by Mary Karr
It’s not virtue that leads me to the Exercises but pain. Only a flamethrower on my ass ever drives me to knock-knock-knock on heaven’s door. Pain, in my case, is the sole stimulus for righteous action.
After six years in Syracuse—Dev’s eleven—I lost a love; or more accurately, I drove one away with a stick. It seems unfair to drag him in kicking and screaming for the purposes of this narrative, so here’s the short version. On tour in London, I’d taken up with a tall Cambridge-educated Brit met through work. (Let’s say his job was in TV.) Our months-long transatlantic affair had a glittery aspect. He owned more tuxedos than a maître d’, and I jetted over for his black-tie soirees. He spent a summer month in green Syracuse with Dev and me. But the distance was a misery. He ran a company in London, and I could never move Dev from his dad. Still, the Brit and I wound up engaged—as in to be married. He’d leave London for Syracuse and consulting.
For a few months I deluded myself that my old dream of family was assembling. I splurged on fancy barrister bookcases for his five thousand, first-edition books, which arrived in duct-taped bubble wrap. I cooked steamship roasts.
But Syracuse was drearier than London, with exactly zero tuxedo-specific events beyond the occasional prom. Plus an underemployed thirty-something bachelor with time on his hands wasn’t exactly a couture fit for a fortysomething workaholic with a six-foot son who giggled while chucking a basketball at said bachelor’s crotch. (You make him stop, I said, staring into my computer.)
The burden of the move quite literally broke the Brit’s back—a slipped disk flattened him. After months of hauling his dinner to him on a tray, I wanted to bubble-wrap him and stick stamps on his forehead. (So much for in sickness and in health.) We scheduled back surgery in London, Dev and I letting a summer place while he healed. But by then I was already wondering if we could get the deposit back on the reception hall, envisioning the dress I’d bought boxed up with mothballs. (If I’d been thinking like an adult instead of a gradeschooler with a Cinderella costume, I’d never have permitted anybody to give up a fancy job and house in Notting Hill.) I broke things off, but his departure tore open an old wound.
Once he’s gone, I begin to sense—as I shove my cart through the supermarket amid the Republican families on Sunday—a giant S on my chest for Spinster. Dev’s preoccupied with friends and rap records. Despite Patti and friends, the old lack of close family makes me fumingly mad at God, who, it may seem nutty to say, is real to me after years of prayer, not like the Easter Bunny or anything. All pain still makes me mad at God.
Running into Big John, who steers me into overhauling how I pray, strikes me as grace. We make best pals playing racquetball at my health club—a joke, given he’s six-five and a former Olympic contender for the water polo team. With our handicapping, I only have to score a single point to win.
As a young man, John had been torn between a career as an athlete and the Jesuit seminary, but he’d drunk his way out of both businesses. On getting sober, he’d started a swim club to pursue his dream of coaching Olympic-caliber competitors. A lumbering guy with curly brown hair and eyes the color of pool chlorine, he pursues that Olympic vision waking and sleeping.
When we meet, he’s sober longer than I am, and—due to his own heartbreak—he’s reconsidering whether he’s called to be a Jesuit. To discern the answer, he undertakes a lay version of the Exercises, emerging nine months later like a creature dipped in fine metal, heartbreak cured. Right after, his coaching career takes off like gangbusters. His swimmers start taking national prizes, and four are pulling down Olympic-level times. One gold-medals in Sydney. In short, following Ignatius jacked up both his mood and his productivity, and—competitive bitch that I am—this spiked my interest.
Still, I waffle when a nun outlines the time commitment—classes, spiritual direction, hours of prayer, journals. Also, while I wasn’t—for longer than I care to admit—boinking anybody, I didn’t want to scare off any future prospects. Imagine saying to your date that you can’t give up any nay-nay till your Franciscan spiritual advisor gives the thumbs up.
Then coming back from New York on the train one day, I slip into a familiar gap. It’s right before Christmas in a packed coach car, the overhead shelves crammed with suitcases and spilling bags and packages. I settle into a window seat with the backrest tilted far back. It’s the only place left. Behind me, a young woman—maybe nineteen—asks me to move my seat up. After fiddling with it for a second, I tell her it’s stuck in a deep recline. Then I lie back while passengers clot the aisles and jam in their overhead bags. She leans forward and says, very close to my ear, I bet if I yanked your hair, you could move that seat.
And from my sagging state of half-sleep, I snap awake and shoot back, You picked the wrong bitch to fuck with on this train.
Around us, the entire car stops. People hold gestures midair. She starts to kick the back of my seat—hard and rhythmically, which I don’t respond to at first. If I were thinking like anything but an animal, I would’ve apologized to her by now. But I sit there fuming instead, telling myself stuff like, She’s just doing this because I’m a woman of a certain age. I’m determined not to respond to the kicks that keep coming, but eventually, she says with force, You better not get off in Albany, bitch, ’cause I’ll slap your face.
With blood pounding in my temples and all the venom that a woman disappointed in love can bring to an instant, I press my face into the slot between the seat and the window and hiss, If you touch me, I’ll cut your fucking hand off.
I don’t even know where this sentence comes from. Not to mention that—in terms of cutting off a hand—I lack even a pair of cuticle scissors. All human activity within sound of me ceases. The entire car is throbbing with hatred for us both. The girl withdraws like a slug doused with salt, and the train lurches west.
About twenty minutes out of the station, while I sit infused with acid at the outburst, I try to write the girl a note, but I wind up crouching by her seat to apologize. She shrugs coolly.
Once home, I call my sobriety coach, Patti, who says, What d’you expect, Mare? Run around without a meeting, and eventually, you’ll start acting like a drunk again.
I wasn’t that bad back then.
Silence from Patti, who knows better.
Okay, sometimes I was.
She suggests I doctor bathwater with lavender salts, set votive candles all over, kill the lights, then step into my own baptismal fount. Maybe there I can rethink events on the train. Follow that, she says, with a list of how your life has changed since you quit drinking.
Lying back in the fragrant water, I let a washcloth obliterate my features, rewinding to the days and hours before I got on the train.
It’s the old story. Underslept and underfed, I’d been running with my shoulder bag thumping against my butt, doing quarterback dodges and rolls on crowded holiday streets, while behind me, pedestrians dove for cover. I was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d loped. Take the subway, the sane voice had said. Take the subway, you can buy a sandwich. Then counterattack claimed I needed cardio for the blubber on my ass. A sandwich isn’t the solution. You need to refinance. You need five hundred dollars this week or Dev’s Christmas is Tiny Tim’s.
You might as well call it the voice of the Adversary, for once I tune in to it, I’ve lost my real self—the God-made one, akin to others. The Adversary’s voice can suck me into the maelstrom of my tornado-force will, which’ll chew up anybody in its path, me included.
The washcloth steams my features soft, and once the water’s cold, I oil myself up like a bodybuilder, slip on sweats, then towel-wrap my hair like a Turkish pasha.
Heating up meatballs for Dev and his pals loudly playing air hockey in the basement, I do Patti’s list of what’s changed in ten years. The boys clattering downstairs are a nightly antidote to the shipwrecked household I grew up in, and we no longer have to roll coins from the sofa cushions in order to afford meat
balls. Last month at Mother’s surprise birthday, I floated in the pool alongside her and Lecia while brother-in-law Tom worked the grill and Dev and his cousin did cannonballs.
The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises—a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.
Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff—all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain—forlorn childhood, this failed relationship—I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.
How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God?
Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied, He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?
I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl.
She laughs at this and says, I see you—she peers through those lenses—what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.
So you don’t judge me? I want to know.
For what? she said. I don’t even know you.
Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day.
She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you?
God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.
I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.
I like the Disney version.
I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.
Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.
Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.
Together we bow our heads.
44
The Bog Queen
Where did they bury the dog after she hung herself,
and into the roots of what tree are those bones entangled?
I come blessed like a river of black rock, like a long secret,
and the kind of kindness that is like a door closed
but not locked. Yesterday I was nothing but a road
heading in four directions. When I threatened to run away
my mother said she’d take me wherever I wanted to go.
—Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Terrance”
The house I grew up in sat in a bog, and in the middle of the house sat my mother, well into her dotage. All my life, she’d blamed the place—anus of the universe, in her parlance—for robbing her of every artistic inclination. Daily, she willed it to slide back into the Gulf it sat on the edge of.
In my thirties, it actually started to sink: plots of land once three feet below sea level got to four. Houses sagged and listed on their brick stilts, and one end of a church parking lot disappeared into a sinkhole. The refineries that pumped toxins into the sky were showing around their rivets starbursts of rust, and fewer and fewer pickups lined up for parking slots every year. Young people started to move away after high school.
Among those left behind in tract houses and trailer parks, the occasional meth lab set off a spectacular explosion. Due to the acid-green poisons poured into bayous and backwaters, the cancer rate shot through the roof. Every family had its fair share of tumor scars and chemo stories. For others, the guns their fathers once pointed at squirrels and possums were increasingly turned on each other or taken between the teeth.
You’d think the destruction of the town would’ve left Mother, who’d cursed it for decades, doing some celebratory chicken dance on Main Street. But in a wry twist, Mother has come to love the house in the bog. She’s had it painted egg-yolk yellow. With the red roof and green lawn, it looks like a child’s crayon piece, with my mother inside it dwindling into a line drawing.
But the swamp is eating Mother’s house, too. Wet rot gobbles at the window fittings, and purple wisteria vines edge in, followed by various species of lizard and beetle. She finds, sleeping in the clothes hamper, a chicken snake big around as her wrist. A neighbor has to come with a hoe and a garbage bag to haul it off while Mother stands aside with a small snub-nosed revolver. All the house’s screens are imploding, their frames no longer square, and the back doorjamb is edged with encroaching honeysuckle.
Mother sits in the house reading the Bible along with histories of lost civilizations and books of gnostic mystery ordered from far away. Plus The New Yorker and Artforum. Her hair’s grown out from spiky to thick cumulus cloud, and the curves of her body have started to burn off. Though she’s shrinking down toward the underlying bone, her mind is unquenchable fire.
She’s grown saner with age, but she still has the lackadaisical whims of a kid. Even after a quadruple bypass has reamed the four chambers of her heart, she smokes nonstop and exists on a diet—I once heard her announce to her careworn cardiologist—of provolone cheese and summer sausage, fruit, and the occasional Ho Ho. Two suitors come to see her at regular intervals, but their romantic beseechings have become as matter-of-fact as her refusals. Afternoons, she plays dominoes with them at the kitchen table, speculating at length on which of them will die first.
And she says, I don’t know why I’m still here.
She lights one long cigarette after another and despite all this, fails to seem—exactly—unhappy.
She still has some arrows in her quiver. For instance, when she feels hungry for Mexican food or merely wants company, she’ll call my sister more than two hours away with killer traffic.
Lecia’s family of six (her son and four stepkids plus executive husband) keep her busy. She runs an insurance business that’s paid for a house, inside which are a waterfall and a pond with plump orange koi trained by regular feedings to recognize my sister’s shadow and swim to her with their mouths blowing her kisses from the pond’s surface. On the edge of that, a golf course where tall Husband Tom—nickname: Big, both for his height and after the romantic lead in a TV show—putts with an accuracy almost surgical. There’s even a metal-lined room to hide in if the revolution comes and bandits or insurgents show up. The Scarface House, I dub it.
But to run all this, my sister gets up at four or five most mornings, following a regimen fit for a five-star general executing a military coup. At night Big entertains executives by cooking vast carcasses on that grill the size of a station wagon. They take a lot of trips—some involving golf, which Lecia hates—and the rest of which she mostly doesn’t think up. In short, she’s as much slave as empress to her realm.
Yet when Mother calls to report a heart attack coming on, my sister grabs her bag and dashes out of the house, floorboarding her Batmobile down to the sagging corner of earth sliding toward the Gulf, only to find Mother affably awaiting her, palpitations miraculously improved. No, they needn’t visit the doctor, but that place on the corner has the best enchiladas and virgin margaritas.
Even after I urge my sister to ask Mother point-blank if she’s lying about her ailments to yank Lecia’s chain, and even after my Mother baldly confesses that she makes up about 95 percent of her maladies, my sister can’t stop herself from galloping toward the town of our birth, since forty years of training can’t be shaken off, and codependence is a terrible thing.
While we sisters agree it’s time to sell the sagging house and move Mother closer to one of us, each time we sound serious about this, Mother gets weepy and suffers shortness of breath and unprecedented rises in blood pressure that twist my sister’s innards.
&n
bsp; A few times I fly Mother to New York City, the mecca of her youth, and roll her through museums in a wheelchair until she says, I feel like a fool; why don’t I push you awhile? We horrify many citizens of that great city as she limps behind me and I recline, swigging water. At night, though she swears to stay out of the minibar, she forces me nearly to bankruptcy by devouring as many fifteen-dollar Cokes and twenty-dollar PayDay bars as she can in her brief stay. At one breakfast, I find her hands smeared with chocolate.
But I’m the prodigal, the long-gone daughter, and I can’t send home enough checks to pay down that guilt. And when one night she tells me her mother hasn’t come back with the car, and I have to remind her that her mother is forty years dead, I can hear the hoofbeats of the apocalypse galloping unwilled toward her.
So I fly home, crossing the patio whose bricks are being split by grass. I walk in, drop my bulging bag, holler, Honey, I’m home, and I find the dining room ceiling caved half in, the central air conditioner dangling down through plaster on a slanted slab of plywood, hanging in midair as if by magician’s wires.
Mother, I say, rushing into the room and feeling under my sandals the squish of water in the green shag carpet, which exudes moldy odors of a color I don’t want to picture. I say, Mother, what happened here?
I stare up into the hole while standing off to the side, fearing the rest of the ceiling is on the verge of collapse. Finally, I ask, Why didn’t you call somebody?
I didn’t know who to call, she says. She’s distractedly studying a crossword in one hand, her brass glasses on the tip of her narrow nose till she says, What’s an eleven-letter word for coinage of Alexander the Great?
I squish my feet, saying, The rug’s ruined. Can’t you smell that?
No worse than outside, she says.
This didn’t happen just today?