Cherry (25 page)

Miss Gacy follows you through the doorway, saying, Just a minute. She pulls the door shut after, so the two of you stand alone in the shadowed
cool of the glazed hallway. You arrange your face into the snide untouchable expression of one about to receive another in a long series of metaphorical ass-whippings.

She says, I just want you to know, they’re doing this on purpose, with a goal in mind, and I think it’s unfair.

The obliquity of her wording doesn’t escape you. She’s saying that Mr. LeBump has fixed you in his sights and will pull the trigger anytime he gets a clear shot. They want you out, not suspended but expelled, and for good.

The enormity of Miss Gacy’s generosity in letting you in on this, however indirectly, is hard to convey. The action has the political resonance of a narcotics cop taking a drug dealer aside mid-bust to say her civil rights are being violated.

And Miss Gacy is your least expected champion, being about a million years old, cursed with a thin comb-over hairdo and the bad breath that seems to plague any teacher who winds up bending over close to help. You suck at math and suspect they only keep you in the advanced class so it won’t be all boys and Ruth Gallagher. You should be grateful for Miss Gacy’s shocking confidence. Instead, it upends the entire cosmos and the frailty of your constructed self which relies wholly on stereotypes, black-and-white judgments.

You tell Miss Gacy it’s okay. Then you give her the ancient lie of adolescents everywhere (which she can’t possibly, after her years of teaching, still swallow): That you don’t care.

But you should care, she says. And as you stare flatly at her, she lays a palsied hand on your forearm. The humanity of this touch shoots along your arm like thin lightning. She says, You’re not a bad girl.

This gentleness shapes a compact knot in your throat, and your eyes start to well the hallway blurry, for nothing is more shocking in that environment than unbidden care.

You turn your back to her and head toward the office in what you hope appears a casual amble. Soon as you round the corner from her sight, you duck into the smoky girls’ room, lock yourself in the first stall
and bend over, fighting sobs, and what is wrong with you, snap out of it, for God’s sake.

Later at the sink, washing your face in cool water, you glance up at the shrunken image staring quizzically back from the industrial mirror. How little you’ve actually changed since junior high.

Miss Gacy’s insight also sets your scalp aprickle. For the first time this year (perhaps ever), you fear for your prospects. Before, you assumed you’d skate through high school like Lecia—the underachiever who won’t play the game but still pulls off A’s, her flippance endured for the sake of the shimmering promise she embodies. But flippance in one so unaccomplished grates, and promise loses its sheen if it goes undelivered long enough.

Plus the pharmaceuticals just trickling into some student bodies will hit flood capacity by fall, and this will strike such horror in administrators who’ve only toyed with suspending you so far that their tactics for suspected druggies will get more radical and involve civil authorities.

But even this fleeting shiver of helplessness won’t edge you one millimeter from your plotted course with LeBump.

Outside his office, the line of chairs holds the usual boys who list and study their feet—one saying
Hey,
another
You again.
My peer group, you think, with no small parcel of chagrin. Two of these are large boys with mysterious scars and inked icons on their forearms, boys you and Lecia used to swim and steal watermelons with in the summers. Within the week, they’ll be arrested for robbing liquor stores with sawed off shotguns, the paper claiming they called themselves Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. First felony arrest. State pen. Double-digit sentence.

In LeBump’s office, he says, Miss Karr, you’ve failed to come equipped with the proper undergarments.

You ask him, sir, to repeat the charge. You’re secretly picturing the college you’ll soon vanish into—some leafy place with broad playing fields and girls in plaid skirts and cheerful Irish groundsmen cheerfully snipping at hedges saying, top of the morning to you, little miss.

You’re distracting the boys, Miss Karr. Proper undergarments are required.

You inventory yourself for what you’ve done wrong. Skirt and Capricorn T-shirt and sandals that neither flip nor flop.

I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following.

He leaves his desk and comes back with Miss Smith from the guidance office across the hall. Mr. LeBump closes the door. He says, You tell her, then starts staring out the window like some jail guard turning the volume down on the torture session before it kicks in.

A brassiere, Mary, she says. You have to come to school wearing a proper bra.

It’s distracting the boys, he says.

You ponder what can be said that’s enough of a fuck you. (The problem with fuck you’s in this sort of place is that you habituate them; they lose their potency, and ergo must increase in outrageousness.) Finally you say, What makes you think I’m not wearing a bra, Mr. LeBump?

In algebra next day, Miss Gacy sits gray-faced behind her steel desk. She doesn’t look up from the quizzes she’s sorting when you pass by, nor when you wedge yourself noisily into the desk, drop your book a little too hard on the floor. Dale Badgett pokes you with a pencil, saying, Got the proper underwear on today, Miss Karr?

You’ve always had a weird little crush on him. You turn around to mouth
asshole
just as Miss Gacy floats by, laying the previous day’s test on his desk with its typical 100 percent, on which you draw a smiley face. He suddenly reaches up across his desk to grab your bra strap through your blouse, draw it back, and let it pop between your shoulder blades. Just checking, he whispers over your shoulder. The urge to swing around with your arm outstretched like a sideways piling is barely quelled.

Suddenly you realize Miss Gacy’s returning yesterday’s major section test, 20 percent of the final grade, the one you got suspended from taking. The one you missed just for having tits, you think. And no makeups allowed for dress-code convicts.

She starts around the room a second time, handing out a dittoed worksheet, its odor of fresh-baked rolls and solvent wafting toward you while you study her face for some hint of the humanity she showed yesterday. But she won’t even meet your eyes when she lays the still damp worksheet on your desk. Well fuck her. Fuck polynomials and factoring and college altogether. Your bitterness is a numbing iceberg you plan to cling to.

Imagine the letdown when you find paper-clipped to the worksheet your own blank copy of yesterday’s test, the one you should’ve gotten a zero on. It’s another blind act of kindness that denies you the martyr status you long for. You could have whined about that zero for a week. Instead, Miss Gacy’s meticulously printed
Do in class
in the high right corner.

B
Y SUMMER YOU’RE BACK IN PHIL’S
two-tone Ford, parked at the seawall with the black satin sky and its myriad pinpricks glued across all the car windows. He’s repledged his love and recanted the previously unspoken fuck-or-walk ultimatum that broke you up in the first place.

You’d decided in advance of this particular night to up the ante on rolling around by taking your shirt off, yet you have to get drunk on cheap apple wine to justify doing so. You have to sneak Phil into your parents’ dozing house and light a listing candle in a Chianti jug before you start to peel yourself bare. It’s a sad perversion that you only know how to display your own desire by evoking his. (Only years hence do you guess that his desire was so great he was doomed not to express it.) In fact, you possess neither the sexual generosity nor the unbridled instinct to unbutton his shirt or to search his body for the nether-pale square inches neither you nor sunlight has ever touched. You determine to raise up your shirt and set out doing so with a heretofore unknown modesty, an awkward shyness the night seems steeped in.
Which also highlights the so-called respect Phil shows by not rushing to fumble under your shirt.

Phil waits on the sofa with openly beguiled attention, and you kneel beside him to lift your T-shirt slow as a rising curtain to show him your new breasts. His hands tremble to cup first one, then the other, and you feel the new expanse of your nipples contract in that touch. (A phrase overheard somewhere: nipples like pencil erasers.)

He doesn’t even dare lower his mouth to a breast, nor do you think to ask for such a thing. There is no asking yet for you, and there’s a loneliness in the warped truth that though you hold a cyclone of desire in your body, you abandon it by pandering to his.

On another such evening, you unbuckle his belt and the one silver button atop his jeans and don’t unzip him or reach deep but only let your fingers slip just into the elastic of his jockey shorts to touch the head of his rigid cock, and when it leaps at your light touch, it seems more intelligent and less bluntly dumb than you’d expected and the fluid that issues from the tip is so much like what you feel soaking your panties that the gesture furthers the myth of how similar you two are, how ideally matched. What rare luck to have found each other so young when the whole carpet of your lives stretches before you.

You tell Meredith about this adventure in some detail, and she acknowledges how serious this is without the characteristic bemusement she usually brings to your Phil-based confidences. Her earnest tone is the first blessing she’s bestowed on your union, though she still lapses into teasing. When you explain how his dick leapt at your touch like a living thing, she accuses you of being an animist.

Meaning what, o Merlin. Dictionary me.

You know. In animism they think if it moves it’s alive, has intelligence. Like the trees are alive, rivers and clouds. Meredith picks at the crew collar of her T-shirt. Because she’s heavy, she suffers in the heat.

Like gimme a for instance, you say.

Like if you lived in Bali, you might leave some mangoes or rice at the temple of the penis god. So it’d jump at your whim. That kind of deal.

How do you know this kind of obscure shit?

Innate genius.

No I mean it, you say. Everything I read falls right out of my head. Mind like a sieve.

You’ve got yards of poetry up there.

Yeah and I don’t know what half of it means. I’m like one of those ponies they train at the fair. Pound the ground with my hoof to count. But how’d you know that about the penis god?

I made up the penis-god part. So you’d get the parallel.

Okay then, about clouds moving and all that?

I can’t remember. Michael was real into Tarzan in junior high. I seem to remember he had a lot of pygmy books. Or Ray took an anthro course.

See, Mother took a course like that, and all I remember about the pygmies is how the guys tied their dicks up around their waists, so it looked like they had hard-ons when they went into battle. And how the women’s breasts got all long and tubular.

Pendulous, she says.

I guess I’ve heard about animus before—

Mist. Ani-mist. Like you spray from a can. Animus is ill-will. Meanwhile, you think his penis actually has big ideas?

Say dick, just say it one time. Or boner at least. Say, big old hard-on.

My mouth is pure. I’ll say,
le serpent.

You could French-fry a dirty joke.

Phil and Meredith have entered the détente stage of their relationship, each still giving the other wide berth as if suspicious, or as if protecting you somehow by keeping distance from the other (though maybe that’s untrue, and only reflects your narcissistic desire to serve as locus for all thought and action). Phil relishes the role of seductive older man that’s worn very lightly by truly seductive older men and not at all well by the average teenager. That he’s smarter than everybody also makes him arrogant in a way Meredith likes to deflate.

Somewhere in the course of several weeks before he leaves for college, you decide, in a phrase, to give it up to Phil—pussy being the only wolf bane you can imagine draping over him to ward off the smart college
coeds he’ll doubtless bump into. You book your official deflowering for a Friday night at Meredith’s house, when Mrs. Bright’s working overtime or at Aunt Willy’s using the good sewing machine to jazz up Meredith’s wardrobe.

Meredith has invited your new friend Stacy to play chess with her in the living room while you and Phil “do the deed.” (Stacey had lived invisibly in your midst for years till Meredith discovered she knew more about T. S. Eliot than either of you.) She’s a terrific poet, a budding photographer, and a strapping state champion volleyballer (whose announcement in college that she’s a lesbian will only prompt a
no kidding
from everybody). Before going back to Michael’s white bed, you and Phil stand in the living room with your arms around each other’s waists as Meredith and Stacy align chess figures, and suddenly you can just as easily imagine not being defiled this particular night, just saying to hell with it and piling in Phil’s car to go out for chocolate dip cones at the soft-serve joint. But the girls are assembled here as for a fiesta, and through the fabric of Phil’s T-shirt, you can feel his rib cage tremble from internal percussion.

Once the last black rook is in place on its board square, everyone seems to wait edgily for you to do something. Here I go, you finally say without moving.

You’ve done this before, right? Meredith asks Phil through a maternal grin.

Not as much as I’d like, but enough. (Something he later tells you is a lie, and then after that says is true, so you in fact never know if you jumped over that broom alone or not.)

I wish I brought my camera, Stacy says. This seems like a moment for the family album.

Maybe a before-and-after shot, Meredith says. Flowered and deflowered.

What would the caption be? you say, only halfway kidding, because you’re looking for some tag line to label the event with.

How about, something from Eliot:
I should be glad of another death,
Stacy says.