The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Mary Karr

  About hollering distance from our car, we could see a dozen men spread out over the beach in a seining party. Basically, it’s a poor man’s fishing, seining, a good way to scoop fish out of the water with neither bait nor boat nor patience. All you need is eight or ten partners and a long net about four or five feet high. First, the seiners wade out to sea together in a pack. If you were watching and couldn’t make out that somebody was carrying the rolled-up net, you might think it was a mass suicide or some weird form of baptism, because people tend to wade out in their clothes. They wear canvas shoes so their feet don’t get cut, and blue jeans or light khakis so nothing can sting their legs. You catch the best stuff by heading a good ways out, past the little sandbars that keep the shorebreak choppy. Daddy always said you have to go as far offshore as you can without getting dragged off by the Gulf Stream heading for the Florida Keys. The water’s liable to get neck-deep on somebody short, and guys seining hold their beer cans up out of the waves while they walk out. (These cans get chucked into the surf when empty, of course, with no mea culpa to the environment.) Once the men figure the water’s verging on deep enough, they fan out from each other, unrolling the net while they do it, passing it hand to hand, till it’s pretty straight. All told, it might be thirty or forty yards long. Then everybody just walks back to the beach real slow, each fellow hanging on to his hunk of net, which strains out whatever swims in its path. By the time they get back to the beach, the net’s loaded with creatures and takes some work to get laid out flat on the sand. Then you walk along the net picking out whatever’s fit to eat.

  They must have been done with the seining for a while on that particular evening because by the time we got up level with them, I spotted a washtub of seawater cooking over a big fire back by their trucks. You could smell the crab-boil spices—onion and garlic and probably whole ropes of Mexican peppers. Down by the water, two of the guys carrying white bait buckets were stooping to untangle soft-shell crabs and shrimp. One of these, a crew-cut guy in camouflage pants, straightened up from the beach holding a little shark two or three feet long in his hands. He told somebody named Bucky to run get the Polaroid. This set somebody (Bucky presumably) loping back to the car. Then the shark-holding guy (who was wearing pink rubber gloves of the type grandmas use to wash dishes) asked Daddy if his girls wanted to see the hammerhead, and Daddy said sure.

  I’d never seen a shark up close before, and what struck me was how chinless it was, its mouth drawn low down where its neck should have been. This gave it a deep, snaggle-toothed frown and kept it from looking very smart. Plus its whole body was one big muscle. It couldn’t have weighed more than fifteen or twenty pounds, but the guy was having to fight to hold it, yelling over to Bucky to hurry. The shark, meanwhile, was thrashing from side to side in the air. Finally, Daddy helped the man pin the thing on the sand with his foot so Lecia and I could feel how rough its skin was. I rubbed it the wrong way (exactly, Daddy pointed out to me, as he had told me not to do) and it chafed the skin off my fingers like sandpaper. In the black-and-white picture from Bucky’s Polaroid camera, Lecia is looking solemnly at the shark, which is blurred into a kind of swinging bludgeon in the fellow’s gloved hands, and Daddy is grinning a little bit too hard, and I am studying my bloody fingers like they’re some code I’m about to crack. What was on my mind was Mother vanishing up those steps to drink, taking herself Away. There’s no picture of that worry, of course. I can only guess it from the crease in my forehead.

  Farther down the beach, we hit a kelp bed full of dead men-of-war, which was what Daddy had wanted us to see. There were more of these tangled up in the brown ribbons of kelp than I’d ever seen in one place before. The storm had blown them in, and Daddy wanted us to look out for them. If you’ve never seen a man-of-war, it’s something right out of science fiction. The head’s a translucent globe about the size of a softball and full of air, so it floats on top of the water, clear in places, but full of sunset-type colors in others—royal blue and red-violet, the colors bleeding into each other. A bunch of men-of-war bobbing on a wave looks at a slant like water flowers—lily or lotus, even. The colors are that strong. You can poke the head with a finger and feel it give like a bubble-gum bubble. But the tentacles dangling down under the surface hold serious poison. They’re fuchsia and grow yards long. They sway around where you can’t see them just looking for a leg to wrap onto, or so Daddy told us that afternoon. We knew jellyfish better. They had short hard tentacles that stayed in one place. We’d both been stung by jellyfish, and it was about like a honeybee sting. Plus you could just pick one up by the head and pitch it away if it brushed against you. Daddy said that a man-of-war could wrap around you like an octopus, suck itself tight to your leg so no amount of pulling could unwrap it. He said if we saw one of those bubbles on a wave, to clear out of the water, even if it looked like it was ten yards away. The tentacles could reach that far. They had little suckers that ran down each tentacle and could sting you through each one of those, a thousand times all at once, worse than a nest of hornets. The creature could kill a grown man if he had a weak heart or something. Daddy wasn’t one for idle warnings, so we backed away from the kelp pretty quick.

  Maybe by the time he had vanished up the steps of the Breeze Inn to keep Mother company Lecia had forgotten to be scared. We were horsing around in the water. If we had a cent’s worth of caution in us that day, we spent it trying to stay lined up with the car, since even a light undertow could pull you sideways a mile down the beach before you knew it. Lecia was a ways out by this time, hip deep at least. I remember she dove into a brown wave just before it crested so the white soles of her feet disappeared in it. Like the tailfin of a mermaid, I remember thinking. After the wave broke, she bobbed up on the backside of it, behind the white water, her blond hair all slicked back like a seal’s.

  Maybe I hung on the sand because I remembered Daddy’s warning. I do recall kicking around the shorebreak and wondering very specifically what Mother was drinking and how much. I yelled to Lecia did the Breeze Inn just serve beer. This was a big question, since Mother didn’t even drink beer, not on her worst hungover morning. Lecia ignored me and twisted around to dive into the next swell. (The terrible thing about children—I’d like to mention here—is that they’re so childish.) When Lecia surfaced again, I yelled again. This time I waved my hands to show how dire I was feeling about my question. I couldn’t remember if the Breeze Inn sold mixers, in which case I wondered did Mother have her purse with her. A purse might hold a fifth of vodka. I could picture the giant sketch pad but no purse. Was that right? I hopped up and down and pointed back to the bar. Lecia drew her face down into a grimace that mocked my expression. She flapped her arms like a chicken. She turned and dove again. It was then that I started scanning around for something to chuck at her, nothing too hurtful really, a pebble or a light hunk of driftwood.

  I spied a huge cabbage-head jellyfish on the sand. It was a dull white color. It looked like a free-floating brain knocked out of somebody’s skull. I found a pole to pick it up, stabbing up under the hard white tentacles till it was pretty deep on the stick with its inner goop squooshing out. This was the perfect weapon to chase Lecia with, jellyfish being somehow like roaches in their ability to make her squeal. I stood in the shorebreak and brandished it like a head on a pole, holding it angled away from myself so none of the poison would get on me. She’d backed up into a big piece of chop. The white top of the wave slapped over her head and got her hair in her face. She must have had hair spray in it, because it stayed glued together in a kind of slab, and she started rubbing at her eyes with a fury. She was still rubbing with one hand when she started squealing.

  At first I thought she was screaming to mock me. It was such a high-pitched squeal, like a little shoat hog might make. Then she danced up and down in the water, pumping her knees too high. I kept wielding the jellyfish on the pole at her. If anything, I was happy because I was really scaring her with it. I waded out a little closer to her. I wan
ted her to stop making fun of me so I could find out what kind of liquor license they had at the Breeze Inn. But of course she kept squealing. The slab of hair over her eyes shielded her face. But when she began swatting and slapping at her leg below the water, I backed up pretty quick. Maybe a braver child would have rushed to help her. I was not a braver child, though. I backed up slow, afraid if I took my eyes off her she might vanish below the surface in the jaws of some sea creature. After a while, I dropped the pole and ran as fast as I could to the bar.

  It was a hard run in deep sand from the waterline to the steps of the Breeze Inn. My feet sank and couldn’t get traction, like the run in a bad dream.

  Mother and Daddy ran back with me all the way down to the beach, but once they got there, they seemed way too calm. I mean, neither of them lit a cigarette or anything, but it took a long time before either of them really did much.

  The guy in the camouflage pants had dragged Lecia out of the water while I was fetching my parents. He was kneeling beside her with his pink grandma gloves on when we came up. Lecia sat on the sand with her legs straight out in front of her like some drugstore doll. She had stopped squealing. In fact, she had a glassy look, as if the leg with the man-of-war fastened to it belonged to some other girl. She wasn’t even crying, though every now and then she sucked in air through her teeth like she hurt. The camouflaged guy with the pink gloves was trying to peel the tentacles off her, but it was clumsy work. Mother was looking at Daddy and saying what should they do. She said this over and over, and Daddy didn’t appear to be listening.

  I sat down hard on the sand next to Lecia. I was getting that tight, buckled-down feeling in my stomach like I’d had during the hurricane. I wrapped my arms around my knees, bowed my head, and prayed to a god I didn’t trust a prayer that probably went like this: Please let Lecia not die. Make Daddy think of something fast. Don’t let them chop off her leg either.…But all of a sudden, there was that humming noise again, running underneath the prayer like an electrical current in my head. I opened my eyes fast so it went away.

  Daddy finally scouted around for a sharp shell and cut the head off the man-of-war and then popped it like an old balloon. But he saw quick that that didn’t do any good. The tentacles stayed wrapped around Lecia’s leg, which had started to swell up. Up near her hip joint the tentacles came together where the bubble-head had been. They fanned out down her leg all the way to the ankle. Where the guy with gloves had picked off a length, I could see tiny circle marks left behind where it had suctioned onto the flesh. The flesh was pulpy where these had been attached. There were perfectly circular blisters rising up. This wasn’t supposed to happen with Daddy around, I thought. I recalled a story of Daddy’s in which he’d stood drunk on this very beach with Jimmy Bent, the most badass Cajun in four counties. Jimmy had been drunk too, on Tennessee whiskey. It was a seining party. Girls in capri pants had been sitting along an old log they used for a bench. The girls were eating shellfish from the kettle of crab boil when Jimmy started shooting at Daddy’s feet with a Colt .45, saying, “It take a strong man to dance in the sand.” And Daddy saying back, “I’m a strong man, Jimmy,” dancing, till one of their seining buddies got up behind Mr. Bent and cracked him on the skull with a stick. That story came back to me as proof of my daddy’s omnipotence. People weren’t supposed to get hurt with him around.

  The next instant I can see, they’ve somehow gotten all the tentacles off, and there are bright red welts around Lecia’s leg in a swirly pattern, like she’s been switch-whipped with willow branches. Mother has dug a trench in the sand for the leg, and she is packing wet sand on it, trying to get the swelling down the way you would with a poultice or mustard plaster. The leg doesn’t look much like a leg anymore. The skin is too tight and inflamed. It looks to me a little like the gray blood sausage Cajuns make called boudain. There are more people standing around—all the men from the seining party and a family, and the light is fading fast behind all their heads. The sky has gone gray, and the colors from everybody’s clothes seem muted, like somebody has sprinkled us all with lime. Somebody gives Lecia a slug of Coca-Cola, and she spits it right back out. She’s going pale all over, to match the leg.

  In the next slide, dark finally comes. Daddy is talking off to the side with some lawman about what hospital to take Lecia to—High Island or Port Arthur: which is closer, which better. Somebody’s had the idea of turning everybody’s car headlights on us, so lights shoot at us from all kinds of crazy angles. I am kneeling right next to Lecia, holding her hand, but I don’t want to look at her face. The last time I checked it out, it was the color of the moon that’s starting up. Mother is washing that face with a little damp Wash’n Dri cloth she got out of a foil packet in her purse, and I can smell the antiseptic from that under the sea smell and the musty smell of vodka they’ve given Lecia mixed up with Coke to help with the pain. Instead of looking at Lecia, I am paying big attention to the Gulf, which has moved farther away, breaking in long, electric-white lines in the dark.

  Mother starts talking. She says the light in the breaking waves is caused by phosphorus. She is telling Lecia this like Lecia’s listening. Mother’s voice is very whispery and makes me want to go to sleep. There are, in salt water, she says, microscopic sea animals that get excited by the turmoil of water and so give off light when waves break. One night the three of us took off all our clothes—a phosphorus night like this—and went skinny-dipping. Daddy picked our clothes off the sand and laughed at us from his truck. “You crazy, woman,” he yelled to Mother, but there was joy in it. Then the waves ate his voice, and I dove in and watched my whole body light up.

  Probably I was falling asleep on somebody’s lap, because that’s what I see us doing. Mother and I are flying underwater like light-green phantoms. It reminds me of the Matisse painting that she’d razored out of one of her art books and taped up over the bathtub. In it the women dance nude in a circle. And we are like those huge women, fluid and pale, Mother and I. Ahead of us in the green water, I can see Lecia’s pale white feet like the neon tailfin of a mermaid slipping away just out of reach.

  I was sure in my sleep that Lecia was fixing to die, which is why, I guess, I slept so deeply. I had wished her dead a thousand times, even prayed for it, no less fiercely than I’d prayed for Grandma to die. Now God, who had done me the kindness of killing Grandma, was taking payment for that kindness by killing Lecia too, poisoning her in the leg with a man-of-war, all because I had chased her with a jellyfish, all because she had mocked me when I was scared. I was a child—three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, barely literate, yet already accountable somehow for two deaths.

  I don’t remember the hospital at all. Lecia and Mother rode there in the highway patrol car, I guess, with Daddy and me following behind. I slept next to Daddy while he drove home. The car slipped off the shoulder at one point, so I jerked awake and saw all that blackness rushing by the window with the stars getting long and streaking away behind me. Then he said to lay down, that Lecia was in the backseat. He told me the old lie that everything was fine and just to lay down. And that’s what I did.

  The next morning I counted more than a hundred water blisters on Lecia’s leg where the man-of-war had wrapped around it. She’d been ordered to stay in bed but seemed perfectly happy to lie there with her puffy leg propped on a pillow. I was so grateful she hadn’t died that all day I played servant to her empress. I brought her chicken pie for lunch on Mother’s bone china and spent my own money buying her peppermint swirls at the drugstore. I broke out the Encyclopaedia Britannica and read aloud to her about squids the length of battleships and massive shark attacks on shipwrecked sailors during World War II.

  By the next day, she was charging neighbor kids a nickel to see her blisters, a dime to touch one, and a quarter to pop one with a straight pin we’d dunked in alcohol. Sometime during those transactions, she got mad at me and eventually got out of bed to stuff me once more into the dirty clothes hamper that pulled out from the bathroom
wall. I heaved my body against the hamper to open it a slot, but the heavy lid fell back closed and mashed my fingers before I could get out. I wished her dead again, Lecia. I sat in the dark among the sandy towels and damp bathing suits for nearly an hour before she finally let me out. It seems Daddy had gone back to work, and Mother had gone to bed for the foreseeable future. There was no one else around.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I’ll tell you just exactly how my daddy died,” Daddy says. “He hung hisself.” This is easily the biggest lie Daddy ever told—that I heard, anyway. His daddy is alive and well and sitting on his porch in Kirbyville with his bird dogs. I gawk at Daddy’s audacity, while the men in the room shift around at his seriousness. They take this death as gospel. They twist around on their folding chairs like they would rather corkscrew holes in the floor and drop out of sight than hear about somebody’s daddy hanging hisself. Daddy unfolds the blade of his pocketknife—dragging out their squirming for them—and cuts a circle from a log of pepperoni. He lifts it to his mouth on the blade edge, then chews. “This is kind of tough, ain’t it?”

  It’s Christmas Eve morning in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop. Daddy hasn’t taken me to the Liars’ Club in months, and this is their most special day. I am squirting Cheez Whiz in curlicues on saltines for all the men in hopes that Daddy will notice me helping and invite me back. I miss going places with him. I miss shooting pool and drinking free Cokes and hearing stories with lots of swear words. I’ve been sitting around all month watching cobwebs grow between my mother’s fingers while she lays in bed reading and wishing herself dead. She doesn’t say that, of course, but it’s not hard to figure, even for somebody as dense as Lecia says I am half the time. Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher’s lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.