Cherry (5 page)

Mother was only in her studio one afternoon a week, not painting, but teaching painting to various Leechfield housewives. In response to an ad she’d run in the
Gazette,
women came to set up easels there Wednesday afternoons. To keep them from baking alive, Daddy installed a secondhand window air conditioner that leaked icy water into a pie tin with a steady drip that marked those otherwise timeless afternoons like a conductor’s baton. I was supposed to be exiled to the house for these sessions, for which the ladies paid good money to have Mother stare with furrowed concern bordering on horror at their canvases—muddy-looking peaches and grapes, stiff-backed sunflowers stuck dead center lackluster vases. The worst were the portraits—kids and grandkids mostly, with massive hydrocephalic foreheads and wall-eyed expressions. (“One eye’s looking at you and one’s looking for you,” Daddy said of one.)

The percolator would burble up the burnt coffee smell under the pine resins from the turpentine, a heady mixture that drew me from the solitary house’s endless black-and-white soap operas. Mostly, I’d just sit outside the door on the hood of Mother’s yellow station wagon in the dark garage, listening to the ladies’ endless complaints about their husbands. I specifically recall one lady saying she wouldn’t let her husband touch her pocketbook (a word I’d somehow always known was a euphemism for pussy) till he’d bought her a dishwasher.

“Hell, you might as well sell it down on Proctor Street, if that’s the deal,” Mother said. You could hear the intakes of breath all around, and pretty soon the offended lady came bumping out the door, wet canvases
in hand. Once or twice I’d stand in the doorway and wheedle for my own sketch pad and charcoal and one of those giant beige gum erasers that I liked to eat when I was littler.

Other days, Mother was at college studying for her teaching certificate—a real oddity back when few moms worked outside the home. But she wanted a higher standard life than the local average and feared destitution at every turn. (Ironically enough, it was her own extravagant habits that tended to edge us to that brink. During a few screaming matches over debts she ran up, my daddy accused her of far outspending anything she earned teaching, but I wouldn’t swear this was true.) Her college work seemed to me like yet another escape route from the banality of time at home with us.

Mother also had a secret history of hasty marriages and equally hasty dissolutions. Pretty much if you pissed her off good, you could expect to hear her tires tearing out the driveway. Within days, the knuckles of a process server would rap on your door. But I’m writing about the 1960s, when Lecia and I didn’t yet know about all her pre-Daddy adventures. She ultimately racked up seven marriages in all, but we’d only witnessed the two to my daddy—with the short, nearly negligible blip of my stepfather. (He’d appeared after my grandmother’s death, after Mother had been briefly carted off to the hospital for—among other things—the vast quantities of vodka she’d managed to guzzle.)

Such events kept our household from drawing much traffic. Kids loping straight through the yards on Garfield Road tended to cut an arc around ours as you might a graveyard. Probably this was more habit than any deliberate shunning, but the effect was the same.

With the house carved of human life, I took undue interest in the occasional chameleon that slithered from the tangle of honeysuckle through the vents of the air conditioner in my room. Once I spent a whole morning at the bathroom mirror trying to get one such unfortunate lizard to serve as a dangly earring by biting my earlobe. (If you squeezed his soft neck just right, his mouth would open like a clasp.) But he’d only bite down for a second or so before his jaw opened and he
fell down my shirt front or into the sink and I’d have to catch him again. His tail finally broke off, and our Siamese—then hugely pregnant—wolfed him down her gullet in two quick swallows.

The house held me in a kind of misty nether-time. The air conditioner hummed. The refrigerator kicked on and lapsed off. I waited a lot, though for what I don’t know. Nothing whatsoever seemed to be approaching from any direction.
I wait like an ox,
Franz Kafka wrote and Mother underlined in one of her college books. The sentence was copied down like an axiom into one of the dozen or so Big Chief tablets I bought that summer, then let stay blank after a few scribbled pages.

But if it’s great literature you’re after, Big Chief tablets seem gray-paged and flimsy, too pale to inscribe with genius of the caliber I aspired to. So I pilfered a black leather sketchbook from Mother’s studio. To disguise my theft, I glued green and red Christmas glitter on the cover in a swirly pattern meant to be hypnotic. I never ripped out her pencil sketches of fishing boats, or the advice on portraiture she’d dated 1964: “Details of features not as important as mood, character, or manner etc. Artist must be proficient enough to work intuitively. Relatives or friends may not see person truly.” Under this, I wrote in baroque cursive: “Me too—Mary Karr 1966.”

To hold that book in my hand—its simple bulk and being—is to grasp onto the hard notch from some faintly erased time line and draw myself back there. Opening it, I breathe old air.

Any fable I’ve told about who I was then dissolves when I read that loose-jointed script I wrote. We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across the blanker selves that the young actually proffer. (When my son was born, I remember staring into his blue, wondering eyes, then asking the obstetrical nurse what he might be thinking. “You know the static channel on your TV?” she answered.)

So in actual written artifacts from my past, I sound way less smart than I tend to recall having been. My poems clip-clop doggedly along, less verse than trotting prayers, wishes to become someone other than who I found myself to be, to feel other than how I felt. The diary entries don’t differ from any eleven-year-old’s, though the pathos I found
in them makes me wince: “I am not very successful as a little girl,” I wrote. “When I grow up, I will probably be a mess.” The Sharp family had dragged me to two tent revival meetings that summer in a town called Vidor (famous, by the way, for its Ku Klux Klan fish fries). On those steamy nights where people fanned their dripping faces with funeral fans on which a blue-robed Jesus knocked on a gleaming golden door, I never followed the weeping line of believers to the altar to dedicate my life to the Lord. But the rhetoric stayed with me. My writings are rotten with it. Mountains crumble and rivers run dry, etc. Rainbows come out after floods worthy of Noah. Every cheek is rosy, every cloud silver-lined. Reading those pages, you can almost hear the tambourines shaking in the background and a surge of ballpark organ music as the preacher asks you to testify.

Unfathomably, the career path I drew was the strange one I wound up undertaking, “to write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography.” Though I never managed to wrest for myself a career as “philosipher,” whatever I thought that meant, I also longed also to become “a real woman, a hardworking woman with a pure soul. Not just a perfumed woman on the outside.”

I also wrote a lot of poems for the star of a cowboy show on TV called
Branded,
on whom I’d developed a wicked crush. In fantasy, he was interchangeable with Marshal Matt Dillon from
Gunsmoke
and Palladin from
Have Gun Will Travel
—cowboys who would soon magically transform into knights in armor after I discovered tales of chivalry. Jason McSomething, I think they called him. He’d been falsely convicted of treason during a Civil War battle and sentenced to hang before escaping. Most episodes, he galloped around the West looking for folks who could prove he wasn’t a big sissy who ran out on his regiment. But somebody who thought him guilty would always pop up, so he’d have to slink out of town—hiding under some wagon straw or holding onto the side of a train. Always he left behind some widow schoolteacher or banker’s daughter he was just fixing to get frisky on. I devoted more than a few pages to praising Jason’s long suffering. (The stoicism I favored was less in the mode of Marcus Aurelius and more reminiscent of the donkey Eeyore from
Winnie the Pooh.
) I imagined him hoisting
cups sadly in the air, saying goodbye to folks he’d never see again. One reads, “Faithful companions we may be./ But, Soldier, fill no glass for me!” That sort of thing.

When the pencil lead wore down and faded to slate gray, I’d sometimes walk to remote neighborhoods and knock on the doors of strange houses. If someone answered, I’d claim I was trying to sell Christmas cards, though I lacked any samples or other convincing evidence that this was so. I don’t recall trying to extort actual dollars. (I had money, and there was nothing to buy anyway.) I just had nothing better to do.

People were damn nice about it. They handed me sugar cookies and Rice Krispie Treats in waxed paper, foil-wrapped kisses and hard candy by the fistful, but no Christmas card orders got totted down, even though I copied some random names from the phone book to convince everybody how well cards were selling.

Once a middle-aged woman in a pale blue duster hovered in the doorway a minute before bursting into tears. She put both hands on her jowly face. The tears rivered between her knobby fingers while I tried to figure out how to flee. Cool air spilled from her house as I stood melting in the heat.

“It’s okay, baby,” she said, into the damp palms pressed over her mouth after I’d said I was sorry for about the fifteenth time. “You just put me in mind of my boy. He’s passed over—” She choked off a sob, a body-wracking convulsion that really made me wonder if people could break in half with grief.

Finally she gathered herself up. For a heartbeat’s space, neither of us said anything. Then her shoulders relaxed a whit. “Do you want to see?” she finally asked, in a voice hardly above a whisper. She didn’t even say see what. Nor did I run through any of the dire warnings I’d heard about getting in cars or houses with strangers. Maybe that’s odd. Doubtless a more regular kid would have cobbled up a dental appointment to bolt off to. But the weight of her grief drew me to her. She held open the aluminum screen an extra notch for me to pass through.

The living room was cold as a meat locker and smelled like a pot of cabbage left too long on the stove. The light was muddy as gloom, all
the shades being drawn flush to the sills. She’d also laid down plastic runners along the most traveled paths to keep the carpet naps fluffy. So plastic paths led from the door where I stood to a mossy-looking plaid sofa, then zigzagged to what must have been kitchen and bedroom and bath. Tables that would have hit you at knee level or shin level in the dark crowded every inch of available floor space, and were themselves packed with little porcelain figurines. A more useless assemblage of objects I’ve never seen—hoop-skirted shepherdesses with pilgrim’s staffs, guys with powdered wigs, dinner bells, and gilt-edged snuff boxes. I remember specifically a disembodied female hand with rings and bracelets and red nails. The hand seemed to be reaching up from under the wood grain.

The dead boy’s pictures lined one whole wall. Of his face, I remember almost nothing. He was blond when little, and his hair got darker as he grew. What’s stuck with me in those staggered pictures’ advance through his short life were the costumes marking any boy’s inching toward manhood—a toddler with suspendered shorts; a school-age boy with a homemade birthday hat; then a Little Leaguer’s striped knickers; baptismal robes; and finally a gangly teen in a white dinner jacket holding a corsage box.

“He shot himself,” she said. Her face told me it was on purpose. Up till that day, he’d been the perfect boy, she said. Then he went to a dancing party and asked a girl onto the floor. And she said no. He came home miserable, opened up the Bible to the Twenty-third Psalm, and shot himself, right in the head. They were in the next room at the time watching Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music Hour.

What she did next is the kind of gesture I’ve since learned that I somehow invite. (After I stopped thinking of such moments as my fault and began to regard them as an odd form of privilege, I handled them better.) She steered me by my shoulder along another plastic path to the coffee table. I did not shrink from her touch. I both longed to see and dreaded what we were headed for: the worn black Bible on the rectangular laminated wood. A laminated card stuck out of the pages to keep the place.

Hefting up the Bible worked some tranquilizing voodoo on her. She became strangely calm, as if getting to the heart of some matter she’d been circling all day. She’d done it before and often. Her ease told me that. Some passing assemblage of milkmen and water-meter readers and Avon ladies had stood where I was standing and sought to arrange their faces into tolerable expressions, as I then did. Certainly I wanted to stay upbeat, but grinning like a monkey was way wrong. I settled on the look of earnest expectancy, but pleasant.

She opened the massive Bible and held it out for my study. A stain the color of burnt chocolate took up most of the pages’ deep valley. The paper had puckered from the wet. Still the words were legible. “The Lord is my shepherd…,” I read in my head.

Then I was saying a hasty goodbye, for only a few years before, my own wild-assed mother had threatened suicide. Part of me believed the notion was contagious, a germ I could pick up that might reinfect Mother. I didn’t consciously ponder this, but it flitted through me strong enough that before the lady could say diddly, I was shaking her leathery cold hand on the porch in waves of heat. Then I was running home full tilt as if the house wouldn’t be empty when I burst in. The tedium there was suddenly preferable to the terror of those houses I loped past, inside which were unknown losses.

Sometime that summer I stopped prowling around strange houses and concocted a real job shining shoes at the barbershop. This act of mine thwarted Daddy’s vow that his daughters never work for pay while under his roof. Still, I defied that order by taking his shoeshine box to the shop and weaseled myself a post in the red leather shine chair.

The shop held special allure that week since I’d overheard somewhere that John Cleary was going in for his annual crew cut the next day. I watched in worshipful silence as, under Mr. DePello’s humming clippers, hanks of John’s shining yellow hair fell in slow strips to the linoleum, where it was swept into the copper dustpan. Afterward, his shaved and knobby skull floated in Mr. DePello’s hand mirror. There’d been around his ears that strip of untanned scalp we called “white sidewalls.” John’s hand ran over the stubble real slow, as if it held for him a
great mystery. The gesture was one that drifted back to me in my bed at night, such puzzled tenderness as he touched that bristle. Maybe he even caught a mirrored glimpse of my figure in the giant red vinyl shine chair, for my awe must have been palpable. Mr. DePello untied the apron and shook it so short hairs fell to the floor in cuneiform patterns. John handed the mirror back and said
yessir looks good, thank you.
To me he said
seeya at school,
though school was months off and our paths till then crossed practically every day.