Cherry (6 page)

The bell jangled as he left. I watched him swing his leg over his bike and shove off down the sidewalk in a strip of sunlight. Long after he’d gone, I resisted the urge to snatch a handful of his clean yellow hair from my suddenly growing collection of John Cleary memorabilia.

Probably this unlikely brush with his grooming habits kept me coming back to the barbershop another day or so. But he never showed up again. No one my age did. Nor did I ever have a single customer. And I was, if not overtly lazy, quick to bore. The slow turning of
Field and Stream
pages (they allegedly hid the
Playboy
s in a drawer when I showed up) and the repetitive, metallic snip of Mr. DePello’s slender scissors on some bald guy’s tonsurelike fringe eventually wore me down to my natural, nail-biting state.

After I watched
Song of Bernadette
on TV that summer, I drew in my glitter-spackled book a picture of Jesus. For a while, I prayed ardently on my knees by my bedside—not yet for titties or for John Cleary to ask me to the couples’ skate, but for a best friend.

Only one girl showed outlaw tendencies nearly as wild as mine: Clarice Fontenot, who at thirteen had three years on me, which discrepancy didn’t seem to matter at first. The only obstacle to our spending every conceivable second together that summer was her Cajun daddy’s tight rein on her, which consisted of seemingly innumerable chores and capricious rules he ginned out.

The Fontenots lived in a celery-green house on the corner that seemed to bulge at its seams with her wild-assed brothers. They all slicked back their hair on the sides and walked with a sexy, loose-hipped slouch. If they looked at you at all, the glance came from the sides of
their faces. Like their tight-lipped father, they barely spoke, just radiated a sly disapproval.

Clarice’s role in that Catholic household seemed to be serving their needs. While they ran the roads, she scrubbed and hung laundry and baby-sat a variety of black-eyed cousins whose faces (like hers) were spattered with freckles as if flicked from a paintbrush. Her blights and burdens put me in mind of Cinderella’s, though Clarice rarely whined. Still, her circumstances defined her somehow, for her jittery, electric manner seemed to have formed itself solely to oppose both her station in life and her brothers’ quiet surliness.

Clarice would have hung out at my house every day for the abundant food and the air conditioning if not my somewhat peculiar company. But her daddy’s strictness was the stuff of neighborhood legend. A compact, steel-gray man, he was about the only guy on our block who didn’t do refinery work (I think he worked for the gas company). That he wore a tie to work made him not exotic but peculiar. No one’s daddy knew his schedule or ever heard him say more than a passing hey. Usually, Clarice could only play at my house an hour or so before she’d be called home for chores. I didn’t take these partings lightly.

Once she was back home, I’d patrol the strip of road before her house, skateboarding past palmettos and the dog run and back again, trying all the while to predict her return by the advance of her work. Window by window, the glass she was washing would lose its grease smears and begin to give back blue sky and flickers of sun when I rolled by. Or I’d watch through those windows while Clarice unhooked each venetian blind. I’d try to measure how long it would take for her to lower those blinds into the Clorox-fuming bathtub, to wash each slat, then towel it off and reappear to hang the blind, giving me an exasperated wave before moving to the next.

Sometimes her daddy just summoned her home for no reason. Which infuriated me. She’d joke that his fun-meter had gone off, some invisible gauge he had that measured the extent of her good time and sought to lop it off. He’d insist she stay in her own yard, and forbid me to cross over the property line. I’d pace their yard’s edge for an hour at
a pop, or just sit cross-legged along their hurricane fence line reading while their deranged German shepherd loped and bayed and threatened to eat my face off. From my lap I’d flip him the permanent bird using a Venus pencil to keep my fingers cocked in place. A few times, Clarice joined me in this border-holding action. She’d loiter in the heat on her side of the fence, glancing over her shoulder till her dad’s gray face slid into a window or his gravelly voice shouted her in.

Doubtless her daddy meant this all as some kind of protection. Plenty of girls her age “got in trouble,” and there were countless lowlife characters circling like sharks to pluck any unwatched female into libidinal activity in some hot rod or pickup truck. But my own parents were so lax about corralling me at all (“You can do anything you’re big enough to do,” Daddy liked to say) that I found Mr. Fontenot’s strictures mind-boggling. In my head I engaged in long courtroom soliloquies about him, at the ends of which he and his feckless sons were led away shackled while a gavel banged and Clarice and I hugged each other in glee.

Clarice bridled against her daddy’s limits but never actually broke the rules. She lacked both the self-pity and the fury I had in such abundance. She laughed in a foghorn-like blast that drew stares in public. She could belch on command loud enough to cause old ladies in restaurants to ask for far tables. I never mastered this. But thanks to her, I can whistle with my fingers, execute a diving board flip, turn a cartwheel, tie a slip knot, and make my eyeballs shiver like a mesmerist. While other people worried what would come of Clarice if she didn’t calm down, for me she had the absolute power of someone who fundamentally didn’t give a damn, which she didn’t (other than toeing her father’s line, which she seemed to do breezily enough).

My first memory of her actually comes long before that summer. It floats from the bleached-out time before I’d passed through the school doors and so had no grade levels by which to rank my fellows.

A cold sun was sliding down a gray fall sky. Some older boys had been playing tackle football in the field we took charge of every weekend. In a few years, they’d be called to Southeast Asia, some of them.
Their locations would be tracked with pushpins in red, white, and blue on maps on nearly every kitchen wall. But that afternoon, they were quick as young deer. They leapt and dodged, dove from each other and collided in midair. Bulletlike passes flew to connect them. Or the ball spiraled in a high arc across the frosty sky one to another. In short, they were mindlessly agile in a way that captured as audience every little kid within running distance of the yellow goalposts.

We could not help watching. Even after I stepped accidentally in a fire-ant nest and got a constellation of crimson bites on my ankles. Even after streetlights clicked on and our breaths began to spirit before us and to warm my hands I had to pull my arms from my sweatshirt sleeves, then tuck my fingers into my armpits so the sleeves flapped empty as an amputee’s. In fact, even once the game had ended, when the big boys had run off to make phone calls or do chores, we stayed waiting to be called for supper. I can almost hear the melamine plates being slid from the various cupboards and stacked on tile counters. But having witnessed the big boys’ game, we were loath to unloose ourselves from the sight of it.

It was before the time of stark hierarchies. Our family dramas were rumored, but the stories that would shape us had not yet been retold so often as to calcify our characters inside them. Our rivalries had not yet been laid down. No one was big enough to throw a punch that required stitches or to shout an invective that would loop through your head at night till tears made your pillowcase damp. Our sexual wonderings seldom called us to touch each other, just stare from time to time at the mystery of each other’s pale underpants or jockey shorts, which we sometimes traded looks at under a porch or in the blue dark of a crawl space. For years our names ran together like beads on a string, JohnandBobbieClariceandCindyandLittleMary (as opposed to Big Mary, who was Mary Ferrell). With little need to protect our identities from each other, we could still fall into great idleness together—this handful of unwatched kids with nowhere to be.

At some moment, Clarice figured out as none of us had before how to shinny up the goalpost.

That sight of her squiggling up the yellow pole magically yanks the
memory from something far-off into a kind of 3-D present. I am alive in it. There’s early frost on the grass, and my ant bites itch. Clarice’s limbs have turned to rubber as she wraps round the pole. She’s kicked off her Keds, so her bare feet on cold metal give purchase. About a foot at a time she scoots up, hauls herself by her hands, then slides her feet high. And again. She’s weightless as an imp and fast.

At the top of the pole, she rises balletic, back arched like a trapeze artist. She flings one hand up:
Ta-da,
she says, as if she were sheathed in a crimson-spangled bathing suit with fishnet hose and velvet ballet slippers, then again
ta-da.
We cheer and clap, move back to the ten-yard line to take her in better. This is a wonder, for her to climb so far above us. And there we align ourselves with the forces of awe that permit new tricks to be dreamed up on chilly fall nights when nothing but suppers of fried meat and cream gravy await us, or tepid baths.

For a few minutes, Bobbie Stuart tries to weasel up the other pole, but he’s too stiff. His legs jackknife out from under him, and his arms can’t hold his long thin body.

Then Clarice does something wholly unexpected for which she will be forever marked.

She sticks her thumbs in the gathered waistband of her corduroy pants with the cowgirl lassos stitched around the pockets. With those thumbs, she yanks both her pants and her undersancies down around her bare feet. She then bends over and waggles her butt at us as I later learned strippers sometimes do. Screams of laughter from us. John falls over and rolls on the ground like a dog, pointing up and laughing at her bare white ass, which still holds a faint tan line from summer.

We’ve just about got used to the idea of her butt when she executes another move. She wheels around to face us and show us her yin-yang, a dark notch in her hairless pudendum. Her belly is round as a puppy’s jutted forward. Then our howls truly take on hyena-like timbre. And there across the ditch, which marks the realm of adult civilization, appears the fast moving figure of Mrs. Carter through leaf smoke of a ditch fire. She’s holding the spatula in her hand with which she intends to blister our asses, Clarice’s most specifically.

But she’s a grown-up, Mrs. Carter. Her steps on the muddy slope are tentative. Not wanting to funk up her shoes with mud, she hesitates before she leaps across. And in that interval, Clarice slithers down the yellow pole and tears off in a streak. And the rest of us flee like wild dogs.

Decades later, I asked Clarice point blank why she did it. We were in our forties then, living two thousand miles apart, and talking—oddly enough—on our car phones. Her voice was sandpaper rough with a cold, but it still carried the shimmer of unbidden amusement. I’d only seen her every two or three years—the occasional holiday, at my daddy’s funeral, and after Mother’s bypass surgery when she kept vigil with me. Still, there’s no one who’d be less likely to tell me a flat-footed lie. Across the hissing static, I asked why she took her pants down that day, whether somebody had dared her to and I just didn’t remember.

The answer that she gave remains the truest to who she was and who I then so much needed her to be: “Because I could, I guess,” she said. “Wasn’t anybody around to stop me.”

M
OTHER’S OLD POWERS CAME BURBLING
up in her again that interminable summer, for the first time in years. She tore around so fired up about her schoolwork she left an almost visible trail of energy. She pored over books the way a thirsty person sucks down water. Even poking at a pot of mustard greens, she’d have some paperback on the Russian Revolution getting damp on the counter beside her. When I staggered out from sleep before dawn, I often found her studying calculus at the kitchen table, held in a cloud of Kool smoke like some radiant, unlikely Buddha.

“It’s a language,” she said of the math one morning, tapping her legal pad with the tip of the mechanical pencil. “I’ve never understood that. It’s a language that describes certain stuff really precisely.” Before I’d even rubbed the crust from my eye corners, she was prattling on about some old Greek named Zeno who fired an arrow at a target. Trouble was, he was trying to measure how it traveled in this really stilted way. So he cut up the line between the bow and the target—first into feet, then into inches, then half inches, then quarter inches, and so
on till the whole infinitesimal universe unfolded in that strip of air, multiplied. This didn’t seem like a language anybody would bother to talk. You want the butter passed, you don’t talk about arrows shooting. I said something to that effect.

But Mother was incandescent with the idea. Her green eyes shone. She ran her hand through her thick hair and left brief rows in the new white streaks. “You do if you’re trying to measure this line.”

“Why not just say it’s a line, thus and such long?”

“Because that doesn’t describe the whole thing. The rate of change. It’s a language for motion, speed. Like in those Pollock paintings. Movement.” Her hand cut arcs in the air. The number of pieces Zeno cut the line into approached infinity. The size of the pieces approached zero. Didn’t I see the beauty of that? I didn’t. I only wondered if the waffle iron was scrubbed out from the day before, and what manner of interest I’d have to feign in this before she’d whip up some batter.

“It’s called taking the limit. As
x
goes to zero and
n
to infinity. Get it? One’s going one way big forever, and the other’s going one way little forever?” I still didn’t. Her words washed over me as the words of every math teacher I’d ever had, like the blat of a flat-noted trombone. (Years later, a college math tutor would pick up this dropped thread, and I would let out a delayed belly laugh of understanding at the punchline of some ten-year-delayed joke.)

Some time after her calculus final, she bought roller skates like mine, the metal kind that clamped around your shoes, and went skating with me. She wobbled to a stand holding my arm. When she hung the key threaded on a brown shoestring around my neck, I briefly felt something like pride.