The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

Her stories will no doubt reconfirm the only sliver of irrefutable wisdom on the subject of kin The Liars’ Club’s odyssey has taught me, now oft-repeated: a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.

nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria —Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI

Mother had been taken Away—he further told us—for being Nervous. I should explain here that in East Texas parlance the term Nervous applied with equal accuracy to anything from chronic nail-biting to full-blown psychosis.

The sheriff let go of my hand once we were outside. From inside the tall shadow of his hat, with my sister still wrapped around him in bogus slumber, he told me to wait on the top step while he talked to the ladies. Then he went up to the women, setting in motion a series of robe-tightenings and sweater-buttonings.

Daddy was handsome enough and the proper blend of outlaw and citizen. And he didn’t bow much to the mannerisms she’d picked up to impress her coldblooded Yankee husbands. The only Marx he knew was Groucho, the only dance the Cajun two-step. The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to see what he was getting into.

He put the bullet in there deliberately, for a reason I would today give a lot to know. Whose face was floating in your mind, Daddy, yours or some other’s, when you snapped the chamber into place and after some thought, perhaps, put the safety on? Even if I’d had the wherewithal to ask this question before his death, he would have probably answered with a shrug, staring into a cloud of Camel smoke. Maybe he would have started a story about his first squirrel gun, or a lecture about how much to lead a mallard with a shotgun before you picked it off. Like most people, he lied best by omission, and what he didn’t want you to know there was no point asking about.

Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry, which I took to be gospel for longer than I care to admit. Maybe the only thing worse than being a Republican was being a scab.

Digging a basement in that part of the country was out of the question. So when a tornado warning was announced on the radio, everybody but Mother herded into doorways and bathrooms for fear of a touchdown. She tended to throw open the doors and windows. I can still hear the hard rain splatter on the broad banana leaves and the cape jasmine bush off the back porch, like a cow pissing on a flat rock, we liked to say.

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.

Grandma bought Lecia and me each white leather Bibles that zipped shut. “If you read three chapters a day and five on Sunday, you can read the Holy Bible in one year,” she said. I don’t remember ever unzipping mine once after unwrapping it, for Grandma was prone to abandoning any project that came to seem too daunting, as making us into Christians must have seemed.

I had this succinct way of explaining the progression of my grandmother’s cancer to neighbor ladies who asked: “First, they took off her toenail, then her toe, then her foot. Then they shot mustard gas through her leg till it was burnt black, and she screamed for six weeks nonstop. Then they took off her leg, and it was like a black stump laid up on a pillow. When we came to see her, she called Lecia by the wrong name. Then she came home, and it went to her brain, so she went crazy, and ants were crawling all over her arm. Then she died.”

She was so thin and pale you could practically see straight through her. Her lips were bluish and her hair had gotten whiter, so that her eyes, when the lids flickered open, seemed paler, as if she’d seen something that scalded her inside.

Lol

Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo.

(Lecia says that I would eat them only in pairs, so none would feel lonely in my stomach.) The oysters had a way of seeming to wince when you squeezed the lemon on them. They started off cold in your mouth, but warmed right up and went down fast and left you that musty aftertaste of the sea. You washed that back with a sip of cold beer you’d salted a little. (Even at seven I had a taste for liquor.) And you followed that with a soda cracker.

My sister grew up with an almost insane physical bravery: once in the parking lot outside her insurance office, she brushed aside the .22 pistol of a gunman demanding her jewelry. “Fuck you,” she said and opened her Mercedes while the guy ran off. The police investigator made a point of asking her what her husband did, and when she said she didn’t have one, the cop said, “I bet I know why.”

I now know that I couldn’t twig to the fact of those two spare kids because they were lost kids. And if they could be lost—two whole children, born of Mother’s body just like us—so might we be. To believe that she’d lost those kids was to believe that on any day our mother could vanish from our lives, back into the void she came from, that we could become another secret she kept.

Now I know that she needed him there that day, and her fury was the closest she could get to an invitation. Daddy was lost to us in that fury. The line was severed, and in the mist that occupied my skull that morning, he floated away, getting smaller and smaller. I looked over to Lecia, who shrugged and went back to cutting her fringe with a sick precision. At that instant, I knew we should have evacuated long before. The slow psychic weight of doom settled over me.

She handed me the phone. She didn’t want to be alone in knowing how alone we were, so she handed it to me, so I’d know too. And that flat silence right up against my ear brought it all home to me. You never notice how hooked up to everybody you feel when you hear that rush of air under the dial tone, as if all the world’s circuits are just waiting to hear you—anyway, you never notice that till it goes away. Then it’s like you listen, expecting that faraway sound, and instead you get only the numb quiet of your own skull not knowing what to think of next.

I remember leaning across the front of his blue work shirt to tell Lecia that was some good crying she did, to which she lowered the paper towel so I could finally see her face. It was like a coarse brown curtain dropping to show a mask entirely different than the grinning one I’d expected. Her eyes and nose were red and her mouth was twisted up and slobbery. All of a sudden, I knew she wasn’t faking it, the grief I mean. It cut something out of me to see her hurt. And it put some psychic yardage between us that I was so far from sad and she was so deep in it.

“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. I watched from the middle of my parents’ bed, a steaming plate of beans and biscuits balanced on my patch of covers, while one grown man after another buckled in the middle like everything inside him was going soft all at once, and I knew that the dead child’s face would stay on each daddy’s eyeballs forever.

That truth—that death came in a big blind swipe—was gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining motion like its own kind of storm.

“That’s sure a awful way to go,” Ben says. “Ain’t no good way,” Shug says. “Sorry you had to be there, Pete. With you momma and all.” Shug knows better than to look at Daddy when he’s saying something this nice. There are shrugs all around, like saying something nice is water you have to rise out of and let slip off your shoulders.

For a minute, I even think about Mother propped up in her bed night and day next to a tower of books that only seems to get taller and more wobbly. Then it’s her face slack-jawed I see in place of Grandma’s, her arm hanging down that the ants are running on. 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. I am eye-level to the card table, sitting on an upended bait bucket, safe in my daddy’s shadow, and yet in my head I’m finding my mother stretched out dead.

Drinking was not a totally new hobby in our house. Daddy always drank, and with few ill effects that I can see. By always, I mean he drank every day. He kept a six-pack in the fridge. Plus there was a fifth of whiskey ratholed under the seat of his truck. You knew he was heading for a drink when he made the mysterious pronouncement that he was going out to check on his truck, the idea being—or so I thought for years—that it might be scared out in the garage by itself or lonely for him. That was just maintenance drinking, as I see it now, as opposed to drinking so’s you’d notice.

My daddy even worked with a guy whose teenaged son had gone berserk with a twelve-gauge shotgun and marched one summer day into the junior high, where he shot and killed a guidance counselor while the principal (the alleged target, we later heard) hid in the school safe. The men on Daddy’s job right away nicknamed this kid the Ambusher. The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers. I shit you not. Daddy claimed that the card they gave the poor fellow read: “Here’s hoping the Ambusher can finally hang up his guns!”

“I remember that storm,” Cooter says. He’s got a little wire of excitement in his voice at the idea of actually being in on the story. “Cooter, you was still shitting yellow back then,” Ben says, “if you was drawing breath at all.” He breaks the yolks with his spatula so the eggs fry up hard. To get eggs like this in a truck stop, you say to the lady, Turn ’em over and step on ’em. “Well, I remember one like it,” Cooter says. “Hell, we all remember one like it,” Shug says.

Of course, I am famous for running in the middle of a spanking. It makes me proud that Daddy used to run too. I always figured only a dumbass would just stand still and take it.

I can still see Daddy scraping at those potatoes, which would keep the smoky fish taste from the lard. He was singing “Goodnight Irene” under his breath, staring into the skillet with that faraway look. Watching the sky arch above us through pines, I thought about a passage I’d read in the encyclopedias Grandma bought us, how the Rockies were formed by glaciers sliding across the continent to rake up zillions of tons of rock. I pictured one moving slow as white silk across where we sat. Maybe God dropped that boulder off right there, I wrote in my diary the next day, for us to cook on.

No, it wasn’t Daddy standing on the passenger side of Mother’s car. It was Hector, the barkeep from the cowboy joint. Mother leaned over the car roof holding out a hand weighed down by a diamond solitaire ring. I stopped in my tracks. Say hello to your new daddy, she said. And I could hear Lecia close the gap behind me, her spurs clanking while I took in Hector’s alligatorlike grin, and Lecia whispered what I was already thinking: Oh shit.

For a week or so after mailing off the Father’s Day cards, Lecia and I stopped at the P.O. morning and evening looking for a letter back. She drew the mailbox key from the string around her neck to open the tiny brass door, whose actual number is nothing but a smudge in my memory. Daddy wasn’t much of a correspondent. It always sat empty as a little coffin.

We must have made a sorry procession: Lecia and I clanging the bridles, the long reins dragging on the frosted ground behind us; Joey and Gordon in their thin trench coats and scuffed-up dress shoes, both stinking of old drink. Still, I actually believed that those horses would gallop toward us, the way National Velvet had toward young Liz Taylor. But the alert look in Big Enough’s round dark eyes was not, in fact, joy at my return. It was dread. He’d gone green as a colt. His expression was some equine way of saying not her again.

Sisyphus had it way worse than all of us, it seemed to me, being doomed to sweat and grunt pushing a boulder up a mountain all day and night without rest. The punch line was that once he got to the top of the mountain, the rock just rolled back down. So he had to push it up again, over and over. This happened forever, Mother said, closing the book. With my head lying deep in the trench of my pillow, I was still waiting for some moral, or happy ending, a reward for all that work. I must have said as much, for at some point she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and told me there was no more point to Sisyphus’ task than there was to washing dishes or making beds. You just did those things endlessly till your body wore out, then you died.

Wasn’t it weird, I said to Lecia in the bath one night, how we thought of trees having leaves as being “normal,” when in fact six months out the year they were necked as jaybirds.

Mother and Hector went away twice, both times to Mexico, I think. She’d cooked up a scheme to buy a tract of land down there for the purpose of founding an artists’ colony, some new place for her to paint, though she hadn’t hit a lick at a canvas since we’d got to Colorado. The truckload of art supplies she’d ordered sat untouched in a spare room. I was itching to break the seals on the new tubes of oil, dozens of them lined up by shade in a leather briefcase, but knew better. The clean brown palette with the hole for your thumb never got a single, bright turban of color squirted on it. The sable brushes of all sizes kept their paper wrappers on. The canvases she’d bought already stretched and primed white sat around the edges of that room like windows on nothing. Lecia and I made up titles for their emptinesses: “Polar Bears in a Snowstorm” and “Talcum Powder on the Moon.” She never painted in Colorado, and they never bought any land in Mexico. They just drank and fought and flew back both bent over double from diarrhea, which Daddy had always called the green-apple shits.

I can spend the better part of a day moving between the sad part of this book, where Charlotte dies, then paging ahead to read about the three baby spiders wanting to stay with Wilbur. I cry a little, then cheer myself up. (Later, I’ll learn that’s the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)

When I explained it to her as nice as I could, she broke out crying, though I hadn’t even used a single cuss word, sticking instead to those words you find in the encyclopedia under A for Anatomy, with the sheer glassy pages of muscle and vein and bone assembling into a man body and a woman body side by side in TV-family clothes. Still, the minute I got to the end of telling the principal’s daughter about the baby being born, her face just collapsed in on itself in a big pucker. She screamed that her parents would never do something that nasty, even trying to have kids. “Then where do you think you came from, dumbass,” I said.

“You got a smart mouth, little girl,” Mrs. Dillard back in Leechfield always said, narrowing her eyes at that pronouncement. And I said that a smart mouth was better than a dumb one anyday. Still, sometimes I think being smart just makes certain words go scooting through your head, leaving some bad-word vapor that a mean man can pick up on.

What I wonder is not where to run or how to lunge past him. I know that’s impossible. Besides, even if I beat him scrambling downstairs to the phone, what would I say? I have a vocabulary for my own wrongness. All kids do, I think. It’s the result of being smaller than, less than, weaker than.

Early the next morning, we washed our faces. I brushed each tooth with the neat circle stroke Captain Kangaroo had instructed me to; then we buttoned ourselves into church dresses. By dawn, we stood side by side in the full-length mirror. Lecia had tied the hood of my car coat too tight under my chin, so I felt like a sausage in oversmall casing. Her face floating next to mine in the mirror would never again be the face of a child.

Eventually, they waved us onto a night plane heading for Harlingen, Texas. I woke to clouds. A whole Arctic wasteland of them bubbled up in the round plane window where Lecia’s sleeping head was tipped. The clouds seemed to have seized up in violent motion, like some cauldron that got frozen mid-boil. A full moon shone across them. It cut a wide white path straight to us, the beauty of which flooded me with some ancient sense of possibility. Maybe there was hope for me yet, even from the vantage point of being a kid, hurtling across the black sky with my sister, whom I would never know the heart of again.

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

I would like to say the film clip I’ve shot for myself stops there, for I have seen men fight in the parking lots of certain bars. And always after the first collision of fist with face, or the first spots of blood down a shirtfront, I turned away, thinking myself too tenderhearted to watch. On that day I watched steady, for Daddy’s pounding on Hector made me truly glad.

Mother never said that she was coming back to us that evening. Per usual, nobody said spit. But I sensed that she would come back, eventually at least. She had a soft spot for Daddy whipping up on a man who’d spoken to her in disrespect. And back then, heat still passed between my parents. You could practically warm your hands on it.

The sheriff was already backing down the porch when Mother’s last words on the subject were spoken. Here’s what she said before the door closed on that rectangle of night, closed on the red silent siren light whirling across our window, closed like a tomb door sealed over the subject of Hector entirely, for she never mentioned him again: silliest thing, she said, no big deal, she said, then, nothing we couldn’t handle.

After prime time, she lay in a torment that barbiturates only blurred the edges of: Football, fishing, and fucking—she’d say—that’s all anybody down here thinks about. I swear to God I’m going to blow my brains out.

Mother puckered her mouth with worry hearing how I’d smoked opium at a surf contest on Padre Island. But I’d first filched Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from her knitting bag. And her curiosity about the drug ultimately leaked through: What was opium like? Together we conspired to lie to Daddy about my whereabouts, lies Daddy helped by not prying overmuch.

Lucy collected things—souvenir spoons, porcelain dolls. She had an assortment of wiglets, braids, and falls that she wove in complicated whirls with her own dark hair. She’d also filled the back wall of the bar with those old cat clocks whose black tails hung down twitching while their eyes rolled side to side. But the clocks were out of sync in a way that preyed on your nerves. Mother always said if you weren’t a drinker heading into the Legion, that woman’s wall-eyed clocks jerking at odds with one another would start you off.

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.

But Dole made a tactical error. He grabbed the pool cue he’d leaned against the bar and swung it in a whistling arc at Daddy about eye-level, in a motion so wide and slow only a moron would have failed to catch that cue midair and sucker-punch Dole in the throat with it. Which is what Daddy did. Dole cooperated by falling down. He lay on the linoleum in an x-shape. Lucy fetched his Stetson to balance on his big belly. “That was better than Gunsmoke,” she told Daddy.

“He wants stretching,” Daddy told me. He’d trained the cat to get stretched before coming in or out. This involved holding the cat’s hands and feet, pulling gently while he arched his whole length. All this time, you had to say (I shit you not, the cat would only come in or out once these words were spoken), “Gosh, what a long cat.” Afterwards, Bumper body-blocked the glass door and trotted out.