The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Mary Karr

  The few times I’d seen Daddy heave up a coffin with other men, he always toted more than his share of weight, doing so with that slow-paced, sweating dignity a funeral requires. That was the bearing Daddy brought to handling my stepfather that day. He helped Mother fold him into the seat with utmost gentleness.

  When he turned to climb up on the porch, his face was blank and sweaty. There was a fan-shaped pattern of blood sprayed across his chambray shirt. “Y’all get on in the house,” he said, but his voice lacked any edge. He brushed past me.

  I watched the Karmann Ghia head down the street—a streak of canary yellow against the gray tract houses that acted as backdrop. Then I heard the pipes groan in the kitchen when Daddy cranked on the faucet to wash up.

  Mother never said that she was coming back to us that evening. Per usual, nobody said spit. But I sensed that she would come back, eventually at least. She had a soft spot for Daddy whipping up on a man who’d spoken to her in disrespect. And back then, heat still passed between my parents. You could practically warm your hands on it.

  That evening she dumped Hector at the nearest emergency room, checked out of the room they’d just checked into, and headed straight back to us on Garfield Road. She’d spent or been cheated out of every cent of her inheritance. So she came back not just broke but deep in debt. And she stayed. She stayed with Daddy till his death, stayed well into her own dotage.

  The neighbors were folding up their lawn chairs, closing their umbrellas to head back indoors. I shoved into my own house, into the cool dark of its wax-papered windows, feeling something like peace. Daddy’s public ass-whipping of Hector proved to me that my stepfather was a bad man. Our time with him had been a bad time. That was over now, Daddy had ended it. He’d drawn a big line in our lives between that bad time and our future. He was shirtless when Mother came back, and they slow-danced into the bedroom laughing.

  When the sheriff stopped by after dark, Mother went to the door naked under her black silk kimono. Daddy wasn’t home just then, she told him. Anyways, there’d just been a domestic disruption—that was the phrase she’d used. She was a terrible flirt, and her eyes while she talked to the sheriff were amused. He took his Stetson off and stood there on the porch while june bugs pelleted the screen and neighbors behind their windows drew back their Priscilla curtains.

  Lecia and I hung over the sofa back, still gleeful from the triumph of Hector’s exile and Mother’s coming back. I’d never seen her eyes so green, deep green, green as the sea past the farthest sandbar where the waves start to head out away from the beach to all the unnamed archipelagoes. Her arms were long and white coming out of the vast black sleeves of that kimono. She clutched it closed at her sternum, the black heavy silk bunching up like an orchid. The sheriff was already backing down the porch when Mother’s last words on the subject were spoken. Here’s what she said before the door closed on that rectangle of night, closed on the red silent siren light whirling across our window, closed like a tomb door sealed over the subject of Hector entirely, for she never mentioned him again: silliest thing, she said, no big deal, she said, then, nothing we couldn’t handle.

  …you were saved not in order to live

  you have little time you must give testimony

  be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

  in the final account only this is important

  and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

  whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

  let your sister Scorn not leave you

  for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

  they will go to your funeral and with relief throw a lump of earth

  the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

  and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

  to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

  beware however of unnecessary pride

  keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

  repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I…

  —Zbigniew Herbert, from “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

  CHAPTER 14

  Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke while sitting on a stool bellied up to the American Legion bar. It was ten on a summer morning. He’d been pounding shooters of whiskey he washed back with glasses of tap beer, which trick he’d performed daily for the seven years since he’d retired from Gulf Oil at the age of sixty-three. I say retired. Technically, he had a part-time job running errands for Lecia’s husband, David. The Rice Baron, I called him, for he owned working rice farms that nudged his income up towards the fifty percent tax bracket. David bought Daddy a little white pickup for mail-runs or for getting tacos come lunchtime, whatever needed doing. When Daddy, who supplemented his Legion alcohol-intake by sucking from a whiskey bottle he kept ratholed under his truck seat, got too weaving drunk to operate the pickup at all, somebody rang my brother-in-law, who dispatched one of the field hands to ferry Daddy around on some fabricated job till his head cleared and his hands started back trembling, a sign that his blood-alcohol level was edging down toward normal. Then he got re-deposited at the white truck.

  During all this, Mother was usually laid up in bed wearing something filmy. She’d quit teaching art in public school, allegedly to spend more time with her rickety and rheumy-eyed husband.

  Instead, depression had walloped her. She stayed in that giant bed she’d built decades before, with a bearing I still think of as imperial. She’d stopped drinking under threat from Lecia and me, but stayed drugged to the gills on Valium and related pharmaceuticals and whatever book she’d drawn from the literal tower of them stacked on the floor by her nighttable.

  Her reading tended toward religion and philosophy, the books ranging from the profound—Sartre was still a favorite; so was Gandhi—to the crackpot. She’d studied hatha yoga and macrobiotics, macramé and est. Her basic trouble at the time of Daddy’s stroke was that she saw no good reason to get up and put on clothes.

  Back then, I talked to her long distance from Boston most every night. After prime time, she lay in a torment that barbiturates only blurred the edges of: Football, fishing, and fucking—she’d say—that’s all anybody down here thinks about. I swear to God I’m going to blow my brains out.

  My live-in boyfriend at the time—a recent Harvard grad from an old Long Island family—praised my patience with Mother. He took the long hours I spent on the phone with her for kindness. His family estate had a name, an aged and doddering staff, and a formal library where silver polo trophies shone between rows of leather-bound editions. He spoke to his mother on holidays, from one end of a long glossy dinner table (a formality I envied and, when we later married, failed to master). In truth, I stayed on the telephone those nights from an old fear: I didn’t want Mother to kill herself.

  By the time I’d landed in Boston at twenty-five, that phone line was the only umbilical cord that joined me to Mother. Daddy and I had long since faded from each other.

  My weird travels had first taken me from him. I’d started leaving home on short jaunts at fifteen—Houston, Dallas, Austin, Mexico—shopping for books mostly, or drugs. Mother puckered her mouth with worry hearing how I’d smoked opium at a surf contest on Padre Island. But I’d first filched Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from her knitting bag. And her curiosity about the drug ultimately leaked through: What was opium like? Together we conspired to lie to Daddy about my whereabouts, lies Daddy helped by not prying overmuch.

  I’d left his house for good at seventeen. I’d climbed into a camper truck with surfboards strapped on top and driven with a bunch of kids to California, where (before I managed to snag a job in a T-shirt factory) I lived in a car and ate whatever I could steal from local orchards or grocery-store Dumpsters.

  Such squalid facts never reached Daddy’s ears. When I landed back home, tanned, string-skinny, and eager for the comfort of the Minnesota college
I’d talked into taking me, he liked pretending I’d never crossed over the state line. “How was the beach, Pokey?” he wanted to know.

  He took me to GI Surplus to buy me a winter parka. I hold a distinct picture of him picking through the rack of olive-drab coats with orange liners, each one sloped down on its hanger, as if shouldering in itself a burden. Daddy was a suspicious shopper. He peered extra close at the quilted stitching. He ran a lot of zippers up and down.

  The college was a private liberal-arts school that had ginned out a few left-wing presidential candidates. The specter of my coed dorm—one of the nation’s first—must have prompted Daddy that day into his one, veiled lecture on sex. Here’s how it went: “I reckon you know by now not to let any a them little boys mess with you, Pokey.” He was squinting down at a parka’s size tag while he spoke. It had Korean ideograms on it. I said I reckoned I did. “They mess with you, you call me.” He turned me around to measure the coat’s shoulders against mine. “I get on them like ugly on ape.”

  This concern from Daddy for my virtue, however casual, just added to the vague backwater of guilt I carried about him. I’d long since left the world where my virtue warranted defense, which is to say, Daddy’s world.

  So at the cash register in GI Surplus where Daddy shelled out $19.95 for the parka, I felt a flush of guilt. I said no to the suede mittens he wanted to throw in. It was better wearing bobby socks on my hands that first winter.

  Still, on my first visit home from college, he not only spooned my supper plate high, but actually used his pocketknife to saw my T-bone into a grid of tiny bites.

  Lecia—who’d stayed in town for college and who, therefore, garnered not a glance from Daddy when she breezed through the house every day—teased him about it. “Jesus, Daddy, why don’t you just chew it up for her and spit it right in her mouth?”

  Daddy couldn’t stand my growing up, specifically since I grew up female.

  For no sooner had I bought my first training bra (Vassarette 28A stretch), than my invites to the Liars’ Club began trailing off. Puberty was hard won for me. I was a late bloomer. My nickname in the neighborhood was Blister Tits, which I earned in part because Lecia at age twelve already harnessed her boobs into a Playtex 36C. But bloom I eventually did, at least enough to alter the deportment of men Daddy hung out with. If, during a crap game, Ben Bederman let slip the word “cocksucker” in response to having rolled snake-eyes, he’d go pale apologizing to me special, something he’d never done before.

  The last fight I saw Daddy have pretty much cinched my going to any Liars’ Club functions ever after.

  I’d hitched home during college for Easter break. Daddy took me to the Legion, to shoot pool supposedly. But I half suspected that the long-standing flirtation he carried on with the woman barkeep was really a full-blown affair. (Mother actually put the idea in my head, afterwards tacking on this heart-breaking sentence, “All that was over between me and your daddy way back.”)

  Lucy was a small Cajun woman with enormous breasts and a trace of mustache. When we came in that afternoon, she hugged my neck before drawing our beers. She even scooped me a bowl of the cheddar Goldfish they usually didn’t break out till dark.

  Lucy collected things—souvenir spoons, porcelain dolls. She had an assortment of wiglets, braids, and falls that she wove in complicated whirls with her own dark hair. She’d also filled the back wall of the bar with those old cat clocks whose black tails hung down twitching while their eyes rolled side to side. But the clocks were out of sync in a way that preyed on your nerves. Mother always said if you weren’t a drinker heading into the Legion, that woman’s wall-eyed clocks jerking at odds with one another would start you off.

  I plugged quarters into the pool table, and the balls dropped with a fine thunder. I racked them extra tight, my fingertips wedged in the plastic triangle so not one loosened a notch when I finally raised the rack. A second later, Daddy broke solid but easy. The balls whacked around in sharp angles. They slowed up, and finally stopped with nothing sunk. I went to powder my hands. The can lid left a pattern of dots on my palm like white braille till I rubbed it in.

  A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. The slow spaciousness of the green felt mirrors some internal state you get to after a few beers. Back at school, I’d been trying to read the philosophy of art, which I was grotesquely unequipped to do but nonetheless stuck on. I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger. In those days the drug culture was pimping “expanded consciousness,” a lie that partly descended from the old postindustrial lie of progress: any change in how your head normally worked must count as an improvement.

  Maybe my faith in that lie slid me toward an altered state that day. Or maybe it was just the beer, which I rarely drank. In any case, walking around the pool table, I felt borne forward by some internal force or fire.

  My first shot sank a ball. Then I made the most unlikely bank shot in history to drop two balls at once after a wild V trajectory. Daddy whistled. The sky through the window had gone the exact blue of the chalk I was digging my cue stick in, a shade solid and luminous at once, like the sheer turquoise used for the Madonna’s robe in Renaissance paintings. Slides from art history class flashed through my head. For a second, I lent that color some credit, as if it meant something that made my mind more buoyant. But that was crazy.

  Then it hit me that my joy came purely from being in the Legion. In fact, I’d hitched twelve hundred miles to shoot pool there, with that cue warped to shit, on the table whose perimeter was scarred with cigarette burns. And I’d done so without even knowing it. I’d stood solo at the on-ramp of the Oklahoma turnpike for hours with my wind-chapped thumb stuck out and my cardboard sign saying DALLAS nearly torn from my hand every time a gust sucked a dust-devil up off the plain beyond me, and all that while I’d stared back at the ridge wishing for some vehicle to rise up and carry me the fuck out of there, I had no conscious idea of what was tugging me south. The trucker who finally rolled up at dusk and swung open his door, saying climb on up, wondered why I’d hitch so far alone, in such sharp weather. Going home had been answer enough.

  But it was more than that. Something about the Legion clarified who I was, made me solid inside, like when you twist the binocular lens to the perfect depth and the figure you’re looking at gets definite. Maybe I just liked holding a place in such a male realm.

  That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bought there—hot boudain sausage and cold beer—had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn’t deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts—friendship, for instance—couldn’t be confused with payback for something you’d accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize.

  A truck loaded with chicken cases waggled off the road shoulder outside the Legion, fishtailing and sending dust and diesel fumes through the screens. The racket roused up a cowboy who’d been passed out at a round cocktail table in the back corner. We hadn’t seen him before. He’d been sleeping bent over by the accordion-shaped room divider where an army of folding chairs tilted. A straw cowboy hat sat beside him. His face was buried in folded arms, which were sunburnt the unlikely crimson of an oil-rig worker’s. His back heaved up and down as with sobs. Daddy walked over and regarded him a minute. Don’t cry, buddy, Daddy finally said. I hate seeing a fella cry. The guy lifted his crimson face. He wasn’t crying, he said, he was trying not to throw up. Well, I don’t like watching them throw up either, Daddy said. Th
e guy eventually swaggered bowleggedly off to the men’s room.

  When he came out, there were comb marks in his wavy brown hair. His name was Dole, like the pineapple company, and he happened to be from Buna, Texas, where Daddy was born. After a few no-shits, he and Daddy started buying each other beers, talking about who all Dole knew in Jasper County, which turned out to be pretty much everybody you could know. Dole also knew Black Angus cattle, cutting horses, and enough about pool to challenge Daddy to a money game.

  Lucy kept me company the rest of the day. She’d been harboring secret plans for my personal appearance and set about executing them. She teased my hair with a rat-tail comb, lacquered it stiff, then wound it up tight like hers. Hairpins dug into my scalp. From a tackle box under the bar, she drew out frosted blue eye shadow and a black cake eyeliner she wet with her tongue. I closed my eyes when she came at me.

  When I finally opened them, she still had the mascara wand raised in her hand. I blinked a few times. My eyelashes had noticeable weight. In the back mirror, I looked like somebody’s kid sister trying to get in a roadhouse without ID. Lucy went on to whip up a blender of brandy alexanders for the purpose of putting tallow on my flat little heinie. She plunked a few extra filberts in my lowball glass of foam.

  By the time her soap opera came on about two, I was affably drunk. The cat clocks’ offbeat tails twitching overhead didn’t faze me a bit. I was the bodhisattva of brandy, the crown princess of alexander.

  I woke with my damp cheek flat to the bar. I’d somehow crossed from my original joy into drunkenness, and beyond that into a sugar coma. Hours had passed. My bird’s nest of hair tipped sideways. It seemed to be drawing my worrisome headache far beyond the parameters of my skull. I looked around while Lucy poured me a collins glass of water. The stools beside me had been untipped. A shallow paper bowl of Goldfish sat before each one. At back tables, folks stared intently at the domino tiles they’d lined up into short walls. I drained my glass and slid it back to Lucy, who arched a thin brow penciled the color of coffee and caught me up on Daddy’s pool game.