by Mary Karr
The first time, they left us with Hector’s cousin, a girl of about twenty who was cheerfully raising two toddlers by herself on welfare. We called her Purty. She was small and birdlike, with a tumbling mass of black hair that she tried to tame by rolling it on soup cans at night, and still it frizzed and seized up in waves around her heart-shaped face. Purty’s kids were easily the world’s most miserable toddlers, which she didn’t mind one bit, being tickled silly by every blubbering fit one threw. “Poor nanito,” she’d coo, when all I could think was how to smush a pillow across its face to stop its breath altogether. They weren’t twins but have landed in my memory as exact replicas of the same baby, both slobbery-mouthed and worried-looking. They also had freakishly huge heads that wobbled on their necks and whapped into table corners, or could pitch them forward off-balance from sheer weight. Lecia learned quick how to plug one up with a pacifier or a bottle of cold milk. Me, I pouted, reading in the corner.
The second night we were there, Purty’s roving husband showed up drunk and pounding on the back door. He was raving in a slurry Spanish I could barely make out that he’d come to claim his kids, whom, by the way, I would have been hard-pressed not to part with. But Purty yanked the soup cans from her hair so bobby pins scattered all over the dark bedroom with a skittery noise that put me in mind of East Texas roaches scrambling. She shoved Lecia and me under the bed with the babies to keep them quiet. She said he’d kill us all if we made a peep. Lying under that bed, I watched her fuzzy pink scuffs slide her away from us into the strip of light from the kitchen.
Quiet was hard for me. I’d rarely played hide-and-seek without being first found. Plus, the baby I’d been charged with keeping still hardly fit under my arm, being fat and squirmy and smelling—through the powder and baby shampoo—like nothing so much as clabbered milk. There were spiderwebby threads hanging from the bedsprings right in my eyelashes, and the floor through the cloth of my pajama top was a clean slab of ice.
While the voices got louder in the kitchen, the baby got squirmier and noisier. Lecia finally elbowed me in the head to do something, so I clapped my hand over its sloppy mouth. In the course of this, though, my index finger somehow poked between its lips. For a second I felt a few stubs of tooth in what otherwise seemed like endless slippery curves of gum, the baby’s fat tongue writhing like a slug. Something about my finger in that mouth seemed so grotesque that when the baby set to gnawing on my knuckle like a teething ring, I reached down my free hand and pinched it on the thigh, pinched it with all my might, which amazingly enough, made it fall quiet lying under me. Under the backwash of guilt I instantly felt about having hurt a baby was a deep pleasure at such blatant meanness, the soft flesh giving way between my fingers like Play-Doh. No sooner had I done it than I longed to do it again. I didn’t dare, of course, for fear the baby would start wailing again, instead of just making the low-level sniffle I’d decided was okay.
After what seemed a long time, a tremendous crash came from the kitchen, glass shattering. Footsteps headed down the hall to the front of the house before Purty broke out screaming “Murder, Murder!” Her husband’s car peeled from the drive.
He’d shoved her face through the back-door glass, it turned out. But that scene has melted from my head. We must have rushed in and found her bleeding and screaming, and the babies must have hollered something awful. Still, I only keep a picture of Purty very patiently explaining to the red-faced highway patrolman exactly how her husband had choked her throat, then smacked her face into the glass, so she’d heard shattering around her ears and felt the rush of cold air from outside. Her face was all nicked up, and tiny spangles of glass had settled around the flowery yoke of her pink nightgown. The ambulance guy was rigging up a butterfly bandage on a gash that had severed her arched eyebrow into two neat wings.
The next time Hector and Mother traveled, we stayed with his sister Alicia, whom I’d have guessed was too old and fat to fight with her husband, Ralph. She wore long gray braids twisted over her head like an opera singer and stood close to the ground, being about as wide as she was tall. But sure enough, she was standing at the stove frying tortillas one night and bickering with Ralph about car insurance when he lunged at her. Alicia was quick, though. She hit him square on the forehead with the iron skillet’s bottom, and that stopped him in mid-lunge. When he finally swiveled down to the floor, it looked like an afterthought. At breakfast the next morning, Ralph had a blue knot on the center of his forehead like a goat’s horn trying to break through.
After that last fight at Alicia’s house, I flat pitched a wall-eyed fit over the prospect of being left overnight with anybody, which tantrum killed Mother’s trips to Mexico. She wore down staying in Antelope. She even began to pace window to window the way she had in Texas.
I wandered downstairs about three one morning and found Mother sitting in her peach silk wrapper at the piano. She’d twisted pin curls on the top of her hair, the slightly longer part, so the short sides stuck out and put me in mind of duck feathers. There was a long-stemmed glass of red wine on the piano bench next to her, a Salem burning cool blue smoke from the crystal ashtray. Her ragged copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea was propped on the piano’s music stand.
She mixed me some burgundy topped off with 7UP, to help me sleep, she said. She brought it from the kitchen in her fanciest bone china cup, the one with gasolinelike rainbows somehow fired into the white background. It had cherries painted on it—inside and out—and gold on the rim where you put your lips, and even swirls of gold down the handle and around the saucer edge. Mother set that cup next to me on the square resting spot above the keyboard. The 7UP bubbles rose through the red wine like lava from way far down in the earth’s core.
Before that night, I’d had lots of liquor—real champagne even, at somebody’s wedding. And I’d cared for it not one whit. Oh, on a hot day with oysters, I liked a taste of Daddy’s salted beer okay. But more than a few sips left me dizzy. And whiskey or scotch, even mixed with Coke, scalded me inside like poison.
Also, my parents’ drinking was bound up in my head with their screaming cuss-fights. Many were the nights in Leechfield when—with the two of them raging behind their bolted bedroom door—I sneaked into the kitchen and gathered up their bottles (whiskey for him, vodka or scotch for her, single malt when she could afford it). Dumping those bottles down the sink drain, I always craned my face away. Keep in mind that I was surrounded by poisonous stuff that didn’t bother me the least. From my front porch, you could see an iron refinery tower flaming black smoke into the air. With eyes closed in a moving car, I could tell by smell alone whether the stink was from the rubber company, or the open waste pits of the chemical plant, or the clean-earth odor of heated crude from the refinery. None of those made me pinch my nose. But that brown liquor seemed dangerous, even a breathful.
My first sip from Mother’s bone-china cup changed all that. I’d heard her tell a hundred times how the monk who discovered champagne had likened it to drinking stars. Suddenly, that made sense. The wine and sparkly soda set my mouth tingling. I thought right off, Drinking stars. Whole galaxies could have been taking shape in there, for the taste was vast and particular at once. I’d taken too little a sip, though, and had to have another to see if the same small explosion happened. It did. I drank down some more. Besides its tasting good, the wine seemed to go down deep in me, not burning like it had before, but with a slow warmth. A few more sips set that warmth loose and rolling down my limbs. I actually felt a light in my arms and legs where the alcohol was spreading. Something like a big sunflower was opening at the very center of my being, which image I must have read in a poem somewhere, for it came to me whole that way.
When the cup was empty, I set it down in its saucer with a chimelike clink that told me the world had changed. I looked down at my bare feet dangling out of my nightgown. They seemed far off and pale as a marble statue’s, elegant almost. I looked up at Mother. The pin curls with her hair spronging out didn’t look goof
y anymore, or scary like Medusa’s snakes. In fact, the close cap of pinned-down hair seemed elegant. The bones of her face suddenly held all their old beauty. Her forehead was smooth and high, her cheekbones winged out. Her green eyes and pale skin were actually glowing, held in a dim halo. This, it dawned on me, was what people drank liquor for, even though it could make them puke and slur their words, could bring a man to throw a punch at somebody bound to whip his ass, or cause an otherwise clear-thinking woman to drive fast into a concrete wall. Alcohol could actually make life better, if only by making your head better. I thought of all the fairy stories that talked about magic potions, of Shakespeare’s witches from Macbeth with their cauldron bubbling.
Later, I lay in bed a long time feeling woozy. If I closed my eyes, I felt the the mattress tip sideways like a raft at sea. Only staring steady at something could chase off those whirlies, or at least soften the incline that I felt myself sliding up and down in the waves I was dreaming under myself. I fixed on a small portrait on the far wall. It was Mother’s last painting, a guy she called “Mack the Knife.” She’d toted it all the way from Texas. That puzzled me, since it wasn’t even of somebody we knew, being a black-haired Frenchman with almond-shaped eyes. Actually, maybe he wasn’t French. But to me, he was the spitting image of the nauseated fellow on the Sartre book jacket, the one Mother had told me wanted to puke just from being alive. Mack the Knife wasn’t exactly handsome in the technical sense, being sallow-complected and puny. But it was a good painting. His eyes rested on me easy, and the light coming in sideways from the street gave him a sad, knowing look. Plus, he took the whirlies away, merely by being constant in the great roiling of that room.
When I said my prayers that night, which I did only after I was sure Mother was back in the parlor out of hearing range, I directed them as much to that sorry-looking fellow with his sallow cheeks and black turtleneck suspended in a sea of red and black swirls as to any father who might have been installed in heaven. Dear Mack, please keep me from horking on these covers. And keep Mother from finding her car keys in the ivy pot. Amen.
Other nights were occupied with Mother and Hector fighting. The litany of his innate low-lifedness got seared into my skull during this time. Hector was a pussy, was her main gripe. Also, he lacked gainful employment, which meant Mother accused him of sponging off her all the time. But if, of a hung-over morning, he lamely started scanning the want ads for bartending jobs, she’d coo up next to him don’t bother, because if he was working they couldn’t make love in the afternoons.
Hector was also the planet’s sloppiest drunk. He staggered and slurred and forgot stuff. He fell down and threw up. One morning, I overheard her screaming that for Christ’s sake, he’d wet the bed again. Another time with Gordon and Joey standing in the kitchen, she’d hollered that Hector couldn’t even “get it up right.” She rapped the wooden countertop with her knuckles. “Pete’s dick was always as hard as this. Always.” I didn’t know how to take this news, but watched Hector sink down under the weight of it, staring the whole time at the bottom of his lowball glass like it was a crystal ball.
For some reason, Mother was just springloaded on pissed-off, which made her want to harm herself. Once, for instance, when our car was winding home from a particularly nasty dinner in town, Mother just threw open the car door and pitched herself out on the road. Suddenly, the black night was rushing in across the place where Mother had been sitting a few seconds before in a sullen drunk’s quiet. The Impala’s dome light had flown on. The heavy door bumped and scraped against the snowbank piled on the road’s shoulder with a noise like breaking Styrofoam. After a few swerving yards, Hector finally pulled over and threw the car in park. We watched him stagger away from us along the icy road in his unbuttoned peacoat, disappearing in the dark beyond the red taillight. In a few minutes, he staggered back into view with Mother on his arm. She was wearing a white cashmere coat that night, and the flared bottom was splattered with mud.
She was okay, it turned out. She’d just hit a snowbank and rolled. In fact, they both piled in the car laughing like hell. But I noticed that a scary calm had fallen over Lecia’s features. It was a look I’d seen in Life snapshots of old soldiers heading back into battle, while the young ones still wore their fear openly, with sweetness. Then the starless night went back to sliding off the car windows again.
More nights scrolled past, and days so gray and grainy that not one stands unblurred from any other, till I get sick one day and the grown man who allegedly comes to care for me winds up putting his dick in my eight-year-old mouth. In fact, the whole blank winter sort of gathers around that incident like a storm cloud getting dense and heavy.
It’s early afternoon. I’ve stayed home from school, really sick with a fever. I’ve been sleeping, and now my forehead is sweaty and cool. There’s a headache way back in it. Whoever’s supposed to be peeking in on me has left a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, all peppery the way I like it, on a wicker bed tray. That soup is way cold. I can tell by the globules of oil at the edges.
I’m sitting in a shaft of sunlight on the Oriental rug in my room reading Charlotte’s Web for the hundredth time. It’s the part after the spider Charlotte dies, which happens from her having woven an egg sac and then filled it full of baby-spider eggs. Making those eggs took her last ounce of strength. She knew it would kill her, but she did it anyway. Mother has explained to me how that makes her Noble, according to Mr. Camus. Charlotte left the sac in the care of her pal Wilbur, himself a pig. In the weeks since Charlotte last lifted her spiny leg to Wilbur in good-bye salute, he has been laying in the mud bawling. He’s still bawling when all of a sudden the eggs get ripe enough to hatch. Baby spiders start crawling out of the sack, I mean by the zillions. They’re eensy as punctuation marks and scramble out right in front of his blurry eyes.
The fact of them being actually alive makes Wilbur feel better, the way—it occurs to me in that shaft of afternoon sun—people talking about the cycles of nature get to feeling better; the way Baptists talking about the Lord’s Mysterious Plan feel better. But no sooner have those spiders said hey to Wilbur to cheer him up than they begin flying away from him on silky little parachutes. They scatter across the sky over the barnyard like so many seeds. They’re going to make their webs somewheres else, so you think for a minute that Wilbur’s gonna sink back into his porcine misery all over again. Then three of the baby spiders pipe up from the high corner of the open doorway over the pen that they’ve decided to stay with Wilbur. They want to make their webs right over him, just like their mother did.
The story more or less ends there, though the writer—Mr. E. B. White—lets you know that when those three spiders grow up, they’re gonna lay some eggs too. And you know that this sad-eyed pig will have a steady stream of spider pals, each with the vocabulary of a college professor, to edify himself. Sure, they’ll die after they lay their eggs, too, the girl spiders, just like Charlotte did. But the point at the end of the book is that Wilbur will never have to be lonely.
I can spend the better part of a day moving between the sad part of this book, where Charlotte dies, then paging ahead to read about the three baby spiders wanting to stay with Wilbur. I cry a little, then cheer myself up. (Later, I’ll learn that’s the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) The sun feels so warm on my bangs all straight and shiny across my forehead, and the thought of those three baby spiders spinning out the first silk threads to make new webs over the grinning Wilbur laying supine in his muddy wallow fills me with such light that I want to tell somebody about it. I shout downstairs through the open door for my sitter to come up a minute and get a load of this.
When he stands next to me in that circle of sun, I tell him about it with my whole heart. About Charlotte and the babies and Wilbur. I remember so much that I think Daddy would be proud of my telling. My sitter nods all slow and serious. At the end, he says how being special friends with somebody keeps you ever from being l
onesome. And do I want to be his special friend?
That sets me scampering around the room in search of my Big Chief tablet, the one with the vampire club rituals in it. My bare legs are prickly cold under my gown, but somebody willing to be a vampire club member is a rare thing.
I find the tablet and plop back down in my spot of sun to start explaining the initiations. But when I look up from the sloping page, to see if he’s buying it so far, the whole mood of the room has shifted. The zipper of his chinos is level with my eyes. And inside that zipper his pecker is making that bulge, the bad words for which zoom through my head—Hard-on, Boner, Stiffie. I think it is testament to my badness that I even know such words.
Once I spent the night with the principal’s daughter, and when I asked her if she knew what “fuck” meant, she said no. When I explained it to her as nice as I could, she broke out crying, though I hadn’t even used a single cuss word, sticking instead to those words you find in the encyclopedia under A for Anatomy, with the sheer glassy pages of muscle and vein and bone assembling into a man body and a woman body side by side in TV-family clothes. Still, the minute I got to the end of telling the principal’s daughter about the baby being born, her face just collapsed in on itself in a big pucker. She screamed that her parents would never do something that nasty, even trying to have kids. “Then where do you think you came from, dumbass,” I said. She ran caterwauling out of the room at that point. A heartbeat later, her mother popped in all grim-faced. She led me by the hand into their dusty foyer, where she zipped up her parka right over her bathrobe and stepped barefoot into her galoshes. She hoisted me up still in my pajamas with my coat thrown across me and walked through the cold night back across the street to our house. That was the end of spending the night with the principal’s daughter.