Lit

by Mary Karr

  One Sunday I’m eating a bagel with a smear and reading the paper when Dev, age eight, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajamas, announces he wants to go to church.

  I barely look up. Despite my prayer life, organized religion still strikes me as bogus. Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was—as I’ve said before—no more able to commit to a faith than to a husband. She quoted Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses. So I’m suspect of the hierarchies.

  Idly asking Dev why he wants to go to church, I’m confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll. But he says: to see if God’s there.

  The phrase straightens my slouchy spine. Some native faith lets him stare out the window at the aluminum sky and see a scrim before heaven.

  Okay, I say, and I ring up a sober Episcopalian (an oxymoron, he alleges in the car), the only guy I know who goes to church. If I’d had a pal attending a mosque or temple or zendo, we’d have gone there.

  So disinterested am I, so devoid of curiosity, that I climb into my friend’s car toting a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pass time.

  It’s a capital-C Church, with gray stones right out of some horror-movie castle. It sits amid red maples between the university on one side and housing projects on the other. Soon as the engine dies, Dev bolts for the huge oak doors, his loafers slapping up the leaf-strewn walk. He has on a hand-me-down sport coat. With his green clip-on bow tie, he looks like some refugee from a 1950s wedding. Going in makes me a little watery.

  In the foyer, I expect to find some Ozzie and Harriet episode in progress, the women in pillbox hats and white gloves and ear bobs, the men in lizard-green jackets and wing tips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cucumber that makes white people look so seedy. But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis. Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on.

  Organ music starts in the sanctuary, and we drift into a barnlike structure with tall stained glass windows where saints I don’t know are doing saintly things I can’t figure out. We stand and sit and pray for over an hour. People take turns talking at the granite altar. Dev belts out hymns in his brassy alto while I flip pages. Afterward, people eat pastries in the foyer. Kids streak around. A few parents from Dev’s school say hey. Somebody brings me coffee like I like.

  This uninvited niceness seems like a trap. I keep waiting for them to ask me for money. In the car, I ask Dev whether God was there, expecting him to be as cynical as I am. Instead, he cocks his head and squints, as if saying, Where were you?

  We stop going to the Episcopal church after a few weeks because I find it too cold—not emotionally but physically. To heat that vaulted space would cost a fortune, I guess. Still, the scalding baths I take to get blood back into my feet after service feel like penance.

  Dev nudges me to take him to various places of worship. It’s still a social exercise for me, another maternal duty I hadn’t foreseen. Most places get just one visit. The Hebrew that mesmerizes me at the conservative temple frustrates Dev, who likes the Reform service, though it sometimes sounds to me—with its talk of Middle East strife—more political than spiritual. While I adore the hand-clapping gospel music of the Baptists, the anti-gay diatribe is tough to swallow, ditto the long service.

  By summer, I figure my half-baked sense of a higher power might resonate with the super-liberal Protestant parishes that shun dogma, but they actually put me off. Church X has the sterile feel of an operating theater. Since the well-off parishioners send their kids to fancy camps, it’s almost totally child-free. The sermon—on justice to one’s fellows—has so squeezed out any mention of God or Jesus, maybe to sound modern, there’s no sense of history. The pastor asks for peace and gives thanks for plenty, but the homily might come from Reader’s Digest.

  Looking for something to say to the pastor, I ask him how he deals with the problem of evil, and he says, We don’t believe in it—a phrase so obviously untrue, I wonder how they sell it. It’s like a Rotary Club meeting where everybody’s agreed on the agenda in advance and is only waiting for the danish to come out.

  Lots of professors go to Church Y, so again, I think maybe they’ll rook me in. But where Church X avoids God altogether, Church Y sees gods everywhere, each more or less interchangeable. These gods sound no more potent than the rabbit’s foot Dev carries into the batter’s box on a belt loop.

  The zendo wants people to sit in silence then chant for five minutes, which Dev could never do. You could be saying jump-rope rhymes, the monk informs me before the service. The breathing of the chants is supposed to relax you into a posture I couldn’t hold for the appointed time if you oil-canned my knees like Oz’s Tin Man.

  It’s a year before we follow Toby and his wife, Catherine, to their Catholic parish, maybe because I associate their church with the shame of my lapsed pals or the Inquisition’s torture devices.

  The whole surface of the room is sloppy with kids—toddlers zigzag down the aisles, babies squeak and yell. On the altar, Father Kane is a blue-eyed Irishman who takes us through Mass in the most unvarnished way, with none of the maudlin piety I’ve seen at some other churches and temples.

  At the outset, he seems humble without seeming bent or cowed. As a kid, I’d been dragged to a Mass by neighbors, where the priest downshifted in prayer into this slow, syrupy—extra-holy—way of talking, as the congregation no doubt prayed to get home in time for kickoff. When Father Kane breaks up the bread, the movements are simple, stripped of any show—with the solemn dignity of an enlightened master mechanic adjusting a carburetor—nothing pro forma about it. The process somehow erases him so he’s a clear conduit, and the keen quality of his attention draws me in.

  Toward the end of Mass, Dev whispers, Is that a yarmulke on his head?

  Since Dev goes to a Jewish after-school—the best in town—he’s covetous enough of a yarmulke that he once lopped the ears off his Mickey Mouse hat to make his own.

  I shush him, but Toby says under his breath, What is that? The priest has taped to the top of his scalp a round piece of wire mesh. From my vantage, I’d thought it was some holy hat, but now it looks like nothing so much as a small inverted sink-drain catcher.

  Father Kane tips the microphone and says sheepishly, I normally wouldn’t mention this, but I had a growth taken off my head. He pauses, almost blushing as he adds, I didn’t want you to think I’d joined the Hair Club for Men.

  Which draws hoots. Walking to the parking lot, I realize I forgot my paperback. For the first time since God-shopping, I haven’t cracked it open.

  Maybe I’m getting softheaded, I think, driving home. Or the burden of single-motherhood is making me a crackpot. Since Warren’s moved to New Haven for love and work, a church community seems like necessary parenting ballast, though twice a month, he drives in all weather to see Dev, even staying at our house, both alone and with his sweetheart.

  Still, if Dev loses the bow to his school-owned bass the night before a concert or needs his basketball hoop set to regulation height the night before his birthday party, it falls to me. And I won’t say the venal thought doesn’t flit through me that church folk look like they might have wrenches and lawn mowers to loan.

  On Halloween, Dev joins the line of Sunday school kids costumed as various saints and taking turns telling brief, sanitized stories of martyrdom. The tiny St. George—visor askew, plastic breastplate listing—comes last, announcing, You can be a saint, too! like a used-car salesman, which brings down the house.

  Not long after, Dev jumps the communion line—his first show of appetite for baptism. While I’m thumbing my missal, his pal Osiris crooks a finger and Dev shoots out of the pew. I lean forward to grab his sleeve, but he jerks away. The line edges up. I hiss at him to sit down, and he ignores me. Once the line curves, I lose sight of him till both boys pop up at the altar.

  Before the priest, Dev stands slim and solemn. I think how ancestors on both s
ides of his family sought this sacrament, which is painfully carnal if you think of it. The body of the god is absorbed by the human body to nourish the spirit. Dev’s mouth pops open wide as a baby bird’s.

  Afterward, the boys plop down beside me whispering, their hands busy. What obscene gestures, I wonder, are they practicing? But I crane over to catch them in the middle of that old hand game: Here’s the church. Here’s the steeple. Open the door and see all the people. The game’s been passed down for decades, one kid teaching another how to bear long, adult-prescribed intervals of inertia—a lineage I belong to.

  While the priest speaks and the responses come out, I feel myself as an animal herded among similar animals—an echo of the homeless shelter. I think how horses in the Colorado of my youth—huddled together in the cold.

  At one point parishioners call out their intentions, people they want prayers said for. For my daughter whose tumor has metastasized. For the refugees from Bosnia and Rwanda. In gratitude for the safe return of my mother from Ireland…

  Catholics aren’t who I thought they’d be, not even close. It isn’t the ritual of the high Mass that impresses me, but the people—their collective surrender. If I can’t do reverence to that, how dead are my innards?

  Within a week or two, it’s turning out that I forget to bring a paperback to Mass, so obviously, I’m not just coming for Dev anymore. It’s historical interest, I tell myself, when I start reading all manner of theology.

  When a married couple—he a former Jesuit, she once a nun—invite me to the Peace and Social Justice Committee, I stumble onto the lay tradition of working with the poor and against political tyranny. (I know, historically, plenty of Catholics worked for tyranny.) They protest nuclear arms and host refugees from Haiti and El Salvador. Every Sunday they have some batch of parolees who need jobs, or welfare moms looking for baby clothes.

  Plus they argue like mad. Say what you will about Catholic dogma, like it or lump it, it sure gets people yakking it up. I confess to this couple that Jesus Himself seems sappy—a chump or fool. For all my pretense of practicing surrender, I can’t grasp signing up for crucifixion.

  The wife says, Long time ago, I started focusing my faith on the Holy Spirit. She’s the female pronoun in the Greek Bible.

  C’mon, the husband says. It’s not called Holy Spirit-anity; it’s called Christianity.

  After Mass one day, I challenge Father Kane on certain aspects of the liturgy that bother me. Missal in hand, I bargain like an insurance salesman to convince him how crappy Jesus is. I say something like, He’s so snotty to the lady at the well. I mean, He’s putting her down for sleeping around. (Worried, I must’ve been, about how He’d have judged any future premarital hilarity of my own.)

  You think He’s angry? the priest says. I always thought He was joking or teasing her. And she was just shocked He knew that stuff about her life.

  It’s true. Looking at the text, I’ve overlaid a judgmental tone on the story.

  Father Kane says, You know the best part, though—or a couple things. She was Samaritan. She could only go to the well in the hottest part of the day. This was like a colored water fountain before the civil rights movement. And Jesus drinks after her—that’s the radical part. The disciples are saying, Why’d you even talk to her? But Jesus didn’t flinch.

  Father Kane knows that Dev is studying for baptism and first communion, and he asks if I’ve considered doing the same.

  I unload one of my key deal breakers: I don’t believe the pope is the ultimate religious authority.

  Father Kane says right back, Maybe someday you will. (Little did I know how outmatched I was with the modest Father Kane, who’d clearly had this kind of talk before.) Grinning, he adds, God’s after you. Struggle all you want.

  I’m actually a little shocked that he cares whether I convert. Still, I sign up for instruction, claiming it’s for conversations with Dev. But when the lady in charge of classes kicks me out because I have to miss a few for work travel, I run tattle to Father Kane, who sits me in a pew. He claims I’ve already read what they’ll cover in class instruction. He wants to know my impression of Jesus.

  I say, He was a peasant from a pigsty town who made all the civil and religious authorities so mad they killed Him. But for me, the Resurrection is only a metaphor for renewal.

  If you can believe He made all this happen—Father Kane waves his hand around the room—right here in our little church, forget Rome and Lourdes and all that. That’s a miracle, right? Somebody born into his station.

  Maybe I don’t belong here, I say.

  But you are here, he says. What’s keeping you from joining us? You come to Mass, but you’re denying yourself the Sacraments. Those are the consolations of the Church.

  In Mass the next week, I enter and get on my knees like everybody else, saying the prayers I usually say at home. Opening my eyes, I actually tear up. There’s something different about praying in company—I can’t deny it—once you get over feeling like a poser.

  About a week later, Father Kane tells me he’s found a way for me to miss classes and still be baptized with Dev if I want to. I can meet with Toby and talk about the gospels one-on-one. Father Kane will personally fill in any gaps.

  Which is how one of my literary heroes winds up my godfather.

  40

  Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes

  They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

  For over two years, Mother hounds me to let her read pages I’m scribbling about the worst patch of our family history, but I’m still x-ing out, deleting, starting over. She swears public opinion frets her not one whit. In fact, she and Lecia both signed off on a summary of the story before I set out.

  If I gave a big rat’s ass what anybody thought about me, Mother says, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA. Which I didn’t do.

  But I know reading it could hurt them, since writing it often wrings me out like a string mop. Some afternoons after I close my notebook—I’m working longhand—I just conk out on the floor of my study like a cross-country trucker. I see a shrink who says the naps don’t mean I’m repressing stuff. Don’t you know, he says, feeling all that stuff again is exhausting? So the prospect of dragging Mother and Lecia through it too feels like abuse.

  Mother’s sole focus is money. Whatever wounds I parade through the marketplace, she’s mostly just skippy I have a car, however far it is from paid off. In fact, she’s sure I’ve misunderstood the contract somehow.

  That’s your money though?

  That’s right, Mother. My money.

  What if they don’t like the book?

  Oh well.

  What if it doesn’t sell?

  What poet would plan for anything different?

  The next call she approaches head-on: There’s no way you’ll have to give the money back?

  No ma’am.

  No way, no how.

  Right.

  But do they know you’ve spent it already?

  Once she tries to finagle a peek at the book by threatening to die: saying, What if my heart fails before you finish it?

  I’ll just have to regret it the rest of my life.

  I remind her that as a portrait painter, she never turned the canvas around for view till it was dried, never signed it till she knew what she was endorsing.

  The summer it’s done, I fly her up to Syracuse. Right off, she drops her purse in the hall and falls on the manuscript like a harpie. No, she doesn’t want to come to the park with Dev and me. She waves us on. I’m not going anywhere, she says.

  She takes up a lounge chair in the backyard with pages in her lap while I obsessively assemble cold soups and dips and marinades for the grill nearby, trying not to vulch over her. What am I waiting for?

  Given that she takes in books the way a junkie
shoots dope, I want it to mesmerize her, which—since she’s its subject—is pretty much a slam dunk. I’m also hoping she’ll confirm in detail what she’s agreed in broad stroke is true.

  But there’s something more ineffable at stake, winding like thin smoke through me, unnamed. It’s as if—through the writing—I’ve assembled some miniature replica of myself as a girl, and she’s now being lowered onto Mother’s lap to be verified somehow.

  For all the schisms in my upbringing, the most savage scars didn’t come from pain. Pain has belief in it. Pain is required, Patti likes to say; suffering is optional. What used to hurt was the vast and wondering doubt that could spread inside me like a desert, the niggling suspicion that none of the hard parts even happened. So the characters that so vividly inhabited me were phantasms, any residual hurt my own warped concoction.

  I wanted Mother to see the girl I was—the girls Lecia and I were, really—to take us into her body as we’ve taken her so indelibly into ours. Is that love or need?

  As Mother reads, I grind beans to brew her coffee. I cut her sandwich into quarters. I keep wiping her ashtray clean. I dissolve sugar into tea and shave ice into a frosted glass.

  Occasionally, she hollers out, How’d you ever remember all this crazy crap? She laughs a lot. Once she says, This is your daddy to a T. I can smell him.

  But her strongest emotion seems to be for an alligator belt of hers I wrote about, which she mists up over, saying, I wonder where that went to? She absorbs the material—maybe as she did being our mother—as if it were a novel she’d already seen the film of, though like any mother, she’s inclined to heap on undiluted praise. No more convincing cheerleader ever shook a pom-pom.

  She’s almost to the end when she claims her eyes are tired.

  From downstairs that night, I hear small noises from the bathroom—stifled, intermittent squeaks like a mouse might make. I tap on the door, which opens to her red-rimmed eyes.