by Mary Karr
Then Mother flies up to help, a sober mother who sees frying chicken and assembling lasagna as a way to mend all the chaos she’d brought in the thirty years prior. All my life, she lived in a state of irritation predicated on either drinking too much or not having drunk enough. Never (is this true?) did I lie in bed and have her cook for me. As a child, when I got measles and chickenpox, she’d announce, I just don’t like sick people, leaving me feverishly staring at the TV’s flickering grown-ups.
On this trip, Mother is transformed. She goes with me to the clinic every day, helping me load the baby in the car. Most evenings she brings my dinner steaming from a tray—doughy dumplings in oniony broth, chicken collapsed off its bones, turnip greens with fatback. Afternoons, she lies in bed with me, the baby between us kicking his covers off as I gaze at him.
Mary, I believe you’re gonna stare the skin off him, she says.
Sober she might be, but she’s still capricious as a cat. After about a week, when I’ve gotten used to counting on her, she disappears one day. I’d run out of diapers, and she’d rushed heroically off to the store. Her first hour away, I figure she got lost. An hour later, I decide she’s had a car wreck. An hour after that, I know she’s dead or stopped at a bar somewhere, so I wrap Dev’s bare ass in a towel held together by duct tape and lug him to the market in a stroller, finding no sign of our car in the lot.
Late that afternoon Mother prances in with brochures for tours of Russia and China. She is—miraculously enough—cold sober. But she met a man at a travel agency next to the grocery store, and he took her to lunch and to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum. By then she’s built up enough goodwill during the visit that I let it slide.
My therapist later reminds me that, however sober, Mother will forever be a haphazard fetcher of necessary items. Treat her more like a five-year-old, the therapist says, which method starts shaping expectations to the right size.
Meanwhile, the catheter that’s been in place for weeks has chafed till there’s blood in the piss bag, fire running through my ripped-up undercarriage. After a full month of daily drives to the clinic, I insist they teach me how to catheterize myself—it’s not rocket science, after all. They send me home with a bottle of betadyne and sterile gauze and a bag of glass catheters. Within a day or two—maybe after a respite from the nonstop irritation of the catheter—I start relieving myself like all the other girls.
Which is Mother’s cue to leave. Why? She’s sick of it, no more complicated than that. Right before she takes off, she walks in on me sobbing. Aw, she says, and she sets down the tray and takes my hand in her silky hand, asking, What is it, baby?
I don’t have enough milk tonight. I got up and worked on my classes for fall, and maybe I didn’t drink enough water today. But he’s still hungry.
Dev’s starting to twist his head alongside me, building up to burst into wails, I can tell.
Let me give him a bottle of formula, Mother says. You need the break. He might even sleep a little longer tonight.
I start to cry full throttle at the mention of it, for the bottle is a badge of failure among young mothers.
Let me keep him tonight, she says. Please. I’ll keep him down with me in the dining room.
The thought of uninterrupted sleep glows in my head, and while my better instincts say she’s inclined to all manner of caprice, I make her swear she’ll wake me if there’s any need or he won’t quiet.
Then I sail off into a sleep that unrolls in my head endless bolts of black velvet.
My boobs wake me up, leaking breast milk. I lie in the damp they’d made. Across my legs is a fresh river of sun. In the elm trees off our balcony, loud black crows caw. I right myself and get my bearings in the sunny room. I hear noise downstairs and feel my way to the stair landing where I can hear the baby’s morning squeaks.
I tiptoe down the carpeted stairs, then peek in to see Mother cradling Dev, saying, Old Blue Eyes, that’s what Grandma Charlie’s gonna call you. And when you get ready, you come down. You ain’t never had no fun till you get to my house….
In some way, that tender tone obliterates decades of psychic carnage between us, though Mother’s pending departure recarves an ancient ache in me. She tells me our family threesome will never really knit together till she clears out and Warren comes back to our bed. However polite their exchanges, he absents himself more with her here.
She’s at the grocery store one day when Warren is sponge-bathing the baby in a little rubber inner-tube tub in the kitchen sink. Before, I’ve supervised the project with the hovering posture of a vulture over a carcass. This time I’ve been warned off, but I nonetheless busily fold the warm laundry in the kitchen within sight. While ladling warm water over the baby’s belly, Warren recites a goofy limerick he’s written, using the husky tone he’d previously reserved for a retriever:
There once was a boy named Rotundi,
Who sailed into the Bay of Fundi
Said a fish by his side
My goodness, you’re wide,
He said, Yes, that’s cause I’m always hun-gee.
That’s darling, I say. Did you write that?
He says yes, and I listen to Dev’s feet kick with spastic flailing. His pudgy arm flies before his eyes, and he tries to focus on it, puzzled. Whazzat? his look says.
Is the water too hot? I say.
It’s body temperature, just like you said.
Don’t yell in front of him, I say.
I’m not yelling, he says, I’m trying to take care of my son without you hounding me.
Dev’s arm flies by his face again, and he startles as if thinking, There it goes again!
You really adore him, I say.
Warren looks at me. Of course, I do, he says, he’s my son.
(Was this tone matter-of-fact or territorial? Did I—in my postpartum weariness—impose the most negative slant? Toward me, he tightened every line, which opposed the shining face he brought to the baby.)
I’m leaving you a warm towel here, I say. It’s got a little hood.
For God’s sake.
Well, you have to keep his head warm.
Goddamn it, Mare. Just go upstairs.
On the stairwell, I overhear another of Warren’s compositions:
I really like my mother.
I wouldn’t have another.
My father is a very special guy.
Dev makes a chortling noise.
My head is made of rubber.
My body’s made of blubber.
When I step into the tubber
It’s high tide.
That night before supper, I ask Warren again when he plans to move back into our bed. He says, Once he’s on a regular schedule.
He’s on a regular schedule. He’s up all night. I’m up all night.
I can’t be up all night and work all day, he says. Classes are starting.
I miss you, I say.
I’m here every second, he says—every instant I’m not at work, I’m here.
Here but not here, I say.
At one point, at wits’ end about not sleeping, I call up Mrs. Whitbread, who’d after all raised six children. What did she recommend?
It was so different in those days, darling, she says.
When she speaks, I clutch the black receiver, for her voice conjures clipped lawns under maple trees, the easeful life of Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—men in linen suits and women in billowy pastels, pitchers of lemonade on silver trays. I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage.
She says, Everybody had help. If one of them wouldn’t sleep, I’d let the nurse take the baby home till he got on a good schedule. Or, she says thoughtfully, I’d give them a little phenobarbital.
Shortly before Mother takes off, she comes creaking up the stairs early one night with two bottles of beer and a frosted mug. They do not yet glow for I’ve been off the sauce for a year and am so besotted with Dev that drinking’s been forgotten.
> She pours the golden mixture down the side of the tilted glass, saying, This’ll help your milk let down.
I say, I thought you were anti-booze.
Even my religious cousin Delores, she says, drank beer when she was nursing. She actually had to pinch her nose to get it down.
The fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in wind. By the second or third sip, I remember the slosh of lake water against a boat Daddy had rented, how I sipped from a metal can of Lone Star while he picked through lures alongside me. Thus starts—for healing purposes, of course—my daily beer or two.
Within weeks, I stop breastfeeding, partly because I know three or four or five beers could affect Dev’s milk supply. Warren’s at school, so he must miss these escalating beer guzzles.
And that’s how—in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania—Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.
17
No Mom Is an Island
I was always waiting, always there.
Know anyone else who can say that.
—Franz Wright, “Alcohol”
Through the baby monitor comes a single raspy cough. It barely pierces the heavy sleep that wraps my skull in sodden layers of papier-mâché. Static follows, then a tinny whimper. I fold one pillow over my head. Another gets tucked in my concavities. The husband’s long body unrolls. The white noise machine he’s installed to block out all disturbance makes the brain-sucking racket of a dentist’s drain. It vacuums all consciousness from my head. Sleep.
Till a doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun. I blink my eyes open to the room, immaculately black as he likes it, but for the faint luminosity of the upraised clock hands (2:50) and the tiny red snake eye of the monitor. I fix on it to stop my mind’s inward roiling vertigo an instant—a marble looping around a barrel.
My head is grinding out bad news: That bruise on your shin is bone cancer…. But one glance at the husband’s profile, and I flash on my only happy thought for weeks, the smooth moonstone of an idea. If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow—the kind that cartoon characters whip from their sleeves—I could muster the strength to rear up and whack him vigorously about the head. My mouth creaks toward a smile at the prospect, since his sleep has been unbroken now for almost a year. I gaze at him from under the pillow like a rattler under a rock.
A swerving comet’s tail of silence issues from the monitor. I let my eyes seal shut, then inwardly tumble back down the black tunnel of oblivion that’s my one aspiration.
During my teetotaling pregnancy, when my hormonal stupor must’ve helped me sober up cold turkey, I envisioned these night wakings as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Hearing baby gurgle and coo, I’d leap up to float—smiling and moonlit and brimming with breast milk—in frothy gown to the crib in the next room,
Three gasping coughs in rapid succession, rat-a-tat-tat. I blink at the clock hands (2:58). Silence.
I’ll get up, my husband says. His muscular arm starts to feel around the night table for his glasses.
To which a sane woman with classes to teach tomorrow would’ve said, Thanks, hon, as she sank back into slumbering meadows. He offers again, and again I say no, which is not—as I mean him to think it is—concern for his obligations. Nor is it maternal love for my blond and improbably blue-eyed toddler, just old enough to be lurching around the coffee table, chortling with every stumpy step. I tell the husband I’ve got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be. Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I’m playing to justify the fact that I’d rather drink than love.
The times Dev’s spiked a fever, I shook Warren awake and—fearing meningitis—we tore to Children’s Hospital. With medicine, it’d take Dev a week or so to stop coughing himself awake most nights. Then a week to stop nightly wakings, then here came the next cold, invariably flaming into a fever. The doctors agree the infections and fevers are strange but not unheard of. By every yardstick, my strapping son is a developmental champ. His bounce is boundless, but my limbs are filled with lead pellets, and my head has started to scramble like an anthill.
Another series of whooping lands a hammer blow to my sternum, and I jerk upright. It’s the reflexive, automatic move from some gore-fest movie—that last scene when the butchered killer you think has finally bitten it jolts up. My arm wheels over to smack off the baby monitor. Then, lacking the will to rise (3:07), I plummet back down like a shot bird.
The cough penetrates my dream with the sandpapered force of a chain-smoking speed freak. It’s Daddy’s pneumonia-laden cough, Mother’s emphysema wheeze. Even without the monitor, I can hear the hacking gasps start. My body’s a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, it’s still possessed of a golden nimbus.
That’s the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me—that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness.
Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner’s blast across my naked chest. Forgoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife-beater T-shirt. (3:15!)
In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.
He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head’s tilted with bald curiosity.
Which cracks me up, and he laughs till the coughs start exploding through him again, by which point I’ve cleaved him to me, both of us sweating. His diaper’s sagging from the vaporizer’s work, but fresh steam is his lifeline. Carrying him to the bathroom, I crank on the shower.
But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on.
PART III
Self Help
It would be good to feel good about yourself for good.
—William Matthews, “Self Help”
Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
18
Ivy Beleaguered
Monday
Me.
Tuesday
Me.
Wednesday
Me.
Thursday
Me.
—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary
In my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copy machine of an exalted, ivy-embroidered university, pressing down on the spine of a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. The green light under my hands slides over the book’s face, and the spillage from the edges scalds through my shut eyelids.
It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my
face: Frankenstein-monster green. The machine goes whap…whap at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like thunk. The whaps stab me. The thunks make my eyes bulge in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll’s.
It’s my first year teaching six classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting I could spend eighty hours a week at. Not a new-mom job by any stretch, that work. The sole vestige of the career? I’m on retainer freelancing for a business mag whose editor has left two strongly worded messages on our machine. I’m late with my article on the new Russian perestroika.
Whap…thunk.
The image of my blond three years’ son this morning, sobbing and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped him into the child seat, is a hot stove I can’t stop touching.
Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are complex.
Sure, I need to get in early to copy course materials illicitly—an infraction the secretary, who comes in at nine—warned adjunct teachers about back in the August training session, copies being too costly for the sniveling, no-hope-of-tenure human I am.
Also, on the snowy road here some mornings, I stop to puke out the car door, releasing into a snow bank an acidic coffee bile that stays on my teeth despite brushing vigorously enough to bloody my gums, leaving a bile taste no mint can mask. At the daycare center, mommy-vomiting is frowned on.
But even if I didn’t want to vomit before I got to the daycare center—which resembles a modest colonial parson’s house like in The Scarlet Letter—the perky bustle of the place would incline me in a vomitous direction.
The last time I did the morning dropoff was right after Christmas break. The director had waved me into her office, walls tacked with the bespattered finger paintings of Harvard’s budding geniuses. I’d sat on a stiff chair while she told me Dev was so anxious he couldn’t fall asleep at naptime.
Is everything okay at home? she asked. She had front teeth like fence pickets, and the reflection on her octagonal wire-rims was my puffy face.