Unfathomably, the career path I drew was the strange one I wound up undertaking, “to write ½ poetry and ½ autobiography.” Though I never managed to wrest for myself a career as “philosipher,” whatever I thought that meant, I also longed also to become “a real woman, a hardworking woman with a pure 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 with Marshal Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke and Palladin from Have Gun Will Travel—cowboys who would soon magically transform into knights in armor after I discovered tales of chivalry. Jason McSomething, I think they called him. He’d been falsely convicted of treason during a Civil War battle and sentenced to hang before escaping. Most episodes, he galloped around the West looking for folks who could prove he wasn’t a big sissy who ran out on his regiment. But somebody who thought him guilty would always pop up, so he’d have to slink out of 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 just fixing to get frisky on. I devoted more than a few pages to praising Jason’s long suffering. (The stoicism I favored was less in the mode of Marcus Aurelius and more reminiscent of the donkey Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.) I imagined him hoisting 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 for me!” That sort of thing.
When the pencil lead wore down and faded to slate gray, I’d sometimes walk to remote neighborhoods and knock on the doors of strange houses. If someone answered, I’d claim I was trying to sell Christmas cards, though I lacked any samples or other convincing evidence that this was so. I don’t recall trying to extort actual dollars. (I had money, and there was nothing to buy anyway.) I just had nothing better to do.
People were damn nice about it. They handed me sugar cookies and Rice Krispie Treats in waxed paper, foil-wrapped kisses and hard candy by the fistful, but no Christmas card orders got totted down, even though I copied some random names 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 minute before bursting into tears. She put both hands on her jowly face. The tears rivered 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 after I’d said I was sorry for about the fifteenth time. “You just put me in mind of my boy. He’s passed over—” She choked off a sob, a body-wracking convulsion that 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 said anything. Then her shoulders relaxed a whit. “Do you want to see?” she finally asked, in a voice hardly above a whisper. She didn’t even say see what. Nor did I run through any of the dire warnings I’d heard about getting in cars or houses with strangers. Maybe that’s odd. Doubtless a more regular kid would have cobbled up a dental appointment to bolt off to. But the weight of her grief drew me to her. She held open the aluminum screen an extra notch for me to pass through.
The living room was cold as a meat locker and smelled like a pot of cabbage left too long on the stove. The light was muddy as gloom, all the shades being drawn flush to the sills. She’d also laid down plastic runners along the most traveled paths to keep the carpet naps fluffy. So plastic paths led from the door where I stood to a mossy-looking plaid sofa, then zigzagged to what must have been kitchen and bedroom and bath. Tables that would have hit you at knee level or shin level in the dark crowded every inch of available floor space, and were themselves packed with little porcelain figurines. A more useless assemblage of objects I’ve never seen—hoop-skirted shepherdesses with pilgrim’s staffs, guys with powdered wigs, dinner bells, and gilt-edged snuff boxes. I remember specifically a disembodied female hand with rings and bracelets and red 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 almost nothing. He was blond when little, and his hair got darker as he grew. What’s stuck with me in those staggered pictures’ advance through his short life were the costumes marking any boy’s inching toward manhood—a toddler with suspendered shorts; a school-age boy with a homemade birthday hat; then a Little Leaguer’s striped knickers; baptismal robes; and finally a gangly teen in a white dinner jacket holding a corsage box.
“He shot himself,” she said. Her face told me it was on purpose. Up till that day, he’d been the perfect boy, she said. Then he went to a dancing party and asked a girl onto the floor. And she said no. He came home miserable, opened up the Bible to the Twenty-third Psalm, and shot himself, right in the head. They were in the next room at the time watching Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music Hour.
What she did next is the kind of gesture I’ve since learned that I somehow invite. (After I stopped thinking of such moments as my fault and began to regard them as an odd form of privilege, I handled them better.) She steered me by my shoulder along another plastic path to the coffee table. I did not shrink from her touch. I both longed to see and dreaded what we were headed for: the worn black Bible on the rectangular laminated wood. A laminated card stuck out of the pages to keep the place.
Hefting up the Bible worked some tranquilizing voodoo on her. She became strangely calm, as if getting to the heart of some matter she’d been circling all day. She’d done it before and often. Her ease told me that. Some passing assemblage of milkmen and water-meter readers and Avon ladies had stood where I was standing and sought to arrange their faces into tolerable expressions, as I then did. Certainly I wanted to stay upbeat, but grinning like a monkey was way wrong. 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 of burnt chocolate took up most of the pages’ deep valley. The paper had puckered from the wet. Still the words were legible. “The Lord is my shepherd…,” I read in my head.
Then I was saying a hasty goodbye, for only a few years before, my own wild-assed mother had threatened suicide. Part of me believed the notion was contagious, a germ I could pick up that might reinfect Mother. I didn’t consciously ponder this, but it flitted through me strong enough that before the lady could say diddly, I was shaking her leathery cold hand on the porch in waves of heat. Then I was running home full tilt as if the house wouldn’t be empty when I burst in. The tedium there was suddenly preferable to the terror of those houses I loped past, inside which were unknown losses.
Sometime that summer I stopped prowling around strange houses and concocted a real job shining shoes at the barbershop. This act of mine thwarted Daddy’s vow that his daughters never work for pay while under his roof. Still, I defied that order by taking his shoeshine box to the shop and weaseled myself a post in the red leather shine chair.
The shop held special allure that week since I’d overheard somewhere that John Cleary was going in for his annual crew cut the next day. I watched in worshipful silence as, under Mr. DePello’s humming clippers, hanks of John’s shining yellow hair fell in slow strips to the linoleum, where it was swept into 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 untanned scalp 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 to me 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 vinyl shine chair, for my awe must have been palpable. Mr. DePello untied the apron and shook it so short hairs fell to the floor in cuneiform patterns. John handed the mirror back and said yessir looks good, thank you. To me he said seeya at school, though scho
ol was months off and our paths till then crossed practically every day.
The bell jangled as he left. I watched him swing his leg over his bike and shove off down the sidewalk in a strip of sunlight. Long after he’d gone, I resisted the urge to snatch a handful of his clean yellow hair from my suddenly growing collection of John Cleary memorabilia.
Probably this unlikely brush with his grooming habits kept me coming back to the barbershop another day or so. But he never showed up again. No one my age did. 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 hid the Playboys in a drawer when I showed up) and the repetitive, metallic snip of Mr. DePello’s slender scissors on some bald guy’s tonsurelike fringe eventually wore me down to my natural, nail-biting state.
After I watched Song of Bernadette on TV that summer, I drew in my glitter-spackled book a picture of Jesus. For a while, I prayed ardently on my knees by my bedside—not yet for titties or for John Cleary to ask me to the couples’ skate, but for a best friend.
Only one girl showed outlaw tendencies nearly as wild as mine: Clarice Fontenot, who at thirteen had three years on me, which discrepancy didn’t seem to matter at first. The only obstacle to our spending every conceivable second together that summer was her Cajun daddy’s tight rein on her, which consisted of seemingly innumerable chores and capricious rules he ginned out.
The Fontenots lived in a celery-green house on the corner that seemed to bulge at its seams with her wild-assed brothers. They all slicked back their hair on the sides and walked with a sexy, loose-hipped slouch. If they looked at you at all, the glance came from the sides of their faces. Like their tight-lipped father, 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 variety of black-eyed cousins whose faces (like hers) were spattered with freckles as if flicked from a paintbrush. Her blights and burdens put me in mind of Cinderella’s, though Clarice rarely whined. Still, her circumstances defined her somehow, for her jittery, electric manner seemed to have formed itself solely 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 the air conditioning if not my somewhat peculiar company. But her daddy’s strictness was the stuff of neighborhood legend. A compact, steel-gray man, he was about the only guy on our block who didn’t do refinery work (I think he worked for the gas company). That he wore a tie to work made him not exotic but peculiar. No one’s daddy knew his schedule or ever heard him say more than a passing hey. Usually, Clarice could only play at my house an hour or so before she’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 the while to predict her return by the advance of her work. Window by window, the glass she was washing would lose its grease smears and begin to give back blue sky and flickers of sun when I rolled by. Or I’d watch through those windows while Clarice unhooked each venetian blind. I’d try to measure how long it would take for her to lower those blinds into the Clorox-fuming bathtub, to wash each slat, then towel it off and reappear to hang the blind, giving me an exasperated 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 that measured the extent of her good time and sought to lop it off. He’d insist she stay in her own yard, and forbid me to cross over the property line. I’d pace their yard’s edge for an hour at a pop, or just sit cross-legged along their hurricane fence line reading while their deranged German shepherd loped and bayed and threatened to eat my face off. From my lap I’d flip him the permanent bird 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 on her side of the fence, glancing over her shoulder till her dad’s gray face slid into a window or his gravelly voice shouted her in.
Doubtless her daddy meant this all as some kind of protection. Plenty of girls her age “got in trouble,” and there were countless lowlife characters circling like sharks to pluck any unwatched female into libidinal activity in some hot rod 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 I found Mr. Fontenot’s strictures mind-boggling. In my head I engaged in long courtroom soliloquies about him, at the ends of which he and his feckless sons were led away shackled while a gavel banged and Clarice and I hugged each other in 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 laughed in a foghorn-like blast that drew stares in public. She could belch on command loud enough to cause old ladies in restaurants to ask for far tables. I never mastered this. But thanks to her, I can whistle with my fingers, execute a diving board flip, turn a cartwheel, tie a slip knot, and make my eyeballs shiver like a mesmerist. While other people worried what would come of Clarice if she didn’t calm down, for me she had the absolute power of someone who fundamentally didn’t give a damn, which she didn’t (other than toeing her father’s line, which she seemed to do breezily enough).
My first memory of her actually comes long before that summer. It floats from the bleached-out time before I’d passed through the school doors and so had no grade levels by which to rank my fellows.
A cold sun was sliding down a gray fall sky. Some older boys had been playing tackle 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 be tracked with pushpins in red, white, and blue on maps on nearly every kitchen wall. 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 connect them. 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 every little kid within running distance of the yellow goalposts.
We could not help watching. Even after I stepped accidentally in a fire-ant nest and got a constellation of crimson bites on my ankles. Even after streetlights clicked on and our breaths began to spirit before us and to warm my hands I had to pull my arms from my sweatshirt sleeves, then tuck my fingers into my armpits so the sleeves flapped empty as an amputee’s. In fact, even once the game had ended, when the big boys had run off to make phone calls or do chores, we stayed waiting to be called for supper. I can almost hear the melamine plates being slid from the various cupboards and stacked on tile counters. But having witnessed the big boys’ game, we were loath to unloose ourselves from 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 to calcify 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 an invective that would loop through your head at night till tears made your pillowcase 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 or jockey shorts, which we sometimes traded looks at under a porch or in the blue dark of a crawl space. For years our names ran together like beads on a string, JohnandBobbieClariceandCindyandLittleMary (as opposed to Big Mary, who was Mary Ferrell). With little need to protect our identities from each other, we could still fall into great idleness together—this handful of unwatched kids with nowhere to be.
At some moment, Clarice figured out as none of us had before how to shinny up the goalpost.
That sight of her squiggling up the yellow pole magically yanks
the memory from something far-off into a kind of 3-D present. I am alive in it. There’s early frost on the grass, and my ant bites itch. Clarice’s limbs have turned to rubber as she wraps round the pole. She’s kicked off her Keds, so her bare feet on cold metal give purchase. About a foot at a time she scoots up, hauls herself by her hands, then slides her feet high. And again. She’s weightless as an 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 a crimson-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 her in better. This is a wonder, for her to climb so far above us. And there we align ourselves with the forces of awe that permit new tricks to be dreamed up on chilly fall nights when nothing but suppers of fried meat and cream gravy await us, or tepid baths.