by Mary Karr
I ran through the house again then, calling out for Mother. What I found in her bathroom knocked the wind slap out of me. The big rectangular mirror over the sink had been scribbled up with lipstick of an orangey-red color. Somebody—Mother no doubt—had taken a tube of Mango Fandango or Kiss-Me Peach and scribbled that mirror almost solid, so the silver reflecting part came through only in streaks. In the sink there was a stub end of greasy lipstick. On the floor the empty gold tube lay like a spent shell casing on the fuzzy oval of yellow rug. I shied around it as I would a scorpion. A thin filter of fear came to slide between me and the world. Objects in the house started to get larger and more fluid. A standing lamp reared up at me as I came on it.
In Mother’s bedroom, on the dresser mirror, I found the same lipstick scribbles done in hibiscus. The metal O of the tube had sawed through the silver surface. Other mirrors in other rooms held other lipstick colors—blue reds and mauves and pale titty-colored pinks, and that scary lipstick the color of muddy blood that Mother hardly ever wore because it made her look as pale and black-lipped as a silent-film star.
I went from mirror to scrawled-up mirror till I found the shattered one in our bathroom, which I imagined she’d gotten to last. A round smashed place in the center was about the diameter of her fist. Her face must have been floating in that exact spot when she broke it. The broken place itself was like a cyclone with whirled shatterings in the center and longer spikes radiating out. She must have watched the planes of her own angular face come apart like a cubist portrait. I backed away from the brokenness of it, giving the sink and the smatterings of glass on the floor wide berth.
I slammed outside and ran down the back steps, praying to God that the black spume of chimney smoke from the tin spout on the garage roof meant that I’d find Mother in her studio painting. If her car was missing, I knew I’d never see her again. I had no trouble picturing that car careening around a curve and then slamming into some concrete embankment. I could also see Mother slumped over the wheel with a picturesque trickle of blood coming from one ear. Surely she wanted to be stopped in her tracks that day. I prayed to find that car sitting in the garage, and I did; its headlights looked heavy-lidded and sleepy, like the car was some bored reptile squatting down over its own four tires.
The door from the garage to Mother’s painting studio was open. The padlock was unlatched, and her silver key ring shaped like a longhorn steer and inlaid with turquoise still hung down from it. Mother sat in her mother’s old rocker with her back to me. She was laying papers on a fire in the cast-iron stove. The white edges charred black and curled in. I knew not to speak. Above her on the wall, that big portrait of Grandma looked down, her stiff arms at perfect right angles. Mother had moved that portrait from the living room after the funeral, leaving the wall blank. It scared me to see Grandma Moore there gazing down at her.
There was a strange odor in the studio that day. On top of the regular head-opening sting of turpentine and oil paints, I made out either lighter fluid or the charcoal starter Daddy always used to fire up the Weber grill. In fact, after I hit the doorway, Mother reached down for a can next to the rocker and squirted clear fluid from it so there was a whoosh. Flames licked out the stove front before settling back into their low rumble. (Later on, I’d find a brown scorch spot on the vaulted ceiling. I also later figured that she was feeding the stove with all the mail that had come addressed to Grandma since her death—bank statements and seed catalogues and get-well cards from the Lubbock Methodist Church Ladies’ Auxiliary.)
Anyway, Mother’s back to me in that rocker conjured that old Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho she’d taken us to in 1960. In the end, the crazy killer was got up like his nutty old mother with a gray wig. He rocked in her personal chair. Mother turned around slow to face me like old Tony Perkins. Her face came into my head one sharp frame at a time. I finally saw in these instants that Mother’s own face had been all scribbled up with that mud-colored lipstick. She was trying to scrub herself out, I thought. Sure enough, the scribbles weren’t like those on an African mask or like a kid’s war paint. They didn’t involve the underlying face that much. They lacked form. No neat triangles or straight lines went along the planes on the face. She looked genuinely crazy sitting in her mother’s rocker with the neatly ruffled blue calico cushions in front of that blazing stove with the smell of charcoal fluid and her own face all scrawled up bloody red.
Then we’re in the lavender bedroom I share with Lecia. The sun is going down, so there’s a vine pattern through the wax-papered windows, the shadows of wisteria and honeysuckle. Mother stands before this lit window over a cardboard box by our open closet. She picks up toys one at a time off the closet floor and flings them into the box. We have left our room a mess, she says in a hoarse voice I don’t think of as hers. But that’s the only voice she has left, her drunk Yankee one. I want to be a good hausfrau, she says, which word I didn’t even know meant housewife, but I fear the hard German hiss of it. Hausfrau. That’s my job. That’s what I am—the wife of this fucking crackerbox house. And into the box fly the one-armed Barbies and fistfuls of checkers and marbles and plastic soldiers and metal cars and board games and the marble chess pieces—all hitting the cardboard with a sound like splattering rain.
Once the closet’s bare, she yanks off our bedcovers and sails them through the room. She drags our mattress on the floor, then lifts our bare box spring over her head. She looks like Samson in Bible pictures with one of those big stone pillars bench-pressed up when she heaves it. It hits the wall with a deep-throated clang at once primitive and musical. That’s what starts me crying for the only time that night. I duck my head and bury it in the armpit of Lecia’s bleached white PJs.
Next I can see, we are out behind the garage in front of a huge pile of toys and Golden Books and furniture heaped in a tall pyramid. I have been to football bonfires and beach-side pit barbecues with whole calves roasting on spits. Becky Hebert even once took me to a fish fry hosted by the Ku Klux Klan, where they were burning schoolbooks and drugstore romances in a pile higher than any of the houses around. This stack is almost as high as that. It’s taller than Daddy who’s six feet in his socks.
I zero in on my old red wooden rocking horse. He stands not ten feet from me. He hangs all saggy now from his metal frame by these rusted springs. Mother is pouring gas out of the red can onto him, and he looks sullen underneath.
When she takes up the big box of safety matches, she waves Lecia and me back with a broad sweep of her arm, like she’s about to do some circus trick. I start to stand so I can jump and catch her arm before she lights that match. But Lecia’s hand clamps on both my shoulders to stop my rising. She shoves me back down onto the ground. I feel my legs buckle under me like they’re the legs of some different girl, or even like the cold steel legs of one of those lawn chairs just folding up on itself. I sit down hard on the wet St. Augustine grass, the blades of which are stiff as plastic. That’s my horse getting doused by the upended gas can. I knot my arms in front of my chest and think how I wanted to keep that horse for bouncing. It’s supposed to be a baby toy, but some days when Lecia’s out, I ride it with springs screeching and close my eyes and picture myself galloping across a wide prairie. Now that horse looks at me all blank-eyed and tired.
I scan around for a rock or two-by-four to conk Mother on the head with. But Lecia’s hands won’t let go my shoulders. She could be watching the weather on TV for all the feeling her face shows. I tell her that’s my horse Mother’s messing with. But she’s bored with this complaint. So I let it go. Bye-bye, old Paint, I think to myself, I’m a-leaving Cheyenne.
Mother drags the safety match in slo-mo down the black strip on the side of the box, and the spark takes the red match head with a flare. She tosses the match toward the horse with a gesture that’s almost delicate. For an instant she might be a lady dropping a hanky. Then flames surge up over my horse with a loud whump. For a long time inside the orange fire you can see the black horse shape real
clear. But at some point that shape caves in on itself, gives way to the lapping fire that Mother pitches stuff into, no horse left at all. She upends the last box of toys and shakes it the way, earlier in our room, she dumped out each drawer from our highboy.
The fire is working hard. It climbs up and over every single object piled there. She’s burning her own paintings too, some of them, the landscapes of the beach mostly. The canvases catch before the frames do, so lined up at different heights along one side of the pyramid are these framed pictures of flames. Fire burns wild inside the gilt frames and wormwood frames and slick, supermodern brass frames.
Then Mother drags across the grass the biggest, deepest box of all, an old refrigerator box we had been planning to cut up for a puppet theatre. Out of it she draws our clothes—culottes and sunsuits with shoulder ties and old pajamas with beading on the feet that make a clicking noise on the bathroom tiles and keep you from sliding around. A white shirt with a Peter Pan collar flies out of her hand and arcs across the black sky, and behind it comes a huge red crinoline petticoat I wore to can-can in. It always reminded Mother of Degas’s dancers. Now it swirls from her hand in a circle and settles in the fire almost gently where it’s eaten in a quick gulp. From Mother’s arms tumble dozens of tennis shoes. They smother in a lump till the canvas of them catches, and after that, black smoke comes up with the wicked stink of scorched rubber.
After the shoes catch, she fishes out the dresses. She slips each one off its hanger the better to see it before she commends it to the fire. At her feet, a big thicket of hangers is piling up. Each hanger drops from her white hand into the pile with a faint ringing. That ringing sends her into heavy motion again. She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it’s a schoolkid she’s checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire. There sails my white eyelet-lace Easter dress, and the pinafore Grandma smocked and embroidered with French-knot flowers in pink. There’s the pink peasant skirt Lecia got at the Mexico store in Houston. There’s the green plaid jumper with yellow cowgirl ropes stitched around the pockets that we’ve both worn. Those dresses look like nothing so much as the bodies of little girls whose ghosts have gone out of them. (Epictetus has a great line about the division between body and soul—“Thou art a little spirit bearing up a corpse.” When I read that line years later, I automatically pictured those dresses emptied of their occupants and sailing into the fire in graceful arcs.)
At some point the fire fades to orange background, and I stare only at Mother’s face. It’s all streaked up with lipstick and soot, so she looks like a bona fide maniac. Her lips move in a muttery way, but I can’t make out the words. Nipper growls and yaps. He occupies that large circle of dark by the house that barely exists for me anymore. I can hear him lunge to the end of his chain, then get his bark choked off by the collar before he slinks back under the house. Mother’s voice rises, so I can make out what she’s saying over the fire and the whimpering dog: Rotten cocksucking motherfucking hausfrau.
If I keep my eyes unfixed and look through my eyelashes I discover I can turn the whole night into something I drew with crayon. The trees around us have bubble-shaped heads. The dresses flying into the fire are cut out of a paper-doll book. The fire is burnt orange and sunflower yellow and fire-engine red, with bold black spikes around it. The refinery towers in the distance are long skinny lines I drew with the silver crayon, using my ruler to keep them so straight. Their fires remind me of birthday candles fixing to get puffed out.
I don’t know when all the fight drains out of me, but it does. You could lead me by the hand straight into that fire, and I doubt a squawk would come out. I can’t protest anymore, and I can see that Lecia has been scooped pretty empty too. We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm has settled over me from the inside out. What is about to happen to us has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one and by one.
I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp’s Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. People can get behind pain that way, if they think it derives from powers larger than themselves. So in the middle of some miserable plague where everybody’s got buboes in their groins and armpits swelling and bursting with pus, people can walk around calm. So I know with calm how cut off we are from any help. No fire truck will arrive. None of the neighbors will phone Daddy or the sheriff.
I picture old Mrs. Heinz standing next door at her sink behind the window she cleaned down to the squeak every Saturday with a bucket of ammonia water into which she squeezed a lemon. She can see us out there. I feel her eyes on me. She’s wiping off the last plate from the drainboard and watching us and wondering should she come out. But she thinks better of it. Mother’s flinging things into the fire like one of those witches out of the Shakespeare play, and old Mrs. Heinz probably peers out from behind the ruffled Priscilla curtains that she copied herself on her sewing machine using dimestore gingham to look like the ones in the Sears catalogue. She probably takes one long gander at that hill of flaming toys and furniture and the picture frames of living fire and Mother stirring it all with a long pole and thinks to herself, Ain’t a bit of my business. Then she lets the pink-checked curtain go so it fell across us.
The other neighbors have done the same. I feel them all releasing us into the deep drop of whatever is about to happen. Each curtain falls. Each screen door is pulled tight, and every door hook clicks into its own tight eye, and even big heavy doors get heaved closed in the heat, and all the bolts are thrown. I can almost hear it happening all over the neighborhood. TVs get turned louder to shut out the racket of us. Anyone might have phoned Daddy and said, Pete, looky here. This ain’t none of my bi’ness, but… (The thought that burdens me most today is that somebody did call Daddy to let him know, and Daddy—gripped by the same grinding machine that gripped us—just stayed in the slot that fate had carved for him and said he planned to come on home directly. Or he said kiss my rosy red ass, for Daddy could turn the volume on any portion of the world up or down when he had a mind to. I can very well picture his big hand setting the phone back in its black cradle. The men on his unit might have been frying up some catfish they’d caught. From high in his tower, he could have looked out that curved window across fields of industrial pipes and oil-storage tanks, past the train yards to the grid of identical houses—in the yard of one of which Mother was setting fire to our lives—and maybe Daddy just decided to change the channel away from that fire to the sizzle of cornbreaddipped catfish floating in hot lard. Boy that fish smells good, I can imagine him saying.)
When Mother gets done emptying stuff into the fire, she goes back inside the house, and we follow like herd animals. We don’t run to some neighbor house calling, save us save us. We wouldn’t leave Mother alone in this state. We cross the sopping lawn from the fire’s scorch and into the humid damp of the dark yard and unlit house. We traipse up the concrete steps and into the kitchen at an even pace. She walks down the long hall to her bedroom, and at that moment, some spark of something must catch inside Lecia, some desire to get us both loose, to disembark from that wild ride we’ve been on, because she nudges me to our end of the house. I go where she pushes like a blind calf.
Our room is scrambled and holds no order. That box spring tilting against the wall scares me big league. I can picture Mother heaving it and hear it hit all over again. There’s a gray-and-black quilt Grandma once stitched together from a book of men’s suit samples she got from some tailor. Lecia spreads that out like we’re on a picnic. I lie down on it, and she draws the white chenille bedspread over our knees, which we bend into mountains. The chenille is nubbly as code. We roll on our sides and face each other. The quilt squares stretch beneath us. We hopscotch from square to square in finger tag—black gabardine to charcoal f
lannel to gray pinstripe, like farmlands seen from up high. Mother earlier smashed all the lightbulbs in our room with a broom handle, so it’s dark. You can’t quite decipher the individual pieces of furniture tipped over and flung around, just the right angles that poke up making a jagged mountain landscape around our floor pallet.
I can hear Mother in the kitchen now. She must be dumping cutlery from the drawers because the noise of metal crashing explodes then stops, explodes then stops. If I close my eyes it’s like a great battle right out of King Arthur is taking place in there. I can picture knights in armor bringing their swords down against shields, arrows flying into battlements, lances striking the breastplates of horsemen. When I open my eyes, though, there is only the dark plain of the quilt we lie on divided up in squares by the neat grid of suit samples. Next to me Lecia’s face is long and white under her spiky bangs. She looks baleful as a basset hound. She has stopped hopscotching and now presses her index finger against her lips to show me not to say anything, but what might I say? A long rectangle of light spills over us from the open door.
Then a dark shape comes to occupy that light, a figure in the shape of my mom with a wild corona of hair and no face but a shadow. She has lifted her arms and broadened the stance of her feet, so her shadow turns from a long thin line into a giant X. And swooping down from one hand is the twelve-inch shine of a butcher knife, not unlike the knife that crazy guy had in Psycho for the shower scene, a stretched-out triangle of knife that Daddy sharpens by hand on his whetstone before he dismantles a squirrel or a chicken, though it is also big enough to have hacked through the hip joint of a buck. It holds a glint of light on its point like a star, so that old rhyme pops into my head: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. Then I don’t know what to wish for. Lecia’s finger stays pressed to her lips. Her eyes are big but steady on that figure in the doorway and on the knife. I wish not to scream. Screaming would piss Lecia off. I can tell. A scream is definitely not what I want to happen to me right now. It’s part wish and part prayer that zips through my head and keeps me from howling.