by Mary Karr
For years Lecia had me convinced that Mother left us behind because she was hauling Grandma’s body in the backseat of the Impala. Lecia fed me this lie pretty soon after we got off the phone with Mother that night, and I swallowed it like a bigmouthed bass. I needed an excuse for being left behind, I guess. The truth—that we were murder on her nerves, which were already shot—must have been too much for me. In bed one morning I asked Lecia why didn’t Mother just put Grandma in the trunk. Lecia propped up on her elbow and said that wasn’t very nice for your dead mother. Following that same line of logic, I figured out for myself that she wouldn’t let anybody truss the old lady on top of the car like a deer, just so we’d all get to ride out too. So for years, I pictured Mother driving the five hundred miles across Texas with Grandma’s corpse stretched out on the backseat. (I guess it wasn’t till I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the kids are dragging their dead mother across Mississippi, and the stink gets so bad and the flies and maggots get at her, that I began to figure that some ambulance had probably carted the body back. Mother had small tolerance for odors.)
The trip must have been grisly. The newly dead do, after all, rent a lot of skull space from us. So I still imagine Mother alone in that car with some ghost of her dead mother sitting beside. Mother was driving at night as Grandma would have, for the cool and the lack of traffic night provided. It’s a fourteen-hour drive, and the sky can get awful black in that time, like a big black bowl somebody set over you. One pair of headlights can put you in a trance with the white road dashes coming up in them at exact intervals. And as John Milton says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. I myself am Hell.”
I sometimes want to beam myself back to the old Impala so Mother won’t have to make that drive alone. I always picture myself being incredibly useful—pouring coffee from the thermos or finding something of a soothing and classical nature on the radio—never whining or asking to pee as I surely would have. Maybe I would roll down all the windows just to shoo the mean ghost of my grandmother out.
Mother had left us at home because she was hurt. For her, being hurt meant drawing into herself. (Old joke: What’s the loneliest place in Louisiana? Bayou Self.) And that’s where I have to leave her, alone on the dark highway with the cacti rearing up and falling back down as she passes.
Grandma’s death gave me my first serious case of insomnia. When I lay in bed next to Lecia’s solid, sleeping form, that picture of Grandma’s pale arm with the ants would rear up behind my closed eyes. With it came a low humming in my head—a sound like a crazy cello player sawing the same note over and over, or like a zillion bees coming up out of the ground. In fact, that humming was the sound our car tires had made on the Orange Bridge when Mother either did or didn’t try to crash through the guardrail and fly us screaming down to the river. If I kept my eyes open, the humming stopped. If they fell closed, even for a second, that humming would swamp over every good thought I’d ever had. Nights, I lay awake with my eyes burning. What I was protecting myself against on these vigils was, in fact, my own skull, which must be the textbook definition of early-onset Nervous if ever there was one.
That small psychic crisis kicked off a metaphysical one. Why was everybody so fired up about nature all the time, and God? These kids sitting around me with their heads crooked earnestly over their giant drawing papers seemed to have forgotten that the ocean had decided for no good reason to dislodge itself on top of hundreds of people across the river in Louisiana. Our bodies could have been the ones people saw on TV newsreels after school. Families on these film clips went from one child-sized body bag to another—the bags having been lined up in rows across some movie-theater parking lot. The sheriff would unzip the bag’s top a little bit, and the daddy would peer in, then shake his head no. Then he’d step back while the sheriff rezipped before going on to the next bag. This happened over and over till the sheriff finally unzipped the face the family was looking for—little Junior or baby Jackie, blue-skinned and bloated, tongue black and sticking out.
The cameras didn’t show those faces, of course. But Daddy had seen plenty guys dead in war. I remember he rubbed the sleeve of his faded chambray shirt and said that a human face could go just as blue as that. He also said it wasn’t the coldness of a dead man’s skin that gave you the willies, but how the skin went hard all over, so touching him was like touching wood or concrete.
During this talk, we were sitting in bed eating dinner, a habit we’d gone right back to after Grandma died. Only we’d added the drone of TV news. Its blue-white light was our family hearth. “I shit you not,” Daddy said as he tore off a hunk of biscuit. “You touch a dead man sometime.” He took a swallow of buttermilk. “Hard as that table. Got no more to do with being alive than that table does.”
That description didn’t scare me so much as the news footage of some daddy folding in on himself once he’d recognized a kid’s face. The mothers cried too, of course, and bitterly. But they seemed better equipped for it. They held each other while they cried, or fell to their knees, or screamed up at the sky. But you could tell by the moans and bellows those grown men let out that their grief had absolutely nowhere to go. I watched from the middle of my parents’ bed, a steaming plate of beans and biscuits balanced on my patch of covers, while one grown man after another buckled in the middle like everything inside him was going soft all at once, and I knew that the dead child’s face would stay on each daddy’s eyeballs forever. I stopped trusting the world partly from seeing how those meaty-faced men bellowed under the shadowy bills of their tractor caps or cowboy hats.
The rest of the second grade seemed immune to all this misery. Or they took our escape from the storm as a testament to our moral superiority. It was a sign from God that prayers had been answered, something to be pious about.
I asked Carol Sharp at recess didn’t she think that the people over in Cameron had said any prayers before the storm came in. And she said that maybe God thought Leechfield Baptists somehow better Christians than folks over in Louisiana. They were probably Catholic anyway, she said. We were riding in the middle of the merry-go-round during this discussion. It was standard playground stuff, industrial steel painted fire-engine red. You had to brace yourself on these metal sawhorses to keep from flying off once the kids shoving it around got it up to speed. Once we were whirling pretty good, I tried to pry Carol’s fingers loose from her sawhorse, but she hollered to Shirley Carter to help. They both tickled me deep in my armpits till my own fingers came loose, and I went flying, the whole playground going blurry under me as I flew. I skittered across the asphalt and ground to a stop on bloody knees, my plaid skirt hiked around my waist so my underpants showed. I was screaming to Carol Sharp that her Jesus was a mewling dipshit (a phrase I’d picked up from one of Mother’s less-than-Christian tirades) when Mrs. Hess picked me up by the waist and carried me wrangling and cussing back to her room.
I was given a box of crayons and plopped at a desk that faced a bulletin board of crayon drawings. Mrs. Hess instructed me to make something pretty by the end of recess. The pictures tacked over me pissed me off worse—a spotted butterfly settling in the middle of a daisy, a sailboat bobbing on neatly sloping blue waves, a smiling yellow sun.
I wore my black crayon down to the nub during that recess period, making a sky full of funnel clouds. Over and over I sharpened the point on the back of the box, then quickly made it dull again doing the narrowing spirals. It was a big piece of paper and shiny with black crayon before I was through. On a green hill in the background, I drew grave mounds in brown and topped them off with white crosses, each penciled with “R.I.P.”
That truth—that death came in a big blind swipe—was gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining motion like its own kind of storm. It was drawing me away from the other kids in a way I didn’t even notice. They still saw the world as some playground smiled over by God. I couldn’t, and their innocence rankled
me to the point of fury. When Baptist girls standing next to me on the choir risers got all misty-eyed singing about the purple mountains’ majesty, I would often elbow or jostle them out of nothing but spite. If they turned my way in outrage, I’d make a wide-eyed apology. I couldn’t help myself. Sundays, when Carol Sharp came home from Bible school—her black hair pinched and shining in twin plastic barrettes, her petticoat sticking her pink skirt out sideways—and announced, while I was digging for worms in the flower box, how God had made me from dirt, I said I wasn’t dirt, and I wasn’t God’s Barbie doll either. And why would God set Death loose among us like some wind-up robot destroyer if he loved us so much. Carol was ready for this. “There are some mysteries in life the Lord doesn’t want us to understand,” which serene declaration caused me to turn our garden hose on her full force. Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order.
Leechfield itself would make you think that way—the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it. One fall morning I was crossing a meadow to a sugarcane field with a friend’s family when the bird dogs that had been running alongside the men with rifles turned and went into a hard point right at one little girl’s feet. Somebody’s daddy told us all to freeze still, which we did. He took aim with his Winchester where this four-year-old was standing in her red Keds, scared enough to wet her pants. When he fired, a rattlesnake flew thirty feet up in the still air. It landed with a plop in the weeds, where the dogs fell on it. You might well start toting a rifle or shotgun around after that, for reasons that had nothing to do with other human beings. It’s nature itself, revered in other climates, that’s Leechfield’s best advertisement for firearms. The woods held every species of poisonous snake, spider, and rabid biting creature available in that latitude.
Even at the beach, there were signs warning you to stay out of the eelgrass because of the alligators. The Gulf itself was warm as dishwater and brown. There were stingrays and sea snakes under its surface. Shark attacks were not unheard-of, though nobody had been completely toted off by one in decades. The undertow could drag your ass to Cuba before you even knew you’d been sucked down.
And it was on this wretched strip of shore at McFadden Beach that we took a family day trip once Mother came back.
We’d no idea she was coming home that day. She had just walked in the back door one morning without so much as a howdy. Daddy said, Hello, Joe, can I get you some coffee? She just waggled her head in a loose way, like one of those dogs you see on a dashboard with a long spring for a neck. Lecia and I must have flung ourselves on her right off, because I remember Daddy telling us not to bird-dog her the minute she hit the door.
She sat down on a kitchen stool, and we plopped down on the linoleum at her feet. She was in her stocking feet, which was no surprise since she always said that driving would ruin a good pair of heels like nothing else. Anyway, there were little runs in the stockings, narrow black ladders starting up over her toes. I got to fiddling with one of these right off. I pulled it a little bit so the run got longer and skittered up her shin. Then I pulled a little more to make it creep up over her knee where it got wide. I said did that tickle, and she just patted my hand in an idle way. She still hadn’t said word one. She was massaging her temples with her eyes closed.
Lecia started rubbing Mother’s feet, which were as twisted up as any dancer’s, knotty and callused from decades of high heels. (Lecia became an adult devotee of such heels. Once at a party in Boston, a loafer-wearing debutante suggested jokingly to her that if God had wanted women to wear heels, He wouldn’t have designed our feet as He did. Lecia replied that if God hadn’t intended us to wear heels, She wouldn’t have made our legs look so great in them.) Lecia’s rubbing put me in mind of somebody from the Bible. Then Daddy came over and started digging his thumbs deep into Mother’s shoulder muscles. This made her head flop back. She must have felt like Gulliver being swarmed on by the little people. And, looking up from the floor, I thought she was way taller than I’d remembered. (Silence can make somebody bigger, I’ve come to believe. Grief can, too. A big sad silence emanating from someone can cause you to invest that person with all manner of gravitas.) There were pouches under her eyes that hadn’t been there before, and streaks dried in her rouge from where she’d been crying on the drive home. But her lipstick was fresh and shiny and the color of a dark plum. She’d touched it up in the car, and that’s the last thought I had before my memory fuzzed over.
The next day we went to the beach to cheer Mother up—a good plan, in theory. The only reports of Lubbock we’d been able to drag out of her were that the funeral had been sparsely attended, the trip out and back long. She’d spent the whole week alone or in the company of her mother’s witchy sisters.
But really our family didn’t excel at outings of any kind. Put us in close quarters—inside the un-air-conditioned Ford, say, in our bathing suits, with our legs sweat-stuck to the vinyl—and things got ugly. Toward the end of this particular drive, Lecia and I leaned like vampires over the backseat repeating “Mama-Daddy-Mama-Daddy” in unison, in a fast auctioneer’s prattle, until Daddy’s huge arm came swinging at us about neck level. We ducked down, and the car went surging over a sand dune. Then we slid down to McFadden Beach and the Gulf.
It was dusk. We always went then to miss the crowd, although the state of the shore would have kept most sane people away at any hour. There’d been some kind of hurricane back-tide or oil spill, so you could smell whole schools of dead fish stinking on the beach as soon as you got out of the car. You parked right on the sand, facing the waves. Daddy started unloading stuff out of the trunk.
Lecia and I raced down to the water, assuming Mother would be behind us. Having been reared in the desert, Mother could spend the better part of daylight sitting near the tide cross-legged, dribbling wet sand through her fingers to build up the squiggly turrets of a castle. She couldn’t swim worth a damn but adored floating in an inner tube. She could lie back and doze for hours while the swells bobbed her up and down. But that day, she didn’t even get her ankles wet. We got down to the water in our suits and started leaping over the shorebreak right off. Finally we spotted her back by the eelgrass dunes, walking away from the car. The sun was low on my right. I had to shade my eyes to make her out. She moved into a patch of pale sun and then out again. She turned into a shadow.
Then that shadow was climbing the weathered steps of a beer joint called the Breeze Inn. It was a little screened-in shack, really, high on spindly stilts. More than one storm had blown it over, but they kept propping it back up. Inside was a bar for the shrimpers and for fellows needing a bump of something to help them get through their family picnics. There was also a pinball machine, usually played by sunburnt kids looking pissed off and waiting for their daddies to finish the last swallow and come back to swimming or cooking hot dogs. I studied Mother while she walked up the steps of the Breeze Inn in her black bathing suit. She wore an old white shirt of Daddy’s for a coverup. Like a lot of women with great legs, she had a way of tiptoeing along an invisible line, especially on stairs. It made her butt kind of prissy, and I remember that bothered me somehow, too. She was carrying a sketch pad the size of a small card table, like she was planning to draw the fishermen, but I knew with a cold certainty while I stood ankle-deep in that lukewarm water that she was climbing up there to get drunk.
Maybe that pissed me off, because all of a sudden, I wheeled around to Lecia and whooshed as much of the Gulf at her as I could move with two cupped hands. She tried to cover her face so her bangs wouldn’t get wet, but she was pretty well soaked. She was giving me the finger for having done this when Daddy stepped out from behind the trunk of the car.
But instead of just letting her hand relax, so he wouldn’t see her shooting the bird, she hid the whole hand behind her head, still frozen in the fuck-you position. She stood there like that
for way longer than it might have taken her to relax her hand.
I can still see Daddy coming down the beach toward us. He had his black swim trunks on, and black basketball Keds. He’d put on a red Lone Star baseball cap and was slipping into his blue work shirt while he came toward us. He had the easy glide of men who labor for an hourly wage, a walk that wastes no effort and refuses to rush. His barrel chest and legs were pale. There was a wide blood-colored scar up one shin where one of Lee Gleason’s quarter horses had thrown Daddy, then dragged him around the corral till six inches of white shinbone was visible on that leg. On the same leg, just above the knee, there was a knot of iron-blue shrapnel bulging under the skin left over from the war. Still, he didn’t limp one bit coming toward us. He had an amused squint on his face. Maybe he even knew that Lecia was hiding that fuck-you finger in back of her neck, and that tickled him.
He stood on the packed sand and called to us. “Y’all come on out from there. I want you to look at something.” We followed him up the beach.
We passed what looked like the whole roof off a good-sized shed. There were also stinking loads of dead fish, a whole school of mullet all facing one direction and blank-eyed, looking like they’d leapt up all at once and the wave that had carried them had just evaporated before they came down. Daddy also took a minute to flip over a baby stingray with his shoe so we could see its face. It had wide-spaced eyes and a little slit of a mouth like something you’d cut out of pie dough.