by Mary Karr
No sooner was Mother seated than Gordon lit her cigarette with a butane lighter that sent up a flame about a foot high. He pocketed the lighter, then leaned his butt against the window ledge and opened a magazine he’d brought along, the cover of which showed a cartoon Nazi, skinny and with a long ferret-like nose, squinting his eye to hold a monocle in place. This Nazi was pinning back the arms of a large-breasted blonde dressed in a shredded nurse outfit. The intensity Gordon brought to studying this magazine made me feel even worse than the fact that Mr. Janisch could see the sleazy cover.
I guess I concentrated so hard on Gordon that day, because I almost couldn’t bear to look at Mother. She’d become the picture of somebody nuts. For one thing, she’d tried to dye her hair red that fall, but wound up with a substance less hair than pelt. It was the overall color and texture of dried alfalfa. For another, she hadn’t bothered actually dressing for the meeting. She’d just stepped bare-legged into her cowboy boots, smushed some muddy lipstick on her mouth, and thrown that fur coat on over her peach silk nightgown. But the scalloped hem of the gown kept peeking out her coat bottom whenever she crossed her legs, and it seemed to me she crossed her legs a lot that morning. Maybe she was trying to show her legs off to old Janbo, a man on whom good legs might well have been lost. He just rocked back and forth in his office chair, nodding politely over the vast green expanse of his desk blotter.
I tried to keep a stiff smile welded on my face the whole time, even when Mother invited him and his wife down to the bar for drinks on the house any afternoon. She called the Longhorn “a family place.” She bragged that her own “brilliant” daughters—she smoothed my hair at this point—sat studying at a cocktail table, while the jukebox played classical music. I distinctly recall ducking my head out from under her hand. (Something about the small betrayal of moving away from her still gives me a stab of guilt.) I knew that old Janbo knew that the Longhorn was a sleazeball dive, and I didn’t want to sully myself any worse by seeming to back up such an obvious lie.
Lecia and I did go to the bar after school. But instead of homework we played this electric game, a mix of shuffleboard and bowling, where you slid a hockey puck down a long glossy lane to whack up some bowling pins. Or else we sat at the bar sipping cherry Cokes and learning bar tricks. I knew how to build a house of playing cards, and could throw dice from a cup so they came up nothing but sevens. I could also follow the slick moves of a shell game (I was still too clumsy to execute them myself), or fold a bar towel so it resembled a huge erect horse penis that would set all the customers laughing themselves into a blended chorus of drunk donkey snorts. The only classical piece on the jukebox was Ravel’s “Bolero,” unless you counted the music from Exodus, which made the Irish bartender weep. Mother carried a screwdriver around in her purse to jack the volume of that box up or down depending on her mood and whether she felt like dancing. Mostly we listened to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about mining sixteen tons of coal or following the wild geese with his heart.
Certain steady customers hadn’t moved for so long there were practically cobwebs stitching them to their bar stools. I’d seen the paintings of Edward Hopper, the washed-out misery of people slumped in diners. Mother had a book of them, one portrait more gray-faced than the next. The Longhorn was broke out in that kind of person.
Gordon and Joey were the most animate regulars, being young enough to run errands for Mother when her headaches were too blinding for her to get behind a steering wheel.
Joey survived on disability. He picked up a monthly check from some lawyer in Colorado Springs for the black lung he’d contracted mining, which didn’t keep him from sucking down cigarettes all day and night. The index fingers on both his hands had brownish stains from nicotine. Unlike Gordon, Joey had once been handsome. He was a Mexican-Indian, small but broad-chested and narrow-hipped. He had a square jaw and black eyes Mother liked to call soulful. Those eyes had saggy pouches under them, though, and his straight black lashes stayed at half-mast all the time, the result of codeine painkillers and Valium (which Mother had also asked his doctor to prescribe for her). Plus the coughing fits he went into several times a day lasted a good five or ten minutes and stopped any bar conversation dead. He was clearly fixing to blow a lung. I patted Joey on the back when he coughed, like he only had a fishbone stuck in his throat, asking, “Did it go down the wrong pipe?” while Lecia fetched him a glass of water from behind the bar. She could be very patient, Lecia, holding out a frosted collins glass while Joey wheezed. He always left a pile of cocktail napkins he’d coughed into. Once after last call, I unfolded one and found a buckshot pattern of blood speckles that made me drop it to the floor, like it was radioactive, before Deeter swept it up with the swizzle sticks.
Gordon was sturdier-looking. He lived with his mother on the edge of town and had a pasture where we boarded our horses. “What do you do for a living, anyways?” I asked Gordon one afternoon. At the time, he was trying to teach me how to flip a filbert nut off the back of my hand and straight into my mouth. “Business interests,” Gordon said. That caused Joey to laugh his way into a hacking fit. I was patting on his bony back when Mother pulled me into the bathroom to explain it wasn’t nice to ask what people did. That was opposite from what I’d learned in Texas, where a job was a person’s lowest common denominator, maybe even more defining than sex. You knew people based on what plant they clocked in at, which unit in that plant, and what union took their dues money—pipe fitters, Teamsters, or the OCAW.
In the morning when I’d pad downstairs in my socks, I always found either Joey or Gordon passed out on the parlor sofa. My task was to wake one and send him shivering out to warm up the car before driving us to school. We could have walked, of course. But Mother fancied our being driven. I made a habit of setting the gas flame under the kettle for coffee before I even poured myself cereal. That was meanness on my part, since the shrill whistle of that kettle woke any sleeper within range into a wincing misery.
One bright cool Sunday, Mother sent them both to Gordon’s pasture with us to catch our horses. We’d been begging for that since we’d hit Antelope. I’d torn my hair in numerous tantrums over it.
What finally inspired Mother about the project was some rodeo rider who’d dropped in the bar one Saturday night trying to sell a pair of show bridles. He was on his way to Wyoming and needed extra cash so he could ask his girl to marry him. He flipped open his hand-tooled billfold to show us her homecoming queen picture in its scratched-up vinyl window. She was wearing a rhinestone tiara in her blond flipped-up hair and smiling out at us with more straight white teeth than I’d ever seen in a human mouth. One look at her and at this cowboy’s sorry, mooning face, and Mother bought drinks all around. Then she’d rung open the cash register for a stack of bills and gone outside to buy those bridles right from his truck bed.
Joey and Gordon drove us to the pasture the next day right after dawn.
There was a hard frost on the ground when we set out across the field. The sky was dark blue. The horses stood feeding at some unbound hay bales near a ragged shed. I suddenly remembered the sleek power of being high on Big Enough’s back, how I’d steered him around the barrel in that gymkhana, almost lithe for once, dipping out of the saddle to grab the flag from the sand bucket in a single balletic swoop that saved me seconds and won me the red ribbon. It took all the restraint I had that cold morning (I was not given to restraint) not to bolt at him. I moved easy. I started the low clicking noise Daddy had taught me to stop a squirrel on a branch.
The horse had seen me right off, of course. The minute I’d slid under the barbed wire, he stopped tearing at the straw. He lifted his long neck and pricked his black ears toward us. He nickered, which I read as a nod of greeting. Then Sure Enough stopped eating and high-stepped a few yards away, watching. We must have made a sorry procession: Lecia and I clanging the bridles, the long reins dragging on the frosted ground behind us; Joey and Gordon in their thin trench coats and scuffed-up dress shoes, both st
inking of old drink. Still, I actually believed that those horses would gallop toward us, the way National Velvet had toward young Liz Taylor. But the alert look in Big Enough’s round dark eyes was not, in fact, joy at my return. It was dread. He’d gone green as a colt. His expression was some equine way of saying not her again.
Eventually, Gordon and Joey took off after both horses. They got sick of how patiently Lecia and I held out handfuls of stiff grass, waiting for them to trot over. But the men didn’t know horses. The bridles looked odd in their hands. Gordon squatted down to my eye level and drew his assault plan on his palm like a football captain. Lecia and I were supposed to herd the horses toward the two men. But I knew the animals wouldn’t fall for it. They were faster than us by double, and way more nimble, not to mention that neither Joey nor Gordon had ever stuck a bit in a horse’s mouth.
Lecia and I gave up helping pretty quick. We watched the men chase those horses for the better part of the morning. Gordon was lumbering and slow on his feet. Joey was quicker, but more and more hung over as time wore on. His blood alcohol level must have plummeted sharply at some point, for once he abruptly sat down in what turned out to have been a manure pile, so there was a fresh green shit stain on the butt of his tan raincoat. The horses themselves seemed tickled by the whole game. They’d lope hard a while; then, when the men flagged, they’d slow up.
The horses led the men the whole length of the field that morning—God knows how many acres. After a while, Lecia and I went back to the car to eat packets of soup crackers from the glove compartment. It was also warmer out of the wind. We played scissors-paper-stone with our hands the rest of the morning. The winner got to whip the inside of the loser’s arm—the tenderest, whitest part—with two fingers. You licked your fingers with spit to make the sting worse, then smacked them sharp against the skin. By noon, both our arms had welts all up and down them. The men stood behind the horses far out where the field gave up to rock. The animals started climbing, and the men turned back, Gordon limping slightly, Joey stopping to hack his convulsive cough every few steps.
CHAPTER 12
Fall slid into winter. There were some light snows, but nothing you could sled in. Mother got a local doctor to order her up diet pills. She zipped them in the inner pocket of her Coach bag where she’d always carried baby aspirin before. The “bounce” she claimed they gave did stop her from spending whole days laid up drunk in bed. Her Empress Days, I called them, for she spent them doing nothing more than ministering to herself in small ways. I mean, she’d drink from a bottle of Smirnoff she’d made syrupy in the freezer and cut back her cuticles. Or she’d smoke while paging through back issues of Vogue, some blues record in the corner moaning the whole time about how shitty men were. But those days had never worried Lecia and me overmuch. If anything, we found comfort in them, for they kept Mother safe in bed. The diet pills took those days from us.
They also shot a sliver of pissed-off into Mother’s voice. Even my asking for lunch money—if it struck her as off the subject somehow—could send her tearing around in search of a misplaced wallet, slamming doors behind her, or lead her to scream at the always sleeping form of Hector that he was a lazy sonofabitch. Don’t get me wrong. Mother didn’t go off every time you asked for something, and she had always been prone to temper fits. But on the diet pills a smaller spark could set her off. And the rages could carry her further. When Lecia and I finally figured out how to pronounce the magic word on the diet-pill label—metham-phetamine—we used it in a jump-rope rhyme:
Meth-am-pheta-mean,
Diet pills will make you scream.
Meth-am-pheta-mean
Keep you fighting, keep you lean.
Mother did get thinner. She used an ice pick to poke extra holes in her alligator belt. Plus her tolerance for alcohol—always high—seemed to go up. She drank all day and night without throwing up or passing out. The Yankee accent that had always cued us in to how drunk she was turned into her standard manner of talking.
Even scarier was the fact that she never slept. I don’t mean that she didn’t sleep much, or slept less. I mean all those months, we never saw her asleep. Ever. No matter how late I woke and went scooting downstairs on my pajama butt past the winding stair rods, I could find her downstairs drinking, usually alone with a book on her lap.
She read more and more books by guys with more and more unpronounceable names, saying existentialism was the philosophy of despair. Lecia took to hiding what I called those “French-fried” books down deep in the magazine rack, for they got Mother talking in a misty-eyed way about suicide. She would gaze up from the page and say that for some folks killing yourself was the sanest thing to do. And the rare calm in her voice those times must have set Lecia fretting about the specter of Mother offing herself. We never spoke that worry out loud. But if Mother lingered too long and too quiet in the bath, Lecia might take up a post outside the locked door, her head cocked, listening with an intensity that always put me in mind of my cousin’s hunting dog at a stand of quail. Lecia seemed to hold her breath those times, listening with her whole self for the slightest scuttle to suggest something alive. If I went scampering down the hall humming to myself and ignorant of her worry, she’d wheel my way and press her finger hard against her lips to shush me, her face twisted into a mask of anger. Speaking a word like “suicide” aloud was unthinkable. We didn’t dare give it breath for fear of invoking it.
In fact, we’d become superstitious enough to stop playing with the Ouija board. After the spirit of Grandma started spelling out how she was broadcasting to us from H-E-L-L, Lecia stamped on the planchette till it splintered. I pitched the board into the field of nettles behind our house. We both started any meal off by tossing salt over our shoulders, even times we hadn’t spilled any in the first place. And walking to school, we skipped every sidewalk crack. I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.
Mother’s misery was also sneaking up inside me somehow. One night after Hector passed out, she found me lying wide-eyed in bed next to the lump of quilts that was Lecia. She sat down on the mattress edge and read to me by the hall light from The Myth of Sisyphus, her bible at the time, by Albert Camus, whose name she taught me to pronounce right, so nobody at any future cocktail party would ever tease me for a hick.
Sisyphus had it way worse than all of us, it seemed to me, being doomed to sweat and grunt pushing a boulder up a mountain all day and night without rest. The punch line was that once he got to the top of the mountain, the rock just rolled back down. So he had to push it up again, over and over. This happened forever, Mother said, closing the book. With my head lying deep in the trench of my pillow, I was still waiting for some moral, or happy ending, a reward for all that work. I must have said as much, for at some point she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and told me there was no more point to Sisyphus’ task than there was to washing dishes or making beds. You just did those things endlessly till your body wore out, then you died.
The first French sentence I learned might well have come from that book. Il faut souffrir, one must suffer. For some reason, suffering got lined up in my head not with moral virtue or being good, as it had with the Baptist kids back home, but with being smart. Smart people suffered; dumb people didn’t. Mother had said this back in Texas all the time. We’d be driving past some guys in blue overalls selling watermelons off their truck bed and grinning like it was as good a way as any to pass an afternoon. She’d wag her head as if this were the most unbelievable spectacle, saying God, to be that blissfully ignorant. Daddy had always countered that message, for he took big pleasure in the small comforts—sugar in his coffee, getting the mockingbird in our chinaberry tree to answer
his whistle. Without him, Mother’s misery was seeping in. Happiness was for boneheads, a dumb fog you sank into. Pain, low-level and constant, was a vigil you kept. The vigil had something to do with looking out for your own death, and with living in some constant state of watchful despair.
Meanwhile, the world was draining itself of color before my eyes. The sky was grayer than ash, clouds close and vague as chalk smudges. Trees lost their leaves. Through the venetian blinds in our parlor Lecia and I watched autumn slip into winter like a slide show. For several days our neighbors raked, their kids jumping into the piles with dogs of various sizes bounding on the edges. It was like something from a Kodak commercial. Then the piles got burned in culverts and trash cans in front of the big colonial houses all up the block. Wasn’t it weird, I said to Lecia in the bath one night, how we thought of trees having leaves as being “normal,” when in fact six months out the year they were necked as jaybirds.
At school, I looked around at the dazed and sleeping kids, my peers—one boy drooling onto graph paper, another folding together a cootie-catcher. Even the monitor, the principal’s daughter, who was supposed to be the smartest kid in class, was at that instant blissfully outlining her own hand in pencil. They didn’t seem to mind being there so much, which I couldn’t for the life of me figure, for it was all I could do to tromp through a day without screaming or breaking all my pencils or just kicking somebody hard in the shin.
Mother and Hector went away twice, both times to Mexico, I think. She’d cooked up a scheme to buy a tract of land down there for the purpose of founding an artists’ colony, some new place for her to paint, though she hadn’t hit a lick at a canvas since we’d got to Colorado. The truckload of art supplies she’d ordered sat untouched in a spare room. I was itching to break the seals on the new tubes of oil, dozens of them lined up by shade in a leather briefcase, but knew better. The clean brown palette with the hole for your thumb never got a single, bright turban of color squirted on it. The sable brushes of all sizes kept their paper wrappers on. The canvases she’d bought already stretched and primed white sat around the edges of that room like windows on nothing. Lecia and I made up titles for their emptinesses: “Polar Bears in a Snowstorm” and “Talcum Powder on the Moon.” She never painted in Colorado, and they never bought any land in Mexico. They just drank and fought and flew back both bent over double from diarrhea, which Daddy had always called the green-apple shits.