Free Cherry by Mary Karr

back his head and hooted with laughter, howling up at the dusty light fixture.
    I hurled a handful of pecan husks into the bowl and stood up. Mother came in wearing a nightgown and rubbing lotion into her hands. “What is it?” she said. Her head was wrapped in a towel like a swami.
    I tore into my room and power-slammed the door into its molding. The window glass shivered. I hurled myself down on the lavender-flowered spread. Part of me knew I’d crossed the border into some country where he didn’t—or wouldn’t—tread.
    I instinctively knew the rules laid down for girls’ comportment, but I wasn’t yet resigned to them, for to place my head into that yoke was to part with too much freedom. One day I sat on my porch sucking the long ears of my Bugs Bunny popsicle into a syrupless white dunce cap when a herd of boys my age on bikes pedaled into view. They were shirtless, sailing down the street in careless whooshing speed.
    One blond boy named Corey was somebody’s cousin down from Houston for the summer. He was slim and brown and expressionless in a way that let me manufacture complex thoughts for him. (Was it Chekhov or Tolstoy who complained about what deep personalities we can manufacture behind “some little scrap of face”?) His surfer cut hung in a bright wing across his forehead. He stood stock still in his pedals for the entire strip of road past my house like the figurehead on a ship’s prow, and his thoughtless beauty dragged from me the faint tug of something like desire. His body was thin-muscled as a greyhound’s. Maybe his hurtling motion made enough wind to cool him off, but he didn’t look to suffer from the heat I felt so squandered in.
    This wasn’t desire as it would become. Not yet. The cool fire circled more in my abdomen than between my legs, and it was vague and smoke gray. I pictured no boy yet—not even John Cleary—gatheringme into his arms. Despite what Nabokov’s Humbert wanted to think, I’ve never met a girl as young as I was then who craved a bona fide boning. But glowing nonspecifically from my solar plexus was this forceful light. I wanted John Cleary or Corey or some other boy to see that light, to admire it, not to feed off it for his own hungers. When I closed my eyes at night, I did not manufacture naked bodies entwined. Mostly I didn’t even venture into kissing. Rather my fantasies at that time were all in the courtly mode. I pictured John Cleary/Corey taking my hand for the couples’ skate at the rink, how we’d cut a slow circle together in a spotlight, with his gaze inventing me in the stares of those we passed.
    But the boys’ bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn’t yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose for it. To that I’d say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.) Boys did not have to sit like miserable statues alone on their front porches. They could be swooped up and carried by the force of their compadres before idleness had sucked all momentum from the day.
    This lodged a bad idea in my head, unignorable as any pebble. I went into the air-conditioned kitchen to confer with Mother. She was pouring cornbread batter from a crockery bowl into a cast iron skillet. The cold compound hit the bacon fat greased pan with a hiss. A pot of volcanic-looking chili must have been burbling on the stove, for in memory all the scents of seared meat with four kinds of pepper and cumin made glands in my throat go tight.
    Did Mother think I was too old to go outside without a shirt? She didn’t.
    The bowl returned to the counter, and I swiped a bit of the gritty batter onto my index finger (not sweet like Yankee cornbread, but serious with salt and lard). Asking Mother was a formality,