by Mary Karr
She looks at me and says, Nothing else? That’s it?
My innards are roiling. The smoke in my mouth tastes like creosote, so I flick its small sparks away. Money, I say. I’d like some more money. It sounds shallow, but hell. I kind of have an idea about a book I’d like to write, about when I was a kid and my mom went crazy and my family came apart. But when I sit down with my notebook, my head goes blank. My mind’s just fried. Still, we need some fucking money.
How much money would seem like a gift from God?
Having only made nine grand that year, I tell her twelve would be nice. That’d be fair, I say. I’d like a tenure-track job with health insurance, but Warren has medical, so I don’t really need it.
Then pray for it. Just pray every day for ninety days and see if your life gets better. Call it a scientific experiment. You might not get the money, but you might find relief from anxiety about money. What do you have to lose?
It’s like you’re showing me a tree stump and telling me to talk to it.
You can make up your own concept of what to revere. Like nature…
I hate nature, I say. I don’t mean to, I just never felt much about mountains and trees and shit. I have a genetic memory of pulling a plow or tilling the soil that repels me from dirt and green growing things.
Then think of the good parts in people—some Great Spirit, like the Native Americans have. Talk to it. Practice reverence at it. Attend it the way you’ve been attending these fears of yours.
That night in the living room, with Dev and Warren in bed, I take a small cushion down and get on my knees for the first time in my life—prayer number one.
Higher power, I say snidely. Where the fuck have you been?
The silence envelops me. There’s something scary there, some blanket of dread around me that feels like God’s perennial absence, his abandonment, if he does exist. (Now I’d call it my deliberately practiced refusal of his presence.) It’s hard to sit in. A few seconds later, I say: Thanks for keeping me sober today. Then I get up.
Wait, the sober mind says—that’s trying? You could’ve died last night.
I flop back on my knees. And help me. Help. Me. Help me to feel better so I can believe in you, you subtle bastard.
Such is my first prayer—a peevish start, tight-lipped, mean of spirit, but a prayer nonetheless. I vow to make it regular, this half-baked prayer. I won’t get on my knees usually. But I will silently say, every morning, Keep me sober. At night, it’s Thanks. That’s all I can stand.
I pace around downstairs for a while with skin twisting around my flesh. Had I gotten drunk the night before in front of my students? How much would it cost to get the wheel I’d driven on fixed?
Finally, I slip into bed, and Warren stirs as he rarely does. His voice comes up in the dark. Have you been at your group?
I’ve been downstairs, I say. I promise, I’m not gonna drink anymore.
And he rolls over in silence, which is what I’ve earned.
26
The Reluctantly Baptized
He kicked off his loafers and threw his long ugly body out across the water.
—George Saunders, “The Falls”
Two days into my new sobriety, I’m spotting Dev on the monkey bars when a rise in my gorge announces the arrival of projectile dyspepsia. I yank him off the bars and sprint the block home with his jaw jaggling against my shoulder. Dropping him in the foyer, I scramble up to the bathroom just in time to pitch the contents of my stomach into the toilet.
Mommy? Dev cries as he climbs up.
Ts’ okay, I holler.
I sit back on my knees as he hits the doorway.
What’s wrong?
I’m okay, my little peach pie.
I yank a towel off the shower rod and wipe my sour mouth. Then I pitch forward again with dry heaves till I’m coughing like a cat with a furball.
I feel his small hand on my back as he says, Did you get a bad food?
Maybe that’s it, I say. I crane under the faucet and drink the warm metallic water straight from the spigot.
Then I fall to my knees again, and what I just swallowed reemerges into the toilet’s blue water.
When Warren comes home, Dev is staring into the silver hole of the TV, and I’m locked in the bathroom, evacuating my innards every way I can.
I open the door to Warren’s concerned face and say, I guess this is detoxing.
That night at Joan’s urging, I check in to the Harvard infirmary, where I log my first nights away from Dev since he’s been on the planet. When the internist asks how much I’ve been drinking, I can’t exactly say—a lot. In my narrow bed, I get IV fluids and B vitamins and packaged sandwiches for the weekend till I level out, which the doctor swears will happen in a few days.
Joan shows up with a quart of orange juice and a list of women’s phone numbers, but I’d have to use the hall pay phone, so I’m stranded with my own head. Which (unfairly, it now seems) curses Warren’s hide for not being there to hold my hand. Why hasn’t his love filled the black hole I’ve been pouring booze into?
Four days sober, I leave the infirmary feeling very shaky, on an Indian summer day. At home, I’m meant to be fixing dinner for the three of us, but I cut myself peeling a carrot, which leads me to some burst of undefended incompetence as wife and mother. So I swipe all the unwashed vegetables off the drain board and into the sink and throw myself into a chair.
Poor Mommy, Dev says. He puts his hand on my leg. You need to relax!
You shouldn’t have to take care of me. I’m supposed to take care of you.
My mouth’s so parched, and—seeing Warren’s seldom used bottle of valium above the sink—I instinctively grab it. Before I can open it, I do have the sense to phone Joan the Bone, who’s on her way to the theater and can’t talk.
This, she tells me, is a test of your new willingness. You’ve gotta keep calling till you reach somebody.
I hang up and stare again at the medicine bottle. Raising it to eye level, I study the small blue pills, now glowing ethereally.
Are you sick? Dev wants to know. He’s holding a matchbox car, studying me with the intensity I no doubt brought to my own mother, whose invisible engines of misery could—at the slightest spark—ignite and blast her off into the stratosphere. That level stare of his guides my hand to put the valium back above the sink, where the bottle pulses and throbs. That night I ask Warren to hide it from me.
I phone Lux, who’s barbecuing for his family. They have us over. It’s a freakishly warm day, so they’ve gotten the wading pool out. He pokes at meat splayed on the grill while Dev splashes around the water. I ask Lux, Do you actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it—Lux, that dismal sucker.
Ever taciturn, Lux tells me: I say thanks for all kinds of things.
For what? I want to know, for I’m a habitually morbid bitch. Even my poetry is obsessed with our collective hurtle toward death—the prospect of my own death seeming specially tragic and unsung. For me, everything’s too much and nothing’s enough. I honestly can’t think of anything to be grateful for. I tell Lux something like I’m glad I still have all my limbs. (Why—I now wonder—couldn’t I register the privilege of tossing my wriggling blond boy off the pool float?)
Lux stands in his baggy blue swim trunks at the barbecue, turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical-looking forks. In the considerable smoke, he looks like a bronzed Satan at the devil’s cauldron.
Say thanks for the sky, Lux says, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare. What’re you so miserable about?
In truth, I dread Warren coming home that night, how we skirt each other’s paths, how he still looks at me with suspicion after my short sobriety. I really mean it this time. I fear I’ve sculpted for Dev a childhood tortured and lonely as mine was.
But to confess these realities to Lux would reveal too much of my chewing insides. Instead, I babble on about my long-held grudges against the god I don’t believe in, saying, What kind of god
would permit the holocaust?
To which Lux says, You’re not in the holocaust.
In other words, what is the holocaust my business? When my own life is falling apart, he wants to know, why am I taking as evidence of my own prospects the worst carnage of history?
The smoke coils around him as he says, Try getting on your effing knees tonight. Just find ten things you’re grateful for.
Your effing knees! Dev hollers, kicking his feet to motorboat the raft around.
That night after he’s tucked in, I do try to stretch out my standard two-sentence prayer habit a little longer by dredging up a list of stuff to be grateful for, though not on my knees—no way am I gonna grovel like a reptile. Sitting in a red leather chair, I notice the cherry furniture Warren’s parents gave us. I close my eyes a second, saying, Thanks for the furniture. And the rent. Thanks Warren hasn’t left me and taken our boy.
The exercise seems so self-helpy and puerile, but a few more things come to mind inadvertently. Thanks Dev doesn’t have a fever. Mother’s sober. Lecia’s business is going great, and her new boyfriend’s a prince. Thanks for Joan the Bone and Lux. Also the infirmary this weekend…
Enumerating these small things actually pierces me with a sliver of feeling fortunate. Then from that one moonlit meeting, the young doctor’s face rises up in me, and I think of what she’d said about asking for my dream, so I add, While we’re at it, I’d like some money. Not a handout. I’m willing to work for it.
It takes me a full five minutes to shut up begging, and it sounds crazy to say it, but for the first time in about a week, I don’t want a drink at all. It’s an odd sensation, since the craving’s shadowed my every waking instant for the past few years. But I abruptly stop feeling my skin like a too-tight sausage casing.
(This an unbeliever might call self-hypnosis; a believer might say it’s the presence of God. Let’s call it a draw and concede that the process of listing my good fortune stopped my scrambling fear, and in relinquishing that, some solid platform slid under me.)
I know people needier and way more deserving have prayed far harder for stuff they needed more: to feed starving children, say, to get a negative biopsy result. Nonetheless, it’s a stone fact that—within a week or so of my starting to pray—a man I don’t know calls me from the Whiting Foundation to give me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar prize I hadn’t applied for. Some anonymous angel had nominated me and sent in both my poems and a hunk of a crappy autobiographical novel about my kidhood—maybe pinched from the writing group I’d once been in.
But the call brings no celebration. If anything, I call Warren feeling awful I got the prize instead of him. Plus, the foundation insists on flying me to New York to pick up the check at a ceremony flanked by two mandatory cocktail parties—a small one before, a large one after. I know with clammy certainty that I won’t last fifteen minutes at a cocktail party without imbibing.
Later, I cackle like a madwoman when Joan suggests my quote-unquote higher power orchestrated this.
Horse dookey, I say. Surely you don’t believe that. The foundation probably started considering me back when I was drinking.
With neck tipped to keep the phone against my ear, I scoop out Dev’s second helping of mac and cheese—plop—into his ABC bowl.
You going to the meeting tonight? she asks.
Warren’s got school, I say.
Well, bring Dev. In fact, I’ll meet you both in the park across from the street in fifteen minutes.
I start to argue, then remember my new Navy SEAL of Sobriety pledge and say okay.
In the park, the wind is howling like around Dracula’s castle, the sky yellowing with dusk. Dev’s never out this time of day, and his face has the wonder of a scuba diver. He points overhead to charcoal-colored clouds mounting. We find Joan bundled in a navy peacoat and beret. She’s taken a seat on the merry-go-round, its candy-apple red barely visible in the waning light.
Dev hops onto the sitting post opposite her, and I give the wheel a spin. Preach to me, I say to Joan.
You have to consider prayer a factor in the grant.
Oh, horseshit, I say, adding, Those wheels must’ve started to turn when I was still drinking like a fish.
Joan and Dev rotate around one slow loop as she says, But the vote was taken the day before they called you, around the time you’d started praying your ass off.
Wheeling past me, she leans back and asks, You’re certain you’d still have gotten the grant—prayer or no prayer?
Faster, Mom, Dev hollers.
Of course, I say. Feeling the cool metal post in my hands, I dig in to driving the merry-go-round, putting my back into it, sprinting a few steps.
Is it at least possible, Joan says, that something—some force you’ve never looked for—could’ve invisibly tugged the vote in your direction? I mean, you’re a hundred percent positive?
I feel some fleet movement travel through my chest—a twinge, a hint. This faint yearning was not belief itself, but wanting to believe. Willingness, it was which for months Joan had been telling me I lacked. My inclination to refuse faith begins to lean a few degrees toward the numinous. And I let fall from my mouth my first inadvertent blip of hope: Maybe, I say.
So say thanks tonight, you ingrate.
While I haven’t exactly surrendered to the practice of hope, I’ll keep at this perfunctory gratitude the way a stout girl drinks diet sodas while stuffing her face with cheese fries.
The meeting’s about to start, Joan says, dismounting from her post.
One more, Mommy, a really good one.
I run around a few times as Dev whirls through what’s become full dark. The trees are whooshing overhead from wind.
To Joan, I say, Okay, okay. Maybe, yes. It’s possible. I’ll say thanks. I mean, I’ve never prayed before, and nobody’s ever called me out of the blue to give me money before.
Dev gets off the merry-go-round to stagger dizzy a few steps like a drunk. Then he pulls his hat over his ears as if to steady himself from above. He sits down hard in the dirt, looking puzzled a second.
C’mon, angel puff, I say to him. He climbs up and staggers toward me. The three of us are walking toward the street when he says, Who made all this?
The park? Some nice liberals, I say.
No, this, he says, sweeping his upturned palm across the autumn landscape.
Joan says, I believe there’s a magic force that made it.
Like God? Dev said.
Because it’s Dev saying it, nothing in me resists the sweetness of Joan’s saying, Like God.
He grabs her hand, and the three of us stop at a crosswalk down from the church.
Joan asks if I can fill in for her at Thursday night’s charity event. Our group visits a distant group to put on a meeting, swap ideas, basically mix it up. Isn’t Warren home then? she asks.
The green light flashes. Dev drags us across the street.
Hurry, he says.
I tell Joan I don’t know the guy driving or anybody else in the car. The prospect of riding off with strangers sans Joan feels like being dragged to some hideous school dance without a date. But I’m either practicing a kind of surrender or following instructions my inner outlaw would never have gone for.
She hands me a slip of paper with directions, saying, You show up at the post office in Lexington. Be there by six. James’ll show up. He drives a silver Benz. He’s a lawyer. David will be there—you know David?
Sounds like directives for a drug deal, I say.
We’re coming up on the white church, light spilling down its steps, where a few down-jacketed humans stand in small groups.
About the Thursday meeting, Joan says. Anybody with at least nine months can speak. You just sit and look pretty. Try to identify with whoever’s talking without comparing yourself. And confide in at least one person. Get some advice other than mine.
You promise none of these guys is an ax murderer?
I didn’t say that.
Unsupervised,
I could go to that distant group and spontaneously pull my dress over my head.
If you do, just yell out, My higher power told me to do that.
Climbing the stairs, Dev says, This is a church?
Once inside, he beelines for the cookies, and I follow with my bag of coloring books and toys. (In daycare, Dev’ll introduce himself: My name is Dev, and I’m an alcoholic…)
We settle into two folding chairs close to the door. People are starting to end conversations and sit. A guy comes up and with extreme courtesy says, Excuse me. There are no children at this meeting.
For a minute I sag in my midsection. I don’t have any child care.
Sorry, he says, next time get a sitter.
Being here is life or death for me, I say. (Is this the first time I believe that?)
Oh, well, he says.
And I think of Daddy as I pull Dev on my lap and say, Kiss my Texas ass, buddy.
27
The Untuned Instrument
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
—Samuel Beckett
On the appointed Thursday, I sit in a parking lot in the pissy, indifferent rain you get in New England autumns, versus the open-firehose storms the Gulf had once dragged over us back home. After what seems an eternity, I feel a pair of high beams arc over my face like prison searchlights, then this big silver ship of a car lunges into place. I climb out, holding a newspaper over my head. A few knocks on the side window, and the heavy door swings open.
No sooner does the door slam shut than I inhale—through the cigarette smoke—the stinging juniper scent of gin. It brings me up short. Maybe somebody spilled gin in his car?
You must be Mary, James says, We’re waiting for three other guys.
He has a bald, remarkably flat head, which he’s combed a few russet strands across—plus a beaverish overbite. He asks how much time I have, and I confess it’s taken me a year to put together my first two months.
