Cherry by Mary Karr

Author:Mary Karr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literary, Humorous, Fiction
ISBN: 0141002077
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2001-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

WHILE BOYS ARE CRUISING ROADS in search of liquor or pussy or fistfights that can prove their adolescent prowess and vent their spleens, you and Meredith forge a friendship based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing virtually nothing. A camera trailing you would find neither plot nor action—two girls laze around on sofas in various stages of torpor reading or talking about what they will read or have read or plan to write or make or do in some vaporous future. Or dead silent in mutual paralysis, the two girls stare at a ceiling for hours, just watching idle thoughts drift by.

You languish on her mother’s sofa, Thomas Pynchon’s V. open on your chest. Meredith claims it’s the greatest book ever. You can’t get through the first chapter. Tedious as all get-out. Some sailor singing doodley-do sea chanteys and whatnot. In the Russian books at least if you write down the different names and nicknames, you can get a dim idea of who’s doing what to whom, and who the good guys are.

What we need’s a fainting couch, you say. Something in red velvet. It’s the longest string of words you’ve uttered in what seems like hours. You’ve been listening to the air conditioner’s roar.

Victorian? Meredith asks. She seems to have names for distinctions you haven’t yet begun to make.

And of what does that consist?

‘Of what? Of what?’ The wild beast has some syntax.

I mean it. Edify me.

I think all those curvy frou-frouy couches are Victorian. You know, like they have at Snooper’s Paradise. A slopey thing. With fringe.

I also wouldn’t mind a barge, like Cleopatra. I could really go for a barge, with some Nubian slave boys to fan me with palm fronds. Gliding under leaves of…

Meredith looks up to say, Elephantine leaves.

Dripping elephantine leaves, you say. Then, This book is all turkey gobble. Tell me again what’s so great about it.

Language, mostly. It’s a world created rather than a world described.

Come again.

He’s not trying to copy anything that’s real.

So he’s just making shit up?

Yep.

And that’s an upside thing?

Don’t read it if you don’t like it. I loved it.

You saying I’m not smart enough to read this. I’m just your noble savage friend.

More savage than noble, she says. I personally think you’re adorable. Extremely cute.

Cute is for poodles. I want to be dark and enigmatic.

You’re absolutely dark and cutely enigmatic. One of the untapped mines of literary genius.

This kind of banter is part of an unspoken contract whereby Meredith will pat you on the head a few times before she actually undertakes explaining whatever book has stumped you. The charade somehow dilutes the fact that the most meritory opinions invariably stem from Meredith. Without this oblique shoring up, the friendship would consist of her lecturing while you take notes.

Meredith finally says, Like the whole V thing. It keeps coming back up and back up—geese flying in a V, somebody’s shirt open to show their chest, the triangle of pubic hair. It accrues power, meaning. It becomes something.

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