The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

Not long before my mother died, the tile guy redoing her kitchen pried from the wall a tile with an unlikely round hole in it.

When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl.

For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to “run away” in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

“If you read three chapters a day and five on Sunday, you can read the Holy Bible in one year,” she said.

Maybe this aversion comes partly from a kid’s normal intolerance for the infirm. Somebody dying sucks quite a bit of attention-voltage from grown-ups in a family, but believe me, for a kid it’s like watching paint dry.

(I picture him now reading this, and long to reach out of the page and grab ahold of his shirt front

Probably you thought I forgot what you did, or you figured it was no big deal. I say this now across decades and thousands of miles solely to remind you of the long memory my daddy always said I had.)

He didn’t even have to threaten me to keep quiet. I knew what I would be if I told.

Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s flailings at me didn’t bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything.

I think I fancied myself, in this squirrel-tail stole, some cross between Greta Garbo and Daniel Boone.

He held his spoon the way I later learned guys in jail are supposed to.

(An often-divorced friend of mine once declared that when you’re saying “I do” for the third or fourth time, you have to admit to yourself that they can’t be entirely at fault.)

“I shit you not,” Daddy said as he tore off a hunk of biscuit. “You touch a dead man sometime.” He took a swallow of buttermilk. “Hard as that table. Got no more to do with being alive than that table does.”

That description didn’t scare me so much as the news footage of some daddy folding in on himself once he’d recognized a kid’s face. The mothers cried too, of course, and bitterly. But they seemed better equipped for it. They held each other while they cried, or fell to their knees, or screamed up at the sky. But you could tell by the moans and bellows those grown men let out that their grief had absolutely nowhere to go.

Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order.

Leechfield itself would make you think that way—the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it.

I’d never seen a shark up close before, and what struck me was how chinless it was, its mouth drawn low down where its neck should have been. This gave it a deep, snaggle-toothed frown and kept it from looking very smart. Plus its whole body was one big muscle.

I spied a huge cabbage-head jellyfish on the sand. It was a dull white color. It looked like a free-floating brain knocked out of somebody’s skull.

I wrapped my arms around my knees, bowed my head, and prayed to a god I didn’t trust

One night the three of us took off all our clothes—a phosphorus night like this—and went skinny-dipping.

Then the waves ate his voice, and I dove in and watched my whole body light up.

I was a child—three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, barely literate, yet already accountable somehow for two deaths.

I’ve been sitting around all month watching cobwebs grow between my mother’s fingers while she lays in bed reading and wishing herself dead.

Over in the tank the minnows shiver in their black bodies like a whole school of commas facing us through the glass.

I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I’m more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth.

Becky Hebert even once took me to a fish fry hosted by the Ku Klux Klan, where they were burning schoolbooks and drugstore romances in a pile higher than any of the houses around.

A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The next morning Mother dragged out of bed first thing to hit the post office for stamps enough to mail Daddy our cards. Motoring around before her blood alcohol level got adjusted was no small act of will.

Gordon escorted her in. He was one of the barflies she paid in drinks to drive us to and from what she called the three poles of our being (school, bar, home).

Fall slid into winter.

This, it dawned on me, was what people drank liquor for, even though it could make them puke and slur their words, could bring a man to throw a punch at somebody bound to whip his ass, or cause an otherwise clear-thinking woman to drive fast into a concrete wall.

Alcohol could actually make life better, if only by making your head better. I thought of all the fairy stories that talked about magic potions, of Shakespeare’s witches from Macbeth with their cauldron bubbling.

Maybe if Mother hadn’t taken it in her head to shoot Hector, we’d never have got back to Texas.

In Texas any four-year-old knew you didn’t point a firearm at a live creature unless you wanted it dead. Even a busted, empty gun got handled like a snake.

Joey had that drunk man’s myopic sense of how interesting this all was for everybody.

(Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to rape.)

It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry. My daddy cried at parades and weddings. Watching the American flag slide up the pole before a Little League game could send tears down his leathery face. That night, I stoppered my ears against it.

I heard ribs crack with a noise like icy branches going down in wind.

The few times I’d seen Daddy heave up a coffin with other men,

his hands started back trembling, a sign that his blood-alcohol level was edging down toward normal.

During all this, Mother was usually laid up in bed wearing something filmy. She’d quit teaching art in public school, allegedly to spend more time with her rickety and rheumy-eyed husband. Instead, depression had walloped her.

“I get on them like ugly on ape.”

I’d long since left the world where my virtue warranted defense, which is to say, Daddy’s world.

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. The slow spaciousness of the green felt mirrors some internal state you get to after a few beers.

Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone.

I was the bodhisattva of brandy,

We knew each other in theory and loved in theory. But if placed in proximity—when I came home, say—

any room we sat in would eventually fall into a soul-sucking quiet I could hardly stand.

Liquor had eaten away at Daddy.

Her shadow slid across me, and I jerked upright into the icy blast of a window air-conditioner.