by Mary Karr
Since my driving Mother away always stood as possibility, I reviewed my morning with her in the laundromat. While she body-blocked acres of wet sheets into the industrial dryer, I played pinball. Bells dinged, and lights flashed under me. The silver ball zigged and zagged, fell into holes and popped out, flew like a bullet if I whacked it right in a rare instant so it either ricocheted between poles to rack up thousands of unearned points or fell hapless into the slot between the machine’s forward-stretched flippers. My score never hit what I was after. The melon-breasted blond on the glass facing me stared down at the mechanical landscape I’d failed to master with what I took to be a sneer. Behind me, a line of washing machines jogged. In the dryer on the wall, the snaps of my jeans were clicking. An odor of bleach-scented cotton hung in the air.
Mother stood at the plate glass looking out on Leechfield’s sparse main street. Over black capris, she’d buttoned one of Daddy’s massive white shirts, from which she’d torn the sleeves. She’d jammed her feet into brown cowboy boots caked with mud and run down at the heel.
“Wonder how far we’d have to drive to get some provolone cheese,” she said. “Houston maybe.” She moved to the formica folding table and started matching up Daddy’s banlon socks. I didn’t right off recollect what provolone was.
“You know those hoagies we used to buy in Colorado,” she said, “across from the hotel.” (I did remember them.) “I’m talking about that kinda white cheese they used, thin as paper.” She peered through the giant red O in the word LAUNDROMAT and said, “I’d kill for some provolone cheese.”
I hadn’t much liked it and said so.
“Sure you did,” she said. She lowered the pink sheet she’d held before her like a purdah veil. I fingered a cool metal coin return just in case some change got overlooked. That whole row of coin returns just waiting had started to look to me like hope, and there were two rows of washers after that.
She said, “Point is, you can’t buy any cheese but Velveeta in this whole suckhole.” When she leaned over the table to grab the sheet corners, I could make out her bra through the shirt’s thready arm holes. That wouldn’t have bothered Mother one bit.
“Parmesan,” I finally came up with. “You can get that at Speir’s. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee brand. Right next to the pizza mix.”
“In a can,” she said. “And it’s Parmigiano—this hard cheese that comes in a wheel you need an ax to cut into. You grate it. The stuff you get in the can tastes like foot powder.” The sheriff’s car rolled down the road. I looked at Mother’s muscly arm coming out that thread-ragged hole through which her Playtex Cross-Your-Heart was still visible—half a cream-colored nipple’s worth.
“When were you eating foot powder?” I said.
“You’d worry the bark off a tree’s what you’d do,” she said.
“I mean it,” I said. “How did you get expert in the flavor of foot powder?”
“It tastes like it smells. Don’t get all philosophical on me,” she said. She was patting around for matches among used-car swap sheets on the window seat. An unlit Salem tipped down from her lip.
That night she was gone, I wondered if I’d helped Mother match up Daddy’s banlon socks and embraced the folding of the Wisk-scented towels and the scorning of boxed cheese instead of trying to defend its uncertain beauties, her morning would have gone better, and I wouldn’t be staring after the emptiness her absence cut. But the cheese Mother mocked as low-rent I secretly longed for. Melted Velveeta with chopped jalapeños in it could be scooped onto a broken tostada and crunched down on, salty smooth and sharp at once. Mother’s scorn for Velveeta mirrored her scorn for Leechfield in general and for my daddy in particular, which had led to her running off from us before.
The patch of sky between our chinaberry tree and the garage roof had wheeled around so that some archer Daddy always saw assembled from star points forever drew back his bow. But no matter how many times Daddy used his index finger to sketch Orion, I couldn’t make it out. My eyes just saw a random pattern of buckshot. And for my way of thinking, there wasn’t any God up there behind the black scrim steering things. I’d long since ceased to be a dumbass about that. In lieu of some beaded giant in the sky arranging the nail-headed stars, I put my dubious faith in the power of human will.
That’s where Lecia came in. In junior high, she was already will incarnate. If I worshipped anything at that time, it was her canny intelligence. Surely she could rout Mother out when I couldn’t.
It was three A.M. when I came to stand above her sleeping, curvy form, her body under the chenille bedspread like the princess’s in Sleeping Beauty. The honeysuckle vines across our windows even threw tangled shadows on the lavender quilt like that movie’s thorn vines, which the prince had to hack through when the wicked queen had become a scaly dragon breathing zigzags of fire. Lecia, I said. But one word wouldn’t budge her. Like Daddy she’d learned to sleep hard. I sat down, so her rolled-up form tilted ten degrees closer to me.
I put my hand on Lecia’s shoulder. Her brain must have been so hair-triggered for she surged up, gasping a string of invectives that went something like What, Goddamn, what is it! Fuck’s sake.
She right away came up with driving around to search for Mother. She poached Daddy’s truck keys from the nail by the refrigerator, then we tiptoed barefoot back to our bedroom to unhook the screen and slither out.
There’s much to be said for getting in and out of a dark house by window. The physical sneakiness of it has few grown-up corollaries. Maybe burglary buys you such a thrill, or adultery. But to feel your child’s thumbs pop up a pair of aluminum window-screen latches from the bubble-headed posts that hold them flush is to know the outlaw joy of escape. Your parents’ realm of power has definite borders you can cross out of.
The screen swung out at the bottom. We lay on our bellies looking at the house next door where Peggy Lawrence sat at her parents’ brown upright piano pounding away at a movie song about the hills being alive with the sound of music. In the window well a few gray moth corpses were crumbling to dust. I turned around so my feet stuck out the slot and started worming my way backward outside. The sill scraped my belly, but I finally stood ankle deep in wet grass like a thief birthed from my own room. When Lecia hit the ground beside me, she swatted a mosquito on her calf and stared toward the lit window. Peggy’s boyfriend turned a page with his long-fingered hand. Her butt in the full skirt of her blue gingham dress took up the better part of the bench. I whispered to Lecia that they proved for every ugly man, there’s a woman. And Lecia shot back that was lucky for me.
In the dim garage, the truck’s grillework looked like nothing so much as bared fangs. I’d toted a pillowcase with two encyclopedia volumes and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare to wedge at the small of Lecia’s back so she could inch closer to the floor pedals. Daddy was a demon on any detail relating to his truck, and he might notice the seat hiked to the wrong notch. Since he also kept maniacally close track of the odometer for purposes of standing at the gas pump and boasting about his good mileage, I’d upended a screwdriver in my back pocket for opening the glass over the dashboard and jacking the numbers back.
The driver’s side door creaked loud enough to start Lecia and me hopping around flapping our arms at each other. She gave me the finger, and I hissed at her. Afterward we stood in the silence a full three minutes listening toward the house. But Daddy must have been snoring on, for his footsteps didn’t crunch down the gravel path.
I was charged with steering backward out of the garage while Lecia pushed on the front bumper. I stuffed the pillowcase of books behind me and still could only reach the clutch with a tiptoe. The shift went into neutral—the crossbar of a H, Daddy had told me. Using the rearview, I fixed on Taylor Avenue, the back entrance to our house. It rolled big and bigger out of that oblong mirror as Lecia heaved against the hood. There was one bad bump and a curve I had to cut before the road’s slope started the truck rolling faster than I’d figured. Lecia was shout-whispe
ring for me to stomp on the brake. The truck finally seized up with its back wheel a foot out of a wicked ditch.
A low fog covered the road. Our headlights dipped into it as we lurched along from gear to gear.
“Not the smoothest ride I ever had,” I said.
“Then get out and walk,” she said.
We bobbed along in pouting silence a few blocks. Stop signs reared up, and we edged into the empty intersections past them. At the Fina station on the corner, a long purple sign held a psychedelic lightning bolt down it—Pflash! The James Brown Package Store was long since closed, but in its parking lot sat a squat, pumpkin-shaped vehicle with its amber parking lights on and a pair of sockless feet in loafers jutting out the back window. It was Adam Phaelen’s car we crunched up beside on the oyster shell gravel.
He reared up blinking, his hands raised up like we were the law. I hopped out, ostensibly to ask had he seen Mother. But in truth, his pale blue shirt was unbuttoned, and I wanted to look at the narrow patch of curly hair on his otherwise smooth brown chest, for Adam Phaelen was my Elvis. He bore before him along the otherwise gray avenues of Leechfield one of the handsomest faces in Christendom. He had black curly hair and china-blue eyes that crinkled up in a know-something-about-you-that-ain’t-public grin. When he made a rare appearance at a football game or the town pool, I made it my business to elbow my way through the gaggle of teenage girls that comprised his orbit. He wore English Leather cologne that I’d seen him draw out of his glove compartment in a wood-top bottle.
It was that silvery odor of cologne that wafted to me from the open window of the pumpkin-mobile that night. He squinted at me and lowered his hands, then paused to look back at Lecia behind the wheel of Daddy’s chugging truck.
“What y’all doing out this late, squirt?” he said. I told him while he fished a broken Kool from the green-and-white pack in his breast pocket. “Ain’t that the shits,” he said. “Last damn one too. Y’all don’t smoke, do you?” I shook my head and halfway figured to start. On the off chance that Adam Phaelen’d ever again require from me a Kool cigarette, I would manage to produce one with a flourish.
He hadn’t seen Mother, of course. He’d been playing poker with some old boys for nearabouts two days and had a dim memory of heading out for more smokes. How he’d wound up in the parking lot of the dead-bolted package store was a mystery. He leaned over the front seat, then wondered aloud what fucking asshole made off with his keys. “Sorry, baby,” he said for swearing. When he called me baby, all the molecules in my body listed toward him, but he was lying back down, saying there was no help for it now. He was just gonna stretch out till daylight when his mother’d be up. I stood there while his heavy-lashed eyes sealed themselves against me, and the fine tendons of his sockless feet resumed their post crossed in his loafers out the window.
Back in the truck, I felt my body still vaguely luminous from its brief amble into Adam’s vicinity. I could so easily picture him standing on my concrete porch in a powder blue tuxedo, holding a plastic corsage box with an orchid big as my head inside. On the other side of the door, I stood rustling in a black taffeta gown, a diamond choker around my neck, my hair sprayed into an almost topiary form.
But in reality, Lecia was steering us to the highway that led to Mother’s art class. The streetlights chopped up the night in a regular staccato, with her face flickering through the bright patches. Her forehead was tight, and there was a hard set to her jaw.
“You think Adam Phaelen’s cute?” I finally said.
“Like you read about,” she said with just half her attention. “Cute isn’t the word.”
I kept thinking about his full mouth. At night in bed, I practiced kissing the fleshy part of my hand at the base of my thumb. That’s how I trained for the real kiss Adam Phaelen would doubtless plant on me, once he snapped out of his cologne-soaked fog and twigged to the Inner Beauty that Mother swore shone out of my liquid brown eyes.
A red traffic light above an intersection bobbed in the wind. Lecia eased to a stop without a hitch and downshifted to first gear. “Why in hell”—she said—“would they string up this many traffic lights in a town when there’re no cars?”
“There are cars here,” I said, “just not after it gets dark.” I was working my way up to what I thought of as The Big Question. The light slipped to green, and Lecia eased into the intersection. She was getting slick at it.
Finally, I said, “Would you give it up for Adam Phaelen?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Give it up. For Adam Phaelen,” I said.
“Don’t be ignorant,” she said. I looked at her soft profile in the dashboard light, the big bubble of black hair net above her face inflating her head size overmuch.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a don’t be ignorant. Jesus. Adam Phaelen’s twenty-one years old.”
Actually he was twenty-two. On his birthday, I’d caught sight of him at a high school football game when I’d gone to pee. He was staggering around under the bleachers wearing a black gabardine suit with his tie all unhitched and a crimson red brocade vest, from which he’d untucked a half-pint of cherry brandy. You could make out on his neck above his shirt collar a love bite the size of a half dollar. He’d called me little sister in a rusty voice that made the stars lurch.
“You want a guy with experience,” I finally said. “Otherwise, they hurt you.”
“They hurt you anyways,” Lecia said, “the first time anyway. Experience or no.”
Many nights, I’d listened through the heating vents to Lecia and Nickie Babin discussing the mysteries of being deflowered. That’s how they talked about it. Something you owned was stolen, something of worth ruined. You never could get it back. And your whole market value as a female unit took a subsequent plummet. (Such talk conjured a prickly burr in my own gauzy sexual wonderings, for a long ago evening had left me fearing for the state of my own cherry.) Through the truck window that night, I watched a phone line laze in a low-sloping arc between poles.
“I got news for you,” Lecia finally said. “Adam Phaelen wouldn’t fuck you with somebody else’s dick.” Then she asked, “What are you talking like this for?”
“Just wondering,” I said. We heaved to a stop by the fried chicken stand, where a pullet hen in a crouched running posture circled all night. Now why didn’t somebody flip the switch to turn that thing off when they flipped the closed sign at the glass door?
“Well quit it,” Lecia said. “That’s all we need. You giving it up.”
“I was actually wondering about you giving it up,” I said.
“Well I’m not giving it up. Not to Adam Phaelen or anybody, anyhow. Jesus. Where do you get this shit?”
“It’s natural to wonder, Mother says it’s how we’re made,” I said.
“Speak for yourself,” she said. After a long silence she added, “And get unmade that way. You’ll be in junior high soon for chrissakes.”
We must have driven in silence mostly after that. The gray road came at us in segments through the fog we drove into and out of. Many veils lowered across our windshield were torn away. At no time along the roadside did Mother’s yellow station wagon appear. When we reached the college parking lot, it was bereft of cars.
But somehow in the process of driving, the early rushes of terror about Mother had dulled down. Maybe it was the moist air, or that glimpse of Adam Phaelen. But the minute the truck wheels rolled silently back into the dark garage (Lecia had killed both engine and headlights to sneak back), the fear came back again even sharper inside me. (“Like stabbing a stab wound,” the poet Thomas Lux once wrote.)
Lecia seemed less worried than disgusted with the whole endeavor. Her hands made a strong stirrup to heave me back up to our window slot, after which she bench-pressed the pillowcase full of books we’d used. I hadn’t noticed how fragrant the night was till I slid back in air-conditioned dark, away from honeysuckle and wisteria and cape jasmine. The house
smelled of mildew and my sister’s sweat. She fell asleep right off. I sat up with Daddy’s flashlight thumbing the old Shakespeare for sonnets to learn.
We’d used the volume as a booster seat so I could reach the plywood table as a toddler. Its cover was a weathered navy cloth with a massive water stain on the front. Cardboard showed through the corners. But any speech I learned from there could charm Mother into still attention—a rare state for her. With a sheet draped over one shoulder and a laurel wreath of twisted florist wire, I made an ignoble Mark Antony.
I balanced the book on my pubic bone and pinched the flashlight under my neck. At first I couldn’t actually read without Mother’s absence rushing back to distract me. Still the book’s weight alone anchored me with a strange comfort. I kept thumbing the onionskin pages for the pictures alone. There was a triad of Weird Sisters over a kettle. There was a dwarf with the face of a frog. The footnotes—absorbed in a glance—began to sink in first.
COIL: disturbance, ado.
FORTH-RIGHTS: strange paths.
OMINOUS PORTENTS: evil forebodings
URCHINS: goblins in the shape of hedgehogs.
These realms were rife with monsters, but there was odd solace in them. The woods and castles and battlefields seemed to carry definite rules of comport, orders everyone adhered to. But for kings and queens and nobility, everyone seemed to stay put where you’d left them.
Before I even knew it, I was slowing down, starting a kind of blind search, skimming first one passage then another with the urgent attention of a wizard over a book of spells. I wanted some entrance to those dominions, some language to say what I was mute to.
I don’t know whether it was that night or some other I found the soliloquy from Richard the Second. I only know that finding it let me sail off some blind cliff face into full-blown flight:
—Of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,