The Liars' Club: A Memoir
Page 36
That day in the car, I only knew we were late getting home to relieve Daddy’s nurse. In the slap of tires on the road’s melted tar, I heard the ashy voice of my own fear hissing Daddy’s dead, Daddy’s dead.
Mother was crying softly beside me. She slipped on her sunglasses. The white oil tanks sliding off the lenses still seemed primordial to me. As a kid, I’d thought they were dinosaur eggs and worried about what might hatch out of them. They cast humped shadows across the refinery yards. We drove past them. The fence running alongside us went from the industrial hurricane’s diamonds to barbed wire that sloped in parallel lines from post to post, behind which were broad rice fields, rich green stalks leaning every which way, almost heavy enough to harvest.
Then the fence vanished, and the dissected fields gave way to a foggy riverbank spilling morning glories. Dark was closing in. We hit a long stretch of roadside bluebonnets that broadened to a meadow. Here and there in the flowers you could make out small gatherings of fireflies. How odd, I thought, that those bugs lived through the refinery poisons. Beyond Mother’s tired profile, the fireflies blinked in batches under spreading mist like little birthday cakes lighting up and getting blown out.
I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only do so now. The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t.
Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both, in a way. All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. I never knew despair could lie. So at the time, I only felt the car hurtling like some cold steel capsule I’d launched into onrushing dark.
It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters. I’m thinking of the cool tunnel of white light the spirit might fly into at death, or so some have reported after coming back from various car wrecks and heart failures and drownings, courtesy of defib paddles and electricity, or after some kneeling samaritan’s breath was blown into stalled lungs so they could gasp again. Maybe such reports are just death’s neurological fireworks, the brain’s last light show. If so, that’s a lie I can live with.
Still, the image pleases me enough: to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes grow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.
Rave Reviews for Mary Karr and Cherry
“Karr captures, exactly, what it’s like for a girl to kiss the first boy she loves.… She captures, exactly, what it’s like to start high school.… She captures, exactly, what it’s like to be a book-hungry teenager, enraptured by the words and heady ideas that offer transport from the banalities of small-town life.… As she did in The Liars’ Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“A compelling ride through [Karr’s] adolescence…What distinguishes Karr is the ability to serve up her experiences in a way that packs the wallop of immediacy with the salty tang of adult reflection…her descriptions of the bruised-lip, druggy wonder of teenage love are precise, unsentimental, and lovely.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The Liars’ Club left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write…the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again? Cherry lays that question to rest once and for all.… It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it’s about all of us.”
—Newsweek
“A smart, searing memoir…Romance, in all of its wondrous and heart-breaking incarnations, is Karr’s great subterranean subject, the ground upon which her wily, whip-smart writing catches root.”
—Lisa Shea, Elle
“Stunning.… If The Liars’ Club succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity, Cherry succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Cherry is the kind of book a brave parent could do a lot worse than to give to a teenager.… Teenage girls might come away from it knowing that they’re not freaks, that mistakes aren’t fatal, and that good writing kisses just about everything better. And for teenage boys, reading Cherry would be like stealing the other team’s playbook.… Mary Karr gives memoir back its good name.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
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