Lit : A Memoir (P.S. Book 3)

by Mary Karr

  Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.

  Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom’s suggested, you’ll get new data about her hospitalization.

  He’s theorized that she’s manic-depressive.

  Will she come if you call?

  She’d go to a dogfight to get out of Leechfield.

  Which was true enough—not that I prewarned her by phone that her florid psychosis was our upcoming topic. Actually, I dreaded her coming, since she might freak out and threaten to hurt herself, as she tended to when pressed toward her walled-off past. She’d been a big one to lock herself in the bathroom with a firearm.

  But Mother never showed for the session, and—here’s the kicker—neither did I. Our excuse? We forgot, both of us, two sessions plus a rescheduled third. Just slipped our minds, the event she’d expensively flown up for. Papa Freud would’ve said, There are no accidents.

  After she’d gone back, I sat across from Tom Sawyer in a tub chair swiveling side to side, and he was—in a quiet, stiffly midwestern way—pissed. Unless I’d commit to getting better, he wouldn’t treat me, he said. I had to fly down to Texas and make her talk to me.

  She’s not gonna kill herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card.

  Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out a curse I hadn’t heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out.

  Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion’s den to confront Mother.

  (In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.)

  After a conciliatory session with Tom Sawyer—who was blasé about the rolling-doughnut comment—I flew to Texas on cheap standby, in a cargo plane whose pilot wore a World War I flying cap with flaps like Snoopy wore.

  At my folks’ house, digging around in the attic, I routed out four wedding rings from a trunk. After days of my relentless nagging, plus a pitcher of margaritas, Mother owned up to having married a few times before Daddy, like maybe about four.

  She doesn’t date, she marries, her mother had said of her. Age eighteen—not even knocked up before she’d wed at seventeen—she’d given birth to my brother, Tex, followed a few years by his sister, Virginia. Mother’s engineer husband could afford a nice place in New York, where she pissed him off by taking classes at the Art Students League. Her bohemian streak didn’t suit him. His mother moved up to help with the kids, and one evening Mother came home to find the house cleared to its baseboards, the babies gone. It took her years to track them down in New Mexico, where they were happily in school and calling another woman Mommy. Single, broke, scared, Mother had—on the spot torn up the custody papers she’d brought along.

  Then came her marrying spree, as she looked for a husband who’d help her get those kids back. By the time she got to Daddy—who was willing to take them in—they were grown, Tex training for a stint in Southeast Asia.

  So my sister and I had reignited that preexisting loss. That was why Mother had gone nuts, not because I kept asking her to make grilled cheese or give me fifteen cents for the Weekly Reader. An old spark had already been burning down the fuse toward her explosion.

  After her breakdown, we’d bobbed on unsteadily till I was in grade school, when she inherited a bundle of cotton and banking money from her supposedly middle-class mother, and she divorced Daddy, this time bringing Lecia and me to Colorado. She’d married a Mexican bartender, husband six, buying a bar to boot. Less than a year into that, having spent what may have been a million bucks, Mother had gone back to Daddy, who became the only husband to sign up twice—husband five and seven.

  During a handful of stable years, she’d reenrolled in school and wound up teaching art in junior high. But her lost kids never stopped haunting her, she said. Her own mother—my now-dead grandmother—had blamed her.

  Once the secret had poured out—the rough patches were gone over—Mother got to wondering about those children. So Lecia hired a Pinkerton detective to track down Tex and Virginia.

  My half sister turned out to be a blowsy L.A. blonde with such a taste for pills that I’d bust her eating Daddy’s back-pain meds straight from his bedside drawer. I bought her a bus ticket back to San Diego then, and I never saw her again, though she and Mother talked sometimes by phone.

  But I took to my easygoing brother, Tex, right off. He was slim and wiry with hair dark as mine. Finding Mother explained to him the artist streak his engineer father had shipped him off to military school to get rid of. After the service, Tex had gone on a tear with drugs and alcohol, but he’d been in active recovery some decades. It tantalized me to think his sobriety might spill over onto Mother, especially when he decided to relocate his photography business to Texas.

  Daddy greeted Tex like a lost army buddy, but he’d grown tired of the story long ago, so—after a few hours sitting around the living room catching up—Daddy drifted off to watch some game.

  In movie versions of traumatic secrets, the family walks arm in arm into a field of poppies while the sun paints them gold, which scenario I had faith in. With Tex there, a lot of infection drained off pretty fast. Into the night, Mother sat in the rocking chair in her studio, poking at the wood fire, reviewing the tale for some shifting configuration of Lecia and Tex and me. With each version, a new detail emerged—the snow in her hair as she came into the cleared house; the photo of Tex in a sailor suit she’d hoarded; how thick the custody papers were as she tore them—her hands were sore for days.

  For decades we’d watched her portraits start with fluid ocher streaks, marveling as each layer of paint drew from the violent slashes a particular shrimp boat, say, down to its last bolt. So for a week or so, with every retelling, Mother herself got more real. Before I left after ten days or so, she’d moved way closer to the front of her face.

  Back in the Midwest, I bounced into Tom Sawyer’s office like somebody who’d thrown down her crutches to start tap-dancing. He’d been so right. It wasn’t my fault, Mother’s madness. Cured, I declared myself.

  Not long after, the low-residency grad school in Vermont I hadn’t believed existed took me on probation, no doubt due to puffed-up references from Walt and Etheridge. I kept living in Minneapolis, teaching there. But twice per year I went to Vermont for a few weeks—poetry camp, I called it.

  Age twenty-three, I walked into a decrepit mansion on a campus approaching bankruptcy. (The college would officially fold the year I graduated.) The chintz sofas were faded. The French-pleat drapes were missing a few hooks. The white wine came from a gallon jug and left the taste of pennies in your mouth.

  To get there, I’d drawn from a grubstake I’d cobbled together trucking crawfish from Louisiana for my sister’s newly acquired farmer husband—the Rice Baron, I called him.

  Back then nobody had heard of the teachers whose red ink so bloodied the poems and essays I turned in. Bob still worked construction in the summer to feed his four kids. My thesis advisor, Louise, baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants. Heather had one slender volume and was better known for her wicked pool moves. Frank played jazz piano in a Boston bar on weekends. Ray had almost won a big prize for the dog-eared paperback of stories I’d been hauling around, but he still crashed in a sleeping bag on my floor when he was in Minneapolis. Two brothers, Toby and Geoffrey, hadn’t published their memoirs yet. A poet named Ellen Byant Voigt had gathered up this crew about five years before they started dragging Pulitzers and presidential awards and genius grants in their wake.

  Easily the least prepar
ed person to study with this august—if not yet anointed—company, I drank like a fish during residencies. Classes ran all day. Parties went till dawn, and I got to hear storytellers of the first order practice their craft. Ray described how the bankruptcy lawyer he’d stiffed of a fee had taken him to small claims court to try to get custody of Ray’s dog. The outraged judge had said, You’re gonna take this man’s dog?

  Back in Minneapolis, the only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober, which meant living like a nun. Going nowhere booze was served, I slid as if on a greased track between apartment and library and whatever teaching I could scrape up. No more bartending—the temptation to drink would’ve kept me blotto—no more pogoing to punk bands. The one art opening I slipped into for a glance around turned into a three-day binge.

  After a few years’ work, I’d reached the final meeting with my thesis supervisor—the Resident Genius, I called her—in a chic French restaurant I’d saved up to take her to. She was an elegant woman with a ballerina’s slim poise and the ability to run a demitasse spoon around a china cup without looking callow. I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals, telling her all I needed was the right publisher. (How did I dare? I now think.)

  I swear, I said, it’s like the magazines installed a machine at my post office that recognizes my address, yanks the poems out, then stuffs them in the return envelope.

  Count yourself lucky, she said. You’re still promising until your first book’s out.

  It was dawning on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be happy.

  Setting her spoon down, she said, Don’t worry, she said, You don’t have that choice—which either knighted or blighted me, I’ll never know which.

  PART II

  Flashdance

  “So, Papa, are you feeling good now that you’re in my hands?”

  “No,” Papa said, “I’m feeling bad.”

  Then Semyon asked him, “And my brother Fyodor, when you were hacking him to pieces, did he feel good in your hands?”

  “No,” Papa said, “Fyodor was feeling bad.”

  Then Semyon asked him, “And did you think, Papa, that someday you might be feeling bad?”

  “No,” Papa said, “I didn’t think I might be feeling bad.”

  —Isaac Babel, “The Church in Novgorod”

  6

  Inheritance Tax Summer

  We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Lafe’s sack. Because I said will I or wont I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack was full when we get to the woods it wont be me…. If the sack is full, I cannot help it.

  —William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

  The young poet I’ll wind up marrying tours my grad school for a week. Rumor has it, he’d been the star of genius Robert Lowell’s last class at Harvard. Drawn by his shy smile and decorous bearing, I right off start getting to the cafeteria early so as to slide my tray next to his and sit in the scent of detergent he gives off.

  Afternoons, we walk through the woods to a sandy stretch of beach alongside a green river, and one day we find inner tubes impressed in the sand as if placed there by wood nymphs. Given the golden aura of ease Warren moves in, I figure this kind of crap must happen to him all the time. His quiet formality counteracts the grungy, drunkenly proffered offers from pierced boys I’ve shrugged off in various punk bars of late—waiters and turnstile-jumping musicians.

  Do you think it’s okay if we borrow them?

  The hot rubber is warm in my hand as he asks, for I’m greedily rolling what I instantly decided was my inner tube to the water’s edge.

  We’ll bring them right back, I say, impressed to have met such a stand-up citizen.

  The inner tubes plop into the green swirl, and we wade in behind. Arms and knees hanging over, we let the current take us. Occasionally, deliciously, my foot brushes his muscled calf, which makes me go all creamy in my center like a stuffed chocolate.

  He seems vaguely stirred by my blue-collar credentials, that I paid my way through schools with all manner of unsavory tasks and now hold down community teaching jobs.

  That night I call my sister to make my crush official.

  Well, he’s Ivy-educated, so he’s not an idiot, she says. What does he look like?

  Superman.

  Her silence on the phone is passive doubt.

  I swear, like that actor. Very patrician-looking, cheekbones out to here, square jaw. Also those long dimples, very fetching—deep enough to hold a dime.

  Is he short?

  Six-five, I say.

  Height—ours and our boyfriends’—is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she’s liable to say, I’m five-nine and hang up.

  You’ll have to stand on a step to kiss him.

  He rowed crew, I tell her. (Not really his sport.) Plus, he can recite more Shakespeare than anybody not paid to learn it.

  Shakespeare meets Superman? He might as well walk out with his hands up.

  A few nights before the residency ends, he asks where I’d like to have our first solo dinner, and I say—provocatively, I hope—Montreal.

  I hope you don’t mind chipping in on gas, he says.

  Among young poets, this is standard, even on a date—is this a date? I gnaw my thumbnail.

  Before we hit the freeway, Warren stops for an oil check, though his car—a recent graduation gift—still has the dealer’s sticker on the rear window.

  What’s your dad do? I ask as Warren squeegees off the windshield.

  He’s a lawyer, Warren says. I don’t ask what kind of law because who knew there was more than one.

  Buckled into the driver’s seat, he adjusts the rearview with microscopic precision before even cranking the ignition—a care that opposes my haphazard plowing around in an uninspected Vega, its heater pumping out enough monoxide to give passengers a metallic-tasting headache.

  The mountain road hairpins under us, and the green valleys that open up in the windows can’t stop my fixation on his regal profile. Trying to impress him, I quote a new translation from Swede Tomas Tranströmer.

  Warren counters with “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” And watching his unkissed mouth shaping those plush syllables is the libidinal equivalent of a studly crooner mouthing a love song.

  Wordsworth? I say.

  Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.”

  Dang, I say with a Gomer Pyle grin—my mask in grad school, where I’d posed as a redneck aborigine just to warn everybody up front how far behind I was before it blatted out like a fart. Once there, I started burrowing nightly into the library to look up references everybody else nodded in recognition over.

  As a result, I’ve taken in a gnat’s portion of American and European poetry, but our banter—Warren’s and mine—includes his modestly correcting me on the English tradition. By the time we cross over into Quebec, I’ve scrawled a long list of books to wade through, impressed he can teach me so much. There’s a low-slung fingernail of moon in the orange sky, and I pretend to interpret the local license plate slogan—Je me souviens, I remember—as I am a souvenir.

  He smiles. You’re kidding, right?

  Not even I am that primitive.

  You’re not at all primitive, he says.

  Don’t lie, I say. But I secretly hope to pass for a girl he maybe went to prep school with, though I could’ve impersonated a baboon closer.

  In the restaurant, we give our names as Wally and Holly Stevens, a poet and his editor daughter. At a tiny candlelit table, I smell the red wine on Warren’s breath. As he passes over my menu, his hand touches mine, and the pulse in my chest grows so thunderous I fear he’ll make it out. This has to be a date, dammit. When he starts to quote Yeats’s famous love poem, When you are old and gray and full of sleep/And nodding
by the fire take down this book…

  I leap in to finish: And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…

  And if there’d been a chaise longue nearby to land on, I might have stood up and swooned.

  The night before I graduate, he shows up at a bar where I dance with him all night while my putative suitor buys our drinks. In the wee hours, Warren quotes the famous pastoral proposition poem, Come live with me and be my love…The sixteenth-century version of Hubba, hubba, sweetcakes. My heart’s banging bongos. And four months later—after he’s driven cross-country to see me several times—he asks me to move to Cambridge with him. Three years after that, we’ll get engaged.

  But before any of that, I have to meet the family, and boy am I eager, facing the task with a peasant girl’s bouncy determination to wow people not overimpressed by much. The final miles Warren’s tiny car putters, I hold a compact in one hand and a mascara wand in the other, globbing on lashes. (Little did I know my mother’s advice—You can never wear too much mascara—is, in this company, deeply wrong.)

  We pass through wrought-iron gates, and I look up, wand in hand, to ask, Is this a subdivision?

  This is my house, he says.

  It’s a testament to Warren’s reticence that he’s failed to mention the place is posh enough to sport a baronial-sounding name without seeming ridiculous: Fairweather Hall. There’s a separate wing for the live-in staff, severely reduced now that the six children are gone. If I remember right, the gardener even grew up on the estate since his father had been Mr. Whitbread’s valet in law school—sounding like a Chekhov serf to me.

  After Warren parks, I gawk my way from the car, jaw unhinged, about to burst out with a ghetto goddamn.

  Why didn’t you tell me about all this? I ask.

  Tell you about what? he wonders, completely sincere, for he’s never less than sincere, which partly informs my devotion. I already know how Warren shrinks from show. When people ask where he went to college, he’ll avoid dropping the H-bomb as long as possible, though I’d have tattooed it on my forehead.