The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

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.