’ve scared me big time,” Lecia said. It’s her confidential adult voice, intimate but nonchalant. (More and more now, Mother talks to her like she’s some sorority sister, and Lecia answers back that way.)

“I fought him and wrestled around and clawed at his face,” she said. “He had a fat, wadded-up kind of face. Very German-looking. His big beer belly pressed down in my middle. He said, ‘I love it when they fight.’” Mother looked off sideways, as if for intervention from some unseen bystander.

He shoved her over and got behind the wheel. He said his name was Dutch. On his right forearm was the tattoo of a great gear wheel with big square teeth. Dutch was a talker, it turned out. He couldn’t stop yakking about all the things he was fixing to do to my mother.

“Like what?” I wanted to know. The back door was open to a noisy summer thunderstorm. All the plants danced and shimmied under the rain.

“You
know,”
Lecia said. But I was a vulture for morbid detail, the result of reading by flashlight under my covers at night
Sergeant Rock
comics, where you could see soldiers flayed and dismembered and blown—as the Sarge said—to smithereens.

“Don’t be a dipshit,” Lecia said again. A flash of lightning made the backyard surge up in its jungle colors before dimming down again under the gray rain. She stood on one leg like a crane with her other foot propped on the opposite knee.

“He said he’d left women dead in ditches before,” Mother said. Thunder clapped, and I felt my forehead clamp onto that thought—
women dead in ditches.

“I would’ve just jumped out,” I said. “Jumped and rolled and hit the ground running.” It was a Batgirl move I could picture executing with catlike grace, cape flapping behind as I loped down the highway toward the cruiser I’d conjured there.

“Never happen,” Lecia said. She pulled out a column of Saltines not yet torn into and did we want some. We didn’t.

“He was in the fast lane, or I would’ve, “ Mother said.

Lecia tore open the wax paper. She started crumbling that whole tube of crackers into a crockery bowl.

“I knew what he was after,” Mother said. “Said he was ‘a high octane sex fiend.’ That was his phrase.” Lecia was pouring buttermilk on her cracker crumblings, mushing them up with a spoon.

Till that moment, my mind had blurred past the sexual nature of the attack. I’d heard the tale as one of a deranged killer. The urge to choke the life out of my mother was somehow more palatable than some oaf wanting to rape her.

Lightning flashed again. “That was close,” Lecia said. She started counting out loud to see if the storm was moving toward us or away.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi…

I asked Mother couldn’t she just have kicked this guy in the nuts? This was the recommended wisdom when facing rape. Knee him in the cojones. Though I’d never actually witnessed anybody doing it, I’d seen a fastball landing in a little league catcher’s crotch bow the fellow up like a cut worm.

“I couldn’t get to his balls,” Mother said. “I was scared shitless. He was gonna
this,
he was gonna
that,
” Finally she told him she
wanted
to go with him, got him convinced.

This was maybe the most boggling fact in the whole story. How would you convince a man with a gear wheel tattooed on his forearm of your ardor for him, especially when your shirt was torn half off and your face bleeding where he’d popped you? Mother waved her hand as if to shoo something off. “He wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the tree,” she said. She told him she had money for a bottle if he’d just pull over at the package store. When he did, she jumped out and started yelling, and he took off the other way, toward the rice fields. The guy in the liquor store grabbed his shotgun and went after him. Mother got behind the counter with the guy’s wife, who called the law.

It turned out Dutch was fast for a fat man. Before the liquor store guy could get his weapon shouldered, he made out Dutch’s figure on the other side of the barb wire, scrambling over the top of one of those rice levees. Like a cockroach, the guy said. He’d got that far.

Through the window I watched the knotted honeysuckle and the broad leaf of the banana plant pelleted with fat rain. A hard rain blown in from the Gulf could set all the leaves in the world adance. It was worrisome. Our house lacked real foundations. Like all the houses I knew, it had only squat stacks of brick to prop us a few feet off the spongy ground and keep us dry when water rose. Probably the support beams didn’t actually shake with thunder, but I remember it so—the rattle of windows coming unputtied in their panes and the asbestos siding that held us together starting to shiver.