“You got time to help me with mine? I mean, not now, of course.” He looks around all apologetic, as if I could have failed to notice he was in football practice. There’s a pair of twin grass stains on the knees of his short britches that somehow make the remaining whiteness of him brighter. “Maybe after supper? I mean, if you’re not buried with other work.” I suddenly go mute, for the prospect of this arrangement is so foreign, so wholly hard to imagine, it takes a minute to sink in. John Cleary. Asking me over. After sundown. To do homework. What flashes in my head is that night in Mother’s studio in summer. I wonder if he ever thinks how soft the tips of our tongues were reaching toward each other from the dark caves of our mouths.
The “sure” I eke out is the only blip my stopped breath can handle. I stand there, heart fish-flopping inside my rib cage. But he just says thanks and jogs back to where the push-up guys are resting. His moving form is the whitest on the field—slim-hipped, muscle-legged, his back broad as a gladiator’s.
There’s nothing wrong with junior high that a night with John Cleary won’t rectify (one of our spelling words). I start to run home but feel my head waggle on my shoulders and have to force myself slower.
Once home, I remember the love spell our voodoo neighbor gave me for John Cleary. LaFaree lives behind us and reads tarot and plays Ouija board with me and Clarice sometimes. This spell involves my laying hold to John’s hair trimmings and fingernail clippings to mash into a candle I can burn. That’s why I stick a sandwich bag in my pocket before I trot over to his house. For good measure, I also tuck in the plastic mass card she gave me of Saint Jude. The patron saint of lost causes, LaFaree had told me, things despaired of.
In the Clearys’ yard, their sprinkler goes whap whap whap and throws a huge silver spiderweb above the lawn in the dusk. The plastic card I finger in my back pocket feels like the only smooth, cool thing in a sandpapery world.
I barely knock before Mrs. Cleary answers holding a dish towel. She’s got on a blue calico apron that reflects her eyes nice. Her wide smile is a ditto of John’s. She stands there wiping her hands off. “Little Mary,” she says, like isn’t she lucky I’m there. Then she shoves the screen open.
I haven’t set foot in the Clearys’ house since fifth grade when John and Bobbie and I started a motorcycle gang with playing cards clothespinned to our bike spokes. It’s smaller than our house. The ceilings are lower and rooms smaller, but the scale doesn’t seem so much cramped as cozy. There’s a strong smell of chocolate. “Waiting for a plate of fudge to harden up, Mary Marlene. Gotta finish these dang dishes,” she says. That’s the other thing about the Clearys. Hardly nobody cusses. It’s always dang and darn, and sugar instead of shit. I offer to help dry and put away—something I’d never do at home but that I’ve learned any girl offers who isn’t dead-assed lazy.
Mr. Cleary calls me into the living room where he’s watching the news. He looks up and says, “Big bad Mary. Come hug my neck.” John’s body is sprawled on the pumpkin-colored shag carpet in front of the TV so I have to step over him. He’s got his chin on a sofa bolster and is scribbling the last numbers on a math mimeo sheet.
He rolls over to say thanks for coming, and with that full-length gaze at him, I decide he’s luminous enough in his blond body to read by in the dark.
Mr. Cleary shoos us out, and we head to the back porch, which is all screens insulated with thick plastic. So when the wind blows, it sucks the panels against the screen with a series of loud slaps. There’s an old porch glider in one corner, and that’s where we sit. Our feet rock us back and forth. The panels rattle in the wind to drown out the TV in the next room.
John’s got his cloth binder open on his lap, and whatever help he claims to need for his essay is not much, but I coax him along. He says things, and I say things back that must sound marginally right. But the words and sentences are just background to the stomach-dropping drama of sitting by him. Mostly I breathe the oxides he gives off and study him. I watch his thick-fingered hand holding the blue Bic move across the blue-lined page. He inscribes each letter at such a far forward pitch that you half expect the words themselves to fall over on their faces and pour off the margin. John’s face bent over his work in the lamplight is for an instant so serious inside his freckles that I could almost cry. Time this close to him is so magnified that you can practically hear the grandfather clock seize up between ticks.
The essay gets written and is pretty good, but I’m rocked clear out of that evening and place. I half believe that the stars outside have frozen into their sockets. The moon has stopped its circuit. John bends over his page in the lamplight. He puts the last period in place and says he’ll copy it over neat while he watches the game, and do I want to stay.
In the living room, John stretches out to recopy his paper, and I remember all the stuff LaFaree says I need for my spell and head for the bathroom.
Sure enough, in the black brush on the pink-tiled counter there are dense squiggles of blond hair around the bristles, some short enough to be John’s. But no way can I know which of these hairs grew from John’s actual scalp. If I cast a spell on the wrong Cleary, his goat-footed big brother (a phrase I stole from the poet I loved and had for years repeated in schoolyard cuss fights like I owned it) would come lumbering after me all heated up.
I open the medicine cabinet as if the answer’s in there. And, Lord is it neat, a testament to the housekeeping tips the ladies clip from the Leechfield Gazette and leave clothespinned to each other’s mailboxes. Open our bathroom cupboard, and there are prescriptions three deep. There are bottles with necks so crusty you’d need a pair of pliers to crack them open. And no other storage compartment in our house gets any better. The floor of every closet is a swamp of blouses and slacks slipped loose from their wire hangers with unpaired shoes scattered around. The clothes drawers are all jammed shut tight. And if you open the refrigerator looking for an orange, you’re as apt to find a pair of dice Daddy left there last night when he came in late, or a book of paper matches announcing that you could write children’s stories at home for cash.
But the Clearys’ cabinet holds the bare minimum, with no repeats—grown-up aspirin and band-aids, a tiny bottle of orange methiolade, whose clean black cap comes with a little glass stick in the middle to dab that stinging stuff on your bo-bos. Even their toothpaste rolls up from the bottom, neat around the end crimp. The top’s screwed on tight, and not one widget of paste squeezes out the sides like clay.
Only the cough syrup is prescription. I study the label. It’s for Mr. Cleary from just last March, the bottle not one bit sticky. Somebody sponged off any drips before setting it back there, so the bottle’s just slick as my ass. I unscrew the top and give it a sniff—grape it’s meant to be. Then I slug down a swallow for good measure, as I’ve seen Mother do, to calm my racing nerves.
I get the fine-tooth comb and pick every hair out of the brush and twist-tie them into the sandwich bag I jab back down in my pocket, figuring I can burn them all in a pile, and let all the Clearys will be nuts about me, John included.
Before I leave, I notice a small ashtray with what looks like nail clippings in it, little half moons scattered. But before I pick them up, I get hit by an odd feeling. Suddenly I can picture Daddy saying, “Ain’t you got a case of the sweet ass!” And I get an odd surge in my chest— something like dignity keeps me from picking up any toenails to take home. You got to draw that line somewhere, I figure.
Back in the living room, the Dallas Cowboys run around on TV. Mr. Cleary’s watching it like it’s the apocalypse while Mrs. Cleary crochets some bootie in a color I think of as baby-boy blue. John is bickering at his sister, Jana, who sits cross-legged with her skirt draped over her crossed knees and a physiology book in her lap. John is saying, “I’ll do you. Come on. My legs are killing me.” She says no, she’s gotta learn all these muscles for the quiz. “Mr. Lyons always gives a quiz on Friday,” she says.
And John shoots back that she was a cheerleader at o
ur school. “It’s doing something for the team,” he says.
“Ask Mary to do it,” Mr. Cleary says. He spits tobacco in his Folgers can, a gesture that makes Mrs. Cleary wince. Her crochet hook stops looping a second before it resumes.
I am still hanging in what I think of as the balance. John cranes around at me and says, “Would you?”
“He wants somebody to rub his legs,” Mrs. Cleary says.
Mr. Cleary kicks in, “That idiot coach doesn’t stretch them out right.”
“Lecia ran track so I did this with her,” I claim. That’s how I come to be kneeling over John’s brown legs with the glinting pale hair. I take one hard calf in my hands, and my heart leaps up. I mash a little on it then stop. “You can do harder than that,” he says. I knead in the middle of the calf a minute till the flesh starts to loosen under my fingers’ workings. Jana pipes in that I’m doing his gastroc now. Mr. Cleary, who’s coached just about every sport you can think of, says I need to lengthen the muscle. So I start at the heel end and run my fingers up around the heart-shaped calf muscle. This makes John groan and say that feels good. One of the Cowboys is hauling butt between goalposts. John Cleary’s whole glorious body is laid out before me, and I am saying to myself, John Cleary under my hands.
“That other muscle’s his soleus muscle,” Jana says. I say where, hoping it’s up higher, but she says, “Down there, by the Achilles tendon.” It’s a smaller muscle, and he complains I’m pinching him, so I go back to trying to lengthen the calves out.
I could do this all day and not mind, I think. Some liquid has begun to spill and spread throughout my middle, which makes it hard to keep breathing regular. I look at the screen long enough to make some dim comment about the score. John bends his neck forward and mumbles something into the sofa bolster. I say what.
“The backs of my thighs,” he says. “They’re killing me.”
Mrs. Cleary gets up and says she’s heading off to bed. “Y’all don’t be up all night if it goes to overtime.” She kisses everybody and plants one on top of my head, saying it’s nice having another girl around. Which causes me to feel double guilty that I’ll soon be casting a spell to woo her unsuspecting boy.
I am waiting for somebody to get back to John’s thighs so I don’t look overeager rubbing them. But there’s a penalty call everybody has to mullygrub about. Statistics go back and forth.
It’s halftime when Mr. Cleary says Goddamn, and Jana says Daddy. Then Mr. Cleary with no prompting from me or anybody says, “Mary, you oughta work on his hamstrings. They stay drawn up that tight it’ll send his back out.”
I move up his leg, and as I do that, my whole body starts humming inside itself, like some locust singing inside its husk. I am scared to look at anybody for fear that this trembling in me shows through. One hand settles on the back of John’s knee, and the two tendons are tight as bowstrings.
“You can sit there,” John says. “Just sit on my calves,” he says to the TV. “You can reach better with two hands.”
When I was little, for a while I had a horse that carried me across meadows where long grass and purple loosestrife grew up to the stirrups. He’d stretch out long to gallop so my hair flew back and the mountains alongside me smeared against the orange sky. One day, he came to a ravine or dry creekbed I didn’t see coming, and even though he wasn’t much of a jumper, he had the sense to bound over it. It was a leap I didn’t expect, and in my center everything fell away for an instant. I flew through blue air so long I later believed he’d briefly grown wings on his feet and some invisible sail had lifted us.
I straddle John’s calves, and something of that animal comes back to me, and I can almost feel the stalks of loosestrife flower against my calves again. My thumb settles on the inner thigh muscle, which Jana names. I bear down with light pressure and start to run that thumb up the long muscle, what would be in the inseam of jeans if John had jeans on. But this is flesh, and it yields to me.
All at once I believe John feels something too. His skin quickens to my touch. He’s gone super still, and the blond hairs on his thighs have come to attention. My thumb slides further up, and I feel some deeper part of him under me. It twists my very center, some knot going tight with pleasure. I slide my thumb up John’s thigh to where his cutoffs end. And then I go back down to the knee, start over, stroke the muscle slow and deep its length. I think again of that horse, nudged by my heels into a gallop. How of his own volition, he could break into a full lope so the blossoms we passed close to were stripped almost bare.
When the game’s over, John leaps up and runs to his room to get ready for bed, and I am down the steps and out into the dark before I know it. Mr. Cleary follows me out. He lights a smoke and stands on the sidewalk, watching me run home, waiting till I wave on the porch to go back in.
That night may be the first time I’m grateful Lecia’s gone. I reach for the damp between my legs and find my panties soaked through. There are so many gross jokes you hear about stuff coming out of you down there. (“After a date, throw your panties against the wall, and if they stick, you had a good time,” Darlene Smith once said.) I push these out of my head and close my eyes, for under my hand there’s a fire burning cool as menthol. For some reason, I don’t conjure John’s body stretched over mine, or under it, or even the long muscles of his thighs hard under my hands. The fact of that body is too carnal for this sharp luminosity in me. Instead I picture John leading me under the spangled light of this mirrored ball for a slow dance. How he wheels me past those too stunned by our beauty to dance themselves. And suddenly John is there, holding me lightly in his arms and breathing his Juicy Fruit breath into my mouth. Then the horse leaps between my legs, and that soaring fall enters me, and everything dissolves.
I remember the next morning, or think I do, lolling in bed like my own bride. Maybe it was some other morning, but I remember it nonetheless. Some dense little sun glowed in my solar plexus. I’d wallowed my whole sleep away in it.
Only when I came across the baggie in my pocket did my face heat up. Touching myself didn’t seem so bad. Mother said everybody did that, even people who swore to God and stick-a-needle that they didn’t. What shamed me was the plastic bag, that an ardor so pure as mine for John Cleary could involve such deceit. I took the baggie outside in heavy rain and shook the squiggles of hair out into a sewer ditch of rushing rainwater, tossing the empty plastic after it.
Chapter Seven
SOMETIME DURING EIGHTH GRADE, Clarice decides I’m not her best friend anymore. If she’d said this outright, I would have nattered and mullygrubbed at her. Instead, she just stops coming over. No fight, no nothing. One Sunday evening after we’d been playing dominoes all afternoon, she just strolls down to her house and doesn’t come back. Not that I didn’t ask her to.
I did ask, and ask, and ask again nice. The more I ask, the more broke-dick her excuses get. She’ll say she has to help her mother at the doughnut shop one day. The next it’s yardwork, or cleaning the house. Or her cousins are spending the night, and she has to shampoo and set the little girls’ hair for mass the next day. My offers to pitch in and help just make her squirm and tack some bull dookey onto her story. Like she’ll say it turns out her grandma is maybe coming from Louisiana, and her mother wants just family. Or she’s being punished for not doing the yardwork and can’t have company.
Lecia tells me when I complain about it to take the hint. But Lecia seldom spends a whole Saturday by herself reading two books in a row. Mother’s always off at the library, and Daddy’s wherever he goes. It’s just me thumbing encyclopedias with Sally the Siamese or the sleek black tomcat Roy laying around till Lecia’s date brings her home.
That’s why I won’t just blindly take Clarice’s dropping out of my traffic patterns without an explanation. Also I pretty much can’t stand anybody my own age and it’s mostly mutual. I call Clarice every Saturday till one morning her little brother Jeff picks up the phone.
“She ain’t here,” he mumbles.
/> “Jeffrey?” There’s a little pause. I can hear the Road Runner on TV go beep-beep, then make a dashing-off whiz sound. Clearly Jeff’s attention has gone back to old Wile E. Coyote, who winds up—gauging from the explosion I hear—biting down on a dynamite sandwich and lying in the desert with a crown of orbiting stars and his eyes all bugged out. “Jeff, listen up!” I finally say.
“What!”
“Are you telling the truth?” I said. “About your sister?”
“She ain’t here. I swear. She ain’t nowheres around,” he says. I hear what must be an anvil from the Acme Anvil Factory crate fall whistling from the cliff edge.
“Jeff, why do I get the sense that you’re lying to me?”
“I’m not. Cross my heart!” Now the vaudeville closing music plays on their TV, and I decide that I can now weasel something out of Jeffrey.
“Have you made first communion yet?” I ask him, which is a curveball question.
“I just took it Easter!” he says. Clarice and I had grilled him on the catechism questions that still spooled through my head some nights: “Who made the world?” “God made the world.”
“Now Jeff, you know, and I know, and God almighty sure as hell knows that you’re lying like a rug right now. They wouldn’t leave you stranded there by yourself at barely first communion age, and I just saw your momma glazing a tray of crullers down at the doughnut shop.” This last part’s a lie, but how would he know.
His hand smothers the receiver while he mumbles something to someone who barks something back. I can picture his little hand—the nails with half moons of black dirt, knuckles scabby.
When he comes back on, you can hear the ad for the Easy-Bake oven in the background. Jeff says, “Clarice’s gone to the hospital.” His voice has the hard newsbreaking timbre of a revival tent preacher.