by Mary Karr
“And so what’d Uncle Lee do?” Cooter asked. Sometimes I think the Liars’ Club lets Cooter come along just because he always asks the next question. He’s never caught a fish the others didn’t make him throw back.
“Do?” Daddy cocked his head sideways. “Ain’t nothing he could do. He just shakes his head and says, ‘You silly sumbitch,’ and that’s the last they ever spoke. Them three words.”
“Tell how they split up the house, Daddy.”
“This goes on,” Daddy says, “more than ten years.” He roots around in the cooler for a beer. “First they leave notes around the house. Grocery lists, that sort of thing. But pretty soon they leave off with that too. Then something funny happens. It’s like Lee knows what Annie wants before she even wants it. And viceyversa. Say she needs some lard or some such thing. In walks Lee with just-bought lard. Or he wakes up hungry for biscuits, and she’s got the jar lid pressed into the dough already.”
Shug makes a mmh-mmh-mmh sound that says the wonders never cease.
“Not a goddamn peep between them,” Daddy says. “Sleep in the same bed. Eat out the same pot. When I get back from Germany, I’m walking up the road, and he’s just climbing outta his Jeep. ‘Pete,’ he says, ‘you’re the very duck I been waiting for.’ And he tells me this plan he’s worked out.
“Next morning we get up, and sure enough, they ain’t talking. Old Annie hugged on my neck—she could flat hug you hard. Spoke to me like he wasn’t even in the room. After a little while she gets the eggs and bacon cooked and a mess of grits. We set there and eat. And when she leaves for church, me and Lee we get the lumber saw and split that house as clean in half as a oyster. Top to bottom, roof down to the floor. I mean, when she pulls up in that old Jeep that night—they had some function or other that kept her all day—we’re just hooking up the tractor to haul her half off.”
“And she don’t have nothing to say about all this?” Shug asks. He’s helping me untangle one of my lure’s three-pronged hooks from the green nylon line.
“Wouldn’t have said shit with a mouthful of it. See those reeds over there, Pokey?” He gestures with his Schlitz can. “I’d try and put it over there.” He frequently leaves off his own fishing to instruct me, and I am today feeling too big to be instructed, having already been instructed out of my plastic worm and into this miserable excuse for a lure by Mr. Bederman.
“Why didn’t they just get a divorce?” Shug asked.
Daddy cuts his eyes back over at Shug like he’s nuts, then shrugs. My lure plops in the reeds while I squint to recollect the divided house. The two halves sat on the same acre of ground, a scruffy bank of pines separating one half from sight of the other. Daddy and Uncle Lee had nailed raw planks over the sawed-open part. But the idea of the house split wide open like that, showing everything inside, gave me the hives.
Maybe that’s what Mother and Daddy should have done. Still, I swore to myself in that very boat that if they ever split up for good, I would run away and live in the bathroom of the Esso station. I would buy a thirty-five-cent corn dog one day and tamales from the road stand the next. However much that added up to, I planned to make it shining shoes at the barbershop.
Mother kept a copy of a map I left her once when I was running away from home. It shows a dashed line between our house and the Gulf station. There’s an X in the ladies’ room with “me” marked above it.
What I didn’t know until I finally did leave home at fifteen was that, if I had lit out, nobody would organize any posse to sniff me down. Hell, they just figured that wherever I was headed, it must be better than Leechfield. I was a seventh-generation Texan by way of Tennessee and before that Ireland. So I was descended from what the writer Harry Crews once called the great “If you git work, write” tradition. For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to “run away” in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.
Sometimes, when my parents were raging at each other in the kitchen, Lecia and I would talk about finding a shack on the beach to live in. We’d sit cross-legged under the blue cotton quilt with a flashlight, doing parodies of their fights. “Reel Six, Tape Fifty-one. Let her roll,” Lecia would say. She would clap her arms together like a gator jaw as if what we were listening to was only one more take in a long movie we were shooting. She had a way of shining the flashlight under her chin and sucking in her cheeks, so her eyes became hooded and her cheekbones got as sharp as Mother’s. She also had a knack for Mother’s sometime Yankee accent, which only came out under stress or chemical influence. Think of a young Katharine Hepburn somehow infected with the syntax and inflections of an evangelist: I wish that whatever God there might be had struck my car with lightning before I crossed the bridge into this Goddamned East Texas Shithole. Sometimes she’d just cry, and Lecia’s imitation of that was cruelest: There’s no hope, there’s no hope, she’d say with a Gloria Swanson melodrama, her wrist flung back to her forehead like it had been stapled there.
I always did Daddy’s part, which didn’t require much in the way of thought, since he was either silent or his voice was too quiet to hear. The only thing he ever shouted clearly was You kiss my ass! He sometimes turned this invective into a line of advice aimed at whomever Mother found to rage about: Tell them to kiss your ass, he’d say. “They” could be the IRS or a pack of Bible-thumpers knocking on our door to convert us. Tell them to kiss your ass was what you could expect him to suggest. (To this day I have some chute in my head from which “kiss my ass” tumbles. It’s truly amazing the number of times it seems applicable.)
Sometimes we’d hear a crash or the sound of a body hitting the linoleum, and then we’d go streaking in there in our pajamas to see who’d thrown what or who’d passed out. If they were still halfway conscious, they’d scare us back to bed. “Git back to bed. This ain’t nothing to do with you,” Daddy would say, or Mother would point at us and say, “Don’t talk to me like that in front of these kids!” Once I heard Daddy roar up out of sleep when Mother had apparently dumped a glass of vodka on him, after which she broke and ran for the back door. We got into the kitchen in time to see him dragging her back to the kitchen sink, where he systematically filled three glasses of water and emptied them on her head. That was one of the rare nights that ended with them laughing. In fact, it put them in such a good mood that they took us out to the drive-in to see The Night of the Iguana while they nuzzled in the front seat.
When I stepped out the front door into sunlight after a night of their fighting, the activities of the neighbors who looked up from their trash cans or lawn mowers always seemed impossibly innocent. How could people fill their days with those kinds of chores? Sometimes I felt our house divided like Lee and Annie’s. Or I felt like the neighbors’ stares had bored so many imaginary holes in our walls that the whole house was rotten as wormy wood. I never quite got over thinking that folks looked at us funny on mornings after Mother and Daddy had fought. Whether this was prescient or paranoid on my part, I don’t know. If one of the ladies bumped into our grocery cart at the store, she might ask Mother over for coffee, almost as a reflex, before she’d had time to imagine such an ordeal. But a woman’s face always showed palpable relief when Mother declined. And I noticed that when somebody’s mom went knocking on doors for company, she never knocked on ours. The more devout families wouldn’t even let their kids come into our yard.
This wasn’t all Mother’s fault, God knows. Daddy scared the hell out of people. Some days he was just spring-loaded on having a fight. For instance, once when we were standing in line to pay the gas bill, he socked a young Coca-Cola driver for saying we shouldn’t be in Vietnam.
And Lecia and I both behaved like savages at any opportunity. When she was only twelve, Lecia could beat the dogshit out of any neighbor boy up to the age of fifteen. For my part, I can remember standing behind the drainage ditch in our yard cussing Carol Sharp for
bloodying my nose. I had blood sprayed down the front of my new yellow sunsuit, one that tied at the shoulders and had elastic around the legs. I couldn’t have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said I didn’t give a shit. Following Daddy’s advice for any sort of conflict, I was likely to yell at any of the neighbor ladies to kiss my rosy red ass, then dodge into our house before they could catch and spank me.
At dusk in the late summer in 1962, the mosquitos rose up from the bayous and drainage ditches. Kids fell ill with the sleeping sickness, as we called encephalitis. Marvalene Seesacque came out of a six-month coma that left her what we called half-a-bubble off plumb. Other kids weren’t lucky enough even to wake up, and for the front page of the paper, Mother had taken a slew of funeral pictures with tiny coffins. A mosquito truck was dispatched from Leechfield Public Works to smoke down the bad swarms. It puttered down the streets every evening trailing a long cloud of DDT from a hose as big around as a dinner plate. Our last game of the day that summer often involved mounting our bikes and having a slow race behind the mosquito truck.
A slow race is the definitive Leechfield competition. You win it by coming in last. This might sound easy enough to do unless you’re riding a two-wheeler, in which case slowing too far down makes you tump over. The trick was to pedal just fast enough to stay upright, but not fast enough to pull ahead of anybody. Add to this the wet white cloud of poison the mosquito truck pumped out to wrap around your sweaty body and send a sweet burn through your lungs, and you have just the kind of game we liked best—one where the winners got to vomit and faint. That was what I remember Tommy Sharp doing, vomiting in the ditch in front of the swimming pool. Shirley Carter set down the kickstand on her red Schwinn just in time to pass out cold as a wedge on the roadside, so that Lyle Petit’s mother, who worked as a nurse, had to be called to blow into her face and get her going again. Not a winner, I was standing in the crowd of kids watching her blue face get pinker when my mother started calling me.
All the kids looked up. It was never Mother who called us. Mother rarely even came out in the front yard since Mr. Sharp had told her she was going to hell for drinking beer and breastfeeding me on the porch. “You could see evil in the crotch of a tree, you old fart,” she was supposed to have said in reply. Since then, it was Daddy who hauled the garbage out front and did any calling home for supper. At the sound of her voice, the kids all startled a little the way a herd of antelope on one of those African documentaries will lift their heads from the water hole at the first scent of a lion.
I started running, vaulting the muddy ditches that ran in front of the identical houses. I’d just leapt over one of the squat towers of mud that crawdads left when I saw my grandmother’s red Ford wagon parked in front of our house. Our car always arrived from even the shortest trip strewn with candy wrappers and soda bottles and a coffee can sloshing with pee. But when I peeked into the Ford’s window, it looked like the old woman had driven clear across the state of Texas with nothing more than a box of pink tissues. Mother was holding the screen door open and shading her eyes as I climbed up onto the concrete porch. Her cheekbones winged out, and her eyes were the flawed green of cracked marbles. She told me that Grandma had cancer and had come to stay with us for a while, but that I shouldn’t let on I knew.
Maybe it’s wrong to blame the arrival of Grandma Moore for much of the worst hurt in my family, but she was such a ring-tailed bitch that I do. She sat like some dissipated empress in Mother’s huge art deco chair (mint-green vinyl with square black arms), which she turned to face right out of our front picture window like she was about to start issuing proclamations any minute.
All day, she doled out criticisms that set my mother to scurrying around with her face set so tight her mouth was a hyphen. The drapes were awful; let’s make some new. When was the last time we’d cleaned our windows? (Never.) Had Mother put on weight? She seemed pudged up. I looked plumb like a wetback I was so dark. (Lecia had managed to come out blond like her people, but Grandma never got over my looking vaguely Indian like Daddy.) And I was pore-looking, a term she reserved for underfed farm animals and the hookworm-ridden Cajun kids we saw trying to catch crawfish on summer afternoons on the edge of Taylor’s Bayou. (Marvalene Seesacque once described her incentive for crawdadding all day: “You don’t catch, you don’t eat.”)
In a house where I often opened a can of tamales for breakfast and ate them cold (I remember sucking the cuminy tomato sauce off the paper each one was wrapped in) Grandma cut out a Reader’s Digest story on the four major food groups and taped it to the refrigerator. Suddenly our family dinners involved dishes you saw on TV, like meatloaf—stuff you had to light the oven to make, which Mother normally didn’t even bother doing for Thanksgiving.
Our family’s habit of eating meals in the middle of my parents’ bed also broke overnight. Mother had made the bed extra big by stitching two mattresses together and using coat hangers to hook up their frames. She’d said that she needed some spread-out space because of the humidity, a word Lecia and I misheard for a long time as stupidity. (Hence, our tendency to say, It ain’t the heat, it’s the stupidity.) It was the biggest bed I ever saw, and filled their whole bedroom wall-to-wall. She had to stitch up special sheets for it, and even the chest of drawers had to be put out in the hall. The only pieces of furniture that still fit next to the bed were a standing brass ashtray shaped like a Viking ship on Daddy’s side and a tall black reading lamp next to a wobbly tower of hardback books on Mother’s.
Anyway, the four of us tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our backs together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs. Mother called it picnic-style, but since I’ve been grown, I recall it as just plain odd. I’ve often longed to take out an ad in a major metropolitan paper and ask whether anybody else’s family ate back-to-back in the parents’ bed, and what such a habit might signify.
With Grandma there, we used not just the table but table linens. Mother hired a black woman named Mae Brown to wash and iron the tablecloth and napkins when they got greased up. And we couldn’t just come in out of the heat at midday and pull off our clothes anymore with Grandma there. We’d had this habit of stripping down to underwear or putting on pajamas in the house, no matter what the time. In the serious heat, we’d lie for hours half-naked on the wooden floor in front of the black blade-fan sucking chipped ice out of wadded-up dish towels. Now Grandma even tried to get us to keep shoes and socks on. Plus we had to take baths every night. One of these first baths ended with the old woman holding me in a rough towel on her lap while she scrubbed at my neck with fingernail-polish remover. (It had supposedly accumulated quite a crust.)
She undertook to supervise our religious training, which had until then consisted of sporadic visits to Christian Science Sunday school alternating with the exercises from a book Mother had on yoga postures. (I could sustain a full-lotus position at five.) Grandma bought Lecia and me each white leather Bibles that zipped shut. “If you read three chapters a day and five on Sunday, you can read the Holy Bible in one year,” she said. I don’t remember ever unzipping mine once after unwrapping it, for Grandma was prone to abandoning any project that came to seem too daunting, as making us into Christians must have seemed.
Much later, when Mother could be brought to talk about her own childhood, she told stories about how peculiar her mother’s habits had been. Grandma Moore didn’t sound like such a religious fanatic back then. She just seemed like a fanatic in general. For instance, she had once sent away for a detective-training kit from a magazine. The plan was for her and Mother to spy on their neighbors—this, back when the Lubbock population still fit into three digits. According to Mother, this surveillance went on for weeks. Grandma would stirrup Mother up to the parson’s curtain
ed windows—and not because of any suspected adultery or flagrant sinning, but to find out whether his wife did her cakes from scratch or not. She kept the answers to these kinds of questions in an alphabetized log of prominent families. She would also zero in on some particular person who troubled her and keep track of all his comings and goings for weeks on end. She knew the procedure for taking fingerprints and kept Mother’s on a recipe card, in case she was ever kidnapped. Grandma even began to collect little forensic envelopes of hair and dust that she found on people’s furniture when she visited them. Mother said that for the better part of a year, they’d be taking tea at some lady’s house, when her mother would suddenly sneak an envelope with something like a dustball in it into the pocket of her pinafore. Whatever became of this evidence Mother couldn’t say. The whole detective-training deal got dropped as abruptly as it had been undertaken.
When Grandma came to our house, she brought with her that same kind of slightly deranged scrutiny. Before, our lives had been closed to outsiders. The noise of my parents’ fights might leak out through the screens at night, and I might guess at the neighbors’ scorn, but nobody really asked after our family, about Mother’s being Nervous. We didn’t go to church. No one came to visit. We probably seemed as blurry to the rest of the neighborhood as bad TV. Suddenly Grandma was staring at us with laser-blue eyes from behind her horn rims, saying Can I make a suggestion? or beginning every sentence with Why don’t you…?