Lit

by Mary Karr

  You’re not praying yet? Deb wants to know.

  I am…well, barely. I figured out that asking for relief from the craving every morning seemed to make it go away. I figure it’s like I mesmerize myself. But God? No way. I’m an agnostic.

  A spike-haired blonde passing by with a cup of coffee says, Another intellectual? Lucky you.

  Janice, this is Mary.

  Janice slides next to me, saying, Like the Blessed Mother, huh? She gives off the kind of outlaw ethos that appeals to me.

  Deb says, Mary’s reluctant to get down on her knees because she doesn’t believe in God.

  I add, What kind of God wants me to get on my knees and supplicate myself like a coolie?

  Janice busts out with a cackling laugh, You don’t do it for God! You do it for yourself. All this is for you…the prayer, the meditation, even the service work. I do it for myself, too. I’m not that benevolent.

  How does getting on your knees do anything for you? I say.

  Janice says, It makes you the right size. You do it to teach yourself something. When my disease has ahold of me, it tells me my suffering is special or unique, but it’s the same as everybody’s. I kneel to put my body in that place, because otherwise, my mind can’t grasp it.

  Out of the kitchen holding a crockery mug comes a lady with cropped dark hair and eyes the color of fresh-dug earth. Liz has the frank, inquisitive gaze of a trained scientist, but softer in its aspect. The clubhouse/college-dorm feel of this place suggests a camaraderie lacking with my writer pals.

  Can we help her not drink? Deb asks, Liz. And it appears a sincere question.

  Absolutely, Liz says, pulling up a chair. We’re all about the not-drinking thing.

  From the TV in the living room, the mongoose is announcing his name in a chittering falsetto: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi!

  Deb explains that Liz had run a lab at MIT, adding, She had a hard time with the higher-power thing, too.

  I stayed sober a year, but I was white-knuckling it, Liz says. It was hell, and I drank again. Second time around, I started the prayer stuff. You get miserable enough, you’ll take suggestions.

  Liz envisions her higher power as a sober part of herself—some saner, more adult aspect of her own psyche. She says, It’s not so different than Freud’s superego—or healthy ego.

  I tell her maybe I could pray easier if it was a positive-thinking exercise.

  From the next room, Sam says, The smart money’s on the cobra. Wanna make a gentleman’s wager?

  Two’ll get you four for the mongoose, Joe says.

  Dumb money, Sam says, but I’ll take it.

  I’m thinking, This doesn’t seem like a cult or a trick, there’s something—I don’t know—realistic about these women. They don’t seem misty-eyed or drippy. So I tell them how shaky I am inside, afraid my marriage is a mistake, and how I can’t even read anymore.

  Liz says, Try lying in bed, picturing yourself held by two giant hands.

  Giant hands?

  Liz says, I know what you’re thinking. That’s idiotic.

  For some reason, my eyes well up, and I find myself saying to women I just met, I’m afraid I’m not a good mom.

  Dev runs up to me, announcing the victory of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

  While Sam is fishing bet money from his jeans, Joe says, Never mess with a mongoose.

  Sam drops quarters into Joe’s open palm next to a wadded-up dollar, adding—genially, it seems—Eff you, brother.

  Deb shoots him a look. Joe pockets the change, then pulls it back out. He offers to buy Dev a soda.

  Can I, Mom? Dev says, for soda is contraband in our house, and I say sure, and later in his life, Dev will remember the chesty rumble of the soda machine in the basement of that place, the faded tattoos on the bulging biceps of Joe and Sam. He’ll also remember the claim of Philosophy David (who’s working a security job while trying to start a novel) that a doctor made him keep the bandana on his head else it might explode. Several afternoons a week we spend with this company.

  Let go, they urge me. Let go. I have no idea what this letting go means beyond surrounding myself with sober women—I mostly talk to women—and grouchily taking their suggestions.

  But each sober day seems to widen the chasm between Warren and me. The halfway house is another hiding place from our troubles. With our therapist, I sit across the room and rail. Rather than scrutinize my own absence—first via booze, now via recovery—I devote each session to old grievances. How Warren went running during Daddy’s funeral, took his paternity leave when Dev and I were still in the hospital, left every single late-night feeding for me to handle alone. Not that these complaints don’t have weight, but I nurse my grudges like foundlings.

  For his part, he succinctly itemizes the shrewish railings I’ve unleashed on him. Eventually, he says, I can’t undo the past, Mare. What about now?

  Surely you’re not gonna be one of those women, the doctor says, who gets her husband’s attention and then bails out just when there’s a chance to get a marriage she wants?

  But I am. I say, I just don’t trust that he cares for me the way I want.

  What you want, nobody can give you, he says.

  Intimacy exercises that involve backrubs and kissing, I flatly refuse to do. There’s a door slammed shut in me that I’ve barred. And Warren says—on the topic of our nonexistent sex life—One day you’re gonna reach for me, and I won’t be there. (From today’s vantage, my withdrawal and coldness seem so corrosive and mean, I want to shake my young self.)

  Prayer isn’t patching up the marriage yet, though applied to small problems from time to time, it sometimes yields up a feasible idea.

  Stranded without child care once, I figure out after a prayer—it comes to me—that I could slip Chris, an ex-hooker from the house, a few bucks to hang out in the quad with Dev for a spell, which seems safe enough for an hour or so.

  After, I snap Dev in his car seat and drive Chris home. She’s nineteen, six months clean, with lush dark hair and the pink cheeks of a cheerleader. In the car, she talks about heroin as a devious lover. Her voice is smoky as a lounge singer’s, a real Billie Holiday rasp.

  I look in the rearview. She ran Dev around so hard in the quad earlier, he’s slumped over in his car seat. So I ask Chris how sobriety’s treating her. This is the cusp of my starting to ask after other people—a change from pouting alone on the porch before.

  I’m starting to feel all clean inside, she says.

  How does that happen? I want to know, for I keep having dreams that I’m getting sneakily drunk and trying to hide it from people in my group.

  I’m making amends to people I’ve screwed over, she says. Like I shoplifted a bunch of stuff from this deli, and so I brought the guy thirty bucks. Korean guy. He was really nice about it.

  The snowy roads make us fishtail now and then, and traffic has started to drag.

  See, I resent this shit, I say, pressing on the horn, adding, Even the fucking traffic feels orchestrated to fuck me up. Dev needs to eat. You need to get home before dinner curfew or you’re grounded.

  It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh?

  I laugh, saying, Making amends to other people isn’t high on my list right now. I’m still too pissed at everybody.

  Think of all the ways you’ve let yourself down, resentments against yourself, she says, and she looks at me from down her turned-up nose.

  I say, I’m too much of an asshole even to contemplate looking at that carnage.

  Listen to how you let your own mind talk to you, she says. You’d fight anybody to the ground who said that shit to you.

  Just as traffic starts to ease up, the car’s engine light goes on. A mile or so later, steam starts pouring from the hood. I steer to the far lane, cars whooshing past in snow. Dev wakes up blinking and crimson-cheeked in his down jacket, really hungry.

  Stepping out of the car, I land ankle-deep in slush and start swearing under my breath.

  But no sooner d
o I pop the hood than a vehicle pulls alongside. Joe and Sam happen to be driving a borrowed tow truck that has—another stroke of fortune—jugs of blue engine coolant. From a paper bag on the dash, Joe’s massive mitt draws out a glazed donut for Dev. He says, Here you go, tough guy.

  We all stand on the side of the road in the blue dusk, Dev snug in big Joe’s arm and gnawing the pastry as Sam doctors the radiator. For an instant, I can feel the gratitude seep up from my damp footsoles—one of my first pure instances of it. Back in the car, I announce it to Chris.

  Say thanks, then, she says.

  I just did. Joe wouldn’t even let me pay for the antifreeze.

  I meant, she says, say thanks to your higher power.

  I look at her round girlish face. She still has a few snowflakes in her dark lashes.

  Thanks, H.P., I say, but it actually shames me, for some reason, to say such a dumb thing.

  (A year later, Chris would flee the house to stick up a bank with a machine gun. She’d cop heroin and overdose in a park. I last saw her in a public hospital, where she was blind, HIV-positive, and pregnant with a baby who died—I believe—around the time Chris did. She didn’t make it to twenty-one. Thanks, Chris T., for hauling my ass into the light that day, and still.)

  A week before the Whiting ceremony, Lux and I take our kids to the park, settling them in to swing through their low-slung arcs. It’s near dusk when I ask if he has any truck with a supreme intelligence.

  C’mon, he says. There’s a force that fuses the greeney flower. Look at these damn kids. There’s an energy that threads through us that deserves your reverence. It’s not all serial killers and Hitlers.

  Of course it is, I say.

  Ever notice, Tom says, your mind immediately leaps to the most extreme position—like, if you turn to God, He’s gonna nail you to a tree.

  I’m scared I’ll drink at the Whiting ceremony. A week away. A year ago I’d have killed to get to go to double-barrel cocktail parties.

  Lux looks at me sideways and asks, Want me to go with you?

  Though I’m a champion whiner, inclined to blame people for failing to help, I almost never outright solicit a favor. The offer stuns me. I’m teaching in New York that day anyway, Lux says. I could make it to the second party—the big public one.

  On the appointed day, I stand before the Park Avenue hotel they booked for me, wondering why it looks so familiar. As I stare up at the facade, it hits me that—at some point in the 1970s, I scored cocaine in this very building.

  At the elevator, the numbers glow down to me while I stifle an animal impulse to bolt.

  Help me, blind power, I think, get through. (Prayers of real desperation like this—however sparse—are starting to come unbidden. Sometimes one even leaves a sense of peace—or at least hope that peace is coming.)

  I fling my hanging bag on the bed and instinctively draw the drapes against light. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I decide that the black dress I zipped on thinking it made me look employable as a professor in fact has shoulders padded like a linebacker’s.

  I flop on the bed and click the TV on to channel-surf when I notice that, just under the screen, sits a minibar. I can picture the frosty air it holds, its tidy array of bottles. Eyeing it like I would a crocodile sloe-eyed on the bank, I back out of the room and take the elevator downstairs again.

  The desk clerk says housekeeping can take it out eventually, but they’re overloaded. So I sit in the lobby, hands twisting in my lap, until it’s time for the drinks I can’t have.

  29

  Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead)

  YOU ARE HERE.

  —A mall directory

  I don’t enter the Morgan Library for the second reception thinking, Wow, I’ve arrived, my life will change now. I edge in sweating like a sow, shaking like a dope fiend, and heavy with dread. I feel the paste pearls around my neck and the cardboard soles of my cheap shoes.

  The party spreads out inside a book-lined cathedral—forty-foot ceilings lined with volumes. Glass cases around its perimeter glint in the low light. One holds a Bible printed by Gutenberg, another a Shakespeare folio, another etchings by poet William Blake. Standing there, I study a knot of people at the room’s center with no idea how to elbow my way in. Then with some jostling, the crowd parts, and there stands Toby Wolff, looking immensely hearty dead center of that vaulted room. He wears a blue blazer and has a beer in his hand. Hardly anybody reads memoirs much, but I check them out by the armload, including that year Toby’s This Boy’s Life, his own hair-raising account of battles with a bullying redneck stepfather.

  The fact that Toby’s origins are almost as scabby and unfortunate as my own partly make him approachable. Plus he taught me in grad school before he was a big deal. I’d even written him for advice on how to rework the discombobulated novel I’d cobbled together into nonfiction. (The concocted protagonist had served as a correction to the real me—beautiful and noble; she’d volunteered at the local nursing home and did differential calculus in sixth grade.) The letter Toby sent back got taped over my desk. It said:

  Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.

  For the unbeliever I am, Toby’s wave in my direction is incalculable shithouse luck. (I’d later call it grace.)

  He gives me an avuncular hug and claps my padded shoulder. He’s mustachioed and fit, with a military bearing earned in Vietnam. Good for us, huh, Mare?

  I’m trying not to drink, I tell him, a confession he barely registers.

  Stand next to me, then, he says, adding, I’ll drink for you.

  Toby doesn’t drink for me, of course. But he feels like a pillar propping me up. I woodenly shake hands with men in suits and ladies in cocktail clothes. Who they are, I have no clue, beyond knowing they outearn me. In the midst of this, Lux shows up, and between him and Toby, I manage not to accept a single glass of the nonstop champagne flutes foisted on me from various silver trays.

  Later, I’m called onto the stage, where I’m supposed to stand immobile while they read my résumé—skimpy compared to every other. Then I’m meant to shake hands with one paw while I take the check with the other. Instead, I’ve fallen into such a flop sweat that a pause in the speech causes me to grab the check, thus failing to strike for the photographers the pose of humble gratitude I’d practiced for weeks in front of a mirror.

  At the party, Toby introduces me to his agent, a whippet-thin blonde with silver bangles up her muscled arm. She wears a raw-silk size-zero pencil skirt and is almost exactly my sister’s height in pricey heels. She lets Lux and me tag along to the expensive dinner for Toby.

  At the table, I feel conspicuous not ordering a drink, and—since water glasses haven’t shown up—as everybody else hoists a glass at Toby, I feebly hold an invisible glass in the air, as my head says, Do you think they are convinced by the nonexistent drink you are faux-lifting? I look at Toby, and the fact that his eyes don’t meet mine makes me wonder if he actually asked the agent whether Lux and I could come, or are we crashing? Am I supposed to pay for this meal? Next I know, Toby holds his glass aloft again, saying, And to my old pal Mary.

  A few minutes after everybody’s gone back to their conversations, I blurt out to nobody special, Thanks for having us. I say it loud enough that neighboring diners look over, but nobody says anything back. Lux keeps talking to the woman on his left. About that time, a passing waiter stops beside me to lift my napkin and lower it into my lap.

  I keep sweatily waiting for somebody to ask me why I’m not drinking so I can fire off one of the salvos Joan and I came up with, for to an alcoholic, not drinking is conspicuously freakish. (Now I realize nobody would notice excep
t another sot.) Maybe I’ll just say Fuck you or On second thought, maybe I will…Waiter!

  I look at my watch. Fewer than ten minutes have elapsed since we sat down, and the night yawns before me. I slip off to the pay phone to call Joan the Bone—no answer. Ditto Deb. Coming back to face a full wineglass, I see Lux isn’t in his seat. I stare around at Toby, his agent, his editor—their faces are at the pinched end of a telescope. At one point, I think, What if somebody says something to me? The next instant, What if somebody doesn’t?

  In the bathroom, I splash some water on my neck and study how pasty I’ve gone. Plus, my nose has grown gargantuan pores—I never exfoliated! And boy am I shiny. I shift the pins at the back of my head around, but a tendril keeps springing loose on one side. I try slicking it down with a few flecks of water. The hair spray in it enlivens it to jut out.

  Eventually, I latch myself into a stall, heart thumping, dizzy. It occurs to me I actually need to brace my hands on either side of the walls. My insides are ricocheting around when the old advice burbles up.

  Pray. Get on your knees and get still.

  So I kneel down, my bony knees in a puddle of Lord knows what. None of the promised quiet comes to me. Breathe, Joan tells me all the time. If you don’t believe in God, you know there’s scientific evidence about the psychological benefits of meditation, even among nonbelievers. Breathe deeply to calm yourself. Then count your breaths to ten, over and over.

  But when I start counting breaths—slow, deep inhalations—I almost hyperventilate. Correcting for it, I speed up my breathing till I’m panting like a pooch. After a lifetime of effortless breathing, I’ve forgotten how. For a few minutes, it feels like gasping underwater.

  I try to detach from the scattered thoughts that float up in me, and they start to drift away from the small damp spot I’m kneeling in. Silently, I say one of the few prayers I know, the serenity prayer—maybe my second or third truly desperate prayer.

  I clasp my hands together before my chest, and where my head has been jabbering, I find unusual space. Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please. Starting to get up, I kneel again. And keep me from feeling like such an asshole.