Cherry (22 page)

You spend hours generating titles and names for books or bands you’ll never even start. Meredith’s autobiography will be called
Ennui on Me.
Yours is
Hooves Over Texas—a lusty brawling tale set under the savage Texas sky.
You will form a soul group called the Chicken Supremes. These projects never endure the failures inherent to execution. They let you luxuriate in possibility.

The summer you and Meredith reread
Franny and Zooey
together, you evolve in a mystical direction, combing libraries and religious bookstores all over the county for a copy of the medieval Christian tome called
The Pilgrim’s Way.
It describes the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) that Franny chants mantralike during her
unbelievably attractive nervous breakdown, the repetition being meant to burn the prayer into your very breath and heartbeat resulting in all kinds of tranquillity and saintliness.

When your mother fails to find the book in several Houston bookstores, you give that up and found a yoga club. (Hatha Yoga at the time being about as common as speaking Urdu.) You aim to achieve Nirvana itself. Hopefully before school starts.

But you’re no more smoothed down by yoga with Meredith than when your mother offered it as a way of calming your nerves before junior high. If you can’t pull off a pose the first few tries, you click on the TV and topple onto the sofa, watching a rerun of
Father Knows Best
and mocking it while you long to enter those well-mopped rooms where you’re certain the candy in the milk-glass dish hasn’t been soldered by humidity into sticky, inedible concrete.

Meanwhile, Meredith actually slides into poses. She also reads the yoga book that for years you’ve just studied the pictures of. There she finds various directions for cleansing—fasting, drinking buckets of lemon extract and room-temperature green tea. In one case, you’re meant to cleanse your sinuses by snorting up warm salt water that floods through your nasal passages and comes out your open mouth: a kind of hosing out of one’s sinus that Meredith masters right off. But your effort leaves your skull pounding as it does when you eat a snow cone too fast.

Later, Meredith constructs a meditation mat from a great rectangular piece of foam rubber as you watch. She covers it in a cotton madras the colors of grass and apricot culled from the cheapo remnant section of the fabric store. On the same trip, she picks up a bolt of black flowered cotton to sew you a floor-length monk’s robe with a hood. (You figure on being dressed right for transcendence once it hits.)

The next morning, you leave the house for Meredith’s wearing the monk’s robe and what you call Lecia’s slave-girl-of-Caesar sandals, with leather thongs that wrap around your calves. But unless they’re tied so tightly that your circulation’s cut off, they tend to slop down around your ankles. Halfway to Meredith’s, you untie them and sling them over your shoulder like a string of fish.

Thus monastically clad and unshod, you walk the tar-sticky roads holding your mother’s orange-and-black yoga book. About halfway there, a roaring truck draws up on the rough shoulder holding a whole crowd of bikini-clad girls and boys in cutoffs in back, including the luminous John Cleary sitting high on the side, a blue towel around his neck. Some girl asks real loud, where’s the Halloween party, while everybody else breaks in half laughing. Somebody (you want to think it’s John) says, C’mon you guys, and the truck roars off, leaving a wake of titters that you halfway believe visible—little clicking black birds swarming from the silver truck to where you stand, eyes welling up.

At the threshold of Meredith’s icily air-conditioned house afterward, she says, Well, hey. Don’t you look all Buddha’d up.

You shove past her, saying, Lemme in fast. I’m baking alive in this thing. You dive the length of the sofa, letting your hair shield your face since crying ruined this morning’s Egyptian eye makeup.

Unzip me, you say. I feel like a pork sausage in this thing.

Just a minute, she says, and tugs at the zipper behind you trying to manipulate it back into action.

You’re choking me to death there, you say. Your fingers claw toward the zipper tongue you can’t quite reach.

This is one of those old brass-looking zippers, she says.

It’s an old broke-dick zipper, is what it is, you say.

Another tug from behind, and the neckline chokes you. It yanks tight against your throat as if you’re being hauled up by some tether you’ve dared to lunge against.

Meredith says, You have to soap one sometimes to loosen it up.

You’re struggling to twist free when another choking tug comes, and in that instant, all the indignity from the truckload of kids seems to break into a thousand wide-flying shards.

I’ve almost got it, she says.

Well goddamn get it or get the fuck out the way.

Meredith lets go the fabric. She retreats in a movement both liquidy and sudden. Her shadow slides off you.

Drawing the robe over your head, you manage to yank it off and emerge blinking as from a tunnel. A handful of hair caught in the open zipper tore out several strands and left the back of your skull stinging. You’re standing there in cotton underpants and Penney’s bra feeling impossibly bare. Across the room, Meredith’s blank look says you’ve offended her.

She seems so colossally untouchable that you’re almost shocked she could be wounded. But her carriage is caved in slightly, like someone who’s received a hard slap. You’d like to take it all back, but the word
sorry
hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary. All you know how to do when faced with conflict lately is leave.

Maybe I should go home, you say.

Maybe you should, she says. She’s using the polite tone she saves for teachers and movie tellers. When you snatch up the monk’s robe, you don’t even know what fury it is that you’re so devoted to sustaining, just that you have to storm out. (Friendships often seize up at such an instant—the standoff in which two people either deepen to each other or part company. For decades you’ll tend to be counted among the parting variety.)

But you’re trying to work the zipper’s brass tongue, and it will not budge past the torn-out hair. And you can somehow feel Meredith looking at you. Her eyes have settled on your face as palpably as a shone light. Without moving an inch, she’s reached out some tendril.

She says, You need help. (It’s not a question.) She takes the robe and fools with the zipper, looking down while she asks, Were you crying when you got here?

In that moment, extremely athletic sobs burst from you. There’s great heaving rigor and an extreme runniness of nose. You feel like a fool and say so. Crying in your underpants. God. And when you tell her about the truck and the mockery, it seems like nothing really, the kind of thing that happens every day in Leechfield. So why can’t you even catch your breath in the gale force of it? You weep a while before you can say much.

And Meredith listens. Finally, she says, Those people are just jerks. You can’t explain to her the ways they’re not, how John Cleary is really a glorious being even though he plays football and baseball—for to tell her that would betray some pact, leave her stranded in this strange world you’re fabricating together.

Later, Meredith works to change the zipper in the monk’s robe while you watch in her pink chenille wrapper. It’s a complex task that requires a wicked hook you’d expect a dentist to wield. Meredith handles it deftly, undoing the seams often without even tearing a thread. Bent to the work, she resembles some old fashioned girl from a calendar, her wild mass of hair electrified by the pale blue light through the curtains.

So she’s a little heavy, you think, what your mother would call Rubenesque. That shouldn’t blind everyone to her beauty. It does, of course. No one in that truck would invite her to go swimming or to a sleepover, though she has enormous entertainment value and a great heart. (Also in all your life, you would never see her commit an overtly cruel or vindictive act.) Somebody might invite you, and if you brought Meredith along, no one would be rude to her, for she had a bearing that usually thwarted such treatment. But no one would talk to her much or ask her back.

Suddenly you say, You look really pretty doing that.

Thanks, she says, and her face lights up with what you call her Rockette grin. Plus I’m a demon with a needle.

This is true, you say. Then you tell her how everybody in your family is hotheaded. The least little thing, and you blow. That’s the closest you can come to an apology.

Lots of native peoples are like that, she says. She takes up a tiny pair of scissors to snip a thread you would have torn with your teeth. Meredith’s civilized that way. (Soon she’ll speak excellent French.) She hands you the old zipper, saying, Here study this. There’ll be a quiz. Then she bends back to the task of pinning the new zipper in.

You say, It’s a big old geyser of my tresses caught in a broke-dick zipper.

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren’t worth one strand of a woman’s hair.

K
IDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT
repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. Or to be told in sketchiest form—merely brushed by. It’s an irony that airing these dramas is often a family’s chief taboo. Yet the bristling agony secrecy causes can only be relieved by talk—hours and hours of unmuzzled talk, the recounting of stories. Who listens is almost beside the point, so long as the watching eyes remain lit, and the head tilts at the angle indicating attention and care.

Without such talk by the kids of these families, there’s usually a grave sense of personal fault, of failing to rescue those beloveds lost or doomed. That silence ticks out inside its bearer the constant small sting of indictment—
what if, what if, what if; why didn’t I, why didn’t I, why didn’t I…

It’s the gravity of such silence that you detect in Meredith. At some point, she levels her sea green eyes on you and says: I can tell that you’ve suffered. Which observation takes your breath away in its simple nobility.

I have, you say, nodding in acknowledgment. I have suffered.

You’ve known real despair, she said. I can see that.

Me too, you say, I can see that about you too. Then you dare a question that airs your own ignorance: What is it about suffering that makes people like us so different?

And Meredith says, It teaches you about the human heart. Suffering and despair force you to plumb the depths of the human heart in a way normal life can’t. It makes us wise beyond our years. Most people just go along.

Just one cylinder firing upstairs, you say.

If that, she says. Unless you’ve suffered.

No one has placed any sword to your shoulder to appoint you to a legion of honor—Those Who’ve Suffered. Yet the notion lends you a new kind of dignity. It also permits you both to air family dramas abstractly, as evidence of the world’s inordinate suffering, without exactly betraying the tribal silence you’ve both forsworn.

The sources of Meredith’s own suffering never fully register on you as dire at the time because she reveals them so matter-of-factly, as if recounting episodes from a soap opera. She stays so cordoned off from showing the grief one might expect with her life’s events that you buy her act. Partly you credit her with massive courage (true enough); partly you’re grateful to ignore some of the awfulness of her past (which was a betrayal of epic proportions).

The obvious distress is the Brights’ being poorly off. Their house was the only rental you knew, a tiny shotgun structure—meaning if you fired a gun through the front door in the living room, the shot would fly clean through and out the back kitchen door. It was square and plain, painted the stark white of a boiled egg, and it rose on short stilts that made it seem ready to run—like a cartoon house—out of the oyster-shell drive it was doomed to perch in. (There was no real yard.) It never did run off, of course, just hunkered there, as sterile and ornament-free as a doctor’s office. Which, in fact, it used to be.

Dr. Boudreaux ran his old office there when you were a kid, and Meredith found this a pleasant coincidence, almost a foreshadowing of her arrival there and your taking up with her. You explained the house’s
oddities—a massive hole in the bedroom wall plaster once held the x-ray machine. How at the kitchen table, your chair leg tended to edge into one of the four scooped-out places where the examining table had been bolted. (As a five-year-old facing a booster shot, you’d leapt from that examining table to that very linoleum floor and led three adults—the doctor, his nurse, your mother—on a chase beneath it and around it and eventually over the counters.) Because you were so often carried through that door wrapped in a quilt, your mind swimming with fever, the house kept an otherworldly air, spooky in its familiarity, yet wrong in detail—with doily-covered armchairs and polished upright piano where straight chairs and metal tables once stood.

Meredith never complained about the house or not having money, and she always insisted on paying her own way.

Nor did she talk about her dad running off except to mention it in passing, as if giving the formal précis of a novel. One Saturday shortly after they got to Leechfield, while her mom worked at the cleaners, he secretly cleaned out the bank account, loaded up their only car, and whisked away the house’s portable TV under a blanket. But in his hurry to get away, he accidentally slammed the car door on the extended antenna, so Meredith saw it sticking out and puzzled over its presence there as he backed from the drive.

He left no forwarding address, just vanished, fell off the earth. Years later he’d turn up in San Antonio, delivering pizzas while shacked up with a woman whom Meredith and her brother referred to as Ralph. Meredith recounts all this with enviable calm. You never remember her even saying she missed her dad, a fact that flummoxed you because when your parents split up back in fourth grade, you pitched a series of black-eyed fits (a seminal one involving a BB gun).