by Mary Karr
I lie in the cold bath as in a tomb. From the outer hallway comes a ruckus that works on my brain like an eggbeater. Much of the Loyola men’s basketball team is running hither and yon, playing some game with a tennis ball. Every now and then they hurl the ball against my hollow-core door. This is not an accident.
Earlier tonight, with rabid expression and possibly some spit spray, I told the team they had to keep it down or I’d call the front desk. They froze and stared as if some bog creature had reared up from the mud. The instant I closed the door, the game resumed at full decibel level.
The rusty old clerk who came to rescue me had a dowager’s hump that kept him bent over at ninety degrees. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the ballplayers arrayed behind as he said, We’re full tonight. I can’t move your room. Then he turned on his heel and hightailed it through the gauntlet of giants back to the elevator, which two looming guys were holding open.
Against the hotel door, the tennis ball occasionally whams, shaking the door earthquakelike on its hinges. If they could bust in, they’d throw me on a bonfire and torch me, I know it.
They must sense the pitiful failure I’m mired in: turning thirty, far from home and family, making it up as I go. Worst of all, I’ve failed to publish a book, which means my ancient fantasy of being a writer has abraded off like the name on a wind-worn tombstone.
I unscrew the tiny bottle of vodka’s red lid and suck a few drops. Every asshole I know has published a book. Over six years, I’ve collected rejections for my manuscript, sometimes the occasional nice note for second place. So a sheaf of dog-eared pages curling at the edges lies on my desk like drying roadkill, though every dang poem in it has come out in some literary mag, which is—as Warren points out—not nothing.
But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go psss psss psss like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit.
By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens pretentious on page bottom.
The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation.
Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to.
Bam bam bam. The door rattles. I holler out, You grisly fuckers! If I had a firearm, I’d hunt each of you down like the dogs you are.
Now I’ve taken up a weensy bottle of Scotch, J&B in the green bottle. What moron designed these bottles so small? And why a minibar when a maxibar is clearly what’s called for?
Today on the phone, the big-deal consultant who got me into this business said, Your having to give this presentation in my stead is a little like going to work in the hospital as a janitor and winding up performing brain surgery.
Don’t remind me, I said.
Think about it, he mused. Your whole business career has derived from a series of flukes….
While he talked, I stretched the phone cord and dexterously slipped the small fridge key into its slot. I said, Aren’t you supposed to be finding flights?
My travel agent’s going to ring the other line, he said.
He was a captain of industry, this guy. Once the thirtysomething president of my old company’s e-mail subsidiary, he’d left to consult for big bucks, promising me enough subcontracting work in ghostwriting and market research to hang out my own consulting shingle. I could double my salary while freeing up intervals for poetry.
On the phone to me, he said, You can write the next great business best seller. First there was In Search of Excellence, Mary Karr brings us In Search of Incompetence.
He was rich enough to be jovial about this, but I knew if I screwed up the presentation and lost this client’s fat retainer, I’d be dead, for without this expert’s benevolent referrals, I had zero credential.
Can you help me with my notes? I said.
But through the phone’s overseas hiss, I heard another phone start ringing, and he said, Maybe this other flight came through—
Then the dial tone went retreating across the Asian oceans, and I resisted the impulse to pound the phone receiver on the first solid surface.
Toward dawn in the hotel room, I pick up the legal pad and try to envision my solo presentation. Standing at the grease board, I’ll draw a horizontal line—an X axis—saying, This line represents your spending. It goes from spending zero on the left to shelling out shitloads of money on the right. My vertical Y axis measures returns on that money—from getting back zero at the bottom to making zillions at the top. I’m gonna tell the president of Company X and his minions that they need to spend as little as possible while making shitloads in return. The question is, how to stretch this expensive advice into a nine-hour meeting?
I never have to find out. The next morning Mr. Consultant skids into the boardroom sideways from a flight I never knew he got on. He takes the laser pointer from my hand, and I sit sweatily at the conference table. Other than taking notes, I’m free of the babble floating over us. Free, that’s how being a poet looks to me, like freedom from the grind among pencil-necked office guys in clip-on ties.
Sitting there, I fantasize about the birthday dinner my grad school guru planned in San Francisco before I catch the red-eye back. He’ll talk about translating the great Polish Nobel dude and about the ballads of Wordsworth and about his own drunk mother whose loony-bin demise he managed to live through. He knows the botanical names of plants and how to do carpentry work. In my mind, I picture his curious, becalmed expression the way certain saffron-robed acolytes do Buddha. His very stare will rebaptize me a writer, despite my business suit.
But he doesn’t make it. (Later, I’ll find out his bloody divorce had just started.)
On the verge of missing my flight, I lug my garment bag back to the rental car and weave drunkenly through the fog to the airport, where I toss down enough cocktails to note how costly my rising tolerance is. Eventually, I call Warren from the pay phone. The phone rings and rings, and I hear my own voice on the machine, and I say, Pick up, pick up.
He listens patiently, for he is both patient and a listener. And he reminds me his book isn’t in print yet, either. It’s the work that counts. I feel my mouth slurring words as I ask him to pick me up at the airport in the morning for my birthday—the only present I want.
I thought you wanted that party we’re having, he says, with your sister coming for a week.
This party—our first—was long negotiated. He’s noting the traffic to and from the airport, the hours of writing he’ll lose. Should I offer to cancel the party in order to be picked up? When he hangs up, I feel confident that I’ll see him at the gate.
Having touched down in Boston at dawn, I wander through the airport with an inner plunging sense—no sign of Warren. When the magic doors glide open on the empty taxi stand, I feel the regressed terror of a kid lost in the glass cubicles of a department store because her manic mother has just wandered off—maybe on purpose, maybe not. (Crazy to admit this, but true.)
H
ow do you get past it, I ask my shrink, when you never got that sense of acceptance and security as a kid?
You’ve got to nurture yourself through those instants, he says, recognize the source of the misery as out of kilter with the stimulus. Realize you’re not lost. You’re an adult. Warren didn’t hurt you on purpose. You were perfectly capable of getting yourself home.
Nuture myself. Now, there’s an idea I can glom on to. I say, Like I could have a drink when I got home?
If that calms you, he says. One drink.
Just what I hoped he’d say.
12
Bent Bender
“Well, if God doesn’t exist, who’s laughing at us?”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
One day Lecia rings me up. Tawdry, she says.
An adjective meaning crude or trashy or otherwise unseemly, I say. Talk to me.
Mother’s sleeping with Harold, she says, meaning Daddy’s pill-popping nurse, crashing of late in the spare room.
Never happen, I say. That man has got to be gay.
Happened, she says. They showed up drunk last night, talking about the hustle contest at Get Down Brown’s.
Lecia lives two hours from our hometown, but her former secretary saw Mother and Harold necking. I wonder were they doing this with Daddy in the house!
Who knows? Lecia says. Daddy’s so out of it, he may not have twigged to it anyway. If anything, he likes Harold better than Mother.
Harold’s nicer, I say. Way nicer.
And he used to work at the jail, Lecia says. I wonder if they practice safe sex.
We both went quiet till I add, She needs to get an AIDS test.
Tawdry, Lecia says.
Tawdry, I say, and hang up.
So vivid is Mother’s story of her final drunk with Harold—so painterly in its grotesque detail—that I take the liberty of recounting as if I were there, for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied. The way other families keep wedding videos or log dates in a Bible, mine stores in the genetic warehouse alcohol-fueled catastrophe.
I’m the voyeur as Harold tries to zip Mother into her red sequined top, a close fit on her sixty-two-year-old frame. You need to spray some PAM on me, Mother says. Before the mirror, she sucks in her cheeks and rouges a terra-cotta stripe in the cheekbone’s shadow. He tugs down on the blouse hem and she feels her zipper pop midback.
Whoa, she says. I can feel a breeze in here. She takes a sip of Harold’s banana daiquiri as he checks her out from behind.
I’ll safety-pin it, he says.
After draining the glass, she holds up the empty, saying, And do me.
He opens the refrigerator, on which Mother has painted a bulbous hippolike old woman, nude in a floppy hat.
Hippos are their theme animal, Mother and Harold’s. In the months since I’ve moved Daddy into the home, the old house has sprouted hippos all over. Money I’ve sent to help out has partly been used for the bloated, nappy furniture they laze on—also for redoing the bath, where Mother painted another cartoonlike mural of twin hippos, which I fear echoes the two of them nude together.
Mother dials the phone while telling Harold to put some britches on. The silky polyester shirt he slides into has zigzag lightning bolts. Once the buttons are fastened, the front puckers.
In our apartment in Cambridge, the phone squeals, and I holler to my husband, who’s typing in the next room, That’s her.
Don’t answer it, he says. I know he’s right. The meetings I’ve been dipping into for children of alcoholics—at the urging of Tex—suggest I stay out of Mother’s orbit when she’s loaded. I started consulting Tex when she and Harold took off on this tear a few months back. But rather than steer clear of her like they all say, I’m morbidly compelled to connect with her. Pray about it, those religious morons suggest, for they fancy some bearded giant staring down from a cloud is gonna zap me into shape. But a god I don’t believe in can’t wave a wand over my mother to stop her drinking. Or wipe away thirty years of fret that therapy has just tamped down.
Harold says I’m smoking hot, like a skillet, Mother says.
Lucky you, I say.
Y’all going out tonight? she wants to know.
Hardly, I said. Warren’s working on an essay. I’m ghostwriting an article about the stock market for that business review. I’m on deadline—huge pressure.
Actually, I’m not working on squat. I’ve been swilling chardonnay on the tiny porch—a back stair landing off our colonial—while headphones pump Mozart’s Requiem into my head over and over. However sorry for myself Mozart’s howling angels can make me, I want Mother to feel sorrier. This is part of our elaborate economy circa 1984. I send her money, and she lets me blame her for everything wrong with my life. She also intermittently berates me for becoming a corporate drudge. On the phone, she asks what we’re doing home on a Saturday night.
You’re both sticks-in-the-mud, she tells me. Or is it stick-in-the-muds?
We’re working, Mother. We’re not out drinking ourselves to death.
Don’t start on me, she says.
I was talking about Daddy, I say. But I hadn’t been talking about Daddy. I’d been trying to land a small barb through the thick fog around her.
Since you moved your daddy out, Mother says, I feel like a teenager again.
Is your blood pressure any better? I ask, hearing in the background the music from Flashdance start up.
I’m so fat, she says, I’m scared to take my damn blood pressure.
You’ve never been fat in your life, I say. I’ll bet he’s still wearing his poison ring. One of the ways my sister and I stay convinced that Harold’s gay is the hinged ring he carries valium in.
He wears those cheap ass gold chains—she raises her voice in Harold’s direction—that’re turning his chest green.
In the doorway across from me, Warren comes to mime hanging up the phone, and I raise my index finger to indicate I’ll be a sec. Why don’t I put the phone down? She’s ranting about the losers in the damn sobriety group Tex goes to. She says, His daddy told him I didn’t want him, which was a goddamn lie. Who does that to a baby? He might not have been an alcoholic without that.
I thought you and Harold were gonna go to some meetings with him? I say.
I went to one, and it was I went here and got drunk, I went there and got drunk.
In the background, I hear the blender whir as she adds, I’d sooner dip snuff.
Again, Warren appears in the door, holding up the empty bottle of wine with a puzzled look on his face. I jot down on a pad that I spilled the bottle.
Mother’s saying, I’m not an alcoholic, Mary. When you were little, I called the hotline that one time, and they showed up with a six-pack of beer because they assumed I’d be having the DTs. Without seizures, I didn’t make the team. They told me, You’re not an alcoholic, lady.
Eventually, I hang up to drink my own self into a stupor. And the next morning, when I ring Mother’s house to ensure she’s still got a pulse, I get no answer and no answer.
Calling Lecia next, I hear her ask am I sitting down. The question takes the bottom out of my stomach like a speed bump, and for the umpteenth time in my life, I feel the cold impact of Mother’s death. It’s so easy to picture her and Harold reeling down the road from Get Down Brown’s like they were in bumper cars.
She’s not dead, Lecia says. Dead would be simpler.
Lecia tells me that Harold allegedly propositioned some cowboy in the men’s room, and the guy had beaten the shit out of him. Which prompted Mother to draw—from her beaded bag—the pearl-handled revolver so small it could pass for a cigarette lighter. She held the cowboys at bay through the parking lot while she wrangled the pulp-faced Harold into her car.
Once home, Mother poured herself a glass of milk and opened a tranquilizing package of ho-hos. Then she proceeded to tear Harold a new asshole—verbally speaking. He was bloody-nosed already, and stout as a prize pig, blubbering Mother
was his soul mate till he corked off on the kitchen floor.
Mother had sat on the counter stool, sipping at the milk and ratcheting up her pissed-off with every whisper sweep of the clock till it came to her Harold needed a piece of her mind. She’d pelted him with a pastry, then kicked him not very hard, she’d told Lecia, and mostly in his big fat ass.
Then she got her pistol out again and fired it over Harold’s head, and he’d screamed himself awake. Somewhere in there, he’d pissed his pants. She couldn’t shift him off the kitchen floor, so she called to Tex, who hauled Harold to detox.
She shot at him? I say.
That’s exactly what I said. You shot at him? Lecia says. So embarrassing.
Lecia’s our only family member plagued by a sense of propriety. She belongs to civic groups and the country club. She’d that morning taken from Mother’s house every gun she could rustle up. Do I know of any little pistols laying around? I don’t.
It’s like the old days, I say. Remember her shooting at Hector? (Lecia and I had draped ourselves over our stepfather’s semi-supine form while Mother brandished a firearm.)
Daddy, too.
When did she shoot at Daddy?
You were too little to remember. I know I told you about it. One Christmas. You never saw the bullet hole in the kitchen tile by the stove?
I thought Daddy was cleaning a pistol. Why’d she shoot at him?
The better question is, Lecia adds, why’d she shoot at anybody?
There was a pause, and we said in unison, To get their attention.