The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Mary Karr

  Still, when I started stuffing those stamps in the tin metal coffee canister with a rooster painted on it, Mother didn’t utter a word to mock it, which must have taken some big-league restraint. I spent my evenings at the kitchen table licking stamps and then smoothing the sticky sheets into savings books. When my spit ran out, I took up the sour-smelling blue sponge from the sink. On the pages of those books lay neat grids spelled out in menthol-green lines. I worked sloppy most of the time, but it pleased me no end when I did manage to line up a strip of stamps exactly within those borders. Lecia asked me on a nightly basis if I’d gone slap-dab crazy. But there wasn’t much venom in her voice.

  Days, I hung out at the grocery store in town, just inside the magic doors. People sometimes pulled their stamps out of the paper sacks to hand over to me before shoving their carts onto the black rubber runner that ticked open those doors with a hum.

  Garbage day was my best haul. People tended to stuff grocery sacks in those armored-looking metal cans. Often as not, the brown sacks came in a neatly folded pile on top of all the yucky stuff. Only a few times did I have to dig past coffee grounds and melon rinds to get at them. And in those sack bottoms, you could sometimes find Green Stamps by the yard that somebody’s husband or teenager forgot to draw out. The few doctors and business people from Colorado Springs who kept weekend places up there didn’t mess with stamps at all. I hit their small, neat garbage cans first.

  At the end of all this foraging and licking and counting, I had dozens of full stamp books stacked in a vodka box. Lecia had to help me scoot it over the pine needles and gravel in the driveway to the car. Mother then heaved it in the trunk. She drove me clear to Colorado Springs, to what the Green Stamp marketing wizards had named the Redemption Center.

  The Indian woman behind the counter wore a polished turquoise stone on a fine silver chain inside the deep shadow of her serious cleavage. That cleavage stays with me because I stood eye-level with it a long time. Finding something I’d X’ed in the catalogue actually on the shelves turned out to be a problem. There was no new rod and reel looking just like a Zippo. There were no gold cufflinks shaped like horseshoes with diamond chips for nailheads. The lady offered to send to Ohio, which would take six to eight weeks. But my daddy didn’t raise me a fool. Just as I knew not to buy on credit, I damn sure knew not to pay for something I couldn’t lay my hands on, not unless it was from Sears.

  The lady was nice about looking through her inventory book, though. We spent the better part of her shift at it. I’d read off the product number from my dog-eared catalogue, and she’d check for it in her three-ring binder. The notebook was tethered to the counter with twisted cable, and had a dusty blue cloth cover like the ones high school kids carried. As time wore on, the inventory book came to hold all the power of a sorcerer’s spell book. It had Daddy’s gift somewhere inside it, and locating that gift on its onionskin pages was the last leg of a long journey that had started back when I’d chased after Daddy down the mountain. Whenever the lady stopped flipping past the staggered dividers and started running her fingernail down a single page, I’d cross the fingers on both hands for luck.

  All this time Mother stood chain-smoking back by the glass door. I could hear her stamp out each cigarette butt. The toe on her high heel wiggled and made a raspy noise against the concrete floor. No sooner had one been stamped out than another got lit. I’d hear that lighter flip open, then the rough click of the flint sending out a spark. A few seconds later a double lungful of Salem exhaust would drift up to us. She also sighed out heavy smoke every time the clerk shook her head no.

  Not a single thing I’d picked was in stock. That shocked me. I’d lain in bed night after night picturing Daddy stepping down from his truck after the long drive to Colorado, how he’d scoop me up in his arms while Lecia stood tapping her foot. Behind him on the truck seat would sit the box in which the new fishing reel (or tie tack, or ebony domino set) had been shipped. Luring Daddy back had—in my mind—edged over the line from being a wish into being a fact. I even fooled myself that not having everything in stock augured well. Fate itself would pick Daddy’s present, rather than running the risk that I’d get something half-assed.

  Mother headed up the aisle toward us. I heard the measured click of her heels, which told me she had the red-ass over this whole undertaking. She announced to the counter lady that the catalogue didn’t say word one about them not shipping stuff till Kennedy was out of office. She said her baby (meaning me) had worked like a field hand getting all those stamps stuck in books. I tugged the elbow of her beige cashmere jacket to slow her down, but she jerked away. It was a rant I’d heard—the Goddamn Lying, Republican Bastards who’d ever thought up the miserable, niggardly business of stamp-licking. The lady misheard the “niggardly” part and herself got steamed, saying she wasn’t colored, she was an Indian, to which Mother replied, “I don’t give a great steaming pile of dogshit what you are—”

  I somehow herded Mother outside under the forest-green awning. A fine rain had started to fall. Great gray clouds rolled down the mountains. The street was wet and black. I’d left my box of stamps on the counter and would have fried in hot lard before I’d have slid into Mother’s Impala without something in my lap for Daddy, however small and wrong that gift might wind up being. But I knew better than to say it that strong. You couldn’t draw a hard line in front of Mother, ever, could never set down an ultimatum. Doing so only made her bow up—as Daddy always said—like a cut worm. She would spend her last breath calling you a cocksucker before she’d back down. I hedged. I suggested. I finally watched her skitter through the rain on her heels across the wet street to a bar with a red neon sign in the window, the Black Cat.

  For what seemed like hours I walked the wide chilly aisles of the Redemption Center. The shelves rose all the way up to the twenty-foot steel-beam rafters. Most of the grown-up stuff was inside boxes the color of dirt, so I kept going back to the front desk. But the clerk—dead sure, I guess, that Mother had called her a nigger—wouldn’t let me handle the inventory book hitched to the counter.

  After a while, the toy aisle drew me. There were Ping-Pong tables and pool tables, an inflatable swimming pool deep enough to go swimming underwater in. I almost blew a batch of stamp books on a plastic toy factory that used a heat and vacuum process to sculpt from small squares of plastic the kind of bright-colored doodads you got out of gum machines for pennies—baby footballs and squatty dolls with loops on the tops of their heads to string them around your neck. The picture on front showed a clean-scrubbed boy and girl about my age operating a roadside toy stand. They were taking fistfuls of dollar bills from a whole herd of toddlers clambering around to buy their toys. I’d read a comicbook biography of Henry Ford and fancied having my own assembly line—a union shop, of course. For a full twenty minutes, I stared at that toy-factory box thinking of all the dollars I could generate at ten cents a pop selling geegaws to the rich tourists at the stable.

  When reason finally struck, it fell over me with the harsh neon light from long bulbs high among the metal rafters. It was a light the color of horse piss. I knew that no kid in her right mind would shell out real coins for that crap. Daddy’s voice ran back through me. He’s always talked back to the TV commercials. “Now how did I live fifty some-odd years with no Veg-O-Matic to make me julienne fries? Confound my bad old luck!”

  I wound up getting him a ceramic statue of a pot-bellied monk with a bald pate and a crown of hair made of real brown felt, fuzzy to the touch. The monk carried a bamboo fishing pole with a line of gold braid. A mug of frothy brown beer sat at his sandaled feet. I also got Mother an electric can opener, which impressed me most for the built-in knife sharpener it had at the back.

  When she lifted that can opener out of its box there under the red Coca-Cola clock in the Black Cat Lounge, she was tickled over it in that loopy drunk’s way. I could have given her a rat turd in a bucket and gotten the same amount of gush. She planted a lipsticky kiss on my che
ek and passed the can opener around. The cowboys lined up at the bar handled it too gently. They turned it over in their rough hands in a way that made it seem shoddy. The barman even unplugged his blender to test the sharpener on his lemon knives. The shrill grinding sound it made on steel was crazed as a dentist drill.

  The monk got wrapped in newsprint and shipped. The coffee canister got filled up with Green Stamps again, almost by accident. But the very prospect of them made me tired. One night I stomped on the trash-can pedal so the lid popped open like the jaw of something, and I upended the stamps in there.

  On what felt like the last day of summer, we helped Mr. McBride and all his saddle hands herd the stable horses to winter pasture. Dusk was coming on. The constable had cleared the main road of cars for the time they figured it would take. He even blocked off incoming roads with black-and-white-striped sawhorses.

  I don’t know why they let Lecia and me ride along, because even Mr. McBride’s kids—all champion riders—were forbidden. Once the corral gate got thrown open, the herd hesitated before trotting out. Only after they’d crossed the stone bridge did they seem to twig to where they were headed. Then they ran in a single, faintly weaving body at full tear. Their big necks strained forward, their long backs seeming to follow behind. If I’d fallen, I’d have been stomped flat before anybody even noticed the empty saddle. Still, I mostly wasn’t scared. The whole scene was like something from a cowboy movie. Much of the road was packed dirt instead of pavement, and the dust was enormous. A great cloud wrapped around us the whole time. Even Lecia’s face bobbing seemed blurry as a cheap newsreel. All I could make out for yards in any direction was the bare backs of those horses—dun and chestnut and blue-spotted Appaloosa—stretching out for rows and moving in such perfect unison that I could sometimes convince myself I was standing still in the undulating roar of it. To ride in the midst of that filled my skull with thunder and made me dumb. At some point, I watched a little paint pony break loose from the herd. He skirted up somebody’s lawn, leaping first across a sidewalk, then over a low hedge into another yard. Mr. McBride finally galloped up the incline and folded him back in. That single horse cutting out brought home to me in a great rush how fast we were traveling in that streaming tide of animal. My own velocity gave me a rush of stark fear. I bent over my saddle horn and locked my body down over that fear, then got swept back up in the surge of horses again.

  The next day, Mr. McBride’s truck pulled up to the house dragging a hired trailer with our horses inside. That’s how we figured out we were leaving town for the school year.

  We headed west again, into even higher altitudes, toward a black dot on the map that Mother had circled in red ink—her own idea of winter pasture, I guess. She’d bought herself a bar as an investment. If your mother’s drinking worries you, and she buys herself an entire bar in a town you’ve never heard her so much as mention before, you might respond with big-eyed quiet. She did try to soft-pedal the bar aspect of the move. In her speech at the time, she claimed the Longhorn Bar was no different than a sock you’d stuff with your gambling stake and pitch deep under your bed where dust bunnies rolled around. Hector had some family in the new town. Also, if we stayed in the mountain cabin, Lecia and I would have to catch a bus to a Colorado Springs school at six on winter mornings. Who’d relish that? she said.

  Lecia and I carried some clothes in round Barbie travel cases. I watched the cabin get littler behind us. Then a grove of aspens came between us and it, blotting it entirely from view, and the car started to hairpin down the mountain.

  I knew we’d never get back there and said as much to Lecia, who claimed that was the least of our worries. I looked at her serious profile while she watched the trees tick past. She had a way of tucking her chin in. Her head dipped down like a gull’s would facing a steep wind, so her brown eyes peered up at the world from a definite slot under her blond bangs’ sharp border. She drew her chin back further into her neck’s folds. That was her way of digging back into herself, of getting down deep in the solid foundation of what she was before another change swamped over her. Seeing her profile go all chinless in the car, I felt a whole flood of dark fill me up, cold as creek water. Daddy wouldn’t even know where to come get us when he got ready.

  We drove all day across the high plains. All the while, Mother was babbling about how small our life in Texas had been, a town with no music but country and zydeco; no books but the Sears catalogue, which ladies I grew up with called the “dream book.” The only thing a woman might dream for there, Mother said, was a deep-freeze filled with deer meat she’d cleaned and dressed herself; or a fat vinyl ottoman to prop up her swollen feet on at day’s end. At one point, she just pitched her black beret out the window. I watched it tumble to a stop behind us and lay there like roadkill.

  At a Western store, we ordered blue-plate specials for supper: meatloaf, and mashed potatoes that Lecia and I molded into volcanoes. On the way out, Mother bought a man’s Stetson with two long quail feathers sloping backwards out of the band, and a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. She also paid a hundred dollars for a squash-blossom necklace. It was made of leaded silver heavy enough to feel like an ox yoke when you put it on.

  By the time our pale Impala began to rise off that plain back into the mountains, the sun had gone red. Dark settled in. The speedometer glow got noticeable. I stood between their heads, Hector’s and Mother’s. His saggy, reptilian profile as he slouched behind the wheel—he always put me in mind of an alligator—showed no response to Mother’s new cowgirl motif. Hector was, to my mind anyway, in the deepest way possible along for the ride. Mother stretched out on the shotgun side of the car, her cowboy boots propped on the front dash. She’d taught us an old cowboy song earlier. I fell asleep to her singing it alone in her tuneless whisper:

  I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande,

  But my legs ain’t bowed, and my cheeks ain’t tanned.

  Well I know all the songs that the cowboys know

  ’Cause I learned them all on the ra-di-o.

  Yippee-ay-yo-ky-yay…

  CHAPTER 11

  Our headlights streaked across a billboard announcing that we’d crossed into Antelope proper. The town fathers hoped to catch the ski crowd, who drove straight past that sign—painted in chubby red cursive like you saw on ice cream trucks—to Telluride up the road. Antelope was founded during the Gold Rush, though very few nuggets of gold got sifted through the screen mesh of many miners’ pans back then. Somebody did pickax up great streaks of silver and copper, but after those mines played out, Antelope had no clear means of keeping its citizens alive. Lecia was slumped on my shoulder, and I elbowed her to scope the place with me.

  Mother had geared us up all our lives for a great city. The bedtime stories she told were full of such places: Athens in the age of Socrates, before the Cynics started running things and folks got to opening up their wrists longwise in the baths; the Paris of the twenties; Vienna when a sick and sweaty Mozart was scribbling out the notes to his own requiem. Not least on that list was Mother’s own New York in the forties. Such a city was our birthright, we’d been told. But when we eased along Antelope’s main street that wet fall night, the squatty buildings and storefronts were lit only by a few beer signs. No marquees blinked. No long awnings were guarded by officious doormen with gold taxi whistles around their necks.

  By daylight, the landscape was capital-B Beautiful. But something grim and Gothic hung around the place. The mountains seemed to lurch over the town. Plus that fall the sky stayed gray, not unlike the skies I’d read about in Dracula, vaulted over by the Carpathian Mountains with their bare trees clawing out.

  I’d founded a vampire club at the time, myself the only member. I wrote out the initiation ceremony, which was lengthy and painful, in my red Big Chief tablet. You started by poking your finger with a straight pin to swap blood with all the other members. With Lecia watching, I jabbed both my own index fingers, to prove how serious I was about the whole deal. You w
ere also supposed to douse your hand in lighter fluid and set a match to it, afterward patting it out fast on a wet towel—a trick I’d seen back in Leechfield on Halloween. (This I postponed actually trying till there were more members to wow with it.) Then came the written vampire test. You had to spell out the three or four Transylvanian words from Bram Stoker’s book. (Vlkoslak was the one, I think, that meant vampire.) These would serve as passwords to enter the clubhouse I never got around to cobbling together. Once you’d passed these trials, you got to mark your carotid artery with two red dots from a laundry marker. Lecia refused to endure this even when I offered to waive the initiation rites and promised she could be my vice president—then president, with myself as Igor.

  But truly, Antelope suggested such things—secret clubs, demonic rituals. The German market still hung sausage by twine from the ceiling. The first time I pushed open the heavy door that set the huge cowbell overhead banging, I was horrified to look up and find all those fragrant, inert hunks of meat in blood-colored casings swaying over me. They reminded me of some medieval etching I’d seen in one of Mother’s art books—dozens of heretics hung by the Spanish Inquisition. The bodies had swung off this giant scaffolding in some town square and just twirled rotting in the breeze, arms falling off, eyeballs popping out. The guy who owned that market was named Olaf, no less. He ran the place with his twin sister, Anna. They were both about a hundred years old, their arthritic spines seeming to curve them more deeply in on themselves every time you went in. Each cast a shadow like a bulbous question mark on the scuffed and streaky linoleum.

  They scooped penny candy from drugstore jars and gave out samples of their own garlic cheese spread, which was a Day-Glo orange you never came across in nature. There was stuff on the shelves that had been sitting there since Eisenhower. The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. “If swallowed—” each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning.