by Mary Karr
You don’t have to yell at him, she says. In fact, if you yell at him, what happens?
He’ll yell back? I say.
Worse. He’ll stop listening.
Dev picks up two drumsticks and pounds out a one-two till he’s caught a fast trill.
See, he’s an extremely talented noisemaker, I say.
I am! he says, grinning with those black-lashed blue eyes of his as he bangs on.
I tell him, I’m ratting you out for the yeller you are.
Just worry less that you should be doing something for him every second, Dr. G. says. She tells me to call her in the afternoons if I’m reaching my wits’ end.
After another trip to the grocery store, where Dev grabs all the candy bars off the shelf, the doctor teaches me how to put him in a time-out—a minute for every year of his life—which I initially hate to do, for it feels like punishment. So I wait till he’s pulled stuff off the supermarket shelf six times rather than doing it right off. Which means by the time I get to it, I’m rattled, and he knows he’s got me.
I sit moldering at midnight on the back porch, holding what’s become a tumbler of whiskey sans ice and floating cherry—my ten thousandth last drink. The doctor has agreed to squeeze me in for an emergency appointment at dawn. Our couples sessions have become me alone in Parenting 101.
She explains that if I wait till I’m mad to put Dev in time-out, that anger becomes the only limit he’ll recognize, and he’ll wait till I’m screaming to stop. The time-out isn’t punishment, it’s a circuit breaker you throw.
Sleep. I crave sleep. That night his coughing keeps us up all night. I’m filled with wet sand. The doctor tells me that Dev has to learn to settle. I should only go in at increasing intervals, adding a minute each time. You can’t engage him, she says, otherwise, it’s reinforcing the waking.
Even looks like in The Exorcist?
Even if he’s possessed by Satan, she says. He’ll cry himself to sleep.
As I’m gathering my stuff up, she lowers the pen to ask again, What about your drinking?
For an instant, the plant-filled room inches over a little. I lie to her, saying, I’ve cut way down.
Not long after, on a warm afternoon while Dev’s in the tub, Warren and I step across the hall to the bedroom to jack up our sniping. You always this, and you never that. We unzip our mild parental personas, shedding them, rising up like four-legged beasts reared back. The room is swirling with our invectives when—in the doorway—there stands Dev in his three-year-old body. He’s naked and gap-mouthed. All the raging that swirls around us arrests into violent stasis. The fury in the room dispels itself like smoke siphoned up with a hose.
Coming from the tub, Dev’s pale body shines with water, ringlets damp alongside his blazing cheeks. He’s dragged behind him a brown and soaking towel like the hide of some slaughtered animal. (Almost twenty years later, he told me that this crisply drawn memory was the worst of his life.) I’ve never been on the receiving end of such a plaintive stare. Standing in a sniper’s crosshairs would feel safer.
Later, as we draw the quilt up over him and his stout polar bear—named, prosaically enough, Mr. Bear—we practically sing our lame guarantees. Over his horizontal body, our shadows cross same as ever. We swear to him that the lady we’re talking to helps us play nicer.
Like Martin Luther King? he says.
What does Martin Luther King teach, sweetie? Warren says.
Dev’s twiddling a blond ringlet around his finger as he says, Take turns. Share toys.
You know Grandma Charlie marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama.
He wrinkles his nose, saying, No, she didn’t.
So I tell the story. How she climbed in a van with a bunch of college students, and they rolled through the swamps and bayous to a city encircled by scary men with guns and blind batons that swung down even on bodies huddled in surrender. How with my daddy and sister eating our upended pot pies off TV trays, we saw fire hoses pinning people against chain link.
That was brave, Dev says.
You’re brave, I say.
He nods as if considering. I am, he says.
But as Warren and I stand in his doorway with arms around each other’s waists, swearing we won’t fight anymore, Dev wears the wearied expression of someone who knows he’s being lied to.
At the bottom of the stairway, the sob that comes through me nearly breaks me in half, and Warren unbends me to draw me to him. His white shirt smells of laundry bluing, and he strokes my hair in the old way and says, We can’t do that in front of him again.
21
The Grinning Skull
The grinning skull begins to take on skin—
—Wislawa Szymborska, “An Old Story” (trans. Stanislav Baranczak)
The next night, still hungover, I sullenly drag in to the therapy group for people trying to quit. Maybe they know ways to cut back that won’t make me too itchy. It’s a Cambridge church basement—a musty yellow room whose ancient carpet smells of wet gym socks. Hung from the walls are giant posters like you’d expect at a high school pep rally, splattered with cornball slogans. There are rows of aluminum folding chairs, baby-shit brown in color.
I warp my mouth into a stiff rictus and begin trying to impersonate a good and sober person who’s only wandered in through curiosity and happenstance. Here the coffee costs a dime, and you can read the styrofoam cup’s manufacturer embossed backward on the bottom.
Standing at the urn, I hear a tweedy classics professor say to a big black marine with patches from Khe Sanh on his bulging arms: It’s hard to be an articulate ghost. Illogically, as I hear this, some frozen inner aspect thaws enough that a small surge of pity swells through me. I heap my watery coffee with powdered cream and stop thinking about myself long enough to come alive a little. I notice in the professor’s baggy face his red-rimmed eyes, and the care in the marine’s gaze starts to plug me in to something invisible that rivers among these strangers. It’s like running from my cardiac area, I’ve been dragging a long extension cord unplugged from all compassion, and it’s suddenly found a socket. The room comes breathing to life.
I’m standing by a book cart loaded with navy blue hymnals, and through the tall windows, I can see dusk falling. The leaves of the oaks are dabbed with orange paint. A woman in a snug yellow sweater is polishing her tortoiseshell glasses with a red silk square.
We’re asleep most of the time, I once heard the writer George Saunders say, but we can wake up. In that instant, for no reason I can discern, I wake up. Faces cease to be blurs and grow distinct features. Coming toward me from the door is a buff musician whose CDs I own. He’s carrying a plate covered in foil, talking to a handsome, mustachioed friend whose leather jacket must’ve cost more than our rusting vehicle. I stand aside as he lowers the plate to the table and peels off the foil—homemade chocolate chip cookies melting into each other. People from around the room come up, and I snatch one and head to my seat, sinking my teeth into the buttery dough and warm chocolate.
Pleasure, I feel—mouth to spine to head. A small uprush of pleasure. This, I think, is why other people aren’t screaming. I’ve briefly forgotten to feel sorry for myself, to worry, to generate any kind of report on my own performance.
The marine says to the professor, Days three to ten suck the worst. You can do it this time. Just drink a lot of water. And call me. Build a wall around the day and don’t look over it….
The chair I fold myself into chills my ass. That tiny discomfort unplugs me again, and I fidget and rifle my purse for hand lotion. Why don’t I carry mints? There are people in the world who carry mints. But given a tin of mints, I’ll eat every single one straight off. As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who—if he can’t have too much of something—doesn’t want any of it.
In the front of the room, a lady asks for a moment of silence, and people on either side of me bow their heads. Are they serious? I look over at the buff musician and his friend—heads down, plus
the tweedy classics professor. Lord, I think, this is some fake Christian cult I’ve wandered into. Then a guy at the front reads some kind of warm-up, saying they’re not a sect or church, reiterating how nobody’s the boss of anybody—we’re all the same—the lie of equality that teachers tried peddling in high school, where, in fact, the reigning hierarchy would’ve tied stones to the feet of druggy teens like me and dropped us off bridges.
Then a laminated list of suggestions starts circling the room, with people reading a line at a time. It sounds to me like Be good and you won’t get in trouble and Stop having fun and grow up and Tell everybody how you’re bad and face the firing squad.
A woman stands at the front, saying her higher power helped her through a family wedding without drinking, though her soused-up relatives tried to force all variety of cocktail down her gullet, and it’s all I can do not to bolt out the door. Higher power, my rosy red ass, I can hear my daddy saying, and Church is a trick on poor people. I look over at the classics prof, now giving the thumbs-up sign like she’s scored a touchdown, and I think, What fun-house land have I crossed into, where the rich seek the counsel of the poor? Any minute, some snake-handling preacher might well get up and start stomp-dancing while his underage wife passes a hat. I slather on more hand lotion and sit perched on the edge of my seat like a bird on a wire.
The guy at the front calls on a lady in a bouclé Chanel suit, complete with gold buttons and long chains hanging down. She might’ve stepped from the pages of Town & Country magazine. She relates how she used to tuck her vodka bottle inside a turkey carcass stashed in the basement freezer. While cooking dinner, she’d run down and yank it out and guzzle a bit. And her family, who’d done two interventions, kept rifling laundry hampers and closets, looking to no avail for her stash. Then one night, she tells us in a demure voice, the frost had built up so deep she couldn’t midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it.
She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don’t drink like this.
Rather than scorn her like schoolmarms for the sin, the room roars—myself among them—while she gives a startled smile. And because I’ve never drained vodka from an icy bird, I think I’m nowhere near as bad as that crazy bitch.
Another guy talks about burying bottles all over his mother’s yard before being dragged into rehab. Fresh out, he needed only to secret inside his Speedo bathing suit a plastic straw. Then he’d grab a towel and some tanning oil and step outside, saying he wanted to catch some rays. His mother would study him all day through the sliding door, totally flummoxed when he came crab-walking in—drunk and beet-red—at sundown. More laughter, and I hear myself join in since the company is more raucously alive than most dance clubs.
Was it this same meeting where a man told the story of trying to hang himself? The rope was too green, and at dusk, his wife tilted open the garage door to find him twisting drunk, on tiptoes, half conscious. She cut him down, called him a bastard, and packed her bags. He then went into the kitchen and blew out the pilot light and stuffed towels around the edges of the room. He emptied a bottle of sleeping pills into his mouth and finished the last of the whiskey.
Three days later, he woke with a crushing headache, and his first thought was, Boy do I need a cigarette. So he patted around on the front of his shirt and pulled out a stogie. Then he drew the Bic lighter from his pants pocket and rubbed up a single flame.
He didn’t hear the explosion as the walls of the room were blown out. In his next conscious instant, he was smoldering in his neighbor’s yard with his brows singed off.
When have I laughed so hard in company at the specter of human frailty? Not since the last great poetry reading I’d sat through, when some outcast put a fresh name on the unnamable. I don’t know what I expected here—a bunch of guys who crawled out from alleys or under bridges looking for hot coffee and a bowl of soup. But the folks around me look mostly present and clear-eyed.
Among the academics and guys in suits sit working people—chamber maid, garage mechanic, diner waitress. I recognize the Latino guy who pours my coffee at the local donut shop. When they share—a word that right off makes me want to dip snuff—about how hard it is to make the rent or whether the exhaust system wired together by a coat hanger will hold, I realize how far I’ve moved from the people I grew up around.
The next instant a gray-haired lady in pearls smiles at me, and I turn away, thinking, I’m not like you, lady….
Nonetheless, I raise my hand a few inches, but when I don’t get called on, I yank it down and start sitting on it again. How far I’ve fallen from the hand-flapping freshman, how saturated in shame.
That flip-flop keeps going on inside, as if opposing inner judo masters take turns body-slamming each other. One minute I’m thinking, They’re not all that strange. The next, their laughter bounces off me like bullets from a Kevlar vest. I go outside to smoke.
In the common across from me, the bare trees are twisted into agonized forms. The bronze cannons seem aimed straight at my sternum. I look back at the lighted windows and hear a woman’s unintelligible voice.
The door opens a crack, and in the spilled, triangular glow, a tall kid wearing a red bandana over his streaming brown hair slips out. He stops six feet away and bends slightly forward—almost a butler’s bow—saying, Excuse me, Miss Karr. Mind if I join you?
Who is he? With his formal demeanor and gold granny glasses, he could be a student—some Ivy League suck-up.
Join away, I say, adding as I flash my wedding ring, I’m a miz.
My goodness gracious, ma’am, he says, those are some seriously blinding stones you’re flaunting. We met before…
And we had. David was a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in philosophy I’d once been introduced to at the back of a reading by mutual pals. Some kind of genius, David’s meant to be, though his red bandana is the flag of gangster or biker, ditto the unlaced Timberland work boots.
I ask him how long he’s been coming, and he says not hardly any time, and I say it’s my first go, and he asks if I get it, and I say if I got it, I wouldn’t be out here smoking. He says same with him, adding while he drank a lot, he mostly did marijuana, which can’t be so bad because it’s natural.
I say—cleverly, I think—Strychnine’s natural.
He concedes that’s true but also points out how, since the average pot smoker doesn’t tend to steal your TV, people don’t frown on it like they do, say, smoking crack, then plowing over the crossing guard.
We stare at the cannons facing us, both agreeing we really have better places to be as we grind our cigarettes with our boot heels. Climbing the steps back to the lighted doorway, he holds the door, bowing as he says from his scruffily bearded face (this is the pre-scruff U.S.A.), After you, Miz Karr.
It brings me up short—his outlaw wardrobe paired with the obsequious ma’am thing—and I say testily, Are you fucking with me?
No ma’am, he says, his hands flying to his T-shirted chest.
Then it strikes me that he’s just a shy kid from the Midwest raised to say ma’am like I do to every waitress and dry cleaner. We scuttle inside like a pair of field mice from our inept exchange.
Back in my chair, the filter of my head notices how people keep talking about being grateful, as in I’m so happy to be thankful to be grateful to sit here with you nice sober folks. I look around and think, Your lives must suck worse even than mine if this constitutes fun for you.
Eventually, I raise my hand high enough to get called on. I announce that I doubt I’m an alcoholic, since I never drink in the mornings, and nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me—not bankruptcy, car wreck, nor even the standard mugging. While I expect some indictment, everyone smiles that sugary smile I mistrust and nods, and the lady next to me whispers, Keep coming.
At the end, when everybody grabs hands to pray, it’s like some dreary ring-around-the-rosy, and I refuse to mouth the words, instead gaping around at who’s dop
ey enough to go along. The musician and his friend do, and the professor. Perfectly smart people, talking to air with grave expressions. Go figure.
On the way out, I pass bandana’ed David talking with great speed and animation to the musician. David’s actually holding up his finger in some Confucian posture, saying, It’s a logical fallacy that they’re telling me I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease, since this a priori implies that any citizen who denies they have this ailment is no doubt infected…
Like me, he’s obviously here to educate them to their cult’s fallacious thinking.
On the sidewalk, the night is cool and wet, and a few passing women hand me their phone numbers, saying call anytime, even to say hello, which feels slightly pitiful on their parts. What do they want?
One says, For me, a car wreck was a yet. I mean, it just hadn’t gotten around to happening. Another says she’d wondered just like I had whether she really needed to quit drinking, but that underperforming or having a bleak inner life is a severe consequence of drinking even without an external loss like job or child.
The comment stuns me in a way. Inside I say to myself, How dare you suppose I have a bleak inner life! Driving home, I check my puffy eyes in the rearview and tell myself that I look as cheerful as the next lady…don’t I?
I know that I don’t, and while I sit in the driveway smoking, I can catch—almost feel zip through me—a streak of the kindness I’d witnessed at the coffee urn. Just to be on the receiving end of a warm baked item while living so fenced off from husband and community brings me up short. Maybe, I think, I do belong among that peculiar company…. Well, maybe not those sad ladies who give their phone numbers out to strangers. What losers. I stuff the slips of paper in the car ashtray.
Inside, with my small family abed, I pour my tumbler of whiskey and drink it on the back porch. Before staggering upstairs to pass out, I fix a second, since I’ll invariably wake around two or three, unable to cork off again without a few swallows.