by Mary Karr
The next morning I take the half-empty tumbler of whiskey before grabbing Dev to piggyback downstairs. There, standing over the sink, I look at the watery drink and say to myself—as I do every morning—Seems wrong to pour it out. So I swill down those dregs. Only this time I hear my own voice from the night before, righteously claiming I never took a morning drink. It’s the first lie I caught myself in. In fact, I never poured the drink. Just drank it.
It’s a snippet of a revelation, Dev’s solid weight on my hip the only force cementing me to earth. I feel flying through me like a hard-hit ball David’s phrase; I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease…but I’m not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that’s been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me—as one lady at the meeting said—and go on living without me.
22
Mass Eye
Each spectral port,
each human eye
is shot through with a hole, and everything we know
goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash
the baby’s old…
—Heather McHugh, “The Size of Spokane”
Down in Texas, a botched cataract surgery has nearly blinded Mother, and I suggest she have the corneal transplant to repair it in Boston. Since Mr. Whitbread serves on New York Hospital’s board and likes to flex that helping muscle, Warren urges me to write him to find a doctor. I suspect (is this true?) Warren really fancies Mother’s presence will let him vanish further into work and daddy-hood. Still, I’m grateful when Mr. Whitbread right off cops for Mother an appointment with the pope’s own eye surgeon, who bumps Mother way up on the transplant list. That spring she comes to live in our dining room, waiting on a tissue match.
I’ll help with my grandson, she says. I’ll look after him while you grade or write in your study.
You’re blind, Mother.
Not entirely. I mean, too blind to drive, but I can keep him away from sharp stuff.
The first day she does babysit, but the second, Dev scampers into my study with Mother right behind, and do I want to go to the park? By the third day, Mother makes the most infuriating announcement: I don’t do kids.
I sputter, You had four of them, Mother.
Nobody helped me with mine.
Bullshit. Daddy took me everywhere.
She rolls her milky eyes toward the light fixture, saying, Here you go with that my sainted daddy shit. Your sister and I both wonder why he got a big pass for doing nothing whatsoever.
Daddy never left us at the movies and didn’t pick us up.
He never did anything whatsoever.
He paid every bill.
We lived in absolute squalor.
He worked at an oil refinery, Mother. Did you fail to notice that?
Ragging on Daddy is Mother’s de facto response to any complaint about our upbringing. She deftly pawns off her own failings on the desolation of her marriage.
So she bitches that Daddy had been offered promotions but wouldn’t leave the union. And I counter that she’d been a Marxist when they married, and we dwindle into those niggling definitions until my fury boils over, and I lunge with the biggest weapon in my verbal sheath. I remind her that Daddy had never stood over me with a butcher knife.
I say it with a forceful little puff of air so the fact lands in her like a curare dart. All talk exits the room. We face each other in this vacuumed-out bubble, and part of me knows it’s a pathetic fact that not trying to murder me was all he had to do to win the better-parent prize.
Mother sucks her teeth and sits down on the low-lying futon we moved into the dining room for her. But she doesn’t collapse in operatic weeping like she’s done in the past. Which is strange. She seems very still as she pats the side of the futon. She says, Sit down next to me.
I’m not in the mood to cuddle and say so.
Her eyes are cloudy as an ancient oracle’s. She says, I’ve made amends to you, Mary. Best I could.
And that’s it? You’re sober now. I zero out your account.
You want to get mad at me, she says, knock yourself out.
I don’t want to get mad, Mother, I say. I am fucking mad.
Well, get it off your chest, she says.
So I do, pacing up and down, ranting like a Pentecostal preacher while she sits in a Buddha-esque pose studying me. Finally, I float into place next to her like a soggy balloon. She stubs out the end of her smoke and looks at me with her misted eyes.
She actually shrugs. What will you have me do? she asks.
There’s nothing she can do. I say so. After getting sober, you’re supposed to make up to people you’d plowed over. Mother’s sorry occupies two sentences: You know all that stuff that happened when you were little? I’m sorry about that.
She doesn’t risk a joke, but I see mischief in her, some bemusement. It’s disarming about Mother, her ability to laugh at the wrong instant.
Just stay sober, I say. Plus keep your grandson for one fucking hour without it being a federal case.
It interferes with my serenity, she says.
Lecia had gone through a similar fight where she’d told Mother, You don’t cook. You don’t clean. You haven’t had a job in forty years. What exactly do you bring to the party? The way Lecia told it, Mother had looked puzzled. She’d actually cocked her head like she was trying to remember her purpose on the planet and had finally, confidently, popped out with: I’m a lot of fun to be with.
I remind her of that, saying, So what do I get? You’re a lot of fun to be with?
Basically, she says. Or look at it this way: Maybe I left you a lot of good stories to write about. Maybe you’ll make your fortune on me.
Or my misfortune. Poets don’t make fortunes.
Don’t be so sure, kid. I’ve been praying about it for you.
I won’t inhale and hold it, I say.
You know what I pray’ll happen for you?
It better involve money.
That you’ll get this program.
For God’s sake, Mother, stop proselytizing for one day. I’m not gonna be your cliché-spouting recovery acolyte.
Some kind of spiritual discipline might free you from some of this anger….
I stomp upstairs, slamming the bathroom door behind me. Mother preaching to me about discipline is more than I can abide.
But over the weeks she’s with us, I can’t refute how calm she seems; funny, too—an equanimity I’ve never seen—patience, even. Feeling her way around my kitchen, she manages to mold little balls of corn bread into patties she fries up for us, and by day, she takes calls from her program friends and knits for me by feel alone a sweater the color of daffodils with the three-D pattern of a tree blooming up the front.
The day before the transplant, in a packed doctors’ office, we waltz to the front of the line to see the doctor, as Mr. Whitbread arranged, everybody watching us pass like we were majorettes. Though I’d expected to feel radically glad—for once having the leg up that the rich always have—my throat sours as I look behind us, for we pass up all manner of near-blind children, including one knobby-kneed broomstick of a boy with a black eye patch; plus an entire family from Pakistan who’ve waited—their son explained—eighteen months and spent their savings journeying to get their father’s eye cancer seen to. They aren’t waiting for transplants, necessarily, but just getting to the doctor before them feels like cheating.
After the surgery, Mother lies with her head wrapped, wanly joking that she feels like playing pin the tail on the donkey. She listens to cassettes of The Cloud of Unknowing, Buddhist sutras, Centering Prayer, the writings of mystic Simone Weil—all brought from the hometown library.
Afternoons, young Dev likes to lead her around the yard, joyfully stranding her in front of the azalea bush. Or he dons a plastic knight’s helmet and hands her a stick, batting at it with his plastic sword till she’s holding a stub.
One evening I’m in the kitchen cleani
ng up dishes when he rushes in, claiming Mother stole the last cookie from him and threatened to slap him. She comes behind holding the cookie to her chest. Her story is they were doing watercolors together, and when she idly reached for the last cookie on the plate, he snatched it up and scampered to the other side of the table.
Give him the cookie, Mother.
But he had three. I had one broken one.
He’s the baby, Mother. He gets the cookie.
She gives me a pitiful stare and announces it was the last one. I promise to fetch another package after the dishes, and she hands it over to Dev, who nyah-nyahs her a few times, then leaves the room doing a victory dance.
You can’t slap him, Mother.
She stares at me with two different eyes—one blue, one green. The green one has a brown nick in it, like a fault in ice.
I didn’t want to smack him, she tells me. It would’ve just been instinctual.
Batching your pants is instinctual, Mother. We don’t batch our pants. We don’t beat babies. That’s what civilization is all about—reining in those pesky instincts. Dev’s never been slapped.
She huffs, Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him.
Rising up through me with primordial force is the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her till her head pops off like a broken Barbie. The urge shoots through me like a barreling train, and I feel every single car flicker by before I say anything else. Breath comes in my body and leaves it.
I love you, Mother, I say with great measure, but if you lay one hand on him, I’ll kick you till you’re dead.
Okay, she says, exhaling slow. Okay, that sounds fair.
When I put Dev to bed that night, I ask him if Grandma scared him earlier.
He gives me a puzzled look. Why would she scare him?
About the cookie, I tell him.
He tells me, You’d never allow that to happen.
Which I repeat here as a boast, for that sentence might be the most gratifying endorsement I ever got.
23
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
First you wake in disbelief, then
in sadness and grief and when you wake
for the last time, the forest you’ve been
looking for will turn out to be
right in the middle of your chest.
—Dean Young, “Side Effects”
One evening after I’ve dropped off some final files to the big-deal telecom consultant I once worked for, I lounge with him and his wife on their patio under a sprawling oak. In the spirit of farewell to my goofy career as a telecom marketer in business, he takes down a double album cover and begins to roll a joint.
We hardly do this—not since grad school—he says, but you deserve a send-off.
Ten days without a drink at this point, I say no. His wife has a crystal wineglass in her hand and a winning grin. Sure you don’t want some? she says. The sculpted garden spreads around us, neat as a plate of sushi. She has on a gauzy black dress, and as she takes the joint and tokes it, she drapes her long legs over the garden chair, saying, This is very different from drinking, right? I mean…She trails off into an exhale.
I think, It is different. Pot was never my problem—true enough—compared to the all-day bong-blowing, resin-scraping drug dealers I’d lived with—true enough. I view my hand reaching for the joint as if on a movie screen. The sober part of myself is vanished entire. The coal on the burning stick flares as I draw on it, then I hold the sweet smoke as it creeps up my spine to my brain stem, where a tight-closed lotus starts to flower open. Exhaling, I blow away all those creepy people from the church basement. The wind wafts them off into summer dust motes.
Later, my friends tuck me in a car, then stand, their arms waving side to side with the liquidy motion of seaweed while I ease off. I roll the window down so my hair streams along the side. The edges of the road have softened, the trees are giant scrambles of green fuzz. Just past the Star Market, right before the road splits to wrap around the local pond, my left blinker clicks on of its own volition, and my car tires cant to cut across the traffic. The vehicle surges into the liquor store parking lot. Ten days clean at this point, I tell myself I’ve straightened out, and a little wine with dinner won’t hurt….
Waking up with the outline of Warren’s back—all I ever see of him—I feel soldered to the bed, with cobwebs yards long grown from head to floor. For an instant I convince myself the binge was an awful dream. Then the tinny taste in my gummed-up mouth floods me with self-loathing.
So I find myself in the shit-brown aluminum chair again. The guy at the front asking if anybody’s had a drink since the last group, and though I wonder about raising my hand, it hangs in the air of its own accord. I tell them I’m no alcoholic, but I’d shared a passed joint with a former boss, not wanting to seem like an ingrate. I fail to mention the five-dollar bottle of wine I’d drained later.
Part of me expects to be handed some kind of hall pass that says the occasional joint—when part of a necessary business interaction—is okay. Another part of me thinks—hopes?—the group police will charge down the aisle, hoist me up by the shoulders, then show me the door.
But I haven’t yet seen anybody get kicked out, even a hallucinating homeless dude and one individual with Tourette’s syndrome who once hollered out, I wanna suck your titties.
Over the months, I keep going back to the bottle, though with each relapse, I come back one notch humbler, more willing to take a suggestion I’ve scorned.
Like, get phone numbers of ladies and pick one for a sobriety coach you can call every day till you can get a grip. So I pick a lady in an A-line denim skirt and penny loafers, and maybe because her society lockjaw accent has the cadence of my mother-in-law’s, I never call before I pick up a drink—when she could talk me out of it—only after.
How does Warren miss all this? Maybe he conks out, or maybe I’m a sneaky bitch.
I wake one night on the back stair landing, choking on bile that’s erupted from my throat while passed out. Feeling my way up the unlit stairwell, I see at the top my pajama’ed boy, his frayed polar bear tucked under his arm, and around him is glowing some pale blue corona from a source I can’t name, and his eyes are acetylene torches. I hoist him in my arms and feel his soft arms around my neck, and he pats my cheek and says, Are you okay, Mommy?
I lie that I am, and after I’ve settled him in his brand new big-boy bed, he corkscrews his way back into a dream. Then I stay all night propped against the wall, watching the light sift over him as if grated from the moon. Get a fucking grip, you drunk bitch, the sober part of me says. The two halves seldom war anymore, because they’re never in my head at the same time. They’ve worked out some system of shifts: the sober voice only gets in during periods I’m drowning in remorse; the drunk voice is otherwise resident as I hurtle toward a drink.
The next night I humbly return to the shit-brown chair, trying to read the Boy Scout aphorisms hung from the wall, and I promise myself the first woman who makes me laugh, I’ll get her number and call her the second I get up tomorrow. Doing it alone is not working.
The speaker’s named Joan—an elegant pageboyed social theorist at Harvard whose unlikely outlaw stint in Alaska involved going to the bar one night in subzero weather wearing a tutu under her arctic parka, just to stir things up. Since the night I woke up after puking, I’ve become semi-teachable, and I tell her that I’m ready to hear suggestions. She says, Do some volunteer work.
So I start scrubbing coffee urns with the black marine, who tells me that, yes, even if I consider dosing the coffee with cyanide, the act of making it still constitutes spiritual progress. Joan also urges me to start praying to some half-baked higher power whose existence I argue against.
No way, I say. Never happen, no offense.
But her voice—speaking daily to me on the phone—keeps me postponing the drink I often feel myself barreling toward like a boulder rolling downhill. With her ministrations, I do not—for two months—drink: a
white-knuckled, tooth-grinding effort that impresses no one outside the church basement I go to a few nights per week.
The sun rises and sets. The moon makes two arcs over the house I fail to sleep in. I remember no intersecting days with Warren, aside from how he takes evening shifts with Dev when I go to meetings. It’s as if he doesn’t even live there, which can’t be right.
I don’t write. I can barely read enough to grade the bushels of essays I lug around. And when I long to drive off to the liquor store to buy and suck down fiery elixirs, spiritual directress Joan the Bone—a nickname picked solely for the rhyme—tells me I can do it first thing I wake up: even before you brush your teeth. And while I mock her one-day-at-a-time ploy as a trick for the dim-witted, since it actually means no day dawns in which drinking is a good idea, I have to admit that—sixty days in—when she buys me a celebratory bagel with my coffee, I feel fresher inside, albeit a bit scooped out, like a gourd. Stick a candle in my mouth, and you could use me for Halloween decor.
It’s September fifteenth. We sit at a nameless coffee shop I call Now Baking, for the neon sign in its window. It’s before the age of bottled water, when ordering a cappuccino gets you crap coffee dollopped with whipped cream, a zigzag of grenadine syrup, and a cherry on top. So we drink that day unadorned diner coffee, mine laced with fatty cream and enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma, sugar craving being the curse of the newly sober. (One newly sober pal stole half-sweetened baking chocolate from the kitchen of a friend he was visiting—the host later found the wrappers stashed under the guest room mattress.)
Leaves aren’t yet tumbling from the trees, but for me, all color is leaching from the landscape. I’m blunted, muted, starved, yet stubbornly refusing the one suggestion everyone sober for very long makes: prayer. I recoil from any talk of spiritual crap, though I can’t fail to notice that the happier, less angry ex-drunks talk about such matters without any strapped-on, phony-sounding zeal. Joan the Bone claims some nonbelievers use the group as a higher power.