Stone Fruit Season

thoughts on "Cherry" by Mary Karr

[after a half-hearted suicide attempt at age 13]

When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?

All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.

The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.

Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.

Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.

Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.

It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.

Mary Karr, “Cherry”

I first read Cherry when I was twenty-seven. I’d been sober maybe 18 months, churning through recovery memoirs with a desperate utility where I wasn’t really reading, but grasping for evidence that a shattered life could continue. Karr felt different even then because her prose was so honest and her simplicity felt earned. I could sense how many decades she’d carried those truths for them to be that transparent.

I keep coming back to “You don’t earn it. It’s given.” I’ve been trying to figure out why those words do what they do to me. Part of what wrecks me, I think, is that her parents are wrong about everything. They don’t have the facts. They’re comforting the wrong sickness, loving her for the wrong reason — and it doesn’t matter! Their love lands warm before they understand the first thing about what they’re soothing.

I spent most of my life believing the opposite: that the people who loved me needed an emotional MRI before their tenderness could count. That I had to be correctly diagnosed to be correctly loved. Karr dismantles that in six words. I want to say I was only wounded by my belief, but I think I built it because it kept me unreachable. If love has to understand me first, I get to decide it never quite does. Makes it damn easy to keep the door shut and call it a standard. But Karr doesn’t ask the hurting versions of ourselves to be legible. She only asks us to open our mouths.

Which is maybe why this feels like a postmodern answer to Simone Weil to me. And I love Weil; this isn’t a contest. But I think her definition of grace has to be approached. I can only reach it through the long work of becoming porous enough to receive it. Karr doesn’t ask me to build or sacrifice anything. She just hands me what I need. I used to think it was the same light in two forms. Maybe it’s not. Weil’s feels vertical, an austere radiance. Karr’s is the light in a kitchen, falling on the ordinary mess of my life without asking that life to deserve it. One I climb toward. The other is already in the room with me (jfc if I only had eyes to see more often).

What Karr keeps writing toward is being two things at once, and I have a particular education in that. My blood turns on me: eosinophils mass past all reason, infiltrating whatever organ they reach, so the sickness in me is also literally an excess of care. Some days I look fine, and I’m quietly on fire. Some days I feel like I’m dying and the only proof is the count. I had to stop thinking of sick and well as two countries with a border between them and instead embrace that they’re weather systems over the same continent.

Recovery laid its own version both over and under this, and the picture didn’t get clearer; it got truer. Three years after I got sober, HES arrived and fundamentally changed, well, everything. Fighting to live made me realize my life was worth living. Not having the answers or access to a miracle treatment (I have idiopathic HES) made me uniquely willing. Before that threshold, I kept waiting for succession: for the sick, heroin-addicted version of myself to carbonize, and for a new, whole version to emerge from that chrysalis. But that sequence never came (bless). It’s simultaneous and super-positioned. I can’t explain it, but I know that I am both sick and well depending on the moment you observe the state of my soul. Most days, I’m well [though I still have my moments]. And yet, I have witnessed the inverse, nearly every Monday night for years: that a newcomer in withdrawal is, in that very same hour, also someone learning how to live. Just like I can be, on an unremarkable Tuesday, genuinely flattened by grief and still laughing until my ribs hurt.

That’s what living requires of me, I think: to be a revenant in a world I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in and then scandalously to enjoy it. To let a part of myself die so another could go on and then live with how that dead part follows me. Not every waking hour. Sometimes it stalks me, sometimes it drifts into myth, and I nearly forget its weight, but it follows. That junkie is still out there, somewhere behind me, at a fixed distance that never quite closes. I’ve stopped pretending those cancel out. The beauty, I’m learning, is they were never supposed to.

And this is where I return to Cherry, to the plums. Karr never makes her younger self choose which version survives. She lets her be all of it — the one dying and the one being hauled back — and nobody on the page needs her cleaner first. Reading it now, I’m held the same way: still sick and still well, still grieving and still, somehow, joyously, stupidly here. Still trailed by everyone I’ve had to bury to keep going, and somehow, still reaching for sweetness. Karr walks into the black of my heart and opens the blinds. Before I’ve done a single thing to deserve it, she puts the ripeness of this life back in my hands.