Cherry (38 page)

At that, she looks glancingly satisfied, says only, in gratuitous admonishment, Be sure and clean up that mess before you go to bed.

At dawn in an instant of psychic stillness that can only come to a badly scrambled mind, the single true sentence finally comes to you bristling with sparks. The sentence is stolen, but that doesn’t diminish the force of your pounce upon it, or the cometlike brilliance with which it streaks through you.

You write it in six-inch letters on a poster board you thumbtack to the wall, as if it’s a formula on par with relativity theory. Then you slip into shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops.

The morning is dew-washed and lustrous, the inside of a pearl. In the garage, you haul out the rusty Schwinn you haven’t ridden since sixth grade. Your body weight flattens its split tires, but it’s the mode of
transport closest to a galloping horse, which is what this type of message requires. Riding it’s like plowing through swamp muck. It takes all your thighs’ might to pedal on the flat rubber and aluminum rims to Meredith’s house. She’s home for Easter weekend. You drop the bike at her window and scratch on the screen so as not to wake her mother.

Her round face appears shining, framed by the copper waterfall of hair. The pink yoke of her nightie is cross-stitched with
x
’s.

You rant out the events at Effie’s in a single gust. While you sense as you speak that your hair is standing straight out from your skull in a three-foot corona, touching your head proves every time that it’s in place. The sentences unspool from your mouth of their own accord and at some velocity. Meredith listens through the screen with head bowed like a confessor.

You tell her how all this led you to unearth the ultimate sentence, the endlessly resonant snippet of language with implications no one can ignore. Before you actually let Meredith hear it, you bow your head and hear an internal drum roll. You finally look up to say, There’s no place like home.

She freezes in place holding onto her grin. Mockingbirds bounce on the chinky-pin branches in the next yard. Some seconds go by. She says, That’s it?

You add, Well, basically, yeah. I mean. I have to work out a few kinks.

You do remember it’s from
Wizard of Oz?
she asks. Her eyebrows are raised.

You say, But the context of Effie’s totally overhauls it. I mean, we were in this place where all the love had been sucked out of people, but the husks of them kept staggering around and trying to take stuff in, and there were these black ladies I guess were whores. One was this giant Amazon wearing Tuesday panties. I found her in the bathroom shooting up in the neck.…

Meredith listens again with the placid repose of untrammeled acceptance. Finally, she says, Sounds like wicked strong acid.

Maybe it’s a little less than revelatory, you say, in the cold light of day. Plus I haven’t written it up right yet.

Guess you kind of had to be there, Meredith says, coming close enough to the screen that you can finally see how she’s struggling to keep her sea green eyes placid, holding down some gust.

That’s when the idiocy of your insight—the treasured scrap you’ve rescued from your descent and meandering through Effie’s—flames over you in a noxious internal backdraft.

You say, It’s a completely dipshit idea, isn’t it? You’re deflating now notch by notch like one of those whoofed up cakes laden with frothy egg whites. Taken from the oven too soon, one’ll just sag down to a puddle of nothing.

Did I say that? she says. You can sense her laughter’s held back by a single breath.

Well your face is awful pink, you say. Which indicates effort.

She says, Don’t feel bad. What was Doonie’s big revelation that time? I wrote it down somewhere but can never remember it.

When we’d done all that crystal at the surf thing? you say. With that girl he liked.

The scene blows over you—a campsite in Mexico at dusk. You’ve been awake seven straight days snorting crystal, and Doonie comes scampering along the beach in his Hawaiian print baggies waving a strip of paper bag he’d written this sentence on.

You repeat it now to Meredith, ‘She was thinking fucking, and I was just fucking thinking.’

That lets the laughter out. Its bursts are rib-rattling and purgative. They take your breath for some minutes. A bakery truck flies by trailing hot cinnamon. In your encyclopedia there’s a photo of a cinnamon tree, guys peeling the bark with these odd tools.

You say, I want to live somewhere where there are cinnamon trees.

I thought you wanted to live in New York City.

There too.

Meredith’s mother stirs around inside the next window, hollers who’s out there, and you say you and hey, and she heys back.

You should leave. It’s only proper, since they’re not even dressed, not to mention Meredith’s been away and having you descend like a harpie probably isn’t Mrs. Bright’s first plan. You say, I gotta go before my parents find my sign.

Sign?

With the sentence writ large, you say, shaking your head. Big letters. Yay big. They’ll send the posse out looking for me. Guys with the long-armed coats.

They’ll see your door closed and think you’re snug down in your Barbie dream bed.

The refinery shift whistle lets go its wolf howl to end the graveyard shift. You wonder is your daddy in bed or stepping into his truck to come home? Maybe your mother’s brewing up coffee. They seem smaller somehow than they once did.

You say, I wouldn’t mind a little bowl of something.

Are you still hallucinating?

I can hear a Mexican mariachi band, trumpets and so forth.

That’s benign enough, she says, as hallucinations go. But can you face Miz Francine in her pink sponge curlers?

Bring her on. Hell, I’m the iron maiden, woman of steel. If I can make it through Effie’s, she’s a cakewalk.

At the front door, Meredith is grinning, holding out a Mickey Mouse bowl full of Froot Loops and milk. Taking it feels like accepting some blessing.

You’re inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, You have accomplished a great thing.

And what would that be, Bwana? you ask, mouth full.

You’re your Same Self.

The truth of this flickers past you like a spark. For years you’ve felt only half-done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, I am my Same Self. That’s not nothing, is it?

Meredith nods one of her gypsy fortune-teller nods. She whammy-waves her hand over your cereal, says, I see big adventures for Mary. Big adventures, long roads, great oceans: same self.

Like I’m chocolate through to the center, you say. Same self.

That oddball catchphrase will serve as a touchstone in years to come, an instant you’ll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up. You were there solely for embellishment and witness. You were there to watch.

At the table, your chair slips into the bolt hole left by the old examining table, and it rips some jittery giggles from you. But wrung out as you are from the acid, you’re not overjangled. It’s as if some substantial cloak now drapes over you, some reward for escaping the dragon’s lair.

As for the actual validity of the notion, an immoveable self ever firm, you’re there only by half at best. But half’s still a good measure more than some people ever get. You’ll spend decades trying to will Same Self into being. But you’ll keep shape-shifting. Probably everyone must, so long as a body’s treading sod or drawing breath.

What’s unalterable as bronze, though, is the image of your radiant friend that morning barefoot on the porch with suns in her rampant hair. She’s holding out that bowl of Froot Loops and touching your shoulder as if to bestow the right name upon you, the one you’ll bear before you through the world, each letter forged into a gleaming shield.

Mary Karr’s
Cherry
was a bestseller for
The
New York Times
,
The Boston Globe
,
Los Angeles Times
, and
San Francisco Chronicle
. It was excerpted in
The New Yorker
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book, and was named “Best Book” of 2000 by
Entertainment Weekly,
Us,
and
Amazon.com
.

The Liars’ Club
was a
New York Times
bestseller for more than a year, and was selected as one of the best books of 1995 by dozens of periodicals, ranging from
The New Yorker
and
The Washington Post
to
Time
,
People
, and
Entertainment Weekly
. It won prizes for best first nonfiction from PEN (The Martha Albrand Award) and the Texas Institute of Letters. The American Library Association named it one of ten Notable Books for 1995.

Mary Karr’s three volumes of poetry are
Abacus
,
The Devil’s Tour
, and
Viper Rum
. Her poems and essays have won Pushcart prizes and have appeared in such magazines 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 Literature at Syracuse University.

Rave Reviews for
The Liars’ Club
by Mary Karr

“Astonishing.…One of the most dazzling and moving memoirs to come along in years.…Karr’s most powerful tool is her language, which she wields with the virtuosity of both a lyric poet and an earthy, down-home Texan. It’s a wonderfully unsentimental vision that redeems that past even as it recaptures it on paper.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times Book Review

“The essential American story…a beauty.”

—Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post

“This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion…it’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.”

—Molly Ivins,
The Nation

“Mary Karr’s God-awful childhood has a calamitous appeal.…The choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers towards laughter. Karr has survived to write a drop-dead reply to the question, ‘Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?’”

—
Time

“This is one hell of a story, and Karr tells it vividly…there is no question that this uninhibited and unsettlingly tough-talking book is driven by love.”

—
The Chicago Tribune

“In a gritty, unforgettable voice, Mary Karr describes her East Texas childhood in the bosom of a crazy family tormented by unspoken sorrows. Yet the result is funny, lively, and un-put-downable.”

—
USA Today

“A triumphant achievement in the art of memoir and in the art of living.…Karr fills her turbulent pages with a prose as pungent and zesty as a Gulf Coast gumbo.”

—
New York Newsday

“A dazzling, devastating memoir.…She paints an unsparing portrait of her struggle through a fractured childhood. Recounting one apocalyptic event after another, Karr’s voice never falters or rings false.”

—
Vogue