by Mary Karr
My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of Daddy’s hatchet-shaped profile—his hawk-beak nose and square jaw. Some headlights glide over him and then spill onto me. I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls.
All at once, the car rears back the way a horse does underneath you if it shies away from a small, skittery animal on the road, and we’re climbing up the bridge. The steel webbing of the road sets the tires humming. That matches up just right with that humming in my head left over from the hurricane day. The night streams over the car and fans away like black water. I can almost feel a long wake of dark dragged out behind us. Sometime during this ride, the car has filled up with that musky snake smell from Grandma’s old room, a smell I hadn’t even noticed had been gone from our lives till it flooded back. Lecia rolls down the window, maybe to get the stink out. Her hair is spronging loose from its French twist. The wind’s about to suck me out that window and over the bridge rail. The rushing sound marries with the tires humming till a big rocket fills the small car space and makes me feel little.
I muster all my courage to look out my window at the long drop down. It makes my stomach lurch. The steel girders jerk by my window in a fast staccato. In the distance, I can see two flaming refinery towers. They make a weird Oz-like glow that bleeds up the whole bottom part of the sky. It’s a chemical-green light the color of bread mold, rising up the night sky like a bad water stain climbing wallpaper. Out beyond the river there are marshes and bayous. A black barge moves slow under the bridge.
Mother is shouting, shouting she wished herself dead before she’d ever married Daddy. She wished she’d been struck by lightning on this very bridge before she crossed over into that goddamn bog. Leechfield is the asshole of the universe, the great Nowhere. And Daddy is a great Nothing. I feel over for Lecia’s hand, and it’s a cold fist knotted shut. I set it down the way you’d put down a glass of water you don’t want to spill.
Then out of all the darkness I see Mother’s white hands rising from her lap like they were powered and lit from inside. Like all the light in the world has been poured out to shape those hands. She’s reaching over for the steering wheel, locking onto it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She’s trying to take us over the edge. There’s no doubt this time. I mash my eyes closed, and Lecia heaves herself over on top of me. Both of us topple down in the backseat well, so I can’t see anything, but I can feel the car swerve while Mother and Daddy wrestle for the wheel.
Then there’s a loud noise in the front seat like a branch cracking, after which the car goes steady again. I can almost feel the tires click back in between the yellow lines. The rearview mirror got knocked long-ways when they were wrestling, I guess. So when Lecia and I crane up from the backseat, our two scared faces float in it. We look like sea creatures coming up from the fathoms.
Amazingly enough, the car is off the bridge and back on the road, safe. Mother’s lying slack-jawed against her window where Daddy has socked her to get control of it. He’s never hit her before, and the punch came from a very short distance, but she’s down for the count.
When she wakes up, we’ll be pulling into our driveway. She’ll rake her fingernails all the way down Daddy’s cheek, drawing deep blood so he looks for days like some leopard’s paw has gone at him. The kids playing night tag in the Heinzes’ yard will stop their game to gather at our property line and watch us spill out of the car, Mother still trying to claw Daddy, Daddy holding her wrists in his iron hands. At some point, Joe Dillard will sidle over to ask me what they’re fighting about, and his brother will crack that they’re fighting over a bottle. That’s the last thing I remember anybody saying, Junior Dillard in his wise-assed voice saying, “Probably fighting over a bottle.” Then Mother breaks loose from Daddy to stamp her foot at the group of kids, and they scatter like buckshot into their own dark yards. And that’s it, that’s what I remember about my birthday.
CHAPTER 7
Grandma wound up leaving Mother a big pile of money, which didn’t do us a lick of good, though Lord knows we needed it. Daddy’s strike had dragged on till mid-March, pulling us way down in our bill-paying. He managed to keep up with the mortgage and utilities okay, but the grocery and drug bills and other sundries got out from under him. When he picked up his check at the paymaster’s window on Fridays, he cashed it right there. Then he’d drive to Leechfield Pharmacy and go straight up to the pill counter in back to tell Mr. Juarez—kids called him Bugsy, after the cartoon bunny—that he’d come to pay at his bill. I can still see Daddy winking while he said it, at. He’d squint down at his billfold and lick his thumb and make a show of picking out a single crisp five-dollar bill and squaring it up on the counter between them. But that little “at” held back a whole tide of shame. It implied the bill weighed more than Daddy, superseded him in a way. In Jasper County, where he’d been raised, buying on credit was a sure sign of a man overreaching what he was. Even car loans were unheard-of, and folks were known to set down whole laundry sacks stuffed with one-dollar bills when it came time to pick up a new Jeep or tractor.
Bugsy knew these things. They mattered to him. He was a kind guy, prone to giving me comic books for free because it tickled him that I read so well. He always acted like he hated to take Daddy’s money when it slid his way. “Heck, Pete. Put that back. We weren’t a-waiting on this,” he’d say, and Daddy would slide the bill closer and tell him to go on and take it. Then Bugsy would shrug out an okay. He’d ring some zeros up on the cash register and slip the bill into the right stack. He kept his accounts in a green book under the counter. He’d haul that out, find Daddy’s name with his thick nicotine-stained finger, and note down the payment. Before we left, Bugsy usually led me to the back office, where he’d draw out his pocket knife to cut the binding cord on the new stack of funny books invariably standing in the corner. I’d sit on his desk and read out loud an entire issue of Superman or Archie, which skill caused him to smile into his coffee mug. Daddy would shake his head at this and say that I didn’t need egging on because I had already gotten too big for my britches as it was.
That was the dance we went through with Bugsy on payday. The movements of it were both so exact and so fiercely casual that I never for a minute doubted that this whole money thing was, in fact, not casual at all, but serious as a stone. All the rest of the week, nobody talked about it. That silence slid over our house like a cold iron. But woe be it to you if you didn’t finish your bowl of black-eyed peas, or if you failed to shut the icebox door flush so that it leaked cold and thereby ran up the electric. Daddy would come up behind you and shove that door all the way to or scoop the last peas into his own mouth with your very spoon. After doing so, he’d stare at you from the side of his face as if holding down a wealth of pissed-off over your evil wastefulness.
Evenings he wasn’t working, he sat in bed to study his receipts and bills. He liked to spread out the old ones stamped PAID along the left side of the bedcovers. The new statements still in their envelopes ran along the right. He’d worked out a whole ritual to handle those bills. When one hit the mailbox, he slit it open, then marked down what he owed over the front address window where his name showed through. That way he sort of nodded at the debt right off, like he was saying I know, I know. Plus, he then didn’t have to reopen and unfold every bill in order to worry over it. With all those envelopes staggered out in front of him, he drew hard on bottle after bottle of Lone Star beer and ciphered what he owed down the long margins of The Leechfield Gazette, all the time not saying boo about one dime of it.
I knew full well that people had way bigger problems than those Daddy had. Lots of guys didn’t have jobs and houses at all. Or they had kids fall slobbering sick with leukemia, not to mention the umpteen-zillion people who were
born in the Kalahari Desert or the streets of Calcutta blind or missing limbs or half-rotted-up as lepers. But Daddy’s nightly cipherings were the most concentrated form of worry I’ve ever witnessed up close. That long line of numbers, done in his slanty, spidery scrawl, was not unlike the prayer that the penitent says over and over so that either the hope of that prayer or the full misery of what it’s supposed to stave off will finally sink in.
Meanwhile, Mother was either laid up next to him slugging vodka from an aluminum green tumbler and reading, say, Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina was her favorite book) or else crying along with some Bessie Smith record. There was no more commerce between them than if a brick wall had run the length of that giant bed. Lecia and I tended to sprawl at the foot of it nights faking that we were doing the homework we both usually finished at school. We stayed there to keep an eye on all their worry, fearing it might somehow rise up above what they could handle and spill over us.
The mood in our house was tenser than when Grandma came to rot in the back bedroom. We’d gone back to our version of “normal.” But our family habits seemed odder than ever, warped somehow by the judgment that Grandma’s death implied and by Mother’s sick, unspoken grief about it.
That spring Mother started walking around the house again buck naked. Daddy wore nothing but boxers, and Lecia and I alternately went flapping through the house either bare-assed when Daddy wasn’t home, or wearing some combo of pajama tops and underpants (we called them undersancies) when he was. Don’t get me wrong. We hadn’t turned “naturist,” though Mother did once shock the Leechfield PTA Mothers’ Circle by claiming to have played volleyball on some nude beach in New Jersey. (That was the last time my school formally invited her anywhere; after that she occasionally gate-crashed the Christmas play, but otherwise was a vapor trail at school functions.) Lecia and I did earn nickels selling peeks at Mother’s nudist cartoons from her New Yorker anthology. (We saved the art books for kids who could cough up as much as a quarter for a long stare at a Bosch painting with lots of skinny demons and some large-breasted matron being poked with sticks.)
Our staying undressed came from insomnia. As a family, we just couldn’t sleep. From this state of constant, miserable exhaustion, we took up the hazy idea that sleep might come more often—it only arrived in spurts—if we were dressed for it, or, rather, undressed. Our bare bodies were walking invitations to any nap that might claim one of us. You could stagger into the living room most mornings and find one of our bodies sprawled asleep on the floorboards alongside the couch. Or you could come out at two A.M. and find Mother at the stove with her apron strings tied in a neat bow above her round butt as she worked on a Western omelet, while in the living room Lecia sat cross-legged in underpants slapping down cards for solitaire in front of the TV test pattern. We never came together in those hours, just wandered all over the house in various stages of neckedness.
In fact, the only time Mother got out of bed for any length of time that spring was to seal our windows off from the neighbors’ view. One Sunday when I was hanging naked from the sturdy cast-iron rod over my window—Lecia and I were having a chin-up contest—I saw the Dillards’ royal blue truck wheel slowly past carrying the whole gaggle of Dillards. They stared openmouthed at my hairless, dangling form. It startled me so I just hung there in full view a second, my nipples getting hard against the cold glass, before I got the wherewithal to drop from view. Then I crouched under the window ledge thinking how danged unfair it was: nobody on the block ever got up and out that early but us.
Mrs. Dillard and Fay were in the truck cab with their black mantillas on like they were heading to six A.M. mass. Even Junior and Joe had been stuck into white shirts with clip-on bow ties. They squatted on the flatbed’s built-in toolbox. Their two blond heads were slicked flat with Butch Rose Wax. I could hear their laughing over the truck’s rumbling muffler.
When Mother heard Lecia tease me about it in the kitchen, she decided to get out of bed. She threw the bedcovers off her legs, a gesture we’d all but deleted from our memory banks, and said it was a lot of horseshit caring if people saw you naked because we were all naked under our clothes anyway, but goddamn if she’d listen to me caterwaul about those boneheaded Dillards anymore. She was gonna seal over the windows so God Herself (she made a point of the female pronoun) couldn’t see in.
Her method for this was wacky. First, she took a cheese grater and made crayon shavings in all different colors. She sprinkled these between sheets of wax paper and ironed the paper together till the crayon melted. With sable brushes and Elmer’s glue, Lecia and I set to work pasting these squares of paper and color over all extant windows, an effect Mother likened to stained glass.
It was Mother’s first enthusiasm in a long time, and we pounced on it. Lecia started racing with herself right off. She timed the process to see how fast she could paste over a whole window, then tried to beat that time.
Not long after we blanked out the windows, I came home from school and found the front door open and the screen ajar. That was weird, not only given our fierce need for privacy, but on account of all the roaches and june bugs, lizards and mosquitos down there. The semitropical climate could also send a spotty green-black mildew climbing your whitewashed walls if the full damp of the outdoors somehow got inside. You couldn’t stop it entirely, but nobody left the door wide to it.
In my head, I go back to that open door. My penny loafers outside it are the color of oxblood and scuffed and run down on the inside from how pigeon-toed I am. I can almost feel the thump of my plaid book satchel on my right hip.
It was hot that day, the air thick as gauze. I bounded up the front steps after school having just gotten 100 on my spelling test. That grade barely beat out my class rival for the best grade, Peggy Fontenot, who’d lost two points for misspelling “said.” I’d personally graded her paper, and my heart leapt up like a roe when I saw it spelled “sed.” I had the winning test in my hand with the gold star that said my grade was highest. I raced up the concrete steps, even stopping short at the open screen before I slammed inside hollering I was home. I slung my book satchel over the sofa back and called again for Mother.
The silence that came back was even heavier than the air outside. It lay across the coarse rugs like swamp gas. Maybe that quiet somehow kick-started my fretting. Maybe then I paused to consider the oddness of that open door. I ran into the kitchen with the test still in hand looking to show it to Mother. There was only the black fan sweeping a dull little wind over a cup of cold coffee. No other sign. Back in the living room, I found the last page of the letter from Grandma’s lawyer folded into about a dozen accordion pleats the way a kid would make a paper fan. Mother must have sat on the horsehair sofa using that fan to push a breeze across her face before dropping it there. I smoothed it out.
The oddest details from that letter have stayed with me, while other things—such as the exact amount of Mother’s inheritance—have been sucked up into the void. Maybe the number was too large for my small skull to hold, being in the hundreds of thousands. (The figure also varies with Mother’s telling, from “only $100,000” to “over half a million” depending on the point she’s trying to make with the story. To this day, if pressed to give us the exact number, she presents a kind of walleyed expression with a loose-shouldered shrug that suggests such sums of money must be taken in stride, give or take a hundred thousand.) The stationery was thick and butter-colored. The page number was “6 of 6.” The lawyer promised to wire $36,000— about four times what Daddy could make in a year before overtime—from the sale of Grandma’s Lubbock house and farm to the Leechfield Bank, to thus-and-such an account number. We’d all expected that money. What this letter went on to describe that I didn’t expect was the money from a new oil lease.
Apparently, Grandma hung on to the mineral rights for her land, keeping them in her name more from habit than any real hope of drilling oil there. Enough Dust Bowl crackers and dirt farmers out that way had sold their farms at fifty ce
nts per acre one week only to watch a gusher spout all over the buyer’s Cadillac the next for a faint dream of oil money to lie embedded in every West Texan’s brainpan. You just did not sell mineral rights outright, ever. You held them. Even I knew that. You leased them for huge sums. (To my knowledge we still hold drilling rights on that land, though every inch of it has long since been proven bone-dry to the earth’s core.) Anyway, it turned out that loads of would-be drillers had hounded Grandma for two decades to start poking holes in her stretch of desert. We never quite figured out her reasons for snubbing their offers. In one letter I found later, the old woman had explained to Mother that she was in the cotton business, not the petroleum business. Maybe she’d worried about getting bilked by some silver-tongued oil-company fellow, which bilking wouldn’t befit her status as a prudent Methodist widow-lady and lifetime member of the Eastern Star. Somewhere in her effects, however, Mother’s lawyer had found a letter from a Dallas oil baron. With Mother’s permission, the lawyer would “execute an oil lease” for this guy. That was the exact phrase. I also recall moving my index finger along a string of five zeros, but I’m damned if I can conjure the exact amount the letter laid out. There was a lot of other stuff, of course, but I just remember my index finger stumping from one zero to the next. I counted till it hit me that we were in the hundred-thousand-dollar range, just one zero shy of the million mark, that magic number that sent dollar signs flying through movie montages. Here, I doubtless thought, is the spotted pony I’ve run out looking for every Christmas morning. Here’s a garnet birthstone ring from the baby Ferris wheel in Gibson’s Jewelry. And since I lacked for charity, I also probably had an idea like the following: Maybe I can get to Disneyland and that lard-ass Peggy Fontenot can go screw.
