by Mary Karr
Warren, can you hand me my purse? she says. I’ll find the Shalimar.
Can we stop and buy some Visine? I say. And some mouthwash, maybe?
It’ll make us late, he says.
And I need some cigarettes, Mother says, rummaging through her purse. She stops suddenly and looks at me. She touches her mother’s cameo at my neck, saying, I’d like to paint you like this.
The road’s lights steamroll over us.
I can see the sweat break out on Warren’s temples as I beg him to stop, though he hates being late. I’ve mostly tamped down Mother’s ash-white hair, and I’m using my fingers to comb through its natural waves, saying, You do have the best cheekbones, Mother.
I can’t tell if there are tears in her eyes or she’s just high as she says, I don’t want to go if I’m gonna embarrass you.
Warren pulls up outside a bodega and leaves us in the puffing car. Seeing his runner’s form in the unfamiliar structure of a suit brings a surge of ardor. Soon as he’s out of sight, Mother says, Harold and I share a glass of wine every now and then, when we go out dancing—Harold being the somewhat prissy young man of color hired to help care for Daddy.
This gives me a sick feeling in my chest. I look toward the door Warren disappeared through, his presence an antivenin to the snakebite of Mother’s disarray. Our family’s so inadequately small compared to the profligate Whitbreads. My own daddy’s so out of things, he probably doesn’t actually know I’m getting married.
Inside, I keep trying to squash down the image of my blear-eyed daddy, since a buried part of me longs for him to be reborn all tall and sober, to loop my arm in his, to wrap my hand on his biceps, then squire me to Warren’s side. A father walks his daughter down the aisle. Such a wholly unoriginal wish could dismantle me if I permit myself to dip into it. In my head, I shoo it off like an insect.
Warren gets back in the car, handing me a small paper bag over his shoulder. I fish through it for the eyedrops. Mother has her Shalimar out and is studying the cap for where the nozzle is. I tell her, They’ll be unfailingly polite. They always are.
She squirts behind her ear, and the scent of rose attar touches some reptilian area of my brain, where lies whatever faint recollection of beauty I have.
Warren, she says, you know what they say a mother-in-law’s job is at a wedding?
I don’t, he says, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Just shut up and wear beige.
He actually snorts at the prospect.
Mother takes my hand in her scented one. My heart was thumping so bad in my chest. I was scared to take another valium in case there was a toast or something because I’d fall into my plate.
I take no comfort in sharing anxiety with my once towering, powerful mother, for any ways we favor each other feel distinctly un-bridal. I show her my throat, adding, Make me smell like you. Then we draw up into the gilded light of the Ritz, and the doorman helps me out.
We enter the paneled bar to find the Whitbreads plural—six siblings, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law—scattered among the low tables. Taken together, they’re the tallest people in the room, and possibly the best looking. My chic sister and her lawyer boyfriend have been chatting equably with them over drinks when we bluster in. There’s the hubbub of shaken hands, and I can see Mother’s turned out nice and smiling. The martini that lands before me gets tossed down.
Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.
The next thing I know, Lecia’s grabbing my arm as we stride up the stairs to the table, saying, What is she on? Then we’re seated at enormous tables draped with enough linen to clothe a convent.
Sometime after the first course, Warren turns to me, asking if we can speak privately in the foyer. I rise on numb legs. The pre-wedding joke Lecia kept nudging me with was this: Soon as the Whitbreads met Mother, the wedding would be off. From across the room, my sister’s eyes lock on mine, brows raised. I shrug at her, and her napkin seems to wipe off her own smile.
Walking behind Warren, I’m approaching execution, till he stops and draws from his breast pocket a small blue velvet box. It holds a platinum ring with a sapphire the size of a chiclet flanked by diamonds of equal size, which—with all the drinks in me—makes me wobble. He slides it onto my shaking finger, saying, They’re family stones. Mother had it made. I joke I’ll need a bodyguard to wear it in public. When I lean back to stare into his green eyes, I resist the urge to kiss him—a public display he’d hate. But our gazes are so interwoven, I feel neither Texas trash nor WASP-itude can touch us.
It doesn’t matter that my mother-in-law sobs through much of the meal, not—I’m guessing—from joy. Warren’s brother Dev says with genuine puzzlement as we head down the grand staircase, She was crying? And I think How do they block this stuff out? Nor does it matter that Mother offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote.
The next day, at the inn we took over for the wedding, I swallow enough expensive champagne to float me effortlessly to the altar, toward the only lover I’ve ever both adored and admired. Around us, the green lawns of New England spread away into a fresh geography. Warren slides my mother’s mother’s rose gold band on my finger next to the blinding platinum and jewels from his, and it’s a transforming sensation. The ties of both our families unloose us. We are, by my measure, free of them all, our disparate homesteads. Our small family circle will be impenetrable.
10
Bound
He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.”
—Ernest Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro”
When two hearts beat as one, there are in-laws to bond with, or, in my family’s case, outlaws. But for our first years Warren and I never go to Texas, not once. (Later, I’ll resent this like hell, but I don’t recall arguing about it much.) Daddy’s dying in the house I grew up in, while Mother begrudgingly nurses him. Yet Warren’s sense of duty to his own family is a virtue I so hope will tether him to me that I try to take on his obligation as my own. Plus if I didn’t go with him, we’d wind up with separate holidays, and I have some daytime soap-opera notion of what it means to be wifely. Besides, Lecia and Mother visit us a few times per year in the way Warren’s far-flung siblings never would, and I fly home to see Daddy plenty alone.
Yet for every conceivable holiday—from Easter lamb to Christmas ham—our tin-can car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn’t meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it’s all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can’t recount one damn thing we did.
The estate sits spitting distance from New York, and those first years, I show up with clippings of art I want to look at or friends’ bands I plan to hear. We never—not once—go into the city. One doesn’t venture outside estate walls. Even the clawed furniture seems dug in to the deep nap of ancient rugs.
But that doesn’t explain the lethargy that overcomes me there, the anesthetic effect of luxury. Instead of jogging, we read by the pool or walk down to feed carrots to the donkeys. The paper is meticulously studied, also The New Yorker. I sometimes poke around the attic or unused bedrooms, opening the ancient chests of drawers to catch whiffs of cedar or lavender sachet.
It’s a readerly tribe, and I can slouch in a leather chair drinking with a book in my lap for hours as well they can—my one affinity. But no sense of connection eve
r evolves into closeness. Outside each other’s company, Warren’s parents refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread, so I’d never presume first names.
Only once does Mr. Whitbread ring our house. It’s Warren’s birthday, and I answer as Mr. Whitbread says, This is—long pause as he contemplates what to call himself, uncomfortable saying either Dev Whitbread or Mr. Whitbread—Warren Whitbread’s father.
I put down the phone and announce to Warren, Your father’s on the phone.
What does he want? Warren says, not even rising from his desk.
I suppose to tell you happy birthday.
The light reflecting on Warren’s glasses transforms his eyes into white rectangles as he says, Ask him if it’s important.
On our regular visits to the big house, I’m all too eager to inject myself into the clever table conversations, which cover history and great novels, sport and politics—all with an ease I struggle to keep up with.
But smart as the conversation is, it has a strangely repetitive quality. You never know anybody better—the talk never deepens, but neither does it show the slightest strain, and I’m nothing if not strained to the gills virtually every second. You enter that place and live suspended in amber like characters in a Victorian novel.
How’re your parents, Mary, I’m asked. How’s your father? And I say the same and that it’s sad, and everyone agrees, and then the character of my pretzeled daddy is dismissed like a servant whose health has been respectfully inquired after.
For four long years, Warren never meets the dying man whose care, or lack of it, occupies my thoughts waking and sleeping without relent. Dreams of Daddy haunt me. In one, I scoop his scrawny frame into my arms like he’s a baby, and his limbs begin to snap off as if they were a leper’s as I fight not to drop him.
In fairness to Warren, I often have to fly down expensively at the last minute for some bedside death watch Daddy winds up surviving. Or maybe I’ve struck some unconscious deal to shield him from the cesspool of my birth, or I’m eager to win some blessing from the Whitbreads that they’re no doubt not even interested enough to withhold.
So the day I move Daddy out of our childhood home, I’ve flown in alone. Lecia has a meeting in Houston that day for her insurance business, and Mother hides sobbing in the garage.
There’s a big financial argument for keeping Daddy home, of course. But the florid bedsores in his heels have begun to fester beyond what I can stand thinking about. The only day nurse we can afford is the kindly but sometimes stuporific Harold. At night Mother fails to turn Daddy often enough to keep the sores at bay.
So I arrive alone alongside Daddy’s home hospital bed. There’s the bleach from the sheets and the air tinny with iodine. Under the air conditioner grind, his breathing is labored. Honeysuckle vines cling to the window screen, and a chameleon hangs by its claws.
My hand grasps the aluminum bar Daddy’s hand holds on to. He is clinging hard, and the bewilderment in his face tells me that all the explaining I’ve done about the move has rolled through his head like tumbleweed. I say, You’re going for a simple hip surgery, then in a few days, Lecia will ride with you to a facility where nurses can take better care of you than Mother.
Yamma?
Mama’s heart medication has been doubled, Daddy.
A dozen times I’ve been over this, but for the first time, his expression goes quizzical, his head cants.
Yamma? he says.
Mama’s not here, I say.
Yamma, he says, and a silly grin splays across his face, and he lets go the bed bar like a man relinquishing his hold on a life rope. Then he grabs my hand through the bars.
Garfield, he says. He says this word a lot. Mother and Harold take it as a reference to the orange rascal of a cartoon cat from the funnies. Daddy has an orange cat coffee mug he can’t drink out of, and a plastic figurine that nonstop bares his teeth in a snide grin.
Garfield, Daddy says.
Maybe this is the day I figure out that Daddy never gave a shit about an orange effing feline in the funnies, which he used to flip past on his way to the scores. Garfield’s the name of our own street. What dimwits we are. How often did he tell me I couldn’t leave home by saying, You’re staying right here at 4901 Garfield.
Garfield, he says. Which means Home. Safe. Stay. How little we ever wanted, the creatures in my family, and how hard we struggled in one another’s company not to get it.
Looooo, he says, which means both hello and I love you.
I love you back, I say. I love you more cause you’re bigger.
But in my mind are other sentences, which I’ve spoken to enough licensed professionals by now that I can let them stream through me without a scalding lava burn. I love you harder cause I need you more, you leathery old galoot. Did my absence hurt you into this? How dare you cease to daddy me so soon….
And when the ambulance driver shows up with his stretcher, he and the attendant have to pry Daddy’s large-knuckled hands off the silver bars of that bed. Daddy’s eyes lock on mine. He says one word to me, and it must meander through his skull a long time, searching through the ruined brain to find the perfect monosyllabic curse.
Bad, he says to me. They’ve taken his teeth out, and tears river down the crow’s feet of his tough Indian face. Bad bad bad.
I talk to the ambulance driver. I look through Daddy’s wallet for his social security card, which I can’t find. What I do find is my first college report card—straight A’s for the only time since grade school. Also, there’s the copy of the first poem I published at age nineteen, with the stains of many beers where it had been spread across the damp surface of many bars, a page smoothed out for men no doubt too bleary to read it.
We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We’re like totem animals in each other’s foreign cosmologies—like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I’ve turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved. Age about twelve, I’d ceased to shoot pool and scale fish, stopped tuning in to the Friday night fights after Ali and Liston, nor did I follow the Yankees with the intensity Daddy thought their due.
My very last visit when Daddy was still upright and continent and unparalyzed, he’d squired me to a New Year’s dance at the American Legion club, a place so skeevy neither Mother nor Lecia ever—to my knowledge—set shoe leather in the joint. I dressed for the occasion as I might have for Sunday school or a job interview. Daddy steered me by my elbow through the threshold onto the sloping floor of scarred sky-blue linoleum, inside the boxy paneled walls with imitation knotholes that could—with sufficient liquor—make you feel stared at by all the veterans who’d drunk themselves into early graves in that place.
Folding chairs were drawn around small tables whose treacherous wobbles required matchbooks, and the matchbooks advertised kits you could write away for so as to finish high school and become an artist or beautician or drill press operator. The women’s room had the shocking dead-meat smell of a butcher shop and a mirror whose crack left it in the shape of Louisiana.
And since January first was Daddy’s birthday, he’d joked that the party was for him. One after another, I’d danced with the men he’d worked on oil towers with and caught bass with, guys who’d built the garage studio for my mother one blistering summer. Two elementally nicknamed Red and Blue, men monosyllabic in every way. One named Buck, one Bubba, one Sweet. Not one didn’t have a union card in his wallet, and their faces were weathered as dried fruit. Your daddy’s so proud of you, how smart you are and your writing and all. The Texas two-step we did, the cotton-eyed Joe, swing dancing I could barely keep up with.
At the end of the night, the ladies’ room sink was plugged up with puke, and two disputes had been taken outside—one over a pool game, one over Lord knows what. By the time Daddy grabbed my hand for the last dance, the floor had begun a slow tilt-a-whirl around us. His squinting bloodshot eyes sta
red over my shoulder as he glided me around to The Tennessee Waltz. We listed through the song. I don’t remember midnight.
At the truck, I yelled myself hoarse trying to get his keys away from him.
A passing cowboy said, Dang, Pete, give the girl your keys.
And Daddy said, Mind your own business before I stomp a mud-hole in your ass.
And I remember the fog we drove in, how it billowed up over the road from the bayou on either side till the road narrowed to smoke. The biker bars I’d been in, skinny-dipping drunk in a lake miles wide, hitchhiking: Never had I felt closer to death than with that old man feeling his drunk path on and off the road shoulder through that smoky miasma.
The day I moved Daddy to the hospital, he grabs my arm as we cross the lawn. I’m carrying his piss jug again. The checks I sent home never paid down the guilt I tote today for having disappeared from the place he’s dying in, which is—in turn—a place dying in me. My life with Warren somehow excludes my daddy. The me Daddy knew doesn’t exist in Warren’s house, which is maybe why my husband didn’t come down on this mission—down being the operative word. Where I came from is a comedown.
Daddy’s last upright public appearance was on the bar stool in the VFW, where one final shot of whiskey felled him the way German snipers had failed to. In an increasingly skeletal form, he kept breathing, though each week he’s sanded closer to the bone. But he’d been floating farther from me, starting when I’d left him—he’d left me? I never could decide—more than a decade before.
The ambulance door seals me inside with him. Daddy’s good hand wipes his wet face then swats my hand away.
11
In Search of Incompetence
I don’t drink every day, but I find myself unpredictably blotto at inopportune times.
Like the night before my thirtieth birthday: I lie fully dressed—albeit shoeless—in a charcoal business suit in the bathtub of a Silicon Valley motel, sipping whiskey from one of those minibar bottles that makes you pucker your lips into a doll’s pinhole mouth. On the shag rug, the legal pad with notes for my all day corporate presentation tomorrow holds a single x and y axis drawn into an L-shaped graph. To say I’m ill prepared understates the problem. My sole plan is to: (1) stride into the boardroom; (2) smile like a monkey as I briskly shake hands. Then I imagine a diaphanous veil falling across the rest of my presentation.