by Mary Karr
Who saw it coming? Not you, certainly. Not the friends who follow soon in their own frail vehicles. Casualties to jack up the tally. There’s the young heart cloven with a switchblade so deep the boy was dead, the coroner said, before he hit the barroom floor. There’s the square-off with well armed drug dealers that ends in a boy tied to the chair and beaten. (The biblical phrase Doonie used for these first reports: Live by the sword, you die by it.)
Not to mention the so-called self-inflicted wounds: the car wreck that led to quadriplegia. The brain damage. The overdoses (plural).
Innumerable types of custodian will manifest: parole officers and trustees and court-appointed whoevers. Cops who’ll cuff a fella inside the paddy wagon and drive reckless all the way to the station till his wrist breaks. Cops who’ll peel off a bill on the street if they see a man jonesing too bad. Methadone supervisors and urine checkers; hair analyzers and body-cavity searchers.
With the AIDS virus comes the adage you first hear by phone in the late nineties: Just get me high and let me die—this followed by a sepulchral cough.
In Los Angeles, drugs work these transformative magics till the place stands as a geographical epicenter of grief, a city as sacked and ruined for you as Troy. Well into your forties, any time business forces you to fly there and you watch the airport tarmac unfurl from your cabin’s glinting oval, it will feel like the wrong side of some psychic track.
Nobody tries to stop you. Maybe no one could. When the blind seer in The Odyssey foretold the loss of all companions, that portent went unheeded. The captain had turned to the horizon by then. The ship’s ropes had been loosed, and the sails filled.
You wouldn’t have listened. Wedged bare-legged in the banged-up truck with your fellows, you are still immortal, and that coast across the yellow map of the richest country on earth is beckoning to you with invisible fingers of hashish smoke.
PART ONE Elementary’s End
…We sense there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals, and the ants—
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.
Is it logical you’d be walking around entirely orphaned now?
The truth is, you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew
and that is why everything you do has some wierd failure in it.
—Kabir The Radiance (13th century)
Translated by Robert Bly
I want to make a noise with my feet
I want my soul to find its proper body.
—Nicanor Parra Piano Solo
Translated by Miller Williams
Chapter One
VIOLET DURKEY HAS A HAMSTER and a miniature turtle who lives in a shallow plastic bowl under a palm tree with snap-on fronds, and an albino rabbit named Snuffles with pink ears from Easter. It’s the hamster I’m thinking about here.
One night he nosed out of his poorly latched cage and scampered across the glowing iron surface of the gas heater, blistering the bottoms of his tiny pink feet, the same feet whose weensy, lizard-like nails Violet had wanted to lacquer Sashay Pink. (Her mom said oh no Violet.) The vet prescribed a greenish antibiotic balm Violet was meant to smudge on with a Q-tip every morning. This balm, deemed icky by Violet, was so tasty to Hamster that he not only licked it up but ultimately (unbelievably) came to nibble off the digits (fingers? toes?) on all four of his feet, which act left him—when Violet burst in from school that day—with bleeding stumps so painful for everybody to look at that he had to be put to sleep.
Violet told this tale of woe in the skating rink’s tiny toilet—her blue eyes misting over and her Earth Angel Pink mouth quivering while Ruth Ann, Sherry, and Suzy Torvino gathered around. The skating rink was a hurricane-fence cage with a brown canvas roof and vinyl flags like those you see in a used car lot strung whapping around its perimeter. From box speakers mounted at the tent’s four corners, the Beatles sang that she loved us yah, yah, yah. This song was warped by coming through the pink plywood door to where we stood at a makeshift sink with little blue packets of Wash-’N’-Dri for after you got done peeing. (Actually, because I never overtly peed on my hands, I never bothered with hand washing anyway.)
In the tiny mirror that hung from a nail poked in fiberboard, Violet’s round, clear face was flushed under her pale freckles. This was the year before we all hit sixth grade. Violet straightened her curly brown hair not with bouts of Curl Free, which her mother said she was too young for, but by having her big sister steam iron said hair under a towel, using clouds of Aqua Net after to hold it. But in the close humid air of that bathroom, the hair spray was failing. From Violet’s otherwise glossy pageboy, small ringlets were breaking loose at the hairline, seizing up in a way that evoked Renaissance paintings (Hans Somebody the Elder) that my mother praised for their delicacy. (The fact that Mother, who was a painter, kept art books deemed our entire clan somewhat suspect.)
In short, Violet was beautiful, and much beloved by the general populace. Her parents and two teenage sisters pampered her, yet she managed to represent herself as both entitled to that pampering and somehow surprised by it. The skates she owned (not rented) had held no one’s feet but hers and did not leave her socks smelling like goat turd. They fit exactly. They were fresh-polished nurse white and had pink pom-poms laced to the toes. The pom-poms matched her gingham clam-digger pants with the knee ruffle, and those matched her crop-top. She and her mother had stitched this outfit up themselves from the Simplicity pattern that morning. When, during school, I whined out loud about my lack of wearable dresses (I had scads but only deigned to wear four of the least babyish ones, and so had to repeat my Monday dress each Friday), Violet always asked why I didn’t just stitch something up. She recommended me to Sigona’s dry goods, where a bin of mod print remnants cost just fifty cents each. More than once she told me that a dress for me probably wouldn’t take a yard.
She might as well have asked why I didn’t slay a zebra for its hide for all the interest I had in sewing.
Violet smelled like grated lemon peel and baby powder. Her Snoopy box purse, balanced open on the sink edge, held a miniature packet of pink tissues for just such weepy moments. There was also a pink rat-tail brush, and a minuscule glass vial of perfume that reminded me of nothing so much as a cyanide capsule from The Man from U.N.C.L.E., my favorite TV show about international spies.
I poked my head past the elbows of girls encircling her while she dabbed under her lashes with the Kleenex wad. I asked to borrow her brush, hoping that this begged favor might buy me entry to their circle when gawking outside it for fifteen minutes had failed to.
“I’m sorry, Mary.” Violet talked in italics sometimes when addressing me, the way you would to a deaf person or foreigner you were pretty sure otherwise wouldn’t twig to what you were saying. “My mother won’t let me loan it out. I’d get in so much trouble.” It seemed that Mrs. Durkey feared Violet’s glossy head would wind up squirming with head lice if she passed her brush around (a not unfounded fear). With that, I was dismissed. She drew back into the comfort of her friends. In a nonitalicized voice, Violet told Ruth Ann and Sherry and Suzy Torvino that they needed to bring their own pillows to her sleepover that Friday.
My expression must have altered, for Violet’s eyes in the tiny mirror clicked in and then detached from Sherry’s and Ruth Ann’s in turn. We’d all been on a cobbled-together track team that summer, myself the relay alternate, and I’d fancied myself somehow welded into Violet’s good graces by a meet we all traveled to in Houston. But Violet’s gaze, which had lit on the floor, said otherwise.
“You’re having a sleepover?” I finally said.
This kind of overt angling for invitations was part of what kept me outside the elbows of those girls. I seemed destined to blunder into conversations nobody else cared to have. Most girls knew better. If Mavis Clay had overheard her own omission from suc
h a party, she would have skated out without a word. But I had to pipe up, to worm the mystery of the event into the air. (Counterphobic, some shrink will later call it, being magnetically drawn to whatever one fears most.)
“See my mom only told me I could have five girls, and Ruth Ann’s my best friend, and Sherry’s my second-best, and Suzy’s my third. And if I don’t invite Joettie Bryant, she won’t invite me to her trampoline party. And if I don’t invite Lynda Delano, her dad will yell at my dad at work. And if I don’t invite Jasmine Texler, Joettie can’t come because her mom goes to Church of Christ and doesn’t know my mom.” Violet gaped at my ignorance of these complex barters in social currency, and all the girls but Ruth Ann mirrored that gaping. (Ruth Ann was someone whose calm blue eyes tended to fall on me at such moments with something like care.)
“But that’s six girls,” I said. Violet looked puzzled, her head cocked itself a notch to the right. I held up my hand and counted them off each finger. “Ruth Ann, Sherry, Suzy, Jasmine, Joettie, Lynda.” With Lynda I stuck my thumb into the air and let my jaw hang.
“Well okay.” She looked imperiously at me. “My mom said I could only have six girls then.”
Such was the early logic of exclusion, as explained to me by Violet Durkey—who, in all fairness, committed no crime other than being adorable enough that I wished to be her. I don’t remember if I actually told Violet Durkey at that instant that she was a snotball and her hamster probably ate his feet off as part of a suicide plan to get loose from her. At some point in my social career, I did let such a comment fly. Which is precisely why I didn’t get asked to sleepovers. Other girls from families weird as mine managed to overcome their origins. Lecia got invited out by popular girls. So did Jasmine Texler, who’d moved to our town after her mom drank a bottle of laundry bluing and died. Jenny Raines even got elected cheerleader though her mom lived in the state loony bin.
Without the company of other girls, the summer became the first of many vastly vacant summers, a long white scroll of papyrus onto which something longed to be writ. Unless I’d found some book to lose myself in (the ferocity of my appetite for books rivaled a junkie’s for opiate), the idleness was stultifying.
That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else’s plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird three times in one week, closing it on the last page, then cracking it open again to the first till the binding came unglued and had to be masking-taped back on. In it, a girl my age got rescued from a lunatic trying to kill her by the town bogey man, who’d years before stabbed his daddy with scissors while cutting paper dolls. She actually took this guy Boo by the hand and made friends with him, showing a courage and care beyond anything I could ever muster. (When our town maniac, a massively fat man named Otis, came shuffling down the road talking in whispers about Jesus and the Blessed Virgin and the good elves of this world, I always crossed to the other side.) In the second or third grade, I’d seen the movie of this book, and always superimposed my own face over that of the puckish Scout, while also picturing for myself the chiseled resolve of the young Gregory Peck playing her daddy. Inside their story, I could vanish from myself.
But books have last pages. The instant I finished one such page, I’d be forced to look up at whatever soap opera I had on. In the overacted, melodramatic gestures of those black-eyelined actresses I felt my own day’s heaviness even more keenly. They flung their wrists to their foreheads in torment, or clutched their own heaving bosoms, or pitched their black-veiled selves across glossy coffins. In short, they moved through dramas of consequence far beyond any I’d ever be called to act in.
Mostly, the house was empty. When Daddy wasn’t pulling shift work at the refinery, he either tried to cadge some sleep or stayed off on mysterious rounds. By eighth grade, my sister Lecia had already manufactured a persona for herself that ranged free of the family and its unspoken stigmas. She filled out a 36C cup and dated a variety of football stars. When she climbed the bleachers at a game with legs a yard long in cutoff jeans, her blond flip sprayed into a form no wind could alter, high schools boys stood up by the row.
Mother was only in her studio one afternoon a week, not painting, but teaching painting to various Leechfield housewives. In response to an ad she’d run in the Gazette, women came to set up easels there Wednesday afternoons. To keep them from baking alive, Daddy installed a secondhand window air conditioner that leaked icy water into a pie tin with a steady drip that marked those otherwise timeless afternoons like a conductor’s baton. I was supposed to be exiled to the house for these sessions, for which the ladies paid good money to have Mother stare with furrowed concern bordering on horror at their canvases—muddy-looking peaches and grapes, stiff-backed sunflowers stuck dead center lackluster vases. The worst were the portraits—kids and grandkids mostly, with massive hydrocephalic foreheads and wall-eyed expressions. (“One eye’s looking at you and one’s looking for you,” Daddy said of one.)
The percolator would burble up the burnt coffee smell under the pine resins from the turpentine, a heady mixture that drew me from the solitary house’s endless black-and-white soap operas. Mostly, I’d just sit outside the door on the hood of Mother’s yellow station wagon in the dark garage, listening to the ladies’ endless complaints about their husbands. I specifically recall one lady saying she wouldn’t let her husband touch her pocketbook (a word I’d somehow always known was a euphemism for pussy) till he’d bought her a dishwasher.
“Hell, you might as well sell it down on Proctor Street, if that’s the deal,” Mother said. You could hear the intakes of breath all around, and pretty soon the offended lady came bumping out the door, wet canvases in hand. Once or twice I’d stand in the doorway and wheedle for my own sketch pad and charcoal and one of those giant beige gum erasers that I liked to eat when I was littler.
Other days, Mother was at college studying for her teaching certificate—a real oddity back when few moms worked outside the home. But she wanted a higher standard life than the local average and feared destitution at every turn. (Ironically enough, it was her own extravagant habits that tended to edge us to that brink. During a few screaming matches over debts she ran up, my daddy accused her of far outspending anything she earned teaching, but I wouldn’t swear this was true.) Her college work seemed to me like yet another escape route from the banality of time at home with us.
Mother also had a secret history of hasty marriages and equally hasty dissolutions. Pretty much if you pissed her off good, you could expect to hear her tires tearing out the driveway. Within days, the knuckles of a process server would rap on your door. But I’m writing about the 1960s, when Lecia and I didn’t yet know about all her pre-Daddy adventures. She ultimately racked up seven marriages in all, but we’d only witnessed the two to my daddy—with the short, nearly negligible blip of my stepfather. (He’d appeared after my grandmother’s death, after Mother had been briefly carted off to the hospital for—among other things—the vast quantities of vodka she’d managed to guzzle.)
Such events kept our household from drawing much traffic. Kids loping straight through the yards on Garfield Road tended to cut an arc around ours as you might a graveyard. Probably this was more habit than any deliberate shunning, but the effect was the same.
With the house carved of human life, I took undue interest in the occasional chameleon that slithered from the tangle of honeysuckle through the vents of the air conditioner in my room. Once I spent a whole morning at the bathroom mirror trying to get one such unfortunate lizard to serve as a dangly earring by biting my earlobe. (If you squeezed his soft neck just right, his mouth would open like a clasp.) But he’d only bite down for a second o
r so before his jaw opened and he fell down my shirt front or into the sink and I’d have to catch him again. His tail finally broke off, and our Siamese—then hugely pregnant—wolfed him down her gullet in two quick swallows.
The house held me in a kind of misty nether-time. The air conditioner hummed. The refrigerator kicked on and lapsed off. I waited a lot, though for what I don’t know. Nothing whatsoever seemed to be approaching from any direction. I wait like an ox, Franz Kafka wrote and Mother underlined in one of her college books. The sentence was copied down like an axiom into one of the dozen or so Big Chief tablets I bought that summer, then let stay blank after a few scribbled pages.
But if it’s great literature you’re after, Big Chief tablets seem gray-paged and flimsy, too pale to inscribe with genius of the caliber I aspired to. So I pilfered a black leather sketchbook from Mother’s studio. To disguise my theft, I glued green and red Christmas glitter on the cover in a swirly pattern meant to be hypnotic. I never ripped out her pencil sketches of fishing boats, or the advice on portraiture she’d dated 1964: “Details of features not as important as mood, character, or manner etc. Artist must be proficient enough to work intuitively. Relatives or friends may not see person truly.” Under this, I wrote in baroque cursive: “Me too—Mary Karr 1966.”
To hold that book in my hand—its simple bulk and being—is to grasp onto the hard notch from some faintly erased time line and draw myself back there. Opening it, I breathe old air.
Any fable I’ve told about who I was then dissolves when I read that loose-jointed script I wrote. We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across the blanker selves that the young actually proffer. (When my son was born, I remember staring into his blue, wondering eyes, then asking the obstetrical nurse what he might be thinking. “You know the static channel on your TV?” she answered.)
So in actual written artifacts from my past, I sound way less smart than I tend to recall having been. My poems clip-clop doggedly along, less verse than trotting prayers, wishes to become someone other than who I found myself to be, to feel other than how I felt. The diary entries don’t differ from any eleven-year-old’s, though the pathos I found in them makes me wince: “I am not very successful as a little girl,” I wrote. “When I grow up, I will probably be a mess.” The Sharp family had dragged me to two tent revival meetings that summer in a town called Vidor (famous, by the way, for its Ku Klux Klan fish fries). On those steamy nights where people fanned their dripping faces with funeral fans on which a blue-robed Jesus knocked on a gleaming golden door, I never followed the weeping line of believers to the altar to dedicate my life to the Lord. But the rhetoric stayed with me. My writings are rotten with it. Mountains crumble and rivers run dry, etc. Rainbows come out after floods worthy of Noah. Every cheek is rosy, every cloud silver-lined. Reading those pages, you can almost hear the tambourines shaking in the background and a surge of ballpark organ music as the preacher asks you to testify.
