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Lit: A Memoir
Mary Karr


The long awaited sequel to the beloved and bestselling ‘The Liars’ Club’ and ‘Cherry’ – a memoir about a self-professed ‘blackbelt sinner’s’ descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness, and her astonishing resurrection.‘If you’d told me, even a year before I start taking my son to church regular that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.’Mary Karr’s prizewinning ‘The Liars’ Club’ chronicled her hardscrabble Texas childhood and sparked a renaissance in memoir, cresting the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. ‘Cherry’, her ecstatically reviewed account of a psychedelic adolescence and a moving sexual coming-of-age, followed it into bestsellerdom. Now ‘Lit’ answers the question asked by thousands of fans: How did Karr make it out of that toxic upbringing to tell her own tale?Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, blueblood poet who can quote Shakespeare by the yard produces a blond son they adore. But Karr can’t outrun her apocalyptic upbringing. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors awakens her to the possibility of joy again, and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since St. Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord – but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.‘Lit’ is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. This hotly anticipated sequel brings Karr’s story full circle; it will endure in the hearts of readers alongside her influential and beloved earlier books. Simply put, it is a triumph.









MARY KARR

Lit


A Memoir









PRAISE (#ulink_3dd86807-58af-57bf-bb3c-d8fbb07a3c7b)


From the reviews of Lit:

‘Searing … A book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. Chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer’

New York Times

‘A brutally honest, sparkling story’

Glamour

‘Karr continues to delight with her signature dark humor and pitch-perfect metaphors delivering large doses of wit and painful insights. There are plenty of memoirs about being drunk, but this one has Karr’s voice – both sure-footed and breezy – behind it’

Time Out

‘As irresistible as it is unflinchingly honest … With grace, saltiness and profanity galore, Karr undeniably re-establishes herself as one of our finest memoirists and storytellers’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘In a gravelly, ground-glass-under-your-heel voice that can take you from laughter to awe in a few sentences, Karr has written the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years’

New York Times Book Review

‘Dazzling … Lit reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art’

Boston Globe

‘Karr’s sharp and funny sensibility won me over to her previous two volumes, but what wins me over to Lit is the way her acute self-awareness conquers any hint that hers is the only version of this story. Karr is as funny as ever’

Washington Post

‘Karr could tell you what’s on her grocery list, and its humor would make you bust a gut. She holds the position of grande dame memoirista’

Los Angeles Times

‘A radiant, rueful, rip-roaring book … Warm enough to burn a hole in your heart’

Entertainment Weekly




DEDICATION (#ulink_d1a6d0f5-0361-5c7a-96c2-96b074bc2b08)


For Chuck and Lynn Pascale

and for Dev:

Thanks for the light.


Passage home? Never.

—The Odyssey, Book 5, Homer (trans. Robert Fagles)




CONTENTS


Cover (#u3db03464-b93e-51bf-bc23-a6b6cd5c5448)

Title Page (#ub0aed177-88ef-52be-9d76-0aea98789aac)

Praise (#ulink_5818072b-b6f7-54db-b839-739290302888)

Dedication (#ulink_cabe74a3-0136-5d60-bc59-90ed724ceea5)

Prologue: Open Letter to My Son (#ulink_79bf8507-9101-577e-9143-3306393e5812)

Side A: Now

Side B: Then (#ulink_f5181f13-2207-511c-ad3b-ac63ee731648)

I ESCAPE FROM THE TROPIC OF SQUALOR (#ulink_ec962fbb-343a-545c-a533-a920da7cb22f)

1 Lost in the Golden State (#ulink_9e4a3f40-4bb9-52ee-9a63-afcd41f0dece)

2 The Mother of Invention (#ulink_18b38913-e585-59c1-b700-1251c8cd94bf)

3 Lackluster College Coed (#ulink_03f04a0f-d61b-5b76-8e5b-4cd7e14365c1)

4 There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz (#ulink_afdf4597-7089-58bf-80d3-5ef9ab0fd6a9)

5 Never Mind (#ulink_b65096c9-f740-56dd-93ae-df5fdc2fd9f3)

II FLASHDANCE (#ulink_95414527-87d8-5e79-8162-237d6a43fa03)

6 Inheritance Tax Summer (#ulink_b0cec186-74bb-51c8-b6af-c6f81b928ab7)

7 The Constant Lovers (#ulink_9e86ac64-57ac-56c6-9665-f30af6691d3c)

8 Temporary Help (#ulink_4a855913-f721-5514-a657-988a16d2ed31)

9 There Went the Bride (#ulink_4a025bd6-4f24-5d65-8576-84d4f05b9bdd)

10 Bound (#ulink_4595b4ee-8b24-5f7a-b53e-56d8ab40cabc)

11 In Search of Incompetence (#ulink_3ea832fc-3f48-5581-be23-85c0b8324a5b)

12 Bent Bender (#ulink_b5485df6-747f-5cd9-b6b8-29546acbbf99)

13 Homesick (#ulink_11729eb7-741c-56ea-8ce7-f7b4dcdd4531)

14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable (#ulink_f280d2f2-528d-5b35-abb9-2cb6a94c1025)

15 Journey of the Magi (#ulink_3706fe66-aea6-5c32-9361-96c4471004c9)

16 Postal Partum (#ulink_0029fb6c-602b-534d-b360-9cb03f55d092)

17 No Mom Is an Island (#ulink_6a0c925e-fdc6-552e-8036-18c5064d2c68)

III SELF HELP (#ulink_7035b5fe-7c48-5c97-a503-dad46d2873f9)

18 Ivy Beleaguered (#ulink_7878ec21-e83e-521e-b52a-ffbf98f77506)

19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind (#ulink_0e53abc6-7ccc-5b72-ba79-41edcc8bcd7a)

20 My Concept of Commitment (#ulink_575b3a04-eed3-53ce-8a8a-9ab4a04d1b22)

21 The Grinning Skull (#ulink_4b98fbea-557b-5315-9f74-8bcd8e7821e7)

22 Mass Eye (#ulink_1026ecf6-d172-57a2-85ff-199ca3109f99)

23 Lather, Rinse, Repeat (#ulink_d2cf6201-1f65-549d-93c4-0bec662b42d0)

24 Affliction (#ulink_1f380a63-190f-523b-9746-80b8a6ed1411)

25 Reprieve (#ulink_02fd2f15-a4de-5764-8766-cef1f3dcff4b)

26 The Reluctantly Baptized (#ulink_b13b252b-89bd-55f9-b484-151c14bd57d3)

27 The Untuned Instrument (#ulink_90c598bf-8a1c-559b-bef9-92f97faed88c)

28 Halfway Home (#ulink_a108d2a5-6749-5450-9a30-1bed2c31f1ff)

29 Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead) (#ulink_b032e7ee-f5f4-52eb-8b67-f5a0efadc924)

30 Hour of Lead (#ulink_c2706416-3e7c-5a84-9bb4-9f5fe4a94c7e)

IV BEING WHO YOU ARE IS NOT A DISORDER (#ulink_b176f117-db20-5020-aecf-fa311d2c5b67)

31 A Short History of My Stupidity (#ulink_705a0ca5-f49d-534b-bd4b-cc8bf992e698)

32 The Nervous Hospital (#ulink_81c8491c-cad2-55d8-a593-52e76ddb5227)

33 Waking in the Blue (#ulink_0e00e702-6e3d-5bb6-8a6a-1ab1c43d59c6)

34 The Sweet Hereafter (#ulink_f95b8474-dc84-53a2-9a0b-5ccef782a790)

35 I Accept a Position (#ulink_65748326-2cc8-56da-a47f-05da5b312dc7)

36 Lake-Effect Humor (#ulink_e33942b4-6774-5eae-a96b-3fc808cd07a9)

37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or the Romance of the Prose (#ulink_2bebedc3-82e7-597e-9677-62adc872aab8)

38 Lord of the Flies (#ulink_3370dfc3-a7f9-54f6-bc2a-437e1dc8a84d)

39 God Shopping (#ulink_55fec6ac-1fe1-5fa3-aba1-bf60cffc59ff)

40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes (#ulink_a72ec604-6845-533f-857f-cd601bca30b0)

41 It Makes a Body Wonder (#ulink_8205d3b1-0a7c-5be7-a31e-4094a231d4f2)

42 On the Road (#ulink_98caf63b-0216-52e3-8e3e-95842bbed70e)

43 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (#ulink_db309981-9532-5b55-b1c5-ea934e24d0c0)

44 The Bog Queen (#ulink_c38d07c6-4bd8-5b14-90d7-78e39dcd2d8f)

45 My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness (#ulink_c961a543-c3a1-5bea-9560-99e85d34fd89)

Acknowledgments (#ulink_19b7f732-2ff2-5c16-becd-1da00bb6cf01)

Permissions (#ulink_4a0f129c-1f3c-518d-abe8-2252dc60f9c9)

About the Author (#ulink_8a0e2348-950d-5c79-a399-28c8987094f8)

Also by the Author (#ulink_34e497d3-53ed-5092-9270-781ef5d60283)

Copyright (#ulink_8932626e-303a-583e-a91b-d388c14c2e32)

About the Publisher (#ulink_22266ccb-7b8b-54f2-a7d3-2923c5b63f55)





Prologue: Open Letter to My Son (#ulink_18d812cc-45de-5551-8b7b-ac278ae86c7a)

SIDE A : NOW (#ulink_3c9ea034-0993-5359-857f-ee3db44cf404)


Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.

How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.

And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera you’ve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. You’ll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal—not the Italian boot—but tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. That’s why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen.

Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and I’ve felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. You’re not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am.

Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture.

However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors.

Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.

Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, you’re shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man.

Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, you’re athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner—an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself. While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registered—peeking from the top of your saggy jeans—the orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid.

Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episode—the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming.

You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about it—a healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you.

It was kind of crazy, you said.

You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras.

I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell.

Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood.

This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs.

You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you.

Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over.

I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through.

It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy.

She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isn’t that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo.

Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mother’s Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine—a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing.

Don’t you love that? she says. It’s silly, but I love it.

I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you.

How long had you been drinking?

Oh I wasn’t drunk, Mother says. Maybe I’d had a few drinks.

This completely counters her earlier version, in which she’d claimed to have been shitfaced. But I don’t press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh.

I’d never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. You’re showing my life to me through a new window—not just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother.

For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. She’s your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her child-rearing judgment never improved.

You still think it’s funny that she let you screen—at age eight—the über-violent Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods artistic. But I’d stood before her sputtering, What about the sodomy, Mother?

From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was.

Mother said, When the man hurt the other man.

You asked her if it was the guy with the bondage ball in his mouth.

Jesus, Mother, I said. You see!

Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said.

It’s a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till we were on the plane to tell me she’d also shown you—at the outset of our visit—a pearl-handled revolver in her pocket-book. Her rationale? She didn’t want you coming across it in her purse.

I’d never go through Grandma Charlie’s purse, you said.

Still, you considered the pistol incident something I’d want to know, while you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon.

Mostly, Mother couldn’t hurt you. But I both could and did.

The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk. Your father and I were coming to pieces, and not long after, you came to see me in the hospital.

You remember the embossed smiley faces on my green slippers. You remember the red-haired woman so psychotic she once landed in four-point restraints just about the time you got there with your Ninja Turtle lunch box, and you could hear her howls.

We had a picnic one summer afternoon when you visited, and the hospital grounds so evoked the playing fields where your father distinguished himself that you told your teachers at daycare that I was at a slumber party at Harvard.

We both remember, albeit in varying tones of gray and black and shit brown, the misery I mired us in.

That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk. How being drunk got increasingly hard, and being not drunk felt impossible. In Odyssean terms, I’d wanted to be a hero, but wound up—as Mother did—a monster.

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall.

Blameless, the Greek translators call it. That’s what Odysseus wished for his son, Telemachus: to live guilt free. As a teenager myself, reading how Odysseus boffed witches and fought monsters, I inked the word blameless on the bottom of my tennis shoe. And my favorite part was always when he came home after decades and no one knew him.

As you get older, you look at me more objectively—or try to. As I become strange to you in some ways, you’ve become more familiar to yourself. Maybe you could loan me some of the shine in your young head to clear up my leftover dark spaces. Just as you’re blameless for the scorched parts of your childhood, I’m equally exonerated for my own mother’s nightmare. Maybe I can show you how I came to peace, how she and Daddy wound up as blameless in my story as you are.

Before you left the other night, you added—in the form of afterthought—what was, to me, the most dramatic news I’d heard that night: after the tape of your grandmother, you’d read nearly fifty pages of my own memories.

You added, I’m gonna use that and some footage of Grandma for my documentary class.

I watched you disappear down the stairs and wanted to call you back but thought better of it. Your girlfriend was with you, and you were so loaded down with bags and equipment. And something about those orange boxers with their cartoon fish—they draw from me such a throat-clenching nostalgia for a younger version of you—an image at odds with the man you are.

You’re disembarking now, I can see it. Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.




SIDE B: THEN (#ulink_cd05275a-9194-5b04-803d-963aa4691aaf)


At the end of my drinking, the kingdom I longed for, slaved for, and at the end of each day lunged at was a rickety slab of unreal estate about four foot square—a back stair landing off my colonial outside Cambridge, Mass. I’d sit hunched against the door guzzling whiskey and smoking Marlboros while wires from a tinny walkman piped blues into my head. Though hours there were frequently spent howling inwardly about the melting ice floe of my marriage, this spate of hours was the highlight of my day.

I was empress of that small kingdom and ruled it in all weathers. Sleet, subzero winds, razor-slicing rain. I’d just slide a gloved hand over my tumbler, back hunched against the door. I defended my time there like a bull with a lowered head, for that was the only space in the world I had control of.

However I thought things were in that spot, so they were. No other place offered as much. My sole link to reality was the hard plastic baby monitor. Should a cough or cry start, its signal light stabbed into my wide pupil like an ice pick.

That’s a good starting point, the red pinpoint eye. If I squint inward at it and untether my head from the present, time stops. I close my eyes. From that center dot, I can dive into the red past again, reenter it. Blink, the old porch blooms around me, like a stage set sliding into place, every gray industrial board. Holding the monitor is my smooth thirty years’ hand. The cuticles are chewed raw, but there’s nary vein nor sun blotch. On the yellow fisherman’s coat over my pajamas, rain goes pat pat pat.

Not one thing on the planet operates as I would have it, and only here can I plot my counterattacks.

Problem one: The fevers my year-old son gets every few weeks can spike to 105°, which means waking the husband, a frantic trip to Children’s Hospital, a sleepless night in the waiting room. No reason for this, nothing wrong with his immune system or growth. They’ll give him the cherry-flavored goop that makes him shit his brains out, and the cough will ease, but his stomach will cramp, and on the nights he ingests that medicine, he’ll draw his stumpy legs to his chest in agony and ball up tight, then arch his back and scream, and though no one suggests this is my fault, my inability to stop it is my chief failure in the world.

Problem two: If he’s sick, I’ll have to cancel classes so maybe the real professors who just hired me on a friend’s recommendation—despite my being too muttonheaded to sport a very relevant diploma—will fail to renew me next semester. I’ve published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It’s like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.

Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they’re after Dev’s blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there’s a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding. Sod off, I said to the answering machine, shooting it the finger, both barrels, underhanded, like pistolas from a holster. Double-dog damn them. Mr. Loud plans to spend all spring and summer painting the house. All today he stood on a ladder scraping—meticulously by hand—lead paint. Meanwhile, his old-time transistor blares the so-called easy-listening channel—zippity doo-dah for nine hours—and he’s only cleared a four-foot square, and I have to tape shut Dev’s room so no lead gets in. Mr. Loud’s bringing a boom box tomorrow, and all his Peter, Paul & Mary tapes. Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon, he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. Virtually every hour, Mr. Loud trudges loudly in to pee—age maybe seventy, one plaid thermos, yet the guy pees like Niagara Falls. By dusk, he’s washing his brushes in my sink, while in my mind, I’m notching an arrow in my bow and aiming it at his ass.

Problem four—minor but ongoing: I’m just a smidge further in the bag tonight than I’d planned on, which keeps happening. The yard hasn’t started to spin like a roulette wheel yet. I’m upright, but even the slightest list can set it off. Posture’s what I need, balance, like walking with a book on my head, which I always sucked at. Unless I keep that bubble exactly in the middle, the whirlies will start. Tip my head even one inch to the left, the oak tree pitches right. Unless I focus extra-hard at something close, I’ll tumble off the face of the planet, trailing puke as I fly. What helps is staring at the index finger. Just foreground it and let the rest fuzz up. I sit upright against the kitchen door, staring at my own finger like it’s the Delphic oracle.

And there I sit, poised as if on a flagpole, feeling with my free hand for my drink, when the wisp of an idea trails through my head. It doesn’t last, but it’s audible: you’re the bad mom in the afterschool special, the example other moms—little parentheses drawn down around their glossy mouths—go to the principal about.

Oh, horseshit, I think. Mother fell down and pissed her pants, Daddy got in fistfights and drank himself to death. (Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) I turned out half okay; well, a quarter—at least a tenth okay.

As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life.

Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off—Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline.

Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point.

Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.

The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view.

I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.




PART I (#ulink_25f0afcb-2797-5d39-8838-4ef0d4bce9c4)

Escape from the Tropic of Squalor (#ulink_25f0afcb-2797-5d39-8838-4ef0d4bce9c4)


I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,

and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that’s how I thought

poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature.

—William Matthews, “Mingus at the Showplace”

They all followed a circuitous route, which very often took them to foreign countries, but led only to disintegration and death, and meanwhile their parents, their brothers and sisters and other relatives, drank themselves to death at home. … They existed in a ceaseless delirium of accusation and blame, which amounted to a deadly disease.

—Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence




1 (#ulink_17b7e865-1b9e-5613-bc54-24faee7d0c4a)

Lost in the Golden State (#ulink_17b7e865-1b9e-5613-bc54-24faee7d0c4a)


Here lies one whose name was writ in water

—gravestone of John Keats

Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

Easy and Quinn were unhooking their boards from the truck that had choked and sputtered through twelve hundred uncertain miles.

Wasn’t that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted Robert Frost:

The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in

And thought of doing something to the shore

Water had never done to land before …

Pretty, Doonie said.

Quinn spat in the sand and said, She’s always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she’s fine.

He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

That’s me, I said. Miss California.

Quinn himself was no Adonis. We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he’d just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer. From the time we’d hit the state line, he’d been going into phone booths to skim directories for the guy’s name.

Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, Y’all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I’m gonna carve those waves up like your mama’s Christmas turkey.

Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards—Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe.

But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude. They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water. They’d suffered no car wrecks in which an ancient axle had snapped. Nobody was missing any obvious teeth, either.

In the ocean, long waves came with open-fanged mouths, drooling where the spray blew back only to bite down on my pals, who’d thrown themselves onto their homemade boards and were digging in.

From the beach, it was a bitch to witness—not just the ass-whipping the sea was delivering but the massive cheer of my friends taking it, the small and concentrated energy of repeatedly hurling themselves at impenetrable force.

Mocking their inadequacy against those waves, one guy walking past said to his small-boned girlfriend, This is why they send the white trash to Vietnam.

At some point, a guy as wasp-waisted as a Ken doll, with stomach muscles you could have bounced a quarter off, strolled over to where I sat. The sun shone through his long dark hair, making a halo around him. Maybe he’d seen our license plates, for he said to me, You Texan?

I allowed as how I was.

You interested in some acid? Ken said.

When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas?

Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping.

I shrugged. What do y’all do here?

He unfolded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD.

I knew right off I didn’t want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose.

He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he’d scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug.

At dusk, we parked in an apartment lot where a hometown dope dealer had left his pink Lincoln Continental with its busted steering column. Easy knew somebody who lived there, and in the way of poor hippies, they cooked us noodles and let us use their bathroom in exchange for the free pot Doonie could lay on them. Secreted inside the freakishly fat surfboard—in a scooped-out hollow in its foam core—he’d ratholed a few fragrant bricks of pot and a baggie of questionably acquired pills. These investments—tucked away from the law under sheets of fiberglass and squeegeed over with resin—would free him from the factory jobs we’ll all eventually take.

For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in—not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke.

By the time I’d dressed, beers were being handed around. Black speakers thumped out music. The guys agreed I could sleep in the palatial luxury of the Lincoln, not that sleep was possible on that acid. Doonie helped me run an extension cord with a caged mechanic’s light so I could read. But with the nearby ocean buzzing like a hornets’ nest, I could only puzzle over the black letters squiggling off the edges of the white page.

At some point, a looming figure glided up to the foggy side window, and I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.

But it was just Doonie’s thin shape with black frazzled hair. His knuckles whapped the glass.

I body-blocked the heavy car door open, saying, You scared the fuck out of me.

Each word materialized between my lips like a tiny pink balloon that rose with other balloons in a birdlike drove.

Doonie had his sleeping bag over his shoulder like a corpse. He said, Sorry, man. Mind if I grab the front seat?

As I stared at him, his edges grew more solid, and when I told him to go ahead, there were no more balloons blipping from my lips. He plucked an azalea off the nearby bush, saying, Can you believe how this place even smells? I didn’t know the outside could smell like this.

I breathed in the living green of it, then asked if the others were asleep.

Yeah, Doonie said, except Dave keeps busting out hollering shit. He just sat up and said, We’re all gonna die! Like he’s in Nam or something.

Doonie looked around. Man, ain’t it the Ritz up in here? Don’t you know, those side lights used to light up like the Superdome.

I looked at the long bank of dead bulbs and felt a sinking at how dim and broken everything could get.

I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry.

Nah, it ain’t like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he’s a dumbass.

He put his callused feet up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. I asked him what Quinn’s momma was like.

Doesn’t have one. I don’t know.

How do you not have a mother? I said, but somehow I knew, because mine had always lived on the brink of evaporation. (Strange, we never—not one time—talked about the doped-up or drunk-assed backgrounds some of us were fleeing.)

Doonie said, Quinn’s died or ran off or something. This is according to Dave, of course, so who knows. And get this, Dave also says Quinn brought a pistol to kill the waterbed king with. If he can’t get his old man’s money back. A no-shit gunslinger pistol like we used to shoplift from Woolco. You’d get a little plastic sheriff’s badge with it. He’s got some fantasy he’s gonna get even for his daddy.

The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one. I could feel Daddy’s roots in me, but I couldn’t fit him into any version of my life I could concoct. He’d been going away for years, out into the garage at night, down into the bottle he secreted under his truck seat.

I adapted to Daddy’s absence partly by smoking enough reefer to float me through a house where—increasingly—nobody’s path intersected with another.

Doonie’s voice jolted me back into the warm car. He said, You know what I’m gonna do?

A lot of obscene and illegal stuff, I’d wager.

He said, I’m gonna fix this Lincoln up and drive it back to Leechfield. My senior year ride. No more Mama’s Torino.

Like you will, I said.

Like I won’t.

My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy.

In the Lincoln, the image faded inside me, and I heard myself say, What use am I now?

Doonie said, Something wrong?

What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I’d planned to be, but it felt like … like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it.

I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud.

Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards.

Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners.

But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes. …

(What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

Parched, covered in dust, with blisters the size of half dollars on both feet, I finally stood on the coastal highway, having adopted the most desultory hitchhiking manner in history. Holding up a cardboard sign that read SAN CLEMENTE—where my pals had been surfing all day—I tried to look bored, like a girl who didn’t actually need a ride. I was a hitchhiker to aspire to.

Toward dusk, a black Volkswagen pulled up, its driver a tattered-looking doper with sleek raven hair and pork-chop sideburns. He jumped out and ran around to open my door, announcing that Tennessee men were bred to manners. Sam-u-el, his name was—short version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots.

The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out.

I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview.

He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear. Along the populated beach were tanned, bemuscled men; women whose hands bore diamonds the size of gumballs. I tried to roll the window down more, but it stuck about halfway. He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn?

I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath.

He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers.

That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that.

He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down.

I nodded at the King James Bible cadence he’d slid into, his accent no longer evoking Grandpappy on the porch with a slab of pie, but a preacher whose fire and brimstone maybe came from a guilty conscience about underage choristers. I tried to adopt the big-eyed face of a church girl with a well-armed brother. A crumb of fear.

He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip?

No, sir, I said.

He said, Not a pretty habit on a young woman. After an awkward silence, he added, Here’s the real truth, if you can dig it. He reached into the backseat and handed over a bedraggled paperback whose inside-back ads involved books on UFOs and Nostradamus.

Looks real interesting, I said.

You believe in presences? he said.

I lied that I knew ESP and ghosts existed, though I believed in nothing, naught, nada. (When I got to college and found the word nihilist, I’d glom onto it the way a debutante does an alligator handbag.)

He shook his head. Those are just circus tricks for the weak mind.

That’s when I noticed that no aspect of this hillbilly matched up with the surfboard lashed on top. Sam’s sunken chest meant his only swimming included water wings. Or—the ghost of reason said to me—when he was weighing down corpses in some black sunken lagoon.

He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don’t. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

He studied me in black-eyed silence for a while. You’re not a Jew, are you? I didn’t peg you for a Jew.

Me? No, sir. Actually, do you know a good church around here for me and my fiancée? As if, I thought, I’d ever enter a church other than carried by handles.

He spat in a coffee can and pointed out my window, saying, Look at this cathedral we been give here.

Sun was spattering the indigo water with silver sequins. Girls who seem to have stepped from chewing gum commercials jogged in bikinis along the shoreline. It was a lobster-salad-eating crowd.

I said, They say it never rains here hardly at all.

With two fingers, he stroked the edges of his thick mustache like some diminutive Chinese emperor about to sign a death order. He said, We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin. He paused to spit in the coffee can. He said, I can see past this day to the time when these same waves will be made of blood. You believe that?

Sounds like you know the Bible, I said.

That I do. I’ve studied on it pretty good. You don’t mind, he said, brightening up—you don’t mind, I gotta make a quick stop by a friend’s house right this side of San Clemente.

With that statement, his manner altered. He smiled, showing the pointy incisors of a gerbil. Which change hit my adrenal system like jumper cable voltage. He was suddenly trying to be charming. For the first time, I could see how wildly high he was. I must have had heatstroke to miss it. His eyes were tar pits, his body slick with sweat. This wasn’t cannabis sativa high, nor heroin nod-off high, nor John Lennon’s imagine-all-the-people-living-in-one-world high. This was eyeball-boiling, grind-your-teeth-to-bloody-stubs high. In short, crystal meth high.

Sorry, I said. I gotta make my old man dinner.

Why, I thought, why didn’t I just go to the midwestern college I’d weaseled my way into early admission, then chickened out of? A premed student I had a crush on went there. At the time school had seemed repellently conventional. Plus the education fund Mother and Daddy had—all our lives—reassured us we’d have turned out to be nonexistent. Mostly, though, I knew I’d fail in such a place, having once secured a D in art class—even, maybe not accidentally, given that Mother was a painter.

Sam tucked his long black hair behind his ear, the smile still rigid on his face. He said, This is a cool scene. You’ll dig it. My friend used to jam with the Grateful Dead. (A claim ubiquitous among West Coast guitar players circa 1972.)

Cars zipped by. I bent over and pretended to rummage through my big fringed purse as though I were a woman who clipped recipes. Lifting my knees to block my right hand from sight, I got a tight grip on the door handle.

He said, This won’t be but a minute.

We slowed down for a curve, and I scanned the empty road behind us before I hoisted the handle and hit the door.

Nothing happened. The handle was floppy loose. It could have spun in a tractionless circle like a pinwheel, no connection to the mechanism. Now I knew why he’d been Sir Galahad with the door.

He downshifted, and the car’s loose hull rattled around us. His solvent breath was so strong, one match and he’d belch out dragon flames. He said, It’s the truth that saves us, but some people’s truth is bitter gall. You’re a woman, Mary, with the curse of Eve on you.

I wondered where were the ubiquitous squad cars that had plagued my friends and me. The doughnut-munching bastards.

You wanna see my truth? Sam asked.

I firmly doubted I had a choice. I said of course I’d be honored to see his truth, wise in the arcana as he seemed to be. Then I waited for him to raise up the hatchet or samurai sword with which he would surely split my skull to the gizzard.

With some ceremony, Sam drew from under his shirt a suede pouch on a leather cord slung around his neck. Opening it, he drew out a thin object a few inches long and wrapped in red silk with tiny Chinese ideograms on it. On his lap, he unfolded it with one hand—a small brownish-black burnt-looking thing like an umbilicus. A root or charm, I thought.

That’s my twin brother’s finger, he said.

I looked at him, white stuff at the sides of his mouth, flecks of tobacco on his bottom lip. I felt my right hand on the floppy door handle.

Sam had been on a tarmac bagging bodies unloaded from a helicopter fresh from the carnage of the Tet Offensive. He’d peeled back one tarp and looked down into his own face. Which was his brother’s, of course.

Mary, he said, pray the Lord you never see a face like that. One half was like the inside of a roast you left outside. Just blown slap off. His ear had stayed perfect, though. I wanted something of my brother’s power. And I’d had a vision before I got shipped in-country. In a big cathedral, he was, wearing his dress blues. He was praying over my casket. That’s what was supposed to of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off.

The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar.

All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it.

We rounded the curve into Dana Point.

The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins.

I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me.

He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook.

I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless.

By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me.

At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.

Sometime after that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag.

College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board.

Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth.

You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said.

How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game.

Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual. …

I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum.

On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.

I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they’d celebrate my homecoming at term break.




2 (#ulink_8c55318c-5f14-5dbf-a939-b5153145c591)

The Mother of Invention (#ulink_8c55318c-5f14-5dbf-a939-b5153145c591)


If Jesus had said to her before she was born, “There’s only two places available to you. You can either be a nigger or you can be white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please. Jesus, please,” she would’ve said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available.”

—Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks.

But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.

She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas.

We got peaches galore, I said.

The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore?

Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity.

To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand.

Out the window, legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother.

She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bump in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century—with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features.

She said, Don’t look at me that way. We got up at five. It’s cocktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice?

I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider’s silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendía family. The prodigal José Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village whores with his appetites. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant.

Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

It was sometime on that ride that Mother asked me what was I reading. So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection. I can hear her voice made harsh by cigarettes asking, What’s in your book?

This was a hairpin turn in our life together—the pivotal instant when I’d start furnishing her with reading instead of the other way round.

Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper.

I said, A family.

She said, Like ours?

Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours?

Meaning: as divided as ours. We passed some Jersey cows staring at us like they expected us to stop. I said, I wish Daddy had come with us.

Oh, hell, Mary, she said, upending her drink, rattling the ice in the cup’s bottom. Read me some.

I tried to explain how little sense the book would make starting from there, and how I was too engrossed to go back. But she was bored and headachey from the drive and said, Well, catch me up.

It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I’ve done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

On the road that day, I did the same, only with better material, and—no doubt skimming past the sex stuff—I let those elegant sentences issue from my mouth like mystery from a well rubbed magic lamp. She was rapt. She gasped. She asked me to read parts over. By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn, my voice was a croak.

In the room, I got puking drunk for the third night in a row. Hair of the dog, Mother said. The first screwdriver had smoothed me right out. However expert I was at drugs, I remained an amateur imbiber, yet drink was all I had that night to blind me to the presence growing slurry in the next bed.

Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who’d divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump, and as the dolls’ faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe.

I had to sit up and breathe deep and make my stinging eyes wide so all the shimmery-edged versions dispersed, and she once again lay in filmy underpants and a huge T-shirt with jagged writing on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE.

She said, You can’t go now. I’m not done with you yet. Sob sob sob. She had on one of the derby hats she’d bought each of us in Houston the day we left—pimp hats, they were, trailing long peacock feathers in their brims.

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen’s lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don’t let me be her, don’t let me be her. For however she’d pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.

In the morning when I stirred, my eyes lasered on to her supine form in the next bed. She was nearly done with Hundred Years of Solitude. She still had her hat on, pushed back on her head to give her the wondering expression of Charlie Chaplin. My hat had a hole in it, which I didn’t remember incurring. My first blackout.

When I pulled up to the green lawn of my college where dogs caught Frisbees in their chops, I decided to reinvent myself for that leafy place.

I’d probably gotten in by wheedling a reference from the only professor back home I’d known well enough to bother. A lumbering drinking pal of Mother’s from the technical university where she’d gotten her teaching degree, he sported a meager russet beard with a skunk stripe and a French accent I later learned was fake. He’d first materialized on our sofa one morning, shoeless, his coat draped across him. The conventioneer’s name tag pasted to the breast pocket—apparently printed by the wife I never met—read, DON’T BRING HIM HOME HE’S GOT THE CAR!!!

I liked the sentences he could spin out in midair, with commas and clauses and subclauses woven through. I liked how he oohed at the poetry I’d been encouraged to press on him since about age eleven. It was tricky to find the right moment—after I’d faked interest in Ming porcelain but before he got too lubricated to talk right.

Having not seen him since I was in grade school, I felt pushy showing up in his office brandishing recommendation forms. But he’d said on the phone I could come, so I leaned in his open door slot to ask was he busy.

He sat behind a desk sprawled with papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician. He closed the door behind me, then steered me to a chair facing his desk. I figured he’d decided against recommending me, having found the poems and essays I’d sent him in advance dim-witted. I felt oafish before him. No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he’d forgotten something. He walked to my side and—with a kind of slow ceremony I did nothing to stop—lifted my T-shirt till I was staring down at my own braless chest. With his trembling and sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By God, they’re real!

Such was the interview that landed me in a school far beyond my meager qualifications.

For years I stayed grateful that the whole deal had been fast—a small price to pay for getting out of Leechfield. Though it was smaller than more violent assaults that had happened as a kid, which I paid for longer, it touched the same sore place—did I draw these guys somehow? But for ten years or more, when I was spent or hurt and totting up unnecessary gloom, his bearded face would float to mind, and I’d conjure a deep fry pot big enough to lower the pasty bastard into. Later, I pitied him more, for he was no doubt writhing in his own private hell. Which point is moot, since by now the worms have eaten him, and slowly.

What’s a typical journey to college? I couldn’t tell you. I hope my son, Dev, had one last summer. His dad was staring owlishly into the computer screen, trying to download music, while I slipped folded shirts into fiberboard drawers and ran extension cords. Before I left, Dev heard a series of moist-eyed platitudes till he said, Mom, don’t Polonius me with this nagging. Still, he hugged me—his huge form ripe with shaving lotion—hugged me right in front of his backward-ballcap-wearing roomies. Dev’s parting words: Love you. Don’t forget to mail those CDs.

My passage involved three blue-ribbon hangovers and the genial loneliness of a South American novel and an image of Mother charging out of a liquor store in blinding sun holding a gallon of vodka aloft like a trophy.

On the morning Mother’s yellow station wagon deposited me at a dorm and pulled away from the curb, I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow stitched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. I didn’t cry when she pulled away, for there were cute hippie boys playing guitar cross-legged on the lawn, but my throat had a cold stone lodged in it. I was thirsty.




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