by Mary Karr
There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open—an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there.
How long passes? Somebody knocks on the door for group.
I creak to my feet, feeling lucky—which I maybe haven’t felt since the early glory days with Warren—lucky for my nutburger family, and for the near-strangers who’ve carried me the past nine months. Joan, before leaving town, and Deb and Liz and Janice come every day. Most of my putative friends—writers and academics and drinking buddies—not at all. Even Joe, who’s landed back in the joint on an old car-theft charge, sends me daily missives using stamps he can ill afford.
Somebody has given me a copy of a prayer attributed to St. Francis, and beginning that day, I set my dull mind to memorizing it. The prayer—which Jack of the Tinfoil Helmet first said that night going home from the meeting—now rivers through, sometimes dozens of times a day: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love…The first time I said it, I bridled against the phrase “O Divine Master” and the last two lines about eternal life, which I thought were horseshit.
O Divine Master, ask that I not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying to self that we are reborn
to eternal life.
As I slow down inside, the world’s metronome seems to speed up, for without keen, self-centered focus on your own inward suffering, clock hands spin. Days get windstormed off the calendar. Rather than thinking about spiritual practices, arguing them out in my head, I almost automatically try them. That, I suppose, is surrender.
My final few days at the hospital whipped past, so I recount them here in rough outline. I prayed to get to go to my Radcliffe meeting, and—without being asked—Mary offered to escort me on her day off. On a steaming August day, I attended my first scholars’ sherry hour wearing a plastic wrist bracelet I tried to hide under the sleeve of my gabardine jacket. Shortly after that, Warren ran into a friend of ours who was a shrink, and I called to ask if he could get me the fuck out of the bin, and he waved a wand that made Alice in Wonderland disappear like the ghost she was. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Then I was stepping through the door of my own house. Then my son’s smooth arms were around my neck.
34
The Sweet Hereafter
In the loony bin, I surrendered—not full bore, the way saints do, once and for all, blowing away my ego in perfect service to God—not even close. But watching the world through chicken wire convinced me that my unguided thought process would no doubt swerve me into concrete. Before, I’d feared surrender would sand me down to nothing. Now I’ve started believing it can bloom me more solidly into myself.
So once home, I take suggestions I’d carped about before with a new zeal, albeit with the occasional snotty look on my face. I sit squirmy in prayer while conflicting thoughts zip through my skull like so many simultaneously slammed tennis balls. Before, prayer had involved bouncing on and off my knees so fast it resembled a break dance move.
Make a daily gratitude list, Joan said, using every letter of the alphabet to delineate what you’re grateful for.
Like J for Joan the Bone.
Bingo, she says.
You’re not serious. That’s so puerile.
Childish things for stubborn children, she says.
I’m teaching again with some ease, and the writing started in the hospital plows forward.
Warren and I exist like kindly intentioned siblings, though he’s putting forth more effort. On my birthday, he stuns me by gathering friends at a restaurant to holler surprise, but when he reaches for me the next morning, I roll away. The prospect scares me. Never, I think, could I kiss that handsome mouth. Whatever his reaction stays shut inside him. I follow the old advice of St. Jack of the Tinfoil, who’d counseled me to fulfill my contract unless otherwise guided.
Right before I hit a year sober, Joan suggests starting a women’s group for gab of some spiritual variety—think quilting bee where we stitch on each other’s souls, autopsy where the corpses take turns carving. In my office at Radcliffe on Sunday nights, we meet—about four or five sober women trying to stay that way.
Nobody operates from a formal religious construct, no church ladies or temple mavens. Joan rustles up a list of discussion topics she used in a similar group, and we start off talking about prayer. When Deb claims her regular prayer is for a joyous day filled with serenity, I say, You can ask for that?
Nights I put Dev to bed, the St. Francis prayer becomes part of our ritual, in the form of call and response. I say, Where there is hatred, let me sow, and he shouts out, Love. I say, Where there is conflict, and he hollers, Pardon. Afterward, if I have trouble sleeping, I lie in a hot bath with a washcloth over my face, saying prayers I hardly believe but take blind comfort from.
I’m still given to cussing any traditional notion of God.
What god would deny you children? I say to Deb, for she’s enduring torturous in vitro hormones trying to conceive. Some afternoons at the house, I inflict the agonizing shots, the big needle stiff in her muscle, while in the next room, a house resident may have popped out a second or third addicted or HIV-positive baby. Deb’s calm baffles me.
I’ve let go, she says.
If you’ve surrendered, I say (I get maniacal in these arguments), wouldn’t you stop using the hormones and harvesting the ova?
Deb says, It may not be right for me to conceive. But to pursue them and not get them will somehow turn out in my favor in some way I can’t foresee now. (Years later, Deb will divorce, and her ex will kill himself, and she’ll tell me, Now I see maybe why we could never get pregnant.) I tell the other women that Deb doesn’t even mark on her calendar when her period’s due. Her doctor does that. She needs to relinquish all control.
Joan wonders if the rest of us could manage such faith, and we strike a deal that we’ll all let go our own wills as openhandedly. In fact, until each of us has given up care of her life to some greater force for good, the group won’t go on.
But I quibble so much about arcane definitions of will and care that the women wind up voting that I’ve surrendered already and am just being a bitch about it.
And to their will, I yield, which is a start.
With the group, I finally succumb to Joan’s long-running nag that I list stuff I feel most crappy about—every single grudge and humiliation—a private exercise we all talk about over a month or so. I break mine into columns with the crappy thing on the left, the particular way it hurt me in the middle, my part in it on the right. In some cases—being sexually assaulted, say—my part has been burying or ignoring the awful event in a way that restabs the wound. Almost eighty pages, mine gets to be. Theirs are way shorter, since they’ve done this before.
Sitting in my posh office in low lamplight one Sunday, we unscrew Oreos and sip muddy coffee while privately rolling down our individual columns—we cherrypick what to share—and it floors me to see laid out how fear has governed pretty much my every moronic choice. I’ve never regarded myself as a fearful individual. I’ve hitchhiked in Mexico and blustered drunk into biker bars all mouthy. Those acts now strike me as more pitiful than brave—the sad bravado of a girl with little to lose.
We’re supposed to go over the full grudge lists with another person, and Joan gives me a list of sober preachers and rabbis and priests who’ll listen. In my shame, I half expect a religious guy to hurl lightning bolts down on my head.
A man with a thick Irish lilt answers one call. Come on over, he says. But would you mind bringing me a Coca-Cola? I crave the stuff and can’t afford it.
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I wind up in a room facing a guy in a monk’s robe, a giant crucifix hanging from his belt like a scalp. Brother Francis (not his name) is over eighty and skeletally thin, with sunken cheeks and blue veins all over an age-spotted skull. The liter of Coke sits on the low table between us, alongside an ashtray. The instant I sit down, he pulls out a pack of rolling papers and constructs an immaculate ciggie while I light up. Both of us smoke like tar kilns the whole time as legal pads I flip through quickly pile in my lap—minor offenses. But when it comes to the wreckage of my romantic past, I stall, holding my styrofoam cup as I press my thumbnail around the rim in a series of half moons.
We seem to have reached an impasse, he says.
Well, Francis, there are some things I’m uncomfortable talking about with you.
His thin lips draw on his hand-rolled stogie. He says with an expression of terrifying hilarity, Are they things of a sexual nature?
I nod.
He exhales smoke and says, Maybe I can put you at ease, for I’ve had more experience in that area than my vows would suggest.
He tells me some pretty hair-raising stories about his life in South America, when he was still on the whiskey. How he wound up joining a twelve-step program for people whose sexual natures were—in his words—severely disordered. His tale doesn’t involve pedophilia or some fetish for disemboweling kittens or anything gross. But my betrayals—cheating on a college beau, making out with my English boyfriend’s Afghan squash-playing pal—pretty much pale alongside his. I sit and listen until dark comes, and the next morning I come back for most of the day.
At the end, jazzed to the gills on many plastic bottles of Coke, I sit drained over the overflowing ashtray, and Brother Francis blinks behind his smeary horn-rims, saying, Leave all that stuff here with me. God wants you to put this stuff down now. Go wear the world like a loose garment. And be of good cheer. If you let God in, He’ll take this shame from you.
Descending the subway stairs, I no longer ooze the sweaty, reptilian stench I walked in with, but I can’t say I feel like I’ve wholly shed my past. That night, though, I sleep like somebody clocked with a sledgehammer. The next morning in the bathroom mirror, there’s more shine in my eyes. Throughout the day, when my head lurches for the old miseries to start gnawing on, I have a touchstone phrase—That’s done—I blurt internally as often as need be. The mind, whirring for decades at thousands of rpm’s per second, keeps trying to fill in new freefalls of quiet. For the first time in my life, I go to sleep every night soundly, without medication, sometimes nine hours a pop.
Don’t get me wrong. The irritation that once drove me like a cato’-nine-tails can start flailing in an instant. But now the car door I slam or the snipe I let fly at Warren trails an apology. I blurt out sorry nonstop, since I never again want to nurse such bitterness as I’d stored up before.
Once, I’m laden with parcels and carrying Dev up slick stairs on my hip after he’s hurt his ankle, and he calls me poopy head so many times that I’m ready to fling him down and swear. But a quick prayer—Please let me be a loving mom—leads me to bust out laughing instead.
When a guy honks and cuts me off and shrieks at me, calling me the c-word, my hand does not automatically flip him the bird—a small change, maybe, but for me profound. That spring-loaded trigger has eased off. The guy’s comment just flows past as if I’ve been lacquered over. Every so often I find myself praying for citizens like him, though in the past I might have petitioned for a machine gun.
One morning at my desk, an essay I’ve had an idea about starts to unreel itself like a satin ribbon. Six hours later, I look up and realize I’ve been writing with ease.
Some days, premenstrual self-loathing can transform me into a ring-tailed, horn-honking, door-slamming bitch. But those incidents now strike me as 100 percent my problem, regardless of provocation. And they bring me to my knees, for it’s on their back end that I sometimes fantasize about a slender glass of innocent champagne with some berry-colored crème de cassis making a little sunset in the flute’s bottom.
Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past. But the spiritual lens—even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day’s actions—is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.
35
I Accept a Position
“I accept the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when someone repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad! she’d better!”
—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Just when I’ve stopped craving a drink, a job offer from Syracuse floats down, with grad students and colleagues like Toby, plus a curriculum that’ll let me scavenge the library like in the golden days of grad school. But I can’t picture staying sober outside the circle I’ve conscribed—the women I hang out with, the house, coffee making for meetings, a meditation group. The further I get from that rainy night my car skidded sideways on my last drunk, the bleaker the outlook of toppling back into the tar I’ve just slithered out of. A beer has come to seem like a bullet in a gun’s chamber. But the occasional urge for icy oblivion can still tear through me with brute longing.
So after some prayer, I turn down the first few Syracuse offers. It’s not the money, I swear. There’s just way more quiet in my head around staying than going, which Joan says is how a spiritually inspired idea might rival a will-driven or egocentric one. I’m trying to train myself to tune in to the quiet messages inside. (That’s the kind of softheaded loon—I sometimes think—I’m dwindling into.) After each refusal, the chairman calls back with an offer of stuff tacked on—a parking place, teaching for Warren, a new computer, moving expenses, a foreshortened period of time before I come up for tenure.
The last time the phone rings, I’m shocked to hear the guy again, more so at how fetching the whole enterprise sounds all of a sudden. I get a solid little click in my chest, some new peace at the prospect of going. I try to buy a day, but he exhales impatience, giving me till five.
My first impulse in telling this is to claim that Warren had wanted to leave Cambridge worse than I did. That’s how I remember it. His book was almost due out, and teaching appealed to him. We’d settled it with a phone call. Except that’s horse dookey. So empty is my head when it comes to us, so seared of detail, I fell to rifling old notebooks, which held an opposing truth: Warren and I went back and forth when the offer came up.
Again, there’s that mysterious dead-head space around the marriage’s unraveling. This blanking out has the same flat quality surrounding my time with Daddy before leaving home. The Freudian implications aren’t lost on me, of course. But what do these two radical disconnects mean in the story? Maybe my forgetting is how I absolve myself for bailing out in both cases.
Ultimately, I ring the chairman back to accept. He says, You’re the toughest negotiator I’ve ever dealt with. This was our final offer. I was calling the next candidate if you said no again.
How can I tell him that had I been negotiating, I’d have taken the first offer?
Right before decamping, I go with a few women from my group plus Dev for a weekend on Cape Cod. He splashes in the waves with the ladies, and at night we boil lobsters and stuff ourselves with mounds of herb-sticky pasta.
At dusk on Sunday, we all pat together an ornate sand castle with moats and levees and bridges. We mold bucket-shaped turrets. The courtyard’s tiled with seashells. The scene blows back to me now with a high, clear oboe note of joy, a feeling then so unfamiliar, it no doubt accounts for my vivid recollections of that day—the sound of Dev’s yellow shovel going shush, shush in wet sand. Behind us, winds in long grasses hiss. The sky is fading to purple with a fat sun red as a cough lozenge about to sink into the sea.
I lounge in a
low deck chair, a glass of lemonade jammed in the sand beside me. Dev’s hunched over, moving down our ranks, packing sand over each set of feet. Deb adds her own pebble toenails.
Why didn’t I ever go on vacation before? I wonder.
You and Warren never went? Liz asks.
Just to his folks’ houses. We were always so broke, trying to find time to write.
Deb says, Didn’t you go to the Vineyard once?
That’s right, I say. See, I still fail to remember the good stuff very much. (In my head, I can hear Joan—who wasn’t there—say, Work on that.)
Warren and I fought on the ferry going over, I remember, because he didn’t want our friends to come for the weekend. He wanted to write the whole time. So I pouted most of the week.
You figured he was being stubborn, Deb says.
But I was being—(I flounder for a word and hear Joan say stubborn)—stubborn.
You could’ve taken other holidays, though, Deb says.
Liz comes around with more lemonade and tops me off.
That’s what our therapist says. Maybe we can swap houses with somebody in another city.
Dev, done with patting sand on my feet, informs me it’s his garage; my feet are cars; I need to reverse them easy so the structure doesn’t collapse. I gingerly slide them out, and he whoops, then runs down to get a bucket of water. The sandpipers clear him a path. We watch him lug his bucket sloshing back and set it next to me.
What’s this for? I say.
To wash your feet off, he says. He dumps the cold water over my callused dogs.
Deb says, This is how he’s gonna think women are—just lined up in front of him, cooing approval.
Now bury my feet, he says. Soon as he slides down in the deck chair, though, his body folds in on itself. His head drops. Every line of him loosens. The sun’s low, the western sky burning. Smoke from somebody’s grill drifts over us.