Cherry (26 page)

We use Thomas Stearnes for everything, Meredith says.

Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you say.

Which seems to set everybody gawking at his or her own individual piece of floorboard. Nobody says a word. You wish there were a mantle clock to tick loudly. Or that Meredith was absentmindedly playing that ravishing Chopin prelude you learned back in junior high. The stepping-stone melody would make a funereal deflowering march to carry you back to the bedroom. Or you wish some military attaché would enter bearing the license that sanctioned this. There should be more ceremony, you think. You want momentum.

Stacy is starting to pick at the sofa nap, and you can feel Phil staring down at the top of your head from his gentle height.

Here I go, you say again, and as he steers you off, Meredith says
bon voyage
at your backs.

Of the actual episode, only the oddest details will remain. He’s under the sheet with the entire expanse of his nakedness while you undress matter-of-factly, explaining all the while that the hole in the wall plaster is where Dr. Boudreaux’s x-ray machine used to fit. You’re not scared of the physical act, for Phil has been kind. But you have one raging horror of looking like you don’t know what to do (you don’t), and another horror of looking like a slut, and so don’t tell him that you’re on the pill, hoping the rubber he winds up using will numb his smart dick from knowing that some brute stole your cherry. (How odd, you’ll later think, that you embarked on your first love affair—meant as an intimacy—with such a large sexual secret in tow.)

The lustrous warmth of him along your body is like taking a long drink of something you’ve wanted all your life. But his kisses seem to come from some boy you never knew. He’s trying to be slow, to wait for your okay, but this urgency emanates from him. In your eagerness to please, you stand aside for his passion, let it dwarf your small wants till you feel somewhat beside the point. You’ve brought a whole bunch of towels from home to lay under you, and you keep spreading their edges so the sheets won’t mess up. Also, Phil read somewhere that a pillow under the woman’s hips puts her at a helpful angle, and there are towels
over two of those until you feel raised up on some pyramid of wadded towel and pillow like a Mayan sacrifice.

Afterward, you feel somewhat deflated and can’t wait to get up and dress. This urgency to re-create your public self after a private dismantling must be innate to your age and expectation, but it’s disappointing somehow. In truth, you’d hoped this physical act would magically yield up emotional intimacy. (But for a long time sex would merely replace the closeness you longed for, almost usurp it.)

You bust out the door in your underpants and announce to Meredith and Stacy that you had an orgasm (astonishing lie). Meredith says that must be from all the practice alone at home you do. Then on the porch Phil declares his undying love and handles you with immense tenderness, but you feel remote. The myth of absolute like-mindedness, cathexis, soul-deep entwinement that you cooked up inside those infinite kisses has been banished. You could have wallowed forever in the silky infinity of those nights, whereas for him, those wordless conversations were doubtless arrows aimed at this night, precursors to it, erotic cheese and crackers.

Henceforth, your power over him seems increased. But you feel exiled from the sexual pleasure he seems to drown in. That’s how trying to open the door to libidinal adventure closes it, and how trying to seal your closeness to Phil makes you eager to get away, to run.

B
Y FALL, YOU ARRIVE AT SCHOOL A WHOLE NEW CREATURE
.

The drill team, for one thing. Your desire to stand on the football field and kick over your head with a line of other girls also wearing outfits (or getups, as your daddy would call them) covered in what can best be described as a kind of matted silver fur—this once-desperate desire has evaporated like so much flash paper.

Back in August, when other drill team members were lowering their hot roller sets into various train cases for sleep-away camp, you’d (a) stopped shaving your legs and armpits, (b) learned how to clean pot and roll a joint, (c) made a trip to Austin, Texas on the very day 40,000 screaming hippies protesting the Kent State murders would be teargassed by National Guardsmen (one of whom would, in a few years, become your brother-in-law, the Rice Baron), (d) been sleeping with Phil.

As a result of all these events, you’ve (e) stopped going to drill team practice unless you come stoned out of your gourd. While the other girls wear their beaded headbands underneath their teased flips so the
band is just a stripe across their foreheads (a kind of cerebral band-aid, you often joke to Meredith), yours is tied over your long straight hair like a hippie trying to keep her head (so called) together.

So while the boys you fancy leave for their various far-flung colleges, you wow them with the dramatic move of quitting drill team at the start of your junior year. Which fires up a minor scandal. No one’s ever quit before, Miss Stanley says in her office, without being in a family way. Either she has a bad cold that day, or she actually tears up once you’ve told her. Are you expecting? she asks, and when you say no, the answer seems to flummox her. Like she’d had a whole speech ready, and you left her sliding her thumb down this year’s roll book looking for the last time you’d said
regular
to announce your period during roll call.

In LeBump’s office, he eyes you wearing the expression animals get smelling something. But by then you’re unflappable. Without flap, whatever that means. Scenes like this have begun to unfold with an air of unreality. You can’t help thinking as he pontificates and gets up and paces behind his football-field-size desk like a coach in a locker room pep talk that he resembles those square-headed cops from
Big Ass Comix.

He says, It’s clear to me, Miss Karr, that somebody once told you that you were clever. Well clever doesn’t compensate for bad citizenship. Not here. You’ve thrown aside great opportunities, honors other girls would have killed to enjoy, but you have chosen to slam shut those doors. You’ve bolted and latched them. Those paths are not for you. And we get the message in this office. It’s been delivered loud and clear. Be forewarned that henceforth these walls have eyes, and you will be under scrutiny, Miss Karr. And we’ll not put up with one inappropriate action.

At this, he walks around the front of his desk to sit atop it and peer down at you to deliver this insult: Neither are we a home for unwed mothers, he says.

This is particularly comical because if they were to expel every girl with a so-called bun in the oven, a good chunk of the senior class would just vanish.

I’m not pregnant, sir, you say.

Are you positive?

Not unless it’s the immaculate conception, sir. (Lord but the lies come easy).

He pulls off the glasses he’s been peering down through. He reaches behind himself on the desk and grabs your folder to consult for some pertinent detail, then stares back at you with dark eyes. It does give you a twinge of fear to be flat-faced stared at with such fury. You automatically look down, then hate yourself for giving him that triumphant point.

Finally, he says, Were you aware I’m a practicing Catholic?

No, sir.

Don’t get a smart mouth on me, he said.

No, sir, you say.

Because I won’t tolerate it. Not for a Yankee minute.

No, sir.

He glances down at the folder through his specs, then looks back up at you with a glare that must have been searing when it came framed within his football helmet’s grate. He says, It might surprise you that I have taken personal interest in locker number 481.

Why, sir?

Let’s just leave it at that.

The prospect of a locker search actually fills you with juvenile glee, for number 481 swung open would reveal an ancient, unlaundered gym shirt the color of cat piss; a graveyard of old papers; some novels by Salinger and Bellow and Hemingway; and a sack holding an orange so lustrous with green and white mould and caved in on one side that you might well pawn it off as a bio experiment.

We’ve also made some changes in your schedule, Miss Karr.

This is a slyly palmed trump card he’s playing. You’ve heard rumors about a few criminal-type detentions they set up for incorrigible guys who’d punched a teacher or blown something up. The offending party would get isolated from general population, left to sit all year in a steamy, padlocked storage room behind the field house—the only contact being some tobacco-spitting coach who came in periodically to collect homework, or the lines the boy had to write repeatedly, stuff
like “I will not sass.” It was said that one guy had been forgotten entirely over some summer, was found in fall either swollen and crawling with maggots or else shriveled like a mummy, his Venus pencil clutched in his finger bones.

Like what changes? you say.

Sir
, he says. What changes,
sir
. He must see the fear spark in you, for he seems invigorated—a predator who’s caught the whiff of a wound. You don’t say anything, just slouch a notch lower in the hard chair.

We’ve taken you from Miss Park’s English class and Mrs. Theriot’s history, and put you in Mrs. Wylie’s English and Coach Kryshak’s history that same period.

Don’t they do, like, remedial classes, or something? (Long pause) Sir.

It’s true that we’ve taken you out of AP English and history.

For what reason, sir? I’ve stayed on the honor roll. I believe I have A’s in both subjects.

There are issues of maturity and citizenship—

What!

—that we feel could affect the learning environment.

He hands you a pink hall pass. End of interview.

You plod from the office trying for the first time in a while not to cry, for you’ve been cast into the academic equivalent of a dungeon. It’s only a few weeks before the kind-eyed Mrs. Wylie insists to the head office that you move up from both classes into AP—a feat that must’ve cost her considerable ill will from LeBump.

Meanwhile you spend two weeks in Kryshak’s class, where it turns out he passes whole class periods reading aloud from the textbook, often until he himself corks off, dozing in the valley of the pages while hell breaks loose in the room. On Moratorium Day, when Meredith stitches black armbands for you both to wear in protest of Vietnam—her one act of civil disobedience—he catches her alone and shoves her against a locker, saying, Take it off or I’ll take it off for you. Her hands tremble all the way home.

Before Thanksgiving, you travel to Phil’s college for a plotted weekend escape of illicit sex and drugs. You find yourself stepping down from the metal Greyhound steps like a bride with the Samsonite suitcase that you borrowed from Clarice despite its hideous salmon color. As soon as you see Phil leaning in jeans against the wall in a pose worthy of the young James Dean, he somehow seems unbelievably goofy-looking and beside the point.

How did this happen? For weeks, you’ve carried a snapshot of him in a pair of overalls the way Catholic girls carry mass cards of their name saints. Nights, you’d stood at various 7-Eleven pay phones, risking arrest and jail to use a fake credit-card number, just to hear for three minutes (before they could trace the card and discover it was fake and call the cops) his voice—the low pitch of which could mesmerize you with desire.

But in the steamy, diesel-soaked air of the bus terminal, he looks all wrong. He’s bought a wide-brimmed felt hat of the kind Western farmers wore in cowboy movies. (His American Gothic hat, you call it, after that Grant Wood painting.) On the way, the two-tone Ford he drives—the same one you’d kissed in all the previous summer—chugs like an Okie tar-kill. His fingers entwined with yours are damp with sweat.

Once you get to his dorm room, you find the odor of old pizza unfathomably discouraging. The same holds for his agenda of things he wants to show you. The worst of these is a record of two guys having a fart contest, which ends when one actually batches his pants.

(Twenty years later, this notion and its attendant memory will strike you as wicked funny. Also you could then recall the boy’s tender, odd ministrations with the fondness they warranted.)

Phil seems to know you and yet does not in any way know you. After some awkward introduction and small talk, his nerd-ball roommate is conveniently dispatched with sleeping bag to some other where. At that instant, Phil adopts the sheepish sidewise look of the amorous cartoon skunk called Pepe LePew, whose cookie-cutter heart beat through his furry chest whenever he saw his sweetheart.

Suddenly you feel too much like a child in Phil’s hands. When he
pulls your T-shirt over your head, it tangles in your hair for a blind minute and you feel choked and push him off.

He says, Hey slow down—we’ve got all night. But in saying this his face warps, his teeth suddenly looking bucked as any mule’s (which they weren’t). In that hallucinatory instant, Phil somehow embodies everything in your life you want to get loose from. In this way, your soul mate on the slopes of Parnassus (translate: college dorm room) thus becomes a kind of Gomer fawning over you in a cold cinder-block purgatory.

He’s all kinds of sweet. He holds you a long time, touching your rib cage with shy fingers. His neck smells of patchouli oil and his mouth of cumin from the Mexican food you had earlier. You want to take a shower and brush your teeth, but being concerned with hygiene at such an instant would sound so uncool. Also, you aren’t sure that cleaning up would help. It’s the whole blunt corporeal exchange that’s eating away at you.

Soon after you make love, you curl in the fetal posture in the narrow bed and fake sleep for hours, staring at the luminous dial of the roommate’s clock face. Once you think Phil’s breathing deep and slow enough, you slink into the bathroom downstairs—on the girls’ floor—with your ragged copy of
Anna Karenina.
You sit on the cold tiles in your sweatshirt and shorts and have just begun to ponder the lunkheadedness of the cuckolded husband when Phil appears in the doorway. He looks tousled and fond. He wants to make love again, and you swear to yourself that on future nights you’ll lie still till dawn rather than risk these additional ministrations.