The Liars' Club: A Memoir

by Mary Karr

  The door had just hissed shut behind her when Daddy’s eyes opened a notch. He raised his arm up stiff the way a cartoon sleepwalker would. With one trembling finger, he poked the plastic oxygen tent as if to touch my face. Then his arm dropped heavy. “Looooo,” he said. The left side of his mouth was drawn down in a sharp parody of being sad. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I sounded cheerful enough to teach Romper Room. “Goddamn,” he said. Then, “Yamma.” I told him Mama was talking to the nurses. He used his good hand to feel down his bad arm like a blind man, exploring each finger. He pulled it across his middle as if to park it there. But the arm slid back to his side, dead as a fish.

  I drew the supper tray over and lifted the plastic lid. “Presto,” I said. Did he want any of that? He wrinkled his nose. “Shit,” he said. He went back to studying his bad hand, like it held the answer to some question he couldn’t quite formulate.

  I finally stuck a bendy straw in a carton of milk, and he sucked that down. Afterwards, I wiped his wet chin with my sleeve. “Ah looo,” he said. He stared at me steady, like a swami sending brain waves. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I held up a cup of orange juice covered with Saran Wrap, and he wrinkled his nose.

  From curiosity, I pulled open the metal drawer of his bed table. A single can of Lone Star rolled into view. I shut the drawer, and in that brief interval, Daddy’s eyes had closed. I sneaked under the oxygen tent to be sure. “Daddy?” I said. But he was like Brer Rabbit, just playing possum.

  Mother let me drive home. Dr. Boudreaux had spent an hour going over Daddy’s condition with her and Lecia. He’d dismantled a plastic model of the brain for her. The report to me was way more concise: “His head’s all fucked up,” Mother said. There was something called an “immediate-recovery period” of a few weeks after a stroke, while brain swelling went down. In that time, Daddy could just snap out of it, start talking and walking like before. Or maybe he’d turn into one of those chicken-chested old men you see in rest-home hallways, tied to their chairs and listing for decades.

  The Leechfield I drove home through that night had eroded into a ghost town. I’d somehow not noticed this before. Streetlights had been shot out in strings. Our car kept moving into black intervals of road, then bursting into light again. Lawns grew wild. For-sale signs stuttered by too fast to count. All the necessary stores were boarded up—pharmacy, cleaners, hardware. Gone was the jewelry store with its Ferris wheel of lockets and birthstone rings; gone the coffee shop. The fancy clothes store—where all the cheerleaders worked after high school—went bankrupt when the proprietor was arrested in a motel room with two such cheerleaders and a Ziploc baggie of cocaine.

  I set down in my journal the businesses we passed that night: nail-sculpting salon, knickknack shop, trophy store, aerobic-dance studio, K-9 dog-training school. There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig’s mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starving To Death. Where the filling station used to stand was a parking lot lined with industrial ice machines. So driving by, I read ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE. You could also get chemotherapy in a modern cinderblock building, which didn’t surprise me since the town formed one of the blackest squares on the world cancer map. (It’s still right up there with Bhopal and Chernobyl.)

  Once we hit the hurricane fence that ran alongside the rubber factory, Mother started talking. Money was a problem, she said, being as they didn’t have any. She thought he’d bought some supplementary insurance. That reminded her to fish Daddy’s wallet from his jeans jacket in the backseat.

  She unfolded the wings of it and started picking past onionskin gas receipts and ticket stubs. There was a cocktail napkin with the point spread from a baseball game on which the lights had long since gone dim. Strangest of all, she found two documents of mine—the one college report card where I pulled down straight A’s, and a Xerox of my first published poem. The poem was about Daddy’s sister. It had been unfolded so many times and smoothed across so many damp bar tops the parchment warped and buckled. The middle creases were cloudy with blurred ink. The notion of his toting that around nearly broke me in half crying, so Mother started bawling too.

  We blubbered in a wild chorus behind bobbing headlights all the way home. Maybe all my snubbing kept me from seeing clear. Or maybe, as Mother always contended, I just drove too damn fast, for when the car finally surged in the garage, there was a dull thump under the rear axle, a hollow sound like a dropped cantaloupe.

  I threw the car in park and crawled around in the exhaust fumes looking for what I’d hit. By the back tire on the shotgun side, there was a blood smear. It looked black as an inkblot in the red taillights. Of course, Bumper didn’t come when called. He was nowhere in evidence. Mother later believed she saw some animal’s white hindquarters slithering off into a field of saw grass and blackberries in back of the garage. But there were snakes galore in those weeds, Mother said. Maybe even nutria rats.

  She found him bloody and panting shallow on the back porch at dawn. She wrapped him in a lemon-colored bath towel and fetched him to the animal hospital. We only had a hundred dollars between us and planned to put him to sleep. But the vet offered to try some surgery for free. He put pins in the cat’s hips and wired his broken jaw shut. For years the doctor had heard outrageous tales in bars about this animal’s unlikely survival. The old cat might just make it.

  CHAPTER 15

  One morning, an orderly with arms like a wrestler’s scooped Daddy up, bent his limbs around so he’d fit in a wheelchair, then rolled him from intensive care to a regular ward while I walked alongside. I carried a warm jar of piss that had a tube running out and leading under Daddy’s hospital gown. Mother brought his metal flip chart, where somebody official had declared Daddy’s condition “stable” in block letters.

  After that, the men from the Liars’ Club came practically every night to shuffle at Daddy’s bedside. They came straight from work, unfed, but refusing to dip into any pizza box you tipped open or to take any wrapped sandwich you held out. They arrived alone or in awkward pairs, holding their silver hard hats at belt level, turning them around in their hands like so many prayer wheels.

  Once, when Daddy had shit the bed, I found Ben and Shug talking about an upcoming Yankees game, talking volubly as if the room didn’t stink like a barnyard.

  Ben cried that night in the hall. His big meaty hands covered his face. And after that, he only came late, when Daddy was dozing and Mother was gathering up the day’s magazines and leftover soda cans. Ben took his post in a precariously tipped tub chair outside Daddy’s room nearly every night for hours at a pop “in case something happened.”

  But nothing ever happened. Whatever vacuum the stroke had dug inside Daddy’s skull held its place. He was pitched way back behind flat-staring eyes, too deep for any mere human presence to register on him as much more than shadow. Some mornings if he’d slept straight through, he’d spark up when you came in. You could suddenly see him seeing you, almost feel him bearing toward you from where he lay, though the form of his body never altered one iota.

  Such times, he might come into a word like “juice,” squawking it out in his new crow’s voice. Only a few such words ever got spoken, though, before his eyes fogged over again, and his head dropped back on the pillow.

  On the anniversary of D-Day, Mother and I watched a TV special. The first young GIs scaling the wall on the French coast got picked off by German bullets like so many insects. Daddy had been an infantryman there. He’d waded out of a landing craft with his rifle held up out of the surf. The film footage must have overlaid with images fixed in his head, for watching he roused as if jolted up by stong current. He cried out, “That’s Omaha Beach!” with perfect clarity. He pointed at the screen and fought to rise to a full sit, but his own body pinned him down. Mother had to push the button to tilt the electric bed up. “That’s Normandy!” Daddy hollered. A while later, he started calling what first sounded lik
e nonsense, then took on the cadence of the old Latin mass. But I finally figured he was saying names, surnames, in fact, the ones I’d seen scrawled in the ragged address book he carried all across Europe. He was still calling those names in a whisper when the light went out of him.

  Mother tapped on the nursing station window, eager to announce Daddy’s miracle turnaround. But the night nurse just kept painting her nails with sheer lacquer. Whole chunks of brain function stayed intact after a stroke, she told us. Usually times that had a strong feeling attached, as D-Day would. That was also why Daddy could still cuss like a sailor. He’d stored words like “motherfucker” in the region of the brain where a man’s most basic expressions—those rising out of rage or grief or stark fear—were kept.

  The next morning, I brought a stack of old Life magazines I found in the back closet. Sure enough, Daddy could name a B-17 fighter plane and an M-1 rifle. On the maps, he could tell Italy from Poland, and he placed a shaky finger on the thin face of General Montgomery when I asked who’d pinned the medal on him after the Battle of the Bulge. He frowned at General Patton—“Riding crop. Mean-assed. Bad.”

  But when I tried to steer him from those glossy pages smoothed across his bed tray to naming the implements on that tray, he lost it. “What do you call this, Daddy?” I held up a fork. He mimed eating with his good hand. “That’s right. You eat with it, but what’s its name?” He looked off to the side, as if some invisible straight man there could confirm what a bonehead I was. After a second, though, his head’s machinery must have started to scramble. His eyes tilted up as if he were searching for the right word. Meanwhile, in my own skull I leaned hard on the right word—fork fork fork—like a mantra. His eyes flashed. The good side of his mouth warped up in a half smile. “Bacon!” he said, as if some switch had been thrown. In my best nursery school voice, I said bingo, Daddy.

  Being in that hospital room for half an hour at a pop took all I could muster. Not that I did anything else of value. Crawfish season had ended. My typewriter’s machinery was a well of dust. I went on a few awkward dates to cowboy bars with fellows Lecia and David scared up for me.

  After one such debacle, I lay awake with a wicked case of the whirlies induced by tequila, resolving to devote myself to Daddy all day, to by-God master whatever it took.

  Next morning, I tried shaving him. With his own daddy’s old boar-bristle brush, I lathered up his neck, which was leathery as a Christmas turkey’s. But my hand shook holding the plastic razor. It felt light and insubstantial next to his throat cords. My first stroke nicked him deep enough to draw blood; a thick drop cut through the white soap. Daddy didn’t flinch at this. His breathing pattern didn’t quicken. Still, Mother had to finish.

  Afterwards, I held my moon-shaped compact up to his face. He ran his good hand over his smooth chin. “Purty,” he said. The left side of his mouth twisted up in a sharp half smile. With the other half drawn down, he turned into one of those split masks, comedy and tragedy. “Purty goo,” he said. I left the hospital to buy a quart of malt liquor in a paper bag. Inside the cavernous movie cineplex, I drank this fast, then watched three matinees in a row. I sneaked from one theater to another, never paying extra, half daring the pimply young usher to turn his flashlight on me and ask for a ticket stub.

  A few days later, Dr. Boudreaux came to stand on our porch in the purple dusk. He held his brown Stetson formally in two hands like a suitor with a box of chocolates. He had on a short-sleeved blue shirt going dark at the armpits. The neighborhood kids broke up whatever loud game they’d been playing to stare gaggle-jawed at Dr. Boudreaux while he wiped his feet on the mat before stepping inside. A real doctor was a thing to witness. They stood at the end of our driveway even after he’d come inside.

  Suddenly, I knew that Daddy was dead, knew it by the train sound rushing in my ears and by the way the room suddenly telescoped, so Mother and the doctor got little.

  No, Dr. Boudreaux said. It wasn’t that. Some folks might call death a blessing. He didn’t believe that was so. But anyway, Daddy wasn’t any deader than he’d been at suppertime. That was the good news.

  It’s the money, isn’t it, Mother said. The insurance from the new refinery won’t cover the hospital. Or home nursing after he gets home.

  You know if it were up to me, Dr. Boudreaux said. He paused and hawked something from the back of his throat. His hands were small and girly. He folded them in his lap. He said the union lawyers might be a help.

  But Mother didn’t seem to be listening. She’d moved to the door to shoo the kids away from their staring. They scattered like buckshot. She stepped back in.

  Dr. Boudreaux said it wasn’t his decision. Hell, he’d treated plenty of folks on credit, times when a strike drug on.

  Outside the kids divided into two teams for a game. You take Barbara, and we get Bob, a voice said. No fair, if we take Barbara, we get Bob and Robbie too, the other voice said. You cheating sack of shit, the first voice said. Then I heard a slap and the sound of two small bodies falling on the grass to the cheers of other kids.

  You’ll never get a bill from me, Charlie, Dr. Boudreaux said. And then the doctor’s white Buick backed away from us like an enormous ship.

  Next morning, the hospital called to say an ambulance was hauling Daddy home. Somebody needed to come down and settle his bill. That set Mother’s sarcasm loose in the beige phone receiver. (Etymology: sarkazein, to tear flesh.) She told the phone that the fucking ambulance could deliver Daddy buck naked to the aluminum lounge chair in the front yard. As for paying, Mother wanted to point out that debtor’s prison had been abolished long ago. They couldn’t get blood from a stone.

  I’ve heard it said that caring for an invalid is like caring for a baby. And I suppose it’s the same basic deal, but a baby rewards you each day with change, sprouting a tooth or discovering that the object randomly waggling before its eyes is, in fact, its own hand. But an invalid is a hole you pour yourself into. Every day he fixes you with a glance more gnawed-out tired than yours, more hurt. If life is suffering (as the Buddha says), some endless shit-eating contest, then the invalid always wins, hands down.

  Maybe real nurses grow accustomed to a sick person’s pain. I tried to ignore Daddy’s uncircumcised penis lying swollen along his thigh, plugged with a cloudy tube and red from the steady irritation.

  One day when Mother was turning him to change his sheets, she found small red spots on his heels where they’d rubbed the sheet fabric too long. Days later, the spots were water blisters, which eventually broke and started to ooze. Over time, those bedsores ate oval holes into Daddy’s heels nearly half an inch deep. His very bones were trying to cut their way out of him. Or that’s how the visiting nurse put it. She showed Mother how to pack the wounds twice a day with wormlike strips of gauze soaked in antiseptic and tamped down in the sores gently as you could with the back end of a tweezer.

  Other bedsores broke out not long after, on his bony lower back, at the winglike tips of the shoulder blades. Just keeping those wounds cleaned out and dressed, and feeding Daddy, and fighting by phone and mail with the insurance company for various reimbursements kept Mother busy like I’d never seen her. Plus he messed the bed a lot, so there was laundry by the bushel basket every day.

  But his speechlessness was the battle I was least fit for. If you’d been able to tell me unequivocally that Daddy had no more brain wattage than an eggplant, it would have been easier. Instead, I tended to feel around in his aphasia for signs of the old self.

  “That was Lecia on the phone,” I said.

  “Purty goo,” Daddy came back.

  “She’s worried sick about their taxes on their motels this year.”

  “Loooo,” Daddy said.

  “You want some of this ice cream? It’s vanilla.”

  “Bad bad bad.”

  “It’s not that bad, Daddy. Try some. I’ll fix you a dish.”

  “Yamma,” he’d say.

  “Yessir, Mama ate some too.”

&nb
sp; I couldn’t go on this way too long without making up somewhere I needed to be. I wanted to treat him with dignity—needed to do so, even—but his circumstances defied the only forms of dignity I knew. Maybe I was suffering from a failure of imagination: I couldn’t make up new forms of dignity unrelated to articulate speech or the body’s force. Plus Daddy could pout like a two-year-old. If Mother were trying to roll him over to change his bed, and he wanted sleep, he’d clamp hold to the bed railing with his good arm and fight her.

  Sometimes it even seemed he shit the bed on purpose right after, to get even. Surely that can’t be true. Maybe the air on his butt only motivated his bowels those times. Still, she often had to clean him twice in a row, while he crossed his good arm across his thin chest and sulled up, refusing to help.

  The speech therapist who came a few times was equally clueless about how cogent Daddy might be. “I tell you, Charlie,” Harold told Mother over coffee one morning, “you need to learn some equanimity, honey.” He was a soft-spoken black man who drank his Sanka real blond and wore a ring that opened up as if for magic powder. His cyanide ring, he called it.

  “Equanimity, my ass,” Mother said. “I can’t tell if he’s in there or not.”

  Neither could I, which ultimately made me a piss-poor nurse. The one time I fed him all by myself, I nearly killed him, albeit slowly, and with none of the double-barrel grandeur of a real mercy killing.

  I’d brought him a pint carton of shrimp gumbo from the Farm Royale. Those days, Daddy was subsisting on milkshakes Mother cracked whole eggs into, and small plastic cups of chocolate pudding. But the gumbo worked some voodoo on his appetite. Once I’d lifted the plastic lid, a curl of garlicky steam rose up. The gravy was thick and brown as bayou water, with a few plump shrimp bobbing under the surface, and translucent scallion greens and nibbets of rice floating at the edges. I imagined that steam forming a misty and serpentine finger that rose to tease at Daddy’s nostrils. His mouth popped open—pink and naked as a baby bird’s, for we’d long since taken his dentures out.