by Mary Karr
After a while all the flying around in there stopped. In fact, everything seemed to stop. The day itself stopped. Lecia elbowed me in the head to shut up my crying, so I did. Then for a long time there was just that clacking, humming sound.
They passed as fast as they had come. Lecia nudged me again, to look, and I lifted my head from my folded arms just in time to watch them peel away from the back windshield. You could see the cloud assemble and thicken before your very eyes. All over the inside of the curved back windshield, there were splats of locust goo with legs and antennae kind of spronged out, and a few hairy legs still flailing. Other than that, you could almost forget they were individual bugs at all and just look at the cloud. It rose up and seemed to shrink away, and blue sky appeared around it, and the humming receded. On either side of the road were bare fields, and it was that strip of naked road we followed to the outskirts of Lubbock and Grandma Moore’s house.
Grandma never did sugarcoat her opinion of Daddy. In fact, any skills she had at sweet-talking or diplomacy were said to have died with my grandfather, decades earlier. She said something about Mother coming to her senses, then immediately set us all to work putting up an evil sweet relish she called chowchow. Open jars cooling on all the cupboards steamed up the whole farmhouse. I was a fairly lazy child, unaccustomed to chores, and it seemed Grandma always had peas to shuck or stinging cucumbers to pick or some big piece of furniture we had to buff real hard. So I tended to drag-ass and generally make a poor impression, whereas Lecia thrived on instruction.
My memory of that day drifts into focus again with all four of us in Grandma’s bathroom, which seemed vast as a barn. The old woman was just out of the tub and dabbing drugstore powder all over herself with a big yellow puff. When I was little, she’d given me an enema once, and I could never look at her without fearing her bony strength. But naked, her body put me in mind of something real easy to hurt, like a turtle without a shell. Stripping down came more naturally to Mother. This was back when women’s underwear was like armor: the bra cups were rocket cones, and the hose stayed shaped like somebody else’s legs when you took them off. Mother wiggled out of her long-line girdle, which immediately shrank up with a dull snapping noise at her ankles. Why she wore that thing I don’t know, because she hated a girdle in summer like nothing else and sure didn’t need it. The diamond-shaped control panel left a mean imprint on her belly, where there was also a slanty scar from when I’d been born. (I had been a difficult birth, feet first, like Caesar, Mother liked to say.) She stepped into the steamy water with a grace she must have learned modeling for life study classes during art school in the forties, all flowing lines and violin curves.
I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and fiddling with one of Grandma’s hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She used these steel clamps with little teeth that made deep marks on my index finger as I played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother’s stockings in the sink, but Lecia was idly playing at fitting her arm inside one and peeling it off like a snakeskin. So Grandma kept cutting her a look as if to say, Get on with it. Every now and then, from my spot on the toilet, I’d lean out and try to snatch the other stocking away from Lecia, but she was way too fast.
“You can’t keep raising these children like heathens, Charlie Marie. The little one can’t even tie yet.”
I don’t remember making any defense of my shoe-tying disability. I just stood up from the toilet, pulling up my white underpants, which had little red apples printed all over them. Lecia had learned to tie at three. Grandma had even taught her how to tat lace by the time she was five. (Tatting is an insane activity that involves an eensy shuttle, thin silk thread, and maniacal patience. Belgian nuns are famous for tatting, it turns out.) Lecia had immediately generated half a dozen doilies, which Grandma had draped over worn spots on the sofa. In my hands, even the simple Jacob’s ladder that any kid in Vacation Bible School could make went all tangled. No matter how many times I was shown, my brain refused to hold on to the pathways necessary to tying a shoe bow. I was thought not so much boneheaded as stubborn on this point.
Mother lay soaking in the tub with a mint-green washcloth over her face. Her mouth made a dark spot in the terry cloth as she breathed. I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle. “Now this here is Crisco,” she said, cold-creaming her face. “You should never let anybody sell you anything else. They squeeze a couple of eye-droppers of perfume in it, and Charlie Marie will buy a tablespoon for a dollar. She just wants to throw money away! Do y’all still have those clay banks I got you down in Laredo?” At some point, Mother said the water was like ice, and would I hand her a robe.
The next morning, we drove out to visit Mother’s cousin Dotty, whose husband, Fermin, ran a cotton gin in Roundup, Texas. She had a sprawling white ranch house with so many bedrooms that none of us had to double up. Lecia and I had never been inside a house so fancy. There was a pool in the back and a storm cellar that a cleaning lady kept swept clean and stocked with jars of vegetables Dotty didn’t have to deal with till she forked them up to eat. Her daughter, Tess, had a pink Princess phone by her bed and kept her toenails painted frost white. Dotty’s son, Robert, wore a tie to his church school.
When you have relatives who farm, the first thing that always happens on a visit is a tour of the crop or the livestock or what-have-you. Other people trot out photo albums or new patio furniture or kids’ trophies. With relatives who farm, it’s almost impolite to ask about any of these things first. You get to them after lunch.
We took the farm road down through acres of cotton. The field was in full bloom. It almost made me dizzy the rows of plants rushing by. Each row ticked past as if marking time, and yet they all seemed to come together at one still point on the horizon. Dotty said it was a miracle that the locusts didn’t bother them at all this year. The same way tornadoes cut narrow paths—so an outhouse would be left standing alongside a house blown to splinters—the locusts chewed up fields at random. They’d left this one alone.
Grandma told how her daddy had farmed her out to chop cotton that looked just like that by hand when she was still a teenager. Her sister Earle had to go to work in the fields too, but the three other girls stayed home and took singing lessons. They were pretty and expected to “make good marriages,” which didn’t mean they’d be happy, only that they wouldn’t have to farm. The sepia portrait of all five sisters in Grandma’s parlor photo shows five wispy blondes. Their seeming frailty made it nearly impossible to believe that the two youngest had been rented out to sharecroppers. They wore eyelet-lace necklines and had those loose-blown Victorian roses pinned to their slouchy Gibson girl hairdos. They were pale, translucent, and somebody had tinted the picture slightly so that their cheeks and the roses were a faint peach color.
In the middle of the cotton field, we stopped Dotty’s Cadillac and climbed out of the air-conditioning. Up close, the plants were near black and spidery-looking. Each one had dozens of cotton bolls exploded in little clouds, each boll shot full of long skinny brown seeds. Grandma pulled one loose and expertly plucked out the seeds till she had a mass of pure fluff in her hand. She showed Lecia and me how to draw a thin thread out of it like spider silk by rolling the strand between thumb and forefinger and pulling just so.
Cotton was a mean crop, I recall her saying, like most money crops. It sucked a lot out of the ground and even more out of those who worked it. When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl. Water was so scarce that the average thirty-year-old had a dowager’s hump from toting buckets up to the house several times a day. Their faces wrinkled from too much sun, and their hands grew hard as boot leather. Every family buried a couple of kids, too, and that made them hard inside. Thinking of G
randma’s picture in the gold oval frame above Mother’s bed, I tried to imagine someone choosing those girly white hands of hers to do field work, but never quite fathomed it.
We stood in this field in our Sunday visiting clothes, Grandma dabbing at her temples with a hankie. About a stone’s throw away, there stood a barn and tall silo aswarm with Mexican workers. At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgment wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseat and wandered off to the barn. When I tried to follow, she squatted down and said to stay with Grandma. This caused Lecia to mouth that I was a baby, and subsequently I tossed a pebble at her kneecap, so Grandma clamped her bony hand on my shoulder and made me go sit in the hot car by myself.
On the way home, we pulled up to the barn to pick up Mother. The door to Dotty’s Cadillac made a big impression on me: it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and also lit up like Broadway when I heaved it open. Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying her sketch pad. One of them quickly tucked a pint bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket. You couldn’t smell liquor on her when she got in, but she had that clipped, Yankee way of talking she always got when she’d had a few. She must have done ten thousand such sketches in my childhood, but for some reason, that drawing stays with me: a hasty sketch of the older man in a sombrero, done in bold scrawls with few shadings, his face withered up. She pulled a can of Aqua Net hair spray out of her bag and sprayed the sketch to fix it, then snapped shut the pad. It bothered me that nobody else asked to look at it.
We stayed in Roundup a few days. The only outward sign of trouble in Dotty’s whole family during that time was that Robert had knocked up his high school girlfriend, who was Catholic and therefore needed marrying. The young wife lollygagged around the house in his football jersey, her belly so big she looked like a balloon from some parade. They were fifteen and slept in his room, on bunk beds. That sort of trouble happened often enough in those days. Robert was going to finish high school and eventually take over the cotton business.
He must have seen me as some sort of warm-up for being a daddy, because while Lecia was learning from Tess how to paint on eyeliner and tease her hair, he played tic-tac-toe with me on my magic slate. I remember he also drew me a Crayola picture of a train wreck he’d seen where people’s legs and heads were scattered every which way among the cotton plants. The cotton was amazingly detailed given how rough the rest of the drawing was. When he tucked me into bed he told me such a vivid (and grotesquely inaccurate) version of Rumpelstiltskin (where the mean troll forced the lady to spin straw into gold herself) that I can still recall my nightmares about it. There was a carbuncular troll who had locusts spewing out of his mouth, and he was threatening to take away Mother’s baby. I finally convinced Lecia to let me crawl into bed with her. But she made me sleep with my head down by her feet, stifled under the tucked-in covers. In the morning, Dotty lit into Robert for scaring me, and he lost interest in playing daddy.
I heard from him only a few other times. Two years later, he sent me a birthday card from China Beach, Vietnam. Mother said I must have made some kind of good impression on him, which was a first for me, so I sent him one of my school pictures. He sent back a picture of himself in jungle fatigues pointing what looked like a grenade launcher at a palm tree. The story is that three years later, home from the war in time for his twentieth birthday party, he stood up from the table saying he didn’t know why he was alive and his buddies were dead. Then he went crying into the bedroom. His wife and son were slicing the white sheet cake when the shot came.
That was about the only story I ever heard implying that anybody in Mother’s family was inherently Nervous. Oh, she had some outlaws everybody talked about. Her daddy had used his engineering degree to open a garage, which drove his banker daddy nuts. There was her great-uncle Earl who used to dress up like a matador when he got drunk, and her maternal grandfather, who’d been a bootlegger and who used to give her nickels to hear her cuss. I never heard anything more exotic than that. Most of the names block-printed in Grandma’s huge family Bible, which sat in a heavy plastic wrapper on her coffee table, meant nothing to me.
The morning Mother decided to go back to Daddy, she and Grandma had a fight about whether her lipstick was too dark. Grandma had brought it up at breakfast and just clamped down on it like a Gila monster. Finally, Mother stuffed our new clothes in her dead father’s Gladstone bag and piled us in the car in our pajamas again. Again the old woman had crimped her hair. Just before we pulled out, she poked her clamp-studded head in my window. Some curls had sprung loose from the clips, so she looked for all the world like the stone head of Medusa that Mother had shown us in her mythology book. The old lady called Leechfield a swamp, a suckhole, and the anus of the planet before Mother cranked up the engine. The too-sweet smell of Grandma’s hyacinth perfume hung in the car till Mother lit a Salem.
We drove all night, Lecia curled on the backseat. I stretched out dozing on the flat shelf under the rear windshield’s slope. The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The oil refineries and chemical plants gave the whole place a rotten-egg smell. The right wind could bring you a whiff of the Gulf, but that was rare. Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat. I later learned that Leechfield at that time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange, which surprised me not one bit. That morning, when I woke up lying under the back slant of the windshield, the world smelled not unlike a wicked fart in a close room. I opened my eyes. In the fields of gator grass, you could see the ghostly outline of oil rigs bucking in slow motion. They always reminded me of rodeo riders, or of some huge servant creatures rising up and bowing down to nothing in particular. In the distance, giant towers rose from each refinery, with flames that turned every night’s sky an odd, acid-green color. The first time I saw a glow-in-the-dark rosary, it reminded me of those five-story torches that circled the town at night. Then there were the white oil-storage tanks, miles of them, like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.
In case you think I exaggerate Leechfield’s overall nastiness, Business Week once voted it one of the ten ugliest towns on the planet. Mother was working as a stringer for the town paper when the story came out, and the mayor, whose only real job was to turn on the traffic light every morning, called a press conference. Mother brought Lecia and me along, and another reporter was there from The Port Arthur News. He was chewing Red Man tobacco, I remember, and spitting into a Folger’s can he’d brought with him for that purpose. In the back of the firehouse, somebody had strung up one of those big flags made out of the royal-blue felt that you see only at Scout jamborees. It had the town motto on it in gold letters: Leechfield Will Grease The Planet! Mother took a Polaroid of the mayor standing in front of it holding up the copy of Business Week like he’d won it in a raffle. The big-jawed reporter from Port Arthur told Lecia and me that he felt like he was supposed to write up the winner of a shit-eating contest. After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor’s wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that’d break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.
The last stars were clicking out just as we pulled up in our yard. The old Impala’s tires had left deep muddy grooves in the yard in front of our house when we’d backed out for Grandma’s days earlier. Those were what we plunged back into coming home.
Daddy had come in from the graveyard shift and was shaving at the kitchen sink, his hard hat sitting in the drainboard. He always shaved without a mirror, using soap and cold water, something he’d learned in the war. It was a kind of modesty for him, not watching himself too much. He was standing shirtless at the kitchen sink with little speckles of blood all over his chin. Lecia and I came tearing
in and threw ourselves around his skinny legs, but he made out like we hadn’t been anywhere. Like his own daddy, he might well have asked us if we’d got the coffee.
Mother threatened divorce a lot of times, and Daddy’s response to it was usually a kind of patient eye-rolling. He never spoke of divorce as an option. If I asked him worried questions about a particularly nasty fight, he’d just say I shouldn’t talk bad about my mother, as if even suggesting they might split up insulted her somehow. In his world, only full-blown lunatics got divorced. Regular citizens in a bad marriage just hunkered down and stood it.
His uncle Lee Gleason, for instance, didn’t speak to his wife for forty years before he died, but they didn’t bother with divorce. According to Daddy, who broke horses for Uncle Lee in the summer of 1931, Uncle Lee and Annie stopped talking that very year, after they got into a fight about how much money she spent on sugar. Annie Gleason saddled up an old mule they kept to keep the horses calm and rode all the way into Anhuac, Texas, with her boots dragging in the dust. She bought a fifty-pound sack of sugar, turned the mule around, and rode straight back and into the barn where Daddy and Uncle Lee were just nailing the last square-head nail into a quarter horse’s shoe. Still mounted on the mule, Annie slid a jackknife from her apron pocket and, staring straight at Uncle Lee, she raised it up and jammed it down into the burlap bag strapped across the mule’s backside. The sugar poured out of the sack, Daddy said, like a liquid.
We’re bass fishing with Cooter and Shug and Ben Bederman at the time I remember him telling it. We’re in Ben’s big fiberglass motorboat, which is way nicer than the little flat-bottomed rentals we’re used to. We each have a floatable red Coca-Cola cushion to sit on. I don’t know how old I am, but I haven’t yet outgrown the concept of fishing with Daddy, which must have happened when I was about eleven. I don’t even know yet that such concepts can be outgrown. All I know is that Cooter’s cigar smoke stinks to heaven. I jerk the banana-yellow lure across the surface of the water so its tiny propellers whir and stop, whir and stop. What in God’s name could a bass under water think that thing is, scooting along? I prefer a plastic worm sunk down in the bottom silt, but Ben has bossed me into this gadget.