Cherry (21 page)

Meredith is also stout—not fat-girl stout, but well padded around her big-boned frame. This makes everything about her round—her face is round and shiny pink; her mint-colored eyes are round and heavy-lidded. Using your mother’s gauge for female success, she seems prettier than the smart girls, and smarter than the pretty ones. She also wears slung around her neck a leather thong bearing an orange clay disk slightly smaller than a saucer in circumference. It bears the word POT floating dead center in avocado-colored print. In the midst of the war whoops (which you refuse to actually whoop for) she carries herself—grinning, but with disaffected stateliness—to the very back corner of the bus. And there you leave her unmolested, though you spend some intervals picturing her tied to the center of a straw-filled bull’s-eye propped at a slant while you draw an arrow from your quiver.

She crops up in the auditorium during your recitation of “In Flanders Field”:

Miss Baird has charged you with several rather sweeping hand gestures. Your stiff arms wheel to indicate a flying lark; later, the arms spread low with palms up in a pose you think of as Christ-like. You intone the words “We are the dead” in a sort of cotton-mouthed manner stolen from Boris Karloff. (Years later, you’ll see these replicated on an airport tarmac: a man in a beige jumpsuit using two flashlights to wave a plane into place will send
In Flanders Field the poppies grow
tumbling through your head.)

Meredith slips out before some kid can perform his hysterical rendition of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which involves a lot of
head-whipping back and forth, his neck wiggly as a goose while he refrains: “Cannons to the right of me/Cannons to the left of me.…” At the awards assembly, you pick up a red ribbon. The only blue ribbon from your school goes (small wonder) to Meredith, who wins for some Shirley Jackson short story.

On the trip home, the students on the bus belt out songs that combine aboriginal hand clapping and foot stomping with tireless repetitions. Still, Meredith sits serene in back, her great, leonine head of curls tilted above Dostoevsky’s
Idiot,
a rarity since books by Russians can make teachers question you over vigorously about Communism. To see her reading a book by a foreigner emboldens you.

Anybody sitting here? you ask, holding onto the curved metal seat backs as you jostle.

No, she says. She’s almost got a grin on her face, but somehow seems far away, as if internally afloat in some glassy lake.

Her silence is formidable. You figure out after a few minutes that she’ll sit there sphinxlike until you prompt her again. You drum up a more provocative opener. I hear you’re a genius, you finally say.

You wait for her to deny this with a demure shake of her curly head, which denial you could then judge for its falsity. Instead, she gives a nod that strikes you as sage. This is true, she finally says.

You’re edged off balance by such certainty. She is, after all, the new girl, somewhat chubby and very oddly dressed. She should be beholden to any local who might deign to speak to her. Rather than solicitous gratitude, you’ve been faced with what you’ll come to call her Chinese empress pose.

I’m really smart too, you say. (The audacity of this forces you to shrug, as if shedding the great mantle of smartness you’re forced to bear.) You probably heard that already.

No, she says. I hadn’t.

Well, anyways, you say. We should be friends. These other people are idiots.

She nods again, saying, This is also true.

You ask her what religion she is, and when she says Baptist, you tell
her she’s too smart to be Baptist. She should be Buddhist like you and your mom. She snickers at this, saying, I’ll look into it.

The bus bobs along, and your mind lurches back to her not having heard you were smart.

You say, You didn’t hear I published a book of poems in fourth grade?

No, she says. She considers this for a few heartbeats. Finally she says, Fourth grade’s pretty young.

You sense some scant disapproval in her tone. Here you’d always figured that youth made your talent both more rare and your long-term prospects more certain. You’d collected stories about young writers from which to sip encouragement. You recount for her how Arthur Rimbaud at fourteen published some big deal poems.

Wasn’t he dead by twenty? Meredith says. Gangrene of the leg or something. In Africa.

Yeah, I remember that now, you say. (You never knew it.)

Meredith says, Milton thought he had to read everything before he was educated enough to write poems.

You scramble to think what you know about this name, Milton, which you skimmed past in your mother’s poetry anthology. You don’t even know if Milton’s his first or last name. You messed up that way once with Dante, which was one poet’s last name and another one’s first. You’ve lately stopped reading anybody who wrote earlier than Elvis because a distant idiom is harder to steal from.

Is he the dwarf, Milton? you finally say.

No that’s Pope. Milton’s the blind guy.
Paradise Lost.
His daughters had to write stuff down for him.

Well, anyway, you say. You look out the window at a field of rice, its sheaves of green leaning. Watching them, you remember a poem that you’re fairly sure she won’t know. You learned it off some standardized test, but they didn’t have poets’ names for fear that would lend test takers some clue:

You pause and scramble through your head for the next lines. You relocate yourself in the cafeteria where the test took place, how you stopped penciling in the empty bubbles, entirely stopped the test to memorize the lines—a contemporary poem was that rare a thing. Even in the relatively quiet test-taking room, you’d had to plug your ears, for even the heel clicks of the overseeing teacher were an intrusion.

Once again, you plug your ears—this time against the bus racket, as if to re-create the seashell roar from the moment you found the poem. Inside this roar, Meredith tugs your sleeve. You unplug your ears to the loud world, and she says:

Now Meredith stalls, and after a brief inward drifting, you find the final lines:

The bus rocks you both over the gritty roads of east Texas. Yet some immutable shift has altered the air around your bodies. Glib chatter is no longer possible. Your own need for braggadocio has been washed
away in that moment of reciting together. Meredith’s round eyes seem to have grown even rounder.

Nemerov, she says. Howard Nemerov.

That’s who wrote it? you ask. This is data of the rarest kind. With a name you can ask your mother to find his poems in the college library.

(Which your mother does. Once you discover that he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, you draft an obsequious fan letter over the next few weeks, asking Meredith to correct various versions. Eventually Nemerov writes back a typed letter of thanks and encouragement. And nearly ten years later, he’ll be lecturing in Boston, and you’ll introduce yourself, and he’ll shake your hand and stare with wonder and say, My God. You’re that little girl from Texas.)

Meredith continues to nod slowly at you, and you at her. You’re lost in some capsule of wonder that will sustain you both in years to come beyond anything you could hope for. When a smile breaks large across her moon face, something worthwhile has been granted.

W
HILE BOYS ARE CRUISING ROADS
in search of liquor or pussy or fistfights that can prove their adolescent prowess and vent their spleens, you and Meredith forge a friendship based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing virtually nothing. A camera trailing you would find neither plot nor action—two girls laze around on sofas in various stages of torpor reading or talking about what they will read or have read or plan to write or make or do in some vaporous future. Or dead silent in mutual paralysis, the two girls stare at a ceiling for hours, just watching idle thoughts drift by.

You languish on her mother’s sofa, Thomas Pynchon’s
V.
open on your chest. Meredith claims it’s the greatest book ever. You can’t get through the first chapter. Tedious as all get-out. Some sailor singing doodley-do sea chanteys and whatnot. In the Russian books at least if you write down the different names and nicknames, you can get a dim idea of who’s doing what to whom, and who the good guys are.

What we need’s a fainting couch, you say. Something in red velvet.
It’s the longest string of words you’ve uttered in what seems like hours. You’ve been listening to the air conditioner’s roar.

Victorian? Meredith asks. She seems to have names for distinctions you haven’t yet begun to make.

And of what does that consist?

‘Of what? Of what?’ The wild beast has some syntax.

I mean it. Edify me.

I think all those curvy frou-frouy couches are Victorian. You know, like they have at Snooper’s Paradise. A slopey thing. With fringe.

I also wouldn’t mind a barge, like Cleopatra. I could really go for a barge, with some Nubian slave boys to fan me with palm fronds. Gliding under leaves of…

Meredith looks up to say, Elephantine leaves.

Dripping elephantine leaves, you say. Then, This book is all turkey gobble. Tell me again what’s so great about it.

Language, mostly. It’s a world created rather than a world described.

Come again.

He’s not trying to copy anything that’s real.

So he’s just making shit up?

Yep.

And that’s an upside thing?

Don’t read it if you don’t like it. I loved it.

You saying I’m not smart enough to read this. I’m just your noble savage friend.

More savage than noble, she says. I personally think you’re adorable. Extremely cute.

Cute is for poodles. I want to be dark and enigmatic.

You’re absolutely dark and cutely enigmatic. One of the untapped mines of literary genius.

This kind of banter is part of an unspoken contract whereby Meredith will pat you on the head a few times before she actually undertakes explaining whatever book has stumped you. The charade somehow dilutes the fact that the most meritory opinions invariably stem
from Meredith. Without this oblique shoring up, the friendship would consist of her lecturing while you take notes.

Meredith finally says, Like the whole V thing. It keeps coming back up and back up—geese flying in a V, somebody’s shirt open to show their chest, the triangle of pubic hair. It accrues power, meaning. It becomes something.

And what exactly is the V thing?

Well, it’s a lot of stuff. It’s death, I guess, the arrowhead we’re all flying in…

From obscurity to oblivion. From this fucking suckhole to anywhere else on the goddamn planet. Tell me why if you don’t believe in God, how come you refuse to cuss?

Because I’m pure, untainted. My lips unsullied by obscenity.

And I’m the fucking whore of Babylon.

Cuss your brains out. It doesn’t bother me a bit.

Say fuck, c’mon.

I don’t want to.

What if you were in a play by T. S. Eliot, and a character had to say
fuck,
would you just not do it? Up and walk offstage? Leave your fellow thespians sputtering?

That’s not Eliot’s vocabulary.

But what if? Okay, who
would
say fuck? Other than me, of course, in my little foulmouthed self?

I don’t know. Maybe Beckett. Not Oscar Wilde or Eugene O’Neill—

These are people I don’t know.

Remember that two-person scene that Stephen kid from Beaumont did? Endless. Him and this other guy swishing around? Tugging off each other’s cowboy boots and putting them back on?

Waiting for Lefty?

For Godot.
Waiting for Godot
. That’s Beckett.

That didn’t make any fucking sense either. And I don’t remember anybody saying fuck. C’mon now, say it just the once.

In such ways do your days unwind in a haze of aimless blabbing with Meredith’s literary opinions introducing intervals of quality.

Every now and then someone tries to spur you both into a project. Mrs. Bright will ask why you don’t go play putt-putt in the scalding heat, or your own mother will suggest drawing. To such ideas, you’ll both jovially claim to be “depressed out of our minds.” But depression as you bear it is less pathology than a kind of cerebral accessory.

Long, long are the hours of each leaden day for girls who’ve sworn to devote their entire beings to what they call “the life of the mind,” but who find themselves unfairly stranded in a town where the proudest sign in the library is one proclaiming every extant issue of
Popular Mechanics.

The art forms or projects you occasionally rally to are markedly static and wholly conceptual, demanding nothing more than talk. After Meredith’s brother Michael brings home an underground comic called
Despair,
you spend hours concocting static theatrical tableaux that you’ve no real plans to perform, staged and epigrammatic scenes each a minute or so long.

Let’s say the curtain opens on a man and woman. She looks outside an upstage window, and both his hands clench the overstuffed chair arms. (
Both
hands: this is high drama.) There are small empty cans that once held Vienna sausage all over the coffee table and two plastic forks. She says, Harry, where’s Asia? He says, I don’t know. Let’s find it on the globe. She says, Where’s the globe? He says, It was burnt with all the other things. The curtain closes.