by Mary Karr
In some ways, all the kids in my neighborhood were identical. Our fathers belonged to the same union. (“Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, Local 1242” was how they answered the phone on Daddy’s unit.) They punched the same clocks for almost exactly the same wage. (Our family had been considered rich because of Mother’s part-time newspaper work.) Maybe one kid’s daddy worked Gulf and another Texaco and another Atlantic Richfield, but it amounted to the same thing. Maybe one was a boilermaker and another controlled the flow of catalyst in a cracking unit. But they all worked turning crude oil into the various by-products you had to memorize by weight in seventh-grade science class—kerosene, gasoline, and so on. The men all worked shift work because that paid a little better, so all of us knew how to tiptoe on days when the old man was on graveyards. The union handed out cardboard signs that ladies tacked to their doors: SHHH! SHIFT WORKERS ASLEEP. Nobody but Mother had ever been to college. (She’d attended both Texas Tech and art school.)
When the football field was cut on weekends, we’d gather hay from behind the tractor and lay it out in lines that followed the same square floor plans our fathers had unrolled on blueprints when their GI loans were approved—two bedrooms, one bath, attached garage, every one. The cut brown clover and St. Augustine grass smelled wetter and greener than any field cuttings I ever encountered in my adult elsewheres.
It’s that odor that carries me to a particular cool day when I lay down within the careful lines of my own grass house. I was sure that I could feel the curve of the earth under my spine. I watched the clouds scud behind the water tower. Then I rolled over on my stomach. There were wild pepper plants that had hot little seeds you could pop between your teeth. Clover squeaked when you pulled it out of the ground, and its root was white and pulpy sweet.
Once I got stung by a bee, and this older boy I mentioned doctored me with a plaster of spit and mud till I stopped my snubbing. So I believed he liked me, and I was thirsty for liking.
On the hot days, when running was forbidden—heatstroke was always bringing little kids down—we played a game some kid invented called Torture. This sounds worse than it was. A bigger kid would herd us into the skin-tightening heat of the most miserably close spot we could find—the spidery crawl space under the Carters’ back porch, say, or Tommy Sharp’s old pigeon cage, or some leftover refrigerator box waiting for the garbage truck. There we’d squat into the hunched and beaten forms we thought made us look like concentration-camp inmates. This evil boy had a picture of Buchenwald survivors in his history book. All of us collectively studied it, memorized it. We did so not out of any tender feeling for the victims’ pain or to ponder injustice, but so we could impersonate them playing Torture. We lined up shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh under the cold dull eye of this big boy’s Nazi. He didn’t twist arms or squish heads or inflict wounds. He was too smart for that. He just reigned over us while our parents called us home for lunch. We hunkered down without moving. I imagine all those bodies when crammed into a tight space generated temperatures well over a hundred and twenty degrees. Blinking or whimpering wasn’t permitted. We melted into a single compliant shape. It was almost a form of meditation. The world slowed down, and your sense of your own body got almost unbearably distinct. Sweat rivered down my rib cage. I could feel every particle of grit in the fold of my neck. The Nazi boy would menace us not with overt cruelty but with an empty professional stare. There was no need to switch-whip us; we didn’t dare move anyway. That was the whole game. We sat there together, radiant with misery. Eventually, of course, some adult arm would poke into where we were hiding and signal the arrival of somebody’s mom come to pull us out and drag us home for lunch or supper.
And it was one of these times—an evening, oddly enough—when the arm felt around and didn’t find me huddled in the corner, that all the other kids poured out and scattered to their separate homes for supper, so this big boy and I were left alone.
It was going dark when he got hold of me under God knows what pretext. He took me into somebody’s garage. He unbuttoned my white shirt and told me I was getting breasts. Here’s what he said: “You’re getting pretty little titties now, aren’t you.” I don’t recall any other thing being said. His grandparents had chipped in on braces for his snaggly teeth. They glinted in the half dark like a robot’s grillwork. He pulled off my shorts and underwear and threw them in the corner in a ball, over where I knew there could be spiders. He pushed down his pants and put my hand on his thing, which was unlike any of the boys’ jokes about hot dogs and garden hoses. It was hard as wood and felt big around as my arm. He wrapped both my hands around it, and showed me how to slide them up and down, and it felt like a wet bone encased in something. At some point, he tired of that. He got an empty concrete sack and laid it down on the floor, and me down on top of that, and pumped between my legs till he got where he was headed. I remember I kept my arms folded across my chest, because the thing he’d said about my breasts seemed such an obvious lie. It made me feel ashamed. I was seven and a good ten years from anything like breasts. My school record says I weighed about fifty pounds. Think of two good-sized Smithfield hams—that’s roughly how big I was. Then think of a newly erect teenaged boy on top of that and pumping between my legs. It couldn’t have taken very long.
(I picture him now reading this, and long to reach out of the page and grab ahold of his shirt front that we might together reminisce some. Hey, bucko. Probably you don’t read, but you must have somebody who reads for you—your pretty wife or some old neighbor boy you still go fishing with. Where will you be when the news of this paragraph floats back to you? For some reason, I picture you changing your wife’s tire. She’ll mention that in some book I wrote, somebody from the neighborhood is accused of diddling me at seven. Maybe your head will click back a notch as this registers. Maybe you’ll see your face’s image spread across the silver hubcap as though it’s been flattened by a ballpeen hammer. Probably you thought I forgot what you did, or you figured it was no big deal. I say this now across decades and thousands of miles solely to remind you of the long memory my daddy always said I had.)
When he was done with me it was full dark. I unballed my clothes and tried to brush off any insects. He helped me to pull them on and tied my Keds for me. He washed me off at the faucet that came out of the side of somebody’s house. The water was warm from being in the pipe on a hot day, and my legs were still sticky after.
Our porch light was amber. The rest of the houses were dark. You could see the spotlights from the Little League park and hear the loudspeaker announcing somebody at bat. I wondered if this boy had planned to get ahold of me way in advance, if he’d picked the time when everybody would be at the game. Which was worse—if he’d only grabbed me at the opportune moment, or if he’d plotted and stalked me? I couldn’t decide. I didn’t want to be taken too easily, but I had been, of course. Even at seven I knew that. On the other hand, the idea that he’d consciously chosen to do this, then tracked me down like a rabbit, made me feel sick. He walked me home not saying anything, like he was doing a baby-sitting chore.
Then I was standing on my porch by myself. I could hear his tennis shoes slapping away down the street. I watched the square of his white T-shirt get smaller till it disappeared around the corner.
The honeysuckle was sickly sweet that night. I stood outside for a long time. I tried to arrange my face into nothing special having happened. There was a gray wasp nest in the corner of our porch. It had chambers like a honeycomb, each with the little worm of a baby wasp inside, sleeping. I thought sleeping that way would be good. After a while, Daddy pulled open the door and shoved the screen wide and asked me had I been at the game. “Come in, Pokey. Lemme fix you a plate,” he said. I still fit under his armpit walking in. You could hear a roar from the park as somebody turned a double play or got a hit. I thought of the boy climbing the bleachers toward his admirers. I thought of all the jokes I’d heard about blow jobs and how a girl’s vagina smelled like popcorn.
I looked at my father, who would have climbed straight up those bleachers and gutted this boy like a fish, and at my mother, who for some reason I imagined bursting into tears and locking herself in the bathroom over the whole thing. Grandma in her wheelchair would have said she wasn’t surprised at all. Lecia was at the game, probably at the top of the bleachers combing down her bangs with a rattail comb and laughing when this boy came climbing toward her. He didn’t even have to threaten me to keep quiet. I knew what I would be if I told.
CHAPTER 4
By mid-fall, the cancer had spread to Grandma’s brain. This would have sent most people to bed, according to an oncologist pal of mine. But Grandma just bore down on us harder. If anything, whatever pain she was in or ideas she had about dying seemed to jack up her resolve.
She didn’t take morphine or any other pain drugs. Instead, she drank beer nonstop but never seemed to get drunk. She stopped wearing her prosthetic leg, claiming it hurt her, so her stump poked out of her nightie at about eye level to a kid. That gave the impression—when she wheeled toward you—of some finger pointing you down. And it was around this time that her eyes seemed to get more bleached out behind her horn rims. Maybe she had cataracts, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing. But the blue part was lightening up daily, and sharp white spikes stabbed out from the black pupil into the iris. This was the time when you could order X-Ray Specs from the back of Superman comics, and when lasers were just starting to make the Walter Cronkite reports. In some weird conjunction of these two phenomena, I started believing that Grandma watched me through the wall when I slept. Sometimes I’d start up from a dead sleep thinking that two hot beams of white light were coming out of her eyes in the next room, fixed on me, trying to bore right through the wall between us. Nights, I wouldn’t look out the door when she clunked around trying to get to the bathroom. I was scared that I’d see something like little headlights beaming her path down the dark hall. Actually, I wasn’t so scared of seeing this as I was of her seeing me see it, which knowledge might make her angle those beams on me and melt me like wax.
Basically, I tried not to notice her at night at all. When I was about five, I had cooked up a technique that kept me from throwing up when I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. If I tightened my stomach muscles and squinched my eyes shut and grabbed the chrome front bar as hard as I could, then the ride’s sick bucking around didn’t reach me somehow. Oh, my hair still twisted every which way, and I could feel the lights move across my face, but it was like I could sink back into myself, away from all the diesel engine’s heaving, and not wind up horking my corn dog all over Lecia’s penny loafers. I got famous in our neighborhood for being the littlest kid to ride the scary rides. Anyway, that’s what I tried to do in bed when I heard Grandma thumping around, just hunker down and harden up till everything I was fit into a small stone I held in place behind my stomach muscles.
Mother was her own kind of rock. She seemed distracted all the time, moving in some addled way through the rising sea of chores Grandma thought up. The only time she displayed much more than a low-level pulse was when Grandma talked her into spanking me about once a week, and then only if I really fought back.
Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s flailings at me didn’t bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything. She was way too scared of hurting anybody to hit with much of a sting. She must have been scared, too, of her own temper, or of feeling anything at all, because, as I said, she stayed pretty blank-eyed no matter what we did unless Grandma hollered her into action. At one point, Lecia and I emptied a box of Tide on the kitchen floor, then dragged in the garden hose till the whole house, carpet and all, was running with suds about a foot high. (We were imitating a floor wax commercial.) Grandma happened to be asleep during this, and Mother just sent us outside to play, then set about mopping the whole mess up without so much as a cuss word.
But some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn’t whipping us, because she knew if she got started she’d kill us. This worked way better than any spanking could have. Your mother’s threat of homicide—however unlikely she tries to make it sound—will flat dampen down your spirits.
Anyway, her whippings, when they did come, were almost a relief given the spooky alternative of her silence. And they didn’t last very long if you stood still, as Lecia had the sense to do. Me, I never stopped trying to break loose for a second, which protracted the whole thing. (My spankings were a kind of family sporting event complete with rounds and what my sister still claims was a system of scoring more subtle and intricate than the mating signals of certain spiders.) Unless Mother managed to get me down in a corner, she would have to hold one of my wrists to keep me within flyswatter distance while she flailed in my direction. At best, she made contact about ten percent of the time. I dug my heels into the gray carpet and used my weight as you would in crack the whip. I became the pivot point in the spankings, a jerking, central force that she had to wheel around.
Locked together this way, the two of us would spin from room to room with Grandma at our perimeter in her wheelchair, scolding and bitching and calling down the wrath of God on that spoiled ungrateful child, all the time seesawing the big wheels of her chair to keep herself in position.
I hold a distinct image of Lecia’s face, the distant sister as referee. She is standing in the doorway, grinning and shaking her head about how hard I am making things. (Being spanked is never near as bad as being laughed at during the spanking. Trust me. The presence of another kid ups the humiliation quotient exponentially.) Mother’s arm makes a shadow on the wall rising and falling with the flyswatter, and with every turn I make, Lecia’s smile slides off of me as if she’s saying, You don’t have the sense to pour piss from a boot—then I wheel around the room one more time before coming back to that weary grin of hers—with the instructions on the heel.
I almost felt a weird power over Mother during such a time. She had ahold of me, at least. And her grip felt like she would hang on no matter what I yanked her through.
By this time it was hurricane season. And just the way the weatherman on TV explained how hot and cold air fronts could smack up against each other over open water and make a wild-assed storm that turned around a still center of blue sky miles wide, so I felt almost calm during these whippings, as if all the misery in our house whirled around me somehow. Getting spanked at least brought some motion and force to the surface of the household. You could see us spinning around the room crazy instead of just walking through the day quiet and fretting about how miserable everybody felt and wondering where the ghost of that misery would pop up, and in what form.
In school when I stumbled on the famous Yeats poem about things falling apart, it was the spin of those spankings I thought back to, where the falcon breaks loose from its tether and from the guy who’s supposed to be holding it:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I always loved that last part, about the best lacking all conviction, which phrase made me think of Mother. And the worst being full of passionate intensity always put me in mind of Grandma, who was nothing if not intense.
Of course, at that time, Mother was still hanging on to the shreds of what she thought right, a grip she would lose entirely after Grandma died.
One morning, while Mother was plaiting my hair, the old woman got all pumped up about some project she had read about once in a magazine. She only too
k about two bites from a bowl of buttered grits before she hauled herself off to Kitty’s Hobby Shop. She didn’t even strap on her leg or bother with the wheelchair. Mother set her in the car seat, and she just drove off to town, then sat behind the steering wheel till Kitty came out to the parking lot and said could she help. We also heard later that she stopped by the hardware store for a three-foot length of industrial rubber tubing. Grandma came home with this stuff in paper bags and locked the door to her room for the better part of the day. When she finally rolled into the living room at dusk, she was waving a tasseled horse quirt over her head like Annie Oakley. She had braided long leather strips in brown and beige and tan around the rubber tubing, which instrument she wanted Mother to use for whipping us.
It was the only time I ever saw Mother defy her head-on, and Grandma was batshit about it: “These children are being ruined! You think you have trouble now, you just wait.” Mother started crying but shook her head about using the quirt. She wouldn’t meet Grandma’s eyes, but she stood in one spot with her arms folded and shook her head no. She was studying her own feet the whole time.
Then the old woman went on to waggle her quirt tassels at Lecia and call her Belinda, just like she’d done in the hospital. “I hope Belinda does to you what all you’ve done to me,” Grandma said, staring hard at Mother and waggling the horse quirt at Lecia the whole time. Again I got that dim stab of fear that this lady who bossed our mother’s soul didn’t even know our right names.