Cherry
Brand: Penguin Books
Color: Purple
Categories: Books, Literature & Fiction, Poetry



Grade level: 12 and up
Dimensions: 7.78 x 5.07 x 0.56 inches
Reading age: 18 years and up
ISBN-13: 978-0141002071
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780141002071
Publisher: Penguin Books
Print length: 276 pages
Publication date: September 1, 2001
subtitle: Paperback – September 1, 2001
author: Visit Amazon's Mary Karr Page search results Mary Karr
review: Editorial Reviews Review “Karr captures, exactly, what it’s like for a girl to kiss the first boy she loves….She captures, exactly, what it’s like to start high school….She captures, exactly, what it’s like to be a book-hungry teenager, enraptured by the words and heady ideas that offer transport from the banalities of small-town life….As she did in The Liars’ Club , Ms. Karr combines a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A compelling ride through [Karr’s] adolescence….What distinguishes Karr is the ability to serve up her experiences in a way that packs the wallop of immediacy with the salty tang of adult reflection…her descriptions of the bruised-lip, druggy wonder of teenage love are precise, unsentimental, and lovely.” —Chicago Tribune “ The Liars’ Club left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write…the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again? Cherry lays that question to rest once and for all….It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it’s about all of us. —Newsweek “A smart, searing memoir….Romance, in all of its wondrous and heartbreaking incarnations, is Karr’s great subterranean subject, the ground upon which her wily, whip-smart writing catches root.” — Lisa Shea, Elle Stunning…If The Liars’ Club succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity, Cherry succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose.” —The New York Times Book Review “ Cherry is the kind of book a brave parent could do a lot worse than to give to a teenager….Teenage girls might come away from it knowing that they’re not freaks, that mistakes aren’t fatal, and that good writing kisses just about everything better. And for teenage boys, reading Cherry would be like stealing the other team’s playbook….Mary Karr gives memoir back its good name.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Here, intact, is the smart, sassy, wickedly observant voice first met in The Liars’ Club, a voice that knows how to tell a story in a crackling vernacular that feels exactly true to its setting.” —The Washington Post “Cherry delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events…its humor, warmth, and crackling language should keep Karr’s fans hungering for another round.” —People Magazine “Karr writes about adolescence with the same emotional precision that illuminated her account of childhood…[she] nails with wonderful specificity the complex way adolescents bond intellectually and emotionally. Her descriptions of her early sexual experiences are also original. Her language is frank without becoming clinical, and she captures the swooning tenderness of a kiss without sounding sentimental…firmly rooted though it is in a particular time and place, Cherry, like all serious autobiographies, is about something much more universal: the construction of a satisfying identity or, more precisely, the discovery of a fundamental self that was there all along.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “It’s the powerful spiked punch of Karr’s writing that amazes…Cherry is about the dizzy funk of female teen sexuality, and Karr captures the innocence and dirt of it, the hunger and the thrill, with exquisite pitch. Karr’s connection to her younger sexual self is profound with mercy or nostalgia….Karr identifies the vulnerable, frightening gap between most girls’ night thoughts and those in the day….Right now, in this remembrance of blooming, Karr continues to set the literary standard for making the personal universal.” —Entertainment Weekly “This book is best when it portrays things common to all of us in adolescence. The woeful sense of isolation. The fierce desire to have friends. The agitated, wondrous discovery of things sexual. Those awkward kisses in the dark. And the risks.” —USA Today “This book is about being a female adolescent, a horrible fate; the best that can be said of it is that one does recover. The extraordinary thing about Karr, in addition to the poetry of her writing, is her stunning honesty.” — Molly Ivins, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram “Awesomely written…Cherry is beautifully wrought and tart in its angst-wrangling….Karr can render sentences so powerful as to make you bow your head in reverence.” —The Village Voice “Cherry is beautifully written, without a single word wasted. Karr’s poetic yet tensile language creates exceptional landscapes, both physical and emotional…her broad but precise descriptions, coupled with piercing insights into the sometimes agonizing trials of growing up, create fully realized characters with whom the reader can immediately empathize….Hardly a soul alive hasn’t felt exiled in the dark territory of adolescence; Karr maps this landscape expertly and candidly.” —The San Diego Union “Step aside, J. D. Salinger, and take your alter ego Holden Caulfield with you. Mary Karr has staked out your turf, the upended land of adolescence. And she is just smart, angry, sensitive and self-mocking enough to defend it with everything she’s got…this time Karr has created another fiercely poetic and alternately bruising, comic, and picaresque account of her wild and painful journey through early adolescence. And if ever the tortuous metamorphosis from caterpillar to damaged butterfly has been captured in print, this is it…the tales of her first serious crush, first kiss and first date [are] each gorgeously delineated in all their tragicomic dimensions, and unique in the way they capture the overwhelming combination of attraction and repulsion involved in early sexual experiences. But everything Karr touches is emblazoned with this raw honesty and a sense of the breathtaking confusion and emotional terrorism of adolescenc About the Author Mary Karr's poems and essays have won Pushcart prizes and have appeared in magazines such as the New Yorker , The Atlantic , and Parnassus . She was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College, and is now the Jesse Truesdale Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Cherry A Memoir By Mary Karr Penguin Books Copyright ©2001 Mary Karr All right reserved. ISBN: 0141002077 Chapter One Violet Durkey has a hamster and a miniature turtle who lives in a shallowplastic bowl under a palm tree with snap-on fronds, and an albino rabbit namedSnuffles with pink ears from Easter. It's the hamster I'm thinking about here. One night he nosed out of his poorly latched cage and scampered across theglowing iron surface of the gas heater, blistering the bottoms of his tiny pinkfeet, the same feet whose weensy, lizard-like nails Violet had wanted tolacquer Sashay Pink. (Her mom said oh no Violet.) The vet prescribed a greenishantibiotic balm Violet was meant to smudge on with a Q-tip every morning. Thisbalm, deemed icky by Violet, was so tasty to Hamster that he not only licked itup but ultimately (unbelievably) came to nibble off the digits (fingers? toes?)on all four of his feet, which act left him-when Violet burst in from schoolthat day-with bleeding stumps so painful for everybody to look at that he hadto be put to sleep. Violet told this tale of woe in the skating rink's tiny toilet-her blue eyesmisting over and her Earth Angel Pink mouth quivering while Ruth Ann, Sherry,and Suzy Torvino gathered around. The skating rink was a hurricane-fence cagewith a brown canvas roof and vinyl flags like those you see in a used car lotstrung whapping around its perimeter. From box speakers mounted at the tent'sfour corners, the Beatles sang that she loved us yah, yah, yah. This song waswarped by coming through the pink plywood door to where we stood at a makeshiftsink with little blue packets of Wash-'N'-Dri for after you got done peeing.(Actually, because I never overtly peed on my hands, I never bothered with handwashing anyway.) In the tiny mirror that hung from a nail poked in fiberboard, Violet's round,clear face was flushed under her pale freckles. This was the year before we allhit sixth grade. Violet straightened her curly brown hair not with bouts ofCurl Free, which her mother said she was too young for, but by having her bigsister steam iron said hair under a towel, using clouds of Aqua Net after tohold it. But in the close humid air of that bathroom, the hair spray wasfailing. From Violet's otherwise glossy pageboy, small ringlets were breakingloose at the hairline, seizing up in a way that evoked Renaissance paintings(Hans Somebody the Elder) that my mother praised for their delicacy. (The factthat Mother, who was a painter, kept art books deemed our entire clan somewhatsuspect.) In short, Violet was beautiful, and much beloved by the general populace. Herparents and two teenage sisters pampered her, yet she managed to representherself as both entitled to that pampering and somehow surprised by it. Theskates she owned (not rented) had held no one's feet but hers and did not leaveher socks smelling like goat turd. They fit exactly. They were fresh-polishednurse white and had pink pom-poms laced to the toes. The pom-poms matched hergingham clam-digger pants with the knee ruffle, and those matched her crop-top.She and her mother had stitched this outfit up themselves from the Simplicitypattern that morning. When, during school, I whined out loud about my lack ofwearable dresses (I had scads but only deigned to wear four of the leastbabyish ones, and so had to repeat my Monday dress each Friday), Violet alwaysasked why I didn't just stitch something up. She recommended me to Sigona's drygoods, where a bin of mod print remnants cost just fifty cents each. More thanonce she told me that a dress for me probably wouldn't take a yard. She might as well have asked why I didn't slay a zebra for its hide for all theinterest I had in sewing. Violet smelled like grated lemon peel and baby powder. Her Snoopy box purse,balanced open on the sink edge, held a miniature packet of pink tissues forjust such weepy moments. There was also a pink rat-tail brush, and a minusculeglass vial of perfume that reminded me of nothing so much as a cyanide capsulefrom The Man from U.N.C.L.E., my favorite TV show about international spies. I poked my head past the elbows of girls encircling her while she dabbed underher lashes with the Kleenex wad. I asked to borrow her brush, hoping that thisbegged favor might buy me entry to their circle when gawking outside it forfifteen minutes had failed to. "I'm sorry, Mary." Violet talked in italics sometimes when addressing me, theway you would to a deaf person or foreigner you were pretty sure otherwisewouldn't twig to what you were saying. "My mother won't let me loan it out. I'dget in so much trouble." It seemed that Mrs. Durkey feared Violet's glossy headwould wind up squirming with head lice if she passed her brush around (a notunfounded fear). With that, I was dismissed. She drew back into the comfort ofher friends. In a nonitalicized voice, Violet told Ruth Ann and Sherry and SuzyTorvino that they needed to bring their own pillows to her sleepover thatFriday. My expression must have altered, for Violet's eyes in the tiny mirror clickedin and then detached from Sherry's and Ruth Ann's in turn. We'd all been on acobbled-together track team that summer, myself the relay alternate, and I'dfancied myself somehow welded into Violet's good graces by a meet we alltraveled to in Houston. But Violet's gaze, which had lit on the floor, saidotherwise. "You're having a sleepover?" I finally said. This kind of overt angling for invitations was part of what kept me outside theelbows of those girls. I seemed destined to blunder into conversations nobodyelse cared to have. Most girls knew better. If Mavis Clay had overheard her ownomission from such a party, she would have skated out without a word. But I hadto pipe up, to worm the mystery of the event into the air. (Counterphobic, someshrink will later call it, being magnetically drawn to whatever one fearsmost.) "See my mom only told me I could have five girls, and Ruth Ann's my bestfriend, and Sherry's my second-best, and Suzy's my third. And if I don't inviteJoettie Bryant, she won't invite me to her trampoline party. And if I don'tinvite Lynda Delano, her dad will yell at my dad at work. And if I don't inviteJasmine Texler, Joettie can't come because her mom goes to Church of Christ anddoesn't know my mom." Violet gaped at my ignorance of these complex barters insocial currency, and all the girls but Ruth Ann mirrored that gaping. (Ruth Annwas someone whose calm blue eyes tended to fall on me at such moments withsomething like care.) "But that's six girls," I said. Violet looked puzzled, her head cocked itself anotch to the right. I held up my hand and counted them off each finger. "RuthAnn, Sherry, Suzy, Jasmine, Joettie, Lynda." With Lynda I stuck my thumb intothe air and let my jaw hang. "Well okay." She looked imperiously at me. "My mom said I could only have sixgirls then." Such was the early logic of exclusion, as explained to me by Violet Durkey-who,in all fairness, committed no crime other than being adorable enough that Iwished to be her. I don't remember if I actually told Violet Durkey at thatinstant that she was a snotball and her hamster probably ate his feet off aspart of a suicide plan to get loose from her. At some point in my socialcareer, I did let such a comment fly. Which is precisely why I didn't get askedto sleepovers. Other girls from families weird as mine managed to overcometheir origins. Lecia got invited out by popular girls. So did Jasmine Texler,who'd moved to our town after her mom drank a bottle of laundry bluing anddied. Jenny Raines even got elected cheerleader though her mom lived in thestate loony bin. Without the company of other girls, the summer became the first of many vastlyvacant summers, a long white scroll of papyrus onto which something longed tobe writ. Unless I'd found some book to lose myself in (the ferocity of myappetite for books rivaled a junkie's for opiate), the idleness wasstultifying. That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reachme. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like aspell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying hewas sorry but not really meaning it. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar RiceBurroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an apeman to swing me from vine to vine. I read To Kill a Mockingbird three times in one week, closing it on the lastpage, then cracking it open again to the first till the binding came ungluedand had to be masking-taped back on. In it, a girl my age got rescued from alunatic trying to kill her by the town bogey man, who'd years before stabbedhis daddy with scissors while cutting paper dolls. She actually took this guyBoo by the hand and made friends with him, showing a courage and care beyondanything I could ever muster. (When our town maniac, a massively fat man namedOtis, came shuffling down the road talking in whispers about Jesus and theBlessed Virgin and the good elves of this world, I always crossed to the otherside.) In the second or third grade, I'd seen the movie of this book, andalways superimposed my own face over that of the puckish Scout, while alsopicturing for myself the chiseled resolve of the young Gregory Peck playing herdaddy. Inside their story, I could vanish from myself. But books have last pages. The instant I finished one such page, I'd be forcedto look up at whatever soap opera I had on. In the overacted, melodramaticgestures of those black-eyelined actresses I felt my own day's heaviness evenmore keenly. They flung their wrists to their foreheads in torment, or clutchedtheir own heaving bosoms, or pitched their black-veiled selves across glossycoffins. In short, they moved through dramas of consequence far beyond any I'dever be called to act in. Mostly, the house was empty. When Daddy wasn't pulling shift work at therefinery, he either tried to cadge some sleep or stayed off on mysteriousrounds. At thirteen, my sister Lecia had already manufactured a persona forherself that ranged free of the family and its unspoken stigmas. She filled outa 36C cup and dated a variety of football stars. When she climbed the bleachersat a game with legs a yard long in cutoff jeans, her blond flip sprayed into aform no wind could alter, high schools boys stood up by the row. Mother was only in her studio one afternoon a week, not painting, but teachingpainting to various Leechfield housewives. In response to an ad she'd run inthe Gazette, women came to set up easels there Wednesday afternoons. To keepthem from baking alive, Daddy installed a secondhand window air conditionerthat leaked icy water into a pie tin with a steady drip that marked thoseotherwise timeless afternoons like a conductor's baton. I was supposed to beexiled to the house for these sessions, for which the ladies paid good money tohave Mother stare with furrowed concern bordering on horror at theircanvases-muddy-looking peaches and grapes, stiff-backed sunflowers stuck deadcenter lackluster vases. The worst were the portraits-kids and grandkidsmostly, with massive hydrocephalic foreheads and wall-eyed expressions. ("Oneeye'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 resinsfrom the turpentine, a heady mixture that drew me from the solitary house'sendless black-and-white soap operas. Mostly, I'd just sit outside the door onthe hood of Mother's yellow station wagon in the dark garage, listening to theladies' endless complaints about their husbands. I specifically recall one ladysaying she wouldn't let her husband touch her pocketbook (a word I'd somehowalways 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 soonthe offended lady came bumping out the door, wet canvases in hand. Once ortwice I'd stand in the doorway and wheedle for my own sketch pad and charcoaland one of those giant beige gum erasers that I liked to eat when I waslittler. Other days, Mother was at college studying for her teaching certificate-a realoddity back when few moms worked outside the home. But she wanted a higherstandard life than the local average and feared destitution at every turn.(Ironically enough, it was her own extravagant habits that tended to edge us tothat brink. During a few screaming matches over debts she ran up, my daddyaccused her of far outspending anything she earned teaching, but I wouldn'tswear this was true.) Her college work seemed to me like yet another escaperoute from the banality of time at home with us. Mother also had a secret history of hasty marriages and equally hastydissolutions. Pretty much if you pissed her off good, you could expect to hearher tires tearing out the driveway. Within days, the knuckles of a processserver would rap on your door. But I'm writing about the 1960s, when Lecia andI didn't yet know about all her pre-Daddy adventures. She ultimately racked upseven marriages in all, but we'd only witnessed the two to my daddy-with theshort, nearly negligible blip of my stepfather. (He'd appeared after mygrandmother's death, after Mother had been briefly carted off to the hospitalfor-among other things-the vast quantities of vodka she'd managed to guzzle.) Such events kept our household from drawing much traffic. Kids loping straightthrough the yards on Garfield Road tended to cut an arc around ours as youmight 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 occasionalchameleon that slithered from the tangle of honeysuckle through the vents ofthe air conditioner in my room. Once I spent a whole morning at the bathroommirror trying to get one such unfortunate lizard to serve as a dangly earringby biting my earlobe. (If you squeezed his soft neck just right, his mouthwould open like a clasp.) But he'd only bite down for a second or so before hisjaw opened and he fell down my shirt front or into the sink and I'd have tocatch him again. His tail finally broke off, and our Siamese-then hugelypregnant-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 Idon't know. Nothing whatsoever seemed to be approaching from any direction. Iwait like an ox, Franz Kafka wrote and Mother underlined in one of her collegebooks. The sentence was copied down like an axiom into one of the dozen or soBig Chief tablets I bought that summer, then let stay blank after a fewscribbled pages. But if it's great literature you're after, Big Chief tablets seem gray-pagedand flimsy, too pale to inscribe with genius of the caliber I aspired to. So Ipilfered 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 meantto be hypnotic. I never ripped out her pencil sketches of fishing boats, or theadvice on portraiture she'd dated 1964: "Details of features not as importantas mood, character, or manner etc. Artist must be proficient enough to workintuitively. Relatives or friends may not see person truly." Under this, Iwrote in baroque cursive: "Me too-Mary Karr 1966." To hold that book in my hand-its simple bulk and being-is to grasp onto thehard 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 thatloose-jointed script I wrote. We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across theblanker selves that the young actually proffer. (When my son was born, Iremember staring into his blue, wondering eyes, then asking the obstetricalnurse what he might be thinking. "You know the static channel on your TV?" sheanswered.) So in actual written artifacts from my past, I sound way less smart than I tendto recall having been. My poems clip-clop doggedly along, less verse thantrotting 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 anyeleven-year-old's, though the pathos I found in them makes me wince: "I am notvery successful as a little girl," I wrote. "When I grow up, I will probably bea mess." The Sharp family had dragged me to two tent revival meetings thatsummer in a town called Vidor (famous, by the way, for its Ku Klux Klan fishfries). On those steamy nights where people fanned their dripping faces withfuneral fans on which a blue-robed Jesus knocked on a gleaming golden door, Inever followed the weeping line of believers to the altar to dedicate my lifeto 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 floodsworthy of Noah. Every cheek is rosy, every cloud silver-lined. Reading thosepages, you can almost hear the tambourines shaking in the background and asurge of ballpark organ music as the preacher asks you to testify. Unfathomably, the career path I drew was the strange one I wound upundertaking, "to write 1/2 poetry and 1/2 autobiography." Though I nevermanaged to wrest for myself a career as "philosipher," whatever I thought thatmeant, I also longed also to become "a real woman, a hardworking woman with apure 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 withMarshal Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke and Palladin from Have Gun WillTravel-cowboys who would soon magically transform into knights in armor after Idiscovered tales of chivalry. Jason McSomething, I think they called him. He'dbeen falsely convicted of treason during a Civil War battle and sentenced tohang before escaping. Most episodes, he galloped around the West looking forfolks who could prove he wasn't a big sissy who ran out on his regiment. Butsomebody who thought him guilty would always pop up, so he'd have to slink outof 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 justfixing to get frisky on. I devoted more than a few pages to praising Jason'slong suffering. (The stoicism I favored was less in the mode of Marcus Aureliusand more reminiscent of the donkey Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.) I imagined himhoisting 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 forme!" That sort of thing. When the pencil lead wore down and faded to slate gray, I'd sometimes walk toremote neighborhoods and knock on the doors of strange houses. If someoneanswered, I'd claim I was trying to sell Christmas cards, though I lacked anysamples or other convincing evidence that this was so. I don't recall trying toextort actual dollars. (I had money, and there was nothing to buy anyway.) Ijust had nothing better to do. People were damn nice about it. They handed me sugar cookies and Rice KrispieTreats in waxed paper, foil-wrapped kisses and hard candy by the fistful, butno Christmas card orders got totted down, even though I copied some randomnames 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 minutebefore bursting into tears. She put both hands on her jowly face. The tearsrivered 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 afterI'd said I was sorry for about the fifteenth time. "You just put me in mind ofmy boy. He's passed over-" She choked off a sob, a body-wracking convulsionthat 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 saidanything. Then her shoulders relaxed a whit. "Do you want to see?" she finallyasked, in a voice hardly above a whisper. She didn't even say see what. Nor didI run through any of the dire warnings I'd heard about getting in cars orhouses with strangers. Maybe that's odd. Doubtless a more regular kid wouldhave cobbled up a dental appointment to bolt off to. But the weight of hergrief drew me to her. She held open the aluminum screen an extra notch for meto pass through. The living room was cold as a meat locker and smelled like a pot of cabbageleft too long on the stove. The light was muddy as gloom, all the shades beingdrawn flush to the sills. She'd also laid down plastic runners along the mosttraveled paths to keep the carpet naps fluffy. So plastic paths led from thedoor where I stood to a mossy-looking plaid sofa, then zigzagged to what musthave been kitchen and bedroom and bath. Tables that would have hit you at kneelevel or shin level in the dark crowded every inch of available floor space,and were themselves packed with little porcelain figurines. A more uselessassemblage of objects I've never seen-hoop-skirted shepherdesses with pilgrim'sstaffs, guys with powdered wigs, dinner bells, and gilt-edged snuff boxes. Iremember specifically a disembodied female hand with rings and bracelets andred 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 almostnothing. He was blond when little, and his hair got darker as he grew. What'sstuck with me in those staggered pictures' advance through his short life werethe costumes marking any boy's inching toward manhood-a toddler withsuspendered shorts; a school-age boy with a homemade birthday hat; then aLittle Leaguer's striped knickers; baptismal robes; and finally a gangly teenin a white dinner jacket holding a corsage box. "He shot himself," she said. Her face told me it was on purpose. Up till thatday, he'd been the perfect boy, she said. Then he went to a dancing party andasked a girl onto the floor. And she said no. He came home miserable, opened upthe Bible to the Twenty-third Psalm, and shot himself, right in the head. Theywere in the next room at the time watching Lawrence Welk's Champagne MusicHour. What she did next is the kind of gesture I've since learned that I somehowinvite. (After I stopped thinking of such moments as my fault and began toregard them as an odd form of privilege, I handled them better.) She steered meby my shoulder along another plastic path to the coffee table. I did not shrinkfrom her touch. I both longed to see and dreaded what we were headed for: theworn black Bible on the rectangular laminated wood. A laminated card stuck outof the pages to keep the place. Hefting up the Bible worked some tranquilizing voodoo on her. She becamestrangely calm, as if getting to the heart of some matter she'd been circlingall day. She'd done it before and often. Her ease told me that. Some passingassemblage of milkmen and water-meter readers and Avon ladies had stood where Iwas standing and sought to arrange their faces into tolerable expressions, as Ithen did. Certainly I wanted to stay upbeat, but grinning like a monkey was waywrong. 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 ofburnt chocolate took up most of the pages' deep valley. The paper had puckeredfrom the wet. Still the words were legible. "The Lord is my shepherd...," Iread in my head. Then I was saying a hasty goodbye, for only a few years before, my ownwild-assed mother had threatened suicide. Part of me believed the notion wascontagious, a germ I could pick up that might reinfect Mother. I didn'tconsciously ponder this, but it flitted through me strong enough that beforethe lady could say diddly, I was shaking her leathery cold hand on the porch inwaves of heat. Then I was running home full tilt as if the house wouldn't beempty when I burst in. The tedium there was suddenly preferable to the terrorof those houses I loped past, inside which were unknown losses. Sometime that summer I stopped prowling around strange houses and concocted areal job shining shoes at the barbershop. This act of mine thwarted Daddy's vowthat his daughters never work for pay while under his roof. Still, I defiedthat order by taking his shoeshine box to the shop and weaseled myself a postin the red leather shine chair. The shop held special allure that week since I'd overheard somewhere that JohnCleary was going in for his annual crew cut the next day. I watched inworshipful silence as, under Mr. DePello's humming clippers, hanks of John'sshining yellow hair fell in slow strips to the linoleum, where it was sweptinto 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 untannedscalp 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 tome 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 vinylshine chair, for my awe must have been palpable. Mr. DePello untied the apronand shook it so short hairs fell to the floor in cuneiform patterns. Johnhanded the mirror back and said yessir looks good, thank you. To me he saidseeya at school, though school was months off and our paths till then crossedpractically every day. The bell jangled as he left. I watched him swing his leg over his bike andshove off down the sidewalk in a strip of sunlight. Long after he'd gone, Iresisted the urge to snatch a handful of his clean yellow hair from my suddenlygrowing collection of John Cleary memorabilia. Probably this unlikely brush with his grooming habits kept me coming back tothe barbershop another day or so. But he never showed up again. No one my agedid. Nor did I ever have a single customer. And I was, if not overtly lazy,quick to bore. The slow turning of Field and Stream pages (they allegedly hidthe Playboys in a drawer when I showed up) and the repetitive, metallic snip ofMr. DePello's slender scissors on some bald guy's tonsurelike fringe eventuallywore me down to my natural, nail-biting state. After I watched Song of Bernadette on TV that summer, I drew in myglitter-spackled book a picture of Jesus. For a while, I prayed ardently on myknees by my bedside-not yet for titties or for John Cleary to ask me to thecouples' skate, but for a best friend. Only one girl showed outlaw tendencies nearly as wild as mine: ClariceFontenot, who at fourteen had three years on me, which discrepancy didn't seemto matter at first. The only obstacle to our spending every conceivable secondtogether that summer was her Cajun daddy's tight rein on her, which consistedof seemingly innumerable chores and capricious rules he ginned out. The Fontenots lived in a celery-green house on the corner that seemed to bulgeat its seams with her wild-assed brothers. They all slicked back their hair onthe sides and walked with a sexy, loose-hipped slouch. If they looked at you atall, the glance came from the sides of their faces. Like their tight-lippedfather, they barely spoke, just radiated a sly disapproval. Clarice's role in that Catholic household seemed to be serving their needs.While they ran the roads, she scrubbed and hung laundry and baby-sat a varietyof black-eyed cousins whose faces (like hers) were spattered with freckles asif flicked from a paintbrush. Her blights and burdens put me in mind ofCinderella's, though Clarice rarely whined. Still, her circumstances definedher somehow, for her jittery, electric manner seemed to have formed itselfsolely to oppose both her station in life and her brothers' quiet surliness. Clarice would have hung out at my house every day for the abundant food and theair conditioning if not my somewhat peculiar company. But her daddy'sstrictness was the stuff of neighborhood legend. A compact, steel-gray man, hewas about the only guy on our block who didn't do refinery work (I think heworked for the gas company). That he wore a tie to work made him not exotic butpeculiar. No one's daddy knew his schedule or ever heard him say more than apassing hey. Usually, Clarice could only play at my house an hour or so beforeshe'd be called home for chores. I didn't take these partings lightly. Once she was back home, I'd patrol the strip of road before her house,skateboarding past palmettos and the dog run and back again, trying all thewhile to predict her return by the advance of her work. Window by window, theglass she was washing would lose its grease smears and begin to give back bluesky and flickers of sun when I rolled by. Or I'd watch through those windowswhile Clarice unhooked each venetian blind. I'd try to measure how long itwould take for her to lower those blinds into the Clorox-fuming bathtub, towash each slat, then towel it off and reappear to hang the blind, giving me anexasperated wave before moving to the next. Sometimes her daddy just summoned her home for no reason. Which infuriated me.She'd joke that his fun-meter had gone off, some invisible gauge he had thatmeasured the extent of her good time and sought to lop it off. He'd insist shestay in her own yard, and forbid me to cross over the property line. I'd pacetheir yard's edge for an hour at a pop, or just sit cross-legged along theirhurricane fence line reading while their deranged German shepherd loped andbayed and threatened to eat my face off. From my lap I'd flip him the permanentbird using a Venus pencil to keep my fingers cocked in place. A few times,Clarice joined me in this border-holding action. She'd loiter in the heat onher side of the fence, glancing over her shoulder till her dad's gray face slidinto a window or his gravelly voice shouted her in. Doubtless her daddy meant this all as some kind of protection. Plenty of girlsher age "got in trouble," and there were countless lowlife characters circlinglike sharks to pluck any unwatched female into libidinal activity in some hotrod or pickup truck. But my own parents were so lax about corralling me at all("You can do anything you're big enough to do," Daddy liked to say) that Ifound Mr. Fontenot's strictures mind-boggling. In my head I engaged in longcourtroom soliloquies about him, at the ends of which he and his feckless sonswere led away shackled while a gavel banged and Clarice and I hugged each otherin glee. Clarice bridled against her daddy's limits but never actually broke the rules.She lacked both the self-pity and the fury I had in such abundance. She laughedin a foghorn-like blast that drew stares in public. She could belch on commandloud enough to cause old ladies in restaurants to ask for far tables. I nevermastered this. But thanks to her, I can whistle with my fingers, execute adiving board flip, turn a cartwheel, tie a slip knot, and make my eyeballsshiver like a mesmerist. While other people worried what would come of Clariceif she didn't calm down, for me she had the absolute power of someone whofundamentally didn't give a damn, which she didn't (other than toeing herfather's line, which she seemed to do breezily enough). My first memory of her actually comes long before that summer. It floats fromthe bleached-out time before we'd passed through the school doors, so we had nograde levels by which to rank ourselves. A cold sun was sliding down a gray fall sky. Some older boys had been playingtackle football in the field we took charge of every weekend. In a few years,they'd be called to Southeast Asia, some of them. Their locations would betracked with pushpins in red, white, and blue on maps on nearly every kitchenwall. But that afternoon, they were quick as young deer. They leapt and dodged,dove from each other and collided in midair. Bulletlike passes flew to connectthem. Or the ball spiraled in a high arc across the frosty sky one to another.In short, they were mindlessly agile in a way that captured as audience everylittle kid within running distance of the yellow goalposts. We could not help watching. Even after I stepped accidentally in a fire-antnest and got a constellation of crimson bites on my ankles. Even afterstreetlights clicked on and our breaths began to spirit before us and to warmmy hands I had to pull my arms from my sweatshirt sleeves, then tuck my fingersinto my armpits so the sleeves flapped empty as an amputee's. In fact, evenonce the game had ended, when the big boys had run off to make phone calls ordo chores, we stayed waiting to be called for supper. I can almost hear themelamine plates being slid from the various cupboards and stacked on tilecounters. But having witnessed their game, we were loath to unloose ourselvesfrom the sight of it. It was before the time of stark hierarchies. Our family dramas were rumored,but the stories that would shape us had not yet been retold so often as tocalcify our characters inside them. Our rivalries had not yet been laid down.No one was big enough to throw a punch that required stitches or to shout aninvective that would loop through your head at night till tears made yourpillowcase damp. Our sexual wonderings seldom called us to touch each other,just stare from time to time at the mystery of each other's pale underpants orjockey shorts, which we sometimes traded looks at under a porch or in the bluedark of a crawl space. For years our names ran together like beads on a string,JohnandBobbieClariceandCindyandLittleMary (as opposed to Big Mary, who was MaryFerrell). With little need to protect our identities from each other, we couldstill fall into great idleness together-this handful of unwatched kids withnowhere to be. At some moment, Clarice figured out as none of us had before how to shinny upthe goalpost. That sight of her squiggling up the yellow pole magically yanks the memory fromsomething far-off into a kind of 3-D present. I am alive in it. There's earlyfrost on the grass, and my ant bites itch. Clarice's limbs have turned torubber as she wraps round the pole. She's kicked off her Keds, so her bare feeton cold metal give purchase. About a foot at a time she scoots up, haulsherself by her hands, then slides her feet high. And again. She's weightless asan imp and fast. At the top of the pole, she rises balletic, back arched like a trapeze artist.She flings one hand up: Ta-da, she says, as if she were sheathed in acrimson-spangled bathing suit with fishnet hose and velvet ballet slippers,then again ta-da. We cheer and clap, move back to the ten-yard line to take herin better. This is a wonder, for her to climb so far above us. And there wealign ourselves with the forces of awe that permit new tricks to be dreamed upon chilly fall nights when nothing but suppers of fried meat and cream gravyawait us, or tepid baths. For a few minutes, Bobbie Stuart tries to weasel up the other pole, but he'stoo stiff. His legs jackknife out from under him, and his arms can't hold hislong thin body. Then Clarice does something wholly unexpected for which she will be forevermarked. She sticks her thumbs in the gathered waistband of her corduroy pants with thecowgirl lassos stitched around the pockets. With those thumbs, she yanks bothher pants and her undersancies down around her bare feet. She then bends overand waggles her butt at us as I later learned strippers sometimes do. Screamsof laughter from us. John falls over and rolls on the ground like a dog,pointing up and laughing at her bare white ass, which still holds a faint tanline from summer. We've just about got used to the idea of her butt when she executes anothermove. She wheels around to face us and show us her yin-yang, a dark notch inher hairless pudendum. Her belly is round as a puppy's jutted forward. Then ourhowls truly take on hyena-like timbre. And there across the ditch, which marksthe realm of adult civilization, appears the fast moving figure of Mrs. Carterthrough leaf smoke of a ditch fire. She's holding the spatula in her hand withwhich she intends to blister our asses, Clarice's most specifically. But she's a grown-up, Mrs. Carter. Her steps on the muddy slope are tentative.Not wanting to funk up her shoes with mud, she hesitates before she leapsacross. And in that interval, Clarice slithers down the yellow pole and tearsoff in a streak. And the rest of us flee like wild dogs. Decades later, I asked Clarice point blank why she did it. We were in ourforties then, living two thousand miles apart, and talking-oddly enough-on ourcar phones. Her voice was sandpaper rough with a cold, but it still carried theshimmer of unbidden amusement. I'd only seen her every two or three years-theoccasional holiday, at my daddy's funeral, and after Mother's bypass surgerywhen she kept vigil with me. Still, there's no one who'd be less likely to tellme a flat-footed lie. Across the hissing static, I asked why she took her pantsdown that day, whether somebody had dared her to and I just didn't remember. The answer that she gave remains the truest to who she was and who I then somuch needed her to be: "Because I could, I guess," she said. "Wasn't anybodyaround to stop me." Continues... Excerpted from Cherry by Mary Karr Copyright ©2001 by Mary Karr. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more