As
a public school teacher, your mother espouses dosing the water supply with
birth control, or that's how she justifies putting you on the pill before
your fifteenth birthday. Even the mention of birth control would send most
mothers into a frenzy of either tent-revival hollering or else candle-lighting
and novena-saying. But your mother holds loudly forth on any and all pussy-related
subjects, with nothing falling too far off limits. You'll be sitting at
the kitchen bar wolfing cereal, and she'll say out of the blue, Do you know
what a blowjob is, honey? Or: I hope you feel comfortable touching yourself
down there. It makes you want to bury your head under a pillow for the remainder
of any meal.
You go along with the birth control idea because
you read somewhere estrogen makes tits bigger and might kick start a girl's
period. Mother books a gynecologist appointment in another city — "so
you won't be embarrassed, I could give a shit." She yanks you out of school
and calls in sick to keep you company, which rattles you slightly, like
she thinks you're a drill team sister or something
You've got your learner's permit, and standing
in the garage, you lobby to take the wheel. But it's still spitting rain,
she says, and after all the water last night those roads are slick as glass.
And it's close to Houston so there might be traffic.
While you don't belabor the point, you wonder how
Lecia managed to drive alone at thirteen. They've even given her the Mustang,
but road conditions never seem quite right for you so far as your mother
is concerned. It's also a damn strange thing that she can look at you and
think "too little to drive" and "birth control pills" simultaneously.
Once the yellow wagon pulls onto blacktop, you
point out that even though the rain's not that hard anymore, all the other
drivers have their lights and wipers on.
Oh baby, she says, I can see through those little
dots of rain better than through that whapping blade, and hell, I navigate
best by instinct anyway. She's got her window cracked a few inches and is
trying to wave the smoke from her Kool out the slot, but it manages to whoosh
back in and dive-bomb straight to your eyes with its stinging menthol.
You're slouched down reading and minding your own
business when she kicks in the talk you know she's been burning to have
and that you'd rather dip snuff than hear. Straight out of the blue.
She says, I've seen too many girls turn up pregnant,
Mary. Too many bumpy-headed toddlers come staggering through after school
on leash-and-harness deals their mothers hang on the ends of. I swear. Little
girls who never got out of junior high, no business making babies.
Mother I can't get pregnant when nobody even asks
me out. Not more than that once anyway. I mean —
It only takes once, honey, she says. She's still
talking when you start to read signs and notch off the yardage between telephone
poles. Live Bait. Boudain! Fat Boys Sausage. Then long stretches of grassland.
At a four-way stop on a farm road, you lock eyes with a crusty-looking old
pearl-colored bull and are tempted to roll down your window to shout what
are you staring at.
You look back at Mother after a long silence, and
she says, with no segue whatsoever, If you want to have sex, so be it. Just
don't get pregnant.
Mother! you say with all the virginal outrage you
can marshal given the amount of time you spend reading Henry Miller in the
bathroom. You've never had a steady boyfriend. Nobody's ever even tried
to feel you up. Some girl on your volleyball team who talked about making
"dry love" with her boyfriend gave the closest firsthand reportage you've
received on actual boning. Even Clarice, who's been going steady for more
than a year, doesn't do more than French kiss and dole out the occasional
hickey her boyfriend can hide with a Band-Aid at home and wear like a badge
with his buddies.
Mother says, And abortions can be got, Mary. Believe
me, even in Jefferson County, and by real doctors. I know some people from
when I worked at the paper.
Mother, you've got me splayed out and knocked up
like a tube top ho' —
Some of those tube tops are cute, she says.
— and I don't even have a boyfriend.
That nice little Demolay hayride boy seemed nuts
about you —
Mother, I swear to God if you mention Mortimer
G. Beauregard again like he's my last, best hope, I'll — (You sputter
at this point, for it's hard to find something that would really set Mother
free other than becoming a Republican, which Lecia is leaning into.)
You'll what? she says.
I'll start wearing blue eye shadow.
Oh, Mary, you're so damn funny.
Why aren't you driving old moose boobs to do this?
Your sister? I don't worry about her.
Well she's got tits out to here and boys swarming
six deep, if I were a betting woman, I'd be doing the birth-control expedition
with her.
Even while you're saying this, you intuitively
know that, despite all those suitors, Lecia will wind up being the oldest
living virgin in the state of Texas. She knows that pussy is a high-ticket
item right up until and during the night you relinquish it. Then it becomes
a commodity and you along with it — with no more value-added than frozen
OJ or pork belly. Of course the instant you take the pussy back, you return
to former glory. (In years to come anytime one of you suffers a breakup,
the other will say, by way of reassurance, Remember the pussy goes with
you.)
At the gynecologist's office, the doctor ushers
your mother into the hall from the examining room, for which you're grateful,
for you never know what she's gonna say during such a deal. But once he
has you alone, door closed, laid back on the paper scroll on the table,
the cold rod of each metal stirrup pressed into each foot arch, his fingers
inside you, he says he expects that his own college-age daughter will remain
— in his word — "intact" until marriage. And weren't you ashamed
at your age? And didn't your church teach you better?
(As a grown-up, you'll consider dropping a note
to this green-coated worm of a physician. Tell him how bare you felt inside
that paper nightgown. Ask him who died and made him God. Remind him of that
oath doctors are meant to take: first do no harm.)
The pill's manufactured hormones do seem to work
some magic. By spring of your sophomore year, Mother says your skin looks
radiant. Plus your heretofore nonexistent tits have swollen to fit a C-cup.
Even Lecia is forced to stop calling you titless, and Clarice (whose novena-induced
D-cup has finally come in — and it's worth mention that no other women
in her family are so well endowed) asks whether you started praying too.
After a dance one night, you sit on the porch with
John Cleary, who counts on you to relay and decode some of what girls whisper
about him in dance floor circles. Against the black northern sky, the refinery
towers burn aquarium blue. It's spring — warm enough to go barefoot,
but you have to pull a red sweatshirt over your pajamas, bury your hands
in the front pocket to stay warm. Moths the color of ash flutter around
the yellow porch globe.
At this particular dance John was triumphantly
crowned with his brand-new cheerleader girlfriend (for your money, a particularly
offensive little troll) something like Most Adorable Humans in the Universe.
This honor was expected by everyone but him. His
blond head bows shyly, almost inadvertently, at your congratulations. At
some point, he tells you that you're "actually getting sort of cute."
"Wasn't I cute before?" you ask, feeling toward
him with invisible antennae for some tremble of a desire that might match
the ancient intensity of your own.
"Not overmuch," he says. Then the instant passes,
and he's crossing the wet lawns home.
You test the power of your new body by asking out
a popular Cajun boy during Sadie Hawkins week, and he surprises you by saying
yes with considerable force. You double-date with another couple to the
drive-in, taking the front seat in the boy's car. He's someone with whom
you'd barely exchanged even a few words, but what begins as a mild kiss
— almost a joke in the context of the other couple's sudden entwinement
— becomes elaborate before the screen's dancing popcorn boxes and long-faced
corn dogs have faded to whatever unwatched movie.
The boy's full mouth works some spell on you to
obliterate most every other aspect of the night. It banishes from your knowing
the far screen squirming with shapes, and the rows of crouched cars hitched
to speaker poles, and the other couple listing in the backseat. Even some
learned stigma about being "easy" vanishes, not that the boy ever put an
impolite hand on you. In that sense, your kisses are innocent. You don't
even have a full-fledged crush on this boy, asked him out on a whim, to
see if he'd go. But you can't seem to withdraw your mouth from his, though
you feel you've edged past the lighthearted flirting that should mark a
first date. Some unnamed luster has rushed into your pelvis with whole swirling
star colonies and nebulae, and to withdraw your mouth from his would extinguish
that glitter and leave you shivering cold.
In bed that night, your hands are gently busy on
your body. You don't yet think in specifics like "cock" or "mouth on my
breast." Such language and imagery are somehow the property of boys. You
can only relive the luxury of those silent kisses until some ocean rushes
through you and you wake hanging off your edge of the bed with a pillow
hugged to your middle.
But morning brings a schism. In the bathroom, the
face staring back at you from the swung-out mirror is out of kilter with
the altered image of yourself from the date. The edges don't align —
what happened to you? Your real face looks too plain for the wild luxury
of those kisses. And in that chasm of self — between what you thought
you were and what you are — comes a tight, internal cringe. What was
wrong with you last night kissing that boy for those lost hours, hardly
saying a word?
(Undercurrent: a boy in the dark bucking over your
seven-year-old body. Later on the side of the house, your thighs sticky.
Water gushing warm from a spigot. Was it the blood of a lost cherry you
washed off? Had you brought this on, exuded some whiff of innate longing
to be taken like this? Or had you merely been taken to ride like an animal?)
When Lecia jokes that you still smell of the boy's
hair oil, the truth of that so repulses you that his failure to call is
good news.
Monday on the school patio at lunch, he saunters
into view with a pal, and not since ancient games of catch-and-kiss has
the urge to flee powered you so fast. There's a door frame you duck into,
standing straight and slim, crushing your Algebra II book and the bag of
half-eaten Cheetos against your chest. But once his profile slides into
view — the black waves of his oiled hair — you know you'll have
to keep moving. The patio suddenly transforms into a complex course of clear
sight lines and obstacles to dodge behind. A circle of Pentecostal girls
with high-coiled bouffants briefly block you till you run-walk up the steps
and past a scolding teacher to the library.
There the factoring of polynomials becomes somehow
cleansing, a ritual of baptism. (Abstraction in huge doses can starve off
yearning.) There's sunlight on the tilted windows. Cars scoot up the street.
You can nearly forget that on Friday night your solar plexus had lurched
and careened from that boy's tender mouth. Away from him, you're briefly
safe from your own ardors.
From
Cherry
by Mary Karr. Copyright (c) Mary Karr, 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
