Clarice does something wholly unexpected for which she will be forever marked.
She sticks her thumbs in the gathered waistband of her corduroy pants with the cowgirl lassos stitched around the pockets. With those thumbs, she yanks both her pants and her undersancies down around her bare feet. She then bends over and waggles her butt at us as I later learned strippers sometimes do. Screams of laughter from us. John falls over and rolls on the ground like a dog, pointing up and laughing at her bare white ass, which still holds a faint tan line from summer.
We’ve just about got used to the idea of her butt when she executes another move. She wheels around to face us and show us her yin-yang, a dark notch in her hairless pudendum. Her belly is round as a puppy’s jutted forward. Then our howls truly take on hyena-like timbre. And there across the ditch, which marks the realm of adult civilization, appears the fast moving figure of Mrs. Carter through leaf smoke of a ditch fire. She’s holding the spatula in her hand with which she intends to blister our asses, Clarice’s most specifically.
But she’s a grown-up, Mrs. Carter. Her steps on the muddy slope are tentative. Not wanting to funk up her shoes with mud, she hesitates before she leaps across. And in that interval, Clarice slithers down the yellow pole and tears off in a streak. And the rest of us flee like wild dogs.
Decades later, I asked Clarice point blank why she did it. We were in our forties then, living two thousand miles apart, and talking—oddly enough—on our car phones. Her voice was sandpaper rough with a cold, but it still carried the shimmer of unbidden amusement. I’d only seen her every two or three years—the occasional holiday, at my daddy’s funeral, and after Mother’s bypass surgery when she kept vigil with me. Still, there’s no one who’d be less likely to tell me a flat-footed lie. Across the hissing static, I asked why she took her pants down that day, whether somebody had dared her to and I just didn’t remember.
The answer that she gave remains the truest to who she was and who I then so much needed her to be: “Because I could, I guess,” she said. “Wasn’t anybody around to stop me.”
Chapter Two
M OTHER’S OLD POWERS CAME BURBLING up in her again that interminable summer, for the first time in years. She tore around so fired up about her schoolwork she left an almost visible trail of energy. She pored over books the way a thirsty person sucks down water. Even poking at a pot of mustard greens, she’d have some paperback on the Russian Revolution getting damp on the counter beside her. When I staggered out from sleep before dawn, I often found her studying calculus at the kitchen table, held in a cloud of Kool smoke like some radiant, unlikely Buddha.
“It’s a language,” she said of the math one morning, tapping her legal pad with the tip of the mechanical pencil. “I’ve never understood that. It’s a language that describes certain stuff really precisely.” Before I’d even rubbed the crust from my eye corners, she was prattling on about some old Greek named Zeno who fired an arrow at a target. Trouble was, he was trying to measure how it traveled in this really stilted way. So he cut up the line between the bow and the target—first into feet, then into inches, then half inches, then quarter inches, and soon till the whole infinitesimal universe unfolded in that strip of air, multiplied. This didn’t seem like a language anybody would bother to talk. You want the butter passed, you don’t talk about arrows shooting. I said something to that effect.
But Mother was incandescent with the idea. Her green eyes shone. She ran her hand through her thick hair and left brief rows in the new white streaks. “You do if you’re trying to measure this line.”
“Why not just say it’s a line, thus and such long?”
“Because that doesn’t describe the whole thing. The rate of change. It’s a language
She sticks her thumbs in the gathered waistband of her corduroy pants with the cowgirl lassos stitched around the pockets. With those thumbs, she yanks both her pants and her undersancies down around her bare feet. She then bends over and waggles her butt at us as I later learned strippers sometimes do. Screams of laughter from us. John falls over and rolls on the ground like a dog, pointing up and laughing at her bare white ass, which still holds a faint tan line from summer.
We’ve just about got used to the idea of her butt when she executes another move. She wheels around to face us and show us her yin-yang, a dark notch in her hairless pudendum. Her belly is round as a puppy’s jutted forward. Then our howls truly take on hyena-like timbre. And there across the ditch, which marks the realm of adult civilization, appears the fast moving figure of Mrs. Carter through leaf smoke of a ditch fire. She’s holding the spatula in her hand with which she intends to blister our asses, Clarice’s most specifically.
But she’s a grown-up, Mrs. Carter. Her steps on the muddy slope are tentative. Not wanting to funk up her shoes with mud, she hesitates before she leaps across. And in that interval, Clarice slithers down the yellow pole and tears off in a streak. And the rest of us flee like wild dogs.
Decades later, I asked Clarice point blank why she did it. We were in our forties then, living two thousand miles apart, and talking—oddly enough—on our car phones. Her voice was sandpaper rough with a cold, but it still carried the shimmer of unbidden amusement. I’d only seen her every two or three years—the occasional holiday, at my daddy’s funeral, and after Mother’s bypass surgery when she kept vigil with me. Still, there’s no one who’d be less likely to tell me a flat-footed lie. Across the hissing static, I asked why she took her pants down that day, whether somebody had dared her to and I just didn’t remember.
The answer that she gave remains the truest to who she was and who I then so much needed her to be: “Because I could, I guess,” she said. “Wasn’t anybody around to stop me.”
Chapter Two
M OTHER’S OLD POWERS CAME BURBLING up in her again that interminable summer, for the first time in years. She tore around so fired up about her schoolwork she left an almost visible trail of energy. She pored over books the way a thirsty person sucks down water. Even poking at a pot of mustard greens, she’d have some paperback on the Russian Revolution getting damp on the counter beside her. When I staggered out from sleep before dawn, I often found her studying calculus at the kitchen table, held in a cloud of Kool smoke like some radiant, unlikely Buddha.
“It’s a language,” she said of the math one morning, tapping her legal pad with the tip of the mechanical pencil. “I’ve never understood that. It’s a language that describes certain stuff really precisely.” Before I’d even rubbed the crust from my eye corners, she was prattling on about some old Greek named Zeno who fired an arrow at a target. Trouble was, he was trying to measure how it traveled in this really stilted way. So he cut up the line between the bow and the target—first into feet, then into inches, then half inches, then quarter inches, and soon till the whole infinitesimal universe unfolded in that strip of air, multiplied. This didn’t seem like a language anybody would bother to talk. You want the butter passed, you don’t talk about arrows shooting. I said something to that effect.
But Mother was incandescent with the idea. Her green eyes shone. She ran her hand through her thick hair and left brief rows in the new white streaks. “You do if you’re trying to measure this line.”
“Why not just say it’s a line, thus and such long?”
“Because that doesn’t describe the whole thing. The rate of change. It’s a language
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