by Mary Karr
You used to look out the window of your daddy’s truck riding to the Towne House and imagine that somewhere from one of these tract houses amid the razor grass and the industrial-maze skyline of contorted steel, a boy riding to the dance might also be pretending that he was being ferried over snowy fields in a Russian sledge. Or perhaps in another truck cab, a girl your age was rethumbing Catcher in the Rye and halfway believing that in the Towne House Holden Caulfield would be waiting under the exit sign in all his wounded, cynical splendor. And that very evening conversation would be struck like a flint, and endless isolate dark illuminated.
But how would such a person find you unless you hung it all out there?
While other girls are zipping themselves into pale blue church dresses or pastel linen, you go out on a fashion limb by slithering into a brown leather dress with square buttons. Your daddy dropping you off looks down at the floor of his truck and says that the yellow Mary Janes with boxy toes you have on look a helluva lot like clown shoes.
A few acts that’ll later garner fame come to the Towne House at regular intervals—ZZ Top and Jerry Lee Lewis, a psychedelic band called the Fever Tree. When Johnny and Edgar Winter visit nearby Beaumont, where they grew up, they also kick in. Admission: one buck—double a movie ticket. You get a tribal hand stamp that glows under black light and won’t wash off for days.
Inside, the band (the Top, as you’ve come to call them) is at first dwarfed by the throbbing light show on the back wall—multicolored amoebae made from clear glass plates sandwiching together an eerie elixir of salad oil and food coloring. The colored squiggles get thrown on the wall by an overhead projector with a Leechfield Library tag. Weird.
Plus this band differs from any you’ve seen, for they wear no powder-blue suits or ruffled prom shirts like the Boogie Kings. They lack the polished and pointy-toed shoes James Brown and the Famous Flames had on the time your daddy took you to a college concert, and you felt for the first time your unalloyed whiteness amid rows of black faces.
The Top wear jeans, torn and patched. Leather cowboy vests over T-shirts. Billy Gibbons’s beard evokes an old gold-miner’s. He and Dusty Hill seem to ride the great bucking rhythms of guitar and bass (respectively) with the stoical stares you’ve seen on prison rodeo bronco busters. You don’t yet recognize their riffs as deriving from Mr. John Lee Hooker. But the beat pounding from those black speakers finds some natural home in your pelvis. It hooks right into the dance moves you picked up either from Lecia (who goes across the river to Louisiana roadhouses like Lou Ann’s or the Big Oaks) or from your slavish devotion to Soul Train. Even kids who start out doing go-go-boot stuff from American Bandstand or Hullabaloo—waving their arms and ponying around like fools—eventually ask you to break down the Cold Sweat or Harlem Shuffle. The music just gets some swivel working in a person.
On stage, a Day-Glo skeleton holds a foreboding sign that says Speed Kills. No one in the band explains that speed refers to methedrine. That even hippies are getting strung out on it. Eating it in pill form, snorting it, or shooting it, forgoing food for weeks on end until they pare themselves down to skeletal form, and ergo have full-tilt heart attacks before the age of twenty on it. (What did you know of velocity then, of weeks eaten by your brain’s own skitter—drops of water on a hot iron skillet? The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.)
Suddenly, and without instruction, even the farm girls in their corny, matching dresses with different color polka dots are talking about speed with the feigned insouciance of old heads, as if some invisible lightning bolt has shot through every teenage brain in the county searing in this common language. Actual drug use of any kind still seems farther away than Vietnam. But (like Vietnam) some of its lingo seems to infect common parlance in a collective instant. Maybe you’d all brought home the same Weekly Reader from school or watched the same TV drug-addict movie. Maybe the hard-driven bass line of the Top just wordlessly hammers all that drug lore into everybody’s skull.
The leather dress you wear is an airless sheath, and every week you soak in your own sweat but can find no other garb appropriate to who you’re trying to become. At one point, you find your body rocking in the arms of a boy from Houston whose iron surfer’s cross clicks against the square dress buttons.
Clarice once told you that tickling a boy’s neck just under his collar would drive him to a sexual frenzy that tethered him to you like a dog. You at first hesitate trying this on the surfer boy, because while you want the power such a response would accord, you don’t want to look like a skank. With all the tentativeness of a cat testing water, you touch his neck lightly then draw back, half expecting he’ll mistake your fingers for a junebug that needs swatting. But sure enough, the minuscule gesture from you signals him. He draws you closer. You try it again, and his breath quickens. By the end of the song you’re tracing your initials lightly on his neck as if to brand him your own.
Later you sit in the folding church chairs at the hall’s perimeter. His arm slings over your shoulder so his hand hovers inches above your breast without even once grazing it—no small feat. (What did you talk about? Was talking permitted, or was it all you could both do in the rushing terror of letting your bodies touch to endure it?) You ask him—more trying to make conversation than from any true curiosity—about that burnt peanut smell in his clothes, and he tells you he smoked a joint with his sister between sets.
You don’t blink in the face of this fact. Yet he suddenly seems wholly alien to you. Though you’ve been languidly hanging in his arms all night waiting for a kiss, you’re subsequently glad it happens only once, during the last song. His mouth is arid and sour. At the hesitant touch of his tongue, your body seizes up with a fear that masks itself as arousal, even conjuring for a fleet second that night with John Cleary. For years, you’ll confuse terror and sexual heat this way. Whether it’s your peculiar mistake, or the curse of anyone new to bodily discernments, you’ll never figure. But the feelings do favor each other, i.e. sweat rolls down the ribs; breathlessness kicks in; the skin surface become hyperalert. It’s baffling that you feel phosphorescence gather in your body—as you had with your Sadie Hawkins date—given your slight revulsion at the boy’s heavy body and sour kiss.
You draw back from his embrace and pretend to see your daddy’s truck through the far window. Outside, you sneak glimpses of the boy shooting pool in the game room. And when he calls the next day to firm up plans for a beach trip, you won’t come to the phone.
Maybe a friend of high caliber can only arrive after several months of parched loneliness, or after a string of psychic outlays such as you endured those years in junior high, because only the erasure of beloveds can force you to reveal your need for a friend to a stranger.
For the first months of high school, your lack of friends isn’t a worry. You’re too busy trying to absorb the shock waves of your own new strangeness. Occasionally loneliness manifests as a specific longing—harsh as thirst—for Clarice or John Cleary. But a new awkwardness infuses your dealings with them.
Clarice has hooked up with a traditional Cajun boyfriend from the cross-town rival high school. He keeps a close watch on her and has a whole list of stuff she’s not supposed to do, like cussing or going out at night without him. She lands a job at the Chicken Shack, and despite the boyfriend’s rules, she still manages to flummox customers by chirping things like, “Fuck you and come back,” but so fast the words are nearly (just barely) unintelligible. Some nights, you sit out under the stars about the time John pulls in from a date, and he trots over smelling of shaving lotion to scratch the cat under its chin, but there’s a void between you now.
One source of succor is the drama teacher. Maybe you migrate to her for help in playacting your new self into existence. But drama teachers in that town also have a special role for readers—they’re the only school-based source of contemporary plays and poems. Otherwise, the school curriculum keeps you lashed to the m
ast of previous centuries—Ivanhoe and Tennyson and Dickens out the wazoo. You even manage to resent Melville till you actually read him.
But the twentieth-century works Miss Baird favors for interpretation have an antique flavor and could easily be culled from the past. She adores patriotic and religious sounding stuff, or work with homespun characters—corncob-smoking uncles and head-rag-wearing “mammies.” Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon-River Anthology, so despised by you, is oft-quoted by her. For district poetry competition, you propose Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” whose title character in the final line “went home and put a bullet through his head.” Soon as you say it, Miss Baird cringes deeply over her desktop. She hurries to the podium, waving her freckled hands at you as if the offending image hung in the air and could be dispersed like so much chalk dust.
Whatever her literary proclivities, she’s obliged to haul you to speech and drama tournaments. And just as the Towne House dances broaden the territory in your search for like-minded souls, so do these trips. Kids from other towns and schools pour off yellow buses, and always you look among the books they carry for one subversive enough to recommend its reader as a friend.
It’s after school, and Miss Baird stands a stubby five-foot-one before the Drama Club, her flaming orange hair sprayed into a man’s stiff pompadour. She reads in clipped syllables the muster of contestants picked to compete at the University of Houston that weekend. (Miss Baird made you do tongue exercises, saying phrases like cutta-butta and toy boat over and over.) The school dress code forces her to wear skirts, but she always strides and stands with her legs so far apart that if you sit on the front row, you can see the side seams strain against their stitching.
For the premeet pep talk, she continues to pace before you all, taking the slow, swinging steps that would suit somebody with a peg leg. (Later, you’ll never think of Miss Baird without imagining a riding crop in hand to slap her jodhpured calf with.) “There’s someone who’s worked extra hard for this meet, someone who deserves special praise. Special consideration.” On the stressed words, Miss Baird tends to lapse into an English accent, so hard becomes hah-ed.
Usually this fake accent would rankle you. But at the very word special, a dim hope ignites. You fix a rigid half-grin on your face until you note that Mortimer G. Beauregard’s face has welded itself into the same rictus.
Miss Baird whirls in the opposite direction. “Rarely do I call attention to a single person’s work. We’re a team after all. We rise as a team—” (she raises her hand like a choir conductor calling up all the altos’ power)—“We fall as a team.” The same hand dive bombs downward. “But this young lady has been so tireless, brilliant. Her talent borders on genius…”
With your hand over your mouth, you try to adjust your expression to an indifferent vapidity that opposes Mortimer’s death smirk, while your fellow students glance around the room for someone deserving of this praise.
“I’m absolutely heartbroken she can’t be here this afternoon, for she’s new to our school. I’m speaking, por supuesto—which means of course in Spanish—of none other than Meredith Bright, who’s just joined us from the noble state of Mississippi.” Miss Baird stops mid-room, removes her glasses, and pinches at the bridge of her nose as if in great pain. “Meredith certainly deserves the full Indian war whoop welcome. Let’s show her some school spirit on the bus Saturday. Shall we give it a go?”
At this Miss Baird starts whooping—slapping her fingers over her O-shaped mouth with its faded stain of tangerine-colored lipstick. The other students kick in so the sound rises from the chairs around you. Usually a war whoop leaves you feeling stranded inside some gorilla gang. But in this instance, it’s the only way to hide the sneer your upper lip is drawing itself into.
Lying in bed that night, you decide that Meredith will doubtless resemble one of those prissy, stringy-haired girls from the Honor Society, who view their ugliness as a kind of modesty, something to be pious about. (Inducted into the Honor Society, you’re kicked out within a year, by which time, you’ll have grown into enough of a wiseass to say to the principal, “Aw dang, do I have to give my pin back?”)
The Saturday of the meet, your mother says of Meredith Bright, prophetically enough, “Maybe you’ll like her.” She’s fresh from the shower and whapping talcum powder on her back at the time, each touch leaving a frosty chrysanthemum on the pale skin. Her injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: “You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter.”
Your first sight of Meredith is on the bus amid the dreaded war whoop welcome. She holds a beige folder with a casually posed self-possession. Also, she looks totally unlike anyone you’re ever seen. For one thing, she’s done her honey-colored hair in the corkscrew curls of a young Shirley Temple. This is the era of straight hair. White girls often buy the same chemicals black people use to “conk” or scorch waves from their hair.
Meredith is also stout—not fat-girl stout, but well padded around her big-boned frame. This makes everything about her round—her face is round and shiny pink; her mint-colored eyes are round and heavy-lidded. Using your mother’s gauge for female success, she seems prettier than the smart girls, and smarter than the pretty ones. She also wears slung around her neck a leather thong bearing an orange clay disk slightly smaller than a saucer in circumference. It bears the word POT floating dead center in avocado-colored print. In the midst of the war whoops (which you refuse to actually whoop for) she carries herself—grinning, but with disaffected stateliness—to the very back corner of the bus. And there you leave her unmolested, though you spend some intervals picturing her tied to the center of a straw-filled bull’s-eye propped at a slant while you draw an arrow from your quiver.
She crops up in the auditorium during your recitation of “In Flanders Field”:
We are the dead. Short days ago we lived,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Field…
Miss Baird has charged you with several rather sweeping hand gestures. Your stiff arms wheel to indicate a flying lark; later, the arms spread low with palms up in a pose you think of as Christ-like. You intone the words “We are the dead” in a sort of cotton-mouthed manner stolen from Boris Karloff. (Years later, you’ll see these replicated on an airport tarmac: a man in a beige jumpsuit using two flashlights to wave a plane into place will send In Flanders Field the poppies grow tumbling through your head.)
Meredith slips out before some kid can perform his hysterical rendition of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which involves a lot of head-whipping back and forth, his neck wiggly as a goose while he refrains: “Cannons to the right of me/Cannons to the left of me.…” At the awards assembly, you pick up a red ribbon. The only blue ribbon from your school goes (small wonder) to Meredith, who wins for some Shirley Jackson short story.
On the trip home, the students on the bus belt out songs that combine aboriginal hand clapping and foot stomping with tireless repetitions. Still, Meredith sits serene in back, her great, leonine head of curls tilted above Dostoevsky’s Idiot, a rarity since books by Russians can make teachers question you over vigorously about Communism. To see her reading a book by a foreigner emboldens you.
Anybody sitting here? you ask, holding onto the curved metal seat backs as you jostle.
No, she says. She’s almost got a grin on her face, but somehow seems far away, as if internally afloat in some glassy lake.
Her silence is formidable. You figure out after a few minutes that she’ll sit there sphinxlike until you prompt her again. You drum up a more provocative opener. I hear you’re a genius, you finally say.
You wait for her to deny this with a demure shake of her curly head, which denial you could then judge for its falsity. Instead, she gives a nod that strikes you as sage. This is true, she finally says.
You’re edged off balance by such certa
inty. She is, after all, the new girl, somewhat chubby and very oddly dressed. She should be beholden to any local who might deign to speak to her. Rather than solicitous gratitude, you’ve been faced with what you’ll come to call her Chinese empress pose.
I’m really smart too, you say. (The audacity of this forces you to shrug, as if shedding the great mantle of smartness you’re forced to bear.) You probably heard that already.
No, she says. I hadn’t.
Well, anyways, you say. We should be friends. These other people are idiots.
She nods again, saying, This is also true.
You ask her what religion she is, and when she says Baptist, you tell her she’s too smart to be Baptist. She should be Buddhist like you and your mom. She snickers at this, saying, I’ll look into it.
The bus bobs along, and your mind lurches back to her not having heard you were smart.
You say, You didn’t hear I published a book of poems in fourth grade?
No, she says. She considers this for a few heartbeats. Finally she says, Fourth grade’s pretty young.
You sense some scant disapproval in her tone. Here you’d always figured that youth made your talent both more rare and your long-term prospects more certain. You’d collected stories about young writers from which to sip encouragement. You recount for her how Arthur Rimbaud at fourteen published some big deal poems.
Wasn’t he dead by twenty? Meredith says. Gangrene of the leg or something. In Africa.
Yeah, I remember that now, you say. (You never knew it.)
Meredith says, Milton thought he had to read everything before he was educated enough to write poems.
You scramble to think what you know about this name, Milton, which you skimmed past in your mother’s poetry anthology. You don’t even know if Milton’s his first or last name. You messed up that way once with Dante, which was one poet’s last name and another one’s first. You’ve lately stopped reading anybody who wrote earlier than Elvis because a distant idiom is harder to steal from.