The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

He was unknown to me, and unknowable, though I sensed inside him during that time a darkness so large and terrible that perhaps his last gift to me was trying to shield me from it, and his last failure was that he couldn’t entirely do so.

I’ve heard it said that caring for an invalid is like caring for a baby. And I suppose it’s the same basic deal, but a baby rewards you each day with change, sprouting a tooth or discovering that the object randomly waggling before its eyes is, in fact, its own hand. But an invalid is a hole you pour yourself into. Every day he fixes you with a glance more gnawed-out tired than yours, more hurt. If life is suffering (as the Buddha says), some endless shit-eating contest, then the invalid always wins, hands down.

to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

In the parlor, the fair-haired aunts were nonplussed by Grandma Moore’s decline. They were crisis vultures. “Somebody else’s trouble just thrilled them to death,” Mother told me. After supper, they hid from their husbands to smoke out on the gazebo.

As to why she hadn’t told us all this before—about the marriages and the lost children—her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: “I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

glowing; we weren’t. Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both, in a way. All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. I never knew despair could lie. So at the time, I only felt the car hurtling like some cold steel capsule I’d launched into onrushing dark.