T. S. Garp and Cushie Percy

T. S. Garp and Cushie Percy’s relationship is a youthful affair shaped by an old acquaintance, unequal experience, and a sudden prohibition. Their intimacy gives Garp his first sexual experience, but it does not become a settled romance: he remains attached to Helen Holm in his imagination, Cushie calls him an old friend, and her father eventually cuts off their contact. The relationship also brings Garp’s uncertain knowledge of his own parentage into sharper focus, even as it gives him material to consider as a writer.

Background and Uneven Familiarity

Garp and Cushie had grown up together, but neither treated that history as proof of close friendship. In Garp’s senior year, while Cushie was home for the weekend from the Dibbs School, the fifth girls’ prep school she had attended, the two walked out of town beside the Steering River. Cushie had a reputation for disciplinary trouble; among Steering’s boys, Dibbs was known for girls with similar records. Her social position made her an object of private interest but public embarrassment for many of the boys who sought her company.

Cushie noticed that Garp behaved differently. When she took his hand, he held it firmly and did not seem ashamed to be seen with her. That uncomplicated public affection appealed to her, though she did not mistake it for a deep friendship. Their connection therefore began with a mismatch: Cushie was experienced at testing boys’ affection, while Garp was earnest and comparatively inexperienced.

The River and the Cannons

Their walk brought them to the Steering River at high tide, where Garp watched an eight-oared shell move across the water. Nearby, the Steering family’s three cannons gave the setting its familiar sexual slang: boys spoke of “getting banged at the cannons.” The historical landmark had become a place where schoolboys left condoms, turning the cannon’s mouth into an emblem of adolescent sexual boasting and its consequences. When Cushie teased Garp for not knowing about condoms, the gap between her knowledge and his became unmistakable.

Cushie initiated their intimacy, and Garp admitted that the experience was new to him. When she asked whether their old friendship spoiled what was happening between them, he reassured her that it did not. Her question captures the uncertainty between them: the encounter could draw on their shared past, but neither could assume that it transformed them into close friends or committed partners.

The encounter also exposed Garp to a question about his father. Cushie warned that a child might be Japanese, repeating something she had heard about Garp’s parentage. The remark recalled an earlier childhood incident involving Cushie, her father, and Garp, and made Garp reconsider the limited account his mother had given him. He resolved to ask Jenny Fields for more details than he knew—that his father had been a soldier—but the immediate intensity of the encounter displaced that resolve. The relationship thus joined sexual discovery to a separate, unresolved family mystery.

Intimacy, Limits, and Separation

Cushie controlled the terms of their physical relationship. She made clear that she did not want a pregnancy, and Garp’s ignorance about condoms complicated their first encounter. Their intimacy was not reciprocal in the same way for both of them; the narrative presents Cushie as the more experienced partner and Garp as a willing but unpracticed novice. The difference is part of their dynamic, not evidence that they shared a settled romantic understanding.

Afterward, they walked back along the river holding hands. Garp asked to see her the next weekend, and Cushie called him nice and her oldest friend. The gesture of affection did not erase her qualification that people can know one another all their lives without ever quite being friends. She also acknowledged that she did not know whether Garp’s father was Japanese or who had first made the claim. When Garp asked Jenny about his father, her account remained unwavering, leaving his curiosity unresolved.

The relationship was interrupted by Cushie’s father. When Garp phoned her at school, Cushie told him that her father had forbidden her to see him, write to him, talk to him, or even read his letters. She suspected that a golfer had seen them leaving the cannons. Cushie treated the news humorously, but Garp understood that his hoped-for future meetings were over. She said she would be home for his graduation weekend, yet the ban left their continuing intimacy uncertain rather than promised.

Writing, Helen, and Later Resonance

Even before the prohibition, Garp’s feelings for Cushie existed alongside his idealized attachment to Helen Holm. He feared Helen would hear about the affair despite recognizing that he and Helen had no actual relationship to betray. He nevertheless wrote her a long confession about what he called his lust and contrasted it with his higher feelings for her. Helen replied that the confession was better writing than the story he had shown her and encouraged him to keep sharing his work. She described Cushie as rather stupid but pleasant, and treated Garp’s desire as something he might experience without making it the measure of his feelings for Helen.

That response turns the affair into an early episode in Garp’s development as a writer. Cushie had already challenged him over what he could write about, and his confessional letter gave Helen an occasion to distinguish vivid writing from the story he had previously shown her. The relationship therefore contributes not only to Garp’s sexual coming-of-age but also to his sense that private experience might be shaped into writing.

Cushie’s later life appears in contrast to the brief, youthful affair. She became associated with the Dibbs School and the Percy family, while Garp’s adult life brought him into contact with Roberta Muldoon, his mother Jenny’s colleague and friend. The novel does not present Cushie and Garp as continuing partners. Their relationship remains significant as a formative encounter: a moment of mutual attraction that never resolves into close friendship, a brief opening onto Garp’s questions about his father, and an early experience he carries into his ideas about desire and writing.