by Mary Karr
The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping.
When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther:
It seems there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles,
over and over the movement of his powerful soft
strides is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee. I can see the panther pace back and forth behind the bars on the surface of her sunglasses, as if he were inside her peering out at us. Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her. Other times, I want to pull the glasses from her face, put my large capable hands on her square shoulders, and shake her till she begins to weep or scream or do whatever would break her loose from that island of quiet.
To get out of the heat, we went into a cavelike building, very cool and damp. At that time, I was fascinated with Dracula’s silky evil and headed straight for the vampire bats, which were disappointingly tiny through the thick glass. They were hardly bigger than field mice and hanging upside-down from a stick. Their teeth were tiny, not at all like Bela Lugosi’s on TV. One finally dropped down and wobbled near a petri dish of blood in the center of the display. He seemed so awkward trying to arrange his frail-looking wings that I kept thinking of a broken umbrella. Lecia moved from window to window, looking at owls and opossums and the other nocturnals—she wanted to be a vet back then, or a nurse. Mother sat on a stone bench under the red EXIT sign, smoking. I got hypnotized waiting for the clumsy bat to drink the blood. I tapped the glass pointing it out, but he never did.
By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.
After the amputation and that trip to Houston, we didn’t see Mother much. She either came home from the hospital briefly in the mornings to change clothes before heading back, or she returned after we were in bed. I would wake to her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned in to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like braille under my hands. A few times, she would sit on my side of the bed all night smoking, till the yellow light started in the windows. She had a way of waving away the smoke from my face and making a pleasant little wind in the process. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I roused she’d leave, and I wanted nothing more from her on those nights than to let me lie in the mist of that perfume I still wear and to imagine the shapes her Salem smoke made. Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo. So I did not long to talk of those things or to hear her reassurances about them. (Children can be a lot like cats or dogs, sometimes, in how physical comfort soothes them.) I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, and that heat was all I needed.
Except for these apparitions of Mother, we were left the rest of the summer in Daddy’s steady if distracted care. At some point, the men of the Liars’ Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our garage into an extra bedroom for my parents, who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room during Grandma’s visit. I guess they wanted to make her a nicer place in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had neatly blocked all glimmer of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each morning, about the time that Lecia and I reached the bottom of our soggy Cheerios, somebody’s work boots would stamp up the porch steps, and the screen would bang open, and Daddy would start getting down clean coffee mugs.
The men arrived early and worked steadily through the hottest part of every day. They had all taken their vacations then in order to help out. They worked for nothing but free coffee and beer. By mid-morning they had stripped off their shirts. They had broad backs and ropy arms. They suffered the fiercest sunburns that summer I ever remember seeing. Ben Bederman had a round hairless beer belly that pooched over his carpenter apron, and his back burned and peeled off in sheets, then burned again until it finally darkened to the color of cane syrup. The men pulled Lone Star beers all afternoon from the ice in two red Coleman coolers that Daddy packed to the brim every morning.
A few times a day, somebody’s wife would show up with food. Say what you like about the misery of hard labor—I once had a summer job painting college dorms that I thought would kill me—but it can jack up your appetite to the point where eating takes on a kind of holiness. Whether there were white bags of barbecued crabs from Sabine Pass or tamales in corn husks from a roadside stand, the men would set down their tools and grin at the sheer good fortune of it. They always took time to admire the food before they started to eat—a form of modesty, I guess, or appreciation, as if wanting to be sure the meal wouldn’t vanish like some mirage. Daddy would stop to soak his red bandana in a cooler’s slush and study whatever was steaming out of the torn-open sack while he mopped himself off. “Lord God, look at that,” he’d say, and he’d wink at whoever had brought it.
Ben’s wife, Ruby, pulled in once with a washtub of sandy un-shucked oysters that it took two of the men to heave out of the truck bed. She spent the better part of a morning opening them with a stubby knife. When she was done, there were two huge pickle jars of cleaned oysters sitting in the washtub’s cold water. We ate them with hot sauce and black pepper and lemon. (Lecia says that I would eat them only in pairs, so none would feel lonely in my stomach.) The oysters had a way of seeming to wince when you squeezed the lemon on them. They started off cold in your mouth, but warmed right up and went down fast and left you that musty aftertaste of the sea. You washed that back with a sip of cold beer you’d salted a little. (Even at seven I had a taste for liquor.) And you followed that with a soda cracker.
Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I know about simple gladness. They were glad to get fed for their labor, glad they had the force to pound nails and draw breath. Of course, they bitched loudly about their aches and mocked each other’s bitching. But unless I’ve completely idealized that fellowship, there was something redeeming that moved between those men. Even the roofing part of the job, which involved a vat of boiling tar and whole days on top of the new garage beyond the cool shade of our chinaberry, didn’t wipe it out. At evening, they would pull off their work boots, then peel off their double layers of cotton socks and lay them to dry across the warm bricks. Daddy had a habit of tipping the beer coolers out right where they stood in the grass, so cool water rushed over their sweaty feet. At that time of day, with night coming in fast, and the men taking a minute to pass a pint of Tennessee whiskey between them or to light their smokes, there was a glamour between them that I se
nsed somehow was about to disappear. When they climbed into the cabs of their trucks, I sometimes had a terrible urge to rush after them and call them back.
With Mother, I always felt on the edge of something new, something never before seen or read about or bought, something that would change us. When you climbed in the car with her, you never knew where you’d end up. If an encyclopedia salesman happened to knock on the door, she might spend a month’s salary on books you would pore over all day. With Daddy and his friends, I always knew what would happen and that left me feeling a sort of dreamy safety.
By August they were done, and my folks had a paneled bedroom with a separate tiled shower. And out in back of the house, there stood a detached garage big enough for two cars. It also held a separate work studio for Mother, my father’s one nod to her desire to paint. The studio had a high ceiling and skylights, which were unheard-of in those days, and a black stove where she could build a fire on a rainy night. She wasted no time setting up her easel and starting to work in oils. The first thing she did was a portrait of Grandma wearing a plain blue dress. She worked from a Polaroid taken just before Grandma lost the leg.
Mother must have worked on it late at night after she came in from the hospital. God knows she had no other time. She’d even sacrificed her job at the paper to nurse Grandma. But the amber-colored sketch that first appeared on the white canvas turned into a facsimile of my grandmother inside of a week. I snuck the studio key off the nail in the kitchen to check its progress every few days. Truly, when I pulled the padlock off and the studio door swung open, I felt like a thief in church. I was entering a realm that had before only filled the bedtime stories, about artists of which Mother was fond: Van Gogh’s lopped-off ear; Gauguin’s native girls; the humpbacked Degas mad for love of his dancers; how Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made. The combination of turpentine fumes and damp wood smoke and the distant sting of vodka in the studio was unlike any other batch of smells before or since. The whole idea of erecting a person—from tinted oil and from whatever swirled inside my mother’s skull—filled me with a slack-jawed wonder.
The portrait of Grandma wound up stiffer, more formal than her other work, which was wildly expressionistic. The arms bend at right angles. The shoulders square like a military man’s, and the face is totally devoid of feeling. Maybe it was that blankness that I was trying to fix when I squirted orange paint onto a sable brush and dabbed at the mouth. Ultimately, though, I left an orange smudge in the middle of the painting’s face. Maybe I was trying to blot her out somehow, or shut her up. If you’d asked me, I would have said I was trying to brighten her lipstick.
Mother wept when she saw it, wept and cursed the ignorant vandals who must have broken in. She never even asked whether one of us had done it. She got drunk wearing a Mexican serape and built a fire and cursed the Motherfucking Swamp and its occupants. They do not, she told us with terse judgment, even deserve to call themselves members of the cordate phylum, which Lecia had to explain meant that they didn’t have spinal columns, and were, ergo, like worms, slugs, and leeches. The next morning, Mother drove to the hardware store and bought a heavy lock you couldn’t get through with any bolt cutter. The new key stayed on the same kitchen nail, but after that, I was afraid of wrecking something else and so stayed out of the studio unescorted.
When Grandma came back to our house she had ossified into something elemental and really scary. She seemed way thinner than she had been in the hospital, though perhaps not as pale. She had been fitted with an artificial leg that she strapped on every morning. It wore a sturdy black shoe that never came off. At night, she detached the leg and stood it by her bed. Once, when I passed her door on my way to the toilet, I caught sight of it standing there with no person tacked on top of it, and it was casting a long shadow into the hall that nearly reached my bare feet, so I scrambled back under the quilt with Lecia, my heart thumping, not caring whether I wet the bed that night (I did). The honeysuckle that grew up our screens made spiky wall-shadows on nights like that. Sometimes I’d hear Grandma hop down the short hall into the bathroom, her cane whacking the door molding. Lecia says that I misremember one specific sight of her standing in our doorway with that stump bluntly hanging down under her nightie, her arms spread so she could hold herself up by the doorjamb, and her hair fanned out around her face like white fire. I can see it like yesterday’s breakfast, but Lecia claims it never happened.
Grandma wore very pale pink nylon pajamas with a matching robe, and her wheelchair was spookily silent in the way somebody walking never was. With Daddy’s 3-In-One oil and the same maniacal patience she had brought to tatting, she kept it tuned silent on purpose. She’d upend the chair by her bed and squirt oil in all the tiny hollow places so it was nothing but glide. Then she could materialize soundlessly around a corner. She had a habit of sneaking up on Lecia and me and shouting Aha! as if she’d discovered us shooting up heroin with a turkey baster or eviscerating some small animal. Once she found us playing gin rummy and let out her Aha!, then called Mother. Grandma even watched us the whole time she was yelling as if we were going to cover up the cards before Mother got there. “Charlie Marie! Come in here and whip these children. I swear to God…” Mother, who never excelled as a spanker, arrived and asked some bewildered questions. Grandma gave an evangelistic-sounding lecture on the evils of gambling (and liquor, oddly enough), this despite the fact that she’d been an avid cheater at church bingo (and was, since her surgery, consuming about a case of beer every day). After a while, Mother just gave in to Grandma’s rantings and went through the motions of flailing at our legs with a flyswatter till we ran into our room and slammed the door. I remember crawling up in Lecia’s lap and whining about how I hadn’t done anything. Lecia reasoned that we’d probably gotten away with fifty things we should have been spanked for that day, anyway, so we should just call it even.
It was sometime in August that I started walking in my sleep. Actually I did things other than just walk: I’d go squat behind the living room drapes and go to the bathroom in a pile they sometimes didn’t find till the next morning. Once I wandered outside, and Daddy had to come chasing after me.
That fall my school career didn’t go much better. I got suspended from my second-grade class twice, first for biting a kid named Phyllis who wasn’t, to my mind, getting her scissors out fast enough to comply with the teacher, then again for breaking my plastic ruler over the head of a boy named Sammy Joe Tyler, whom I adored. A pale blue knot rose through the blond stubble of his crew cut. Both times I got sent to the principal, a handsome ex-football coach named Frank Doleman who let Lecia and me call him Uncle Frank. (Lecia and I had impressed Uncle Frank by both learning to read pretty much without instruction before we were three. Mother took us each down to his office in turn, and we each dutifully read the front page of the day’s paper out loud to him, so he could be sure it wasn’t just some story we’d memorized.)
He let me stay in his office playing chess all afternoon with whoever wandered in. He loved pitting me against particularly lunkheaded fifth- and sixth-grade boys who’d been sent down for paddlings they never got. He’d try to use my whipping them at chess to make them nervous about how dumb they were. “Now this little bitty old second-grader here took you clean in six plays. Don’t you reckon you need to be listening to Miss Vilimez instead of cutting up?” When Mrs. Hess led me solemnly down the hall to Frank Doleman’s office, I would pretend to cry, but thought instead about Brer Rabbit as he was being thrown into the briar patch where he’d been born and raised, and screaming Please don’t throw me in that briar patch! At the end of both days, Uncle Frank drove me home himself in his white convertible, the waves of kids parting as we passed and me flapping my hand at all of them like I was Jackie Kennedy.
It was also at this time that I came to be cut out of the herd of neighborhood kids by an older boy. Before that happened there was almost something sacred about that pack of kids
we got folded into. No matter how strange our family was thought to be, we blended into the tribe when we all played together. For some reasons, I always remember us running barefoot down the football field together, banking and turning in a single unit like those public-TV airplane shots of zebras in Africa.
But obviously I had some kind of fear or hurt on me that an evil boy could smell. He knew I could be drawn aside and scared or hurt a little extra. When he came for me, I went with him, and my going afterwards felt as if it had been long before plotted out by something large and invisible—God, I guess.
But before that boy singled me out, the sheer velocity of running across a wet field with other kids felt safe. There were dozens of us. We ranged in age from thirteen or fourteen for the big boys down to Babby Carter, who at two trailed behind the herd everywhere. I was seven and fit into the group about dead center, age-wise. I was small-boned and skinny, but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness. Lecia still holds that I would have jumped a buzz saw. Daddy had instructed me in the virtue of what he called equalizers, which meant not only sticks, boards, and rocks, but having one hell of a long memory for mistreatment. So I wouldn’t hesitate to sneak up blindside and bite a bigger kid who’d gotten the better of me a week before. To my knowledge, I never slouched off an ass-kicking, even the ones that made me double up and cry. It might take me a week or so, but I always came back. (To this day, I don’t know whether to measure this as courage or cowardice, but it stuck. After I grew up, the only man ever to punch me found himself awakened two nights later from a dead sleep by a solid right to the jaw, after which I informed him that, should he ever wish to sleep again, he shouldn’t hit me. My sister grew up with an almost insane physical bravery: once in the parking lot outside her insurance office, she brushed aside the .22 pistol of a gunman demanding her jewelry. “Fuck you,” she said and opened her Mercedes while the guy ran off. The police investigator made a point of asking her what her husband did, and when she said she didn’t have one, the cop said, “I bet I know why.”)