Cherry

by Mary Karr

  Pour lighter fluid on your hand and set a match to it.

  Roll a cherry bomb in peanut butter, then mash a bunch of BBs on it, then drop it lit in the mailbox on Main to see if the whole thing explodes.

  Take a shit-bomb (paper sack filled with somebody’s doo) to the home of the junior high principal, Lead-Head Briggs. Light the sack on fire, then hide in the ditch while he stomps it out.

  Blindfold Davie Ray Hawks and tell him he’s putting his finger up somebody’s butt, but really it’s just wet bread wadded up in a soup can.

  We stand on the edge of the field swatting mosquitoes, not sure where else to go. All around in other fields and neighborhoods, you can hear the sharp pop of fireworks, and Huey Ladette’s mama calls him in because goddamn it, it’s late, and she’s gonna tear him a new asshole.

  Somehow we get to my garage by meandering, nothing on purpose. I find the key to Mother’s padlocked studio, where we’re scared to turn on the light in case my parents look out back and wonder. Something’s about to start, and we stand on the brink of it, still pretending to be shadows to one another amid the paint fumes. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel the mountain pines that give off this smell. The air hangs heavy as gauze between us all. Outside, about a zillion crickets have gone into chirrup, chirrup, each in a different soprano voice. The toads come back in alto. The firecrackers go pop pop pop, and the bottle rockets whish out sparks then burst.

  After my eyes get used to the dark, I make out John’s crew cut. He’s walked over to a canvas propped in a puddle of moonlight, an old nude Mother never framed. “Lookit this!” he says. There’s a slow foot-shuffle in the dark as Bobbie and Davie Ray and Clarice congregate in front of it.

  “Get a load of those knockers,” Davie Ray says, and there’s hissed whispers to shut the fuck up.

  “Boy she got some headlights, don’t she,” Bobbie says.

  “Lecia pose for this?” Davie Ray says, which draws stuffed giggles from all the boys. The unsaid comparison to my little ace-bandaged-looking chest pins me like a lance.

  “Y’all are gross,” Clarice says, and John says that’s her sister, chrissake. Then to make sure nobody thinks he’s a goodie-goodie, or too much on a girl’s side, he reaches a hand up and tickles one painted boob, saying, Gootchie gootchie goo.

  Somebody comes up with rules for a kissing game, but basically Clarice and me each kiss a boy while one of them sits out. Then we switch. If I had my druthers, Davie Ray Hawks would just go home and let me kiss John while Clarice kissed Bobbie. But the whole point of a game like this is how everybody’s kiss is at the same level, so each of us holds the same value, even though in matters of kissing, opinions always run fairly deep. But only by leveling the ground like this does the kiss get possible as activity.

  The first boy I kiss is Bobbie, who holds my elbows as if we’re about to spin toplike through the dark. His lips are chapped dry as parchment and sweet. Then somebody says switch, and Davie Ray Hawks is on me. His lips are blubbery and wet. He puts his hand in the small of my back and leans into me. But I don’t feel danced with. Plus once he gets me arched back a good ways, I can feel what must be his dick hard as a crescent wrench poking my leg. The raw fact of it grosses me out, and this whole scene starts to feel all blunt and greasy.

  Then Bobbie’s voice says switch, and John Cleary draws me to him, and there’s such a surge inside me I can’t locate where it’s bubbled up from.

  I hold my breath, afraid of messing up. That corn dog I ate earlier flashes through my head, and I get a weird urge to draw back, dash out the studio and up the back steps and into the bathroom to brush my teeth, rinse, spit, and rinse again with Lecia’s Listerine before blinking myself magically back to John’s arms.

  None of which I do, of course. I hold my breath and count to myself like during a storm: one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

  There’s a TV commercial for some thick green shampoo that they drop a pearl in to show how rich and heavy it is, the pearl falling through this heavy green goop. And that’s what John smells like. Prell, it’s called. All the cut grass in the world gets mashed into a bottle of this stuff. And the time we move into is that slow-falling, underwater shampoo time. John does not hold my elbows like he’s scared to get too close. He makes a cage of his arms I step right in (colt in a corral, I think). He tilts his head and says with a breath like Juicy Fruit right before he kisses me, “Is this okay?” Before I can say yes, we bump teeth a little, then he’s breathing the Juicy Fruit right into my mouth, my lips, and his lips come closer till the softnesses match up.

  John’s tongue is not hard and pointy like Davie Ray’s or plumb absent like Bobbie’s. It parts my lips a little as if testing the warmth of water. And after a second I get the idea that my tongue’s supposed to do something other than lay there or draw back hiding. I ease it forward so as not to poke at him the way Davie Ray Hawks did me. I taste the coppery flesh of his soft tongue on my wet one. And I put my hands up and press them flat against his chest because half of me is afraid I’ll fall entirely into him if he keeps holding me. And there over his breast pocket, a small embroidered seahorse dips its head down and coils its tail inward. Through the shirt cotton is John’s own strong heart.

  I try to reteach myself to breathe normal, but it comes out in halts and jags. I feel grit in the crook of my elbow and creases in my neck and a single dot of sweat bumping down my spine to the small of my back. Then I feel John’s hands tremble on my back, and I try to draw him out of that trembling with my own tongue, and it’s like we’re drinking from each other.

  Suddenly, I know so much. I understand about waves and cross tides and how jellyfish float and why rivers empty themselves in the Gulf. I understand the undulating movement of the stingray on Sea Hunt and the hard forward muscle of the shark. Now I know why they call it petting, for even though I’m more still in the plush warmth of his mouth than I can ever get in church, my whole body is purring. I let myself breathe into him a breath that tastes like ashes from a long fire.

  Outside there’s the bump of a screen door. Maybe my folks letting the cat out. I hear it latch back careful the way Daddy would do. There’s the far off whine of a bottle rocket shedding sparks across some field. Then nothing.

  Then the crunch of foot on gravel sets us all in a panic. Everybody rears back from kissing and starts mouthing stuff I can’t make out. Clarice has her knees squinched together like she has to pee. She flaps her hands like a bird fighting its way out of a nosedive. Davie Ray Hawks looks out a sliver of curtain then wheels around in the moonlight all bug-eyed. It’s Daddy crunching barefoot down the gravel path alongside the garage, closer and closer till the door on the other side of this studio door aches on its old hinge.

  I think of explicit threats he’s made about using his straight razor to slice up anybody who ever messed with Lecia and me. I think this qualifies as messing. He wouldn’t actually lay a hand on me or Clarice, but the boys might well catch an ass-whipping. But a whipping would be way better than this waterfall of shame I feel at the prospect of him knowing I’ve been standing around with boys in the dark letting them put their tongues in my mouth. This is definitely not what he expects me to be doing.

  In the hot dark, John Cleary’s eyes are blue as struck matches. Plus he’s drawn his whole head turtle-like inside his shirt collar, and pulled that up over his nose like Pud in Bazooka Joe comics. I start figuring our way out of it.

  Wolfman, I could say to Daddy. We were playing wolfman. Or better still, We were gonna make a play about a mummy where lightning knocks out the electricity right before the mummy staggers in…

  Daddy’s in the garage now, easing the door back flush to the frame. When I hear him talking, at first I think it’s aimed at us. I take his sugary tone for a kind of sideways menace. “Poor old fella,” he says. Then the black tomcat Daddy thinks of as his yowls like he’s been picked up in the middle. That’s when I know we’re safe. Daddy’s not heading in here at all. The other kids probabl
y don’t twig to it, but I wouldn’t breathe a word that might spark Daddy’s Indian ears into hearing us. Still the air starts to ease back into the room.

  We stand like statues in freeze tag listening to him in the dark. “Don’t nobody love old Roy like he has coming,” Daddy says. Clarice tries to stuff down her giggles at that. Davie Ray’s waving his arms and miming shhh, John draws an invisible hankie out of his breast pocket and mops his forehead.

  Meanwhile, my own daddy is talking out loud to this shiny black tomcat. “Works hard all day being a cat,” he says, then, “I know it. Nobody even rubs his chin. He’s chasing mice all day. Keeping his whiskers slicked nice.” Daddy heaves open his truck door then shuts it. The whiskey bottle clinks against the seat adjuster as he draws it out. I can picture the broken paper seal and the gold twisty lid and my daddy’s whiskey throat guzzling under the dome light.

  Nobody’s folks drink like mine. John Cleary’s daddy has had the same case of Lone Star in the garage so long spiders have nested all over it. Knowledge of that difference in my family makes me suddenly alone in the room, though an instant before in John’s arms, I’d stood embraced in more warm than I could recall. Now Daddy’s drinking has carved me away from everybody else. He’s sucking down whiskey and talking to the cat, saying, “Just tell old Pete about it.” And maybe Roy does tell him, for the room is a gray velvet tomb we’re all buried in listening hard. After a long time, Daddy says, “Dadgum ’em all to hell.”

  Then the door opens and his steps crunch away, and our exhalings of relief are so loud, I miss hearing the house door.

  Outside, the night has grown exponentially larger. The roads to the horizon seem to stretch farther. We’re small under the sky’s dome. There’s mist at our ankles, and the moon is low. I still feel quivery as a rabbit from where John held me. I can barely look at him because I know he possesses that soft mouth that matches up with mine so right. How can you know such a thing about a person and not lean into it? I squat down and pretend to sift for quartz pebbles in the road gravel till I think his blue eyes glide over my shoulder’s curve, but when I sneak a look, he’s staring back toward Bobbie’s house. Bobbie says, “Old Pete’s tough as a boot.”

  John says, “I wouldn’t wanna tangle with him.”

  Davie Ray makes the sign of the cross. “We damn near died back there,” he says. This puffs me up a little, that Daddy’s so formidable in everybody’s mind. Clarice isn’t saying diddly. Like me she’s doubtless thinking of all that softness these otherwise scabby-looking boys embody. But she also knows that the whole sex-club idea has swept past us, that interval in the garage gone to ether. We’re back on our own separate islands. Nobody could even say “sex club” or mention what happened without being thought of as warped in the head.

  Bobbie says, “Let’s go back to my house and make Jiffy Pop and watch Thriller.” Then they’re slapping away, no goodbye, no see you later. They practically vaporize before us.

  When they’re far enough away, Clarice asks me if I felt myself getting hot back there in the studio. “And I don’t mean temperature.” I say hell yes. We stand there a second, unable either to say more about it or to let the feeling go.

  Finally, Clarice says she wants popcorn too, but just seeing Mother and Daddy would somehow banish how I feel. As long as they’re away from me, I can close my eyes and taste John Cleary’s Juicy Fruit, feel the unexploded weight of him breathing on me.

  Mother harps all the time on how sex and even touching yourself is normal as can be. Her only worry is that I’ll get what she calls hot pants and get knocked up. She’ll let me look at her erotic art book with folks entwined and rolling around like weasels whenever I want. But while lately I consider cracking it open most every day, I always wait till she and Daddy aren’t home.

  Somehow even letting Mother and Daddy whiz through my head totally wipes away the girl John Cleary just held. She’s long gone, and in her place stands this skinned-up kid again. I want to stave off going home wicked bad.

  I ask Clarice if she wants to go over to Bobbie’s house to ask the boys to share their Jiffy Pop. She says that, as excuses go, that’s really pitiful sounding. To show up there would be asking for it. Since the boys have probably got blue balls from kissing us, no telling what they’d do. Her brothers have explained to her that unchanneled sperm makes your balls swell and somehow backs it up into your brain. “They don’t think straight with blue balls,” Clarice says.

  Because John Cleary’s kisses have plugged my body into some unspecified socket still humming on high, I ask Clarice what girls get to have that even approximates blue balls.

  “Diddly shit, that’s what,” Clarice says. Or else you get a Reputation. If you let boys suck hickies on your neck or if you do the shimmy at the skating rink so your boobs slap back and forth like Marilyn Fruget, then you get guys standing around lagging pennies off a wall behind the raceway, talking about how they finger-fucked you and your yin-yang made their hand smell like tuna fish. Clarice is going to high school year after next and has big plans for improving her social standing. She made a novena saying the rosary every night to grow titties, and when that crop finally comes in, the last thing she can have is A Reputation.

  Nor, she warns me, do I want one when I start junior high this fall. I tell her that tonight I’m not so sure.

  There’s a line Mother read me from a book about poor crackers dragging their dead mama across Mississippi or Alabama or some god-awful place: “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth,” the girl says. Just hearing that told me something about being a girl I didn’t know. But standing inside John Cleary’s breath and body temperature with our mouths melting into each other makes me really know it. Really really, as Clarice would say, down south of your neck.

  Chapter Six

  SEVENTH GRADE ACTUALLY STARTS for me the week before it starts, when Mother drives me to Payless to choose shoes from the rows of mud-ugly footwear on industrial display racks that stretch back far as a football field. That they’re two pairs for five dollars is still no bargain. The size elevens are grotesquely baby-fied—a slanted array of round-toed Mary Janes with slick-bottomed soles. The straps are stiff as saddle leather. The holes for the buckle-prongs don’t even stab all the way through, so the tiny metal stick just pokes at the cheap plastic. If you scuff the patent leather on any of these, it by-God holds the mark. Each style I try deforms my sense of self even worse than those before. In pair after pair, I stump along the cement aisle, straps flapping.

  Eventually we go to a department store, but the pricey shoes I wind up setting in my closet are only slightly less babyish than those at Payless. My size is just too small to warrant styling for. One look at the shoes we buy aimed out at me from the closet floor like little gunboats fixing to fire, and I know all about the life I’ll lead inside them. That’s how seventh grade starts.

  That’s the year Lecia’s hanging out with high school boys, so I walk home every day past football practice alone. Faking I don’t see the boys, I keep eyes to the ground while I kick every dandelion in my path baldheaded. Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I’ve been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle. Mother once read me about how Napoleon in exile used to take endless baths. And I feel like that. Like Napoleon, and some bunch of barbarians has stolen my empire and even my horse. I want to peel off my armor and soak in the tub till my digits prune up and I can wrap myself in thick cotton to sleep for the rest of my life.

  Meanwhile, the football drills crashing around me are hard to ignore—all those muscled-up bodies in collision. There’s never a scrimmage that soon after school, just clumps of players in clunky white pads and practice helmets repeating movements designed to induce misery in their executors. Boys run wind sprints in threes and fours that end between these poles. When one guy peels out of the group to the sidelines to vomit, a pair of his own buddies actually comes to yell at him. There he is bent double, horking up
his macaroni, and his teammates are barking at him like drill sergeants about being a sissy. It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy—getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff—get undercut by having to play football. (There’s also cutting up chickens and changing the oil in the car, but the misery of those things pales next to how football practice looks.)

  One day, I’m almost to the ditch behind the Smiths’ house when some guy in practice pads comes rattling up who turns out to be John Cleary. He’s strapped and laced into his white practice uniform and is saying wait up.

  John’s face is never far from what I’m thinking, but seeing it manifest so close to mine so suddenly feels like an ambush. I know John can’t actually look into my pupils and see his face floating there with red Magic Marker hearts scribbled around it. But having the real John overlap so suddenly with the dreamed-of boy yanks my most fervent secret from its inner cave and into stark sunlight. I try hard to take in his galloping beauty straight on, to stand my ground. (Part of me is also crazily rewinding to play back my whole walk across the field, for surely I did some stupid thing. I wouldn’t pick my nose or anything in front of the whole team, but I could have been skipping or singing some goofy song under my breath.)

  John Cleary. His face behind the mask’s cage is red under its freckles, and the sky’s blue looks washed out next to his cobalt eyes. They stare at me from inside the helmet space as Lancelot’s might through a visor. “Did you get how to do that thing in Miss Picket’s?” he wants to know, for in a stroke of luck, we sit kitty-corner in English.

  “You mean the essay? Sure. I finished it in class.” I stand back a little, fairly sure I don’t smell particularly good. My only hope is that he doesn’t smell good either, and his football sweat will swamp my field-walking sweat. But for some reason, I can never smell anything coming off John Cleary but cut grass and Ivory soap.